Quick question here. How could we have a formula for quests that did not equate to the norm, such as get me 10 herbs to heal my friend, Kill 10 boars for food ect? What Ideas do you all have that can get us away from this norm here? We have been questing for the same crap for years and years. However, I cannot think of any other way to approach an RPG/MMO.
Before games became quest heavy we used to grind on mob camps, (DAOC, EQ, etc) so the current design is not the only one out there. Over in EVE the real story is in the players, not the quests, so we live in a virtual world and while there is some questing in the form of mission running and story arcs, they are not the integral part of the gameplay.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can understand that, as I have played Eve since the beginning. But what I refer to is quests in PVE games, or true RPG games. The last new RPG game I have played was Mass Effect 2, and it is a story driven RPG that takes you on a great journey without killing 10 rats to gain a level. Although there is a section in the game that requires you to kill a certain number of X, its all story driven. I think that is where Bioware is taking us. A story driven MMO where we do not kill or take this to there. Only thing is I do not know how this will fair will millions of players. It will be interesting to see how Bioware handles it. They might actually begin a revolution in MMO design.. Or so I hope!
lol!most of the time financer expect to see some form of wow copy
its a fact every successfull endeavor is always asked by investor to be copied
their mentality?if it worked for blizzard it will work for us,then a year later investor finds out they havent made money and lash out at game maker even tho it was at the investor explicit recommendation the game copied a dated model
so in the end the next big title will probably come from blizzard since blizzard couldnt care less what their boss activision or any
@#$^%*^&;())_&would like to have blizzard would just respond this:let us do our job and everything will be fine
but since lot of company have been having financial issue(yes including activision)every employe want to be sent to the successfull outfit
my take on this:if activision employe cant make successfull mmo in activion why would they be better in blizzard ?
they wont they ll just corrupt the blizzard team into lazyness!
same with any outfit!check soe!they took guys from movie industry and sent them into mmo making or publishing
im sorry but employe have become specialised for a reason,you dont ask a pig farmer to maker 32 nm intel chip
1) Promise the moon [...] 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. [...] 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for [...] 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. [...] 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable [...]
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
1) Promise the moon [...] 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. [...] 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for [...] 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. [...] 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable [...]
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
the main issue blizzard faced is the same issue soe (eq1)faced!
it was too popular the network just couldntcope with the popularity they had to instance everything and even then at day (about 18 month ago)they still had web issue.
now the number of player has been cut in half so internet pressure as been relieved but if player go back in masses
at cataclysm the bottleneck will still be there (net provider)
and various issue will still pop up ,and if somewhere along the line some net provider up their security but forgot to update
those that can acess like it happened countless time in the past we ll be facing the same issue we faced so often in so many game!
12. make an MMO off a popular IP like warhammer then create a wussy looking side vs. a kool menancing side then make the game all unbalanced.
LOL I disagree with your second point as well.
Its not the IP. Age of Conan could have been uber. The question is what you're making out of it. A Conan game which offers 3 races, one of them the one of Conan (forgot its name), while NOBODY but Conan has this race in the original books, is an insult. You could have literally hundreds of races in such a game. Additionally they're all human, so having multiple races wouldnt even require that much graphic work, just a bit variance in the rulesystem department.
Some IPs are hard though. I am still not able to think of D&D as a good MMO rulesystem. D&D is made for roleplaying. D&D PvP = uber suck.
good to have a insight from a very experienced game developer... oh wait, nvm.
Those who can, do. Those who can't...criticize...
Do you have to be a mortgage lender to spot the flaws in the banking system that contributed to the recent global economic down turn? Do you have to be a mechanical engineer to notice that the brakes in your recently recalled car weren't functioning? I believe the same rules of logic apply to those who enjoy MMOs--or not, if the MMO is broken, overhyped, poorly revamped, missing features, full of cash grabs etc.
Do game developers really only listen to feedback from other game developers, instead of their paying customers? If that's the case, then I'd add that to my list of ways to kill your MMO:
6) Don't listen to your customers, because you always know better than them. After all, if they can't program the game, their opinion means squat.
7.) Put too much emphasis on PvP so that leveling becoimes near impossible and the majority of the playerbase are obnoxious, small-dicked 15 year olds with axes to grind.
