Its just a long bla blah "we are all victims of the system" shit. I can't hear it anymore. SOME people make decisions, and it is not us gamers. I don't care rats ass if developers or managers or goddamn cleaning personell decides, but SOMEONE in those corporations makes decisions, and they are apparently not smarter than those who ran all those bankrupt banks.
I am not even pointing at myself, but in every single beta there were enough clever people who pointed at the issues long before and the companies and whoever responsible WITHIN those companies chose to ignore the warnings. Devs, managers, I don't care, but the truth was THERE.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I for one am getting alittle more worried about where the MMO market is going, as bad as the globle economy is getting I would not be suprised to see the $14.99 sub-game's goto $19.99/mo or higher just to try an make up loss revenue and to prevent mass lay-offs just to keep their company(for some) above water. but as I see it the gaming industry is going to get hard hit in the wallet and many companies are going to start tightening their belts of which projects have more priority and which can be trashed.
Its just a long bla blah "we are all victims of the system" shit. I can't hear it anymore. SOME people make decisions, and it is not us gamers. I don't care rats ass if developers or managers or goddamn cleaning personell decides, but SOMEONE in those corporations makes decisions, and they are apparently not smarter than those who ran all those bankrupt banks. I am not even pointing at myself, but in every single beta there were enough clever people who pointed at the issues long before and the companies and whoever responsible WITHIN those companies chose to ignore the warnings. Devs, managers, I don't care, but the truth was THERE.
Exactly Ellkal, and that is why I am asking these questions. We have a seemly smart and informed community here and their thoughts and ideas should be heard and heard loudly by the powers that be. Eventually someone in the industry will listen and maybe then we can start having quality games that at least make the grinding part fun, exciting and/or at the very least interesting.
Its just a long bla blah "we are all victims of the system" shit. I can't hear it anymore. SOME people make decisions, and it is not us gamers. I don't care rats ass if developers or managers or goddamn cleaning personell decides, but SOMEONE in those corporations makes decisions, and they are apparently not smarter than those who ran all those bankrupt banks. I am not even pointing at myself, but in every single beta there were enough clever people who pointed at the issues long before and the companies and whoever responsible WITHIN those companies chose to ignore the warnings. Devs, managers, I don't care, but the truth was THERE.
As anyone who has worked for any large corporation will tell you corporations waste money because they do not take the time to look into the small everyday operations. Personally I work for a very small company, and yes I still see waste, but my girlfriend has worked for three very large corporations since we've known each other and they all waste amazing amounts of money because they don't take the time to deal with the individuals who run each division, more managers equals more waste, time and again she's seen this. Recently they even told all employees that they would no longer match the 401k, no college reimbursement and freeze all raises but a month later hired a new VP and spent half a mil on party in her honor, in the building she works in. Most corporations are not smart, fast or agile, they are plodding old dinosaurs.
Gaming corporations are as well. I think it's safe to say that most of us are looking for something new in this genre but we aren't seeing it from the large corporations. The biggest launch of this year, with the possible exception of Aion, could be FE. Yeah CO is chugging along but the free Halloween weekend just reaffirmed, for me anyway, that it wasn't a game I'd be interested in long term. FE went a slightly different direction and although no one is expecting the numbers of an Aion the community seems pretty stable and growing. It's still too early to tell but will Funcom be able to do something similar with The Secret World because it is different, let's hope. But games like STO, which I am still holding a bit of hope out for, goes and alienates what should be their core players by simply ignoring several main components of the IP, is that smart, is that even sane?
On a personal note, I played Planetside when it launched, the biggest problem I had with this game was a simple one that I believe still exists, if the bullets, beams, etc. do no hit the aiming reticule why have one at all? I'm not talking about a shotgun here, or the sniper rifle for that matter, but when you hit 5 feet to the left with a rifle blast of where you are aiming the game becomes pretty pointless. Let's hope this gets fixed in PS2 and I'll be back.
Played in some form: UO til tram, AC, EQ, AO, WW2O, PS, SB, CoH, AC2, Hor, LoTRO, DDO, AoC, Aion, CO, STO Playing: WoW (for gf), WAR Waiting For: SWTOR, FFXVI Hoping For: DCUO, Secret World, Earthrise -S- (UO Sonoma)
"Lord of the Rings Online launched in April of 2007 and as far as I am concerned, it was the last successful triple-A MMORPG launched (I think Free Realms is a good game too, but it's kind of playing a different ballgame). That means that we're coming up on three years before another MMO succeeds and we're placing a lot of hope in Star Wars: The Old Republic and DC Universe Online to bring us back to a place where we can feel good about a major game release. But I'm also hoping that past failures don't scare developers from innovating. I'd love to see another stab at an MMOFPS (which SOE has made mentions of, yay!) or even a new sandbox style fantasy game like Ultima Online back in the day."
I wouldn't put too much hope in those two titles. SOE has it's reputation which will forever (or at least until they let Smedley go) hamper any MMO they put forward. Add to that CO's launch and it looks to me like the "super hero" novelty has come and gone. If it was to succeed again it'd have to be done by a company that doesn't have the baggage that SOE and Cryptic have now. As for TOR...I really don't see it being the hit you hope it will. I think it'll be alot like Dragon Age: Origins, and there will be thoughts that while it is a good storied game, it's not something I'd want to pay monthly for. I'm loving DA:O right now, but there's no way I'd pay monthly for it, good story and all.
As for the second point (in orange) I don't see how it could scare them from innovating. They haven't been innovating, they've been chasing the dragon of WoW dollars and it is fairly easy to say those companies have already stopped innovating. The big name companies haven't put out MMOFPS' and Sandbox games. Only the small, severely underfunded indy companies have, and many have to resort to launching the game prematurely as you mention. Adventurine did it, Icarus the same and now Star vault is blatantly saying "Hey guys, we need you to buy our game so we can finish it".
the funniest thing i keep seeing is how people keep under estimating Bioware. And what is even funnier is before WoW came out people said the same things about Blizzard. Bioware is a tried and true company, if anyone can knock blizzard off their high horse it would be them. And if they can't do it, then honestly i don't think anyone else can. It may only sale a million off the start but in time it will gain ground i'm sure.
But i'm willing to bet that when TOR comes out it will be the greatest SW game ever and they will add in content every month or more-so. Because if anyone payed much attention to the development they would know TOR is designed on the same engine as Hero's Journey. Which enables them to make changes on the fly and add in content on the fly.
I've rooted for so many MMOs that ultimately failed... Ultima Online 2 and Shadowbane to name a few, yet I am still astounded by some of the poor choices that developers and management make. I never played Asheron's Call (I was playing Ultima Online at the time) but I heard such wonderful things about AC's PvP that I was rather ecstatic to have a second chance with Asheron's Call 2. Yet when I loaded it up, even I could tell that it was nothing like Asheron's Call. How is such an obvious blunder made? Ignoring AC2's other issues (as another poster mentioned), I suspect that it failed at the conceptual stage. They wanted another WoW-esque hit. But developers, and investors, and whoever else need to realize something: you aren't going to out-WoW WoW. It's not going to happen. Ever. So stop trying. Look at EvE Online, which is moderately successful because they offered an MMO experience that wasn't just WoW in a different set of clothes. It fulfilled a desire for exploration and diplomacy and space fighting, a desire that no one else had managed to successfully tap. CCP, the makers of Eve, seem to get their business in a way that few others do. Though Eve isn't my cup of tea, I've seen enough to believe that CCP knows how to patch the game in a way that doesn't alter the fundamental experience, the social empire-building aspects. Because of this, CCP has earned their fan's loyalty and trust.
