My Dream Team

If I had unlimited money and unlimited resources to create my ultimate MMO, The first two people I would hire would be Raph Koster (lead designer of the original SWG) and Torfi Frans Olafsson (CCP Games, Senior Technical Producer, current project lead for Ambulation). These two men represent everything I love about MMO's, detail, immersion, sandbox design, skill based systems, freedom, control, roleplaying, social interaction, player driven content. They are by far two of the most innovative game designers, they don't adhere to the status quo of game design. They look at what's been done, and ask why.

Raph Koster was the original Lead Designer for Star Wars Galaxies, he created the original version of the game, that only a select portion of the game's population can recall, it was an amazing start to what could have been a truly spectacular game, but unfortunately he left before he could complete his vision of the game, and it veered sharply off it's freeform sandbox course into a WoW-clone style combat system with simplified crafting, and the wonderful skill based advancement was reduced to a few classes. Raph has a history of developing games that encourage social interaction by forcing players to interact with each-other out of necessity, a good example of this in the original SWG was entertainers. The entertainers were required to heal mind wounds and battle fatigue in the original Galaxies, therefor, combat players would periodically need to seek out Cantinas for dancers or musicians to "sooth their minds". This lead to many friendships being forged out of necessity, it was an amazing thing to see.

Torfi Frans Olafsson started his game design career at CCP in Iceland, his home country. Torfi started as the Lead Artist and Technical Director, he has been with EVE Online since it's inception, he guided the Art Team, spending a lot of time getting the dark cold look and feel of EVE just right. He is now the Technical Producer and is working almost exclusively on the Ambulation project, which aims to bring next-gen photorealistic avatars to EVE Online, this is a feature which some would argue is the most important addition since the game was launched. Torfi's main goal with this expansion is to enhance the social environment of EVE, by creating a combat free space where players can talk, deal, gamble, drink and ambulate to their heart's content. One of the things that makes the Ambulation design so unique is the fact that there will be no running, only walking, hence the name. The stated goal of the absence of running is that it looks more realistic, this is quite true, and for me it will be a welcomed change, no longer will everyone look like ADD chipmunks.

I honestly believe that if these two geniuses of game design were paired with an excellent science fiction writer, they could create one of the most free-form, expansive and immersive sci-fi virtual worlds. So I'll leave you now as I slip back in to my dreamworld...