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Beating WoW At Its Own Game
The BBC has up a short piece on the hopes of game developers and investors to 'beat World of Warcraft'. Representatives for the upcoming Age of Conan, recently-released Lord of the Rings Online, and Star Wars Galaxies all discuss what it's like competing in a post-WoW world. Funcom game director Gaute Godoger has a point when he says, "The industry so needs competition to World of Warcraft ... We need other strong games that can make people understand that there's more to it than WoW." The article discusses some of the features each of these games offer that differ from WoW, and theorizes a bit on where the MMOG genre will go next.
Due to everyone playing WoW, there will be no first post for this article.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The article refers to the Star Wars Galaxies updates as minor fixes and modifications that made players happier and expanded the player base. A simple check would have shown that after every major overhaul, experienced players left in droves and were replaced by noobs. Then to top it off it touts adding creature handling as a new feature (neglecting to add that it had existed long before, but they removed it). Surprising that SOE finally admitted maybe people liked raising animals, and put a feature people wanted in a game.
Yes, I rant, but being an avid fan of SWG before the Combat Upgrade, I can tell you that SWG is no longer the game it was. And then it was beaten while it was down with the New Game Experience which turned it into an action game instead of an RPG. Poor SOE, if you want to release a new RPG, do it. Don't replace what people were playing with something else, ESPECIALLY if they are paying a subscription.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I love how the Star Wars Galaxies guy tries to excuse their massive screwups by saying SWG was one of the first MMOs and that "their wasn't a manual then for how to do them"
Hmmm... didn't SW:G come out after Dark Age of Camelot which was a nice MMO that was based around the concept of "Do Everquest but make it fun"?
Maybe the SW:G team could have spent some time with the Everquest team to help them avoid making the exact same missteps?
discussing there ? a NON game they screwed up SO bad to the extent that they even alienated the staunchest star wars fan ?
go fuck yourselves off in some remote location please. If you have "reps" from swg "discussing" shit, and if these are sony people, not only your article, but its writers, you, deserve it.
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In case any MMORPG developers are reading this, some suggestions:
1. Either make me pay a monthly fee, or make me pay for the client, not both. Charging for both makes it seem like you're not convinced I'll want to keep playing. By all means have a CD distributed in stores at a price that covers costs; it's just the phenomenon of paying $50 for the chance to pay another $10 that doesn't make sense.
2. If you can't make the client free, make it transferable, so I can sell it if I decide I don't want to keep playing. There's no way I'm going to spend $50 on a game I may not even like, if I can't resell it to get back some of the cash.
3. Include Mac and Linux. I don't run Windows and won't run Windows. There are millions of us, and we have very few MMORPG choices right now, so it's an easier niche for you to get into than the more saturated Windows market.
4. Make it possible to play the entire game in cooperative mode. I have zero interest in deathmatches.
5. I prefer SF to fantasy, yet most RPGs are fantasy. I guess it's easier to artificially limit the players and work around plot issues when you have magic around and a lack of fast long distance transport and communication technologies.
6. Don't riddle the game with spyware and have an abusive EULA. Yeah, WoW got away with it, but that's no excuse.
7. Don't require bleeding-edge hardware. My next machine is probably going to be a laptop with Intel graphics.
Generally, the idea I'm presenting is to try and go for the potential players who are not being served at all by the current online gaming market, rather than to compete to steal customers who already have a choice of a half dozen games they could be playing. You know, try to be the Wii rather than the PS3.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
From the article:
How does this system eliminate grinding? It seems to me that it would exacerbate the grinding problems as players would grind even more in order to get the additional power and titles conferred by grinding mid-level mobs.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Instead of complaining about the lack of a strong competitor to WoW, how about making one?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Star Wars Galaxies has gone from 'flawed, but promising' to 'what has science wrought?!' over the course of its existence, a stunning reversal of the usual trend to launch with missing content and patch in later, to launching with missing content and tearing most of what's left out later. Servers are ghost towns, good going there, guys.
Anarchy Online has had more ups and downs than a roller coaster (abysmal beta, spectacularly awful launch, promised lore/television/multimedia tie-ins that failed to materialize... and a free year of basic play offer to bolster subscription numbers), but at least Age of Conan has some interesting gimmicks planned for it.
WoW may be simplistic compared to its predecessors and competitors, but it's been as well-produced as any other Blizzard product-- that is to say, polished to an eye-searing shine. In order to pull the same thing off, their competitors will need to get out of the 'launch first, patch later' mindset, which will absolutely require the trust of the people that fund the projects. Without that element of risk-taking on their part, there's no way that any development team will be able to pull the same thing off. All of that development and polish takes time and effort, which are fueled by money... and the precedent of shipping something that runs, rather than something that shines is still much stronger than WoW's literally phenomenal success.
Are grindfests, and nothing more. WoW is horribly dumbed down. Almost no penalty for dieing, especially in PVP? Grinding the same dungeons and over to get the best items?
The best items should be made by player crafters, not found in a quest dungeon. There should be a real penalty to dieing, specifically item loss. There shouldn't be a need to grind, you should be able to raise your skills by simply using them, not grinding xp to go up a level.
All these along with TOTAL player freedom are what will make a truly great game.
www.darkfallonline.com is a game that will follow all these principles and much more.
EVE Online is one of the largest MMORPGs out there. Its also possibly the only successful science fiction based MMO game. Given these two characteristics, combined with the fact that EVE's developer team is much more hands-off with regard to player-to-player interaction, I'm surprised that EVE was nowhere to be found the article.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
A massively multiplayer game needs to have numbers of players that are... massive. So dislodging WoW from the lead spot takes a lot more than just a great game, you have to reach those players. If there are 8 million subscribers on WoW then how many more are out there to be reached? The $15 or so per month doesn't sound like a lot to most of us, but that's on top of having broadband available, having a decent computer an having the leisure time to spend on a game. The claim that they're making Conan "for adults" sounds fine on paper but other adults think it's odd that I have the time to commit to World of Warcraft. Finding the millions of adults interested in spending the time and money on an immersive game is a huge challenge. It's a lot harder to do than getting people to read the original stories.
I wonder how the numbers of players they need compares to the readership for the works they're based on.
more of the same on Twitter.
7. Don't require bleeding-edge hardware. My next machine is probably going to be a laptop with Intel graphics
WOW will run on less than cutting edge hardware. A friend of mine is a WOW player, and while I'm not sure what what the exact spec of his machine is, I do know that it has onboard intel graphics and that he bought it second hand for sixty pounds when another friends workpalce sold them off.
On a slight tangent, I've been saying for a while now that one of the things that could help invigorate the PC games market is if the developers would stop requiring cutting edge hardware. There are millions and millions of PCs out there, and every big game that comes out effectively limits itself to a tiny niche of that market. Take me, I'd love to play Stalker, but I don't have a machine that could run it, so I'm just going to buy a wii game instead.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
I've found that to be the case with most Blizzard games. They don't do anything particularly innovative (Real Time Strategy existed before Warcraft, MMORPGs existed before WoW), but the level of polish on a Blizzard game is far above and beyond any other game in the same genre.
Heck, look at Starcraft. That game is still being sold and played, despite approaching 10 years of age. Reason: the game was simple to understand and play, and the races were far more balanced than in any other game of that time. Nothing really new or innovative, but the overall execution was of high quality, ensuring continued success.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Quoth the Tao of Programming:
A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. ``Excuse me,'' he said, ``may I examine it?''
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. ``I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard,'' said the master. ``Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.''
``Pray, great master,'' implored the novice, ``how does one find this mysterious setting?''
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
...if they are attempting to steal customers from Blizzard. If your game is worth playing over WoW, you will be able to attract a wider audience if there is a free trial period or weekend. Personally, I played the WoW 'beta weekend' before the launch and only bought the game (read: sold my soul) this past January when I finally decided it might be worth it to spend some cash every month to play a game. I play slowly and at my leisure (I am only level 45) but am already looking at LoTRO. Only one problem -> I am not going to spend $50 just to try it out. And I'm not even a hardcore WoW fan. If they can't win me without a free trial/weekend, how do they expect to snag the level 70s that have been playing for much longer? Most of all I am looking forward to Age of Conan. The gameplay videos and general concept look promising even if I do prefer fantasy races to built men.
It's quite easy to explain why WoW succeeded where others have failed.
