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Best RPGs / MMORPGs of 2004
The folks at RPGDot and MMORPGDot always run "game of the year" polls among their readers and staff members to determine the best interactive RPG experiences of the year. They've now run their course, and all the awards have been given out. For RPGs, they have the categories of Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game (mm...Torment 2), Best Console RPG, and Overall Best RPG of the Year. Vampire: Bloodlines, the dark RPG from the late, lamented Troika appears to have garnered many of the top honors. As for Massive Games, the categories included Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game, Best Expansion, and Best MMORPG Overall. World of Warcraft pretty much swept the categories for the genre.
World of Warcraft was $13 a month. You'd think after 800,000 players just in the US, they could drop the price a little. But then again...we've discussed this before ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
And the genre is RPG? How can that be. Also, by console, they mean xbox.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
...but in this case I have to. Mainly because I can't find anything to explain how the poll was conducted. Was it an email mailed out, asking you to vote on something? Was it a forum post? In either case was the user presented with a list of games, and told to choose one?
(The reason I want to know this is because, if it's the latter, then may I say that, based on their top 10 lists, the poll choices were shitty. Two copies of both Dark Alliance 2 and Bard's Tale in the top 10? Why? Was console choice that important that they needed seperate spots?)
Finally: who in their right mind would even consider voting for Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel? There were far better RPGs released in 2004 that aren't listed there (Sin Megami Tenshin: Nocturne, for instance) than that piece-of-shit disgrace to the previous Fallout games.
A - Appearance
B - Story
A - Quest system mechanics
A - Number of quests
C - Quest content
C - Player classes
D - PvP
D - Incomplete
D - Nerfs
FFF - Availability and reliability of game world
o Basically, it's got:
o Blizzard Polish
o Fisher Price difficulty
o redundant and boilerplate quests
o modestly evolutionary game mechanics
o the worst online world management and availability I've ever experienced (out of UO, AC, EQ, DAoC, ATITD), bar none
Blizzard has made so many poor decisions regarding capacity planning and management it hurts. Top that off with a policy of "nerf first, research later". Let's not forget the unimplimented features, namely the PvP honor system.
Yeah I'm still playing it, because despite those problems it's fun, but it definitely is not 100% quality. It does not begin to meet the standard set by Blizzard on previous games.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
If you look at the results, the voting percentages were very similar in each poll. And this is no mistake. Most people will not invest in more than one MMORPG and few will play two at any given time. Even fewer will choose to play three simultaneously and once someone starts one, they are unlikely to switch to another. Thus, it seems like a lot of the voting was simply based on what people were familiar with via word-of-mouth, their experience with their game of choice, etc. With limited knowledge, it obviously makes it hard to vote properly on the various categories and people will be apt to simply vote for their own game as they haven't seen many of the others in action. The results probably reflect the MMORPG split-up of RPGdot's voting base and nothing more.
The fact that Bloodlines won so many awards gives me a pretty good idea of how bad a year 2004 was for RPG's.
It was a buggy, sloppy mess. They took all the power of the Source engine, smeared it in poo and slowed it to a slideshow. The base gameplay and storyline were good, but not great, and overshawed by the general piss-poor construction of the game itself.
And that's the best we could do last year? Meh.
Let me preface by saying that I played both EQ2 and WoW for ~2 months each. While I believe that WoW is most regards is a much better game, EQ2 definitely has better graphics and sound/music. The results of the poll simply reflect what people are playing. I think the most interesting results are the votes based on the sites editorial boards. At least they seem to have played all the games.
Why is there a monthly fee? I already talked about this before. But, let's give it another go, shall we?
m l which was written by Raph Koster of UO and SWG fame.
I'm familiar with this topic because I run my own online RPG, Meridian 59. It's not quite as large as WoW, but there's still a lot of basic costs that do scale up appropriately.
A discussion on about the monthly fee for larger games can be found at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.ht
Essentially, these games take a lot of money to develop and then to maintain. The box fees help defray the costs of maintenance, and a large part of the subscription fees go towards maintaining the game world. Every time a gameworld in WoW goes down, there's a team of programmers and at least a few network center administrators working on the problem, most likely. These people don't come all that cheap, and a team of people working like this is fairly expensive. This is a necessary cost, because people expect unusually high uptime for these servers considering most people are only paying $15/month or so. I've had more broadband downtime over the past year than people would accept in M59.
I won't go too much into how good a price even $15/month is. You'd expect to pay that much if you watch pay-per-view shows a couple times per month. An online games will provide you with more than a few nights of entertainment per month.
