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SOE Officially Announces The Agency, FreeRealms
Today the embargo ended for news on Sony Online Entertainment's two newest Massively Multiplayer Online Games. One, entitled The Agency is slated for the PS3 and PC formats, and will feature a spies and mercenaries theme so far unseen in the Massive genre. The other is FreeRealms, a fantasy title deliberately aimed at non-traditional gamers. It will feature whimsical gameplay and offer users the ability to create their own content, another first for a Massive title. Gamasutra has an interview with Matt Wilson, the studio director of SOE-Seattle, discussing the inspiration behind The Agency . "I think our big inspiration to develop this game actually came from watching movies. If you pay attention to all of the summer blockbusters there are lot of movies that come out around the spy/espionage genre. Whether it's James Bond, or the Bourne series all the way from Mission Impossible or even TV shows like 24 or Alias, it is a really big genre of information that is out there."
And here, my friends, will SOE feel the full brunt of the backlash of their raping and pillaging many games in the MMO genre.
The very fact that SOE is at the helm will cause many people to not even want to READ about these titles, much less play them (and yes, I am one of the many folks pissed off at what SOE did to completely DESTROY Star Wars Galaxies which was, at one time, probably the best and deepest MMO around)
Living With a Nerd
Their marketing dept. is on fire... After all of the PS3 debacles, they one-up themselves by announcing a MMO for *casual* gamers. Brilliant!
That...uhhh...sounds like Second Life with a little WoW thrown in for good measure.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
This looks like one of those times the Sony boycott will be easy to uphold :-)
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
After what they did to Star Wars: Galaxies I will never play another game connected in any way to SOE. Why put in the time, effort and money when they will inevitably make drastic changes to the game in a lame attempt to match WoW's subscriber base?
Not to troll but SOE hasn't had a truly successful MMPORG in years, you think they would try to fix or cancel some of the existing garbage before throwing more games into the mix. With so many companies doing things right - it's very easy to shrug off anything from the biggest culprit of doing things wrong...
... when you are aiming at non-traditional playerbase.
...)
(but then again, I'm one of the Sony Faithful, I still play EQ
When was it the "best and deepest MMO around?" I paid to play SW:G's beta and I didn't like it. The game felt like a terrible mashup of EQ and the tabletop Star Wars (altho' to be fair I hadn't played the old SW tabletop, just the d20 version, so maybe it was more true to the mechanics of the older system). They planned right from the outset to delay implementing vehicles and starcraft, they restricted access to force-sensitive characters, etc. One of the only MMOs that gave players a real choice between good and evil, and offered a real incentive for players to spontaneously draw up sides and battle each other was Asheron's Call. SW:G was only ever EQ's theory of "naked elfs = profit" + lekku + Outer Space.
The Agency sounds like WoW or Anarchy Online with a coating of James Bond paint. For godsakes, it's been TEN YEARS since Ultima Online was released, and the best they can think of is Yet Another Dungeon Crawler...with social features...and a new theme!
UO2 could have been something, until it quickly got canceled, because they were so sure everybody would want to play the original UO forever. Horizons was shaping up to be the greatest game of all time, until the designer got kicked out, and they decided instead to make it an unambitious pile of crap that nobody ever played. Is there anything interesting in the works, that's likely to be finished and released? I find it hard to believe that there are so many developers out there trying to make the next WoW...by copying WoW.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
That was it biggest card and its biggest failure. People understand Everquest clones. Games like WoW and now Lotro are pure and simple Everquest clones, SWG was not and it confused people.
Questing was purely story based in SWG, not done for loot or XP. Loot drops did NOT give you all your equipment at any level. You only had one character per server, meaning you couldn't use alts to meet your crafting needs. It also meant that if you got ignored by to many people, you had to start over.
The economy was far more in the control of the people. The game didn't hold you hand through a quest system to lead you around the map. Exploring was up to you. Okay, so there wasn't actually that much to see. Welcome to MMO land, smaller then your home town.
