An MMO called Love

Essential linkage: Check out Love, the one-man MMO that's taking the genre in some interesting directions...

The staff required to get even a moderately successful MMO off the ground tends to be kinda large. So you'd have to think anyone trying to develop an MMO by themselves would have to be insane, right?

Well, maybe not. Eskil Steenberg is doing just that, and it sounds like he might be on to something very interesting...

The nice chaps over at GameObserver recently had a chance to chat with Steenberg about his project - an MMO called Love (which really makes me want to listen to some Tribe Called Quest). Love is... well, not only does that sound like one of those cheesy and moderately spooky cartoons, but, frankly, Steenberg does a better job of explaining his unique take on the MMO model:

The game doesn't come into its own until you've been in the same server for a long time and really seen the changes of the world. Since all servers are procedurally generated, they are all different. One of the problems with procedural content is that you can't really expose the procedural nature of the game because then nothing that it generates has any value. Imagine if you have a game where you can generate a new level; you would never do anything that required you do anything hard or difficult because as soon as you'd run into a problem, you'd just say, "Nah, I'll just create a new level that doesn't have this stupid thing that I keep failing at. I'll start a new one." That means that you're never attached to anything, it doesn't mean anything because you have an infinite amount of them, so you can create another [level]. That's why I want to lock people down a bit, and say, "This is your server and you really have to care about it. And these people you will have to deal with them and actually be a part of this." That's the direction I want people to go. I want people to have that soap opera feeling where you have to login to see what's new, what's happened since yesterday. "Have they fought this enemy; have they changed this thing; have they fixed that thing?" That's really what I want from the game.

The whole interview really is worth checking out if even vaguely interested in MMOs. We certainly look forward to hearing a lot more about Love.