Game Development Giant

Let’s not mention these.

Let’s just talk about the development strategy of withdrawing the environment.

Jester thought about it for a long time, but still couldn't make the most correct judgment.

First of all, one thing that can be made clear is that there is no good or bad strategy, it just depends on whether it is used in the right place. This design idea is tailor-made for trading card games.

For a trading card game, this design strategy is indeed very suitable. The reason for this is that no one has been able to come up with a better strategy than retreating from the environment in twenty or thirty years to extend the life of the card game.

So, he's just better.

But for MMORPG games, of course, expansion packs are indeed irreplaceable, but being irreplaceable does not mean that Jester will learn from Blizzard’s development model of expansion packs, which is a pure environmental model. As soon as the expansion pack comes out, all the items in the old world are turned into garbage. This is an extremely irresponsible behavior for the game.

Game companies force players to play new content.

This domineering, arrogant and unreasonable style is indeed in line with Blizzard's style. Those designers who think they are the boss of God and the second best design the game in this way. This is their thinking. What do they think is a good game? Only we understand that what we design is the best game, and you must play it according to our design.

Blizzard even has a very arrogant rule in the BOSS battle of the dungeon, that is, your BOSS battle must be carried out according to my setting intention, and you cannot avoid it, otherwise your account will be blocked.

And for this reason, I know what a good game is and you are all SB.

In the expansion pack of WOW, Blizzard completely introduced the environment withdrawal mechanism in Magic: The Gathering, making the previous version of the world completely a place for leveling, and it cannot play even a little role in the new game. .

Commenting on the quality of a game is a very personal matter. No one can say that I think it is fun, so the whole world must think it is fun. This is simply playing the piano randomly, just like Sid Meier said. A game designer must be an excellent psychologist. He must understand the players' thoughts. Only in this way can the games he designs be liked by the players.

There is not just one way of thinking in developing games in the gaming industry.

Sid Meier is a master. His design thinking is a very pure idea of ​​game design. In fact, there are not many designers with this idea in the entire game industry.

On the contrary, most people are like those idiots from Blizzard who think I am right about everything.

After all, to designers, games are nothing more than their children. Or are they the founders of the design world they are involved in? Have you ever heard of the founder’s opinions being denied? Players are subjects living in their world. How can you oppose the founder's ideas?

Jester hated this design idea deeply.

Although he tried his best to prevent the emergence of such design ideas in Mars Entertainment, although he was revered as the God of Games, he was just an ordinary person and not an omnipotent god. He had no way to Change other people's minds.

Moreover, in fact, from a practical point of view.

Only people with the idea that I am the God of Creation can make the most incredible game.

Sid Meier's concept of making games was actually told to his subordinates. Because their subordinates only need to follow his ideas.

But one problem is that not all designers are Hideo Kojima, Tomonobu Itagaki, John Carmack, or Robert Pardo. In fact, they are all amazingly talented people like these. , they are also rare in the entire gaming world. Although many people have talented people from generation to generation, judging from Jester's later experience and the games he has played.

The gap between the new generation of designers and the older generation of designers is simply unreasonable.

Needless to say anything else. It was the first generation of "Super Balotelli" produced by Shigeru Miyamoto when he was in his twenties and thirties. The experience in game design contained in it was unmatched by any subsequent young designer.

The improvement of hardware conditions in the future will indeed make game development easier, because designers can fully implement some of their ideas into the game.

but. This also makes later game developers worse and worse than the earliest developers in terms of their ability to conceive games, especially in tearing off all the gorgeous appearances and getting straight to the core of the game.

Because at the beginning, the hardware performance was low.

Developers can only make do with functions and abandon all flashy things. A game is just a game. The most important thing about it is its gameplay. Whether it is fun or not? Because the capacity is very small, so every time when adding a setting or a function, the designer needs to consider what this thing does to the game. Has the playability been improved?

You even need to consider, is this improvement much better than the improvement of another setting?

Because the capacity of game cartridges is limited.

For example, "Super Mario" is only a few megabytes in size, but its playability is extremely rich.

The group of game developers who grew up under such difficult conditions really don’t know what a fun game is and what an excellent game is compared to the later game developers who were trained in a development environment with several gigabytes of memory. The game, the understanding of what a real game is is countless times stronger.

They are simply not comparable.

Only those who were killed under extremely cruel conditions can be called elites, and those who came later are really not worth mentioning.

This is why even twenty or thirty years later, those who play the leading roles in the industry are still those who came from the most difficult eight-bit and 16-bit computer eras.

Because these people truly know what the game is all about.

What is the reason why a game will be liked by players?

Not the flashy decorations, but the game itself.

Jester thought a lot about WOW, the good and the bad, the things he could correct based on his own experience, and the things he couldn't correct. WOW was originally a game that opened up history. It is a game that marked an era, and one can even say a qualitative word. If the entire PC gaming industry is to be divided into eras based on games.

So Diablo 2 is the first division, and WOW is the second division.