The most radical difference between SWG and the everquest clone however remains that it allowed you to build your own class. YOU choose what your character was capable off. This, in theory, meant you could never be entirely certain what you were dealing with in another player, unlike ever Everquest clone were EVERY single player with class X will have the exact same abilities. Oh, sure, maybe they have fractionally different stats but you won't find melee champion with ranged skills at early levels in lotro because that just isn't allowed.
Even better in my opinion was that clothing and stats were to a large degree unlinked. People in SWG actually could wear what looked good, not just what gave them the best stats. EQ clones especially at early/mid levels are often a horrible to anyone with a sense of color coordination. Most amazing, SWG even tried (and failed) to make it a CHOICE with benefits and penalties as to wether you wore heavy armour, light or none at all.
So offcourse SWG failed. Almost everyone just grinded the missions, rarely venturing more then a few miles from the largest towns. Okay so everyone specced their character exactly the same way. Okay so everyone ran around in the same armour once doc buffs came along (despite the fact that for instance Terra Kassi could save a small fortune by going unarmoured).
But it tried, and then SOE got desperate and changed it all trying to turn a niche game into a WoW wannabe. It didn't work and ever since we only been having more EQ clones.
Do I hate EQ? Not really, but imagine a world in wich every RPG was a diablo clone with no room for the Baldur's Gate let alone Planescape Torment. No SWG was no Planescape Torment, it barely ranks as a Morrowind BUT it tried.
On the other hand, you have to credit SOE with one thing that few other MMO developers have managed. They know money. They know that NOT everyone has credit cards and therefore offer alternative payment systems. Asheron Call at the time did not, so I never played it.
Even Blizzard doesn't have non-credit card options but at least it is so big that you can just get its debit cards in stores for cash. Hint to MMO developers, those debit cards are NOT an option if you only sell them in credit card only stores.
With SWG SOE tried for a while with a different kind of MMORPG. Sadly because of bugs it just never stood a chance. There was a short time when it was playable, when it worked and then SOE just ruined it.
NGE? Nah. CU? Nope. Doc buffs. Turning every player into an indestructable tank and then countering that by turning every "mob" into a really indestructable tank (100% resist on everything, except one obscure damage source, wich is at 90%, with a million hit points is just silly) does not make for an intresting game.
But doc buffs were introduced as a response to players who wanted to were heavy armour without paying the penalty (no armour, heavy damage but fast healing, heavy armour, light damage, but slow healing).
I think SOE ruined SWG, but they did it because they listened to the players. Ultimately the players themselves ruined SWG.
Until I started to read the articles.
Gamertag: WyleType
Man, I'd still love it if someone made UO2, or even a decent oldschool UO clone. Best game ever in my book.
Warhammer: Online looks pretty interesting, innovative and action-focused if nothing else.
I'm pretty sure that Ryzom beat them to this punch. Or Second Life for that matter...
http://gamenettv.com/index.php?action=Videos.view& id=814
SWG was an MMORPG with a difference. You have to remember that most current MMORPG's are Everquest clones. You also got to remember that Everquest clones are RPG's light.
There is typically NO moral choice. If there is "evil" and "good" they are often purely based on race, and completly seperate the players, only to interact in Player vs Player combat. In Everquest 2 players can betray their alignment and go over to the other side BUT that is a one time deal.
You do NOT choose your own alignment like in the heavier western RPG's. You do not really choose anything in an Everquest Clone.
In many ways they are closer to the japanese RPG on rails. You choose your race, this determines wich class you can pick. You then venture into the world were you complete quests of increasing difficulty. With that comes XP that gives you new skills and better statistics. You BARELY get to affect this.
This is important to remember as a lot of recent MMORPG's try to make a big deal about how you can customize your character.
This is BULLSHIT, with Lord of the Rings Online being one of the biggest bullshitters around. Your class will dictate what stat bonusses you will be looking for, a hunter needs agility, a champion might etc. Yes in lotro a guardian can indeed choose the agile way or the might way (block and stun, parry and area-affect-attack).
The simple fact is that Everquest clones will give you your equipment through quest rewards and loot drops, the useless stuff you sell and the stuff that fits your class you use. Do NOT enter an EQ clone if you have a fashion sense. People wear what gives them the right stats NOT what looks good. Color coordination? Please.
