Last week’s Massive Update ended up kind of feeling like a blog post here. No big news to report, so I whipped out one of my favorite things to do(tm): making a posit and then asking for opinions.

As an exercise, I’m going to run through five high concept ideas for inclusion in a massive game. Feel free to look through the big list of hardcore idea, at Lum’s comments, my own list, and pipe up in the comments with what you’d like to see in a future game. Heck, maybe you’d like to see something added to a game you already play? Permadeath in World of Warcraft, perhaps?

It was (obviously) a further riff on the post put up by Lum on idealized features. I’ve been thinking about that one a lot, actually. Thinking about it, a lot of the stuff that I and other people ‘want’ out of a Massive game is common sense stuff. Even my list (episodic stories, a way to ‘win’, etc.) are all things we’ve talked about here since I put up the site.

And yet, a lot of the features I think of as gang-buster-awesome (in as-yet-unreleased games) are things that came out of left field. I’m really looking forward to playing Gods and Heroes for the first time, and the minion system is a big bump from Guild Wars’ cohorts. The quest variants coming in Warhammer are certainly not out of nowhere, but even at first blush they have a number of nuances I haven’t heard anywhere else. Who could have prognosticated the ship-to-ship combat of Pirates of the Burning Sea?

I don’t really like surprises, but I’m thinking that this whole thing where people get paid to surprise us as gamers? That’s pretty awesome. Keep up the good work.

As an aside, I was a guest on Darren’s Shut Up We’re Talking podcast. Please excuse the poor audio quality; it was raining on the internet that night

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