You are talking about deus ex 1 not 2. And deus ex 1 even with some of its design problems is considered one of the best videogames in history, quite revolutionary for its time.
a movie costs $20 and last approx. 2-3 hours. a book depending on interest and speed 1week to 2 weeks for $7. a video game is $50 and most today end inside of 10 hours (metroid prime record is 90 minutes with 100% complete rate). i;m not saying 120 hours/game all i'm saying is if i'm wasting $50 on a game i don't want to be completed with it in a week.
Assuming that you're willing to pay $20 for the movie then $50 for 3-5 times as many hours of entertainment is good value for your dollar.
yeah now that game play is starting to return to games (metroid prime, kill switch) they are totally sacrificing game length. back in the 80s a game took you at least 2-3 times longer to beat as they do today.
That's a feature, not a bug. I don't want to take 120 hours to play through to the ending of your (padded) game. 20 or even 10 hours is fine. If we're talking about mass-market then you want short games because the mass-market does not have the time to obsessively play a game for that long. If we're talking about artistic value then, again, what other medium has ever made you sit through even 40 hours of artistic expression to get the good stuff?
The idea that greater game length == a better game is so wrong. I mean, a game of chess takes, what a few hours? Clearly it's a bad game. They should have included multiple story-missions and at least two or three other multiplayer modes.
There should be more short games. I want games that will entertain my friends at a party. I want games that I can play in the few hours I have after work that aren't spent doing other stuff. I don't want to devote the next 6 months of my life to your one game. No bok demands that much of my time and no movie does either.
If most of your customers will never see the final two-thirds of your game, why are you wasting your resources on it? Save yourself some effort and time as a developer and start work on the next great, short and tightly-focused game.
There is no problem. This website is acting as a TOOL for parents who want to educate themselves about what is featured in these games. It's saying "here's what's in the game and here's why we don't think you should offer it to your kids."
This is exactly the kind of thing that we want to ahve happen. We want parents to be informing themselves about these games.
People enjoy these sports vicariously. That is not the case with gaming. Gaming is something people like to take active part in.
Are you saying that people *don't* like to take active part in sports? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying. Which would mean that you are a crazy person or a very sheltered person who's never come across a bunch of people tossing the old ball around or whatever.
Or are you saying that people don't like to watch videogames? So far in my experience that hasn't been true either. Whenever we have a bunch of people over to play games some of them end up spending the whole evening just watching others play.
The whole reason that Professional Gaming is being considered at all is the rampant similarities to professional sports.
This is nearly the same as last year, EA, Nintendo and Sony ranked in that order. Is this supposed to illustrate some major change?
No, but it's still news to point out that things have stayed the same. In fact, in a world where people keep going on and on about "Nintendo 3rd Party by 2004" or whenever, it's a piece of information that's pretty valuable. Despite perception on message boards and everywhere else, Nintendo is doing fine. In fact, they're doing very well indeed.
Who are these guys? Do they speak with any authority on this subject? I read the article and as far as I can tell they're a bunch of financial analysts. Do they have a history of predicting this kind of thing accurately? Is there any reason to listen to these predictions?
As a person with a Windows machine, I have lots of choice for games. Hell, there are so many games released for Windows PC that I could take care of all of my entertainment needs entirely through free trials and demo downloads. This means that a game has to be really special for me to stick around and pay money for it. Linux users don't get as much choice.
I bet there is also an activist dollars aspect to it. I mean if you spend a lot of time championing Linux and complaining that there aren't enough cross-platform releases then when a company is finally good enough to make the effort, you'd better put your money where your mouth is and support the effort even if it isn't the best game available. If these companies don't see any return on their investment then they just won't do it next time.
It's kind of like those PC users who paid stupid amounts of money for the earliest PC games when consoles were offering much cheaper, much nicer looking games. Such is the sacrifice of pioneers, I guess.
"Effortless patching" will make the console game market the same cesspool of unfinished, buggy software that PC gaming currently is. The fact that console games were NOT patchable has meant that console game developers put a lot more effort into getting the game *right* before they release it.
You're a crazy person.
There are plenty of console games that crash and generally have all kinds of bugs. Enter the Matrix leaps to mind but it isn't alone. Pick up a copy of GamePro magazine and check their monthly feature on bugs that appear in recent console games and how you can work around them. These are games that are selling well.
There are a lot of reasons that PC gamers have to deal with more bugs than console players. The biggest is that each of the consoles has standard hardware. PC programming, on the other hand, requires you to take into acount a wide variety of different hardward, driver, OS and software configurations. More unknowns means that more can go wrong.