In quests you do NOT choose how to advance, your alignment/race/class has quests which you either do, or don't do. You do NOT choose your own path.
So was SWG different? Oh yeah.
First off, no classes as such. Instead you choose your race, and then could make your own mix of wich proffesions you wanted. NO restriction based on race.
Most new players would get started in ALL of them, only later specializing in what they liked best. You could be a sniper/medic, a scout/doctor. Oh sure, some combo's made more sense then others and sadly many players just went for what somebody had figured out to be the most combat effective BUT still, you could choose, and for every uber-specced player there was one who played a combo they just plain liked and fuck the stats.
To give you an example of just how fucking big a deal this is. In LOTRO I am a guardian, this means NO ranged skills until level 30 at wich I can finally shoot a bow. Badly.
There are a lot of humanoids wich run away, annoying as hell when you are a close range fighter. In LOTRO I just got to deal with it. In SWG I could always create a melee character with a bit of ranged to shoot those cowards in the back.
Another HUGE difference was how you got your equipment. EVERYTHING was made by players. Loot drops only contained resources for crafting.
In most everquest clones crafters have to really grind the first few tiers/levels because nothing they make is in demand. Why should I pay you for your craptastic sword when I got a far more powerfull one from a random loot drop?
Another difference is that by default your character was neutral, neither aligned with the rebels or the empire. You could work for either, and even join their sides BUT you did it in the same world as everyone else. NO seperated cities.
A final note of intrest, SWG NPC's interacted with each other. In SWG I been rescued from certain death by imperial patrols, fought alone side herbivours against predators and gained the aid of the locals.
The mobs did NOT just stand around to be attacked or attack, they interaced with each other. This was NOT like EQ clones wich put guards in places to prevent mobs from wandering into safe zones. Imperial patrols were targets themselves and could easily be
Does anyone actually call them "Massive" games? Isn't MMO the usual term?
They did it in other games already. Try EQ2 whole classes swung between random extremes, and the whole set of spells got changed at least twice. E.g., one of my characters swung from primarily dual-wielding damage-dealer, to primary tank who can't even solo random mobs without a tower shield, to primarily two-hander specialist. It doesn't even have the same abilities as when I designed that character. And crafting got changed into something not even resembling the same thing.
Now admittedly, I don't claim it's anywhere _near_ the magnitude of the SWG NGE fuck-up. That's not even close. SWG didn't just get randomly changed, it got turned into a whole other _genre_. You just can't top _that_ kind of achievement. Still, it just shows the kind of random changes to one's characters that Sony won't think twice about doing.
That said, if I'm to take a wild uninformed guess about the future:
I'm thinking more like... anyone else remember that in SWG smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle? That content just doesn't exist.
Or that they created 4 flavours of the trader class in the NGE, and made them not able to even do the normal quests (since being stuck at combat level 1 kinda makes it impossible to actually kill anything for a quest fast)... and nerfed 3 flavours out of 4 into mostly making a loss? (Now duly noted, crafting in a lot of games, WoW included is mostly a time-sink on the side. But that's just the point: it's a secondary activity of a character mostly geared towards adventuring. But making a class that can _only_ craft and then making them produce worse stuff than the drops off random desert chicken, is kinda harsh.)
Or that they actually broke the Entertainers (you get items like posters which should start a quest, but they don't actually do anything), and the random generated quests send you to dance for some tourists... in an empty room without any tourists? Or that it tells you all the time that Entertainers are masters of extracting information from people, yet the content to actually do that simply doesn't exist after the tutorial?
Or that there's a shitload of levels of Politician, yet you went from zero to max the instant you join a city, since the content for all those levels just didn't exist?
Etc.
So I'm having this mental image of a SOE game with spies... that can't actually spy. And mercenaries which are stuck doing the same randomly generated quest over and over again, because that's all the mercenary content, but can't actually get any meaningful mercenary employment
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How does the MMO genre scale to spy capers?
