Tuesday, March 06, 2007

This will not end well.

Dave "Not the Games Animal one" Perry has apparently created the largest game development studio in the world, with a whopping 20,000 professional, enthusiastic, and talented staff. Or maybe he's just collected e-mail addresses on the internet, but I think that's much less likely than the first option.

Using the tried-and-tested "infinite monkeys" theory Perry plans to create a jaw-dropping, World of Warcraft-beating masterpiece. And certainly not just "WoW, but with like, planes and cars, and dinosaurs, and ninjas, and pirates, and it'll be awesome".

The 1998 PC game Half Life spawned an entire industry when fans created a modified (mod) version of the title, called Counter Strike.
I now realise that my games history is incredibly shaky, since I was aways under the impression that CounterStrike had essentially been created by two talented and driven people, whereas apparently it was the result of some kind of horrific forums-and-media circus.
A professional team of artists, programmers, designers, and audio staff will build the MMO but the creative impetus will come from the users.
Sucks to be the paid designers in that little group. What the hell do you know about finely tuned weapon balance, you schmuck? WoW_is_gay_309 has just posted a poll on the forums and 573 people agree with him that "the M16A2 rifle is, like, way underpowered, in real life it does more damage", so get it sorted to his satisfaction - or you're not going home this weekend.
"accepting that the combined intelligence of all these people is far beyond your own."
I almost agreed with this, then I remembered he was talking about MMO players. Still, even with all my negativity, it's good to see that they are entirely confident in what they're doing, safe in the knowledge that out of their expected 100,000 developers they will definitely get a lot of good ideas. I mean, it's not even as if they've got a back-up plan, in the (obviously extremely unlikely) chance that all of the submissions they get are utter fanboy toss of the highest order.
But he also said there was a back-up plan in place, if the contributions from gamers prove disappointing." If they deliver zero, we can still ship a title," he said.
Oh. Never mind.

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