A Green Mushroom

My posts have been less frequent this week because my wife and I had our baby!  I'm not giving up the blog or anything, but I probably won't post as often for awhile.  A brand new baby takes a lot of time to take care of, but that's ok because she's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen. In the meantime, might I suggest a few of my former posts to check out: Pedigree and the Importance of Developers StarCraft 2 Newbie Guide Game Marketing Fail Jumping into the Action Innovation Trumps Graphics  I hope to get a couple more posts out this week, but our little newbie is my number one priority at the moment.  For the foreseeable future I'll be playing a little game called parenthood.

I'm sick of every MMO on the market feeling the same.  Where's the innovation?  Almost every new MMO on the market is a fantasy setting with auto-attack and hotbar combat.  There are some deviations from the model, but not many. Why does everyone keep trying to recreate World of Warcraft?  It isn't going to work, ever.  WoW has such market dominance that no fantasy hotbar combat game is ever going to catch it.  The only way to beat WoW is with innovation. There are a few games that do things differently, but there should be more.  The MMO releases this year were a weak offering.  I'm hoping that next year with the release of Star Wars the Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 we might see some more innovation in the industry but even those both have the tried and true hotbar combat.  They might not differ all that much but hopefully it's a step in the right direction.

StarCraft 2 not only has single player and multiplayer games, it also allows custom games to be built. Blizzard gives everyone who owns StarCraft 2 access to a very powerful map editor which can be used to design many different styles of games.  Most tend to be RTS type games but I've even seen things like Tetris recreated using falling supply depots.  The map editor can be used to create a diversity of games. Sometimes these custom games become entirely new genres.  DoTA was created in the WarCraft 3 map editor and has since gone on to spawn League of Legends , Heroes of Newerth , and other games in the "battle arena" genre.  In battle arena games you use an RTS control scheme but only control one hero unit.  You are put on a team and face off against an opposing team of heroes.  Both sides get minor AI controlled allies to fight along side them.  If you liked DoTA I would highly recommend looking into League of Legends.  It is my favorite ba...