Getting back to failed MMOs, I would be keenly interested to read an interview with a developer of a failed MMO, for some insight into how and why the ball was dropped. Sadly such interviews are often lacking in said insight, usually full of marketing lines, excuses, or an outright demonstration that the developer at no point knew what he was doing. Though not a MMO, I remember reading an interview with one of the creators of Kane & Lynch (which achieved some fame in the critical realm because of the Gamespot controversy), which was fascinatingly honest. Any chance anyone could link me to a similiar MMO interview? In my opinion, what it often comes down to is that developers (and the 'suits') are unwilling and unable to throw away bad work. As a writer, I've learned that you've got to be willing to chuck something that isn't going to work. I've spent hours upon hours on a short story, or a chapter in a novel, or an article only to admit that it was bad and throw it away and start fresh. Unfortunately while writing is basically free, games require lots of capital, and sometimes these developers are left with basically no choice but to hype their game in order to front-load box sales. Sucks, but I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect otherwise. But because I prefer to never end on a sour note, I admit to being somewhat happy that the big publishers are unable or unwilling to take risks. That makes your more independent titles that much more refreshing, that much more bold. Anyone hear about Love, for example? Only a matter of time til one of these smaller titles scores big.
Red by me:
I don't know if you're speaking in generalizations or if you actually think AC2 came out after WoW. For what it's worth, AC2 was out roughly 2 years before WoW. WoW actually has more in common with AC2 than any other game I've seen/played.
AC2's failures were epic.
First, as has already been noted, AC2 was NOTHING like it's predecessor. The only common item between the two besides the name, was the lore. That's it. AC1 and AC2 were at polar opposites as far as game play. Second was the plethora of brokenness. Chat, skills/combat, crafting....pretty much everything at one point or another. Third, and I think this is one that gets glanced over often, is the system requirements for AC2 at the time of release were mammoth and precluded many interested in the game.
AC2 was a game that was conceived by bean counters. It was the game MS thought they could make to be as generic as possible so as to appeal to as many as possible, and they ended up not appealing to many at all.
I will say I am surprised it lasted as long as it did.
More OT:
Awesome article. One of the better reads I've had in my years lurking the MMORPG site.
I also want to throw my endorsement hat into the ring for Fallen Earth. The post apocolyptic MMO/FPS/RPG. Excellent game from an indy developer. It's a breath of fresh air in a sea of WoW wanna-be's. It's not the perfect polished game, but lots of fun if you take the time to learn it.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
That was a very good read. I agree SOE has messed up a bunch but they have a couple of really good games haging in there. You had turbine who completely blew it with DND to come back out and with the FTP model to almost save it. LOTRO is floudering, despite what some of the fan boys say and the possibilies in china. The game in the states has seen a huge downturn, maybe with this xpack they can save it, but I really dont thing so, lacking any clear dirrection. Other gaming companies, funcom with there problems with AOC, NCSOFT what a joke I have seen so many post where folks went to AION then going back to their respected games. It is a harsh market, and I think were in for an MMO crash soon, total and across the board. Main reaon why, folks are board.
Red by me.
RE: Turbine
An announcement from the devs at roughly the beginning of the summer indicated subs were increasing, even in the western markets. This was made right before they released in Asia where they sold 2.5 million copies.
Add to that they are releasing a new x-pack in roughly a week and it doesn't sound like a company in trouble, or "floudering"(sic) to me.
Doesn't sound much like a company in a downturn either.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
It doesn't help that there are great single player games out there that gives players an epic experience minus the awful communities and gold farmers...
I personally think that the reasons we're seeing so many lackluster releases are twofold.
1. As touched on in the article, too many companies are pushing out their games too early too get a revenue stream coming in. Perfect examples recently are AoC and WAR. It's all been about getting a chunk of the WoW pie too.
Both those games were developed by companies that should have known better than to do what they did, but both did it anyway. Or more correctly, they were forced to push out their games incomplete because "big brother money man" was breathing down their necks because "big brother" was looking over at WoW and salivating at the prospect of getting some of that dough encrusted filling.
MBJ got his truckload of cash (his words at the time) from EA, and Mythic lost it's say as to when the game was released. Oh he'll deny it till he's blue in the face, but those of us that were following the game's development saw the cuts in planned content begin and the feeling of rush rush set in. Funcom signed a publishing deal with SCi/Eidos and SCi/Eidos and major Funcom shareholders started getting anxious about not seeing revenues and we know how that went.
Unfortunately we still see it happening even after those huge mistakes. Take a look at what's going on with Cryptic/Atari and STO.
2. For some reason a bunch of the mmo developers didn't look at what Blizzard did with WoW properly. Blizzard didn't worry about being overly innovative. They didn't worry about getting the pats on the back from other devs at conventions, pseudo gaming experts and journalists, and us talking heads on forums, over their rad design concepts either. They simply took a bunch of things that people obviously liked in other games, put them together in one, and did most of those things better than they'd been done before. They evolved the genre just a little bit. They didn't try and mutate it in one go.
Again we can look at AoC and WAR for good examples. It was evident from the popularity of PvP in WoW that PvP was becoming a more popular activity in mmos. So what do these companies do? Instead of just tweeking the PvP in their games to improve on what WoW was doing, they go whole hog way too far in that direction and promote their games as PvP games. They failed to see that although PvP was becoming a more popular activity for mmo players to participate in, it wasn't something that most mmo players wanted to do most of the time. Sure they both offered PvE too, but it was done in a half-hearted manner.
Then we have games like Darkfall, where apparently the company bought into the rhetoric of the wannabe gaming intelligentsia at various sites (including this one at times), and on the various forums/blogs on a lot of those sites (including this one at times), about having the games hearken back to the early days. The problem is that all these flapping lips seem to forget, or conveniently fail to mention, that there was a good reason why most of those elements fell to the wayside eventually. Most people didn't like them back then, and just because these people remember those things fondly isn't going to make enough others like them now.
I think that we are going to again see some big numbers for some upcoming games, but it'll be the games that make darn sure they have a full game experience at release that's relatively bug free, and offer the players what they are showing they like in what they're playing already. As opposed to thinking they know better what players will like.
Then we have games like Darkfall, where apparently the company bought into the rhetoric of the wannabe gaming intelligentsia at various sites (including this one at times), and on the various forums/blogs on a lot of those sites (including this one at times), about having the games hearken back to the early days. The problem is that all these flapping lips seem to forget, or conveniently fail to mention, that there was a good reason why most of those elements fell to the wayside eventually. Most people didn't like them back then, and just because these people remember those things fondly isn't going to make enough others like them now.