In response to many of the points raised, I think this thread has a lot of valuable MMO gamer feedback for the industry. Many have highlighted issues that really reduce the fun factor in MMOs, and you have even thought about some of the systemic issues related to this (investors, vision, time-lines etc.)
The thread is much better for all these contributions imo, thanks.
For those who sound defensive, this isn't an attack on you or your work. It's a commentary on industry trends. Some of these trends may, in fact, be the reason your excellent idea for a game (and possibly your last 6 months of coding) was tossed into the recycling bin.
1) Promise the moon [...] 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. [...] 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for [...] 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. [...] 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable [...]
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
Games with bugs are common. Game missing "core mechanics" advertised on the box are less common. Games with broken "core mechanics" such as chat, movement, combat are also less common.
I'm not referring to minor glitches here; so yes, I can think of games that weren't plagued by these major issues at release. I can also think of some that were.
New quests are hard to think of? No they are not, but they are done within time constraints and increasingly in MMO’s by people who are not writers. We have had staff articles on how quests are being written by just about anybody on the MMO team and writers are not being employed. Also the mechanics of a MMO limit the types of quest you can do.
A quest example:
The Bridal Gift – Your patron (a not that used in MMO’s story vehicle that can be used for anything) sends you to a region where two tribes are often in conflict to try to calm things down. You are guided (probably by a big neon sign over a npc’s head these days) to the father of a bride who is having trouble coming up with the dowry for his daughter. The couple are from two peoples who do not traditionally get on so the wedding is something of a tense affair. You are sent out to do some traditional collecting, it could be shells down at the beach, the petals of the ravenous vampire flower, whatever.
The gift is wrapped up and you take it to the Father of the groom. Once you are with the groom’s family you learn that the groom has to make a gift for his bride to demonstrate his worthiness as a craftsman. You step in and use your crafting skills to produce a quality item; this may take a while as the crafting system does not guarantee a result. The bride seems surprised at the quality of the gift but tells everyone it is wondeful and just what she expected him to make her. One of the bridesmaids seems about to say something about the groom but the bride steps on her foot.
In return the bride is meant to cook a dinner for the groom. Guess what, she can’t cook to save her life. You step in either crafting or finding a meal to take to the groom. The groom does not look to happy to have to eat it, maybe he has had some of her fare before? Cue groom enjoying the food and proclaiming to his family how wonderful it tastes, even as he looks rather surprised.
The dowry has now been opened, but hang on the groom’s family says it is not enough. Time for some diplomacy (ala Vanguard), You soon realise this is just an opportunity for the grooms relatives to bring up old grievances and you need to use your card game skills to convince them to calm down.
You find out at the end of this that the bride is a craftswoman and the groom a chef, so of course they could not make their own gifts! But the traditions have to be seen to be done, especially when so many in the families where against it.
There you go, one quest chain. Trouble is they have to churn out loads of these a day, staying within programming constraints, think about all the npcs and text needed for the one I have just knocked out. And they are being done by people who trained in programming or the tea boy. One npc asking you to go and fetch 100 shells and come back to him is a lot easier.
Best way to kill your MMORPG = have SOE publish it.
You'll be dead before you even launch no matter how awesome the game is!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
New quests are hard to think of? No they are not, but they are done within time constraints and increasingly in MMO’s by people who are not writers. We have had staff articles on how quests are being written by just about anybody on the MMO team and writers are not being employed. Also the mechanics of a MMO limit the types of quest you can do.