First and foremost, they had an already existing background world. That started it off well. Warcraft has a LONG and quite well known world. Not with movie goers, not with bookworms, but with computer players. That sets it apart from SWG and LOTR. Yes, both have a large fanbase, but those aren't necessarily gamers. WoW had a gamer fanbase from the start.
Second, it's easy. Sorry, dear WoW players, but that game is easy. Easy. Easy. I know a five year old who's leveled to 60 without any real difficulty. But that actually meant that it was one of the first MMORPGs that drew the attention of people who're not hardcore number crunchers and grinders, who don't first of all consult a billion pages about the game to find out whether spell X or spell Y is in situation Z more appropriate.
It was basically the mix of having a good player base at its start and being easy enough that people who got invited by those who knew its name (i.e. the "old" Warcraft players) didn't get bored with the detail work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Like other MMOs! Seriously, I'm really starting to think that Warcraft's popularity was the final nail in PC gaming's coffin. It was already becoming rare to see anything truly great released, and now even more-so that MMOs are at the top of everyone's list of "regurgitated crap to release". At least Age of Conan sounds to add some *cough* new *cough* features and will be set in a universe one could care about. But even at that, I have a hard time seeing how people can justify regularly PAYING to play a game unless they are indeed playing it near non-stop. A habit I have unfortunately witnessed up close and found to be quite annoying. I'm just glad that Quake II actually took some skill, otherwise I might feel as if I had been wasting my time on constant deathmatch back in the day...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Some marketing drone must have earned his money, to make someone believe that SWG is significant, growing, or a "future competitor". The only game SWG is trying to defeat is SWG itself. I don't really believe there's currently any game (announced or released) that has a remote chance to dethrone WoW, but to say that SWG is a contender is ludicrous.
That reads like a Zen koan, not anything the Taoists would write.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
We have plenty of potential "WoW killers" due for release at the end of this year: Team Fortress 2, Crysis, Warhammer Online, Unreal Tournament 2007. They may not steal all of the player base (the hardcore people who play relentlessly for minor equipment upgrades), but I would bet a few dollars to say these games will make a serious dent on the population of WoW. That is unless Blizzard are crafty and manage to get another expansion out by then, which is doubtful.
Although the upcoming patch for World of Warcraft is pretty much offering more of the same and has been 5 months in the making, and WoW players seem to be particularly apathetic about what Blizzard provide them with in the way of content - Blizzard say they prefer fixing bugs rather than producing more content - seems to keep the majority of the wow addicts happy.
http://www.eurogamer.net/releases.php?platform=pc
Shows all the PC games
I think one of the reasons WoW is so successful is full support for OS X, there are basically no games for OS X, so WoW just soaks up anybody who might want to play a more time consuming game that also is on a mac. Even at only 1 in 16 players being on a mac that's still about 500,000 subscribers. Personally I use a mac for all my general computer needs and then play on consoles, but WoW hooked me for two years (mainly since nothing worth playing in the console world), if there was another fun MMO I would have played that instead.
...don't.
You need only look so far as Diablo and Diablo 2 to realize that when it comes to addicting grindfests, Blizzard is king. Attempting to take Blizzard down on their home turf is a ridiculous goal, and one that should be abandoned by any MMORPG hopeful.
I can't say I pay attention to subscription numbers, but to my knowledge the most successful MMORPG outside of WoW is EVE. EVE also happens to be fundamentally different from WoW.
The problem with these companies is that they're trying to make "WoWLotR" or "WoWConan". They see WoW as a formula they can copy and make money from. What they fail to realize is that the "GTA Clone" strategy doesn't work with MMORPGS. Even if you were able to make a game as good as WoW was when it launched you're still 2 and a half years behind on new content updates, balance tweaks and cosmetic upgrades. Even if you can make the game as good as WoW is now, you still don't have the 8 million strong playerbase. Your game literally needs to be significantly better than WoW straight out of launch.
No, you can't beat WoW at its own game. You can wait for it to eventually fade and then stab it when its weak, but that's a long ways off yet. If you want a successful MMORPG, it needs to be different from WoW. It needs to do the things people wanted from WoW but didn't get. I doesn't even have to be in a fantasy setting. I know I'd enjoy a Dynasty Warriors MMORPG, were it done right (we probably don't have the technology to make that as awesome as it could be, sadly).
In summary, trying to beat WoW at what WoW does best (it's own game) right now is like trying to beat an olympic athlete in a marathon when they have an 8 mile head start.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
All there, old man... Origin had that long before Blizzard even started to read documentation for networking.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I see these games, with their bump-mapping, realistic shadows and high-poly models. One or two screenshots is all I need to know that I don't want to play them. Game designers need to realize that graphics are more about art than technology. I don't care how realistic the shadows are, if I'm forced to walk around in some drab, grey world, carrying generic swords taken out of some cheap Maya Model Pack.
The quality and imagination of the artwork in World of Warcraft is one of the main, and often-overlooked, reasons for its success.
"[Conan is] for adults," he said. "We did not want to be a teen-rated game, we wanted to have the possibility of making a game that takes the licence seriously."
Translation: It will have gore and nudity.
"Players want to be more active in combat and know that their skill as a player matters," said Mr Godoger. "There's no auto combat, you have to do all the running and attacking as you sit there."
Translation: Better have the twitch reflexes of a 14-year-old (who will be here for the gore and nudity).
WoW, aside from being a well polished, easily accessible game has more going for it than fun gameplay. WoW has become a social community, many of whom spend time talking on Vent, many of whom are college roommates or friends who all play together and actually keep in touch, not only through facebook or myspace, but through WoW. WoW is a social game and to say that other games are going to pull away users...well I just don't see it happening.
The grind is the worst part of the MMORPG experience. The existence of the grind is understandable: there's only so much material that the designers can create so the grind is a way to extending gameplay. But it's just not fun.
The only game I can speak of from experience is EVE Online. They solved one half of the grind problem by using training rather than leveling. You train skills in realtime. Even if you don't have time to play the game for a week, the skills are still training in the background. So someone with a job and a college student who have been playing for three months will both have comprable skill levels but the college student will have more cash.
The second half of the problem is cash. In EVE, losses hurt. Lower level ships may only cost a few million but better ships can easily cost hundreds of millions, plus all of the equipment you put on it. This can represent the profit of weeks of playtime going up in smoke when a battle goes poorly. You don't respawn, you don't pay a nominal fee to "repair" the ship, it's gone. What makes this so irksome is that profesions in EVE boil down to grinding. You can mine roids, you can hunt NPC pirates in asteroid belts, you can run missions, but it all becomes a tedious chore after a while. For most veterans, the fun stuff is pvp. The downside is that you have to grind to make good those losses. Proponents of the "serious loss" style in EVE say it helps deter immature gamers from ever joining up but that claim has been disproven many times. The other bonus is the adrenaline rush you get when you're putting it on the line with an expensive ship. The pulse-racing experience cannot be replicated in a traditional game where you can just reload when something goes wrong.
It's tough to strike the balance with these sorts of games. You can spent 10 minutes or 10 hours playing Counterstrike and it's non-stop run and gun but you aren't building towards anything bigger. The RPG's require a lot more time with the idea that you're building towards something but you end up suffering from play mechanics that have ceased to be fun, thus a grind. What's more, games seem to go through severe creative lurches. You see a flurry of development before launch and then the effort tapers off, new features coming along once in a blue moon. Players can't really debate the decisions made before a game goes public but everyone has an opinion once they're in the game; fixing one problem gores somebody else's ox.
The best idea I can come up with for a game that makes death count but doesn't add grind would be one that gives a player a certain number of respawns per day. You can earn cash by playing. You die, you lose a respawn. You can buy spare spawns with your cash but it's expensive. For the casual player, they'll be using the free respawns. The more hardcore player will be earning the cash to pay for spare spawns. This can give provide the adrenaline jolt "serious loss" gamers are looking for without necessitating a huge grind for casual players.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The oldest first, Star Wars Galaxies. Yes its launch was bugged, yes bugs took for ever to fix and yes SOE changed the nature of the game, in my opinion ruining it, with the CU and the NGE. Yet it remains one of the most ambitious titles. Player controlled economy with all equipment obtained through crafting NOT looting, yes this could mean that a new player who wasn't socially capable enough to find existing players, had a hard time getting the money to buy the equipment. I personally have helped plenty of newbies to get their decent starter kit. SWG had a nice community. It also remains alone in allowing you to combine classes as you saw fit. Sure, this did lead to some people trying to spec out uber combat classes and to wich SOE made the fatal mistake of them upping the high level content to those specced out players. Yes the doc-buff was the death of grouping BUT it tried.
