World of Warcraft Success

Ok its been awhile since I have written here, but I think its time to start writing again.

This little blog is about World of Warcraft or WOW.

Now, I have been playing WOW for about 9 months I would say. I did the whole pvp run up to Warlord on my rogue 'Nacdune'. I am also a class officer in my guild. Now with that being said I would like to point out why WOW has succeeded.

Wow has created community above all else. You come on meet people and eventually to become friends with them. YOu interact with each other through raids, dungeons, quests etc. The whole scope of it is you supposidly have fun with these people. Now, comes the hard part the drama. Drama comes over certain things, progression, item looting, people not helping, etc.

What WOW made easy

Blizzard made it really easy for people to get from lvl 1-60 in about 2-3 months. Now if that was all there was in the game why would you stay longer for 2 months. Therefore, WOW focuses alot on what the lvl 60s can do. The game is totallly geared for being 60 there is no point of being 55 or lower really.

What WOW has done to hook you for 3+ months

Though everyone thought it was a bad idea to make raids 40 mans this was actually a good idea in terms of getting people to stay with the game. It might create alot of drama, but do the math. A raid has 8-9 bosses each boss drops about 2-3 epic type items. There are 17 slots on your character to equip items, so 27 items drop divided by 40 people so you have a 68% chance roughly to get 1 item froma raid. So if you raid one of these large 40 man dungeons once a week it take you about 4-6 months to get all your epic gear. Now how do you progress to the next harder dungeon you need to be in full epic gear from the previous dungeon basically. Now you have to gear out at least 35 people to try the next dungeon. Thefore, this litte equation here gives you an idea of what you need to do to feel like your moving on in the game. And that is how WOW hooks you.

Building a community

Online games really need to focus on community things like throwing in game parties, events, etc. For online games you need to be able to add and replace content very quickly, so you need a game engine that is very user friendly for your level designers. Basically, the online community is growing huge with stuff like Myspace and now with more Online games you will see a larger and larger online community. For future online games I don't suggest competing with WOW but learn from what they have done you make something easy for them to achieve and then you set the hook to keep them on it. This should be a goal for any company considering developing an online game.

My first E3

Ok E3 I have to say right now is F'ing amazing. The event was huge beyond belief. I met a ton of people, had a ton of dinner meetings, saw some hot booth babes, won some webzen prizes, got on G4TV, and overall I would say its a must see event. Now the only thing that I hated was I was stuck in non-stop meetings on Wednesday and Thursday and I wasn't able to get on the floor. However, I did make up for it on Friday by getting around to see as much stuff as possible. I would of loved to see the Nintendo Wii, but the lineup was way to long and I was not going to wait probably 4-5 hours just to see it. I would though like to say Howling Moon Designs is going to be growing in the next couple of months and we will be announcing more information to the public when we are able to do so. Also we might be changing our name, but www.howlingmoongames.com will still be the site to get all the information about the future of our company.

Update

Sorry its been awhile since I have updated this blog. I have been focusing alot on Game Development and I hope to announce a bunch of stuff in the next 2-3 weeks on my website at www.howlingmoongames.com also I will be attending E3 this year and if you would like to setup a meeting with me you can contact me at lee.ing@howlingmoongames.com

Also I have been sick of all the stupid comments that are basically spam and thats another reason I haven't updated this blog. I will be creating a full development blog of the MMORPG project in the next 2-3 months for people to see and links for that will be on www.howlingmoongames.com stay tune more announcements will be coming very soon.

Lee

The Movies

Back again!!

I am here to wish everybody a happy new year and hope everybody had a good holiday. I am going to talk about one of the games I got over the Holidays.

This year there were really not to many games out there that caught my eye, but I decided to check out the game called 'The Movies' that was developed by lionhead studios and published by Activision.

The game allows you to run your own movie studio and has you grow you can create your own movies, hire stars, upkeep your studio, and add so much more.

The game itself is similar to a simluation game like Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon. The fun part is where you get to make movies. You have script writers that will come up with whatever you tell them too, or you can take the chance to make your own script. Now to make your script will take a ton of time. Also, you have to be careful not to make movies too long or they will cost way to much money to shoot and could leave your studio in the dust. You also have to be careful how many 3-5 star movies your going to make because they are also very expensive and will run your studio into the ground. However, if you want to forget about all of that why not try out the Sandbox mode where you can basically create your own starting budget and just make great movies. The game also comes with a program called Star Maker that allows you basically to create your own stars, now you can customize anything and this is where it gets a bit scary because you could really make a 3d model of yourself or somebody else if you spend enough time doing it. One of the major down flaws to this game is the difficulty of controlling your stars especially when you get over 8 of them. They all want Entourages and it's almost impossible to find entourages unless you take them from another area of the game like crew members or builders. Overall, if they want entourages they should of made a different building where you can create entourages. Also, one other problem is you can never really add in characters you have to really wait for characters to come to you. THerefore, you could be short staffed for alot of the game and it will drive you insane this even happens when you are the number one studio as well. Also, I notice you lose money pretty quickly when you start to PR your films so be careful. I think this would also be a good game for people to write screenplays in for real movies. It would really allow a person to give a visual appeal to a script they wrote and they wouldn't have to hire a concept artists to sketch out parts and areas for them. I think this would be one of the greatest tools people could use to learn how screenplays and scripts could be done.