A quest example: The Bridal Gift – Your patron (a not that used in MMO’s story vehicle that can be used for anything) sends you to a region where two tribes are often in conflict to try to calm things down. You are guided (probably by a big neon sign over a npc’s head these days) to the father of a bride who is having trouble coming up with the dowry for his daughter. The couple are from two peoples who do not traditionally get on so the wedding is something of a tense affair. You are sent out to do some traditional collecting, it could be shells down at the beach, the petals of the ravenous vampire flower, whatever. The gift is wrapped up and you take it to the Father of the groom. Once you are with the groom’s family you learn that the groom has to make a gift for his bride to demonstrate his worthiness as a craftsman. You step in and use your crafting skills to produce a quality item; this may take a while as the crafting system does not guarantee a result. The bride seems surprised at the quality of the gift but tells everyone it is wondeful and just what she expected him to make her. One of the bridesmaids seems about to say something about the groom but the bride steps on her foot. In return the bride is meant to cook a dinner for the groom. Guess what, she can’t cook to save her life. You step in either crafting or finding a meal to take to the groom. The groom does not look to happy to have to eat it, maybe he has had some of her fare before? Cue groom enjoying the food and proclaiming to his family how wonderful it tastes, even as he looks rather surprised. The dowry has now been opened, but hang on the groom’s family says it is not enough. Time for some diplomacy (ala Vanguard), You soon realise this is just an opportunity for the grooms relatives to bring up old grievances and you need to use your card game skills to convince them to calm down. You find out at the end of this that the bride is a craftswoman and the groom a chef, so of course they could not make their own gifts! But the traditions have to be seen to be done, especially when so many in the families where against it.
There you go, one quest chain. Trouble is they have to churn out loads of these a day, staying within programming constraints, think about all the npcs and text needed for the one I have just knocked out. And they are being done by people who trained in programming or the tea boy. One npc asking you to go and fetch 100 shells and come back to him is a lot easier.
Brilliant post. Well done.
So, what if we write the quests?
In tabletop D&D one person had to be the Dungeon Master right. Some of us are inclined that way. We prefer it to playing. So why not set up rules (that protect the player from a quest writer being overly harsh/overly generous) and some tools, and let those of us who want to create some of the content do so?
Best way to kill your MMORPG = have SOE publish it. You'll be dead before you even launch no matter how awesome the game is!
As someone who played The Matrix Online for the last 3 years it was around, I can attest to that. The game had almost limitless potential, but Sony treated it like a leper. No promotion. No real growth. A constantly downsizing staff. By the end, everything that made it what it was had been taken away. Granted, I think we all saw the end soming for that last year, but still...
Best way to kill your MMORPG = have SOE publish it. You'll be dead before you even launch no matter how awesome the game is!
As someone who played The Matrix Online for the last 3 years it was around, I can attest to that. The game had almost limitless potential, but Sony treated it like a leper. No promotion. No real growth. A constantly downsizing staff. By the end, everything that made it what it was had been taken away. Granted, I think we all saw the end soming for that last year, but still...
Good ol' SOE , the same fate happened to Planetside -- i sure loved how they represented the game in every SOE fan Faire.*snicker*...
I've been playing MMOs for the better part of a decade now, and I've seen a lot of things in this business that make me shake my head. I've seen companies do things to their MMOs that would compare to a bullet in the head. I've made a list of the biggest MMO killers in my opinion, and I'd like to hear yours. 1) Promise the moon and deliver a radioactive piece of space junk: Some companies hype their game so much before release that it is impossible for it to be greeted with enthusiasm, even if it is half decent. Usually though, these massively hyped MMOs aren't half decent at all, which brings us to the next point. 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. How many people have played a game where an important feature either didn't work or wasn't in the game, even though it was advertised on the box you found the disks in? 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for respecs, more cash for playable races, more cash for buffs, and even more cash for the best gear. Heck, one company even charges you extra cash just for a random chance of getting some of the best gear. You pay hoping that you'll get a coveted item, but in many cases you'll get nothing but junk. 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. Forum posts highlighting bugs mysteriously disappear, along with their author. Publishers hold face to face summits with players, promise them bug fixes and content, server mergers (anything they want to hear) but then fail to deliver. 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable because someone on your staff decided to "save the game" by reinventing it. /cue the backlash, followed by crickets on your empty servers.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've been playing MMOs for the better part of a decade now, and I've seen a lot of things in this business that make me shake my head. I've seen companies do things to their MMOs that would compare to a bullet in the head. I've made a list of the biggest MMO killers in my opinion, and I'd like to hear yours. 