People that are saying that catacombs killed DAoC are just plain wrong in every aspect, TOA was a big failure, and there are many that will tell you they left because of it. Now im not saying that ToA killed DAoC, what I am going to tell you is that WoW killed DAoC, it came out just before the release of catacombs, and when it hit, pretty much everyone I knew went to WoW that was playing. I was in the beta of catacombs and WoW, catacombs was actually pretty good, some of the zones were not done well at all, but the new classes were fun to play. Don't say catacombs killed it, WoW killed it, and many left it after ToA and Frontiers as well ( I liked it but many didn't) it wasn't the same RvR it used to be for the long timers after that.. Classic servers were a great thing for people that liked the old not-so-OP artifact killers in frontiers that it became. But by that time people were into WoW and they weren't coming back with the other problems Mythic created. That and finally allowing buff bot's made the game unplayable for many, if you didn't or couldn't afford a 2nd account, you had no chance! Mythic did many things wrong with DAoC, making the game unplayable after an expac came out and upgading graphics and the engine to where you had to also upgrade your computer if you wanted to play the new content, many people played it through the older client, even with top of the line comp's, to combat the lag fest that the new clients created, and then they did away with that ability.
Should be a note to all future MMO developers, don't bring out an expac with upgraded tech if you want people to still stay and play your game, many will leave and play a game they can play on their computer rather than upgrading their computer too, and in today's economy, that is even more of a reason.
STAR TREK ONLINE is star wars galaxies 2.0 there just screwing over the player base before release.
it should be (for the most part) that star trek, taken as a whole is a rather deep thoughtful univers full of exploration discovery and learning with some combat thrown in.... well.. STO got 1 out of 4 right.
STO with its new owners cryptic basicly cut everything out of the star trek univers except for the pew pew 10 year old level combat shoot first and middle and last then do it all over again and again.
what REALLY gets my goat is that the star trek franchise had THE potential of them all !
I went to SOL system specificly to explore it figured that would take me a couple of hours NOT! first off they have 1 space station similar to earth & beyond size with the barest of features. then there is earth just a globe to look at, no major capitals to beem down to not even star fleet acadamy which to me was a must! there was also the moon but again just prety to look at and other than a sun that was farther than the space would let you fly to THERE WERE NO OTHER PLANETS no mercury venus mars jupiter saturn jupiter neptune pluto uranus I would have even for your big 3 jupiter saturn and mars and a couple of moons but NOTHING.
wnd where STO really missed the boat was one of THE best platforms for imbeded learning ever constructed and cryptic just let it pass by them in favor of more vidrogame violence parents should ban these type of games especially ones like this one that could have been powerful learning tools. players could have learned about moons and planets visited the memorials on the moon and the rovers on mars and even completed quests basted on planetary surveys but nope cryptic nah lets just shoot stuff over and over! it sounds friteningly like star wars galaxies reason for the "new gamer expirence"
Why is it that games SUCK? there shallow simplistic shooting galleries sure they might have pretty pictures and take a mean screenshot but the story lines and gameplay is thinner than the paper they are printed on.
why is the game bar so darn low? I know im an older player but games just havent gotten any better in the last 15 years they got bigger sure but not better id even swear the mobs have the same AI brain they used back when i played everquest.
I look for a game that is realistic yet fun where there are quests but i can still do my own thing where my participation in the game universe makes a difference where i feel like ive stepped into an alternate universe that you can do prety much everything you expect to be able to do where things and animals act like their supose to, where the economy isnt combat based. "! have a dream"
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
they also had large potential but seemed to forget that D&D was about freedom and socialization not just a zone stuffed with instances, and thats not even mentoning the cut rate hack mape they selected for their "world" instead of something like dragonlance or other popular map worlds yet another game with all the life cut out of it.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
STAR TREK ONLINE is star wars galaxies 2.0 there just screwing over the player base before release. it should be (for the most part) that star trek, taken as a whole is a rather deep thoughtful univers full of exploration discovery and learning with some combat thrown in.... well.. STO got 1 out of 4 right.
I take exception to the “SWG 2.0” comment. ST0, while lacking depth and in imagination works considerably better than SWG did on release. With the exception of new game issues that plague any new release, the game functions. I have found bugs but I have also found work-arounds. There doesn’t seem to be balance issues as yet but I haven't played PvP excessively yet either.
