Would it have done better if there was PVP?

nutha

When this game first came out I played it for about 3 weeks and thought it was a "decent" game. This was before all the financial problems were occuring and such. I usually only play games that have a decent pvp system intact. I have looked at this game a few times in the past year or so but I can not get myself to play it simply because there is no real PVP involved..

Now, can I raise this notion without getting flamed by the pro pve/ anti pvp crowd?

I think this game would have had a much better chance at survival and would have piqued more curiousity had it instituted PVP from the start.

Menkure

Instead of getting into the whole PvP debate..  there are a LOT of other things that could have made the game far better and more enjoyable.

• Optimized Client:  The Horizons Client was a memory hog, and had a memory leak the size of that which sank the RMS Titanic.  Graphics were not optimized in any way, causing people with the best systems on the market to get only mediocre performance
• Optimized Server:  The Horizons Servers had lag out the wazoo when you had more than 30 players in a given area.  Large events like the Feladan raids and the surprise attacks on towns by the Withered Aegis made the game a slide show for people who had broadband connections.
• A more fleshed out game design:  Lets face it, from the starter isles, to lack of quests and lack of NPC interaction...  From the way Tazoon was laid out with the overabundant use of polygons, to a lack of lore, the game was very mediocre when compared to other MMOs of the time.
• Following though on their promises:  Good example is the Adult Rite of Passage quests for the dragons...  Artifact Entertainment said that the quests were in the game, but it wasn't until many months after release that the RoP quests were finished and added into the game.

And those are just the first 4 off the top of my head.  Had those 4 things been worked on a little bit more, the game would have had a far better chance of success.



With the problems the game had, I seriously doubt having PvP in at release would have made anything better (And truthfully, with the way the classes were so badly unbalanced, I think it would have only hastened it's demise)



-Menkure

boeskyle

Nice post Menkure.



The OP could have a valid point about PvP if Horizons was much more developed, but certainly has realized how unfinished the game was at release (Dec 2003) when he played it. So a PvP system was added in its current limited form to keep within the overall game design.



And, the OP certainly realizes that biped "templates" would be quickly found and since PLing was much easier then . . . .



Yes, the game would have failed much faster as dragons were undeveloped at release and the RoP requires biped involvement (as in dragons entering towns and for their combat trials).



However, I would certainly enjoy reading a well written post on how PvP could have made Horizons better, which takes into account the racial conflicts (and mitigated by the Peace Accord).

Menkure

Yep!  There was a PvP "arena" added into the game.  However, it is way too hard to judge how PvP would have affected Horizons based on the testing that the developers did.



For starters, the "arena" was added very late into the life of the game.  By this time, most of the PvP crowd had left the game.  The majority of players still playing were hard-core crafters and RPers.  Horizons had, by this time, a very staunch anti-PvP community, and there were several heated 'discussions' on the community boards over PvP and, most definitely the "arena" island, once it made it onto the live servers.



Also, the classes were not balanced in any way towards PvP.  Worse, someone who had multiclassed out the wazoo could defeat about anyone.. even a dragon with gold rage (Monk ability: foresight can negate gold rage completely.. anyone can master foresight with 10 levels or monk)





Personally, I do feel that PvP could have helped make the game more successful, and had there been a PvP server, there would have been a retention of players, but ONLY if the game had been more fleshed out in the other 4 areas that I listed above in my previous post..   The majority of the players who left cited those 4 things above everything else (even lack of PvP)..  lets face it, PvP isn't gonna keep people when client performance sucks and the best they can get with a high-end system is 10~15fps.



-Menkure