On top of all that, effortless patching doesn't just mean "fixing bugs" it also means "adding new content". As in "here Mech Warrior player, here are some new maps for you to play". That's pretty cool and it's something that neither Nintendo nor Sony can do yet, though Sony is well on the way with their new Final Fantasy with HDD package.
My thought is that we should all vote on those bubble sheets that are used for every standardized test given throughout our public school system.
Oh man, those things screw up all the time. It's just that most of the time, you never get a chance to compare your results to your answers.
You know, I don't buy that it is cheaper to pay highly trained technicians to install and maintain electronic ballots than it is to pay a few people per riding to count ballots. I doubt that it's even faster.
We use manual counting for our federal elections in Canada and last time the US and Canada had an election, we started ours after you guys and finished counting before you did. Mind you that's because we didn't have hanging chad recounts in Florida but that proves my point. A nice big X interpreted by people clearly establishes voter intent and parallel counting keeps things moving at a zippy pace.
If you rely on automation, when things go wrong they things go very wrong. If you rely on people and each group of people is reponsible for, like, 200 ballots then it is much easier to catch an correct errors.
I thought I read somewhere on the Linux for Xbox sites that new Xboxs are running with larger HDDs in them just only the front 8Gb is actually used. I imagine you could do the same thing with a processor, just underclock it.
A lot of this discussion seems to be missing the point that there are (at least) two kinds of movie critics. One kind is the Ebert kind, who tells us which movies to go see. The other kind is that academic kind like Cahiers du Cinema which doesn't serve as a viewing guide but acts as a way to analyse films beyond their entertainment value for the dollar.
Both kinds of critics are valuable. They are valuable at different times. During the times when you are standing around in a store with money burning a hole in your pocket, the Ebert kind are the ones you want to listen to. During the times when you want to increase your appreciation for the artform, or see trends or underlying symbolic themes that some movies might share, or learn about the artistic effect of certain new techniques and technologies, or consider the relationship between the story of a film and the political environment that spawned it, or weigh the merits of attributing a collaborative medium like film to the vision of a single director, then maybe Ebert isn't your man.
It's partially true that the academic critics are mostly writing to each other, but they are also writing to students of film and to creators of film. You can learn a lot from them. It would be nice to learn similar things about games. By all means, let's continue to have buying guides like GameSpot and so on. But maybe it would be nice to have the other kind, too.
There were 2 strobe lights on the vehicle, and each would flash twice in a 1 second cycle. (I remember from the stopwatch that it was EXACTLY 1 second, down to the hundredth of a second). It wasn't a steady rate of flashes... Kinda like the below diagram (L=left strobe, R=right strobe)
L..L......R..R......
then it goes U..D......U..D......B..A......select..start......
There were 2 strobe lights on the vehicle, and each would flash twice in a 1 second cycle. (I remember from the stopwatch that it was EXACTLY 1 second, down to the hundredth of a second). It wasn't a steady rate of flashes... Kinda like the below diagram (L=left strobe, R=right strobe)
L..L......R..R......
then it goes U..U......D..D......B..A......select..start......
Apparently, this is a pretty regular cycle in the games industry. What happens is that the big fish get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of their control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices "hey we're spending a lot of money paying salaries and benefits and keeping staff that we aren't always using," and so they start laying people off and outsourcing a lot becuase it's cheaper. After awhile, they get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of your control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices...
Meanwhile, there are plenty of mon-and-pop games developers who are doing just fine. It's just that you've never heard of them. That's fine. You've never heard of John and Maria's Restaurant but I can tell you that the food is very good and the owners are doing better than they would be if they worked at McDonald's. Small companies can live on small revenues and small revenues don't make international news.
A $100 gameboy getting dropped onto concrete is sad but acceptable...a $300 PDA is not.
It's not even necessarily sad. A month ago, I was running to catch a bus (you know that period of time when the bus is pulling out and you are running alongside it and you're sure the driver can see you in his reaview mirror but he isn't stopping and for some stupid reason you keep running in the hopes that you can reach the front door and knock on it and then he'll be forced to notice you and stop and let you on?).
My GBA SP popped out of my pocket and bounced twice on to the road, where it proceeded to get run over by a bus.