I understand your disappointment with a game that doesn’t meet your expectations, especially with an IP you love, but you can hardly compare a lack of content and features in a functional game with the game breaking bugs that were never fixed and directional changes to the game that SOE chose to make with SWG 4 years after release.
Even f you ignore the NGE which, I remind you, is why SWG was given the number one spot on Scott's list, STO is no where near the epic fail that SWG was on release.
Now, if we're still having 3+ hour outages, multiple times per day in 3 months, THEN you can make the argument that STO should have a place on this list. :-)
It's not really a news article if your telling everyone things that everyone already knew. All this did was embelish the flaws to sound much more grandiose than they in fact were.
dungeons and dragons should be on this list also. they also had large potential but seemed to forget that D&D was about freedom and socialization not just a zone stuffed with instances, and thats not even mentoning the cut rate hack mape they selected for their "world" instead of something like dragonlance or other popular map worlds yet another game with all the life cut out of it.
Again, I think you're mis-representing your dissappointment with the way a company has chosen to present your favourite IP with broken game mechanics. The games on the list had issues that were either broken or made gameplay/progression impossible.
I'm not trying to take away your argument that the games are shallow or do not represent the spirit of the IP but these games function.
As other have pointed out not mentioning or having Warhammer listed the current holder of the title "epic failure" how is it possible you did not list it.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
Another blazing article by one of the best mmorpg.writers - Lumm the Mad.
I must admit to a sense of quiet pride in this article because it was me who suggested, via a PM to LUM himself, that he might write an article on 'The Great Self-Inflicted MMO Disasters' featuring that Tiatnic of gaming decision, the coming of the NGE.
Funnily enough, I received a lifetime ban from Michael Bitton, the new community manager of mmorpg.com for starting a thread that covered this actual subject. I wish he would stop closing down discussions he doesn't like or understand and posting mad threads like this one:
Then these forums could go back to the free back-and-forth discussions they used to be when Laura Genender was coimmunity manager. Yes, yes, I am bitter, peevish etc, etc.
Don't bother banning me, Mike, I'll see myself out.
ahh the original EverCrack... so many painful memories, yet so many memorable moments too:D what the OP didn't realize is just how much WORSE ragefire camp was, on the zek servers:D I was in one of those 72 hr camps and the difference between a blue server and a red server is that on a blue server, the camp is done by 1 person or 1 group of people. on the red servers, the camp is done by the ENTIRE guild + allies:D On tallon zek. I did the camp for one of the most beloved "light"(TZ was a light vs dark type server) clerics on the server. the ENTIRE 72 hr camp our guild + allies had no less then 50 people camping it:D when it spawned at around 4AM EST. we had maybe 80 people in zone. roughly half engaged in ragefire, the other half watching/defending against any PKers/KSers that comes our way:D but we did get our 1st "light side" cleric epic that night and everyone was tired:D As EQ evolved, it became a raiding game. the gap between the casuals and raiders became about as wide as the grand canyon and there was really no motivation for casuals to continue. while it takes a full group of casual to kill a mob, a raider can easily solo the same mob and sometimes at a faster pace. at 1 point, the difference between casual and raider was the difference between 10k hp vs 20k hp... as the pool of recruits dwindled(from the lack of casuals) for the raiding guilds, attrition took its toll on the raiders. from the ever more complicated(long) flaggin/keying to the lack of qualified applicants, the raiders soon found greener pastures to feed on in other games. HOWEVER, credit must be given where it's due. to date, EQ remain the most enjoyable "raiding game" on the market. no other game come close in complexity and technical difficulty of EQ raiding script. For masochists who enjoy large scale raids where 1 mistake can cost you the entire raid, it's a rush to see everything fall into place. The sense of accomplishment in a well executed raid is worth the 3 months of trail and error learning the script and the hours wait getting the raid started:D EQ has trained more advanced raiders then any other games. and, WoW's raid game benefited greatly from the "already trained" raiders that fled from EQ:D its unfortunate that the blind mofo's steering the boat at SoE fail to understand that EQ is more of a niche game and do not refocus the game as a raiders paradise. instead of getting players closer to the meat of the game(raids) they still focus on putting more and more flags/keys between where the grind is and where the game is enjoyable. In the end, EQ killed itself with its AA system. it was a great idea when it came out, but after years and years of AA inflation, no new players have any chance of reaching "raid" level game because they are 2000AA's behind:D anyway RIP EQ. your accomplishments will forever be remembered in the MMO era as the game that proliferated the genera of MMO and the game that WoW possible.