A typical SWG quest, oh wait, nobody bothered with them because although some had nice writing the XP and loot sucked and so why bother, RPG for the story? Not in MMO land mate.
Everquest 2 too tried. FULL SPEECH! Read that again and realize that in 2007 NOT ONE SINGLE MMORPG EXCEPT EVERQUEST 2 HAS SPOKEN TEXT FOR ITS QUEST GIVERS. 2000 called, they want their text bubbles back. It also tried a new crafting system and upped the stakes in the graphics department. It didn't work. EQ2 is a nice enough game but it is also evercamp squared. A typical EQ2 quest goes like this. Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill rare spawn that only spawn on days with no y.
And then SOE changed the game again, the running animation now looks like an old fashioned slapstick and the death penalty was made so light it barely matters.
Next, there is WoW. A little known MMORPG that is managing to hang on somehow. Blizzard is to MMORPG's what Microsoft is to desktops. It does nothing new, it copied everything it does from everyone else and still it absolutly dominates. Does it have less bugs? No, read the forums, did it have an untroubled launch? Like hell, does it have excellent customer service? Still read the forums.
Its gameplay is a throwback to the orignal everquest with absolutly nothing new added. And yet. Something is right. (something is also wrong, but I am coming to that).
EVERY single SOE game has an engine that is claimed to be future-proof wich is why your computer right now will choke on it. Apparently nobody at SOE realized that a future proof engine is of no use unless the game itself has a future.
The WoW engine is NOT futureproof. Blizzard used an engine that computers of that day could run. Its relativly low power is hidden masterfully by their choice of art direction (hint to SOE, you need some) and it works. To a point. I am not alone in simply NOT like the graphics after prolonged exposure. It is worthy to note that of all the major MMORPG's in the west WoW is closest to the korean ones in the lack of being able to customize your avatars basic looks. Well I say avatar, WoW players tend to think of it as toons.
WoW is Everquest Lite done decently. It says a lot about the MMORPG market that this is high praise indeed. What turns people off sooner or later is that WoW copied everything from everquest including evergrind and evercamp. These things I could have done without.
A typical WoW quest goes like this. Loot item from X by killing it. Oops that one didn't have it, kill another, and another and another and another (repeat for several hours).
Next, another SOE title. Ambitous, certainly, trying new things, absolutly. Bugged, oh hell yes. I am talking offcourse about no other game then Vanguard.
More races then any other game and although a cynic might claim most are just color variations, they do have different starting areas/stories. More classes as well. An extra gameplay option in the form of diplomacy. A future proof engine (hint looks great, won't run) and lots of potential. And bugs. Lots of bugs. Basic stupid bugs that
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you have ice cream, I will give you ice cream. If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.
This is the ice cream kaon.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Been a long time running in the MMORPG market and each one is practically a study on the how and the how not's of putting one together. My only real problem is a market that says 'we are listening to you' but then seem to go the other way or generally just ignore you.
.
The reason WOW is on top is beyond the pretty pictures and the raids and the new content....it is because they have an active and reasonable set of devs and techs who address issues that really really do not make the game fun.
It is pretty simple...would you pay to be exploited by a mind numbing bug and not see it fixed or, worse yet, get the patented EQ 'working as intended'? Of course not! The reason why WoW is getting and keeping the numbers is the very reason why SWG, EQ, and the like are not keeping their base.
Take the examples I mentioned:
EQ - They had a huge base at one time. Plenty of regulars jumping in and attracting still at a trickle...but WoW loomed and EQ was avoiding facing the writing on the wall and trying to update their code. Yea, it could have been a major overhaul but instead they wanted you go out and purchase new software and new pricing for EQ2 (mistake). Now add that in to a customer service that from the beginning was a HUGE problem. Don't try to softsoap it, they knew it sucked and they told you to like it or lump it. Sure, there were customer based problems that could not be solved but the standard 'working as intended' response wore thing wayyyy too early. Also, flipping out most of your bug team to developing your new project was a no-no.
Lessons learned:
-Customers smell bullshit even over the internet...don't try to gladhand us and then think you are sly by nerfing things and not telling people. They WILL and DO know and will be very vocal about it.
-Keep your CS up to date and fresh. Do not default to India, get people wanting to make a difference in the game and reward them for reporting bugs. Also, get a leader people can respect in CS. God knows Abashi became a joke amongst others for his thin skin on certain areas (if you got one like that, don't let him post)
-Update your code. Don't make your base have to buy new shit when the old shit was working but you decided to 'force' your base to go over to a new system because you shifted 90% of your old devs into the new project.
SWG: Christ, what a clusterfuck of idiocy. How can a patented and almost guaranteed 'seller' lose? Putting a project out too early for one. Don't even try to deny that SWG needed at least another year of dev before it came out. I was in beta and the boards practically screamed it daily...but they folded and released a buggy mess. Then of course there was no actual 'Star Wars' in SWG till the expansion, which seriously pissed off those rocket jockeys who wanted their own starship. Add to that the great 'Jedi' hunt...the pinnacle of a storyline that people aspire too and you have to do a bunch of professions to turn it on (BTW, saying you can become a Jedi on the box and not enabling the actual ability to do so for a year is not what I call 'good marketing'). Don't even get me started on the infamous action overhaul
Lessons learned:
-Don't throw a game out there when your beta group is telling you not too in droves. Sure, a few niggling details is fine but that mess that SWG was broken and we knew it.
-Don't half ass your base with promises of new stuff that should have been there in the first place.
-MAKE YOUR EXPANSIONS WORTHWHILE. See the above reason. No one wants to shell out 29.99 for stuff that should have been there or is so small, its not worth the price.
-Don't overhaul a system and fuck over your loyal base when there is no real reason. Like it or not, you folded trying to make SWG 'noob friendly', gutting a base of people whose very reasons for sticking with you was because it was tougher and hoping to capture some of that WoW loving. A happy medium would have been to introducing in easier ways to play for the noobs...not
FunCom and Blizzard come from different planets as far as culture and ethos, and IMHO its why FunCom will always be a second rate game company. (The industry will probably never forget the absolute disaster that was the AO rollout. I was personally one of the thousands in line waiting for a full refund for that atrocity). Unlike Blizzard, FunCom sticks to release schedules and predefined featuresets (among many other problems) which will always result in buggy gameplay and cut corners.
What we have now in the industry is a few players who were successful *primarily because they were early to the scene* (FunCom being one. I personally hope Mythic isn't another, but they may be). These players really don't necessarily have the caliber to maintain their position and IMHO will vanish over time.
So when FunCom says "The industry so needs competition to WoW" its very true. Except that FunCom isn't really in the running. The bar of quality and depth has been raised significantly by WoW, and the result is a black-hole which sucks players away from the competition. ArenaNet is still looking strong, and other contenders like LOTRO and DDO are looking good, but FunCom? No.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Starcraft was the only RTS game that had unique races and still had balance. War3 is light years away from being balanced. It is unlikely we will ever see another balanced RTS as it is it becomes harder and harder to do with every new unit and ability. War3, with its 4 races, was doomed from the offset. There are just too many things in the game now to ever find the balance SC has. The problem compounds even more with technology restrictions as well. SC pretty much had infinite units, which contributed to the ability to find balance. With all the new 3d engines, you cannot push that many polygons on the screen without severe frame lag. War3 instituted the unit cap and upkeep in order to promote the use of less units.
With SC2 likely to be announced this month and hopefully as an RTS, we can only hope for some innovation in the genre to present something new in place of true balance. Blizzard learned their lesson with War3 and are unlikely to include the same shortcomings in SC2. Things like creeps, items, upkeep, resource limitation, and shops will all be re-examined and hopefully excluded from the game. Blizzard knows that the success of SC2 relies on the adoption of the game in Asians markets where it would be played competitively. They learned with War3 that it does not matter if it is from Blizzard or not, they will not support an inferior game when better game are still viable. The aspects of competitive Starcraft were not around in War3, which caused it to not be adopted. Not only did they add great focus to micromanagement, they took away from the macro aspect with upkeep, resource limitation, and low unit counts. SC had a much greater focus on macromanagement which yielded the ability to play the game different from a strategic standpoint.
