The article this was referencing was specifically talking about the North American release of the console. Joystiq is talking about the Japanese launch.
But if you want to wait for confirmation, Reggie will be delivering his own press conference at 9am this morning. That should help to clear up any confusion.
The post-PS3 launch does seem a bit odd, since they had previously stated that they would be at market before the PS3. It could be that Nintendo saw the problems Sony is having with meeting production quotas and having to slash their deliveries, and are banking on something like....
Tom Tucker: "Our top story tonight, more video game news just two days after riots destroyed many gaming storefronts from the unexpectedly horrible launch of the Playstation 3. Diane has more, Diane?"
Diane Simmons: "Thanks Tom. Wii. Sure it sounds like a penis, but what else is it? It's the new Nintendo console and it's causing quite a stir. We now go live to Asian reporter Trisha Takinawa for a report, Trisha?"
Trisha Takinawa: "Thank you Diane. Nintendo released the strangely-named console today to rave reviews. As you can see here, waving around this long slender shaft causes action to occur on-screen. It's quite a reversal from the usual manner of things. Retailers report they have plenty of Wii to go around, and that it's something people just can't wait to get their hands on. Personally I bought two and will be using them tonight in the privacy of my bedroom. Tom?"
NES games: 500 yen (approx. $3.50 USD)
SNES games: 800 yen (approx $7 USD)
N64 games: 1000 yen (approx $8.50 USD)
Those prices are confirmed for Japan, no word yet on US prices (wait until about 10am for that). Personally, at those prices I'll be buying the cream of the crop (FF6, SMB3, etc) but not the lesser-known titles they might put up.
The post-PS3 launch does seem a bit odd, since they had previously stated that they would be at market before the PS3. It could be that Nintendo saw the problems Sony is having with meeting production quotas and having to slash their deliveries, and are banking on something like....
Tom Tucker: "Our top story tonight, more video game news just two days after riots destroyed many gaming storefronts from the unexpectedly horrible launch of the Playstation 3. Diane has more, Diane?"
Diane Simmons: "Thanks Tom. Wii. Sure it sounds like a penis, but what else is it? It's the new Nintendo console and it's causing quite a stir. We go live to Asian reporter Trisha Takinawa for a report"
Trisha Takinawa: "Thank you Diane. Nintendo released the strangely-named console today to rave reviews. As you can see here, waving around this long slender shaft causes action to occur on-screen. It's quite a reversal from the usual manner of things. Retailers report they have plenty of Wii to go around, and that it's something people just can't wait to get their hands on. Personally I bought two and will be using them tonight in the privacy of my bedroom. Tom?"
Replying to your own post is bad form, I know, but WHOO HOOOO!!!! From Joystiq:
2:06 a.m. EST [update 10]: The press release is up. It lists the contents of the Wii box: Wii console, Wii remote (w/ strap) Nunchuck attachment, Wii AC adaptor, Wii A/V cable, Wii console stand(?), sensor bar, sensor bar stand and two AA batteries.
They neglected to include Wii Sports, but that's ok. Everything I wanted, even if the price is $50 more than I hoped. I'm pleased with Nintendo.
They'll sell fifteen billion Zelda games even if they don't bundle it. So why would they include it as a pack-in when they could make higher margins selling it stand-alone?
Bah, you were just copying me. I remember that discussion this afternoon =P Anyways, Nintendo met expectations here. They came in with a price under every other "new" console on the market, and while the launch date is a disappointment (didn't they promise to be out before PS3?) the bundle of Wii Sports is a nice surprise. $250, eh, more expensive than I would have liked, but I understand their pricing.
To me the biggest news is that the Virtual Console will be available at launch, with 60 titles by 2007, 10 new titles per month. Plus they will have online web browsing (likely Opera, like the DS browser) and some sort of music player - details were sketchy before the Seattle PI took it down.
Seems like Nintendo is leaping into Online life with the Wii. I hope they do well. But for the love of $DEITY, TELL US IF WE GET THE NUNCHUK ATTACHMENT!!!
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'll be buying one of these on launch day (and at least 3 games for it) even if it costs my first born son. If Nintendo launches with what I said above (Console, Wii Sports, controller/nunchuk) for $199 then they will have cemented their place in this generation.
