Why Game Developers Should All Come To Australia

Just reading over at Biobreak a post about a post by Mark Jacobs, one of the bright lights behind Warhammer Online, is returning to work, although he didn’t say what on.

The thing that caught my eye was the bit about being held by his employment contract to not being able to work in his chosen area for the last year. This isn’t new news of course, there’s a long tradition of US companies that are so scared of the slightest competition forcing their employees to not work for a period of time, or to change career.

So here’s my invitation to you, …

Beware Of The Leopard

Ysharros over at Stylish Corpse, in her monthly wrapup, has just posted about her less than satisfactory experience with Funcom.

It turns out that the geniuses (geniii?) in the Funcom Sales and Marketing Department now require a new digital subscriber of Age of Conan to provide a mobile phone number in order to receive a SMS with an activation code. There’s some sort of drivel, err excuse about security and offering a better game experience. (Why an eMail wouldn’t suffice is beyond me.) Bad luck if you are not the proud owner of this type of communication technology I guess. Ysh, rightly feels put out in having to do this, and I don’t blame her.

As you know, this year I’ve entered …

I’d Do It. Wouldn’t You?

So it looks like Richard Garriott has come up trumps in his lawsuit with NCSoft… at least for now, I saw somewhere that they’ll keep fighting.

Good on him. Garriott was treated abominately by NCSoft who sacked him and tried to weasel out of their obligations by pretending that he resigned voluntarily, as determined by the jury at least.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. In reading the comments made on other boards, I’ve seen a couple of commenters complain that Garriott deserved this fate because he chose to go into space to satisfy a childhood dream shortly after the launch of Tabula Rasa, the ‘failure’ of which caused his sacking. The inference in these comments is that Garriott abandoned the players and the game …

LotRO Allowing Players To Mod The UI With LUA

There have been a lot of factors put forward for the success that World of Warcraft has seen over the years. The amount of polish Blizzard put into the game, the casual friendly nature of WoW, even good timing. To be sure, I think that all of those have played a part.

But I also reckon that one of the factors for WoW’s success is the ability of players to modify the user interface using the LUA scripting language.

The original World of Warcraft user interface was pretty ordinary. But over the years, players have added thousands of mods that make nearly every facet of the game easier to manage. Sure, some of the mods have made some activities too easy, so Blizzard has effectively nerfed them. …

Schilling Announces Amalur. Just Another World of Warcraft Clone?

The news is out. 38 Studios have announced the real title of the long in development Project Copernicus, and it is called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

So just some initial thoughts.

I’m not taken so much by the name. Kingdoms of Amalur sounds pretty generic to me, but that may just be the result of seeing so many MMORPGs with similar names.
Speaking of generic, and quoting through Heartless_ of Heartless_Gamer, RA Salvatore says that he has created a Tolkienesque 10,000-year-long back story: “I think we can say that we are talking about a high fantasy world with multiple races.” I tend to agree with Heartless_ on this point. A high fantasy Tolkienesque world? Why?
YAHFWLG? (That means Yet Another …

Stropp on Facebook

I had forgotten that I set up a Facebook account for this blog a while back, in fact it was quite a long time ago that I did set it up. I think at the time I had seen how a Facebook profile could provide a better rounded experience for blog readers. Instead I ended up focussing on Twitter for the whole social networking thing.

But just recently I’ve received a few eMails from Facebook telling me that I have a few friend requests pending. So I hopped in a little while ago and approved the requests.

Of course nothing is ever as simple as that, and I spent a little while setting things up properly, for instance adding the profile picture, likes, and some info about …

Power To The People

There were a few people who didn’t think that Blizzard would back down over requiring their forum posters to use real names through Real ID, but it appears that they, in fact, did. Mike ‘Nethaera’ Morhaime posted on the Blizzard forums saying that, at least for now, real names would not be required.

It does appear that the response from the World of Warcraft player base gave the folks at Blizzard quite a surprise. Up until this post the very few blue responses, from WoW Europe, were along the lines of, “Hey we hear you, but this Real ID …

Real ID Is A Golden Opportunity

Blizzard’s completely insane move towards destroying their customers privacy might actually be a golden opportunity for other MMORPG publishers.

All they have to do is get all loud and vocal about how they’ll never violate your privacy and how they respect your right to be anonymous. Add a few humorous adverts poking fun at Blizzard, and I’m sure they’ll capture more than a few of the players quitting World of Warcraft over this issue.

Mr Developer, this is called a Unique Selling Proposition, something I’ve been learning while doing my business planning. It means that in order to do well in a market, you have to offer something that the other guy doesn’t. In this case, a respect for privacy and anonimity is something you can show …