Spot on... memories flooding back.
The intricacies of the raid scripts... the sheer exertion of the whole guild on first trips to places like Fear, or first Rathe Council attempts!!
Yes, it was very demanding, perhaps madly so with hindsight... but still my strongest and best MMO memories!!
So why did AC2 fail? Maybe a list of points would be nice. Thanks.
I'll be more than happy to do just that. First off, a lot of what Scott says was spot on. I know because I beta tested this game and played it for about 3 months before I left.
1) The game was universally panned because the subscription base was to be made up of Asheron's Call subscribers except one thing was wrong.
2) That one thing was that even though AC lagged behind games like EQ and UO, the player base was FIERCELY loyal. After having played a dozen or so mmorpg's, it still ranks as the most fun game of the genre I've ever played. Many felt AC 2 was a rip off.
3) Spellcraft : In AC , for the first six months to one year, you actually had to "learn" spells by mixing different ingredients together. It was a completely unique approach.
4) There was not one single structure in AC that you could not enter. For Asheron's 2 , there wasn't one single structure you could walk in to. It just seemed rather idiotic to have a town with buildings that had doors but yet you couldn't open them.
5) The developers basically LIED about the game. The way they marketed it was to tell players that as they used the crafting system, the towns would start to heal, having been destroyed by a huge cataclysm. This was a blatant lie. All that occurred at the end of each month is all the servers just received the same patch that fixed up the towns a bit.
6} The Tyrant creatures, the most powerful creature in the game was bugged so in effect if you were a ranged character like mage or archer, you could trap the tyrant on the landscape and kill him without taking one bit of damage. I exploited this bug for days and not only topped out my character's level but walked away with crazy amounts of loot and cash. In effect, the majority of the population had max leveled two weeks after release.
7) Once they fixed the tyrants, it was quite impossible to level on one's own without getting mowed down by creatures that were unkillable for most solo players.
8) MOUNTS. When these were introduced, you couldn't just buy a mount and be done with it, it was more like you leased them and they were only for a pretty short amount of time.
Don't get me wrong, I thought AC 2's graphics were by far the most beautiful I'd ever seen in many respects but there were just too many annoying factors about it.
"Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go"
Another clueless poster. No developer is perfect, but Turbine has had a lot more success than any other besides Blizzard and CCP. If you ask me, Turbine has done some of the best graphic designs in the business and you can play their games on a far greater range of systems than most.
As other have pointed out not mentioning or having Warhammer listed the current holder of the title "epic failure" how is it possible you did not list it.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
your silly talk about up to lvl 50 in eq2....lvl 50 were 5 years ago. why stop on 50 and then lvl a new.....eq2 is top lvl heavy and you should be happy they made it easier to get to lvl80 as a new player. it is a problem in ANY lvl based game that some content get obsolote or got to be lucky to get a group for the good things.
Originally posted by XxMaticxX (1) Seriously? Quality? That is like saying you bought a new car that didn't function well and most of the systems incomplete, but you are impressed by the quality of the company every time to take it to the repair shop. more like you bought a car and customers complain about various designs of the car, and that company recalls the cars they sold and changed them based on customer complaints =. Again you are looking at the effect and trying to make it the cause. People complained and left, because eq2 was loaded with failure at release. The redesigns were not something initiated by quality. They were in response to a lack of quality. yes they were initiated by quality, like i said SOE made the game too "hardcore" for the casual based gamer now a days so they changed it. Also I think if you look at the history of changes in EQ2 you will find soe wasn't responding to what its players wanted, but what soe thought new potential players wanted. That is why you see so many soe customers complaining of the "wowification" of their game and similar claims. Again, this isn't a company known for listening to its players. Now yeah they don't want easy mode, but if you were on the beta forums and early forums they were filled with complaints about ... shards, crafting, archtype system and all that crap that you mentioned. (2) This isn't about casual at all. EQ2 was a disjointed unfinished game that lacked direction and polish, because it was intentionally rushed to market to beat the competition by a few weeks. The result was that game crashed during a period when the mmo market was exploding. If 3 million people join the market and you have to close down servers, you are doing something wrong. its completely about casual, EQ2s overland zones were filled with group ONLY content, quests lines were mostly group only, dungeons were group only hell crafting had to nearly be done in a group since you needed parts from OTHER crafters in order to get a finished product in your own craft.