Ruefully, I collected it and turned it on. It works great. The only ill effects were that the cartridge popped out (it also still works great) and some serious scratching on the top cover. I like to think of it as battle damage.
i always thought that deus ex just ripped off from cyberpunk(in a good way) literature, but not once i thought that "wow, matrix like" when playing it. it doesn't even take influence from john woo & hk-action films like matrix and max payne do.
You're right about the action not being Matrix-like in DX. I think that it was the black tranchcoats and the conpiracy stuff that made people think of the Matrix. Plus the superbad men in black suits kind of seem like Agents. I do know that they intentionally got rid of the black trenchcoats for DX2 to make it seem less matrix-like (scroll to end of article).
The part of the article that grabbed my attention was when he was talking about Psychonauts. Here is what he said: "...it's great to have something in our portfolio that's just really unique and artistically challenging and not so blatantly commercial.".
This is an attitude I would like to see expressed more often by the people holding the purse strings. One of the ways that Hollywood maintains legitimacy and dodges censors is by having some portion of its annual output be more 'artistic' films. It gives the medium legitimacym and you never know when one of the art films will become a blockbuster.
It would be nice if the majoy games studios took a similar attitude and funded a certain number of art games a year. It would help in the arguments about whether or not gaming is a legitimate artistic medium, for sure.
And why is Microsoft doing the criticism? Do they really think they have more to gain by attacking Nintendo than by going after Sony?
If you were to actually read the article you would learn that he has a lot of respect for Nintendo.
Here, to save you some clicking:
EF: [But] you asked me before what's the last game I spent a lot of time on--that'd be the new Pokemon.
EGM: Pokemon?
EF: Yeah. But then, you know, I've been playing games forever, and some of my favorite games of all time are Nintendo games. I have no problem loving a Nintendo product, because there's a lot there to love. But when you ask me about the future and where things are going, maybe [Nintendo and I] don't agree on that.
See, in the real world, it is possible to both like and dislike aspects of something. All in all he comes accross as a thoughtful, reasonable person who is very interested in pushing games as an artform. It was pretty interesting.
You know, last time I checked, Microsoft developed a lot of software for Macs. In fact I'm prety sure I read an interview a few years ago with the President of Microsoft Canadam where he saidthat, on average, Microsoft makes more money per Mac sold than per PC sold. This is because of all of the extra competitors in the PC Office etc. market. Plus there's that whole Microsoft owning a big share of Apple thing.
How on earth are they going to be able to sell this to the mainstream market if it won't run on my Pentium 4 with 512 Mb Ram and a Radeon Mobility 7500 (problem is the video card apparently)? Lower the system specs, you fools.
Do you know what I want to see in a MMOG? I want to see an expiry date. I want to know that the game is going to have a beginning and a middle and an end. Every great game and every great work of fiction ends at some point. There should be a story arc that changes the world over time so that I have a reason to log in every day and see what's changed. I should be able to get involved in these changing events. There should be high-level, DM-run NPCs on both sides that give meaning and order to the lives of their respective players. An Emperor DM telling the Imperials to attack X. A Mothma DM ushering the Rebels to secret base Y.
There should be epic battles that are announced in advance. Players log in and fight for their side. The results of those battles should affect which side controls which world. Eventually, there is a final month-long epic campaign to take over Base X and at the end victory parties for all and then the server gets reset. It would be like a television series.
There should be no RPG-like persistent experience-points and levelling system. This creates a barrier of entry to the wide casual market, which is your ultimate goal, financially. A linear advancement system that does not reset just means that late entrants will always be behind and people who only have a few hours a week will always be behind. (I've never understood this. It seems to me that your ideal customer in MMOG plays a few hours a week but pays the full monthly subscription. They don't put a heavy load on your servers but you get tha same income. MMOGs should be encouraging these people to play.)
Instead of experience points and levels, players should accrue items and bonuses more like they do in action or adventure games (mind you the game doesn't have to be an action game, I'm just saying that the special advantages should be easy come, easy go). Players who are dedicated will still do better in general casual players due to skill but the casual people won't be so far behind. Even the lowly slave can get a lucky shot with the gun.
In other words, you either need a linear advancement system that resets easily (like Quake) or you need a non-linear system. Ie, every plus has a minus in another direction so you're always hovering around zero.
Right now, persistent seems to mostly mean "unending". It feels like 1984 "We are at war with the East because we have always been at war with the East." Constant, unending conflict with no real ability to make a mark on the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You are talking about deus ex 1 not 2. And deus ex 1 even with some of its design problems is considered one of the best videogames in history, quite revolutionary for its time.
