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In the last blog post, we mentioned how it would be cool to be able to accurately compare the success of different genres of MMOs. It is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish this, though, as the definition of success is so loosely bound.
Originally, we started designing a fantasy-based game, because it seemed like it was the tried and true genre. Many game development companies choose to base their games on it, and fantasy-based movies haven't been more popular. In our minds, it just seemed like there was something about this genre that people liked, and we wanted to explore it.
After our first few months of design work, we started to realize something pretty important - It is very easy to fall into the same rut that dozens of other companies have. Basic game principles, such as class organization, grouping, and leveling are pretty redundant when you compare games. We determined that although it's a popular genre, fantasy-based games seem pretty much the same when you get down to the crux of it.
At that point, it really hit hard that we needed to seize the opportunities that so many other companies have missed. We looked at 18-24 of the critical systems in MMOs (PvP, leveling, classes, travel, economics, real-life communications, etc.) and really broke them down to determine what would best suit the player. We redesigned these subsystems, simultaneously, and when we got a solid idea of what we were doing for each of them, we broke them down a little more and rebuilt them back up, making sure to keep them all interacting properly, in one system. We'll start revealing some of these details, soon.
In the next couple weeks, we hope to get some more functionality built into our blogging tools. We should have author information posted, as well as comment boards for each blog entry. Look for forums to come around March/April.
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