(3) Sites like this are just as full of people calling blizzard the devil and how horrible wow is, but that doesn't seem to stop wow from being successful. also helps they advertise. thats one of the only things i blame on SOE. Do you even understand why blizzard and bioware have great reputations? They make great games. If bioware or blizzard had their name on eq2 it wouldn't have released in the sad condition that it was and it would not have spent the next several years constantly changing design directions trying to find a market of players that would be interested in playing the game. Neither of those companies find it acceptable to push broken and unfinished products to the market. Soe has a long and ugly history of screwing things up and some of it intentionally. Like I said already, great games sell themselves. Somehow I don't think such a masterpiece is being held back by a small handful of angry former customers. BGs, arenas and what not, thats blizzard changing direction of the game as well. so according to you that means WoW = fail. since WoW was a PVE game when it was launched. ne
Major changes, overhauls and removal of systems are not initiated by quality as you keep trying to make it sound. They are initiated by lack of quality. A company that intentionally rushes an unfinished product to market, especially when the beta testers are telling them not to, doesn't really stand as a pillar of quality.
There is a reason people chose to sit in a log in que for hours instead of playing eq2 where there was no waiting. Soe even had an ad campaign about "no waiting lines" and smed was rather smug about it.
Also, battlegrounds and arenas are additions to a game. That is called new content, which is drastically different than revamping major systems that your playerbase doesn't enjoy. Nice strawman attack though.
In the end, you can try to put lipstick on the pig all you want, but in the end it is still just a pig and there are reasons eq2 made the list.
infact ALOT of ppl dont like the changes, but is in minority....SOE is a very proffesional company that listens to what ppl want. MOST wanted crafting to change where I personally found it AWESOME you needed other crafters to do rare crafts.
I loved spirit runs but because ALOT complained about it were changed.
I loved access quests, since made it an achievement to reach new lands. but ppl on their 3rd alt spending ages on get groups for it didnt - and do still think they just should have made it account wide when you got flagged.
Class changes. its silly to say you were half through the game before "becoming" your class. first off lvl 20 always were easy to reach it were the lvl 45-50 that took time since hardly were any solo content in the endgame. 2nd there is no real diffrence now from then other than you called by your class name from start.....personally I liked subclasses, find it cool you start out as a more or less undefined class but by your chars experiences in the world find your path,
over all SOE changed the product for the consumers and stil does. its not always for what I WANT, but for the MAJORITY. Id wish they had sticked to their original gameplay......but money talks.....and MOST is happy about it.
talking about PCs had to be top of the league I find trash too....a guy in my guild playing it on a 8 yo PC, ONLY thing required is 2gb RAM rest can be scaled down even if looks disgustion in lowest settings doesnt take much of a PC to bring the looks up to something acceptable....really think some ppl here didnt look in the options and know to turn off the fluff that their PC cant handle.
over all still find it incredible silly EQ2 is on this list and the only reason it and EQ1 is, is to bring up a couple of names everyone know....too few care if some little company made more of an MMO than they could handle....now bring up SOE...THEN you are sure ppl will react
"Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go" Another clueless poster. No developer is perfect, but Turbine has had a lot more success than any other besides Blizzard and CCP. If you ask me, Turbine has done some of the best graphic designs in the business and you can play their games on a far greater range of systems than most.
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
AC2 - Gone
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
"Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go" Another clueless poster. No developer is perfect, but Turbine has had a lot more success than any other besides Blizzard and CCP. If you ask me, Turbine has done some of the best graphic designs in the business and you can play their games on a far greater range of systems than most.
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
That is utterly untrue. There's not one time in years of playing that this ever happened. There was clipping on adjoining walls that were near doors but that's about it. If you're going to comment on games, it's only respectful to get things right. I'm still waiting for ONE developer to create a game this good. It hasn't happened yet. Still the champion of event update quest lines. No mmorpg has had the guts or the ingenuity to pull off anything like "Defense of the Shard" that occurred on Thistledown.
It would take me a 1000 words or more to describe what happened there.
AC2 - Gone
COULD have been a great game but too many early problems killed it.
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
Never played it so no comment.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
4 tries and only 1 decent outing.
Well that might be true if that was all there was to the game but sorry, this analysis is so flawed, it's hard to know where to begin. First, LOTRO is a well-rounded game that taken as a whole is well executed. Oh I could say, crafting and you'd say "yeah we want to sit around all day sewing" or if I said the instances are incredibly well done you'd say "yeah, I need 4 other players to do them".
