Memo

Grimwell is starting to feel worst than Terra Nova. Goodbye.

Btw, saving comments before it’s too late.


What you write here is a recurring topic over the years.

The point is: how does it play?

Ecology, like Artificial Intelligence, is interesting for the devs. To study it. Not to play with it. That type of stuff is *hard* to polish and misses completely the archetypes that make these games “genres” and then popular.

You attract geeks, because it’s interesting and maybe deeper. But not everyone is a scientists. What would matter is what you can build ON TOP of that system. And again you are working too much on a model hard to develop, manage and control to bring where you want (and deliver what to expect).

That’s an interesting experiments to draw conclusion from it and use those conclusion concretely. But I’m not sure if it could be a good game.


I can explain my personal point of view.

I always draw a visible and sharp line between PvP and PvE. But considering PvP as everything involving a cooperation. Socialization is PvP for example in my model.

These games are just diluted copies of single player games on the PvE aspect, this is obvious. I don’t think the best way to go is to transform the PvE because PvE belongs somewhere else, imho.

Making something static more dynamic doesn’t addresses the core issues. It draws control away from devs, you have to face and solve what you didn’t expect to happen and your world must be generic enough to host this virtuality.

Virtuality means that a spot where you kill murlocks could become a spot where you kill goblins the week after. It may work in a barren world like SWG, where the world design is a fractal automatically generated.

My opinion, instead, is that PvE is ALL about the control in the hands of a dev. Completely. PvE is about stories and situations that must be as much handcrafted as possible.

So instead of creating virtuality and experiments I would focus in crafting. Give each spot of the world an unique look. Script every single mob so that it behaves in a different way, using the small area where it lives strategically. And so on.

Instead your virtuality is useful somewhere else. In the PvP. It’s in the PvP that you can offer a world to the players, let them toying with them. Here you can give control to the players even about some PvE elements. But it’s again about building layers and structures that work this way.

In this perspective the plan would be about thinking how the players interact directly and use the features of the game.

I mean: first you plan what you want to happen, then you give a shape to the features. And not: you build a feature like an ecology and then try to fit it into a game.

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