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what I find curious is the long drawn out end of SWG, and the little that this death seems to have your comments on Raph. It’s fine to talk about the end of beta, but not to talk about the end of a great game?
pfft

I don’t think worldy games will be the main focus of the MMO market for at least 5 years. When the WoW formula is truely exhausted, and the instancing trend of GW and DDO has run its course also.

And yeah, Raph. Give us another funky cool insanely-complex virtual place to live.

[...] I ended up posting summaries of the ways in which the UO and SWG betas ended, since it seemed related: http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=222 [...]

I do know that one of my frustrations with the live teams that succeeded me on UO was that the lore became increasingly disparate from classic Ultima lore. I was always annoyed when people said we ignored the lore… the above, as well as much else in the early stuff, was carefully crafted to jibe with the standalone games and to pull in all the elements that people loved. You had to know your Ultimas to know about Lord Robere, dammit! And actually, the prelude to even that beta event was done with a puzzle where you had to hunt all over to assemble a poem, the prophecy of the world’s ending.

The eventual portrayal of Blackthorn in particular was very different from what we had gradually gotten to. For a while, I was trying to make sure that major game changes were introduced with fictional justification, such as when player bounties and the Knights of Order and Chaos were added.

We also did a riddle for UO’s anniversary, that celebrated all the history that was in both the lore and that the players had created. I wrote that one too, and I think it involved a set of riddles, with answers that were an acrostic, that then led to a final riddle.

I’ve always been a fan of events like that, that cross outside of the game; for one, they scale nicely without demanding crazy content creation loads on the team, and for another, you can make thgem insanely tough and players will still solve them. As you might guess, the only SWG event I was responsible for was the very first one, with the cryptographic puzzle that involved gathering intercepted messages and then breaking an actual code. The forums cracked it in about 48 hours.

[...] The end of the world (Raph’s Website) [...]

Which of the two ends do you think was more successful? Bang or passing? Did you notice a greater impact on the community one way or another?

It seems that the “bang” would be one of those endings that people could relate to each other with the “yeah, that was pretty frickin’ sweet, huh?” after the fact. But, they’re too caught up in the events to really take notice of the people around them.

On the other side of the coin, it may make sense that a game simply passing to the next phase may make for a tighter community for those who were around. Since there isn’t any mayhem, perhaps players will talk to each other, recollect on their favorite moments during beta, take note of each other’s names for the “other side,” etc.

I’m interested to see which you think played out better overall, or if both seemed to play out the same.