It wouldn't really matter what I brought up, you don't like the game so of course it has no redeeming qualities. Yes, I am definately a fanboy of LOTRO because I can appreciate a team that goes out of their way to provide an environment that isn't concentrated solely on dragging players into a loot race such as WOW.
LOTRO is a role players wet dream, the only true mmorpg that is out there. The story lines are engaging, the combat--well we must play a different game because it's a lot more interesting then WOW or any of the other current games around. I don't know what rpgs you play but all the ones I've ever played have random mobs dotted throughout the world.
I’d figure losing 90% of your user base (over 700,000 subscribers) in less then 3 months after launch would warrant an honorable mention at least.
Especially since AOC holds the record for the largest mass exit in MMO history, and would be a perfect example of what "not to do" for some of these future (large budget) MMOs on the horizon.
You could add a lot more examples in all games, but you do need to have a natural selection.
It is also interesting that afterwards everyone can see where it went wrong. Probably AoC and War are too recently published to be included in the list (publicity wise it wouldn't be smart to list them as legendary failures now on this website).
When looking back, ... the mmorpg industry didn't make it too difficult for Blizzard either.
72 hours without sleep. It shows the old games were all about having no life and time sinks as a replacement for skill/challenge.
Logical.
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
infact ALOT of ppl dont like the changes, but is in minority....SOE is a very proffesional company that listens to what ppl want. MOST wanted crafting to change where I personally found it AWESOME you needed other crafters to do rare crafts. <<snip>> over all still find it incredible silly EQ2 is on this list and the only reason it and EQ1 is, is to bring up a couple of names everyone know....too few care if some little company made more of an MMO than they could handle....now bring up SOE...THEN you are sure ppl will react
EQ2 was intentionally released early to directly compete with blizzard. Soe delivered what they thought the gaming market wanted and what would define a more casual game, but it was so far off base that they spent the first few years constantly rebuilding their game to stop the bleeding of subscribers. When the entire mmo market was exploding with new players at never before seen rates, EQ2 was closing servers and revamping major design concepts in EQ2. There is no way to spin what happened in EQ2 as a company listening to players or something that was quality.
Yes EQ2 deserves to be on the list, because it was filled with poor choices from top to bottom and is run by a company that historically doesn't listen to their players. It is funny to hear claims that soe listens, when one of the major complaints form current players is that soe is constantly trying to make changes to the game to appeal to players of other games.
I'm sure the majority of people wanted station cash, station exchange and station loot card mania too?
How many times do the leadership of soe have to make apologies and promise to start listening to their players?
Comments
People that are saying that catacombs killed DAoC are just plain wrong in every aspect, TOA was a big failure, and there are many that will tell you they left because of it. Now im not saying that ToA killed DAoC, what I am going to tell you is that WoW killed DAoC, it came out just before the release of catacombs, and when it hit, pretty much everyone I knew went to WoW that was playing. I was in the beta of catacombs and WoW, catacombs was actually pretty good, some of the zones were not done well at all, but the new classes were fun to play. Don't say catacombs killed it, WoW killed it, and many left it after ToA and Frontiers as well ( I liked it but many didn't) it wasn't the same RvR it used to be for the long timers after that.. Classic servers were a great thing for people that liked the old not-so-OP artifact killers in frontiers that it became. But by that time people were into WoW and they weren't coming back with the other problems Mythic created. That and finally allowing buff bot's made the game unplayable for many, if you didn't or couldn't afford a 2nd account, you had no chance! Mythic did many things wrong with DAoC, making the game unplayable after an expac came out and upgading graphics and the engine to where you had to also upgrade your computer if you wanted to play the new content, many people played it through the older client, even with top of the line comp's, to combat the lag fest that the new clients created, and then they did away with that ability.
Should be a note to all future MMO developers, don't bring out an expac with upgraded tech if you want people to still stay and play your game, many will leave and play a game they can play on their computer rather than upgrading their computer too, and in today's economy, that is even more of a reason.
STAR TREK ONLINE is star wars galaxies 2.0 there just screwing over the player base before release.
it should be (for the most part) that star trek, taken as a whole is a rather deep thoughtful univers full of exploration discovery and learning with some combat thrown in.... well.. STO got 1 out of 4 right.