Yes. That's the joke.
a movie costs $20 and last approx. 2-3 hours. a book depending on interest and speed 1week to 2 weeks for $7. a video game is $50 and most today end inside of 10 hours (metroid prime record is 90 minutes with 100% complete rate). i;m not saying 120 hours/game all i'm saying is if i'm wasting $50 on a game i don't want to be completed with it in a week.
Assuming that you're willing to pay $20 for the movie then $50 for 3-5 times as many hours of entertainment is good value for your dollar.
yeah now that game play is starting to return to games (metroid prime, kill switch) they are totally sacrificing game length. back in the 80s a game took you at least 2-3 times longer to beat as they do today.
That's a feature, not a bug. I don't want to take 120 hours to play through to the ending of your (padded) game. 20 or even 10 hours is fine. If we're talking about mass-market then you want short games because the mass-market does not have the time to obsessively play a game for that long. If we're talking about artistic value then, again, what other medium has ever made you sit through even 40 hours of artistic expression to get the good stuff?
The idea that greater game length == a better game is so wrong. I mean, a game of chess takes, what a few hours? Clearly it's a bad game. They should have included multiple story-missions and at least two or three other multiplayer modes.
There should be more short games. I want games that will entertain my friends at a party. I want games that I can play in the few hours I have after work that aren't spent doing other stuff. I don't want to devote the next 6 months of my life to your one game. No bok demands that much of my time and no movie does either.
If most of your customers will never see the final two-thirds of your game, why are you wasting your resources on it? Save yourself some effort and time as a developer and start work on the next great, short and tightly-focused game.
There is no problem. This website is acting as a TOOL for parents who want to educate themselves about what is featured in these games. It's saying "here's what's in the game and here's why we don't think you should offer it to your kids."
This is exactly the kind of thing that we want to ahve happen. We want parents to be informing themselves about these games.
The end.
People enjoy these sports vicariously. That is not the case with gaming. Gaming is something people like to take active part in.
Are you saying that people *don't* like to take active part in sports? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying. Which would mean that you are a crazy person or a very sheltered person who's never come across a bunch of people tossing the old ball around or whatever.
Or are you saying that people don't like to watch videogames? So far in my experience that hasn't been true either. Whenever we have a bunch of people over to play games some of them end up spending the whole evening just watching others play.
The whole reason that Professional Gaming is being considered at all is the rampant similarities to professional sports.
This is nearly the same as last year, EA, Nintendo and Sony ranked in that order. Is this supposed to illustrate some major change?
No, but it's still news to point out that things have stayed the same. In fact, in a world where people keep going on and on about "Nintendo 3rd Party by 2004" or whenever, it's a piece of information that's pretty valuable. Despite perception on message boards and everywhere else, Nintendo is doing fine. In fact, they're doing very well indeed.
Who are these guys? Do they speak with any authority on this subject? I read the article and as far as I can tell they're a bunch of financial analysts. Do they have a history of predicting this kind of thing accurately? Is there any reason to listen to these predictions?
As a person with a Windows machine, I have lots of choice for games. Hell, there are so many games released for Windows PC that I could take care of all of my entertainment needs entirely through free trials and demo downloads. This means that a game has to be really special for me to stick around and pay money for it. Linux users don't get as much choice.
I bet there is also an activist dollars aspect to it. I mean if you spend a lot of time championing Linux and complaining that there aren't enough cross-platform releases then when a company is finally good enough to make the effort, you'd better put your money where your mouth is and support the effort even if it isn't the best game available. If these companies don't see any return on their investment then they just won't do it next time.
It's kind of like those PC users who paid stupid amounts of money for the earliest PC games when consoles were offering much cheaper, much nicer looking games. Such is the sacrifice of pioneers, I guess.
"Effortless patching" will make the console game market the same cesspool of unfinished, buggy software that PC gaming currently is. The fact that console games were NOT patchable has meant that console game developers put a lot more effort into getting the game *right* before they release it.
You're a crazy person.
There are plenty of console games that crash and generally have all kinds of bugs. Enter the Matrix leaps to mind but it isn't alone. Pick up a copy of GamePro magazine and check their monthly feature on bugs that appear in recent console games and how you can work around them. These are games that are selling well.
There are a lot of reasons that PC gamers have to deal with more bugs than console players. The biggest is that each of the consoles has standard hardware. PC programming, on the other hand, requires you to take into acount a wide variety of different hardward, driver, OS and software configurations. More unknowns means that more can go wrong.