I think that we are going to again see some big numbers for some upcoming games, but it'll be the games that make darn sure they have a full game experience at release that's relatively bug free, and offer the players what they are showing they like in what they're playing already. As opposed to thinking they know better what players will like.
Absolutely agree.
One of the interesting things about veterans (and I'm talking RL military veterans) is that over beers at the VFW hall they seem to remember the good times and not the bad. Which is understandable. They don't talk about how half their platoon was cut in half but they'll talk about the celebration of the victory and forget the cost of it.
So it is with PvP nostalgia for old time MMO players.
SOE in particular is unwilling to examine why WoW was such a success, because SOE doesn't do polish and relatively bug free gameplay. They're not publishing games and making some money at it, they're trying to make money by publishing games.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Is 300k subs per month a failure. Probably in Blizzards eyes although I highly doubt their claim about 10 mill subs as do you all. A game fails if it is not a well developed game. By that I mean coding, polish, art, sound, animation and heart that devs have to put into a game. And for many (including myself) a game fails when you can see through the marketing bullshit preceeding a game. Aion in my eyes will fail eventually even though I have not played it. AoC failed. WAR failed etc etc. As for planetside I did not have a chance to play it partly due to the fact that I did try out a FPS style MMO (Tabula Rasa) which also failed and left me numb to that genre.
There is so much failure in this particular game industry apart from 3 MMO games that are thriving (this can be argued against). The good thing is that I'm glad to be back to normal PC gaming because I cannot see MMO devs recovering from lack of innovation anytime soon. And yes there is a huge lack of it. Once you see that you can accept the facts and hope for a brighter future. In the mean time keep your money to yourselves
<<< Currently playing -> WoW, waiting for SWTOR >>> Favorite games developer - (old)Black Isle and Bioware. Most fun fantasy MMO currently dominating the market, WoW. Most fun Sci-Fi MMO out there, EvE online.
One of the best article written on this website. Im very happy with how MMORPG:COM is now starting to talk as true gamers - instead of talking through the developers.
Why have all these MMO failed? And I personally would add WAR and AOC to this list since going down from 800K + subs to under 100K like is pretty obvious now - is a major failure in anyones book.
But whay the failed is because they were NOT created from a gamers perspective - they were created to make money - only money and NOTHING but money. These compnaies jumped on the bandwagon to make a game for millions - meaning easy money...
And... when they found out that MMO gamers are not all stupid enough to fall for 1 year subs without playing.... These games did the next best thing... They lied and PRed ppl to PRE-ORDER their games. Making sure that even with a total garbage of a game - they would still make some money.
THats why games like Tabula Rasa - AC2 - Vanguard and more games failed. THey launched a game in the SAME state as WAR and AOC did ... but they did not fool ppl into preorder - thus having zero money to actually fix the buggy crap they were offering.
And this is now where we ... The gamers need to put our foot down. Pre- orders are NOT good for gamers. They are a PR trick to get money for something that isn't half developed. Games like Alganon are now going one step further ... acutally chancelling launch dates after ppl have pre-ordered. Next step is that ppl will be able to pre-order - even before the development of the game starts.
The true issue with all these MMOs... is that they were trying to do something better than the big one (WOW). But they just failed to grasp the key elements that make WOW so hugely populare. It has nothing to do with graphics.. it has nothing to do with interface ... it has nothing to do with content. It has to do with the basics of good gameplay (it is a game after all) and last but not least... QUALITY CONTROL. Thats where all these games fail miserably. They let out content (even now after whole year of the game beeing live like WAR and AOC) that is absolutly LITTERED with bugs on top of bugs that make the games totally unplayable days - even weeks after patch. This is where all MMOS are falling behind of Blizzard's Monster.... And it seems that it will not change any time soon.
i still miss Tabula Rasa, it was still widely popular on the european servers and almost all the kinks had been worked out .... it was a far better experiance than AoC or WAR was... WAR mythic can't even spell "new content" let alone design it
ahh well.... c'est la vie.
"nothing actually matters, we're just slightly evolved monkeys clinging to a dying piece of rock hurtling through space waiting for our eventual death." - Frankie Boyle, Mock The Week
I just want to say i loved Tabula Rasa i was so pissed it closed down. I honestly believe it could have killed the WoW giant with a sniper shot from 500 yards (my highest level was a sniper ) if NC soft had just done their jobs,them or whoever was in charge of getting the game out there and makeing it known. I saw one piece on G4 during its early development and then after that....nothing not another word about it till shortly before it came out. For me being a huge Sci-Fi game fan it was the best game id ever played....and it was getting better even when they were getting ready to shut it down....ok i took a real detour there and totally forgot what i was going to say lol. oh yeah it is really hard to compete with the big games that have been around a long time but they really should keep trying anyway dont rush keep working till you get it right people. If the game is really great when your done with it the time and expense will definately be worth it. I hope that makes sense im not good at conveying what i mean.
And one more thing about why I think alot of these games failed. They lack humor. One of the greatest part about WOW is the humor that Blizzard puts into it. I still remember the day when I started WOW and met the boming dwarf NPCs in Dun Morogh. I mean - I still stop by them to giggle.
WAR has abit of that... on the Destruction side. The Order is just one big boredom when it comes to humor. Humor in AOC... Doubt that ppl from Norway have humor after playing it... Other than two puppy and cat jokes... Bunch of nothing.
I just want to say i loved Tabula Rasa i was so pissed it closed down. I honestly believe it could have killed the WoW giant with a sniper shot from 500 yards (my highest level was a sniper ) if NC soft had just done their jobs,them or whoever was in charge of getting the game out there and makeing it known. I saw one piece on G4 during its early development and then after that....nothing not another word about it till shortly before it came out. For me being a huge Sci-Fi game fan it was the best game id ever played....and it was getting better even when they were getting ready to shut it down....ok i took a real detour there and totally forgot what i was going to say lol. oh yeah it is really hard to compete with the big games that have been around a long time but they really should keep trying anyway dont rush keep working till you get it right people. If the game is really great when your done with it the time and expense will definately be worth it. I hope that makes sense im not good at conveying what i mean.
I also enjoyed Tabula Rasa. For all its faults, it was still entertaining. I ran a spy and a sniper up to cap. But once there, there wasn't much at all to actually do. If you've noticed, the three games that NCsoft has axed have all been western. Aion is simply a further demonstration that NCsoft is clueless when it comes to the western markets. They expect the same grind/gankfest template to work everywhere. Their suits seem incapable of grasping the reality that western gaming culture is rather different from eastern. Aion will no doubt follow the Linage2 path. Lots of initial box sales, and then a slow steady decline in subs.
And one more thing about why I think alot of these games failed. They lack humor. One of the greatest part about WOW is the humor that Blizzard puts into it. I still remember the day when I started WOW and met the boming dwarf NPCs in Dun Morogh. I mean - I still stop by them to giggle. WAR has abit of that... on the Destruction side. The Order is just one big boredom when it comes to humor. Humor in AOC... Doubt that ppl from Norway have humor after playing it... Other than two puppy and cat jokes... Bunch of nothing.
