The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

We Now Return To Your Regular Scheduled Random Posting…

As both of you may have noticed, this here blog took a little hiatus.  I assure you that there are two or three very, very good reasons why this blog disappeared for a little while.

  1. I was pushing to release Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to post stuff that might not be construed as a promise to our ever eager fan-base.  
  2. I was writing a column for Game Developer Magazine, and to be honest was having enough trouble finding content for THEM every other month, without also feeding the beast here.
  3. I am a lazy, lazy man.

Things have changed somewhat.  I’m now lead designer of SWTOR, which of course is best described as a dream come true.  As such, I’ll probably continue to stray from writing too much about MMO topics that might be confused with SWTOR discussions.  Such discussions should still happen on our own boards, when they do happen.  That being said, the Game Developer Magazine gig appears to have ended with the collapse of the magazine itself.

I am, however, still a very lazy man.

I have been looking at my backups of the old Zen of Design blog, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that my backups include everything EXCEPT the old content, so all or some of that may be lost forever.  I will endeavor to see if I can dig up some of that old stuff, but at this time I make no promises.

But yeah, anyway, I’m back.

2 Comments

  1. Roger Hågensen

    For some odd reason this post showed up in my RSS feed yesterday.

    Anyway, grats with the job, I envy you.
    And secondly, I love the BioWare storytelling, but I hate grinding (MMO or otherwise) so I’ll just sulk in the corner here until a spiritual KoTOR3 appears.

    By grind I mean, kill x amount of wibbles, then kill x amount of tribbles, RPGs suffer from this, and MMOs more so.

    And in the case of SWTOR you do this and run through a certain area with your first class, then you do the same with the second class as they share the same starting planet, then you find that all the classes on the same side share the 2nd planet, and then you find that all classes on both sides share the 3rd planet.

    There is a certain point where one go “Oh hell no! I’m not going to go through all that again!”

    A lot of the story quests share area but do not overlap that much, the issue is all the NPC enemies on the way there and the sidequests, you have to grind through those with each class.

    KoTOR1 and KoTOR2 let you play as darkside and lightside, but there are certain parts of the game that you are starting to hate and it’s a chore or grind to get through, once even would wish to be ale to skip past it

    Grinding through the same area/mobs/quests causes burnout, it’s damn difficult to avoid or get right. But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played through KotOR. While with SWTOR I stopped after I got 4 classes to their second planet, as I found myself grinding through 50-100% of the same content.

    But, I do envy you. Being able to create Star Wars is a geeky nerds fantasy dream indeed.

  2. Dominic Fitzpatrick

    Congrats on the great job. Glad you have not stopped bloggin’ altogether.

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