1) Promise the moon and deliver a radioactive piece of space junk: Some companies hype their game so much before release that it is impossible for it to be greeted with enthusiasm, even if it is half decent. Usually though, these massively hyped MMOs aren't half decent at all, which brings us to the next point. 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. How many people have played a game where an important feature either didn't work or wasn't in the game, even though it was advertised on the box you found the disks in? 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for respecs, more cash for playable races, more cash for buffs, and even more cash for the best gear. Heck, one company even charges you extra cash just for a random chance of getting some of the best gear. You pay hoping that you'll get a coveted item, but in many cases you'll get nothing but junk. 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. Forum posts highlighting bugs mysteriously disappear, along with their author. Publishers hold face to face summits with players, promise them bug fixes and content, server mergers (anything they want to hear) but then fail to deliver. 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable because someone on your staff decided to "save the game" by reinventing it. /cue the backlash, followed by crickets on your empty servers.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
I've been playing MMOs for the better part of a decade now, and I've seen a lot of things in this business that make me shake my head. I've seen companies do things to their MMOs that would compare to a bullet in the head. I've made a list of the biggest MMO killers in my opinion, and I'd like to hear yours. 1) Promise the moon and deliver a radioactive piece of space junk: Some companies hype their game so much before release that it is impossible for it to be greeted with enthusiasm, even if it is half decent. Usually though, these massively hyped MMOs aren't half decent at all, which brings us to the next point. 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. How many people have played a game where an important feature either didn't work or wasn't in the game, even though it was advertised on the box you found the disks in? 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for respecs, more cash for playable races, more cash for buffs, and even more cash for the best gear. Heck, one company even charges you extra cash just for a random chance of getting some of the best gear. You pay hoping that you'll get a coveted item, but in many cases you'll get nothing but junk. 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. Forum posts highlighting bugs mysteriously disappear, along with their author. Publishers hold face to face summits with players, promise them bug fixes and content, server mergers (anything they want to hear) but then fail to deliver. 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable because someone on your staff decided to "save the game" by reinventing it. /cue the backlash, followed by crickets on your empty servers.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
Agreed. I also agree about LOTRO especially when it was SoA. I could see (when I tried WoW for myself) the appeal to the masses that "triggered" the WoW phenomenon but I didn't last very long - 3 months or so.
For developer teams I think that must be very frustrating - knowing your game is better but only having a small fraction of the playerbase of WoW - and its a kind of inertia in that group of players that you can't do anything about. I made WoW friends who were clearly burned out on WoW but didn't know about other MMOs like LOTRO so they just kept playing WoW and being grumpy much of the time. Even when I urged them to try LOTRO I could see they needed to become extremely unhappy before they would give up WoW and think seriously about another game. It was not nice to see. WoW definitely has an addictive drug like quality.
I've been playing MMOs for the better part of a decade now, and I've seen a lot of things in this business that make me shake my head. I've seen companies do things to their MMOs that would compare to a bullet in the head. I've made a list of the biggest MMO killers in my opinion, and I'd like to hear yours. 1) Promise the moon and deliver a radioactive piece of space junk: Some companies hype their game so much before release that it is impossible for it to be greeted with enthusiasm, even if it is half decent. Usually though, these massively hyped MMOs aren't half decent at all, which brings us to the next point. 2) Make sure that core game mechanics are broken at launch, or missing altogether. How many people have played a game where an important feature either didn't work or wasn't in the game, even though it was advertised on the box you found the disks in? 3) Gold-digging (by the publisher btw). Some games want cash for the disk, cash for the subscription, more cash for respecs, more cash for playable races, more cash for buffs, and even more cash for the best gear. Heck, one company even charges you extra cash just for a random chance of getting some of the best gear. You pay hoping that you'll get a coveted item, but in many cases you'll get nothing but junk. 4) Bad customer service. Bug reports and tickets go unanswered for days, weeks, months. Forum posts highlighting bugs mysteriously disappear, along with their author. Publishers hold face to face summits with players, promise them bug fixes and content, server mergers (anything they want to hear) but then fail to deliver. 5) Massive, ill-conceived game revamps. Even though your game was overhyped, broken, filled with money pits and offered poor customer service, some poor souls hung in there, clinging to some vain hope that things would improve...and then you removed everything from the game that they found enjoyable because someone on your staff decided to "save the game" by reinventing it. /cue the backlash, followed by crickets on your empty servers.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
Agreed. I also agree about LOTRO especially when it was SoA. I could see (when I tried WoW for myself) the appeal to the masses that "triggered" the WoW phenomenon but I didn't last very long - 3 months or so.