Later on the N64 did have bundles - I distinctly remember seeing Pokemon Stadium bundles in a few Best Buys, but again that was years after the launch of the console.
And you're exactly right on the reasons why Wii Sports should be bundled with the system - the graphics are simplistic, they're essentially mini-games... but they are perfect at showing off the possibilities of the new control scheme. They're the perfect "get Mom and Dad into the action" games as well as "hey, dude, come try this" attention-grabbers when friends come over. I honestly don't expect to see Wii Sports flying off shelves if it's $50 - hell, even if it were $30 I'd think twice about it.
As for the nunchuk comments, maybe I'm just holding on to the old terminology of the Wii, where the Wii-mote was the "controller" and everything else including the nunchuk were "attachments". Since then, every game I can think of except Wii Sports has required the nunchuk attachment. Something Nintendo could do (thought it would ruin their recent positive press streak) would be to have the nunchuk as a separate purchase, like the DVD Dongle for Xbox. Obviously I'm hoping for everything bundled for less than $250, but I also know how the world works.
Here's to hoping that it'll all be cleared up in 75 minutes.
Sure you can, when the original poster of the "tease" and the final reveal (Robert Summa, who has since left Joystiq) was trolling the thread for the hours between the tease and the reveal. He kept encouraging people, giving clues, saying "Some people got it right" and "It has something to do with three letters" and egging the people on. He also made it sound like a Joystiq exclusive when it clearly wasn't.
He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew that it wouldn't live up to the hype, but he kept hyping it anyways. Kotaku posted that there would be information at Midnight, that it wasn't going to be major, and then left it at that.
I'm surprised that we didn't get this information in the original post. Nintendo is holding three press conferences tomorrow - one in Japan, one in the US, and one in Europe. The Japan conference is actually happening today at 8:00 pm EDT when you account for timezones. The US conference is in New York at 9:00 am EDT.
It's expected that Nintendo will release launch specifics, including price and launch date, for the three regions during their respective press conferences. This is big big Nintendo news. Personally I'm hoping for a $199 pricepoint with pack-in Wiimote, nunchuk controller, and Wii Sports.
Check out gaming sites (Kotaku is a good one, or any mainstream one like IGN or Gamespot) for breaking news from Japan tonight - I'm sure they'll be up and reporting the Japanese press conference as it happens. Plus those sites don't pull the sensationalistic "get page impressions at any cost" crap that Joystiq does.
I liked FF7 as well because it had a good storyline, interesting characters, and a lot of replayability (damn that Emerald Weapon!). But I have to ask myself, if it were on the SNES with 2D sprites, would I have enjoyed it as much? And the answer is yes. The FMVs added to the experience, and the 3D characters were interesting (even if they were on decidedly 2D backgrounds) but really, the game would have been fantastic on any system.
Graphics become outdated. Today's amazingly-detailed game is tomorrow's bargain bin fodder. No matter how great the graphics look on any console, your children will look at old screenshots of it and say "Wow, that's really horrible looking".
8-bit to 16-bit (NES to SNES): remarkable graphics upgrade, changes the experience
16-bit to 3D (SNES to PS1): remarkable graphics upgrade, changes the experience
3D to FMV (PS1 to PS2): reasonable graphics upgrade, minor experience change
FMV to HD FMV (PS2 to PS3): marginal graphics upgrade, no experience change
There's several ways to update and improve a game. Graphical improvements are one. Gameplay improvements, new features, better AI, and new controls are others. Graphics have long since reached the point of diminishing returns. When you're talking multi-million dollar budgets for the graphics in games, you've gone beyond diminishing returns.
Developers fell back on "make it look prettier" to convince people that their game was worth buying, but now that's stopped working. Now the developers will have to find something else to focus on - Wii is banking on a forced change in interface to drive innovation. The games will still look good, but a successful Wii developer will spend more time playtesting and finding new ways to use the interface and less time making the 3D mip-mapping bump-shaded inverse nipplomatics really bring to live Laura Croft's facial mole.