On top of all that, effortless patching doesn't just mean "fixing bugs" it also means "adding new content". As in "here Mech Warrior player, here are some new maps for you to play". That's pretty cool and it's something that neither Nintendo nor Sony can do yet, though Sony is well on the way with their new Final Fantasy with HDD package.
My thought is that we should all vote on those bubble sheets that are used for every standardized test given throughout our public school system.
Oh man, those things screw up all the time. It's just that most of the time, you never get a chance to compare your results to your answers.
You know, I don't buy that it is cheaper to pay highly trained technicians to install and maintain electronic ballots than it is to pay a few people per riding to count ballots. I doubt that it's even faster.
We use manual counting for our federal elections in Canada and last time the US and Canada had an election, we started ours after you guys and finished counting before you did. Mind you that's because we didn't have hanging chad recounts in Florida but that proves my point. A nice big X interpreted by people clearly establishes voter intent and parallel counting keeps things moving at a zippy pace.
If you rely on automation, when things go wrong they things go very wrong. If you rely on people and each group of people is reponsible for, like, 200 ballots then it is much easier to catch an correct errors.
I thought I read somewhere on the Linux for Xbox sites that new Xboxs are running with larger HDDs in them just only the front 8Gb is actually used. I imagine you could do the same thing with a processor, just underclock it.
A lot of this discussion seems to be missing the point that there are (at least) two kinds of movie critics. One kind is the Ebert kind, who tells us which movies to go see. The other kind is that academic kind like Cahiers du Cinema which doesn't serve as a viewing guide but acts as a way to analyse films beyond their entertainment value for the dollar.
Both kinds of critics are valuable. They are valuable at different times. During the times when you are standing around in a store with money burning a hole in your pocket, the Ebert kind are the ones you want to listen to. During the times when you want to increase your appreciation for the artform, or see trends or underlying symbolic themes that some movies might share, or learn about the artistic effect of certain new techniques and technologies, or consider the relationship between the story of a film and the political environment that spawned it, or weigh the merits of attributing a collaborative medium like film to the vision of a single director, then maybe Ebert isn't your man.
It's partially true that the academic critics are mostly writing to each other, but they are also writing to students of film and to creators of film. You can learn a lot from them. It would be nice to learn similar things about games. By all means, let's continue to have buying guides like GameSpot and so on. But maybe it would be nice to have the other kind, too.
Translation: Go buy an GBA, a copy of PoP for it, and the cable to go between the two, and we'll make the game easier for you!
If you own a GC you are a Nintendo fan and chances are you probably also have a GBA. There are *way* more GBAs out there than there are GCs.
There were 2 strobe lights on the vehicle, and each would flash twice in a 1 second cycle. (I remember from the stopwatch that it was EXACTLY 1 second, down to the hundredth of a second). It wasn't a steady rate of flashes... Kinda like the below diagram (L=left strobe, R=right strobe)
L..L......R..R......
then it goes U..D......U..D......B..A......select..start......
There were 2 strobe lights on the vehicle, and each would flash twice in a 1 second cycle. (I remember from the stopwatch that it was EXACTLY 1 second, down to the hundredth of a second). It wasn't a steady rate of flashes... Kinda like the below diagram (L=left strobe, R=right strobe)
L..L......R..R......
then it goes U..U......D..D......B..A......select..start......
Back Axle. And there weren't many people in the bus either.
Apparently, this is a pretty regular cycle in the games industry. What happens is that the big fish get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of their control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices "hey we're spending a lot of money paying salaries and benefits and keeping staff that we aren't always using," and so they start laying people off and outsourcing a lot becuase it's cheaper. After awhile, they get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of your control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices...
Meanwhile, there are plenty of mon-and-pop games developers who are doing just fine. It's just that you've never heard of them. That's fine. You've never heard of John and Maria's Restaurant but I can tell you that the food is very good and the owners are doing better than they would be if they worked at McDonald's. Small companies can live on small revenues and small revenues don't make international news.
A $100 gameboy getting dropped onto concrete is sad but acceptable...a $300 PDA is not.
It's not even necessarily sad. A month ago, I was running to catch a bus (you know that period of time when the bus is pulling out and you are running alongside it and you're sure the driver can see you in his reaview mirror but he isn't stopping and for some stupid reason you keep running in the hopes that you can reach the front door and knock on it and then he'll be forced to notice you and stop and let you on?).
My GBA SP popped out of my pocket and bounced twice on to the road, where it proceeded to get run over by a bus.
