08-20-2009, 12:56 PM
I think that's an interesting element to discuss:
"Game" vs "world".
Basketball, like a WOW battleground, is a self-contained game. You could throw away all of WOW, create JUST the battlegrounds and have yourself a perfectly viable stand-alone game similar to TF2 or Counterstrike. Teams are even, the field and objectives are well defined.
But it suffers from the same problem. How do you play baseball with 5 people? How do you play a 10v10 battleground if your side has 14 people who want to play? Generally, the more well-defined a "game" is, the more restrictive it is with regards to how many people can play or how you can play. There is certainly a place in the world for this type of well defined game but the average gamer may find them to be inaccessible: he doesn't have access to the right number of players or can't play a solid 2 hour match, etc, and may find "pugging it" to be unenjoyable for a variety of reasons.
The alternative, I think, is to not define a "game" so much as a "world".
Games are very specific in that they have objectives but they also have a potentially long list of rules and requirements before you can even start. A world should still have objectives but it should have very few rules or requirements governing how you achieve those goals.
Games are meant to be fair, which is why they are so restrictive.
Worlds have to aim for fairness in a round-about sort of way.
For example, Planetside aimed to inject some overall fairness by creating 3 teams, such that it was hard for one team to completely lock the map down (as there would always come a point where it became 2v1).
WW2O aimed to inject some fairness by having finite spawns per town, such that while it might be 20 players vs 50 players, it was still 1000 spawns vs 1000 spawns.
By creating a "world" rather than a strictly defined "game", Planetside and WW2O both allow you to log in with any number of people and play together and work towards some goal and while fairness may not be present on a small scale, there were still elements of it on a bigger scale.
So I actually think where WOW and WAR go wrong is by trying to create a strictly defined game similar to a sport. It has its benefits but it necessitates the formation of cliques -- groups of exactly the right size and composition to engage in the specific requirements for the type of match they favor. It's popular enough but it drives out all the players who don't have a clique or who whose real life demands make it hard/impossible for them to find a clique that meets their needs.
"Game" vs "world".
Basketball, like a WOW battleground, is a self-contained game. You could throw away all of WOW, create JUST the battlegrounds and have yourself a perfectly viable stand-alone game similar to TF2 or Counterstrike. Teams are even, the field and objectives are well defined.
But it suffers from the same problem. How do you play baseball with 5 people? How do you play a 10v10 battleground if your side has 14 people who want to play? Generally, the more well-defined a "game" is, the more restrictive it is with regards to how many people can play or how you can play. There is certainly a place in the world for this type of well defined game but the average gamer may find them to be inaccessible: he doesn't have access to the right number of players or can't play a solid 2 hour match, etc, and may find "pugging it" to be unenjoyable for a variety of reasons.
The alternative, I think, is to not define a "game" so much as a "world".
Games are very specific in that they have objectives but they also have a potentially long list of rules and requirements before you can even start. A world should still have objectives but it should have very few rules or requirements governing how you achieve those goals.
Games are meant to be fair, which is why they are so restrictive.
Worlds have to aim for fairness in a round-about sort of way.
For example, Planetside aimed to inject some overall fairness by creating 3 teams, such that it was hard for one team to completely lock the map down (as there would always come a point where it became 2v1).
WW2O aimed to inject some fairness by having finite spawns per town, such that while it might be 20 players vs 50 players, it was still 1000 spawns vs 1000 spawns.
By creating a "world" rather than a strictly defined "game", Planetside and WW2O both allow you to log in with any number of people and play together and work towards some goal and while fairness may not be present on a small scale, there were still elements of it on a bigger scale.
So I actually think where WOW and WAR go wrong is by trying to create a strictly defined game similar to a sport. It has its benefits but it necessitates the formation of cliques -- groups of exactly the right size and composition to engage in the specific requirements for the type of match they favor. It's popular enough but it drives out all the players who don't have a clique or who whose real life demands make it hard/impossible for them to find a clique that meets their needs.