Surprisingly, this is NOT the biggest PS3 news today. The biggest news is that they drastically cut their expected numbers at launch in Japan and North America. And I mean drastically.
Japan: 100,000 units
North America: 400,000 units
To put that in perspective, the Nintendo DS handheld system is selling at an average of 125,000 units per week in Japan right now. If the numbers keep up, the PS3 will not even be top hardware seller on its launch week.
I can't think of a single thing Sony has done right in this launch.
It's amazing, isn't it? How you, as a "game developer" are more concerned about disk space than about gameplay? How many CDs did Pac Man fill? How many times did you have to swap cartridges playing through The Legend of Zelda? Were you frustrated when you scratched the disk of your Super Mario Brothers 3 cartridge?
Gameplay has stagnated in the past 10 years - since the Playstation era. There have been no new innovations in gameplay in that time, only improved graphics. The only games which come to mind with innovative gameplay are games like Guitar Hero with its specialty hardware. Of course, Wii is looking to change all that.
Of course WoW isn't revolutionary. No Blizzard games are. Blizzard takes a genre, picks the best parts of all the other games in that genre, removes the worst parts, polishes it up and then sells it to gamers. Blizzard is not about innovation, it's about polish. For the record, I played EQ for 2ish years, WoW for about 1.5 years, and tried (either during Beta or for the first free month) DAoC, SWG, Matrix Online, Planetside and EVE.
Every MMORPG from here on out will be compared to WoW and will have some part of it "taken" from WoW - even if WoW "took" it from some other game. That's just how the industry works. What's different is the focus. Like I said, it seems like WAR will be a PvP-oriented WoW (which it sounds like you'd be into). Vanguard will be for the hardcore, never stop, must play for days on end without bathing type, but much of its UI is owed to WoW. Eventually the next killer MMORPG will come out and eclipse WoW, but that will be many years from now.
And even though you and I don't judge games by their userbase, you can bet dollars to donuts that the publishers only care about the userbase. That's something a lot of people forget. Gaming companies are not out to make great games, they're out to make money. Making great games helps generate that money, but even mediocre games can make tons of money (see: Madden) so they continue to create them.
Would a Warhammer 40k licensed MMORPG work? Sure. But it would still feel like an EQ/WoW clone with some Sci-Fi elements thrown on top of it, which is what I was trying to address with my previous post. Would I play a WH40k MMORPG? Sure. But it, just like the license it's based on, would just be a Sci-Fi wrapper over a primarily Fantasy base.
Well, in WoW, you had many long and short term goals. Short term you had a ridiculous amount of quests and dungeons you could do, all of which gave the game a short-term focus. I would talk with my co-workers about what quests or dungeons we would be facing that night in our adventures. Long-term you have reaching the level cap, getting better gear, etc. all of which tied into the short-term goals (finish this quest so I can get more XP so I can get to the level cap, etc). Even if WoW didn't have a goal, it disguised it very well in having other, more achievable goals to focus on.
It's been a while since I looked into EVE, but from what I recall there's not much aside from building up your bank. Correct me if I'm wrong.
There's a lot of problems with a Sci-Fi MMORPG. Here's a few off the top of my head:
Mobs: Who can you fight in a futuristic society? Not dragons or Firelords or giant mutant spiders, but people (maybe with a few cyborgs thrown in too). Not that exciting
Weapons: Guns. Lots of guns. Guns which are small, not that much fun to wield (from a MMORPG standpoint) and
Fights: Think about a gunfight. There's a lot of ducking for cover, poking your head out, firing a few times, and then repeating. Not exactly conducive to a MMORPG environment.
I could go on further, but that's enough. There's lots of problem with combat and Line of Sight which are going to cause problems with all the guns around. So instead, let's look at the Sci-Fi MMORPGs which have been released:
Anarchy Online: Launch problems and poor UI doomed this one, never had a huge userbase to begin with
Star Wars Galaxies: Repeated "revamps" killed this one, never had a huge userbase to begin with - though it started out well
Planetside: Pay-to-play a FPS, no thanks.
Matrix Online: Hah! The very definition of failure
It's no wonder that companies are hesitant to go for a Sci-Fi MMORPG.