Ok rant off. To wrap, balance will never be achieved again because companies feel the need to have more and more in games in order to sell them as new and improved, but doing so is at the cost of balance. With every new factor, it becomes exponentially more difficult to balance the game.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
suits me.
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I don't really get people who want death penalties. Most of the time want something like an XP loss, which really just requires grinding to get back. Hooray for pointless timesinks?
You're different. Item loss, eh? So what happens the first time I lose an uber +20 hammer of smiting because of a server lagspike? The only people who will tolerate that sort of nonsense are in the smallest niche of players.
I think that reason would rank VERY low on the list. Not many people game with a mac and the customer base they are largely gaining (college students that think macs are special/unique/fashion statement) are usually too busy screaming about how great their macs are and would rather be dead then appear as a nerdy MMORPGer. However they still feel fine playing NES and ranting about how every game since has sucked, and that the Beatles were the best bang every and how all music since has sucked. Or maybe that was just my personal experience for the last 4 years... Reasons I feel WoW has succeeded: -older MMORPGer players were getting bored with the generic grind style game that had little content. -simple game play on the surface for younger players -complex setups when fully leveled determining what skills/gear to have for nit-pickers (the ones who "NEED" an extra .25%)
-plethora of quests that weren't just: go here, kill 10 things, come back (sure it had many, but it also had others)
-two well defined sides with well defined classes (not too few, not too many)
-attractive graphic/art design
-Simple PvP design
-large and hard instances (although it originally didn't come with these)
-warcraft legacy (although I don't think that is the main reason for success, if it was SWG would be the biggest)
-it is the biggest and the most well known, it became like a snowball rolling down a hill, just kept growing bigger and at a faster rate
The next successful MMORPG will occur when players have gotten udderly bored with WoW and another game comes out that bring out something that seems new or genuinely is new.
You can't move for the WoW refugees who are sick of the endless raid. But I think it says a lot you name facebook and myspace. Like it or not, WoW is the 12yr olds MMORPG, and that loses its appeal if your not 12 anymore.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have the same basis for choosing my character, IF I am going to spend ages looking at it, it better have a nice ass.
Yes I have played Guild Wars and yes it does look nice. If I remember right it even has boob animator for the female hunter. NICE!
Sadly it the basic gameplay just never grew on me. The constant need to juggle your spells/skills around based on the area you were going into just got tiring.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There is a real penalty for dying in Eve, and good teamwork can trump even the most expensive faction setup.
PvP is the point, and flying together with pilots you respect and can count on is the real heart of this game.
It wasn't LucasArts, well, not directly by changing game elements. Their mistake was picking SOE to develop and maintain the game. SOE did NOT listen to the user community. I played SWG from its inception until WoW came out. I buried myself in SWG, at one point paying for 6 accounts by myself. I absolutely loved it, even with all of its bugs. But with every bug that surfaced, the mentality SOE employed was not a bugfix but a complete re-write of the system. The community did not want the NGE, the community wanted long-standing bugs fixed. Instead, SOE decided to completely change the premise of the game. Why was it so hard for them to realize that, through this change, they were going to lose (and alienate) a vast majority of their playerbase?
Blizzard's success hinges upon one fact that many people debate but is essentially true. The developers DO listen to the community. A good chunk of the changes made to the game, or at least proposed and then refined, were driven by the player community. Since the player has a direct impact on the direction the game takes, the loyal playerbase stays with the game. Indeed, for the first year and a half to two years of WoW, I played almost non-stop, every day, all day. I have since made an entrance into the "real world" where there big yellow LED light source we call the sun exists, and have cut back on my WoWcrack addiction by quite a bit.
Perhaps the most laughable piece of the entire article is the claim that SWG was "one of the first" MMOs. It was, by no means, one of the first. It was, however, one of the first MMOs that managed to gain the biggest following, and subsequently lose it because of inept management.
So basically you're saying that LOTRO's lack of grind is... well, the same as WoW before it.
Well, I'm not arguing with your assessment of either. It's just silly nevertheless to hear the LOTRO creators make such claims as that they're beating WoW by eliminating grinding (when WoW didn't require any either) or that titles for the number of creatures killed are what turns grind into non-grind.
It's blatantly silly. If anyone despised WoW's "collect 25 murloc heads... and only 1 murloc out of 20 has a head" quests and considers those "grind", then adding a title for number of murloc kills doesn't turn it into non-grind. If anything, it just adds insult to injury. The _last_ thing I'd want, when I'm bored out of my skull killing those murlocs... and yet another one was headless, is a message to pop up telling me that I got some title for a million murlocs killed. Not only it wouldn't make it magically "non-grind", it would be a reminder of all the points before when I grinded murlocs for some dumb quest.
Basically I'm used to hearing silly boasts from people making yet another "X killer" (where X can be WoW, iPod, etc) or "beating X at its own game", but this kind ranks not only as silly, but as... clueless. If the best they can come up with is "I know, let's add some titles", then they're truly and completely clueless. They didn't actually look hard at what they're copying, what works, what doesn't, what's not what the players want, and what they could design otherwise. They're taking wild guesses at something they don't even freaking understand, and hoping WoW would just have a heart attack so they can claim the kill.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I won't lie, the Linux and Mac gaming market just isn't there in force yet. However, I don't look at this as a hindrance to entering the market; I look at it as an opportunity.
Linux and MacOS is growing. Especially with Microsoft's feeble latest attempt at an operating system, I think that more and more people will be looking at it as a viable home computing platform. Those people are going to want games. There just aren't that many available yet, especially in the MMORPG market.
If I were an MMORPG developer, I'd be jumping on this chance. I'd use as many cross-platform libraries as I could, and that would be one of my major selling points: Whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux, you can play our game. You might make a mediocre dent in the Windows market, probably trailing behind the 800 pound gorilla of WoW. But you would virtually own the MacOS and Linux market for these types of games.
As those markets continue to grow, so does your game, and the market for Windows-only games shrinks. Even Windows users may start preferring it because they can play with their friends who are using Macs and Linux boxes, not just the ones who are beholden to Uncle Bill. Also, as a development company, you gain experience at developing cross-platform games, so the games you come out with in the future will likely be better than other's who are playing catch-up to the new world of multiple OS's out there.
Personally, I think developing games only for Windows is a really bad business gamble. You're basically betting your financial future on Macs and Linux not gaining any market share in the future. I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Oh, and just as an added note, don't forget that in the case of an MMORPG, we're not talking about developing the whole game for multiple platforms, only the client. The primary function of these clients is simply to display graphical representations of network data efficiently and prettily to the user. A very powerful and popular cross-platform graphics library already exists (OpenGL) that will handle the lion's share of this work. In my opinion, if you're a graphics application developer and you're not using it, you're being pretty stupid. As for the back-end server software, unless you plan on selling it or otherwise distributing it, you're free to lock yourself into whatever platform strikes your fancy.
I think I saw that movie. War Games, right?
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Not just new games, but older ones too are always revised to be on par or better with WoW. For example, EQ2 has some significant new content on their test servers. You don't see many MMOs offering a new starting race and city for free these days with the standard Western MMO model of selling expansions.
WoW serves a very good purpose in regards to MMOs though... Like a penal colony, it keeps the obnoxious munchkins in one place, and out of real MMOs.
The reason there will be no competition for wow... MMO is like a monopoly once you control a large enough player base people are scared to jump off the bandwagon and try something different. The real sad thing is for a player like me....
http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/index.htm
This is a fan site from the earlier years of Ultima Online. This was truly a game for all players before they expanded and made it cater to the people who didn't want adversity in their game play.
If this game was unchanged from its glory days, i would pay 14.99 to play this 2D mmorpg over any other mmorpg in todays market.
All you wow heads out there don't realize wow(the scientist) has put you (the mouse) in a little maze with constricted walls and tells you how to play, what a great game you all love... its like playing a single player RPG with codes or a player guide... where is the fun in that....
