Thanksgiving is a peculiar but wonderful American holiday. What originated as a harvest festival has become a time to gather with family and close friends and share the many things we’re thankful for over the prior year. Forget the aprocyphal tales of Native Americans sharing turkeys with pilgrims: this is…
Read More »Word has it that the DRM inside EA’s hack-and-slash action RPG Darkspore has prevented anyone from playing the game for a week and a half now. We’re talking about a single player game that paying customers have been prevented from playing on their own PCs since October 18th due to…
Read More »I’ve found myself wondering about “gamification” with increasing frequency these last few months as various articles appear online to denounce it. What is it, exactly? And is it really as bad as they all say? What follows is a brief exploration of the concept and a look at its applications. …
Read More »Last week we had a double-barreled shotgun blast of opinion pieces advocating for RPGs to hide or drop some of their core conventions and abstractions. Tom Bissell, writing about Dead Island, complained about pop-up damage numbers in a real-world zombie RPG and landed a glancing blow against leveling and statistics-based…
Read More »Looking back on my last developer rant, I’ve decided that I was a little bit too scattershot in my approach. I wanted to cover a multiplicity of areas where detail tends to get overlooked in RPGs, but in doing so I skimped on solutions. In particular, I want to revisit…
Read More »The RPG is an inherently inelegant creature. It is something of a Frankenstein monster, a suite of different gameplay systems stitched together into a shambling chimera. Character creation, simulated markets, item management, navigation, combat, stealth, dialogue, puzzles, class and skill trees–as a developer, it is difficult enough simply to make…
Read More »2K Marin, the developer working on the X-Com series reboot, has become the latest big studio to take a turn at trashing classic turn-based games:
Read More »In my last opinion piece, I provoked a certain subsection of the world of RPG enthusiasts by slaughtering a particularly sacred cow: the D&D-style combat system. A surprising number of people wrote in agreeing with me. Predictably, however, others responded in one of two ways: (1) “So you think a…
Read More »Dungeons and Dragons, son of Chainmail, is the great granddaddy of the modern role-playing game. Its importance cannot be overstated: not only was it revolutionary for its time, it has also directly inspired many of the early computer RPGs on which the genre is now based. Because of D&D’s power…
Read More »Sometimes, in order to save something, you have to shatter it. Making Telepath RPG: Servants of God has taught me some hard lessons about the importance of modularity in designing a larger game. I’ve finally reached a point where, in order to finish creating the game, I must break it…
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