Well, they must be doing something right because they have something like 6 million subscriptions. I'm interested in why you got bored with WoW. Coming from 3+ years of DAoC, I have a feeling it was because of the heavy focus on PvE and minimal PvP aspect of WoW. I also notice that you didn't say WoW was a bad game, just that you got bored. It really is a great game IMHO. I just got tired of the endgame politics, which is why I eventually quit (after 6 months of Beta and 1.5+ years of Retail)
Every single MMORPG article on Slashdot inevitably gets a slew of EVE players who chime in with their advocacy of their chosen game. I think it's great that the playerbase is active and gets the word out about their games, but when I was lumping them in with the "outliers" I figured that I would get a few snide comments about how great their game is, how much it's grown, and how easy it is to try it out for their trial period. I tried EVE for a while and disliked the mechanics and the lack of a real "goal" so maybe I'm a bit biased.
The Slashdot crowd and the EVE crowd seem to have a lot of vocal overlap, is all I'm saying.
At this point, the MMORPG market is basically WoW with a few outliers. I'm sure I'll get some EVE Online heat for that comment, but it's true. For much of the population, "MMORPG" is defined to be "World of Warcraft" the same way RTSes were defined by Starcraft. Blizzard has a knack for taking what's great in all its competition, putting it in one spot, and polishing it to a mirror shine. It's what they do.
Game developers aren't stupid. They see the phenomenal success of WoW and know that if they want to compete they have to provide at least the same level of play as their competitor (to get the former WoWers like me) and hopefully surpass their competitor (to get current WoWers). So, WAR takes the UI from WoW and probably steals a few of its other features to ease the transition until they get you hooked.
WAR is hoping provide a PvP alternative to WoW, which primarily focuses on PvE. Even low-level WAR quests involve some form of competition with the opposing faction. One preview I read had a Giant who you would either (a) get drunk to help fight for you against the other faction, or (b) destroy the first faction's alcohol to prevent the giant from getting drunk and thus fighting against you. And that was a newbie quest.
I'm hoping that the WAR team (BTW, that's their preferred acronym, for "Warhammer: Age of Reckoning") delivers on its promises. Give me WoW with a heavy focus on PvP and Realm-vs-Realm and they'll get my money for a few months.
Slashdot Mirror
The article this was referencing was specifically talking about the North American release of the console. Joystiq is talking about the Japanese launch.
But if you want to wait for confirmation, Reggie will be delivering his own press conference at 9am this morning. That should help to clear up any confusion.
The post-PS3 launch does seem a bit odd, since they had previously stated that they would be at market before the PS3. It could be that Nintendo saw the problems Sony is having with meeting production quotas and having to slash their deliveries, and are banking on something like....
Tom Tucker: "Our top story tonight, more video game news just two days after riots destroyed many gaming storefronts from the unexpectedly horrible launch of the Playstation 3. Diane has more, Diane?"
Diane Simmons: "Thanks Tom. Wii. Sure it sounds like a penis, but what else is it? It's the new Nintendo console and it's causing quite a stir. We now go live to Asian reporter Trisha Takinawa for a report, Trisha?"
Trisha Takinawa: "Thank you Diane. Nintendo released the strangely-named console today to rave reviews. As you can see here, waving around this long slender shaft causes action to occur on-screen. It's quite a reversal from the usual manner of things. Retailers report they have plenty of Wii to go around, and that it's something people just can't wait to get their hands on. Personally I bought two and will be using them tonight in the privacy of my bedroom. Tom?"
Glenn Quagmire: "Giggedy giggedy giggedy."
NES games: 500 yen (approx. $3.50 USD)
SNES games: 800 yen (approx $7 USD)
N64 games: 1000 yen (approx $8.50 USD)
Those prices are confirmed for Japan, no word yet on US prices (wait until about 10am for that). Personally, at those prices I'll be buying the cream of the crop (FF6, SMB3, etc) but not the lesser-known titles they might put up.
The post-PS3 launch does seem a bit odd, since they had previously stated that they would be at market before the PS3. It could be that Nintendo saw the problems Sony is having with meeting production quotas and having to slash their deliveries, and are banking on something like....