Well, let's see who they mention there:
- Funcom: makers of Anarchy Online, launched as the buggiest pile of shit in recorded history. Read the reviews on Something Awful, and know that they're actually going soft on it. The game was actually buggier than that. Also bear in mind that that's not at launch, that's after Funcom had been given more time to fix it, and had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended. Yet people fell through the ground and/or started swimming in the ground, enemies attacked through walls, enemy melee attacks had longer range than a sniper rifle, doors were a swirling graphics error, balance in _all_ aspects was a sick joke, crashes and disconnects were common, getting trapped in scenery was also common, missions were randomly generated crap from the same template (e.g., you actually had to kill everyone in a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission to get the token), etc, etc, etc. It says something about the kind of people who'd proclaim that to be working as intended.
Heck, even the whole freaking factions were so messed up that faction 1 got more money and better equipment, faction 2 just got shafted, and faction 3 didn't even have a shop above newbie level. How's that for balance? Imagine joining, say, the Horde in WoW and discovering that your side doesn't even have more than the newbie areas in the game.
So basically forget these guys, they just _can't_ design a competitor to WoW. All they can do is hope that someone else comes along and kills it.
- SWG: it stayed afloat at all because of being a merchandising exercise (you know, like putting Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt: you hope people will buy it just because it's official merchandise), _not_ because of having good design. It was the game that was awaited by _millions_ of SW nerds like it's the second coming of Obi Wan, and it just managed to disappoint almost all of them. Either right away, or in the many changes, culminating with the NGE that turned the whole game into a whole other _genre_. Among many other sins.
And reading TFA just reminds me of another thing: the team also always had a thorough contempt for the players, and had no qualms with making excuses or telling outright lies. And I see it continues to this day. E.g., now they're introducing pets as some exciting brand-new feature... never mind that it was there before they removed it in the NGE, pissing off everyone whose class had been eliminated. E.g., claiming that reducing the classes was because of noticing what players do and want is... rich. It's like claiming that you kicked someone in the balls because he obviously wanted that. E.g., the excuse that they were the first and that excuses their mistakes... no it doesn't. There were things known not to work long before, some since the time of MUDs, the SWG team just chose to ignore everything. And at any rate, by the time they did some of their biggest blunders, such as the NGE, that was already after a decade of MMOs. They simply didn't have that excuse any more. Etc.
At any rate, to return to the main idea: everyone who is still there, is there because it's SW. _Not_ because the SWG team can design a good game.
- Turbine: Well, these guys did make Asheron's Call, which was rather popular at one point. (Even if mainly due to being the place where you won't get ganked instantly like on UO.) So at least at one point they did have the mojo to challenge the kings of the hill.
Then they seem to have forgotten how.
AC2 was a flop, and its long list of mistakes could make a case study in how _not_ to go about designing a MMO. It seemed to actually go out of the way to be the opposite of what the players wanted in at least two dozen aspects, or at least miss the mark by a mile. Thoroughly clueless game design.
D&D Online was a thoroughly mediocre and uninspired game, which again managed to miss the mark of everything that most players want in a game. Not even a case of trying to innovate and happening to get it wrong, but just getting it wrong with
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The largest problem in MOST MMORPG's is that they dwell on singular components and fundamental modules too much.
What I mean is that the most successful are those that can create inter-cultural settings that make groups of people follow an pathways that are completely outside others. The excitement of the entire secular experience is when those paths cross and it's almost like discovering a new race and culture that was always there but you never knew existed.
The same goes for skills, weapon choice, and etc.
Most MMORPG's do this so poorly that you find yourself in a hamsterwheel spinning as fast as you can to level up to get to the top so that you can finally start to enjoy the game.
The entire point to the MMORPG is not the skill levels, but the social interactions that take place inside the game, and the introduction of those unique experiences in the correct amount of time- no matter how you play the game.
Beating WoW is not the objective, but a by-product of successful construction of a MMORPG.
Take one look at the cookie-cutter and break that into several pieces. Then start from there by taking with you what pieces you like. THAT is how you win.
I miss the late 90's where there were some really original ideas out there in the hands of innovative minds.
Where did all those crazy people go? They really had some moxie!
Wow is very weak at the moment. Expansion was a major failure. Any real competition would be very successful. So... don't write, don't hope. Go make it, chop-chop =)
Blizzard wins right now because they've found the secret. KISS, it's not difficult or hard or painful. If a person wants to pop for an hour grind some rep, or something else they can. That's the key and that's why Blizzard currently dominates. You can take anyone of any age or even a trained monkey and drop them in the starter area and away they go, they can get to the top level on their own, if they decide they want to go further they can raid after they get finished grinding out the 5-man instances. They don't need two other people or four others to go questing with every night.
They have 5-man instances galore, 10-man raids, 3-25's, and another two coming out in the next month. While it's not as easy in the old world for people to play(read: trained monkey's have to be able to play their class now and can't hide their screw-ups), it's still doable.
Casual's have their niche, raiders have theirs, PVPers whine because PVE mechanic's don't mesh well with PVP.
Om, nomnomnom...
...but not in terms of what the industry is actually willing to do.
WoW goes about as far as it's possible to go while still having what is very largely a static environment. Blizz are in the process of phasing in what essentially amounts to zone-wide games of domination, (if your faction holds all 3 or 4 castles in the zone at once, all players in your faction get a 5% damage bonus) but that still isn't what a vocal minority of players have expressed that they want.
What I've heard said minority in the playerbase saying it wants in terms of world pvp is a scenario where regions can literally be taken by one side or the other. In other words, although Hillsbrad for example might start out neutral/contested, there could be a scenario where Alliance players could invade it and it could literally become an Alliance zone. At the moment, zone allegiance is static; it never changes.
The problem with this sort of thing however is that there are technical issues with regards to implementing it, and that said technical issues are mostly above the industry's preferred pain threshold; especially considering that they involve introducing things that are radically outside the current paradigm. (At least from what I've seen) The other incentive for Blizzard NOT to introduce such things is that even though some players generally do want them, such players are a tiny minority. Most players are firmly addicted to ovine repetition such that if Blizzard *were* to start introducing genuinely innovative/novel aspects into the game, it'd probably scare the sheep away. That's something Blizz really don't want to do, because given that the sheep are the overwhelming majority, they're also where Blizz consistently will make most of their money.
If you look at the differences between WoW and UO in particular, what sets WoW apart isn't what Blizzard added to the model anywhere near as much as what they took away. UO was a lot more open-ended; yes there were dungeon crawls, but there was also a much more thorough economy, a somewhat more diverse reportoire of trade skills, and there were player created and run towns in some places due to the player real estate. In other words, the game wasn't only about "Go to X location and kill some monsters, or X dungeon and kill some more monsters there, or X set part of the map and kill other players there."
The real problem though, now that I look at it, isn't with the development industry. It's with the players themselves. If WoW has proven anything, it's overwhelmingly that players want an extremely narrow, object-oriented game environment for the most part. They need objectives spelled out for them extremely precisely. Maxis actually found out the same thing with The Sims; most human beings simply don't have the initiative or the intelligence required to set their own objectives within the game environment, but instead require the game designers to do it for them.
So yes...UO in particular and other games as well have showed us that there's a lot more to it than WoW, but what WoW itself and players' response to it has overwhelmingly shown is that neither the design industry nor the playerbase itself for the most part *wants* more. If Blizzard have any overwhelming talent, it is a talent for identifying and isolating those elements of fantasy which the gaming public want, and then regurgitating said elements back to the gaming public in an utterly McDonaldised way. They did this with both D2 and Starcraft as well as WoW. The end result is a game which is massively horizontal, rather than vertical. There's no depth whatsoever; it's based around literally mind-numbing repetition, but even though nearly the only two activities include killing monsters and finding gear with which to kill yet more monsters, the sheer number of different monsters and loot in themselves make the game sufficiently superficiallly interesting that you're able to at least temporarily (depending on your degree of intelligence, which thankfully for Blizzard, is minimal in the ca
I could make a zillion points...but I'll only make one:
What I'd really like to see is two MMORPG companies get together, preferably from different genres (think SWG and WoW) and create a cross-game PvE and/or PvP zone.
How totally sweet would it be to force choke an elf mage or stab an Orc with a light saber?! WICKED SWEET, THAT'S HOW! Or what about putting together a war party of whatever characters WoW offers and having an onslaught against a clone army?!
Now, MAKE IT SO!
Often World of Warcraft is dismissed as not having any new features. But it does have one key feature that allowed it to attract tons of players: The quest system to get from level 1 to max level allows you to get there with no grind. You don't stay in the same spot or same area for very long. You don't kill the exact same monster for any longer than 1 hour. The quest system makes you move around, and combat different things, and handsomely rewards players with XP and money and equipment for doing so. Of course, this means that a game must launch in a mostly complete state, and that it must contain a lot of content for quests.