Your mission, Double-O-732288291, should you choose to accept it, is to go out in front of Whitehall here and beat up on sewer rats for a while until you level. Then come back and I'll have you take something down to Q. After a few hundred hours of running errands around MI-5, you get a mission to assassinate Blofeld. So you and fifty of your fellow Double-Os camp him over the next twelve hours, neatly dispatching him with 342,994 shots between the eyes, killing him thiry-seven times before he drops Blofeld's Orders which actually lets one of the fifty of you start the epic quest.
Isn't Thief the very antithesis of an MMO? You're supposed to be alone.
In addition to what was already said, let's put it like this: the NGE turned the whole game into a whole other genre. It went from being a SF MMORPG to a FPS with a bad interface, plus a rigid no-choices class system which just says which special attacks you get at which level. The most common metaphor for it is that they turned SWG into Planetside, but that doesn't even do it justice: it's a Planetside with a bad interface, and with actually less freedom than Planetside.
Pay attention to that part about turning the game into a whole other genre, please, and you'll probably understand why most people are annoyed by it. Imagine that you've signed up for, dunno, Eve Online because you like the space combat, and after a couple of years it gets suddenly turned into Everquest instead. Oh and you get to choose a fantasy class instead of your customized ship. Sorry, there's no way to play your old character as it was any more.
Even if you don't think that one is inherently a worse game as such, it's the whole thing of turning it into another game. You can surely see how that would annoy a lot of people. A lot liked the old game, and just don't like the new mechanics and wouldn't have signed up for the new game.
And forcing everyone else to pick a fundamentally different character class is a pretty obvious (and justified) reason for discontent. Imagine that you've actually invested time and energy in creating and levelling up a very specific flavour of character... and suddenly you have to pick from a list of 9 fundamentally different ones, because your old combination is no longer available. Imagine that even the interface doesn't work like it used to any more.
If you're familiar with, say, WoW, imagine that you've wanted to play a hunter. Say, a very specific flavour too, like Beastmastery spec hunter, or Marksman spec hunter. You've done quests, you've grinded your epics, you've spent time at the auction house getting just the right kind of equipment for that character. Because, you know, that's the character you wanted to play. (Feel free to replace with whatever class you actually liked, if that makes the metaphor easier to swallow.) Then imagine that a patch came and just deleted that class. In fact, it deleted both pet classes, so switching to Warlock isn't an option either. Sorry, pal, pet classes are out. We'll let you switch to another class, though. You can be a scrapper, tanker, defender, controller or blaster like in COH now.
Oh yeah, also imagine that they just decided to get rid of the talent trees and the old abilities too. Having a choice of spec was so difficult to balance and all. You may have carefully planned advancing your character, but that goes right into the garbage bin. Now everyone gets to be a clone of everyone else, and uniformly get a pre-determined skill every 5 levels.
Surely you see how that would piss off a lot of people, right? It's not even whether the new classes are "worse" as such (although methinks they are.) People get emotionally attached to that character, and having it unilaterally nuked and turned into something fundamentally different... well, it's gonna feel like that character just got raped. Yet that's just what SOE did in the NGE.
Now also imagine that there was a prestige class, available only to people who've grinded the other classes to level 70. (Which actually would be less grind in WoW than the old SWG "hologrind" to Jedi.) So you've grinded like a slave, dumped thousands of hours into mindlessly levelling up a bunch of unrelated classes (half of which maybe you didn't even like in the first place), did the same quests and shot the same NPCs over and over again... and finally got your prestige class. Now you're a Jedi. Bloody finally.
Now imagine that the same patch comes by and nukes all that achievement, and makes it one of the normal classes available to all newbies. In fact, imagine they got rid of the old Warrior class, and made your Jedi just the melee tank class. Yep, that was another stunt Sony pulled in the N
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry, I play WoW and I've played SWG. The post-NGE SWG is _not_ WoW. I actually like WoW, I wouldn't have minded it too much if the NGE just aligned the interface to the WoW one.
Seriously, the new interface and mechanics are _Planetside_ with a SW theme, not WoW with a SW theme. Except it's worse than Planetside too, in the classes department, since Planetside too is a classless game where you get whatever combination of skills you think fits your style more.
