Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
really resolve latency, so you are forced to design around it. Again, this makes satisfying
twitch game experiences in the MMOG basically impossible by definition.
Play-wise, anything that you want to do in an MMOG must consider latency issues.
Sometimes a team will overreach and try to build in ideas that, at first, seemed possible
even with latency as a challenge.
Gameplay ideas that once seemed possible don’t always pan out, and without a
technology resolution in place for your idea, you end up spending valuable time and
resources that would probably have been better spent working on what you know
will work for the platform. Everquest, as an example, does a remarkable job of working
around latency, even for players with lower-speed connections. As a point of design
learning, notice that the play mechanics, actions, and abilities in Everquest are
combined and geared well for the MMOG platform. The melee fight mechanics, for
instance, are about as fast and fluid as can be currently conceived for an MMOG.
These fight mechanics are nowhere near as fluid or dynamic as a console fighter, but
you can’t even begin to expect that kind of fluidity and response due to the very nature
of the MMOG platform.
I like to say that game design is gaming technology’s greatest partner, but also its
prisoner. Design is always “handcuffed” by technology, and I don’t mean this negatively.
I mean that design limits are clearly a function of technology dependencies. In
the early 1990s, as silly money and talent poured into the game industry, many seemed
to believe that games could do “anything,” limited only by imagination. Everyone
seemed to forget the “handcuff” idea.
MMOGS AND DESIGN ORIENTATION
As we all know, MMOGs are relatively new on the game scene. Learning about how
to design for (and capture) the MMOG audience is obviously important for the many
MMOGs in production right now as well as for the future growth of this kind of
gaming experience. Let’s turn our attention for the moment to some of the design
learning issues many in the industry are struggling with:
� MMOG genre growth
� NPCs and familiars
� Isolating MMOG strengths
� MMOG player categories
� Deep social factors
� Current challenges