Tom Tucker: "Our top story tonight, more video game news just two days after riots destroyed many gaming storefronts from the unexpectedly horrible launch of the Playstation 3. Diane has more, Diane?"
Diane Simmons: "Thanks Tom. Wii. Sure it sounds like a penis, but what else is it? It's the new Nintendo console and it's causing quite a stir. We go live to Asian reporter Trisha Takinawa for a report"
Trisha Takinawa: "Thank you Diane. Nintendo released the strangely-named console today to rave reviews. As you can see here, waving around this long slender shaft causes action to occur on-screen. It's quite a reversal from the usual manner of things. Retailers report they have plenty of Wii to go around, and that it's something people just can't wait to get their hands on. Personally I bought two and will be using them tonight in the privacy of my bedroom. Tom?"
Glenn Quagmire: "Giggedy giggedy giggedy."
They neglected to include Wii Sports, but that's ok. Everything I wanted, even if the price is $50 more than I hoped. I'm pleased with Nintendo.
They'll sell fifteen billion Zelda games even if they don't bundle it. So why would they include it as a pack-in when they could make higher margins selling it stand-alone?
Hi, that's Japan. The PI article (which has since been pulled) was about the North and South American launch.
Bah, you were just copying me. I remember that discussion this afternoon =P Anyways, Nintendo met expectations here. They came in with a price under every other "new" console on the market, and while the launch date is a disappointment (didn't they promise to be out before PS3?) the bundle of Wii Sports is a nice surprise. $250, eh, more expensive than I would have liked, but I understand their pricing.
To me the biggest news is that the Virtual Console will be available at launch, with 60 titles by 2007, 10 new titles per month. Plus they will have online web browsing (likely Opera, like the DS browser) and some sort of music player - details were sketchy before the Seattle PI took it down.
Seems like Nintendo is leaping into Online life with the Wii. I hope they do well. But for the love of $DEITY, TELL US IF WE GET THE NUNCHUK ATTACHMENT!!!
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'll be buying one of these on launch day (and at least 3 games for it) even if it costs my first born son. If Nintendo launches with what I said above (Console, Wii Sports, controller/nunchuk) for $199 then they will have cemented their place in this generation.
Later on the N64 did have bundles - I distinctly remember seeing Pokemon Stadium bundles in a few Best Buys, but again that was years after the launch of the console.
And you're exactly right on the reasons why Wii Sports should be bundled with the system - the graphics are simplistic, they're essentially mini-games... but they are perfect at showing off the possibilities of the new control scheme. They're the perfect "get Mom and Dad into the action" games as well as "hey, dude, come try this" attention-grabbers when friends come over. I honestly don't expect to see Wii Sports flying off shelves if it's $50 - hell, even if it were $30 I'd think twice about it.
As for the nunchuk comments, maybe I'm just holding on to the old terminology of the Wii, where the Wii-mote was the "controller" and everything else including the nunchuk were "attachments". Since then, every game I can think of except Wii Sports has required the nunchuk attachment. Something Nintendo could do (thought it would ruin their recent positive press streak) would be to have the nunchuk as a separate purchase, like the DVD Dongle for Xbox. Obviously I'm hoping for everything bundled for less than $250, but I also know how the world works.
Here's to hoping that it'll all be cleared up in 75 minutes.
He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew that it wouldn't live up to the hype, but he kept hyping it anyways. Kotaku posted that there would be information at Midnight, that it wasn't going to be major, and then left it at that.
I'm surprised that we didn't get this information in the original post. Nintendo is holding three press conferences tomorrow - one in Japan, one in the US, and one in Europe. The Japan conference is actually happening today at 8:00 pm EDT when you account for timezones. The US conference is in New York at 9:00 am EDT.
It's expected that Nintendo will release launch specifics, including price and launch date, for the three regions during their respective press conferences. This is big big Nintendo news. Personally I'm hoping for a $199 pricepoint with pack-in Wiimote, nunchuk controller, and Wii Sports.
