Posts tagged planning 
The Daily Grind: How long do you really plan to play a new title?
Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment. While we like to talk about being a lifetime member of a new game, we generally are referring to the game's lifespan rather than our own. No matter how awesome a game is on release, it's going to show signs of age over time, and some of us just don't ...
Storyboard: The story of the story
Two weeks ago, I went over the bare minimums of running a long-standing story in an MMO. Specifically, I was covering the more administrative and less narrative aspects of keeping a story going, due in no small part to the fact that you can't actually plan most of a story in a consensual ...
The Mog Log: World of Craft-craft
Crafting is optional in Final Fantasy XIV, but that word doesn't mean what it usually means in games. You don't have to take any local levequests or take part in crafting to level up, but you'll find yourself far more constrained and advancing your physical level far more slowly if you ignore the ...
The Daily Grind: How much planning do you want for your character?
All MMOs require some amount of planning for your character ahead of time. Sometimes it's just a matter of choosing whether you want to be a warrior or a healer (with apologies to game-specific terms), but sometimes you wind up in a game with a much longer list of options. There are differing ...
Storyboard: Lasting past level two
So you have what you are absolutely certain is a spectacular idea for a character. You spend the better part of a week planning and preparing for this new addition to your stable of alts. Then you create your character, get into the starting area, and you start going to town... and then you log ...
Storyboard: A group effort
Roleplaying is like many other activities in MMOs -- it can't be done alone. That means that no matter how much of an antisocial player you might be for the rest of the game, you'll need a number of other people to make any roleplaying work. By extension, any longer storylines and character ...
The metagame and its importance to MMOs
What is the metagame? It can mean a lot of different things depending on context, but all of the meanings share the sense that the metagame is not the game itself, but something above and affecting the game as a whole. In a casual game of poker, the metagame could be as simple as one of the ...
EVE and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"
Sun Tzu: Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. The 6th century B.C. military treatise, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, serves admirably as a tract on corporate espionage and warfare in EVE Online's far future backdrop of New Eden. It is, after all, a corporation-dominated setting and ...
Massively goes to Dragon*Con: Monday events
All times Eastern. Post will be updated as schedule changes, so be sure to bookmark this and check back! Also of note: frosty adult beverages will be on sale at all night-time ballroom events. Athens Room: 10:00 AM Anarchy Online: Q&A with Funcom Jorgen Tharaldsen and ...
Massively goes to Dragon*Con: Sunday events
All times Eastern. Post will be updated as schedule changes, so be sure to bookmark this and check back! Also of note: frosty adult beverages will be on sale at all night-time ballroom events. Athens Room: 10:00 AM Star Wars Galaxies: Q&A with SOE In MMO parlance, "A long ...
Featured Stories
Some Assembly Required: Salem dev talks permadeath, griefing, and skill-based gameplay
Posted on Feb 10th 2012 9:00AM