For developer teams I think that must be very frustrating - knowing your game is better but only having a small fraction of the playerbase of WoW - and its a kind of inertia in that group of players that you can't do anything about. I made WoW friends who were clearly burned out on WoW but didn't know about other MMOs like LOTRO so they just kept playing WoW and being grumpy much of the time. Even when I urged them to try LOTRO I could see they needed to become extremely unhappy before they would give up WoW and think seriously about another game. It was not nice to see. WoW definitely has an addictive drug like quality.
I agree with both of you. I dislike WoW and like many games better - even AoC is better than Wow in my opinion. I recently gave WoW another chance due to friends playing it and regretted it. I am an older player and I felt like I had been stranded in kindergarden as far as the player base went. The graphics were dated and it was boring - a killer flaw for me.
I loved LOTRO when it first came out and have spent many hours having fun in middle-earth till my characters reached the various end-game parts. I truly hate raiding, which is why I am waiting for another MMO - like maybe The Secret World to come out. I have played too many dwarves and Elves to ever really enjoy playing them again. But I do stand by my claim that declaring a game to be a WoW killer can kill it. It raises too many expectations and WoW willnever be killed by 1 game - it will have to die the death of 1,000 cuts.
PS - re " WoW definitely has an addictive drug quality." - that is true of many games - single player included - The Game Civilization IV has an in game clock with an alarm so you can time how long you play. And Everquest was first described to me long ago as Evercrack.
Nobody wants a game like wow anymore, untill they are presented with a game completely unlike wow. Then when presented with a game that fufills this, its too low key, too buggy, not moving along fast enough with development. Or worst of all, you actually long for wow's ease, its luxury like ability to hearthstone and ability to instance into a dungeon or battle ground in a matter of minuets from anywhere. You miss its rock solid playability, on even your less than top of the line rig.
If what you all stated, which i gatherd as a smattering of we hate wow, we want a game pure to the roots of mmorpgs or whatever, and expressing your angers of past mmo failing ideas were true of most gamers, you would see big successes in indy games like darkfall, fallen earth, ryzom ect....but you dont, you see the opposite. You the gamer, apparently have no idea what you want, so you might as well just stop experementing with games not approved by blizzard. suckers.
My "how to kill your mmorpg in 5 easy steps"?
1. Dont hype the game, above and beyone even the most ludicous claims. Failure to over hype your game prior to launch will result in the losses of hunders of thousands of suckers looking for the next wow killer, and for a price to ability to calim "FIRST!" among a wide array of acheivements.
2.Dont copy the dominant players in the mmorpg industry terms of trends. If they are releaseing pvp superworld expansion, you better have your reskinned version ready for a buggy and rushed release.
3. Place quality over speed of development , the suckers will pay to play our betas and help debugg the game...something you would normally pay professionals to do. Remember if you can get your content out faster than the competition the better, it all the same anyway.
4.Dont choke all the servers at launch, then offer paid server transfers after everyone got split up at lunch due to full servers. Directly buy a rolls royce after this one.
5. make sure you forget to get a cut of the gold farmer loot. offer free spamming rights to the top 3-5 bidders, ban the rest, along with bots every 6months (the ones that everyone put on ignore anyway). Forgetting to do this will result in the loss of tennis courts on house #3,4,and 6.
Comments
Before games became quest heavy we used to grind on mob camps, (DAOC, EQ, etc) so the current design is not the only one out there. Over in EVE the real story is in the players, not the quests, so we live in a virtual world and while there is some questing in the form of mission running and story arcs, they are not the integral part of the gameplay.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can understand that, as I have played Eve since the beginning. But what I refer to is quests in PVE games, or true RPG games. The last new RPG game I have played was Mass Effect 2, and it is a story driven RPG that takes you on a great journey without killing 10 rats to gain a level. Although there is a section in the game that requires you to kill a certain number of X, its all story driven. I think that is where Bioware is taking us. A story driven MMO where we do not kill or take this to there. Only thing is I do not know how this will fair will millions of players. It will be interesting to see how Bioware handles it. They might actually begin a revolution in MMO design.. Or so I hope!
