Spore is the recently released game from game design genius Will Wright. Reviews have been somewhat mixed, ranging from good to great, with a few occasional mediocre reviews. For the most part, I think this is due to excessive hype, and the impossible expectations caused by following The Sims. But make no mistake, Spore is an excellent game. I recently completed a review titled: Spore - A Detailed Review of the latest Will Wright creation. An exerpt:

The open ended gameplay, the enormous variety of options, the opportunities to express one’s creativity through creation or storytelling, and the sheer fun and joy you get from playing Spore are all major reasons this is such an excellent game. The potential for replayability is great, while the potential to keep playing a single game is equally great.

There is a lesson for all POW developers from Spore. Give your players a way to express their creativity and imagination, and you give them unlimited content. Probably the only thing still keeping City of Heroes alive is the amazing character and costume creator. It is a shortsighted shame when a POW fails to give its players tools to create their own content, customize their characters, and customize some part of the world (generally a house, but other options are good as well).

I have always felt that my customers at Threshold were exceptional people. For over a decade, I have found them to be intelligent, creative, interesting, and for the most part successful people. I never doubted these conclusions, but I do so love being proved right.    A research group headed by Dmitri Williams (and sponsored by the National Science Foundation) was given unprecedented, anonymous access to almost every bit of data SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) had about its customers. SOE gave them “full data logs generated and collected by the world Everquest II.” This amounted to many terabytes of data that they hosted and analyzed on supercomuters at NCSA . They have begun releasing some of their findings , and they are impressive though not surprising. Inspired by Raph Koster ’s list of his favorite findings, here is mine:

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I absolutely despise the MMORPG acronym. It is virtually unpronounceable. It is too long. Perhaps worst of all, it does a poor job describing what a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game really is, or what is most distinctive about it. I started a discussion recently on a game developer mailing list in which I sought a replacement for MMORPG. My favorite response suggested POW for Persistent Online World (thanks, “cruise“). In this article I will break down the flaws (as I perceive them) in the term “MMORPG”, and then I will explain why POW - Persistent Online World - should supplant it.

Breaking Down the atrocity that is “MMORPG”

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The purpose of this post is to discuss a few functional things with my readers here to try and make Muckbeast a more enjoyable blog.

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Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have to craft a story, you have tons of writing to do, and all of it has to weave together in a legible, clear, enjoyable way. The creative aspects of all that writing take a lot of time. Then on top of that, you have the minutiae of making all the rooms, linking them, describing the tiny details so they don’t seem ignored or drab, and all that.

So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.

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