You really have to wonder what they were smoking, really. They already had Planetside and it had buggerall subscribers. They had already gutted the development on Planetside and merged several servers in one, because the income and player numbers were abysmally low. At any rate, it actually had a lot less subscribers than SWG. So someone thinks... "I know, let's turn SWG into Planetside." I mean, wth, they could have just asked their own marketting department if aiming for the market share of the other game is actually an improvement.
But to return to the "it's not WoW" topic, WoW actually has a lot more complexity than the new SWG. For starters:
- WoW has a metric buttload of skills which you need to combine (semi) intelligently to make the most out of a given situation. There are skills which slow down the enemy, skills which reduce your damage taken, skills which boost your own damage, skills which temporarily give you a break from one or more enemies (though they might cause a wipe if you use them in the wrong place), and a ton more. Add different timers on them, and you actually have to think in combinations to suit the actual tactical situation there. It's _not_ just a case of sitting there and mashing fire, FPS-style, with the odd lobbing a grenade now and then.
- WoW does have those talent trees which actually allow _some_ customization to your character. A Survival spec hunter actually needs different tactics to make the most out of its spec, than a Beastmastery hunter. And a Shadow priest doesn't play the same as a Holy spec priest. (The former can spam the Psychic Scream and Mind Flay combo -- again, it has to be used as a combo for maximum effect -- while the latter doesn't even have Mind Flay.) It's not as flexible as the original SWG system, but it's not as rigid and unidimensional as the post-NGE system either.
Most WoW classes would be unable to actually play WoW and survive, if they were as unidimensional as the new SWG classes.
At any rate, trust me, I actually like WoW and the post-NGE SWG is just crap even compared to WoW. It's too dumbed down even for WoW.
Now I can imagine that the order to dumb down SWG did come in reaction to WoW. But that's probably from some people who didn't even understand WoW. It was a knee-jerk reaction, without even trying to understand why WoW works or what do people actually find in it.
_That_ is the most damning thing there. I'm not even against copying ideas from other games, but mindless copying without understanding... well, you see the result in NGE. They didn't actually understand what makes WoW fun to WoW players, and they ended up with something that appeals to neither their old player base nor to WoW players.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, that's technically true, but you have to wonder exactly how much of a leg up.
On one hand, indeed SWG got screwed more than their other existing games. On the other hand, some things _are_ common to all SOE games. As I was saying, the wholesale changing the whole bloody spell list happened in EQ2 too. It wasn't of the magnitude of the NGE fuck-up, but it was a fuck-up anyway.
I don't know... applying Occam's Razor, I find it less likely that a bunch of independent teams independently decided to fuck-up their own games at the same time, than that some fucktard higher up at Sony pushed them all to do it. Not that the former is impossible, but it's a lot less probable.
Sure, some fucked up more, and some had the sense and sanity to stop a lot earlier. But there had to be some "auugh! copy WoW _now_! Marketting says people like dumbed down games! Dumb down _now_!" pressure from above to get them all to do it at the same time.
Heck, it's not just the change of system either. If you look at the quests too, EQ2 and SWG started roughly at the same time to get a buttload of quests that just felt like mass-produced crap that didn't even make sense. It speaks lots that both games ended with such nonsense crap as a sniper scope for a _sword_ in SWG... that actually was a potion, or like quests in EQ2 to kill deer and bears to see which of them stole a book.
I mean, seriously, think about it. Anywhere else if someone found it on their TO-DO list that today they have to code a scope for swords, they'd just go tell someone, "Excuse me? Did I get that right? And how do you want to implement that without attachments?" That they just went ahead and coded it as a potion, speaks volumes. Whoever did that was just a jaded peon who just did their quota and tried not to think about it.
And that it started happening in both games at the same time, makes me think of a more general SOE problem. Something happened there, and it came from higher up than either dev team.
At any rate, since it _did_ happen in more than one game, including at least one where George Lucas and Raph Koster had no say... well, it means it can happen to a new SOE game too.
