Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Your MMORPG cherry?

I've been following the recent publicized info that EverQuest 1 will be releasing a server that is much reminiscent of what many old EverQuest 1 players called a 'Classic' server; Sony call it a Progression server and it works like this:

The server/game world is essentially the same as any other server, except-->
Expansions are simply disabled for everyone, until certain criteria in the current one are met.

This means that global changes like the UI, maps and similar will remain in the game while expansion-specific ones like (gasp!) the Vah Shiir, Iksars and the two new classes Berserker and Beastlord will NOT be in the game from the get-go.

They've hinted at the fact that in order to release Kunark, you must slay Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen. I wonder how long that will take ;)

A recent article was posted on mmorpg.com that explains things in basic terms, and that can be found here

It's interesting, the amount of support the Progression server is getting and even the nostalgia that I myself feel when thinking about the possibility. I do think people are expecting a nostalgia beyond what most will realistically feel, though. I'd quote EQ1 developer Maddoc (the person who seems to be 'in charge' of the server) on this, but I can't seem to locate that particular post of his and I'm too lazy to read through 40-60 posts to find it. So I'll paraphrase:

Your first MMORPG is like your first kiss; Its a magic that can't be duplicated. The progression server allows people to play through content how it was meant to, however.

Only time will tell how the Progression server will live up to expectations.

How long will it take before the entire game is unlocked?

Will the amount of players the server will get amount up to the visibly present (I'd say large but I can't justify saying that) support its getting on forums across different sites?

Will the nostalgia still be there?

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

DanishDev is born

Spurred by various individuals, I've taken it upon me to start up a blog. It's a recent internet fad that I've been leery to indulge, fearing that I would take up another time-consuming habbit. Yet here I am, blogging away! I suppose one can only resist for so long...

DanishDev is my attempt to convey all of the little funky ideas flying around inside my head like a myriad of rainbow-colored pixies all shouting because its getting awfully cramped in there. Yes, I have pixies inside my head (Call it my version of Verant's 'The Vision'; The pixies showed me the way!).

As of late I've decided to dive head first into game design theory, and started reading up on a lot of things that I've been too busy to follow the past few years. I originally subscribed to MUD-Dev at the age of 12 or so (if I recall correctly), and haven't read it since I was 15 or 16- I suppose at 18, I have some catching up to do!

One thing I find very interesting is the recent attempts at trying to grammatically represent games (Raph Koster can be the one to take credit for starting that, I believe), which spurred my own thoughts on attempting to schematically represent MMORPG raid content design; I'll try and post(or is it 'blog'?) something of relevance on that subject as soon as I've come up with enough coherent thoughts amongst the chaos inside my head to represent my ideas and thoughts with text.