STO with its new owners cryptic basicly cut everything out of the star trek univers except for the pew pew 10 year old level combat shoot first and middle and last then do it all over again and again.
what REALLY gets my goat is that the star trek franchise had THE potential of them all !
I went to SOL system specificly to explore it figured that would take me a couple of hours NOT! first off they have 1 space station similar to earth & beyond size with the barest of features. then there is earth just a globe to look at, no major capitals to beem down to not even star fleet acadamy which to me was a must! there was also the moon but again just prety to look at and other than a sun that was farther than the space would let you fly to THERE WERE NO OTHER PLANETS no mercury venus mars jupiter saturn jupiter neptune pluto uranus I would have even for your big 3 jupiter saturn and mars and a couple of moons but NOTHING.
wnd where STO really missed the boat was one of THE best platforms for imbeded learning ever constructed and cryptic just let it pass by them in favor of more vidrogame violence parents should ban these type of games especially ones like this one that could have been powerful learning tools. players could have learned about moons and planets visited the memorials on the moon and the rovers on mars and even completed quests basted on planetary surveys but nope cryptic nah lets just shoot stuff over and over! it sounds friteningly like star wars galaxies reason for the "new gamer expirence"
Why is it that games SUCK? there shallow simplistic shooting galleries sure they might have pretty pictures and take a mean screenshot but the story lines and gameplay is thinner than the paper they are printed on.
why is the game bar so darn low? I know im an older player but games just havent gotten any better in the last 15 years they got bigger sure but not better id even swear the mobs have the same AI brain they used back when i played everquest.
I look for a game that is realistic yet fun where there are quests but i can still do my own thing where my participation in the game universe makes a difference where i feel like ive stepped into an alternate universe that you can do prety much everything you expect to be able to do where things and animals act like their supose to, where the economy isnt combat based. "! have a dream"
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
dungeons and dragons should be on this list also.
they also had large potential but seemed to forget that D&D was about freedom and socialization not just a zone stuffed with instances, and thats not even mentoning the cut rate hack mape they selected for their "world" instead of something like dragonlance or other popular map worlds yet another game with all the life cut out of it.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
Reading all these replies and the original subject, makes me kinda nostalgic. I remember all these games as if it was only yesterday.
I do have to admit that Scott has it pretty much on the dot... Can't wait for the second part.
Great work.
I take exception to the “SWG 2.0” comment. ST0, while lacking depth and in imagination works considerably better than SWG did on release. With the exception of new game issues that plague any new release, the game functions. I have found bugs but I have also found work-arounds. There doesn’t seem to be balance issues as yet but I haven't played PvP excessively yet either.
I understand your disappointment with a game that doesn’t meet your expectations, especially with an IP you love, but you can hardly compare a lack of content and features in a functional game with the game breaking bugs that were never fixed and directional changes to the game that SOE chose to make with SWG 4 years after release.
Even f you ignore the NGE which, I remind you, is why SWG was given the number one spot on Scott's list, STO is no where near the epic fail that SWG was on release.
Now, if we're still having 3+ hour outages, multiple times per day in 3 months, THEN you can make the argument that STO should have a place on this list. :-)
-=[ Gaidin ]=-
It's not really a news article if your telling everyone things that everyone already knew. All this did was embelish the flaws to sound much more grandiose than they in fact were.
Again, I think you're mis-representing your dissappointment with the way a company has chosen to present your favourite IP with broken game mechanics. The games on the list had issues that were either broken or made gameplay/progression impossible.
I'm not trying to take away your argument that the games are shallow or do not represent the spirit of the IP but these games function.
-=[ Gaidin ]=-
This article was a fantastic read. Got a few good laughs out of this, not to mention a whole mind load of nostalgia. Can't wait for number 2.
Very nice article with some very memorable moments for me !!
Probably the best article I've ever read on this site that wasn't a review/preview.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Yep, it was almost as it was written by itself! You read and think "how stupid can people be?"
If not for ther NGE in SWG......i would still be playing it. Eager to read the next.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
Another blazing article by one of the best mmorpg.writers - Lumm the Mad.
I must admit to a sense of quiet pride in this article because it was me who suggested, via a PM to LUM himself, that he might write an article on 'The Great Self-Inflicted MMO Disasters' featuring that Tiatnic of gaming decision, the coming of the NGE.