There are alternatives out there, though. Meridian 59 doesn't require a box purchase and is only $10.95 per month. Sure you're not going to get the prettiest graphics and the slickest UI, but you will get a very balanced game that has superb uptime. You'll also get gameplay that's considerably deeper than most of the games out there. We don't have pre-defined classes and there's no levels.
One of the biggest things about the monthly fee is that no business runs at no profit. Every business needs a little bit to keep growing and developing, otherwise the company stagnates and eventually dies. One of the problems our company is having is that we feel our lower monthly fee is a better deal for players, and we want people to be able to play our game, but it's hard to make significant profit to fund development of new games. We'd love to do something a bit more modern than M59, but it's tough to do when you're on fairly thin margins.
Some information, as usual.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
In addition to a "just vote for your favorite" methodology they seemed to use (and is terribly flawed), their list of single player games is just laughable. Deus Ex 2 wasn't an RPG, while it did have elements; nor was Pirates. Despite these additions, notable games were simply ommited from polling, like Tales of Symphonia and Knights of the Old Republic 2.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Most of the WoW servers have had little downtime.
Did anyone else think that World of Warcraft wasn't that great? Maybe I'm not the MMORPG type, but once you got to the mid-game (about lvl20-25+), you've got most of your abilities, so the gameplay mechanics won't change at all for the next several hundred hours that it will take until you reach lvl60 and can do raid instances. This wouldn't be a big deal (it isn't a big deal in many other games), but the combat system isn't that hard and doesn't have that much depth (compared to the non-multiplayer RPGs that I play). PvP is based upon your class (and race too, with WotF against Warlocks/Priests). If you face a certain class with a certain class, then you'll get schooled every time, unless there is a massive skill/level disparity (paladins > warriors, druids > warriors, rogues > warlocks, etc). Some items are so cheap (spider belt, the blacksmith trinket that stops fear) that they destroy another class' only way to stop certain classes. Character development is sparse, even compared to final fantasy games. Here are the only ways to customize your characters: 1.Race 2.Class 3.Items 4.Talents 5.Skills 1. This has little effect, unless you're an undead PvPer. 2. This makes a huge difference, but this is in almost every other RPG. 3. Your items depend almost entirely on the amount of time you spend playing the game, not on how you want to customize your character (unless you go for looks). Most characters have standard choices based upon talents and class. Warlocks go for stamina/intellect, almost always. Warriors go for stamina/strength/armor/DPS. Rogues go for agility/stamina/DPS. Druids go for stamina/intellect/spirit if you're restoration/balance, stamina/agility/strength if you're feral combat. You don't seem to have to make any choices for your equipment. One piece of equipment will always be better than another piece for a certain class/talent combination. 4. Here is the only way to customize your character other than class. It's well done, for the most part, although certain trees/skills are weak (druid feral, warlock demonology). 5. Your choice in skills only seems to determine your cash flow. A miner/skinner will always be richer than a miner/blacksmith, although their equipment will be similiar. The only exception seems to be a PvP engineer. Everything besides engineering stuff can be bought from another character at the AH (yes, there are some soulbound pieces of crafted equipment, but you can get comparable stuff at the AH), so there's no reason to pick anything other than moneymaking professions (except for engineering). One major thing (that may be endemic of MMORPGs) is that it takes 8 hours for you to level at about lvl30. 8 hours and you get 1 talent point and 1-2 pieces of new equipment. 16 hours gets you 2 talent points, 3-4 pieces of equipment, and upgraded skills. There's very little reward per hour spent playing. Other genres can get away with this (FPS games often have very little character advancement), but they have enough gameplay depth to keep you playing for long periods of time. The one thing that makes an RPG an RPG is character building. If it takes 8 hours to build your character up just slightly, then I'm not playing. It's got great sound and graphics, a good story line, an excellent UI customization system, tons of Blizzard polish, and high production values. The gameplay just isn't good enough, in my opinion (I have to say that Halo seems to suffer from the exact same problems, high production values, but mediocre gameplay, but that's OT). It's good for hardcore MMORPG gamers and casual players, but for a more general hardcore player, there are so many better games to play.
-Tales of Symphonia
-Star Ocean
-Shin Megamin Tensei Nocturne
-Shadow Hearts: Covenant (a flippin masterpiece imo
-Baten Kaitos
-Phantom Brave
That isn't even close to all the offerrings we saw last year. Gamerankings lists approx. 90 rpgs released this year and we are considering fable and Kotor II is all? Whether or not they (the few I listed) are universally loved doesn't matter, as some of the premier titles added to the genre this year they require consideration. How can they look only at console rpgs on the XBOX, the only console that is nearly completely lacking an RPG library. This is a pathertic poll. What a waste of a /. link.