...game will cheat and help you hit My tapers are burning faster In Asherons Call, mages use tapers as material components for their spells. These tapers have a small random chance of burning up whenever a spell is cast, so players tend to carry hundreds of them at once. Then something weird started happening: players became convinced that their...

...game Of course, before you answer that you might ask, do we even have levels in our game at all? Maybe you dont have levels per se, but if you are making an RPG then we already know that the characters become more powerful over time. You need to represent that power numerically to the player somehow, whether its in the form of character...

...game. Its portable across all the major consoles as well as the PC. Use it to create your GUI, and youve got automagical cross-platform goodness. Plus, you can use Adobes Flash development tools to create your GUI! That saves your team development time, too. Howcan you lose Well, Scaleform does deliver what it advertises. But its not a...

...Game has been on hiatus a while, but actually there are posts back here they were just too negative or unproductive to reach the front page. But to vent my spleen enough to get back on track, Ill hit some of these toics quickly enough that you can tell where I stand on the issue, anyway and then we can move on to more productive stuff As an...

...game a lot, which makes it the butt of my attacks. But I prefer itover WoW or Lotro, so my griping is not intended to dissuade people from trying it In fact, since most MMO players have never tried EQ2, they have no idea what they might be missing. And far too often, I find that MMO designers havent played any MMO too seriously except the one...

...games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot show this most clearly: they have tightly-controlled classes with an extremely limited range of effective verbs. Most classes have a right way to build the character and myriad wrong ways to do it. The systems designer makes sure that the classes right ways are all reasonably in sync, at leastat...

...game were reading its forums,they would come away thinking just about any game in existence is terrible. Not just terrible a blight upon the world, a source of misery and death, the reason video games should be banned. The gamescrime? Bad balance, down time, not delivering features on time, bugs you know, life or death stuff Its a frustrating...

...game where the world suddenly feelsbarren and empty. And then suddenly people start disappearing evenmore rapidly, and then thegame boils down to the most dedicated of fans only and then youre stuck with just those people forever Its often very sudden. Your game is just cruising along, losing a few hundredpeopleper month, and then suddenly...

...games. I dont really believe that slow travel makes the world seem bigger. But I put up with travel in MMO games because, however much it annoys me, it rarely rises into my list of top ten concerns But Im finished reading all the new blog posts in Google Reader , Im all caught up with both Salon and Sinfest , and Im considering starting on...

...gamehas finished pre-production and Yourcompany has hired a half-dozen level designers already, but the level-design tools arent finished being coded yet. So those level designers areworking on paper or making mock ups in 3D Max. And playing lots of games on the clock You still dont have a playable demo version of your game that supports...