One of WoW's most attractive features is the many playful takes on pop culture. Two words: "Harris Pilton", the blood elf female with an attitude. The Kessel Run. The entire /silly thing where the human talks about these gnomes and a lost piece of jewelry. The Star Trek references. The game is chock full of pop culture asides that make you smile. "This is only building that fit Brog! Goblins make buildings too small!"
SWG didn't do this as much, but my guildies did. There is so much you can do with pop culture references in an IP like Star Wars, things that are trite and silly but just crack you up, like running into a bunch of Nightsisters and saying, in spatial, "I've got a bad feeling about this".
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Btw, are all the authors really as diabolical as their portraits make them look?. Taken together, they look like something out of Batmans' rogue gallery..
Wachter is an experienced community manager, so he knows the importance of making people afraid of you in order to maintain their respect and compliance.
After all, would you annoy the guy in that picture? No, because he looks like he'd show up at 3am knocking at your door, wanting a little 'face time'. ;-)
LOL! I would not in any state of mind think of offending him
Excellent article that hits on many valid points. We have all seen the effects of changing the games core play (UO when they split it into Trammel and Felucia... Pretty much killed it for myself, my guildmates, and many many others. Then again with the AoS expansion.) and it is NEVER pretty. WoW had the right idea when they designed it. Dumb down the game to the point even an 80 year old woman could jump on and play with no issues. I do not agree that when Blizzard releases their next MMO that it will hit the same status of WoW. They just released the right kind of game for the masses at a time when there were very few developers in the MMO scene. As for SOE their reputation will haunt them forever. The only thing they have done right is to change Infantry Online back to a free game. I am afraid that even getting rid of the upper management will not be enough to save them.
- Case: Thermaltake Kandalf Black Chassis - CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz (OC'd 4.2GHz on Water Cooling) - Memory: Mushkin 8Gb (4x 2Gb) DDR3 1600Mhz - HDD: Dual Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM - GFX: (2) XFX Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFire - New upgrade!
"I like wow, I like aion and I like AoC all for different reasons.....the later cause i get to see boobs, but still its a reason!!" - Sawlstone
Btw, are all the authors really as diabolical as their portraits make them look?. Taken together, they look like something out of Batmans' rogue gallery..
Wachter is an experienced community manager, so he knows the importance of making people afraid of you in order to maintain their respect and compliance.
After all, would you annoy the guy in that picture? No, because he looks like he'd show up at 3am knocking at your door, wanting a little 'face time'. ;-)
LOL! I would not in any state of mind think of offending him
Excellent article that hits on many valid points. We have all seen the effects of changing the games core play (UO when they split it into Trammel and Felucia... Pretty much killed it for myself, my guildmates, and many many others. Then again with the AoS expansion.) and it is NEVER pretty. WoW had the right idea when they designed it. Dumb down the game to the point even an 80 year old woman could jump on and play with no issues. I do not agree that when Blizzard releases their next MMO that it will hit the same status of WoW. They just released the right kind of game for the masses at a time when there were very few developers in the MMO scene. As for SOE their reputation will haunt them forever. The only thing they have done right is to change Infantry Online back to a free game. I am afraid that even getting rid of the upper management will not be enough to save them.
Thats my take as well. Even axing Smed at this point would not redeem SOE. They have made WAY too many BAD decisions over years and years for any hope of redemption.
I'm a 6 years veteran of Planetside and I have to comment abotu a few things:
Planetside was the best game I've ever played, to this day, I've found no fix to replace it. What made planetside ... planetside was actually two parts: Planetside the game and Planetside the community. I've noticed throughout these years of play that the players that stayed and played were those that were involved in excellent outfits and worked as part of the community to promote gameplay. The game *was* repetitive only if you succumbed to the formula the mass of the players (To wit, The Zerg) would rinse and repeat over and over.
This is interesting because of two things:
Planetside was as sandbox-ish as you can get in it's own highly specialized way. You really could do anything you liked - go anywhere you want, attack any continent you want (drain a base, drive it to neutral, hack away), but it required you to actually be part of a large team to accomplish this. These spec-ops tactics required time, effort, patience and sometimes failed completely ... but they were the soul and true core of the game for me. The average Zerger could not (or would not bother) handle this freedom. Which says something about MMO players, my 2nd point:
Players don't want freedom ... sorry. We say we want a sandbox (I want one, me and my outfit enjoyed it very much in 6 years of play), but in fact very few really want it. This drives games such as Wow (which IMHO is a fancy IRC chat room) and its clones to give you three modes of play: The wow-way, the solo-wow-way and the guild-wow-way. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what each means.
As long as players just want a theme park, that's what we'll get. As theme parks go there's no better than Wow. Sorry everybody! Blizzard just know their business and are damned good at it. I guess that leaves everybody else with niche attempts of various degrees of success and failures. I'm happy that a few other companies are now trying to produce an MMOFPS (CCP with their neato EVE hybrid, a rumored Planetside 2/Next) and I'm looking forward to another PS like experience.
TBH, I'd pay a monthly subscription to just get a revamped Planetside - one with no cheating, better netcode and fixed bugs.
As a person who is at the point of abandoning MMOs altogether, let me add my two cents.
MMOs are about communities. You need groups of like-minded people playing something cooperatively. Otherwise, why the hell am I playing $15 month if I'm not getting something social out of it?
To get that, you either need a massive community, from which specific types of players can band together and play together, or you need a specifically-targeted game where the whole community is generally of like mind.
Gaming companies need to put up a lot of money and flesh out the idea of social market segmentation.
Right now, all games are developed trying to appeal to all people, but at their core they are all the same PvP-oriented game with variations of graphics, lore, genre and mechanics. Lets face it, a community is rarely much better than it's worst sub-group of players, and PvP games will always have at their core a bunch of seriously anti-social/sociopathic gankers.
There are reasons why games like WoW, LotRO and DDO have emerged as successes (to varying degrees, of course). Why is it that all these PvP games (I guess with the exception of EVE) just come and go, yet even though there have only been a small number of PvE-focused games released, they have stayed around?
PvP games obviously have their appeal and their market. However, there is a huge market for well-executed PvE that currently exists, and I would say an even larger one that is untapped if you can totally isolate a community from PvPers and gankers.
Every time i hear the worlds "World of Warcraft" it makes me want to hurl.The OP compared it as big to everything else. Hey i played WoW off and on for a year or two. It's an ok game, an average MMO by most any standard. What sells WoW is popularity, ease of play, access. When you ask what did WoW do better then anything that came before it the answer was *MARKETING* plus a huge groupie fanbase.
That doesn't change the fact that by all comparison its just an average game. It's not the best at PVE or PVP as many games dominate it in every genre. Warhammer Online didnt fail because of WoW. It failed because its fanbase were people like myself who seen the greatest PVP game of all time DAOC made into a crappy WoW clone. Had Warhammer been DAOC 2.0 it would of been the be of all PVP games now.
Though WoW is still very popular its so mainstream that people have either played it or quit playing it. It's not a must have for Christmas game anymore. Games fail because they are too affraid to take a chance at success. In doing that they fall back on WoW marketing strategy and go down the drain because NOBODY who plays MMO's wants another World of Warcraft. People want new experiences. They want community of the past and the thrill of playing a NEW experience.
