Not really talking about mmorpgs, but rather pertinent with what I’m writing these days. From an interesting interview about the design of Ep1 (part one here):

Gabe Newell: What we try to do is get people through as much entertainment as possible. This is an argument I have with Warren Spector; he builds a game that you can play through six different times. So that means that people pay for the game, but don’t get to play five sixths of the game, which I feel is a mistake. You spend all of this time to build stuff that most players will never ever ever see, and I feel we try to maximise… I mean, I understand the exploration impulse and we try to make people happy doing that because it’s an important part. Exposition, exploration, combat and so on are things that we need to make sure are present, but if only one per cent of your customers see this cool thing that takes five per cent of your development budget, that’s not a good use of resources.

This other part also fits quite well with the discussion about accessibility barriers and “noise”:

Gabe Newell: It’s one of the critical things that playtesting shows. If there’s a capability and 80 per cent of people aren’t figuring it out then that’s probably a defect in the design. Not to be heavy handed, but the most ridiculous example is to have a hole with a Zombine hand sticking through with a grenade. You’d catch on pretty quick! “You know, I’ll do something to that thing!” I mean, you’d never do that, but that’s a kind of approach you use to get people to understand that there’s now a new choice available to them at that point in the game.

Erik Johnson: That’s why playing catch with Dog with the gravity gun was so important to the whole game.

Robin Walker: If you look back at Half-Life 2, many of our training things were doing multiple stuff where you might be learning a new gameplay element, but at the same time you’re learning about a character that you’re interacting with who might be telling you something about the world, and the relationship between you and the character you’re dealing with. For example, the cop who tells you to pick up the can, which we want you to press use, but at the same time you’re learning about the relationship between the Metro Cops and the players, and the way they use civilians. But at the same time you’re building this animosity between you and this character that eventually you’ll be able to deal with when you get a weapon, and so on. Our training is all there throughout the game, but it’s fairly well disguised with you doing multiple things at the same time.