New games that desire to complete would do well to learn this lesson. Camp & grind based gameplay is dead. The less you include in your game, the more successful it will be.
Of course, WoW eventually has camp & grind activities near the end game, but no MMORPG has solved this problem. Eventually you WILL run out of content, and your main option for continued progression will involve a time sink. A good MMORPG will prolong this as much as possible, and a bad MMORPG will simply create a camp & grind headache for players in a futile attempt to extend customer subscriptions.
Seriously, if the Conan game actually reaches a final/shelved state, I'd buy it and enjoy it for the Arnold factor alone. Be it a revolutionary MMORPG or a complete flop, I'd get at least $50 worth of laughs out of it, shouting Arnoldisms at the screen with my friends.
I can already imagine epic PVP taunts: (Schwarzenegger accent) "I AZK YOU, FATHA KRAAHM, GRAHNT ME VIHKTORY, GRAHNT ME REVENGE!!!"
Starcraft has a cap of 200 units per player. While that sounds immense, I've run into that cap several times (especially with Zerg).
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
UO actually hemorrhaged after they screwed the game up, not because of EQ. I actually played both for several years, but EQ never was as well put together as Ultima Online. In fact, if you check the numbers, you will find a continued and quite substantial player base for Ultima Online. EQ actually tried to kill UO and it's other competitors with EQ2, but it was a flop and more EQ players stayed in the classical version rather then upgrading due to the pathetic gimmick nature of the new version. The current handicap of UO is it's pathetic decline in quality and antiquated client. Ever since they split the world their player base has never recovered. That is not to say those players went to EQ, in fact, EQ lost players during the same time period when they started "improvements" as well. What was really happening was player base alienation. Over confident companies got greedy and lost focus on the fact people have to WANT to play and they can't MAKE them play. If you want a reason for the success of WoW, look at it's perfected design and it's overwhelming adaptability. It has some of the trade flexibility of UO or EQ without the mindless short comings, it has simplified game play for the inferior or novice players, it has rich game art and well thought out environments, it has a very robust client that allows it to be run on antiquated machines, and it has the same Blizzard touches that the Diablo's and Starcraft's had. Make no mistake, Blizzard is not a one hit wonder like the others. They have proven this with Diablos, Starcrafts, Warcrafts that are over a decade old and still played and sold all over the world.
The problem isn't WoW. It's that all the other MMOs out there suck about as hard as a black hole. Make a decent MMO and people might actually play it. SWG dug it's own hole, they can blame no one else. As for other MMOs, how about creating something that we can enjoy after we stop wearing diapers.
I really think that in overall concept, SWG was the most promising MMORPG released to date. I loved the large variety of professions and the fact that you didn't even have to do anything combat oriented if you didn't want to. I also liked the fact that it was accurate to the story line (being between episodes 4 and 5) with very few jedi being in existance (and those that were had to mainly remain hidden or face perma-death if found and killed). It put the focus back on everyone else (non-jedi) who make up 99.999 percent of the Star Wars universe of the time. I had a weaponsmith/armorsmith who made a killing farming nuclear power with our guild's power company. We'd find the top quality patches of radioactive and drop a billion harvesters across the patch to farm it and make a killing. I'd use the money to buy other top materials to make the best possible weapons and armor. It was fun doing it and building a very good reputation on the server for top quality gear. Where I believe they made mistakes (or at least where they started in a long series of mistakes) were having characters unlock Jedi slots by grinding and mastering different professions over and over. This is speculation, but I believe that they had originally set the profession masteries to a very low level (possibly 5-6) to unlock. They underestimated players "hamster like" qualities of running in the wheel all day (grinding professions) to unlock their slots and therefore had to adjust the limits closer to 20 to unlock their jedi slots. The game went down hill when players all caught on to this and began the non-stop profession mastery grind to unlock. They then made it more direct (and grind-like) by adding the whole Force Sensitive grind/profession tree to allow everyone and their mothers the chance of being Jedi. Of course, PVP was useless at this point if you weren't a Jedi. Jedi were everywhere and became very powerful being that they didn't have to hide as much any more. Bounty Hunters had to team up in large groups to take them down and with Perma-Death removal, it didn't matter if they did, really. They basically tossed the story line to the side in efforts of allowing everyone to be the big winner by giving Jedi to anyone who'd grind enough. If they'd just stuck with the original concept, kept Jedi extremely rare and hardly ever seen, and improved the process of being a Jedi, the game would likely remain a huge contender. What I think would've worked best for choosing who was Jedi and not would be to have random CD-Key's chosen as Force Sensitive. That way, regardless of grind, you're a Jedi based on luck. Either you are, at birth (purchase) or not. Also, you'd have to grind a character up a significant way before finding out if you're force sensitive or not to prevent little rich kids from buying 50 copies of the game to try it and toss if it wasn't force sensitive. Also different keys could have different levels of force sensitivity (the force being stronger with some than others). But before I get flamed for the suggestion, keep in mind that I'd prefer living Jedi to be a truly rare thing. If anyone happened to be Jedi, they'd find it extremely difficult to see just how strong the force was with them. And with perma-death in place, they'd have to start over from scratch if they got too obvious about it. So destroying the story by flooding the game with Jedi, weak/klunky expansions, rediculous updates that dumbed the game down significantly and refusing to listen to the player base. Not to mention taking months/years to fix launch bugs. GG SOE. Thanks for ruining what could've been the best MMORPG.
It wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard uses the Starcraft 2 RTS to setup the Starcraft MMO.
Right now, the Starcraft plotline at the end of Brood War makes it difficult to establish a balanced starting point for the multiple factions in an MMO (IIRC, the Zerg won). It also lacks an external threat (like WoW's Burning Legion) for MMO players to rally against (unless you count that other Terran faction).
I've own Warcrafts 1-3 and Warcraft 1 was nothing more than Dune 2 set in a fantasy world... Polish didn't arrive until Warcraft 2, where the sprite size was increased significantly and the control scheme was replaced with one that doesn't suck.
(Warcraft 1's music was good, though)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Novice's "enlightenment" in this case included the realization that Master was a total dick.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
--- Just say no to negativity.
"Galaxies was one of the first MMOs," said Mr Neri. "There was no handbook on how to do these things." -Jake Neri, Lucas Arts Mr. Neri makes it sound as if they were out there all by themselves and misleads the reader into believing that SWG was one of the first MMOs on the market. Not only is this misleading but it is also an out right lie, while SWG was one of the first generation MMOs here in the U.S., there had been others who had done a much better job then the Sony/Lucas Arts diabolic duo. Let us list some of the games that came out before SWG, please also note that some of these games came out at about the same time as SWG, sometimes within a month, make of that what you will. In no particular order, Planetside -- May 19th, 2003 Dark Age of Camelot -- October 10th, 2001 Ultima Online -- September 1997 EverQuest -- March 16th, 1999 Lineage -- 1998 Anarchy Online -- June 27th, 2001 Asheron's Call -- October 31st, 1999 Earth & Beyond -- September 24th, 2002 Neocron -- September 9th, 2002 Runescape Classic -- January 2001 ShadowBane -- March 25th, 2003 The Sims Online -- December 17th, 2002
Go home, nobody loves you. .
- The Blog
Mac versions. And not bad ports, not Wine hackery, not months- or years-delayed half-efforts. Blizzard has always mantained mac versions as first-class citizens among all their products: full feature and performance parity, full interoperability, and synchronized releases. And this has served them incredibly well.
There are somewhere between fifteen and twenty million macs in use right now that are recent enough to run WoW. Even though these are people who have not chosen their platform to maximize the number of games available to them, let's say that one in ten has at least some interest in gaming occasionally.
That's about two million potential customers for whom there is very little product competition. A market that size is about a quarter of WoW's total playerbase, and far larger than most games ever see.
Blizzard is one of the few companies that has been bright enough to catch on to the value of making big-scale games for this incredibly ripe market, and I suspect that it has been a big contributor to their success. With luck, a few other big game authoring companies will figure out this trick as well.
Beating WoW won't take just a great game; if WoW itself had launched in the face of another game that had the same success WoW enjoys now, it would not have had the success it has had. The reason is that many people like to play with friends, either RL ones or people they've met in-game.