The MMO feel is dead and gone now. Its the same o same o. I lust for a game that actually excites me to play once again. I've played them all as have many so we have many resident experts who know what they want vs what they don't want. Attention Developers! The future in MMO's are niche markets not grand scale like WoW. Give us something new , fresh and alive or FAIL
"EVE Online launched to mediocre subscription numbers and lingered at sub-100K subscription levels for two years, to later become one of the top MMO populations out there."
Yeah, by selling multiple accounts to overcome their perverse game design lol. I'd wager that 1/3 the players (us "noobs" although I almost racked up a year's sub time) only had 1 account. All the "pros" had multiple accounts to mine/market/mission grind with - and I'm not talking the alternate slots, I mean paid accounts.
I'm a 6 years veteran of Planetside and I have to comment abotu a few things: Planetside was the best game I've ever played, to this day, I've found no fix to replace it. What made planetside ... planetside was actually two parts: Planetside the game and Planetside the community. I've noticed throughout these years of play that the players that stayed and played were those that were involved in excellent outfits and worked as part of the community to promote gameplay. The game *was* repetitive only if you succumbed to the formula the mass of the players (To wit, The Zerg) would rinse and repeat over and over. This is interesting because of two things: Planetside was as sandbox-ish as you can get in it's own highly specialized way. You really could do anything you liked - go anywhere you want, attack any continent you want (drain a base, drive it to neutral, hack away), but it required you to actually be part of a large team to accomplish this. These spec-ops tactics required time, effort, patience and sometimes failed completely ... but they were the soul and true core of the game for me. The average Zerger could not (or would not bother) handle this freedom. Which says something about MMO players, my 2nd point: Players don't want freedom ... sorry. We say we want a sandbox (I want one, me and my outfit enjoyed it very much in 6 years of play), but in fact very few really want it. This drives games such as Wow (which IMHO is a fancy IRC chat room) and its clones to give you three modes of play: The wow-way, the solo-wow-way and the guild-wow-way. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what each means. As long as players just want a theme park, that's what we'll get. As theme parks go there's no better than Wow. Sorry everybody! Blizzard just know their business and are damned good at it. I guess that leaves everybody else with niche attempts of various degrees of success and failures. I'm happy that a few other companies are now trying to produce an MMOFPS (CCP with their neato EVE hybrid, a rumored Planetside 2/Next) and I'm looking forward to another PS like experience. TBH, I'd pay a monthly subscription to just get a revamped Planetside - one with no cheating, better netcode and fixed bugs.
Very true. I maintain that the only guaranteed way to make a successful (edit: non-theme park) game is to make the tools simple and easy to understand, the purpose clear and direct, and have the obstacles in the way add the complexity that makes players think about what they need to do and combine forces to do it. Theme parks satisfy all of these rules save complexity - they iron that out into a flat road so they don't obstruct anyone's path to the rewards.
Planetside had an excellent foundation going, but was just in the wrong hands to continue growing into the game that defined the FPS market, and did so as an MMO. This speaks to what is wrong with a big company buying a smaller company for its product and trying to manage it for success. It's the small company that understands why people will buy its product in the first place - big-company resources may help it launch the product, but big-company management isn't going to change it for the better.
MMOs are about communities. You need groups of like-minded people playing something cooperatively. Otherwise, why the hell am I playing $15 month if I'm not getting something social out of it?
To get that, you either need a massive community, from which specific types of players can band together and play together, or you need a specifically-targeted game where the whole community is generally of like mind.
Right now, all games are developed trying to appeal to all people, but at their core they are all the same PvP-oriented game with variations of graphics, lore, genre and mechanics. Lets face it, a community is rarely much better than it's worst sub-group of players, and PvP games will always have at their core a bunch of seriously anti-social/sociopathic gankers.
There are reasons why games like WoW, LotRO and DDO have emerged as successes (to varying degrees, of course). Why is it that all these PvP games (I guess with the exception of EVE) just come and go, yet even though there have only been a small number of PvE-focused games released, they have stayed around?
PvP games obviously have their appeal and their market. However, there is a huge market for well-executed PvE that currently exists, and I would say an even larger one that is untapped if you can totally isolate a community from PvPers and gankers.
While some of the core Ideas you have I agree with, such as MMORPG's should aim for Social opportunities and the social aspect playing a bigger role in their gameplay, I do not agree with the conclusions.
In my view, there is a conflict which resides somewhere in the middle between Game design and Marketing.
From one hand Designers make Themepark games, which and by their nature cannot appeal to all, and will only appeal to some.
And on the other hand Marketing is successfully inviting all to play them.
The result is that within the first 3 to 6 months there is a dramatic drop of subscriptions as all kinds of people realise that this is not a game that appeals to them in practice no matter how great the marketing made it sound in the beggining.
Of course, there is exceptions to this like there are exceptions to everything in life, and in this case the exception is Blizzard's WoW, it was just fortunate that its following made the leap to the MMORPG genre and through it a snow ball effect of popularity happened which reached the existing MMORPG playerbase as well. Yet lets not forget that WoW introduced a bigger number of new players to the genre than there was player of the genre at the time as well. And all these new players will not move to a clone of WoW.
So in my opinion trying to make a clone of it, can only be futile...loss of time and loss of investment.
I think the Devs should go back and rethink the approach from the beginning. What is that which popularised the genre in the first place?
A Themepark Game or a Virtual World?
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
Comments
Its just a long bla blah "we are all victims of the system" shit. I can't hear it anymore. SOME people make decisions, and it is not us gamers. I don't care rats ass if developers or managers or goddamn cleaning personell decides, but SOMEONE in those corporations makes decisions, and they are apparently not smarter than those who ran all those bankrupt banks.
I am not even pointing at myself, but in every single beta there were enough clever people who pointed at the issues long before and the companies and whoever responsible WITHIN those companies chose to ignore the warnings. Devs, managers, I don't care, but the truth was THERE.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I for one am getting alittle more worried about where the MMO market is going, as bad as the globle economy is getting I would not be suprised to see the $14.99 sub-game's goto $19.99/mo or higher just to try an make up loss revenue and to prevent mass lay-offs just to keep their company(for some) above water. but as I see it the gaming industry is going to get hard hit in the wallet and many companies are going to start tightening their belts of which projects have more priority and which can be trashed.
Evil will always triumph because good is dumb....
Exactly Ellkal, and that is why I am asking these questions. We have a seemly smart and informed community here and their thoughts and ideas should be heard and heard loudly by the powers that be. Eventually someone in the industry will listen and maybe then we can start having quality games that at least make the grinding part fun, exciting and/or at the very least interesting.
As anyone who has worked for any large corporation will tell you corporations waste money because they do not take the time to look into the small everyday operations. Personally I work for a very small company, and yes I still see waste, but my girlfriend has worked for three very large corporations since we've known each other and they all waste amazing amounts of money because they don't take the time to deal with the individuals who run each division, more managers equals more waste, time and again she's seen this. Recently they even told all employees that they would no longer match the 401k, no college reimbursement and freeze all raises but a month later hired a new VP and spent half a mil on party in her honor, in the building she works in. Most corporations are not smart, fast or agile, they are plodding old dinosaurs.
