Gamespot reports that Raph Koster is leaving his post of Chief Creative Officer at SOE. His blog isn't saying anything about the move yet, at the time of writing.
Raph is one of the influential game developers in the MMORPG business, having worked both on UO and SWG, and has written a book about the Theory of Fun. Unfortunately many people confuse "Chief Creative Officer" and "Game Developer for SWG" with "person responsible for everything which is bad about SWG", which clearly can't be true. So Raph gets a lot of bad flak that he doesn't deserve.
I don't know if there is a place in the MMORPG industry for "star designers". WoW is doing well enough without one. In a $25 million project it is obvious that no single developer can have designed all of the game elements. And things like bugs, or crashing servers, which tend to annoy the players the most, are totally out of the reach of game developers. In my humble opinion the problems that SOE has with their games (SWG, EQ2) are more related to sloppy execution than to inherently bad design. Sure, Jedi were probably a bad idea from a design point of view, but I found the bugs of SWG, and the bad user interface, a lot more annoying than Jedi.
Still game developers have some influence on gameplay, and it will be interesting to see what Raph is going to do next.
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