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Community: The Third Element [Dev Blog 04/02/2010]

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Darth Derriphan

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Community: The Third Element [Dev Blog 04/02/2010]

Many things need to be considered when designing a MMORPG on the scale of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Many things have to be taken into account, and it's a fine juggling act to make sure you do not exclude any particular group, after-all MMORPGS are built around communities and if they aren't happy then your doomed to failure.

This update brings us a Developer Blog by Damion Schubert the Principal Lead Systems Designer of SW:TOR. in it he shares some of his thoughts when it comes to creating a MMORPG.

Damion Schubert said:
Massively multiplayer games are not new. The first true massively multiplayer game was a text-only virtual world called MUD, put together by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. This little window of dizzying text descriptions was a far cry visually from the seductively lush 3D virtual worlds of today, but it was enough. Enough to get the genre started, and enough to get armchair designers across the world to imagine the possibilities, and debate philosophical matters of game design. One of these questions, still asked today, is whether or not massively multiplayer environments should strive to be games or to be worlds.

Advocates of the world philosophy see the space as a simulation or a sandbox. Fans of this viewpoint favor freedom and realism above all else – players have the ability to use and abuse almost anything around them, including other players. In ‘world’ MMOs, players tend to have a wide range of possible actions, most of which have relatively little depth. The depth of the world MMO comes from the interactions – players are urged to explore the world, and to find their own fun. The world MMO hates artificial constraints like classes or level requirements.

The game philosophy is quite the opposite, of course. Advocates of this view favor fun and balance more than anything. The game MMO is often described as being more like a theme park than a virtual world – player activity is tightly controlled, in such a way to help maximize the chance the player will have a fun, balanced and interesting combat experience and, in general, not be nasty to each other. The game MMO has no problem with introducing arbitrary rules to provide a tight, visceral gaming experience. Players can perform fewer actions, but these actions tend to have greater depth (such as a deeper, more balanced combat game)....
Something that is briefly touched upon in the Blog is crafting, something many have worried will not be a big factor in SW:TOR.

Damion Schubert said:
Crafting is another area where we’ve talked a lot about community. The systems design team is not satisfied with some other crafting systems that we’ve seen, where many players craft almost exclusively for themselves. We’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing how to ensure that crafters – true dedicated crafters – can make a name for themselves and be important in their community. But that is a discussion for a future letter.
Will be interesting to hear just how they intend to take crafting and revitalise making it about supplying the community.

The Full Dev Blog can be found on the Official SWTOR Website here

If you want to discuss the possible mechanics of the game as ever please visit our forums here on Stratics!
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