anniversary

Player generated heroics ahoy

Lovely moment of serendipity today. I was looking at this Massively post, asking the question ‘Is user generated content the future of MMOs?’ and thinking ‘Hmm, I’d like to comment about that on the blog’ and then Matt Miller goes and drops Da Bomb in his 4th Anniversary Address for City of Heroes:

Similar in concept to our character creator, [this future feature] allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialogue and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall. It is features like these that we never dreamed of including when we first shipped, but are excited to be able to offer players very soon.

Happy Anniversary, indeed.

I was aware that this was coming – I certainly didn’t realise that it was going to be talked about so soon, so I had a ‘Woah’ moment when I… Continue reading

Guild Wars is three, too

Continuing the apparent obsession we have with releasing games on April 28th, in case you weren’t aware today is also the three year anniversary of Guild Wars’ original release.

(For the record, Guild Wars Factions was released two years ago to the day, while Guild Wars Nightfall was released in October 2006 – possibly even the 28th of that month, or darn near. We do like our symmetry.)

April 28th 2005 was a pretty big day for us in Europe – it was the first time we’d released a game simultaneously with the US*, and it was actually as a company the first time we’d released any title globally at the same time (Guild Wars went live in Korea on the same day). There was champagne and video conference link-ups, if memory serves, and given the time differences some of the participants were in pyjamas (Seattle), some were bleary-eyed (Austin), some were having breakfast (Brighton) and some were going to bed (Seoul).

Massively has a couple of retrospective articles up to mark the date, and of course if you’re a player there have been in-game celebrations going on for the last few days, although today’s special; today is when you… Continue reading