Friday, October 10, 2008

damn the end

What's really interesting about the typical MMO philosophy of "the real fun is at the end" is that people regularly accept it with MMOs but not with anything else.

Would you watch a movie that's pretty boring for nearly two hours but has a great ending? Would you buy a song that's mediocre at best until the last 30 seconds?

Frankly, standard MMO design is based more on manipulation than quality. Even the outstanding games of the genre have failed to abandon what are clearly seedy practices.

3 comments:

  1. Bluntly, that's a byproduct of the business model. When you rely on addiction and brute force grinding to keep people paying subscriptions, of course your game design is going to suffer.

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  2. Nicely put Aaron - clear & direct. Frankly my MMO days maybe numbered until something gets relesased on teh PS3 format ie The Agency.

    Am really interested to see if SOE plan to base The Agency as a paying subscription based MMO.

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  3. Ditto, they need to make more fun everywhere and the subscription model needs to go away and be replaced by a flat fee or add based revenue.

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