Bioware Austin talks about MMORPG

[mkreku]

I don't go out and kill goblins because they're threatening the town; I go out and kill goblins because that raises my 'kill goblin' skill. I feel the same way about the Elder Scrolls. It's not that learn by doing is bad, it's that I'm killing things and jumping up and down a hundred times to increase a skill, not because my character has any motivation to kill things or jump up and down.

I go to the gym and lift the same weights thirty times to increase my real life strength skill. Just as I know my scoring chances at the beach 2007 will increase if I do this tedious task, I know that my rewards in the game will be so much sweeter if I do some tedious things in them. It's just another way of increasing the work-reward ratio.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Story-based MMORPG, somewhat contradicting.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Oxymoron-class. You cant have a story in an MMO any more than you can in a game of QuakeIII. Sure, you can create a story that "generic grindquest instance 356" is about killing some evil person in order to..whatever, but since you kind of go back and kill that same person 50times in the average MMO, that kind of goes out the window.

 

 

The only way you can make an MMO with story is to step outside of the norms of the MMO genre, and no publisher would pay you to do that when they think someones sitting on the next WoW.. which was a game that did exactly what every other MMO did

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I never have been able to pin down WOW's popularity for those exact reasons, it didn't do anything new particularly, more of the same...

 

I'm also 100% certain that a story based MMO is quite impossible without breaking the norm, they would have to be some serious changes to make that possible... I'm dubious, because MMO's make me dubious.

[Sand]

If there is no monthly fee and is set up like Guild Wars I will give the game a try. I bought every other Bioware game, might as well get this one as well.

[alanschu]

I never have been able to pin down WOW's popularity for those exact reasons, it didn't do anything new particularly, more of the same..

 

I disagree. The big thing they did was make it viable for people to play it and make progress, without allocating hours of their life per day to it.

 

Some "hardcore" MMORPGers hated this, but you can't really argue with the results. It's possible to play for an hour and actually accomplish something.