Hi, my name is Nick and I'm currently employed as a Development Tester at Relic Entertainment. I'm essentially a tester ++; in particular I work closely with the multiplayer team.
I fancy myself a writer; I previously wrote a column called Play Fighting for the Escapist, wrote reviews for a Toronto Star affiliated website called Evergeek, and have been keeping a blog (Vancouver Game Design) for a couple years now. I am now trying to prod myself to produce more content for a wonderful gaming site called Game Snobs.
These days I've taken to writing fiction, and am in a bit of a slump in regards to non-fiction game-talk. But I'll do my best to post some interesting stuff here. All of which will, of course, be cross-posted on my blog. Because I am lazy.
The pulsing, constantly dividing organism that is the multiplayer gaming community can only split its attention so much. Why do multiplayer games get made when they will predictably fail to grab part of that organism?
The MMO is governed by numbers and hierarchies whose arrangement has enormous effects on a game and its audience -- why a smaller ecosystem is probably safer.
@Nicholas McFadden True, they exist -- but in the early stage of freeware. Things like the Half-Life episodes are an example of how ham handed AAA games have to handle episodic development. It's not a problem making a small game episodic, but it is a huge task making a polished ...