And Jester wants to do WOW in this world. It is much more ambitious than Blizzard's original WOW. His WOW is not just about defeating EQ, it has 500,000 paying players.

What he wants to do is a game that changes the entire game landscape.

Many people feel that PC gaming has little hope. Because the problem of piracy is serious, after the release of Diablo 2, it opened up a new way for many people, that is, making it an online game so that others cannot pirate it. But at this time, online games are still a niche, whether it is the scale of the game, the number of players, or the market share, compared to console games and arcade games.

None of them are the same.

In the original history, when the time was right, the emergence of WOW gave everyone a few great changes in the potential market for PC games.

WOW will be the last game in his plan, so Jester wants to make this game as perfect as possible.

certainly. Pure perfection is impossible. For example, attribute expansion is a difficult problem that has no solution for MMORPG. It will inevitably show up as the game progresses. Jester is actively detonating attributes, just like Did Blizzard do something similar to the retreat environment in trading cards in the expansion pack, or did Blizzard choose to delay the process of attribute explosion and actively choose the second option.

Because he feels that an RPG game cannot be like the later version of WOW. Only level 10 game content is meaningful.

The structure of such a game society is also extremely unstable.

What he wants to do is make all levels meaningful. In fact, it is very simple. That is to give up the idea of ​​​​retiring the environment. For example, even if the expansion pack is opened, the production of some items in the expansion pack still requires materials from the old world.

This will make it meaningful for players of the old map.

certainly. This may prevent many people from playing the expansion pack - but this is Jester's purpose. Why should everyone play an expansion pack when it is released?

This kind of idea is a stupid idea. Of course, many people may not know how WOW operates. They think that overseas is just like in China. The games are free to download and then charged with a card.

In fact, in Europe and the United States, the client used by WOW also needs to be purchased. The price is the same as that of 3A masterpieces, sixty dollars a copy. Moreover, after you purchase the game client, you still need to purchase a monthly card. Of course, there is no monthly card in China. The card only has points, but in China you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to buy the client. This is why Blizzard insists on using the idea of ​​​​retiring the environment to develop expansion packs.

Because if they only play the remaining content, they can't make money from the client.

Therefore, he can just use this despicable method of withdrawing from the environment to make players want to buy my client if they want to play this game. Otherwise, you will just keep doing useless work on the previous version of the map.

Jester said before that the most important thing about a game is its playability. Whether the game is fun or not should always be the top priority for a developer.

Only stand-alone games can completely abandon the idea of ​​how to defraud players of money to make games.

Because they only need to think about making the game fun and letting players buy it, but MMORPG is different.

While it is an RPG, it also has the prefix MMO. What does MMO mean?

Quite simply, as the name suggests, massively multiplayer online.

When playing MMORPG, you are not playing alone, but a group of people are playing. Only when a group of people are playing can the game run normally. Many people say that if the expansion pack is opened, and the old world The materials are still useful, but doesn’t that make the whole system a lot more complicated? If some servers with a small number of people don't have enough low-level players, they won't even play the normal version.

But there is another issue that needs to be understood when considering this issue.

So what is RPG?

This is an issue that game developers, especially RPG game developers, must understand. RPG is role-playing. Everyone knows this. What needs to be understood is the deeper meaning.

That is, RPG role-playing is based on a social system. Only when there is a social system can there be role-playing.

What is society?

When it comes to society, it must be reduced to the social structure, and everyone performs his or her own duties. This has been the case since the slave era when human civilization was born. There must be a stable social structure system, just like in feudal society, the king granted the title of princes, and the princes granted the title of princes. Your Majesty, there are scholars under you, people from the country below you, and subordinates who have a lower status than people from the country. This is a relatively stable social structure at that time.

Of course, now it seems that such a social structure is backward.

But at that time, it was stable and advanced. The biggest difference between MMORPG and traditional RPG games is that it wants to build a society, and the premise of society is to have a stable social structure.

The sixties were solid.

It became unstable in the 1970s.

In the 1980s, this unstable situation was actually on the verge of collapse. However, the super popularity of Alsace delayed the collapse. By the time 1985, it was considered a complete collapse.

In fact, WOW when Jester traveled through time was already an MMORPG with a collapsed social system.

There is no need for role-playing anymore.

Because have you ever seen a role-playing game filled with legendary characters?

Presumably not.

This is the most serious drawback of decommissioning the environment. Therefore, we must find a way to delay the occurrence of this kind of thing as much as possible. We should not release an expansion pack and make the content in it meaningless. This is like When the country issued a new version of currency, it also announced that the previous version of currency could no longer buy things.

This can indeed temporarily increase income.

But it is also very harmful to the game. It can be seen from the subsequent player feedback that many players like the previous version, whether it is the version in the 1960s, the 1970s, or the 1980s. Everyone will like it.

What designers should do is to make their likes meaningful, rather than forcefully telling them that your likes are meaningless and that you should play the latest version.

This kind of design idea is not what Jester wants. (~^~)