Eurogamer has a nice Free Realms video walkthrough online. This game looks like it will be big, should be interesting to see how their monetization plans work out compared to a traditional subscription model. Free Realms appears to forego the user generated content model, which seems to be a favourite among casual and social virtual worlds lately, taking a more traditional mmog design approach – rightly so, i’d wager. While i’m certainly intrigued by the notion of user generated content in persistent worlds, i’m not quite convinced that crowd-sourcing game design can work on a broad basis, though i’d love to be proven wrong.
Fake following: making the impression that you’ve befriended someone on a social network without actually following them. Somewhat brilliant and inane at the same time. Its necessity in social software services makes me wonder whether they succeed in actually being useful or if they’re just one shiny new popularity contest after another.
Game developer interviews, layoff edition
- 1up interviews Flagship Founder Bill Roper to get his side of the story of Flagship Studio’s closure.
- Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer formerly of Flagship, now of Runic Games, about their new venture. Both of these interviews suggest that the old Mythos team, though reformed as Runic Games, won’t be able to continue work on their property in all likelihood.
- Scott Jennings about Tabula Rasa, the state of the mmo space and the future of multiplayer online games.
The Warhammer Online system requirements where revealed some time ago and while people all over the internet call them low and reasonable, I only noticed that it won’t run on my 18 month old Macbook. I guess when they said it would run on 3 year old hardware they only meant top-of-the-line-back-then gaming hardware, not your average PC and notebook with onboard graphics. I wanted to try this game, but I’m not going to buy a new PC just for that, so their “low” system requirements already lost them a customer. Judging by this hardware rundown of your average casual gamer (via Raph Koster) W:O is severely limiting its potential customer base, which is ok I guess, as long as you’re not gunning for WoW numbers. Just skimming over these graphics card numbers makes it obvious that W:O won’t run on about 80% of the PCs out there.
Incidentally I would like to point out that in the past I ran WoW on a now 6 year old laptop – now that’s what I call low system requirements.