/ Cory Doctorow / 1:50 am Tue Mar 2, 2010

If chess were redesigned by MMORPG developers

AKMA sez, "As I was walking to work I started thinking about some of the reasons I got tired of playing World of Warcraft, and this angle occurred to me...."
After millennia in beta, Échecs Games presents the interactive strategy game for the twenty-first century: Shah-mat 64.0!

• More character possibilities -- now any unit can be any colour or gender! Male queens, female bishops, chartreuse rooks!

• New game board maps featuring additional continents and unoccupied areas -- no reason ever to go back to boring original 64 squares!

• No more grinding through tedious opening levels -- move quickly into endgame content!

• New bosses -- more powerful pieces, but they move entirely predictably and unintelligently!

• New special moves: dimensional portal allows King escape to any unoccupied square in the game!

If Chess Were Invented By MMOG Developers (Thanks, AKMA!)

(Image: Chess vortex, a Creative Commons Attribution image from fdecomite's photostream)

Previously:

24

  1. If mmorpg designers invented chess, within 2 months all the pieces would be nerfed down to the same power of pawns.

  3. This also reminds me of a game from Steve Jackson games long ago called Nightmare Chess. As I recall it added tons of variants to chess, mostly through mixing in a card game. That was sort of Magic the Gathering meets Chess.

    Can you imagine the free to play model for chess? No cost to play! If you want to play as anything but knight or Pawn, only 15 bucks at the cash shop. Oh, special bonus this month, be able to play *AS!* the black side for only 30 dollars!

  4. it was the futility of wow that finally made me quit. & thinking back i’m glad i did, although i’d love to find a new mmorpg 2 play.

  5. The game of chess dates back more than a thousand years. Somehow, I doubt that MMORPG will last as long.

  6. It was pretty fun in beta, but I hear they nerfed the Queen at release because she was too powerful.

  9. I haven’t read the K5 article previously linked, possibly because I thought it jumped … well, not the shark, but maybe into the mouth of the shark when it went to being a pay site.

    Anyway, why is this an article? The only way to be LESS of a massively-multiplayer game than chess would be solitaire, so if a game developer *was* inspired by chess, some changes would have to be made.

    As a gamer who’s tried multiple MMOs, to the point where I’ve taken to calling myself an “MMO tourist,” I don’t have problem with cash shops, unless they exist on top of a subscription model, and sell things that should be available for in-game money. Cryptic’s Champions Online store is bad for that, as is SOE’s Free Realms. GuildWars is not that bad, and even EQ2 has it better than Free Realms, which is just weird, but FR costs a third of what EQ2 does.

  10. “More character possibilities — now any unit can be any colour or gender! Male queens, female bishops, chartreuse rooks!”

    I sorry, but exactly what gender is chartreuse?

  11. Okay, where are the pictures of the sensibly-clad queen? You know the routine: Metal bra, leather bandages, sword bigger than the body and breasts bigger than the head…

  12. Knightmare chess kicked ass. Me & the Hubby played it a lot. Once you got the hang of it though, the superior chess player would win 9 times out of 10. It made the game have a bit more spice.

  13. If there’s one thing I learned from D&D it’s that you can make any rules you want– chess doesn’t have to be played like chess, you can pretend the board is a cylinder and move off one side to appear on the other, you can give the pawns more power, you can add dice, you can decide to end the game at the first check. It’s a game, make it fun.

    1. Duuuuude!!! I can’t believe you busted out with Archon! That totally made my day! Go Basilisk!

    2. http://www.archonclassic.com/

      Archon is BACK. With both classic rules, and with 4 player mode, and other variant rules. Even lets you play as the classic sprites vs the new graphics. I picked it up a bit ago and have been loving it.

      Now if only they’d remake Mail Order Monsters…

  15. @DataShade

    The article is what is known as ‘satire,’ and its point has nothing to do with the number of players chess has. It is that chess has mastered certain general features of good game design. MMOs, however, have failed to learn these lessors and instead focus on gimmicks that, while shiny and attention-getting, don’t actually contribute to good game play design or show an understanding of what makes games fun.

  16. You know what really annoyed me about this game of chess? That until the Burning Checkmate expansion, white side had rooks while we on the black side only had bishops. Bishops were great for strategic pvp, but terrible in pve. Remember? I mean their movements only went diagonally. Come on. Then when they released it so the black side could have rooks the rooks were nerfed so much that it was pointless.

  22. Don’t forget – permadeath is not allowed in MMOs. So when your king dies, he’ll just respawn with no loss. You can’t actually win or lose the game.

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