Yes, computer generated landscape.
Raph Koster has been writing about Star Wars Galaxies development circa 2000-2003 and it’s a fantastic read (more).
First impression, the amount of challenges and design issues to deal with and solve is staggering. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about polishing 2D “me-too” games on mobile the past few years and I had forgotten how complex and utterly insane -giving the technology available at that time- it was to develop a massively multiplayer game in 3D, for what is probably the biggest IP in the world. It’s mindboggling.
One of the best post mortem I have ever read. I now understand why he stayed silent on the subject for over a decade.
I started to work in games in 2000. MMOs were still fairly new but extremely promising in terms of game development in that they were demanding and that would be good career-wise: shit ton of work for years to come. I think that’s when the term game industry made sense. Video games had been a juicy business for decades but now they needed hundred people teams, which was quite a new thing.
For better or for worse, it didn’t happen this way. You can read in the post mortem how a couple decisions –tied to constraints- can destroy years of work real quick. I think Raph’s Jedi ideas were right (NPC only or “secret unlock”). I wanted to play SWG. But once Jedi masters were everywhere and based on grind, I didn’t even bother try the game.
Those blog posts show the intrinsic relationship between design, code/tech and intent and why you should stop reading game news websites and grab RSS feeds from developer blogs. Real shit is going on on those (Cliffsky about launching a game these days for example).