Funnily enough, I received a lifetime ban from Michael Bitton, the new community manager of mmorpg.com for starting a thread that covered this actual subject. I wish he would stop closing down discussions he doesn't like or understand and posting mad threads like this one:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/265162/READ-FIRST-Notice-of-Increased-Moderation.html
Then these forums could go back to the free back-and-forth discussions they used to be when Laura Genender was coimmunity manager. Yes, yes, I am bitter, peevish etc, etc.
Don't bother banning me, Mike, I'll see myself out.
Spot on... memories flooding back.
The intricacies of the raid scripts... the sheer exertion of the whole guild on first trips to places like Fear, or first Rathe Council attempts!!
Yes, it was very demanding, perhaps madly so with hindsight... but still my strongest and best MMO memories!!
I'll be more than happy to do just that. First off, a lot of what Scott says was spot on. I know because I beta tested this game and played it for about 3 months before I left.
1) The game was universally panned because the subscription base was to be made up of Asheron's Call subscribers except one thing was wrong.
2) That one thing was that even though AC lagged behind games like EQ and UO, the player base was FIERCELY loyal. After having played a dozen or so mmorpg's, it still ranks as the most fun game of the genre I've ever played. Many felt AC 2 was a rip off.
3) Spellcraft : In AC , for the first six months to one year, you actually had to "learn" spells by mixing different ingredients together. It was a completely unique approach.
4) There was not one single structure in AC that you could not enter. For Asheron's 2 , there wasn't one single structure you could walk in to. It just seemed rather idiotic to have a town with buildings that had doors but yet you couldn't open them.
5) The developers basically LIED about the game. The way they marketed it was to tell players that as they used the crafting system, the towns would start to heal, having been destroyed by a huge cataclysm. This was a blatant lie. All that occurred at the end of each month is all the servers just received the same patch that fixed up the towns a bit.
6} The Tyrant creatures, the most powerful creature in the game was bugged so in effect if you were a ranged character like mage or archer, you could trap the tyrant on the landscape and kill him without taking one bit of damage. I exploited this bug for days and not only topped out my character's level but walked away with crazy amounts of loot and cash. In effect, the majority of the population had max leveled two weeks after release.
7) Once they fixed the tyrants, it was quite impossible to level on one's own without getting mowed down by creatures that were unkillable for most solo players.
8) MOUNTS. When these were introduced, you couldn't just buy a mount and be done with it, it was more like you leased them and they were only for a pretty short amount of time.
Don't get me wrong, I thought AC 2's graphics were by far the most beautiful I'd ever seen in many respects but there were just too many annoying factors about it.
"Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go"
Another clueless poster. No developer is perfect, but Turbine has had a lot more success than any other besides Blizzard and CCP. If you ask me, Turbine has done some of the best graphic designs in the business and you can play their games on a far greater range of systems than most.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
your silly talk about up to lvl 50 in eq2....lvl 50 were 5 years ago. why stop on 50 and then lvl a new.....eq2 is top lvl heavy and you should be happy they made it easier to get to lvl80 as a new player. it is a problem in ANY lvl based game that some content get obsolote or got to be lucky to get a group for the good things.
Major changes, overhauls and removal of systems are not initiated by quality as you keep trying to make it sound. They are initiated by lack of quality. A company that intentionally rushes an unfinished product to market, especially when the beta testers are telling them not to, doesn't really stand as a pillar of quality.
There is a reason people chose to sit in a log in que for hours instead of playing eq2 where there was no waiting. Soe even had an ad campaign about "no waiting lines" and smed was rather smug about it.
Also, battlegrounds and arenas are additions to a game. That is called new content, which is drastically different than revamping major systems that your playerbase doesn't enjoy. Nice strawman attack though.
In the end, you can try to put lipstick on the pig all you want, but in the end it is still just a pig and there are reasons eq2 made the list.
infact ALOT of ppl dont like the changes, but is in minority....SOE is a very proffesional company that listens to what ppl want. MOST wanted crafting to change where I personally found it AWESOME you needed other crafters to do rare crafts.
I loved spirit runs but because ALOT complained about it were changed.
I loved access quests, since made it an achievement to reach new lands. but ppl on their 3rd alt spending ages on get groups for it didnt - and do still think they just should have made it account wide when you got flagged.
