Quiz. What do these three things have in common?

a) Hockey
b) Artillery
c) MMORPG Design

Give up?

The answer : it’s where you aim your shot.

In the immediacy of hockey, players don’t pass to where their teammate is, but where they’ll be in the next 0.5 seconds. In artillery, shots follow a ballistic trajectory. In sum, the game isn’t won by playing the current game. It’s won by anticipation.

Continue reading Aiming at Vanguard…

A big congratulations goes out to Neardeath Studios on the 10th year of Meridian 59. What a fantastic accomplishment. M59 is the first, the longest-running, and most respected MMORPG of them all.

This article is in response to M59 co-creator Brian “Psychochild” Green’s post, “Why middleware will not save us“. He hits pretty hard, and sets his sights on the “middleware market” in the MMORPG space. I’ll say I agree with the bulk of it. Yet, some of the specifics cause me trouble. Thus this post.

His argument noted two levels of the MMORPG industry, the indies and the AAAs (”the blockbuster games”). The gist of his article is that, as a technological cure-all, MMORPG middleware companies fail in their promise. They will make little impact on game development in MMORPG games. A gross-oversimplification on my part, so I’d encourage you go read Psychochild’s post.

First off, how does one define middleware?

Continue reading MMORPGs, Security, and the Grand Promise of Middleware…