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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.
Alas poor rpgdot we knew thee well.
May refreshes of slashdotters crash you to your knees.
Interesting how Vampire Bloodlines makes it as one of the top Biggest disappointments AND best RPG of the year.. interesting.
Maybe since it's not an MMORRPG, Troika is forgiven for launching a game ridden with gamestopping bugs?
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.
And you thought the Oscars were bad...
What a popularity contest. I do not see any signs that this was anything other than an exercise in people voting for the game they were playing at the time they took the poll. The clincher for me was the comparison between the results for "Best Overall MMORPG" and "Biggest Dissapointment". It would seem that while EQ2 is the second best MMORPG of the year it is also the biggest dissapointment and WoW while being the best was the runner-up for biggest dissapointment...hmmm.
Possibilities:
-Voters have absurdly high expectations and even awesomeness is not good enough for them.
-Voters are die-hard partisans and vote against the enemy for the negative award.
-Voters have never heard of any MMORPG other than EQ2, WoW or CoH
I think it's the last option. The hype machines for those three games pwn all and in a popularity competition it isn't even about popularity anymore, just hype.
Anywho, there are other MMORPGs out there. If you are interested in a well developed, balanced, mostly bug-free game with a superb market-driven economy and the kind of meaningful PvP that WoW and EQ2 only dream about then I suggest you give EVE a look-see.
-Pinkoir
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.
I've looked at Best Surprise, Best Game, Biggest Disappointment and the top three for each were World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and City of Heroes.
I would expect there to be different results at least between the disappointment, surprise and best game. Maybe there's some favortism in some of the more recent games.
Personally I like Final Fantasy XI better and would vote that higher, but when there are a higher number of players in World of Warcraft for each FFXI player now... again, not surprising.
Take out the cost of printing, pressing and all the freebees they had to give away and replacement disks they had to send out for defective pressing, and your profit per item drops way down.
It is still up there, but nowhere near the hundred-million mark you put it.
Yeah, right.
Retail typically marks up a product by 50%, so a $50 title is shipped by the publisher for $25. Often contractual agreements require the seller to use the MSRP for a certain amount of time, as well (so they can't charge less or they break the agreement). Publishers do that to be fair to smaller channels that can't compete with companies like Best Buy and WalMart. I'm a little hazy on the details, but as I understand it, this does not count as price fixing in the US - I believe these contracts only set a minimum price and must provide a timeline for market conditions. I used to be more involved with this stuff, but I've been out of the music biz for 10 years now.
The publisher also has to take into account anything not sold in retail is returned to them, as well as defective products, so it's not quite the honeypot you imagine. Still, I have little doubt Blizzard could have run the game without a monthly fee - they've been running Battle.net for years that way. I prefer the way Guild Wars is doing it - sell expansion packs every 6 months instead of charging monthly fees. I also like that because I don't have to rely on Arena.net holding onto my credit card numbers - I realize that's a bit paranoid, but I didn't like identity theft the first time and would prefer it to not happen again.
-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.
Does anyone know how well Deus Ex: Invisible War sold? I really loved the first game but I felt complete disappointment when I played the PC demo. They definitely got rid of what made the first game great so they could try and make an XBox hit. I'd like to think that the market responded to their crappy juxtaposition by not buying the game, but I haven't been able to find out one way or the other.
Is there any official method of checking how well the game sold and what it cost to develop? I seem to recall that Witchboy and Spector both left Ion Storm right after, so I doubt they were raking in the profit.
The site began its roots as one dedicated to PC RPG games, such as the beloved Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, Baldur's Gate, and etc. franchises. Then that field just kind of slowed to such a crawl, that in order to get more content they needed to branch out into other areas.
They have slowly started adding content for console systems over the last year or so, and they also add RPG-flavored PC games that aren't really RPGs, like the Heroes of Might & Magic strategy games, or Thief, a first person shooter with great characterization and story.
I personally think this dilutes their focus but I'm not terribly bothered by it. Actually I'm all for including the console RPG games, but I don't see a need to include non-genre games just to fill in content, even if they do have RPG elements in them. Maybe if they had a separate news page for that kind of stuff I'd be happier about their inclusion. The thing is, you can filter what you see on the site if you log in so if you don't want to see that stuff, just filter it out. However, I don't think they have customized RSS feeds like that, and I typically get my RPGdot news through Bloglines and then click on the articles that interest me.
If you are an RPG fan, though, you really won't find a better site, especially if you join in on their forums. RPGamer is probably better if you're more focused on the console RPGs, though.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
Someone please tell them that Deus Ex 2 came out in 2003.