lol!most of the time financer expect to see some form of wow copy
its a fact every successfull endeavor is always asked by investor to be copied
their mentality?if it worked for blizzard it will work for us,then a year later investor finds out they havent made money and lash out at game maker even tho it was at the investor explicit recommendation the game copied a dated model
so in the end the next big title will probably come from blizzard since blizzard couldnt care less what their boss activision or any
@#$^%*^&;())_&would like to have blizzard would just respond this:let us do our job and everything will be fine
but since lot of company have been having financial issue(yes including activision)every employe want to be sent to the successfull outfit
my take on this:if activision employe cant make successfull mmo in activion why would they be better in blizzard ?
they wont they ll just corrupt the blizzard team into lazyness!
same with any outfit!check soe!they took guys from movie industry and sent them into mmo making or publishing
im sorry but employe have become specialised for a reason,you dont ask a pig farmer to maker 32 nm intel chip
same thing for video game.
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
i would like to add,
if its going to be easy to level then you better have your end game ready or your population will dissapear. ( see age of conan )
Err ?
Except of course his job on Vanguard was excellent. The failures where not the ideas, they where in the execution.
McQuaid is an excellent game designer. Its not his fault he is not also a good businessman and manager as well.
And even with its many problems, Vanguard is the MMO I would play if only I had the time to play a MMO.
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
the main issue blizzard faced is the same issue soe (eq1)faced!
it was too popular the network just couldntcope with the popularity they had to instance everything and even then at day (about 18 month ago)they still had web issue.
now the number of player has been cut in half so internet pressure as been relieved but if player go back in masses
at cataclysm the bottleneck will still be there (net provider)
and various issue will still pop up ,and if somewhere along the line some net provider up their security but forgot to update
those that can acess like it happened countless time in the past we ll be facing the same issue we faced so often in so many game!
LOL I disagree with your second point as well.
Its not the IP. Age of Conan could have been uber. The question is what you're making out of it. A Conan game which offers 3 races, one of them the one of Conan (forgot its name), while NOBODY but Conan has this race in the original books, is an insult. You could have literally hundreds of races in such a game. Additionally they're all human, so having multiple races wouldnt even require that much graphic work, just a bit variance in the rulesystem department.
Some IPs are hard though. I am still not able to think of D&D as a good MMO rulesystem. D&D is made for roleplaying. D&D PvP = uber suck.
I don't think it is bad hearing his opinions. Heck the MMO devs aren't doing any better. I have watched every MMO I have enjoyed become garbage.
Those who can, do. Those who can't...criticize...
Do you have to be a mortgage lender to spot the flaws in the banking system that contributed to the recent global economic down turn? Do you have to be a mechanical engineer to notice that the brakes in your recently recalled car weren't functioning? I believe the same rules of logic apply to those who enjoy MMOs--or not, if the MMO is broken, overhyped, poorly revamped, missing features, full of cash grabs etc.
Do game developers really only listen to feedback from other game developers, instead of their paying customers? If that's the case, then I'd add that to my list of ways to kill your MMO:
6) Don't listen to your customers, because you always know better than them. After all, if they can't program the game, their opinion means squat.
7.) Put too much emphasis on PvP so that leveling becoimes near impossible and the majority of the playerbase are obnoxious, small-dicked 15 year olds with axes to grind.
In response to many of the points raised, I think this thread has a lot of valuable MMO gamer feedback for the industry. Many have highlighted issues that really reduce the fun factor in MMOs, and you have even thought about some of the systemic issues related to this (investors, vision, time-lines etc.)
The thread is much better for all these contributions imo, thanks.
For those who sound defensive, this isn't an attack on you or your work. It's a commentary on industry trends. Some of these trends may, in fact, be the reason your excellent idea for a game (and possibly your last 6 months of coding) was tossed into the recycling bin.
Hmm.
You know MMO launches which arent like that ?
SCNR
Even WoW was a mess at launch, or so I've heard. Servers hopefully overloaded, servers down for days, game broken for ages, awful customer service, and so on. The usual. Well I havent experienced it myself, as I never ever touched WoW, but thats what people told me about it. Yeah ages later they managed to clean it up, but according to what I've been told about the start, that wasnt half as glorious as some people today make it sound like.
Only MMO I can think of which wasnt like that is Guild Wars. And seriously, I'm highly underimpressed about this also. For GW turned out to be boring like hell when I tried it. Yeah no subscription but seriously I didnt managed to play for a week before I was bored out of my mind.
