CoX: Statesman Speaks

Jack Emmert, the erstwhile Statesman, gives a “post mortem” of sorts to where Cryptic went “right” and “wrong” with CoX (the game is, of course, very much alive, just not in his hands any more).

He was surprisingly frank, starting things off with a list of CoH‘s strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, he cited character customization, fun moment to moment game play, Flight/Superspeed/Superjump, plenty of character slots, no loot. For weaknesses, he told the crowd about how the game had few goals outside of leveling, its lack of PvP, the repetitiveness of the instances, the lack of an end-game, the lack of guild mechanics, no loot.

[…] So what has Cryptic learned from this crazy process? They need to consider player nature — and launch a fully-featured game, rather than planning to add to it later; by which time their potential players will already be doing something else. They need to ensure that their systems (technology) are easy to update — because MMOs are ever-evolving games. If they don’t update their content, they’ll die out. They need to experiment with min/maxing like crazy during product development — push the game to every possible extreme, because players will. It’s a lot easier to nerf something before the players get a chance to see it.

(via Doyce)