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2004’s version of the futureOctober 26th, 2005 |
I was going through presentations and materials that were destined for this website but never made it up during the two years that it didn’t get updated. One of the things I found was this gem, for Gordon Walton’s panel on “what is the next generation MMO?” that took place at GDC 2004. It was exactly one slide, so there’s not much point in putting it up as a presentation–but it’s still fun to look at, and then ponder in light of where the industry actually went for its next gen games.
Raph’s take on the next generation, March 2004
- Embrace user content–if the law and our own fears let us
- Distributed servers
- Dynamic content in all measures
- Algorithmic models, textures, worlds
- Artificial life models for AI
- Stop being called games
Is this still the future? Was it ever? You tell me.
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[...] This last comment is particularly relevant because it brings the discussion on its real origin. We are back at considering the “satisfying repetable content”, or the lack thereof. If at the endgame we need to repeat an instance 50 times to get a drop it is not because the developers are sadistic. But because it’s the only way to keep up the pace and save time. I think everyone can agree without the need to follow a billion of explanatory links that the very first problem of WoW at the endgame has been about the “lack of content”. This has been the main topic since launch and it’s a general problem that is shared between ALL mmorpgs. Every developer working in this genre knows that the first issue is to find a viable solution to produce acceptable content at a decent pace. The debate between handcrafted and randomly generated content is still alive and well (think to the brand new discussion about Will Wright’s “Spore” and the use of algorithmic models, textures, worlds), exactly to try to deal with this need to optimize and maximize the production of content. [...]