Raph Koster is certainly a well-known name in the MMORPG industry who has spent his career working on titles such as Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Metaplace, and Crowfall. But did you know that he is also a prolific writer as well? Koster has posted many intriguing behind-the-scenes and industry discussion essays on his blog, and now he’s compiled those and many other new ones for a book that he’s titled Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One.
Postmortems is due out later this June, and it contains plenty of stories that should intrigue fans and historical buffs of the MMO genre. “It’s not a memoir or tell-all; the focus is on game design and game history,” Koster said. “There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked.”
Koster has been teasing the book by posting snippets of it on Twitter. One had to do with the unreleased Privateer Online: “Interestingly, the worlds of Privateer Online largely didn’t feature static content; all encounters were intended to be dynamically spawned near players as they moved around, and automatically scaled in difficulty for the group.”
We’ll be taking a deeper look at the book in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
Combat in SWG never really clicked, IMHO. Today's little excerpt from my new book POSTMORTEMS is from a section where I talk about reasons why. The book covers 30 yrs of online worlds, with tons of design info on SWG, #UltimaOnline, and lots more. https://t.co/xa92c86Fqn pic.twitter.com/oqS4FnXOLx
— Raph Koster (@raphkoster) June 4, 2018
