Nov

23

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #6 End Game at the Beginning of the Game

November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I am trying to remember which Everquest server this happened on. I believe it was Tholuxe-Paells.

On the very first day that the server came up, I had made a human character in Qeynos and was running around in Qeynos Hills happily bashing wolves and snakes and whatever I could get my level 5 sword on when a strange thing happened: I ended up on a 30 person raid.

You see, in Norrath’s Qeynos Hills, a Necromancer named Pyzjn will rarely spawn and occasionally drops a piece of rare loot which, back in the day, used to be worth a fair bit. Unfortunately, Pyzjn is about level 14 and the highest player in the zone at the time was level 8.  But since this was an expansion server full of people who had put aside higher level characters on other servers to “re-roll” as newbies, the call to arms went out across the zone and soon we had a good part of the zone organized into an impromptu raid force.

It was a bloody fight to be sure, but in the end Pyzjn was down and there was much rejoicing (no real loot to speak of) and then about 30 seconds later everyone went back to the business of trying to level up their little characters to get up to the “end-game” part where we could do this raid thing all over again.

Read more


 

Apr

12

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #5 Take the Bad with the Good

April 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment

The last time I played a pen and paper RPG, the game of choice was Villains and Vigilantes. I happily rolled myself up a new superhero (The Chrome Cricket) who had some wonderful world-saving powers (like armored skin and a sonic attack), but along with the super-powers came a weakness… in my superhero’s case a dependence on a certain medication to survive.

In the old V&V game, a player could drop one of their super-powers to rid themselves of their character’s weakness and I believe that most people who play choose to do that. Weaknesses are a liability and most of us have at least one in real life and would rather not deal with weaknesses in a game which is supposed to be “fun.” In fact it seems like it may be a big taboo to even suggest game elements which might not, on the surface, contribute to immediate and enduring fun. And who in their right mind would confuse a weakness with fun?

I might. Read more


 

Mar

24

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #4 You Like Me, You Really Like Me

March 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Since the dawn of time, man has been living by the wonderful axiomatic reality that it often isn’t what you know, but who you know which determines your success in any endeavor. I wonder if game designers might implement a way to help incorporate this aspect of community in the game empowering players with knowledge of the opinions of other players about their peers.

Some games have offered ways that the engine itself could flag players for bad behavior, but I’m proposing a whole new mechanism for black-balling and/or sucking up to people facilitated by the game. Read more


 

Mar

22

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #3 A Mob by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet

March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments

From across the plains you can see them floating weightlessly in the air, bobbing gently with the movements of your quarry, the impalpable letters of your prey’s name.

Good thing the developers have let me know that it’s a Greater Osterampusaur that I was about to trip over because lord knows I would have hated to accidentally call it, “some weird lizard thing that attacked me.” Read more


 

Mar

21

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #2 An Alternative to the Treadmill

March 21, 2007 | 2 Comments

No more BoarsNo offense to those of you who loved to sit on grassy, gentle, southern slopes of the Overthere, pulling rhinos, succulents, cockatrices and such until you heard the comforting ding of level 40, but grinding for experience to me seems kind of dumb. I wonder why is it that I should simply sit in one place and kill the same monsters ad nauseum in order to advance my level?

Want to have monsters drop occasional worthwhile loot, that’s cool – let the campers get a reward every once in a while, but I am thinking that to drive experience, characters should have to talk to people, take part in a lesson, learn a skill, complete pilgrimages, touch magic rocks, view the massing of an army, witness the execution of a mentor…

So, instead of simply having quests which contribute a little experience to the pool, but are seldom as efficient as just hanging around killing hordes of nameless minions, characters should also get advancement quests which must be completed to, you know… advance. Read more


 

Mar

18

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #1 In the end, I’d like a story

March 18, 2007 | 2 Comments

What fun is it to be an adventurer if there isn’t a handy bard around to record tales of your daring exploits and brushes with death for all of posterity to hear. While in many cases it is hard to find a good bard who will stick with you through the thick and thin of dungeon delving, blood filled battles, and extra-planar exploration, it seems like your trusty computer could keep some notes. Read more


 

Mar

18

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: Prelude

March 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I’ve decided to come up with some radical ideas which could be used to change video games design in strange and unusual ways. The concepts I am throwing out are not recommendations and in some cases may not even be possible. They are an exercise that I have given myself to think of things which have not yet been tried, to my knowledge, in the game genres to which each refers. Since I have yet to write a single idea, I also have no idea if I will end up with exactly 1001 at the end, it could be just one or 10,001, but I’ll keep them all labeled for those keeping track. And they will be, of course, not ordered by importance, significance, value, revolutionary-ness or any other criteria except that I just happened to think/write them in this order.


 

Search