Better Raids through Command Structures

Beating a new raid boss encounter in WoW - and every other MMO I've seen so far - is a three step process. First you have to research the encounter and find out how it actually works, then you have to turn this information into a battle plan, and finally you need to execute that plan reasonably well in order to kill the boss.
If you've ever wiped for a lot of times in a row on the same boss trying to implement a strategy that you knew as correct, you'll know that this can quickly get boring. There is no element of surprise, no adapting to circumstances, you simply need to perform just as the battle plan demands and everyone else needs to do the same.

Complexity

I reinstalled Master of Magic recently, inspired by the news about Elemental - War of Magic, an upcoming Stardock title. The graphics in MoM are beyond terrible (the game is 16 years old after all) and the UI is incredibly clunky. Yet, the game has a degree of interesting complexity that I dearly miss in today's games.

Monster Scaling

It’s been quite a while since I’ve played Morrowind, but there’s one thing I distinctly remember about the game: If you did a lot of sidequests and levelled through them, finishing the main storyline would become trivial. The game was designed as an open world and you could practically go anywhere in any order you liked. The opposite of an open world (or sandbox) game is a railroad game – one in which the player advances on a fixed path. In a railroad RPG, the player can never out-level the monsters because the game developers always know exactly how far a player will have developed at every point in time. The modern day solution of sandbox games for this problem is monster scaling.

Playing Single

I love MMOs. I greatly enjoy working together with other people to either beat a mighty computer controlled opponent or another (team of) players. I love the feeling of persistence and accomplishing something that will last and can be witnessed by my peers - even though I know the distinction between virtual accomplishments and real ones. Have you ever dismissed a game because it didn't have a multi-player mode? I know I have and I know others who do so regularly.
Why would anyone still make games without a multi-player component these days when there are so many advantages to having it and the internet is widely available? I'm glad you asked; here are five good reasons to make single player games:

Where has My Voice Gone?

When I came back home on Sunday, Dragon Age: Origins was lying on my desk, waiting for me. (Thank you Amazon! Cross country shipping in 2 days and €15 saved.) I haven't had a lot of time for it, but I really liked the time I did spend in the game. So far it is quite linear, plays a bit like the interactive movies of old, but not in a bad way. I'm really immersed in the storyline and love talking to the various characters around.
One thing, however, irks me. Where is my voice?

10 Bad Things About Torchlight

As promised, here are ten things that are bad about Torchlight. This doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy playing the game or that I wouldn't recommend buying it. The purpose of this post is to find things that could be done better in the future. It also concludes my mini-review of Torchlight that isn't really a review.
Without further ado, like yesterday in no particular order - 10 bad things about Torchlight:

10 Good Things About Torchlight

I wanted to write about Torchlight for a while now, but there are game reviews enough out there that you don't need me to write another one. Instead, I'll focus on highlighting good aspects of Torchlight today - as a lesson for future games - while talking about the bad sides tomorrow.
Quick intro for those that don't know Torchlight at all: Torchlight is a (at the moment) single player only Diablo clone by Runic Games. Runic Games has a lot of the people in it that created the original Diablo and later Hellgate: London. The game is available for €15 or $20 on Steam where you can also find a free demo.
But enough of that, here are 10 good things about Torchlight, in no particular order:

Servers, What's the Point (Part 3)

On Wednesday I talked about the splitting of MMORPGs into various servers ("sharding") and why it is done. In Thursday's post - which nobody read, incidentally, go do it now - I pointed out reasons against sharding.
Now, creating a single-server world for millions of people isn't easy. Not only do people have different interests, as pointed out in part one, but the world would also, quite literally, get too full. Imagine World of Warcraft's Dalaran (or worse, Ironforge in vanilla WoW) with a hundred times as many players or more. Or imagine the amount of loading time for your capital city in Aion several times more personal shops around than there are already. Below I'll discuss several ways to alleviate this problem, to actually make single-server worlds possible.

Servers, What’s the Point? – Part 2

In yesterday's post I talked about the server structure in MMORPGs, why it exists and why it isn't necessarily necessary anymore. Today, we'll have a look at the question of why it would be good to get rid of isolated servers.

Servers, What’s the Point? – Part 1

We have had cross-server battlegrounds and arenas in World of Warcraft for a long time, now we’re getting cross-server pick-up-groups for dungeons and raids. Games like Aion (and Tabula Rasa and I’m sure others) show us that you can subdivide the population of a region into different channels to make it less crowded while still allowing players to play together. Why are MMORPGs split into servers at all? Why aren’t we all on one big server like in EVE?
Today’s post will deal with the advantages of the traditional server model and try to find solutions for the problems that a one-server world would bring with it. Tomorrow’s part two will then talk about why we would want to condense to one server in the first place and part three (if there is interest in one) will talk about my idea on how such a world could be set up.

Endgame Killed the Levelling Content

Keen over at Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog wrote an interesting post on how current MMO design is too vertical. Content is bypassed quickly in order to get closer to the endgame. When is the last time you have actually cared about gear while levelling?
A huge part of current MMOs is only there to guide the players to the maximum level where the real game takes place. I know I myself usually rush to the new maximum in WoW whenever an expansion hits. I don't care about the content in between; I don't care about crafting (other than getting that to max level too,) etc. Keen calls this “concentrated action” in a follow-up post. Instead of having a lot of things to do all over the place, we are funnelled into a linear progression path to the endgame.

Ze Items, Zey do Nothing

No, I'm not suddenly a subscriber in the blue Ulduar theory. Clearly gear has a strong effect in World of Warcraft, both on performance and as a motivator. What it isn't, is interesting.
Most people I've talked to dislike the incredibly unimaginative Trial of the Grand Crusader gear, but the issue I'm talking about is as old as WoW itself. For one, gear isn't very varied (and will be worse with Cataclysm.) But even if it was, the stats would just be very boring and unimaginative.