Check out gaming sites (Kotaku is a good one, or any mainstream one like IGN or Gamespot) for breaking news from Japan tonight - I'm sure they'll be up and reporting the Japanese press conference as it happens. Plus those sites don't pull the sensationalistic "get page impressions at any cost" crap that Joystiq does.
I liked FF7 as well because it had a good storyline, interesting characters, and a lot of replayability (damn that Emerald Weapon!). But I have to ask myself, if it were on the SNES with 2D sprites, would I have enjoyed it as much? And the answer is yes. The FMVs added to the experience, and the 3D characters were interesting (even if they were on decidedly 2D backgrounds) but really, the game would have been fantastic on any system.
Graphics become outdated. Today's amazingly-detailed game is tomorrow's bargain bin fodder. No matter how great the graphics look on any console, your children will look at old screenshots of it and say "Wow, that's really horrible looking".
Gameplay is king.
8-bit to 16-bit (NES to SNES): remarkable graphics upgrade, changes the experience
16-bit to 3D (SNES to PS1): remarkable graphics upgrade, changes the experience
3D to FMV (PS1 to PS2): reasonable graphics upgrade, minor experience change
FMV to HD FMV (PS2 to PS3): marginal graphics upgrade, no experience change
There's several ways to update and improve a game. Graphical improvements are one. Gameplay improvements, new features, better AI, and new controls are others. Graphics have long since reached the point of diminishing returns. When you're talking multi-million dollar budgets for the graphics in games, you've gone beyond diminishing returns.
Developers fell back on "make it look prettier" to convince people that their game was worth buying, but now that's stopped working. Now the developers will have to find something else to focus on - Wii is banking on a forced change in interface to drive innovation. The games will still look good, but a successful Wii developer will spend more time playtesting and finding new ways to use the interface and less time making the 3D mip-mapping bump-shaded inverse nipplomatics really bring to live Laura Croft's facial mole.
Surprisingly, this is NOT the biggest PS3 news today. The biggest news is that they drastically cut their expected numbers at launch in Japan and North America. And I mean drastically.
Japan: 100,000 units
North America: 400,000 units
To put that in perspective, the Nintendo DS handheld system is selling at an average of 125,000 units per week in Japan right now. If the numbers keep up, the PS3 will not even be top hardware seller on its launch week.
I can't think of a single thing Sony has done right in this launch.
It's amazing, isn't it? How you, as a "game developer" are more concerned about disk space than about gameplay? How many CDs did Pac Man fill? How many times did you have to swap cartridges playing through The Legend of Zelda? Were you frustrated when you scratched the disk of your Super Mario Brothers 3 cartridge?
Gameplay has stagnated in the past 10 years - since the Playstation era. There have been no new innovations in gameplay in that time, only improved graphics. The only games which come to mind with innovative gameplay are games like Guitar Hero with its specialty hardware. Of course, Wii is looking to change all that.
It's called a "defense mechanism". I was making jokes during 9/11 too, because it helped me deal with it.
It was funny. Dark and morbid, sure. But funny.
Of course WoW isn't revolutionary. No Blizzard games are. Blizzard takes a genre, picks the best parts of all the other games in that genre, removes the worst parts, polishes it up and then sells it to gamers. Blizzard is not about innovation, it's about polish. For the record, I played EQ for 2ish years, WoW for about 1.5 years, and tried (either during Beta or for the first free month) DAoC, SWG, Matrix Online, Planetside and EVE.
Every MMORPG from here on out will be compared to WoW and will have some part of it "taken" from WoW - even if WoW "took" it from some other game. That's just how the industry works. What's different is the focus. Like I said, it seems like WAR will be a PvP-oriented WoW (which it sounds like you'd be into). Vanguard will be for the hardcore, never stop, must play for days on end without bathing type, but much of its UI is owed to WoW. Eventually the next killer MMORPG will come out and eclipse WoW, but that will be many years from now.
And even though you and I don't judge games by their userbase, you can bet dollars to donuts that the publishers only care about the userbase. That's something a lot of people forget. Gaming companies are not out to make great games, they're out to make money. Making great games helps generate that money, but even mediocre games can make tons of money (see: Madden) so they continue to create them.