Ruefully, I collected it and turned it on. It works great. The only ill effects were that the cartridge popped out (it also still works great) and some serious scratching on the top cover. I like to think of it as battle damage.
Seriously, these things are like Timex.
i always thought that deus ex just ripped off from cyberpunk(in a good way) literature, but not once i thought that "wow, matrix like" when playing it. it doesn't even take influence from john woo & hk-action films like matrix and max payne do.
You're right about the action not being Matrix-like in DX. I think that it was the black tranchcoats and the conpiracy stuff that made people think of the Matrix. Plus the superbad men in black suits kind of seem like Agents. I do know that they intentionally got rid of the black trenchcoats for DX2 to make it seem less matrix-like (scroll to end of article).
The part of the article that grabbed my attention was when he was talking about Psychonauts. Here is what he said: "...it's great to have something in our portfolio that's just really unique and artistically challenging and not so blatantly commercial.".
This is an attitude I would like to see expressed more often by the people holding the purse strings. One of the ways that Hollywood maintains legitimacy and dodges censors is by having some portion of its annual output be more 'artistic' films. It gives the medium legitimacym and you never know when one of the art films will become a blockbuster.
It would be nice if the majoy games studios took a similar attitude and funded a certain number of art games a year. It would help in the arguments about whether or not gaming is a legitimate artistic medium, for sure.
And why is Microsoft doing the criticism? Do they really think they have more to gain by attacking Nintendo than by going after Sony?
If you were to actually read the article you would learn that he has a lot of respect for Nintendo.
Here, to save you some clicking:
EF: [But] you asked me before what's the last game I spent a lot of time on--that'd be the new Pokemon.
EGM: Pokemon?
EF: Yeah. But then, you know, I've been playing games forever, and some of my favorite games of all time are Nintendo games. I have no problem loving a Nintendo product, because there's a lot there to love. But when you ask me about the future and where things are going, maybe [Nintendo and I] don't agree on that.
See, in the real world, it is possible to both like and dislike aspects of something. All in all he comes accross as a thoughtful, reasonable person who is very interested in pushing games as an artform. It was pretty interesting.
You know, last time I checked, Microsoft developed a lot of software for Macs. In fact I'm prety sure I read an interview a few years ago with the President of Microsoft Canadam where he saidthat, on average, Microsoft makes more money per Mac sold than per PC sold. This is because of all of the extra competitors in the PC Office etc. market. Plus there's that whole Microsoft owning a big share of Apple thing.
It's a laptop. I can't.
How on earth are they going to be able to sell this to the mainstream market if it won't run on my Pentium 4 with 512 Mb Ram and a Radeon Mobility 7500 (problem is the video card apparently)? Lower the system specs, you fools.
Do you know what I want to see in a MMOG? I want to see an expiry date. I want to know that the game is going to have a beginning and a middle and an end. Every great game and every great work of fiction ends at some point. There should be a story arc that changes the world over time so that I have a reason to log in every day and see what's changed. I should be able to get involved in these changing events. There should be high-level, DM-run NPCs on both sides that give meaning and order to the lives of their respective players. An Emperor DM telling the Imperials to attack X. A Mothma DM ushering the Rebels to secret base Y.
There should be epic battles that are announced in advance. Players log in and fight for their side. The results of those battles should affect which side controls which world. Eventually, there is a final month-long epic campaign to take over Base X and at the end victory parties for all and then the server gets reset. It would be like a television series.
There should be no RPG-like persistent experience-points and levelling system. This creates a barrier of entry to the wide casual market, which is your ultimate goal, financially. A linear advancement system that does not reset just means that late entrants will always be behind and people who only have a few hours a week will always be behind. (I've never understood this. It seems to me that your ideal customer in MMOG plays a few hours a week but pays the full monthly subscription. They don't put a heavy load on your servers but you get tha same income. MMOGs should be encouraging these people to play.)
Instead of experience points and levels, players should accrue items and bonuses more like they do in action or adventure games (mind you the game doesn't have to be an action game, I'm just saying that the special advantages should be easy come, easy go). Players who are dedicated will still do better in general casual players due to skill but the casual people won't be so far behind. Even the lowly slave can get a lucky shot with the gun.
In other words, you either need a linear advancement system that resets easily (like Quake) or you need a non-linear system. Ie, every plus has a minus in another direction so you're always hovering around zero.
Right now, persistent seems to mostly mean "unending". It feels like 1984 "We are at war with the East because we have always been at war with the East." Constant, unending conflict with no real ability to make a mark on the world.