ION 08

I am now in Seattle to attend the renamed online game conference now ION 08.

Had a great day yesterday, started off with a walk on the shores here with Mark Terrano sitting on rocks exchanging a bunch of cool ideas and comments on game design. The big game that he is working on has some very cool guild systems that have never been done before that cannot wait to play with.

At the show I bumped into Phil Adams who I know from Interplay days and he walked me through the early days of when he started and ran Spectrum Holobyte especially the time of Gato and Falcon. It was really interesting to hear him explain to me how he taught himself marketing in that time period. I was of course envious to hear how low the development costs were and how high the margins were for the original few publishers. We then went on to what would he do if he was doing marketing spend now and I was really interested to here that he would end up spending very little hard cash on marketing programs. So despite that being his roots he has moved his philosophy forward considerably into the more labor intensive forms of the new forms of reaching customers.

From Phil, I met Joe Ybarra, which was very cool. Ybarra was the the EA-side producer on the Bard's Tale when it was created by Interplay for EA way back in the 1980s. For me, Bard's Tale is that first game that got me hooked in PC gaming (err at that time Apple IIgs). That is the game that I mapped by hand with my friend Elliott Einbinder. We played that whole game, co-op style with me mapping and Elliott and the controls until we explored every nook and cranny of that trilogy! Ybarra laughed and said he had to do the same thing for the Interplay development team was not very helpful in supplying a map of Bard's Tale to be tested either!

I then spent the bulk of the evening on the get together asking Damion Schubert question after question about what high-end raiding is like in WoW. So I play, think and post a lot about WoW, but my experience is largely restricted to the PVP side of the end-game content. Damion previously designed the uber PVP Shadowbane, and is now at Bioware Austin as their lead combat designer on the big new Bioware MMO. But he has been playing in a strong guild who is jockying for #1 and #2 position on the server that he plays on.

It ws cool for me to hera in a very compressed format how the AI and scripting works for many of teh boss battles. Then we discussed the puzzle box solutions vs. the more dynamic encounters. This is especially important to me, for as a PVPer I find most static PVE content mind numbingly boring and tedious, and I wished for some encounters were more dynamic or even gasp use AI like in modern FPS to give the mobs some real challenge. Sadly, he explained to me in great detail how the overwhelming number of PVEers are really there for the control and while a few do like the dynamic scripts it is not favored. Mark Terrano and I talked about this as well. I think it would be very useful to be able to create some instances for WoW with much stronger AI and see what the response is like - I am now wondering how those emulated servers that I see are set up.

Finally, much to my relief Damion assured me that most guilds would be quite happy to take almost anyone through Kara, and that wearing a bunch of S3 is just fine for high end raiding for the casual PUG on good terms with a an experienced guild or two. Yeah! I do not have to worry about grinding two different armor sets on the new server!

Cheers, -Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal