Dr. Richard Bartle, Granddaddy of the MUD, was recently interviewed by Massively, criticizing on the state of MMO’s, namely what he’d change about World of Warcraft.

Steve Danuser, designer from 38 Studios, noted on the generation gap now existant in the MMO genre, giving it props for being old enough to have this gap, and acknowledging the differences between the two camps of MMO players:

What this boils down to is that you have the Old Guard protecting their sacred cows, and the New Guard (many of whom have World of Warcraft as their primary or sole point of reference) questioning their elders. This pattern should sound familiar, because it happens in every generational shift around pretty much every art form. Congratulations to the MMO industry for finally being old enough to have a generational gap!

Bartle, representing the MUD camp, and being one of the ten-million World of Warcraft players, had a lot of criticisms for Blizzard’s MMO, in the realm of things he would change about the game. While his ideas are solid from a design stand-point, not all are necessarily the best way to go about implementing “better” functionality in an MMO.

One change he’d make is the ability to Buy things on the Auction House. You can put up 10 Bolts of Cloth on the AH for 10 gold, but the ability to put up the request to buy 10 Bolts of Cloth for X gold should also be available. Several other games have implemented this feature (Everquest comes to mind), and Bartle demands a reason for not having this available. Maybe it’s to force players to interact with each other in trade channels? Who knows, but I wouldn’t consider it an abomination in design that Bartle seems to present it as.

He next goes on to criticize WoW’s first expansion’s introduction raid zone, Karazhan.

There was absolutely no need for Kharazan to have that kind of hardcore raid attendance thing. There was no need for it. Why can’t you PUG it? It’s got five different sections. There could have been five separate instances. Why?

I’m not sure I even understand this. Blizzard claimed this to be one of their finer achievements in terms of The Burning Crusade, a 10-man intro raid zone, and Bartle would rather it be split into five different single-group zones? Single-group zones already exist at this point in the level 70 game.

Blizzard has done an awesome thing from my now-casual-MMO-gamer perspective; as the age of a raid zone increases, so does the ease of entry. This means the hardcore raiders will always be at the newest zone, draining it for all it’s worth, and the casual raiders will be raiding zones that were once cutting edge. During The Burning Crusade’s launch, Karazhan was exclusive to the hardcore for a few months, but as they moved on to harder zones, the casual raiders were easily able to organize and even PUG Karazhan. What does Bartle have against entry-level raid zones for the casual gamer? There is nothing hardcore about Karazhan, ask any WoW player from any playstyle.

I never played any MUDs, that was before my time, so the generational gap I most feel is from the Everquest era to the World of Warcraft era. The unforgiving slaughter machine that is Everquest made many players hardended and gave them a form of entitlement to everything they earned, and subsequently, felt that if they had to go through something hard at one point for item X, everyone else has to as well. World of Warcraft eased up on this, and felt that it was useless to restrict raiding to hardcore players only, and lowered the entry-requirements to the entry-level raid zones as the hardcore players progressed beyond it, something hardcore players and players from the Everquest era sometimes strongly disagree with.

While World of Warcraft isn’t the perfect game for me, they have made some strong design decisions, and to criticize against an entry-level raid zone for not being split into several single-group instances, essentially taking away the ability for casual players to raid, seems kinda silly.

While we are currently in an odd era of BSC2 (or Before Starcraft II), characterized by perpetual anxiety and waiting and an insatiable fiending to zerg, this may be the cure for the itch until the second coming of Kerrigan occurs.

J!NX Shirts are selling Starcraft shirts that look pretty awesome. Now to decide which one I’m going to get.

I am such a Blizzard shill.

Pyros are getting some love in the form of the latest update released by Valve for the arguably most balanced game since Starcraft. Adopting an episodic form of releasing content, Valve is in the process of retooling each class with additional achievements and weapons, at the rate of one class every two months or so.

Free content updates for an already balanced FPS that I can pick up casually and hop on to backstab some roommates or snipe some n00bz?

Hell yes.

Slowly becoming the norm in the MMO industry with their large updates every few months, let’s hope developers of the FPS and other genres adopt this method of releasing content, instead of bundling it up all in one go.

Following the new medic weapons and achievements update, the Pyro is the second class in line to get tweaked. In addition to the three new Pyro weapons, their main weapon has also gotten an update.

By hitting the alt-fire key, the Pyro is able to produce a blast of compressed air that knocks enemies away, and redirects enemy projectiles.

And the new weapons, unlockable via achievements:

The first Pyro unlockable is The Flare Gun, which replaces the shotgun. It allows the Pyro to ignite an enemy at long range, but does require careful aim on their part. It’s particularly useful for causing havoc on Snipers and Engineers who want to keep their distance.

The second Pyro unlockable is The Backburner. This flamethrower is built for the Pyro who likes to ambush their opponents. It removes the compression blast capability, instead guaranteeing critical hits whenever it’s used on an opponent from behind. To aid in survivability, it grants the Pyro an extra fifty health.

The third Pyro unlockable is The Axtinguisher. This mighty axe guarantees critical hits on any enemy that’s currently on fire, although it’s significantly weaker against enemies who aren’t. A great combination with the The Flare Gun, or with another Pyro buddy riding alongside doing the igniting.

The compressed air add-on could bring some more balance against long-range enemies, and the new weapons open up several new possibilities in playstyles, but I guess we’ll see in time what works and what’s unbalanced, but it seems to be some new fun ways to do this whole Pyro thing.

And of course, the achievements. While some are the standard achievements gained through normal gameplay (Hot on Your Heels: Kill 50 enemies with your flamethrower, from behind), some are going to be harder to get (Plan B: Kill 10 enemies while you’re both underwater). And personally, I can’t wait to get this one:

Dance Dance Immolation: Kill 3 enemies while they’re taunting.

To pull a random quote from a Kotaku comment:

WOW

I WILL BE PLAYING THE SHIT OUT OF THIS CLASS

Indeed, TheNocturnalSun. Indeed.

For any of you n00bz out there who haven’t picked up this refined shooter yet, Valve is having a free TF2 weekend this Friday-Sunday. Hit me up on Steam.

So, after years of development, Will Wright’s latest design nears launch, with the release of the Spore Creature Creator today. I haven’t really been looking forward to it, and tend to avoid and disregard most hype (outside of the promised Everquest-nolstagia-inducing MMO, Vanguard), but their trailer perked my curiosity, and hey, free download, no reason to not try, right?

So.. downloaded! And assembled my first creature. The controls were very intuitive, and I was making my own freak-entity within seconds. Gave it some creepy eyes, some pincers for good measure, and started layering on spikes.

I fucking love spikes.

So I created my creature who is currently nameless and ran him around his little virtual world, and there were several built in animations and moods (happy, angry, flip, punch, “ta-dah!”) that I could trigger and my creature would then perform them. When I say “built-in”, I mean nothing like a cookie-cutter animation; each animation is unique to your creature, and while the “punch” animation is similar in style for every critter, each creature’s arms, legs and body structure can be completely different, so we’re not just talkin’ about copy and paste animations here.

This is smart new stuff, and being an animator, it has a lot of questions still up in the air, like how much longer will we be animating, knowing exactly what the end-result will be, or will user-created characters like Spore’s and AI and physics-infused animation from NaturalMotion’s software be the future?

Enough horror about becoming obsolete!

After playing with my character a bit, I noticed a built in “record video” option. After recording my critter breakin’ some moves, there was an “upload video to YouTube” button, and without ever leaving the creature creator, I uploaded my freshly-created video to YouTube.

Just for you. <3