So even if these games are great, polished, and addicting, if their friends won't leave WoW with them, people will go back to WoW to be with their friends. It's going to be a very tough market for the next 4+ years.
Hopefully at around that point, enough people will be tired of WoW that entire guilds will be looking for a new game to play, and new games will have a much better chance of getting a solid foothold.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
You cant beat WoW, just before you beat WoW they'll do what they always do. Release another expansion.
"That's because lupis is a disease and alcoholism is an addiction."
I agree, the definition of disease should not include alcoholism (as it's not so much biological problem as emotional/psychological addiction), but in fact it does qualify. Thanks to the convoluted English language, we have words like disease with definitions that are not similar.
According to Dictionary.com they definitions of disease are as follows:
1. a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.
2. any abnormal condition in a plant that interferes with its vital physiological processes, caused by pathogenic microorganisms, parasites, unfavorable environmental, genetic, or nutritional factors, etc.
3. any harmful, depraved, or morbid condition, as of the mind or society: His fascination with executions is a disease.
4. decomposition of a material under special circumstances: tin disease.
-verb (used with object)
5. to affect with disease; make ill.
in fact really liked it when it was first released. I even bought an XBox360 controller to use with the game because of how much it really was an action game. My point was that DDO and GW are two different games. The OP was stating that DDO was a fee based Guild Wars, which it isn't and because of its action RPG nature will never be. I was also making out the point that DDO is horribly reliant on stats and items. GW isn't. So comparing the two really can't be done. I've always looked at Guild Wars in that it almost has a Diablo feel to it(probably because heck the people that made it worked for Blizzard before the started Arena.Net), but GW was never about stats or items. DDO unfortunately is, to use a term in the Eberron campaign book, a Monty Haul game at its core. It will always be about PCs having grossly over powered equipment to be able to get by in the end game, it still was when Turbine let old subscribers come back for a weekend in March. I have been playing GW casually for almost a year, and not once have I ran into an outright bump in the road like you can in DDO... 4th Vault of Night quest, Inevitable, no armor-penetrating weapons, 4 hours of your life wasted because you cannot kill an Inevitable without bypassing it's armor and regen.
And please note, not once did I mention CoV, Wow, or LoTRO. I was talking about GuildWars which has no grinding, no standing in a field waiting for monsters to spawn so you can kill them, no digging for ore or searching for flowers. In fact the game is entirely instanced just like DDO and it came out a year before it.
It's wierd that with all the ranting about YucK, it seems that many people forget the other games that do have die hard fans. It's not that WoW can't be beat, it's that it's the only one that gets attention. There is mention of a number of the other successful MMORPGs throughout these posts, but how often do we hear stories written SOLEY about these games?
Quite often people chatting in other MMORPGs will mention wOrLD of warcraft, but rarely, if ever, with positive comments (and yet do make positive mention about other good MMORPGs). Players tend to say they played it and got bored of it so very quickly, or it had certain inadequacies, etc.
Personally, I was disappointed to not see anyone post anything mentioning PlayNC's Auto Assault as well. There is a core set of players that stand by the game, as well as developers. People have tried to report that the company has considered shutting it down, when those of us who play get e-mails stating otherwise, and proof by their continuing to release new updates (without the need to buy a new expansion pack or whatever). The game has just recently had it's 1 year anniversary, released update 4, and they are already working on update 5 and continue to offer 14 day trials - without charge, so you can try before you buy. I recommend everyone to give it a shot; hell, it's FREE to try.
As for the world of warcRAFT, I'd love to stop hearing about it. Unfortunatley, because of how big the game was or is, and with them constantly releasing "expansions" (albeit at an extra cost) trying to make it better or draw more attention to it, writers rarely seem to author an article about a MMORPG without mentioning it. I'm wondering if it is even possible? I bet if writers stopped writing about it, it would be much easier to allow the game to die it's slow and painful death.
I really enjoy MMORPGs, but pricing is a big issue to me. Paying $15/mo when I barely have time to log 5 hours a month feels like I'm being taken for a ride. For someone who's dropping 10 hours or more a week, $15/mo is a steal in terms of cost per hour. For someone like me, however, it makes more sense to buy a block of hours (like a calling card of sorts) or pay a lower monthly cost for a restricted-use account. This is one of the main reasons I quit WoW. Contrary to what more than a few other posters have said, there are plenty of missions that are either difficult or impossible to complete by yourself AND require an investment of 2 or more hours at a time. Sure, you can make it to level 60 without doing them, but you're missing out on a lot of the content. When I figure that I can't play a large chunk of the game without spending at least 10-20 hours a month on it, I feel like I'm being ripped off. EVE gets some of it right by letting you train skills while logged out. Even if I'm not playing all of the time, I still feel like I'm getting some benefit from the game without giving up my Saturdays. Of all of the MMORPGs I'm aware of, this is the one I'd be most likely to start playing just for that reason. (I still wouldn't mind a drop in cost, however.) Where an MMORPG can succeed is by capturing players like me. Make a game that can be played for 30-60 minutes at a time at a lower cost without sacrificing or foregoing content because of time constraints and you'll grab a significant number of price- and time-sensitive clients.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Minor quibble: Scourge take only 1/3 of a food unit each - you get 3 per larva.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
"Apparently nobody at SOE realized that a future proof engine is of no use unless the game itself has a future."
You have a good point, but you've missed something - a future-proof engine is necessary in the long run for a game that does have a future.
The reason I know this is because I literally wrote the book (which was not a strategy guide) on EverQuest. Back around 2002 I was in San Diego interviewing the team that created the game, and I picked up on a few lessons they learned the hard way (in some cases, comically).
The first, and most important, was that they had to ASSUME there was a future for their game. They paid for not doing that big time with EverQuest.
The thing was that the Verant team thought that they'd be lucky if EQ lasted more than a few months. The projection was that if they were lucky, they might get a few tens of thousands of players. They figured that within a year they'd be working on their next project while getting ready to shut down the EverQuest servers. What actually happened was that they caught lightning in a bottle.
Verant had learned from Ultima Online that you have to be ready for a massive hit on your servers on the first day - so they made sure they had enough servers to cover more than they ever figured they'd get. It was a good move...unfortunately, the bandwidth in San Diego at the time couldn't handle the load, and they caused an internet blackout that lasted for two weeks across the entire city (and yes, I think that's funny as hell). The big problem that taught them the value of a future-proof engine was the first EverQuest expansion, though.
EverQuest was a massive success, had formed a close community, and needed more content. But, while Verant could plan an expansion, their game engine actually couldn't do it. It was built for a game that was projected to handle the needs of perhaps 50,000 players over the course of a year and then shut down, so upwards expandability wasn't a concern. So, they had to spend a lot of extra time rewriting the entire engine so that they could release an expansion in the first place.
That's why future-proof engines are so important - you can't predict lightning in a bottle, and the price of an engine that can't expand upwards is all too often a lot of extra development time that could have been saved if you had thought ahead.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
'We need other strong games that can make people understand that there's more to it than WoW'
I quit WoW 3 times (although haven't cancelled my account), the 3rd time after raiding for around 6 months. 3 weeks ago I bought BurningCrusade & played it for about 1 week before I realised why I stopped playing. It's a repetitive time-suck device. I love playing my undead priest I greatly enjoyed instances & raiding, which I'd love to be able to logon & do a couple of times a week for an hour or so. But there is no progression at that rate & it is unsatisfying.
The very idea that MMORPG's can be casual player friendly is a lie when 'casual' means only an hour a day.
Sometimes I think people have forgotten that there are games other than MMORPGs. Or perhaps the game industry has forgotten that they are 'games'. Remember, something you do for fun & entertainment as a break from your real life.
And I'm still bitter about Starcraft:Ghost.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
While I can't comment on the Age of Conan portion of that article, the section discussing Star Wars Galaxies is completely misleading. It suggests that Lucas Arts has "tweaked" the game on a few occasions. What they have actually done is effectively redesigned the entire core mechanics, not once, but twice, and each instance made the game simpler, less challenging, less innovative, and less engaging. The playerbase has responded with its feet and left the game en masse.
SWG is *THE* textbook example of how not to make changes to a game, and the perfect example to show exactly how badly a company can mismanage one of the largest provenances in a game. There is no reason - other than lack of design skill - that World of Warcraft should be more successful than a game based on Star Wars, probably the best recognized storyline in the history of Cinema.