Overall the game is pretty good and it is really addicting and I haven't taken it online yet, but I will soon. I give this game a 8/10.

Go check this game out.

5-8 Hour Completion Time

Hi all,

Sorry its been awhile. I wanted to talk this time about time it takes to finish a game from start to end. I rented out the new Game 'GUN' and I was able to beat it in the first 2 days of my 7 day rental. Now, to me it even came down to it feeling like I wasted my 7 day rental. The game was good and did have a storyline, but it brings up the point of why would I go out there and buy a copy when I just beat it in under a week. Overall, this shows off why I mostly play only RPG games. At least with a RPG your going to usually get about 25+ hours and the good ones usually take close to 40 hours to beat. However, over the last year there haven't been any good ones that have come out. Also, if this trend of a game with a lifespan of 8 hours continues to the next generation and you ask people to pay an extra $10 you can see less sales of the future. Now, I am not saying buying a 8 hour game is bad, but you have to look at it if its worth your time. Overall, before people go out and buy games I suggest doing research to see if its a good game especially if your going to be spending $60 on it. We all know that most gamers are 28 on average or so, but if you still want to attract young people 15-25 you need to really offer them the ability to buy games as well. Especially, people in college because they will mostly be living on fixed incomes and they might not choose video games as there entertainment if it costs them $60 each.

Release of XBOX 360

Well the release of the XBOX 360 is just a few days away. Honestly, the system does not show off to much power. Of course, I would say give it a year or two to see what developers and publishers come up with as well. If anybody is still trying to think about buying an XBOX 360 my advice would be to wait for the PS3 and Revolution to come out before making a decision. The Revolution might not be as powerful as the 2 other systems, but it will allow the most gameplay and it will feature a line up of all the previous games ever made for all the nintendo systems in the past. The PS3 looks very pretty, but its hard to say how easy it can be developed on. The PS3 though will have developers lined up like crazy to develop. XBOX 360 is pretty easy to develop a game. Basically, you can make a PC game and just port it for the XBOX 360. This was similar with the XBOX as well. Overall, my suggestion to anybody considering about buying the XBOX 360 should wait a year to see what SONY and Nintendo can show up with. Also, there are still good games coming out on PS2 and PC that will hold you over until the next systems. Some of the games to look foward for are Final Fantasy 12 (PS2) releasing in Feburary if Square sticks with the release date. There is also the World of Warcraft Expansion pack coming out around the same time. Lastly, I wanted to put up this new information about BIOWARE and Pandemic teaming up. This really shows that these companies both want to make good games and not be controlled by large developers like an EA or other company. Therefore, I applaud both of these companies for teaming up and I hope they have huge success in the future.

Canada X05

Sorry its been a long time since the last post. I have been really busy. I would like to tell everybody about Canada X05 though. Last night Microsoft held an event in the wonderful city of Toronto. The event started off with a few key speakers from Microsoft talking about new windows vista and developing for the XBOX 360. After that A key speaker from ATI talked about the Graphics card in the XBOX 360. Overall that part was mostly an introduction of the presentations. After those 2 speakers there was Dennis Dyack from Silicon Knights and David Wu from Psuedo. Dennis talked mostly about how the game industry is going to become bigger and bigger, and how teams for a game will need to be of about 100 or more people. At the end Dennis showed off a trailer for 'Too Human' a game he is working on for the XBOX 360. The last speaker of the night was David Wu. He talked about the difficulties on developing for different consoles. Then at the end he gave us all a little sales pitch telling us to go buy Full Auto. Now, Full Auto is not going to be a release title on the XBOX 360 just to let everybody now. After the presentations Microsoft was kind enough to buy everybody Dinner and then there was a VIP event across the street to get our hands on the XBOX 360. The games on display there was Full Auto, Kameo, Perfect Dark, and Project Gotham Racing. I was able to play each game. Now, honestly the XBOX 360 will only really look good on a HD TV. Therefore, if your not on HD yet don't buy an XBOX 360. The graphics I would say are not a huge improvement from current consoles. The only really difference is in the HD TV's and not the graphics. I have a HD tv for my PS2 and that does find. As for the games there: I would say they all suck, but there was only like one level to each. However, Full Auto did draw a good crowd and when I played it I did like it, but David Wu would not give an exact release date, and he was sketchy about the details of the game being released on the PS3 as well. Overall, the event was pretty good, but for the system being released next month and only showing off 4 games didn't seem very impressive and one of those games won't even be a launch title. My personal opinion would be to wait until all the next 3 generation systems are all out next year before you decide to make a decision.