Category Archives: Design

Here’s another example of where our brains trick us into enjoying things in spite of ourselves. I was reading a book of folk tales and I got to the story of The Snow Queen. It is about two innocent children … Continue reading →

I’ve read a lot of really great posts as a result of my hornets-nest stirring post about how classes are better than unclassed games. Some rebuttals have been pretty smart and have changed my mind about a number of things. For … Continue reading →

A few years ago, I was interviewing for a systems designer gig. The design interviewer had been at Turbine many years prior, so we vaguely knew each other from there, but she needed to know how much I’d grown as … Continue reading →

We’ve all grouped with great healers. It’s not really very hard to be a great healer: just keep track of all the little health meters and make sure nobody dies. But have you ever been in a group where the … Continue reading →

One hard lesson that new developers have to learn is that not all game difficulty is equally fun. Some types of difficulty are perceived as fair, but other types are perceived as unfair… or worse, buggy. The classics can teach … Continue reading →

When I buy a AAA game from the store, I have a vested interest in liking the game. I’ve plonked $60 down for it, so there’s less of a chance I’ll abandon it just because the installer is annoying, or … Continue reading →

I’ve been fascinated with Cataclysm, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, since I first heard about it. In many ways this expansion is a live team’s dream: an opportunity to fix the whole goddamned mess that the previous teams have … Continue reading →

Can you perfectly predict the weather? No, because it’s too complex — the “chaos factor” makes it impossible to perfectly predict. The same holds true of the balance of any modern MMO. This may be surprising. We create every aspect … Continue reading →

It is December of 2002, and Asheron’s Call 2 has been launched for a month. It is already clear that the game is not going to be a huge success, but I still want to work on it. I have … Continue reading →