I would assume that Bioware's Star Wars: The old Republic has a chance to be not this way. Thats because Bioware always did have good quality at game release, and despite being owned by EA Games now, I see a chance this is still the case.
Games with bugs are common. Game missing "core mechanics" advertised on the box are less common. Games with broken "core mechanics" such as chat, movement, combat are also less common.
I'm not referring to minor glitches here; so yes, I can think of games that weren't plagued by these major issues at release. I can also think of some that were.
New quests are hard to think of? No they are not, but they are done within time constraints and increasingly in MMO’s by people who are not writers. We have had staff articles on how quests are being written by just about anybody on the MMO team and writers are not being employed. Also the mechanics of a MMO limit the types of quest you can do.
A quest example:
The Bridal Gift – Your patron (a not that used in MMO’s story vehicle that can be used for anything) sends you to a region where two tribes are often in conflict to try to calm things down. You are guided (probably by a big neon sign over a npc’s head these days) to the father of a bride who is having trouble coming up with the dowry for his daughter. The couple are from two peoples who do not traditionally get on so the wedding is something of a tense affair. You are sent out to do some traditional collecting, it could be shells down at the beach, the petals of the ravenous vampire flower, whatever.
The gift is wrapped up and you take it to the Father of the groom. Once you are with the groom’s family you learn that the groom has to make a gift for his bride to demonstrate his worthiness as a craftsman. You step in and use your crafting skills to produce a quality item; this may take a while as the crafting system does not guarantee a result. The bride seems surprised at the quality of the gift but tells everyone it is wondeful and just what she expected him to make her. One of the bridesmaids seems about to say something about the groom but the bride steps on her foot.
In return the bride is meant to cook a dinner for the groom. Guess what, she can’t cook to save her life. You step in either crafting or finding a meal to take to the groom. The groom does not look to happy to have to eat it, maybe he has had some of her fare before? Cue groom enjoying the food and proclaiming to his family how wonderful it tastes, even as he looks rather surprised.
The dowry has now been opened, but hang on the groom’s family says it is not enough. Time for some diplomacy (ala Vanguard), You soon realise this is just an opportunity for the grooms relatives to bring up old grievances and you need to use your card game skills to convince them to calm down.
You find out at the end of this that the bride is a craftswoman and the groom a chef, so of course they could not make their own gifts! But the traditions have to be seen to be done, especially when so many in the families where against it.
There you go, one quest chain. Trouble is they have to churn out loads of these a day, staying within programming constraints, think about all the npcs and text needed for the one I have just knocked out. And they are being done by people who trained in programming or the tea boy. One npc asking you to go and fetch 100 shells and come back to him is a lot easier.
Best way to kill your MMORPG = have SOE publish it.
You'll be dead before you even launch no matter how awesome the game is!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
16.
Start MMORPG.COM thread the MMO being dead otherwise it never happened.
Brilliant post. Well done.
So, what if we write the quests?
In tabletop D&D one person had to be the Dungeon Master right. Some of us are inclined that way. We prefer it to playing. So why not set up rules (that protect the player from a quest writer being overly harsh/overly generous) and some tools, and let those of us who want to create some of the content do so?
I'd jump at such a game.
As someone who played The Matrix Online for the last 3 years it was around, I can attest to that. The game had almost limitless potential, but Sony treated it like a leper. No promotion. No real growth. A constantly downsizing staff. By the end, everything that made it what it was had been taken away. Granted, I think we all saw the end soming for that last year, but still...
As someone who played The Matrix Online for the last 3 years it was around, I can attest to that. The game had almost limitless potential, but Sony treated it like a leper. No promotion. No real growth. A constantly downsizing staff. By the end, everything that made it what it was had been taken away. Granted, I think we all saw the end soming for that last year, but still...
Good ol' SOE , the same fate happened to Planetside -- i sure loved how they represented the game in every SOE fan Faire.*snicker*...
So hows The Agency coming along?
Listening to anyone on MMORPG.com forums.. other than myself of course.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
Agreed. I also agree about LOTRO especially when it was SoA. I could see (when I tried WoW for myself) the appeal to the masses that "triggered" the WoW phenomenon but I didn't last very long - 3 months or so.