Gaming corporations are as well. I think it's safe to say that most of us are looking for something new in this genre but we aren't seeing it from the large corporations. The biggest launch of this year, with the possible exception of Aion, could be FE. Yeah CO is chugging along but the free Halloween weekend just reaffirmed, for me anyway, that it wasn't a game I'd be interested in long term. FE went a slightly different direction and although no one is expecting the numbers of an Aion the community seems pretty stable and growing. It's still too early to tell but will Funcom be able to do something similar with The Secret World because it is different, let's hope. But games like STO, which I am still holding a bit of hope out for, goes and alienates what should be their core players by simply ignoring several main components of the IP, is that smart, is that even sane?
On a personal note, I played Planetside when it launched, the biggest problem I had with this game was a simple one that I believe still exists, if the bullets, beams, etc. do no hit the aiming reticule why have one at all? I'm not talking about a shotgun here, or the sniper rifle for that matter, but when you hit 5 feet to the left with a rifle blast of where you are aiming the game becomes pretty pointless. Let's hope this gets fixed in PS2 and I'll be back.
Played in some form:
UO til tram, AC, EQ, AO, WW2O, PS, SB, CoH, AC2, Hor, LoTRO, DDO, AoC, Aion, CO, STO
Playing: WoW (for gf), WAR
Waiting For: SWTOR, FFXVI
Hoping For: DCUO, Secret World, Earthrise
-S- (UO Sonoma)
the funniest thing i keep seeing is how people keep under estimating Bioware. And what is even funnier is before WoW came out people said the same things about Blizzard. Bioware is a tried and true company, if anyone can knock blizzard off their high horse it would be them. And if they can't do it, then honestly i don't think anyone else can. It may only sale a million off the start but in time it will gain ground i'm sure.
But i'm willing to bet that when TOR comes out it will be the greatest SW game ever and they will add in content every month or more-so. Because if anyone payed much attention to the development they would know TOR is designed on the same engine as Hero's Journey. Which enables them to make changes on the fly and add in content on the fly.
Red by me:
I don't know if you're speaking in generalizations or if you actually think AC2 came out after WoW. For what it's worth, AC2 was out roughly 2 years before WoW. WoW actually has more in common with AC2 than any other game I've seen/played.
AC2's failures were epic.
First, as has already been noted, AC2 was NOTHING like it's predecessor. The only common item between the two besides the name, was the lore. That's it. AC1 and AC2 were at polar opposites as far as game play. Second was the plethora of brokenness. Chat, skills/combat, crafting....pretty much everything at one point or another. Third, and I think this is one that gets glanced over often, is the system requirements for AC2 at the time of release were mammoth and precluded many interested in the game.
AC2 was a game that was conceived by bean counters. It was the game MS thought they could make to be as generic as possible so as to appeal to as many as possible, and they ended up not appealing to many at all.
I will say I am surprised it lasted as long as it did.
More OT:
Awesome article. One of the better reads I've had in my years lurking the MMORPG site.
I also want to throw my endorsement hat into the ring for Fallen Earth. The post apocolyptic MMO/FPS/RPG. Excellent game from an indy developer. It's a breath of fresh air in a sea of WoW wanna-be's. It's not the perfect polished game, but lots of fun if you take the time to learn it.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
Red by me.
RE: Turbine
An announcement from the devs at roughly the beginning of the summer indicated subs were increasing, even in the western markets. This was made right before they released in Asia where they sold 2.5 million copies.
Add to that they are releasing a new x-pack in roughly a week and it doesn't sound like a company in trouble, or "floudering"(sic) to me.
Doesn't sound much like a company in a downturn either.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
It doesn't help that there are great single player games out there that gives players an epic experience minus the awful communities and gold farmers...
I personally think that the reasons we're seeing so many lackluster releases are twofold.
1. As touched on in the article, too many companies are pushing out their games too early too get a revenue stream coming in. Perfect examples recently are AoC and WAR. It's all been about getting a chunk of the WoW pie too.
Both those games were developed by companies that should have known better than to do what they did, but both did it anyway. Or more correctly, they were forced to push out their games incomplete because "big brother money man" was breathing down their necks because "big brother" was looking over at WoW and salivating at the prospect of getting some of that dough encrusted filling.
MBJ got his truckload of cash (his words at the time) from EA, and Mythic lost it's say as to when the game was released. Oh he'll deny it till he's blue in the face, but those of us that were following the game's development saw the cuts in planned content begin and the feeling of rush rush set in. Funcom signed a publishing deal with SCi/Eidos and SCi/Eidos and major Funcom shareholders started getting anxious about not seeing revenues and we know how that went.
Unfortunately we still see it happening even after those huge mistakes. Take a look at what's going on with Cryptic/Atari and STO.
2. For some reason a bunch of the mmo developers didn't look at what Blizzard did with WoW properly. Blizzard didn't worry about being overly innovative. They didn't worry about getting the pats on the back from other devs at conventions, pseudo gaming experts and journalists, and us talking heads on forums, over their rad design concepts either. They simply took a bunch of things that people obviously liked in other games, put them together in one, and did most of those things better than they'd been done before. They evolved the genre just a little bit. They didn't try and mutate it in one go.
Again we can look at AoC and WAR for good examples. It was evident from the popularity of PvP in WoW that PvP was becoming a more popular activity in mmos. So what do these companies do? Instead of just tweeking the PvP in their games to improve on what WoW was doing, they go whole hog way too far in that direction and promote their games as PvP games. They failed to see that although PvP was becoming a more popular activity for mmo players to participate in, it wasn't something that most mmo players wanted to do most of the time. Sure they both offered PvE too, but it was done in a half-hearted manner.
Then we have games like Darkfall, where apparently the company bought into the rhetoric of the wannabe gaming intelligentsia at various sites (including this one at times), and on the various forums/blogs on a lot of those sites (including this one at times), about having the games hearken back to the early days. The problem is that all these flapping lips seem to forget, or conveniently fail to mention, that there was a good reason why most of those elements fell to the wayside eventually. Most people didn't like them back then, and just because these people remember those things fondly isn't going to make enough others like them now.
I think that we are going to again see some big numbers for some upcoming games, but it'll be the games that make darn sure they have a full game experience at release that's relatively bug free, and offer the players what they are showing they like in what they're playing already. As opposed to thinking they know better what players will like.
Absolutely agree.
One of the interesting things about veterans (and I'm talking RL military veterans) is that over beers at the VFW hall they seem to remember the good times and not the bad. Which is understandable. They don't talk about how half their platoon was cut in half but they'll talk about the celebration of the victory and forget the cost of it.
So it is with PvP nostalgia for old time MMO players.
SOE in particular is unwilling to examine why WoW was such a success, because SOE doesn't do polish and relatively bug free gameplay. They're not publishing games and making some money at it, they're trying to make money by publishing games.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Is 300k subs per month a failure. Probably in Blizzards eyes although I highly doubt their claim about 10 mill subs as do you all. A game fails if it is not a well developed game. By that I mean coding, polish, art, sound, animation and heart that devs have to put into a game. And for many (including myself) a game fails when you can see through the marketing bullshit preceeding a game. Aion in my eyes will fail eventually even though I have not played it. AoC failed. WAR failed etc etc. As for planetside I did not have a chance to play it partly due to the fact that I did try out a FPS style MMO (Tabula Rasa) which also failed and left me numb to that genre.
