Target group?

We have a question for our project.

What is the intended target group of the "hardcore gamers" which are going to be the primary users of this combat system?

Have you specified some age, cultural or educational expectations of these primary users?

Tim wrote:We have a question for our project.
What is the intended target group of the "hardcore gamers" which are going to be the primary users of this combat system?
Have you specified some age, cultural or educational expectations of these primary users?

One of the basics of an MMO is to NOT address a specific age or group of people, since what a good MMO does, is protraiting the world. This is very different from a singleplayer game, who has a specific audience. Of course there are games out there that does this anyways, like the mature audience of Age of Conan, or the seemingly not so mature audience of Habbo hotel. We base our audience on the content, a mature but not "adult" audience.

Try to study what is happening with World of Warcraft, which is said to be for a younger audience. Polls on mmorpg.com has shown the average age to be above 30, and although its influenced by the sites users, it does correspond to what theesa.com is saying about the average age of gaming people. So our goal is to aim at a mature audience seeking entertainment and exciting innovation to look and play with.

In practical terms, the technology here sets some limits. The FPS model, used by Halo and Counterstrike, is technically not able to work in an MMO setting, since we could have hundreds of people in the same battle. Other developers have struggled with getting 16-20 players to work. This is why we developed an advanced version of the current combat system, the 9 zoned one.

Ok, thanks, Flemming.

From what you've told us, we're going to focus our usability testing on people between the ages of 15 and 45.

We intend to conduct numerous prototypes of the melee interface concept and continually test in order to ensure the majority of the users (15-45) find the interface to be intuitive and useful.

Sounds very good. How is this progressing?

Due to exams and the work-load of classes, we have not yet tested, but we expect to get a prototype ready in flash and test it on a focus group within 9 days...
This prototype will include movement of a sword using the mouse as well as pattern recognition of how the sword is swung.

Yes, you did say not to focus on medieval weapons, but we believe there must be some items which can be swung in a futuristic environment.

~Tim, group 09ml685

There probably will be, like a staff or just the hands. Will you keep the targeting ability that we spoke of both with the keyboard and mouse?

I am looking forward to see what you come up with.

Well... what we've been talking about is the mouse controls the free-view when not locked onto an enemy, and it controls the weapon movement when locked onto an enemy. The keyboard will control only movement either in free-2D or in a circle around the target, as is the case with e.g. Zelda for the Wii... but this idea is only the preliminary idea, and is what we're going to test - hence this functionality might change radically depending on the results of our user tests...

We're keeping our options open, so again, depending on the results of our tests, the exact functionality of both the keyboard and mouse are likely to differ from the current plan.
We have not further discussed the hit-zones as we feel they come later in the process.

It is likely that the tests will be postponed until the next week due to our math exam this friday.