For developer teams I think that must be very frustrating - knowing your game is better but only having a small fraction of the playerbase of WoW - and its a kind of inertia in that group of players that you can't do anything about. I made WoW friends who were clearly burned out on WoW but didn't know about other MMOs like LOTRO so they just kept playing WoW and being grumpy much of the time. Even when I urged them to try LOTRO I could see they needed to become extremely unhappy before they would give up WoW and think seriously about another game. It was not nice to see. WoW definitely has an addictive drug like quality.
You forgot - claim from day 1 that this is the game that will kill WoW.
I've played a lot of MMOs. From my experience, the only thing that keeps WoW alive is that it's WoW. I've played it and was severely underwhelmed and found the playerbase to be very not my cup of tea. LotRO is, for my money, superior. So much so, in fact, that I'm a lifetime subscriber.
Agreed. I also agree about LOTRO especially when it was SoA. I could see (when I tried WoW for myself) the appeal to the masses that "triggered" the WoW phenomenon but I didn't last very long - 3 months or so.
For developer teams I think that must be very frustrating - knowing your game is better but only having a small fraction of the playerbase of WoW - and its a kind of inertia in that group of players that you can't do anything about. I made WoW friends who were clearly burned out on WoW but didn't know about other MMOs like LOTRO so they just kept playing WoW and being grumpy much of the time. Even when I urged them to try LOTRO I could see they needed to become extremely unhappy before they would give up WoW and think seriously about another game. It was not nice to see. WoW definitely has an addictive drug like quality.
I agree with both of you. I dislike WoW and like many games better - even AoC is better than Wow in my opinion. I recently gave WoW another chance due to friends playing it and regretted it. I am an older player and I felt like I had been stranded in kindergarden as far as the player base went. The graphics were dated and it was boring - a killer flaw for me.
I loved LOTRO when it first came out and have spent many hours having fun in middle-earth till my characters reached the various end-game parts. I truly hate raiding, which is why I am waiting for another MMO - like maybe The Secret World to come out. I have played too many dwarves and Elves to ever really enjoy playing them again. But I do stand by my claim that declaring a game to be a WoW killer can kill it. It raises too many expectations and WoW willnever be killed by 1 game - it will have to die the death of 1,000 cuts.
PS - re " WoW definitely has an addictive drug quality." - that is true of many games - single player included - The Game Civilization IV has an in game clock with an alarm so you can time how long you play. And Everquest was first described to me long ago as Evercrack.
Nobody wants a game like wow anymore, untill they are presented with a game completely unlike wow. Then when presented with a game that fufills this, its too low key, too buggy, not moving along fast enough with development. Or worst of all, you actually long for wow's ease, its luxury like ability to hearthstone and ability to instance into a dungeon or battle ground in a matter of minuets from anywhere. You miss its rock solid playability, on even your less than top of the line rig.
If what you all stated, which i gatherd as a smattering of we hate wow, we want a game pure to the roots of mmorpgs or whatever, and expressing your angers of past mmo failing ideas were true of most gamers, you would see big successes in indy games like darkfall, fallen earth, ryzom ect....but you dont, you see the opposite. You the gamer, apparently have no idea what you want, so you might as well just stop experementing with games not approved by blizzard. suckers.
My "how to kill your mmorpg in 5 easy steps"?
1. Dont hype the game, above and beyone even the most ludicous claims. Failure to over hype your game prior to launch will result in the losses of hunders of thousands of suckers looking for the next wow killer, and for a price to ability to calim "FIRST!" among a wide array of acheivements.
2.Dont copy the dominant players in the mmorpg industry terms of trends. If they are releaseing pvp superworld expansion, you better have your reskinned version ready for a buggy and rushed release.
3. Place quality over speed of development , the suckers will pay to play our betas and help debugg the game...something you would normally pay professionals to do. Remember if you can get your content out faster than the competition the better, it all the same anyway.
4.Dont choke all the servers at launch, then offer paid server transfers after everyone got split up at lunch due to full servers. Directly buy a rolls royce after this one.
5. make sure you forget to get a cut of the gold farmer loot. offer free spamming rights to the top 3-5 bidders, ban the rest, along with bots every 6months (the ones that everyone put on ignore anyway). Forgetting to do this will result in the loss of tennis courts on house #3,4,and 6.
Follow this list and profit, apparently.