Class changes. its silly to say you were half through the game before "becoming" your class. first off lvl 20 always were easy to reach it were the lvl 45-50 that took time since hardly were any solo content in the endgame. 2nd there is no real diffrence now from then other than you called by your class name from start.....personally I liked subclasses, find it cool you start out as a more or less undefined class but by your chars experiences in the world find your path,
over all SOE changed the product for the consumers and stil does. its not always for what I WANT, but for the MAJORITY. Id wish they had sticked to their original gameplay......but money talks.....and MOST is happy about it.
talking about PCs had to be top of the league I find trash too....a guy in my guild playing it on a 8 yo PC, ONLY thing required is 2gb RAM rest can be scaled down even if looks disgustion in lowest settings doesnt take much of a PC to bring the looks up to something acceptable....really think some ppl here didnt look in the options and know to turn off the fluff that their PC cant handle.
over all still find it incredible silly EQ2 is on this list and the only reason it and EQ1 is, is to bring up a couple of names everyone know....too few care if some little company made more of an MMO than they could handle....now bring up SOE...THEN you are sure ppl will react
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
AC2 - Gone
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
4 tries and only 1 decent outing.
3 of the first 4 games are all time great PvP games.
UO
SB
DAOC
Flaws and all.
For UO, I love it how that jpeg chart leaves out 2003 and it says : DID NOT HAPPEN.
This is especially funny, because in 2003 Ultima Online had the highest number of subscriptions ever, three years after Trammel..
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
That is utterly untrue. There's not one time in years of playing that this ever happened. There was clipping on adjoining walls that were near doors but that's about it. If you're going to comment on games, it's only respectful to get things right. I'm still waiting for ONE developer to create a game this good. It hasn't happened yet. Still the champion of event update quest lines. No mmorpg has had the guts or the ingenuity to pull off anything like "Defense of the Shard" that occurred on Thistledown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnj9afinaYI&feature=related
It would take me a 1000 words or more to describe what happened there.
AC2 - Gone
COULD have been a great game but too many early problems killed it.
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
Never played it so no comment.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
4 tries and only 1 decent outing.
Well that might be true if that was all there was to the game but sorry, this analysis is so flawed, it's hard to know where to begin. First, LOTRO is a well-rounded game that taken as a whole is well executed. Oh I could say, crafting and you'd say "yeah we want to sit around all day sewing" or if I said the instances are incredibly well done you'd say "yeah, I need 4 other players to do them".
It wouldn't really matter what I brought up, you don't like the game so of course it has no redeeming qualities. Yes, I am definately a fanboy of LOTRO because I can appreciate a team that goes out of their way to provide an environment that isn't concentrated solely on dragging players into a loot race such as WOW.
LOTRO is a role players wet dream, the only true mmorpg that is out there. The story lines are engaging, the combat--well we must play a different game because it's a lot more interesting then WOW or any of the other current games around. I don't know what rpgs you play but all the ones I've ever played have random mobs dotted throughout the world.
Good read, but where’s Age of Conan on the list?
I’d figure losing 90% of your user base (over 700,000 subscribers) in less then 3 months after launch would warrant an honorable mention at least.
Especially since AOC holds the record for the largest mass exit in MMO history, and would be a perfect example of what "not to do" for some of these future (large budget) MMOs on the horizon.
Excellent read.
You could add a lot more examples in all games, but you do need to have a natural selection.
It is also interesting that afterwards everyone can see where it went wrong. Probably AoC and War are too recently published to be included in the list (publicity wise it wouldn't be smart to list them as legendary failures now on this website).
When looking back, ... the mmorpg industry didn't make it too difficult for Blizzard either.
72 hours without sleep. It shows the old games were all about having no life and time sinks as a replacement for skill/challenge.
Logical.
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
EQ2 was intentionally released early to directly compete with blizzard. Soe delivered what they thought the gaming market wanted and what would define a more casual game, but it was so far off base that they spent the first few years constantly rebuilding their game to stop the bleeding of subscribers. When the entire mmo market was exploding with new players at never before seen rates, EQ2 was closing servers and revamping major design concepts in EQ2. There is no way to spin what happened in EQ2 as a company listening to players or something that was quality.
Yes EQ2 deserves to be on the list, because it was filled with poor choices from top to bottom and is run by a company that historically doesn't listen to their players. It is funny to hear claims that soe listens, when one of the major complaints form current players is that soe is constantly trying to make changes to the game to appeal to players of other games.
I'm sure the majority of people wanted station cash, station exchange and station loot card mania too?
How many times do the leadership of soe have to make apologies and promise to start listening to their players?