The original design was ambitious and as it says in the article there was no manual on design, WOW has the advantage of having been built after all the first generation MMOs and thus can incorporate all of the essential features found in those games. It does so very well IMHO, even if I think its a mostly derivative and unchallenging game overall. What WOW does though, is do all the essential things very well, even if it introduces very little in the way of new elements overall. SWG at the moment, does NOTHING well at all in any area of the game, and has lost all of the new and innovative features that once made it a great, if flawed, game. With SWG its like they identified all of the great and interesting points in the game then cut them out of the game one by one until the only thing left was a pathetic FPS/MMO hybrid that has nothing worthwhile left.
The bit about adding the Beastmaster skills completely ignores the fact that up until the last massive rewrite of the game (so for the first few years) there was a highly popular profession called Creature Handler. When they came out with the New Game Enhancement (NGE in SWG parlance), they removed that profession. Now, a year later or so they are reintroducing it as a shell of its former presence like its something new and innovative. In fact just about every new feature added to the NGE has turned out to be something that used to be in game and has only now been revived.
The notorious quote by some Lucas Arts Executive, named Nancy McIntyre I believe is "Players just want to kill, loot, repeat". Thats the basis of the NGE, which has replaced a combat system that forced players to pick the appropriate options from their abilities during a fight, to a system where you point your weapon with your mouse, then hold down the left mouse button until the target is dead (no exaggeration, thats the sum of weapon combat). Previously we had special shots, special effects, etc that were all conditional during combat, now its point and hold. Oh, sure there are some specials you can fire off by clicking the right mouse button as well, but there are only a few of them, and you more or less click them when they come up.
No, SWG is a completely gutted game, and honestly not worth considering. Lucas Arts has taken the most promising provenance available in gaming and produced a complete laughing stock of a game. They couldn't have made a single worse decision than they have throughout its history. What was once, innovative and cutting edge, is now bland, unchallenging and suited for an audience of 6-8 year olds.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
How come no one seems to remember the WoW launch? Serious bugs, serious server instability, missing content, hour long queues, class imbalances. The fixes came much like any other MMO - in patches. Blizzard did add additional content along with the bug fixes and nerfs - but it was the same drill.
When I left WoW in December of 2005 after a year of playing I was still dealing with:
1. bugs present since launch
2. server instability
3. long wait times to logon (and I don't even play at peak hours)
I came back for awhile when Burning Crusade and on the whole the game seems much more stable.
While WoW's launch was no where NEAR as bad as say Anarchy Online, it was not perfect.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I beat WoW ages ago.
<spoiler> Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start during the end credits to enable "ghost mode" and try to beat your best time! </spoiler>
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Some people like to have the ability to write bots for games. Some games even explicitely allows this.
But most gamers don't want this. Plain and simple. Most don't want no bots and no gold farmers. Fix the "broken economy" problem and you've got a game that people will adhere to en masse.
Make an MMORPG that is based, from the start, with fairness in mind. No items stealing, no "untracable money" problem (leading to gold farmers) etc. Make it very clear from the start that the game is for fair players, not for bots / cheats / hacks / gold farmers (for gold farming one could start with diminishing returns per account once a "gold-farming" like behavior is detected) user and that people using using these will get severely affected.
Make a game with an "honor" system, where your honor depends on how you play the game (no bots, no hacks, no cheats) and on how people you play with act. This would lead to guilds of fair players.
It is 100% doable and a lot of people would love to have this.
I am looking forward to the "World of Darkness" game being produced by CCP and White Wolf. If they do this one right it will be the best MMO ever made. I cannot wait to see how it turns out.
LOTRO offered $10/month if you preordered the game or a $200 lifetime subscription. You could in fact purchase a preorder, receive the open beta key and then cancel your order if you didn't like it (I did this with my son as it turned out he didn't like the game). The open beta was also heavily advertised and they gave out something like a million keys.
There were also two weekend stress test events prior to launch with keys given out to anyone who signed up.
If you had any interest at all in LOTRO I really don't see how you could have missed that. LOTRO had considerably more opportunities to try the game before launch than WOW did (when it launched).
Oh and my copy of WOW had one buddy key in it - same as LOTRO. Maybe this changed, mine was purchased from the original batch at launch.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I played Dark Age of Camelot for a couple of years. I got to the top levels with lots of money, items, etc. The most annoying thing for me was the lag. So what do they do every patch but add graphics and create situations where large numbers of people would be in one place which generates....lag. Eventually, I gave up and went to WoW.
I won't wait so long next time. When I get bored or annoyed by the patches, I'll move again. The next game won't be WoW so the game makers shouldn't try to hard to copy Blizzard.
I hope all the WoW wanna-be's make great games so that there will be more choice for consumers. Unfortunately, I expect most of them to suck for the same reason so much sci-fi and fantasy sucks. Gene Roddenberry was passionate about Star Trek and so it was good. Those who followed were passionate about money and so it sucked.
Push the button, Max!
There is this game company who is going to announce a new game soon. They're called Blizzard. If that game is an MMO it might beat WOW.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Linux does NOT have a EULA. There is the GPL *code* license, but that is NOT a EULA. There is NO restriction on end user of Linux.
I was in since an earlier beta (not the one where they invited the WoW crowd literally guilds at a time... but I digress) of LOTRO, and I have to say that I felt pretty similarly to what you do now. The thing is, though, LOTRO is just the same as every other MMO. It really keeps you going with its element of 'ohsnap I can go visit the Shire/Bree' etc. but it also has that phantom greatness that every other MMO seems to have at some point. You're progressing along and keep seeing new stuff and think to yourself in the back of your mind 'I just know Gandalf/Strider*/really cool instance/good items/interesting quests/whatever are at the next 'stage' after where I am now' but it just isn't true. Hence the 'phantom' descriptor.
I love the music in the game and the atmosphere is well done. The engine problems they had were pretty serious when I lost interest (on some systems, the game rendered all distant objects at the highest possible settings and afterward it would dumb them down to whatever the current settings were... this among other things caused massive 'stuttering' which was infamously unfixed in Asheron's Call/2/DDO etc.). I don't really have any major complaints** about the game except that it's the same old shit as all the other MMO's. At least EVE TRIES to make grind seem DIFFERENT!***
*SPOILER DON'T READ THIS SPOILER
-Yes I know Gandalf and Strider are IN the game, but their appearances were disappointing to say the least.
**Although I do remember the jumping/running animations just being absolutely disgusting, although that's a very minor point for me.
***I don't play EVE or any MMO except Guild Wars for the PvP.
Sorry for the AC, I honestly couldn't remember my password since I haven't posted here in so long. I usually just read the stories. Yes, I must be new here.
I only covered the ones mentioned in the slashdot story.
And no I don't claim any particular insight, but I at least unlike the story writer know that SWG is NOT a contender for the WoW crown.
Oh and I played a couple of the ones you mention and several others like Ragnorak Online in its endless open beta, who hasn't.
And I still think my conclusion stands, SWG tried but ultimately failed to deliver and was killed just when its bugs started to become bearable, WoW succeeded because it was the first to simply do an MMO well and LOTRO is the next one to do just that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The whole idea is that you write the code for your current project in such a way that you can re-use it for future projects. Intresting idea BUT it is going to add costs to your current project. If that is going to make you go over-budget so you are fired and never get any future projects you just screwed yourselve. Hard.
SWG, Everquest 2 and Vanguard all have amazing engines that most people just don't have the hardware to run. These are the people that got to buy your game KNOW because MMO's just don't come back from a lack-luster launch.
Yes, a game like The Sims and even its sequel do not have engines that can truly compete any more with the latest on offer. Yet many a game company would kill to have its sales figures years after launch.
The sad fact is that EQ2 on a normal pc looks worse then WoW on that same machine, as today Vanguard looks worse on a normal machine then LOTRO. Yeah yeah, two years down the line when today's monster rigs are common place the game can use that power. And? EQ2 minimum hardware specks are now more realistic because of the advancing years. So were is the mass exodus from WoW to this beautifull game?
There isn't.
Yes, I see your point on everquest BUT you can go to far. If 99% of your player base has to run on "low" settings, your engine might just be a bit to future-proof.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You mean it wasn't "don't play games in front of your boss"?
Either that, or "the way to stop playing WoW is to not play WoW". Put that in your crack pipe and smoke it!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.