Would a Warhammer 40k licensed MMORPG work? Sure. But it would still feel like an EQ/WoW clone with some Sci-Fi elements thrown on top of it, which is what I was trying to address with my previous post. Would I play a WH40k MMORPG? Sure. But it, just like the license it's based on, would just be a Sci-Fi wrapper over a primarily Fantasy base.
Well, in WoW, you had many long and short term goals. Short term you had a ridiculous amount of quests and dungeons you could do, all of which gave the game a short-term focus. I would talk with my co-workers about what quests or dungeons we would be facing that night in our adventures. Long-term you have reaching the level cap, getting better gear, etc. all of which tied into the short-term goals (finish this quest so I can get more XP so I can get to the level cap, etc). Even if WoW didn't have a goal, it disguised it very well in having other, more achievable goals to focus on.
It's been a while since I looked into EVE, but from what I recall there's not much aside from building up your bank. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- Mobs: Who can you fight in a futuristic society? Not dragons or Firelords or giant mutant spiders, but people (maybe with a few cyborgs thrown in too). Not that exciting
- Weapons: Guns. Lots of guns. Guns which are small, not that much fun to wield (from a MMORPG standpoint) and
- Fights: Think about a gunfight. There's a lot of ducking for cover, poking your head out, firing a few times, and then repeating. Not exactly conducive to a MMORPG environment.
I could go on further, but that's enough. There's lots of problem with combat and Line of Sight which are going to cause problems with all the guns around. So instead, let's look at the Sci-Fi MMORPGs which have been released:- Anarchy Online: Launch problems and poor UI doomed this one, never had a huge userbase to begin with
- Star Wars Galaxies: Repeated "revamps" killed this one, never had a huge userbase to begin with - though it started out well
- Planetside: Pay-to-play a FPS, no thanks.
- Matrix Online: Hah! The very definition of failure
It's no wonder that companies are hesitant to go for a Sci-Fi MMORPG.Well, they must be doing something right because they have something like 6 million subscriptions. I'm interested in why you got bored with WoW. Coming from 3+ years of DAoC, I have a feeling it was because of the heavy focus on PvE and minimal PvP aspect of WoW. I also notice that you didn't say WoW was a bad game, just that you got bored. It really is a great game IMHO. I just got tired of the endgame politics, which is why I eventually quit (after 6 months of Beta and 1.5+ years of Retail)
Every single MMORPG article on Slashdot inevitably gets a slew of EVE players who chime in with their advocacy of their chosen game. I think it's great that the playerbase is active and gets the word out about their games, but when I was lumping them in with the "outliers" I figured that I would get a few snide comments about how great their game is, how much it's grown, and how easy it is to try it out for their trial period. I tried EVE for a while and disliked the mechanics and the lack of a real "goal" so maybe I'm a bit biased.
The Slashdot crowd and the EVE crowd seem to have a lot of vocal overlap, is all I'm saying.
Yes. Next question?
At this point, the MMORPG market is basically WoW with a few outliers. I'm sure I'll get some EVE Online heat for that comment, but it's true. For much of the population, "MMORPG" is defined to be "World of Warcraft" the same way RTSes were defined by Starcraft. Blizzard has a knack for taking what's great in all its competition, putting it in one spot, and polishing it to a mirror shine. It's what they do.
Game developers aren't stupid. They see the phenomenal success of WoW and know that if they want to compete they have to provide at least the same level of play as their competitor (to get the former WoWers like me) and hopefully surpass their competitor (to get current WoWers). So, WAR takes the UI from WoW and probably steals a few of its other features to ease the transition until they get you hooked.
WAR is hoping provide a PvP alternative to WoW, which primarily focuses on PvE. Even low-level WAR quests involve some form of competition with the opposing faction. One preview I read had a Giant who you would either (a) get drunk to help fight for you against the other faction, or (b) destroy the first faction's alcohol to prevent the giant from getting drunk and thus fighting against you. And that was a newbie quest.
I'm hoping that the WAR team (BTW, that's their preferred acronym, for "Warhammer: Age of Reckoning") delivers on its promises. Give me WoW with a heavy focus on PvP and Realm-vs-Realm and they'll get my money for a few months.