I had a moment of smartness. It’s rare these days.

This is a comment I wrote on Ubiq’s blog. And it touches many core concepts about which I’m blathering these days. So it’s something dear to me. Another of those elements that I try to push so that they get acknowledged. It’s again the two opposite process of development, the “mudflated” games and the “world” games. Typical examples of the first process are EverQuest or World of Warcraft, where there is a constant demand of content that puts a strain on the devs and progressively builds negative gaps and accessibility issues between the players, typical examples of the second are Eve-Online (the best on this aspect) and Ultima Online, where the development has the players as the focus and aims to give them more and more control over the world and their relationships.

(and you can see already how WoW is suffering this conflict. It became successful thanks to its accessibility, but now the mudflation at the endgame is building wider and wider gaps between the players, making a lot of them crash against a wall. This night I should be able to finish the comment to a wonderful quote from Darniaq that explain perfectly all this and more)

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Ubiq:
I don’t understand why expansions ruin the potential of these games whereas continued development does not. Expansions are, after all, merely continued development in larger chunks.

Because that’s part of a *very* long debate on the forums between me and the “occasional” Scott Hartsman and Brad McQuaid.

It was spawning from the debate about “worlds”. These types of games that are diametrally opposite to mudflated games (which develop horizontally) need a completely different development process.

An expansion must be, by definition, optional. So it must contain features that cannot directly tie with the rest of the game at a low level. This brings to a development process that moves “around the borders” where more stuff can be added without messing the rest of the game (new graphic engines are often just reskin, for example).

As an example take one of the “expansions” of Eve-Online. Considering how they are developed and added they can be directly considered expansions. But they are included in the monthly fee not only as a marketing decision but also because it would be impossible to transform the world at a basic level without strongly affecting everyone.

You cannot break the players between “have” and “not have” because a “world” game is a system where everything is strictly connected (the definition of “system”). A world as a “whole” and not as an amass of optional pieces that have to mudflate and erase previous parts in order to become appealing.

DAoC’s PvP is the “world” part of the game. In fact Mythic CANNOT make an expansion about it. It’s strictly tied with the experience. Instead they make expansions about the PvE, which is naturally “mudflated” and so adapt to become an expansion.

I simply revert these considerations and say that the choice to develop expansions means accepting and performing a type of development that will ultimately hurt the potential of the game as a “world”.

There are workarounds. For example when you use the excuse of the expansion to pass some features over to the basic game. But it’s still a straining. So I say that this process isn’t optimal and in ideal conditions (so without considering the market) the process should be different.

I like to bring the example of Eve-Online because they were able to do wonderful things with it. They rewrote consistently many parts of the game, at a low level. Everything is maintained uniformly and this has the result of a cohesive world that is now rivaling with Ultima Online in complexity and ambition.

At this stage you can see how the game *really* progresses and is maintained young. You don’t need anymore to squeeze the creativity to figure out more interesting PvE content because the game itself will present directly what it needs. That’s the consequence of a real “world” game where the development isn’t destined to only work marginally on the tweak and fixes or spend all the resources (and beyond) to push out content that will then “exit” concretely the game six months later due to the mudflation.

Imho this is just crazy. It’s a total waste of resources to develop stuff that is systematically “eaten” and forgotten and erased even for the new players that will chase the newer paths. The “world” approach to the development is an answer to this, because it’s about developing what matters and keep building on the *premises* of what you did the day before.

The mudflation is a way to continuously create, burn and replace (no ecological sensibility). Always on the same place and with no real progress. The other, better path is a way to capitalize the development and always build on what you did before. So the first moves horizontally, expanding like a stain or a fire (along the borders and toward the outside, creating a dispersion inside). The second moves vertically, adding a depth and, from my point of view, producing more interesting and productive results.