RPG Vault: Online Worlds Roundtable #13 – Part 1
It’s been a very long time since I participated in one of these — but I took the plunge once more, giving one answer to the question of what Far Eastern and Western developers can learn fom each other.
The resultant answers are full of interesting insights. From Howard Marks, for example:
…we realized that there’s a 10,000-mile rule; it is very hard to communicate across a long distance with a different culture and mindset. So, we decided to adapt ourselves to the situation. For example, a pretty obvious feature for us is word-wrapping in chat, even for game screen text. None of our partners ever implemented this feature.
It would take one of our programmers literally 30 minutes to do it. We got a major pushback on it. Why? Well, they do not see the need to have it. Hold on a second. This is critical for us. So, here goes the typical debate. Does the developer acquiesce, or do we painfully accept a fate of typing carriage returns?
Perhaps best is Jack Emmert’s answer, which instead just asks questions — all of them good ones.
3 Responses to “RPG Vault: Online Worlds Roundtable #13 – Part 1”
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DAM YOU AND YOUR Unannounced project BIO!!!!
lol.
Hats into the ring, eh? Lots of questions, as you say Raph, but few good answers.
I spend a lot of time in Beijing for business, and have gone with local friends to net cafes many times to see the “new hotness” in MMO games. In fact, our company is right down the hall from an MMO maker in our office building!
One of the big differences that I see is that in most of the games I’ve observed, there’s little or no effort to make characters look “realistic” or particularly “humanoform”.
But they all have really cool “moves” and very (extremely!) expressive faces. By “moves” I am hinting at not just four or five “swings” — as your warrior will have in WoW, but dozens and dozens of moves, all really cool looking.
The completely wooden faces of EQ, EQII, WoW, UO etc. etc. strongly come to mind whenever I see a Chinese MMO.
Anyway, that’s my observational 2c — probably worth about that or less! 🙂