Wednesday 14 November 2007

It is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance.

From the Cryptic Blog:

"Traditionally, there have been two dominant design motivations for instancing:
[...] Secondly, in the early days of MMORPGs one of the ongoing problems was
players camping valuable spawns or drops, effectively locking other
players out of content."

And the devs of the various MMOs weren't having players doing that!

Not when they could create raid instances and lock the majority of players out of the content themselves. Why should the gankers and campers have all the fun?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about instancing stuff but not requiring raids? That's how Hellgate went, but then everyone said it took the massively and maybe even the multiplayer out of MMO. I thought it was a great solution, but then I solo a lot anyway. ;)

Sorry to have been gone so long. Crazy year, ya know?

Melmoth said...

Hmm, I think I probably would have played a lot more Guild Wars if it had been a touch more soloable, in the respect of not having to rely on others at all, especially when the henchmen AI was so frinky; they certainly had the 'instancing for the benefit of normal players' sanity' pretty much sorted out.

Glad to see you back and about. I hope the craziness of the year was the good sort of crazy, and if not, that things have been happily resolved.