Will it be as big a fuck-up as SWG? No, probably not. That's a monumental achievement as fuck-ups go. Mere mortals can't even hope to achieve something equal to that. But it can be pretty fucked up anyway. And there's _something_ currently at work at SOE which seems to create the right conditions for fucking up. That's all I'm saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's pretty much it, yeah. They figured it's worth fucking their old players up the ass, to try to appeal to the larger WoW group.
Except here's the sad part: they didn't manage to look better to WoW players either. I'm someone who actually likes WoW, in fact I think it's the best MMO ever. And lemme tell you, even from that perspective, the post-NGE SWG just sucks.
I wouldn't be able to even transfer my existing WoW skills and all the stuff I liked about the WoW interface to it, because the new SWG is a FPS with a really bad interface. Equally bad for either for a MMORPG or for a FPS. Even forgetting WoW, from the perspective of someone who's played CS and Quake 3 and the whole UT series in the day, and still had a subscription to Planetside, the whole new SWG implementation is just sub-par for a FPS too.
The reason for _that_ interface change just adds a touch of surrealism to it all. The classes change was at least driven by greed and trying to appeal to WoW players, but the interface change is a separate story of incompetence and stupidity.
It's not even because someone liked the FPS idea more. It's because they couldn't figure out how to stop bots with the old interface. With the old, traditional MMO interface, some people would script bots that ran through a loop of target nearest enemy, shoot at it until it dies, heal when needed, loot, target next enemy. And they'd leave it running overnight. And since the SWG team couldn't figure how to stop that -- and their GMs were busy with bad PR moves like teleporting protesters into deep space instead -- they came up with a FPS interface where you have to keep the crosshair over the enemy all the time.
Sure, it stopped the botting (except for Entertainers and such), but at what cost? It's a solution that's worse than the problem. Even the players which were actually pissed off about the bots, got more pissed off about having the game turned into another genre. It's really like cutting someone's leg off to cure a sprained ankle.
At any rate, even skipping over the change as such, it gave all the players the wrong message. It told them that:
1. Such changes can happen again. So even if you like the new system, God knows when you too will get raped.
2. That Sony doesn't give a fuck about you players. Sure, we all knew in the back of the head that corporations are in it for the money, and that Sony isn't your best buddy, but we like to pretend that they're at least human. Outright shafting the existing players for purely the mercantile reason of wanting more money, feels really inhuman somehow. It's not even a case of tweaking or improving the game to appeal to more people, it's something that outright says, "fuck you lot, we're going for the other group instead. They have more money." It just feels... low.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am sure women gamers will be thrilled with the opportunity to own online puppies and wear cocktail dresses and stilettos! It really makes me want to play these games!
and .
Sony is basically stating they want to get into the pay for content game, and get rid of subscription models.
This will make those that want to go further in a game now pay for content incrementally rather than earning that new sword from some quest. . .
I'm not so sure I like this new direction.
These microtransactions are the major reason I'm not playing Gears of War, haven't bought Rainbow Six Vegas and haven't bought GRAW2, I don't want to pay constantly for mappacks so I can play with friends. I certainly don't want to invest time in an MMO where any 12 yr old with mommys credit card can buy a bigger gun.
Ah, a retard. How cute...
Now you may notice that (A) this was an answer to someone who actually asked, and (B) apparently he was satisfied with the detailed answer, since he thanked.
Did anyone ask whether _you_ care or not? I don't recall that. But you just had to butt in and pretend that anyone actually gives a damn about your pathetic delusions of self-importance, didn't you? It must give meaning to your pathetic loser life to pretend that someone will give a damn about your personally approving of their conversation. Heh.
Yeah, imagine that... someone actually having a conversation that doesn't center around what your highness cares or doesn't care about. People actually exchanging information without giving a damn about whether _you_ are personally interested. Amazing thing that.
But I don't expect something that complex to compute in your tiny smooth neanderthal brains. Sorry about that. You have my compassion for being born such a complete cretin. It must be hard.
Now imagine me having a heartfelt chuckle at your complete stupidity, little troll. Carry on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ah. Thanks for that info. I didn't know he had a hand in screwing up EQ2 too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.