There is so much failure in this particular game industry apart from 3 MMO games that are thriving (this can be argued against). The good thing is that I'm glad to be back to normal PC gaming because I cannot see MMO devs recovering from lack of innovation anytime soon. And yes there is a huge lack of it. Once you see that you can accept the facts and hope for a brighter future. In the mean time keep your money to yourselves
<<< Currently playing -> WoW, waiting for SWTOR >>> Favorite games developer - (old)Black Isle and Bioware. Most fun fantasy MMO currently dominating the market, WoW. Most fun Sci-Fi MMO out there, EvE online.
My blog - norrsken.wblogg.se
One of the best article written on this website. Im very happy with how MMORPG:COM is now starting to talk as true gamers - instead of talking through the developers.
Why have all these MMO failed? And I personally would add WAR and AOC to this list since going down from 800K + subs to under 100K like is pretty obvious now - is a major failure in anyones book.
But whay the failed is because they were NOT created from a gamers perspective - they were created to make money - only money and NOTHING but money. These compnaies jumped on the bandwagon to make a game for millions - meaning easy money...
And... when they found out that MMO gamers are not all stupid enough to fall for 1 year subs without playing.... These games did the next best thing... They lied and PRed ppl to PRE-ORDER their games. Making sure that even with a total garbage of a game - they would still make some money.
THats why games like Tabula Rasa - AC2 - Vanguard and more games failed. THey launched a game in the SAME state as WAR and AOC did ... but they did not fool ppl into preorder - thus having zero money to actually fix the buggy crap they were offering.
And this is now where we ... The gamers need to put our foot down. Pre- orders are NOT good for gamers. They are a PR trick to get money for something that isn't half developed. Games like Alganon are now going one step further ... acutally chancelling launch dates after ppl have pre-ordered. Next step is that ppl will be able to pre-order - even before the development of the game starts.
The true issue with all these MMOs... is that they were trying to do something better than the big one (WOW). But they just failed to grasp the key elements that make WOW so hugely populare. It has nothing to do with graphics.. it has nothing to do with interface ... it has nothing to do with content. It has to do with the basics of good gameplay (it is a game after all) and last but not least... QUALITY CONTROL. Thats where all these games fail miserably. They let out content (even now after whole year of the game beeing live like WAR and AOC) that is absolutly LITTERED with bugs on top of bugs that make the games totally unplayable days - even weeks after patch. This is where all MMOS are falling behind of Blizzard's Monster.... And it seems that it will not change any time soon.
i still miss Tabula Rasa, it was still widely popular on the european servers and almost all the kinks had been worked out .... it was a far better experiance than AoC or WAR was... WAR mythic can't even spell "new content" let alone design it
ahh well.... c'est la vie.
"nothing actually matters, we're just slightly evolved monkeys clinging to a dying piece of rock hurtling through space waiting for our eventual death." - Frankie Boyle, Mock The Week
I just want to say i loved Tabula Rasa i was so pissed it closed down. I honestly believe it could have killed the WoW giant with a sniper shot from 500 yards (my highest level was a sniper
) if NC soft had just done their jobs,them or whoever was in charge of getting the game out there and makeing it known. I saw one piece on G4 during its early development and then after that....nothing not another word about it till shortly before it came out. For me being a huge Sci-Fi game fan it was the best game id ever played....and it was getting better even when they were getting ready to shut it down....ok i took a real detour there and totally forgot what i was going to say lol. oh yeah it is really hard to compete with the big games that have been around a long time but they really should keep trying anyway dont rush keep working till you get it right people. If the game is really great when your done with it the time and expense will definately be worth it. I hope that makes sense im not good at conveying what i mean.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
And one more thing about why I think alot of these games failed. They lack humor. One of the greatest part about WOW is the humor that Blizzard puts into it. I still remember the day when I started WOW and met the boming dwarf NPCs in Dun Morogh. I mean - I still stop by them to giggle.
WAR has abit of that... on the Destruction side. The Order is just one big boredom when it comes to humor. Humor in AOC... Doubt that ppl from Norway have humor after playing it... Other than two puppy and cat jokes... Bunch of nothing.
I also enjoyed Tabula Rasa. For all its faults, it was still entertaining. I ran a spy and a sniper up to cap. But once there, there wasn't much at all to actually do. If you've noticed, the three games that NCsoft has axed have all been western. Aion is simply a further demonstration that NCsoft is clueless when it comes to the western markets. They expect the same grind/gankfest template to work everywhere. Their suits seem incapable of grasping the reality that western gaming culture is rather different from eastern. Aion will no doubt follow the Linage2 path. Lots of initial box sales, and then a slow steady decline in subs.
One of WoW's most attractive features is the many playful takes on pop culture. Two words: "Harris Pilton", the blood elf female with an attitude. The Kessel Run. The entire /silly thing where the human talks about these gnomes and a lost piece of jewelry. The Star Trek references. The game is chock full of pop culture asides that make you smile. "This is only building that fit Brog! Goblins make buildings too small!"
SWG didn't do this as much, but my guildies did. There is so much you can do with pop culture references in an IP like Star Wars, things that are trite and silly but just crack you up, like running into a bunch of Nightsisters and saying, in spatial, "I've got a bad feeling about this".
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Wachter is an experienced community manager, so he knows the importance of making people afraid of you in order to maintain their respect and compliance.
After all, would you annoy the guy in that picture? No, because he looks like he'd show up at 3am knocking at your door, wanting a little 'face time'. ;-)
LOL! I would not in any state of mind think of offending him
Excellent article that hits on many valid points. We have all seen the effects of changing the games core play (UO when they split it into Trammel and Felucia... Pretty much killed it for myself, my guildmates, and many many others. Then again with the AoS expansion.) and it is NEVER pretty. WoW had the right idea when they designed it. Dumb down the game to the point even an 80 year old woman could jump on and play with no issues. I do not agree that when Blizzard releases their next MMO that it will hit the same status of WoW. They just released the right kind of game for the masses at a time when there were very few developers in the MMO scene. As for SOE their reputation will haunt them forever. The only thing they have done right is to change Infantry Online back to a free game. I am afraid that even getting rid of the upper management will not be enough to save them.
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"I like wow, I like aion and I like AoC all for different reasons.....the later cause i get to see boobs, but still its a reason!!" - Sawlstone
Wachter is an experienced community manager, so he knows the importance of making people afraid of you in order to maintain their respect and compliance.
After all, would you annoy the guy in that picture? No, because he looks like he'd show up at 3am knocking at your door, wanting a little 'face time'. ;-)
LOL! I would not in any state of mind think of offending him
Excellent article that hits on many valid points. We have all seen the effects of changing the games core play (UO when they split it into Trammel and Felucia... Pretty much killed it for myself, my guildmates, and many many others. Then again with the AoS expansion.) and it is NEVER pretty. WoW had the right idea when they designed it. Dumb down the game to the point even an 80 year old woman could jump on and play with no issues. I do not agree that when Blizzard releases their next MMO that it will hit the same status of WoW. They just released the right kind of game for the masses at a time when there were very few developers in the MMO scene. As for SOE their reputation will haunt them forever. The only thing they have done right is to change Infantry Online back to a free game. I am afraid that even getting rid of the upper management will not be enough to save them.
Thats my take as well. Even axing Smed at this point would not redeem SOE. They have made WAY too many BAD decisions over years and years for any hope of redemption.
I'm a 6 years veteran of Planetside and I have to comment abotu a few things:
Planetside was the best game I've ever played, to this day, I've found no fix to replace it. What made planetside ... planetside was actually two parts: Planetside the game and Planetside the community. I've noticed throughout these years of play that the players that stayed and played were those that were involved in excellent outfits and worked as part of the community to promote gameplay. The game *was* repetitive only if you succumbed to the formula the mass of the players (To wit, The Zerg) would rinse and repeat over and over.
This is interesting because of two things:
Planetside was as sandbox-ish as you can get in it's own highly specialized way. You really could do anything you liked - go anywhere you want, attack any continent you want (drain a base, drive it to neutral, hack away), but it required you to actually be part of a large team to accomplish this. These spec-ops tactics required time, effort, patience and sometimes failed completely ... but they were the soul and true core of the game for me. The average Zerger could not (or would not bother) handle this freedom. Which says something about MMO players, my 2nd point:
Players don't want freedom ... sorry. We say we want a sandbox (I want one, me and my outfit enjoyed it very much in 6 years of play), but in fact very few really want it. This drives games such as Wow (which IMHO is a fancy IRC chat room) and its clones to give you three modes of play: The wow-way, the solo-wow-way and the guild-wow-way. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what each means.
As long as players just want a theme park, that's what we'll get. As theme parks go there's no better than Wow. Sorry everybody! Blizzard just know their business and are damned good at it. I guess that leaves everybody else with niche attempts of various degrees of success and failures. I'm happy that a few other companies are now trying to produce an MMOFPS (CCP with their neato EVE hybrid, a rumored Planetside 2/Next) and I'm looking forward to another PS like experience.
TBH, I'd pay a monthly subscription to just get a revamped Planetside - one with no cheating, better netcode and fixed bugs.
As a person who is at the point of abandoning MMOs altogether, let me add my two cents.
MMOs are about communities. You need groups of like-minded people playing something cooperatively. Otherwise, why the hell am I playing $15 month if I'm not getting something social out of it?
To get that, you either need a massive community, from which specific types of players can band together and play together, or you need a specifically-targeted game where the whole community is generally of like mind.
Gaming companies need to put up a lot of money and flesh out the idea of social market segmentation.
Right now, all games are developed trying to appeal to all people, but at their core they are all the same PvP-oriented game with variations of graphics, lore, genre and mechanics. Lets face it, a community is rarely much better than it's worst sub-group of players, and PvP games will always have at their core a bunch of seriously anti-social/sociopathic gankers.
There are reasons why games like WoW, LotRO and DDO have emerged as successes (to varying degrees, of course). Why is it that all these PvP games (I guess with the exception of EVE) just come and go, yet even though there have only been a small number of PvE-focused games released, they have stayed around?
PvP games obviously have their appeal and their market. However, there is a huge market for well-executed PvE that currently exists, and I would say an even larger one that is untapped if you can totally isolate a community from PvPers and gankers.
Every time i hear the worlds "World of Warcraft" it makes me want to hurl.The OP compared it as big to everything else. Hey i played WoW off and on for a year or two. It's an ok game, an average MMO by most any standard. What sells WoW is popularity, ease of play, access. When you ask what did WoW do better then anything that came before it the answer was *MARKETING* plus a huge groupie fanbase.
That doesn't change the fact that by all comparison its just an average game. It's not the best at PVE or PVP as many games dominate it in every genre. Warhammer Online didnt fail because of WoW. It failed because its fanbase were people like myself who seen the greatest PVP game of all time DAOC made into a crappy WoW clone. Had Warhammer been DAOC 2.0 it would of been the be of all PVP games now.
Though WoW is still very popular its so mainstream that people have either played it or quit playing it. It's not a must have for Christmas game anymore. Games fail because they are too affraid to take a chance at success. In doing that they fall back on WoW marketing strategy and go down the drain because NOBODY who plays MMO's wants another World of Warcraft. People want new experiences. They want community of the past and the thrill of playing a NEW experience.
The MMO feel is dead and gone now. Its the same o same o. I lust for a game that actually excites me to play once again. I've played them all as have many so we have many resident experts who know what they want vs what they don't want. Attention Developers! The future in MMO's are niche markets not grand scale like WoW. Give us something new , fresh and alive or FAIL
"EVE Online launched to mediocre subscription numbers and lingered at sub-100K subscription levels for two years, to later become one of the top MMO populations out there."
Yeah, by selling multiple accounts to overcome their perverse game design lol. I'd wager that 1/3 the players (us "noobs" although I almost racked up a year's sub time) only had 1 account. All the "pros" had multiple accounts to mine/market/mission grind with - and I'm not talking the alternate slots, I mean paid accounts.
Very true. I maintain that the only guaranteed way to make a successful (edit: non-theme park) game is to make the tools simple and easy to understand, the purpose clear and direct, and have the obstacles in the way add the complexity that makes players think about what they need to do and combine forces to do it. Theme parks satisfy all of these rules save complexity - they iron that out into a flat road so they don't obstruct anyone's path to the rewards.
Planetside had an excellent foundation going, but was just in the wrong hands to continue growing into the game that defined the FPS market, and did so as an MMO. This speaks to what is wrong with a big company buying a smaller company for its product and trying to manage it for success. It's the small company that understands why people will buy its product in the first place - big-company resources may help it launch the product, but big-company management isn't going to change it for the better.
While some of the core Ideas you have I agree with, such as MMORPG's should aim for Social opportunities and the social aspect playing a bigger role in their gameplay, I do not agree with the conclusions.
In my view, there is a conflict which resides somewhere in the middle between Game design and Marketing.
From one hand Designers make Themepark games, which and by their nature cannot appeal to all, and will only appeal to some.
And on the other hand Marketing is successfully inviting all to play them.
The result is that within the first 3 to 6 months there is a dramatic drop of subscriptions as all kinds of people realise that this is not a game that appeals to them in practice no matter how great the marketing made it sound in the beggining.
Of course, there is exceptions to this like there are exceptions to everything in life, and in this case the exception is Blizzard's WoW, it was just fortunate that its following made the leap to the MMORPG genre and through it a snow ball effect of popularity happened which reached the existing MMORPG playerbase as well. Yet lets not forget that WoW introduced a bigger number of new players to the genre than there was player of the genre at the time as well. And all these new players will not move to a clone of WoW.
So in my opinion trying to make a clone of it, can only be futile...loss of time and loss of investment.
I think the Devs should go back and rethink the approach from the beginning. What is that which popularised the genre in the first place?
A Themepark Game or a Virtual World?
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard