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How come Older MMORPGs then WoW, arent more Polish than WoW?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
I seen the argument thrown around many times on this site, that New MMORPGs suffer from a lack of Polish, because of their early release, and that we cant expect game polish like WoW, because they had 6 years of perfection time to polish.
Well if thats the case, how come older MMORPG then WoW, arent MORE POLISH than WoW?
PS: Your MMORPG was Exposed
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
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Because there aren't many Polish dev companies?
Edit: I don't think there's any Armenian dev companies either. Disgraceful, I tell you.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
some older games are trying to play catchup. Like EQ2 that focused on Hardcore at the start had to then shape their game for more casual players and it took a lot of time. Some do not want to spend the money.
To me, it seems like the developers or publishers kind of gave up on them after the populations dropped to a certain point. Wouldn't it be interesting to see the resurrection of some older games become a trend? But, obviously developer teams separate and move on.
Each cycle of a game has new talent and new vision for what the games become. Some of the old games still have expansions coming out once in awhile. But you are right, they are mostly content packages rather than graphic or Interface overhauls. The minor details of a game world seem like something that would be easy to spruce up, but I don't ever hear of content like that being added or focused on; something like art on the walls of buildings, or trees and chairs you can interact with or that get some new variety to them.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Most companies are in a scramble to get content out the door fast enought o satisfy their hungry playerbase which devours it almost as fast as it comes out. If a live team focuses on UI and math polish it often isn't visible to the players and the players are very vocal that the devs are wasting time doing X and not doing Y which is what they want.
Once the game is out the door you are always strapped for resources, and trying to get some polish in each month is a difficult thing. Plus it's a catch 22, as you have to keep pushing out new content, patches, and new zones, you create more bugs which compound on previous issues. It's enough to make Sisyphus weep.
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
Sony's really the only culprit for this sort of opinion to be made.
SOE should have sued that Ronco guy over the phrase "SET IT AND FORGET IT!"
Blizzard has stayed on top of their game addressing issues and I think purposely changing things just enough to keep it different. Keeping over 1 million users for 6 years is an impressive feat. Keeping over 4 or 5 or 6 or however many that's came and gone just attests to the constant attention that's made on the game.
SWG got one big over haul, and it sucked.
EQ 1 and EQ 2 get little attention until the next 'buy our box' expansion comes along.
Vanguard has like 1 person working on it whenever he feels like it now. (That may or maynot be true.)
Polish isn't a one time thing, it takes daily attention for years to address and too many game companies are willing to 'let it set for a month, let it set for a month' and patch a bunch of bells and whistles that people don't really ever get to see. Just for illusion's sake it's worth changing a few things around from time to time just to give people something to complain about.
I kill other players because they're smarter than AI, sometimes.
Earlier mmos were pioneers. It was the game that mattered, not the polish and graphics. Then wow hits the scene and completely raises the bar. Now the old mmos have lost many subs and had no business case to upgrade.
Not true, even some of the other big MMO's suffer from it. LOTR players have a big petition going on to get LOTR devs to fix the bugs from previous content, and even the EVE playerbase are ticked off at CCP for not fixing broken system that were added during the past several years.
http://www.massively.com/2010/08/01/eve-evolved-dissent-in-the-eve-community/
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
WoW is made by Blizzard. Blizzard makes extremely good video games.
Serious death penalties makes every close call an adrenaline rush, and every minor achievement a major victory. This alternative rule-set should be in all MMORPGs.
AOC is pretty buggy and it seems WAR is being retooled as well.
My compare and contrast subject was continued updates tho' to address things. LotRO has updates quite often, but they can't seem to focus is all. They seem more worried about content quotas than bug fixes I agree, but I think they are trying.
There companies that don't even try unless there's profit to be made.
I kill other players because they're smarter than AI, sometimes.
I know what question you are trying to ask.
The simple reason is because they ARE older... older code mostly. Many of the older MMOs would need a significant overhaul to their code to look and feel higher quality than they do now or better than WoW. They investment just hasn't been made to do so in most cases unfortunately.
I am the Player that wonders... "What the %#*& just happened?!"
...............
"I Believe... There should be NO financial connection or portals between the Real World and the Virtual in MMOs. "
__Ever Present Cockroach of the MMO Verses__
...scurrying to and fro... .munching on bits of garbage... always under foot...
Define Polish.. that is step one..
Well IMO LotRo knocks the spots off Wow, having returned a few months ago it now has me as a life timer too. The changes in this game since I last played it are nothing short of brilliant. I beta tested Wow and played it a few times but to me it does not hold my style of play and falls short of what I like in games.
Asbo
Because old MMORPGs were made with older tech, and teams of 30 men instead of 200 developers with millions of dollars in budget? And because they had a lot more features than WoW does, so they didn't have the chance to spend insane hours polishing 1 or 2 tiny features, because the scope of the game was much more massive than WoW.
Turbine does fairly well getting their MMOs into near flawless condition after release.
Many other companies just neglect their MMOs. Bugs never seem to get fixed.
The way I see it, fixing bugs is an investment not an expense. If you don't fix bugs, the message sent to the players is that you don't care enough about the game to keep it bug-free. Not exactly good public relations.
edit: typo
From Poland?
I remember when WoW came out. There were a lot of bugs. Servers went down constantly. It wasn't always a state of roses for Blizzard. As for older games? Shrug, don't know. Are older games really that buggier? Is EVE Online buggy?
how do you spell polish?
To the caterpillar it is the end of the world, to the master, it is a butterfly.
No they aren't, they're just not as streamlined, linear, and "accessible"(aka, shallow and straightforward) as modern MMOs
Thats a lot more then polish. Polish simply means that it lacks the usual amount of bugs that were around in oldschool MMO's. It can also mean it has a lot of small features that makes the game just a tad more userfriendly.
Linear gameplay has nothing to do with if the game is polished.
@OP: its 'How come old MMORPGs then WoW, arent more polished then WoW'? Not Polish, which means from Polish origin or Polish culture(the country Poland).
Oldschool MMO's lack the gameengine in some cases to make it polished. And they are from a time when MMO's werent mainstream yet and the players back then accepted more bugs.
No offense, but this is kind of a silly question all around. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the vast success of WoW has allowed them to hire more programmers and spend more money than spent on other MMOs. The money spent on AoC and even LotRO over the years is a drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on WoW (as well as the money made on WoW).
In my opinion, the better questions to ask are:
1. How did Mythic do so many things right with DAOC on a far smaller budget and then fail so badly with WAR? Why did they give us a WoW clone that wasn't as good as WoW? Why didn't they expand the formula of DAOC?
2. Are we ever going to see another MMO as successful as WoW?
3. Are publishers and developers going to evolve or has the gaming industry lost all creativity like the movie industry has?
4. Are developers ever going to listen to players and stop agreeing to everything publishers want just so they can continue to churn out the same game over and over? How many RTS like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft do we have to endure before someone thinks of something different? How many WoW clones?
In my opinion, and pardon my french, but publishers need to stop being such greedy ass-@#$@#$ and start working on creative ideas. Even WoW is losing customers - fast. Releasing another game just like WoW isn't going to save your companies. Make something worth our time and money (especially in this time of hard knocks) and we will reward you.
I won't be fooled by another quick-to-market pretty engine crap game like Star Trek Online or Champions Online. Think OUTSIDE THE BOX.
ColdSun
I prefer my MMO's have fun and engaging gameplay.
Polish is for furniture.
"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
Polish can also mean that the game is made more userfriendly based on player's suggestions. UI improvements for example. For example when in Guild Wars saveble skilltemplates were introduced. Its not a necessary system, but makes switching different setups all the more convenient.
Or a friend of mine told me that they changed the diceroll system in WoW. Apparently you can only roll 'need' for items for your toons profession now, to prevent the need roll griefing. Its a tiny addition, but can have great value for the overal experience of the game.
ColdSun has hit the nail on the head for me.
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"I like wow, I like aion and I like AoC all for different reasons.....the later cause i get to see boobs, but still its a reason!!" - Sawlstone
Lets not forget that if it wasn't for the MMO's prior to WoW, WoW wouldn't be what it is.... seeming how most of it is cut and pasted from past games... so in a sense, you have to look at the previous MMO's as the "parents" to WoW.... i mean if you gave blizzard, the first shot ever designing the first MMO ever... i gaurantee you it would NOT be as popular, only thru the mistakes of the games past do things improve... and why is there no polish and mostly shallow gameplay now? because noone is willing to think out of the box.... a developer is not going to design something radical when they have pencil neck book worms breathing down there back... remember this indrustry is about dollars, wasn't back then, but now, THANKS to WoW it is.... and you're not going to get out of that cookie cutter design. Why? because its profitable, even if us old school gamers kick and screem, tommy and his 12 million 12 year old buddies are still going to play shallow, free to play games.
in closing, what the MMO industry needs, is less people interested in it... back then, devs actually designed games.... not just did what some suit told them to. and back then, games where both challenging and fun....... but those days are gone, and us old school gamers just have to live with it.
Here mr. Nadriell time for your medicine...
*spoon fed really bad mmo*
soo good isn't it?
Nadriell
Money. It is all about the cheap overhead. No one is investing if they do not think it will be worth their time. That is the bottom line. Investors are not realizing there is a market simply because the people playing them are not spending all their time filling out surveys. Usually the people who are busy playing these games are not the same people filling out surverys. The typical person filling out the surveys are like unemployed housewives that are not even playing any of these games and have no clue what real gamers even want. You want content, fill out more surverys. LOL
This is why they believe the crap they serve is what people want- because the only people taking the time to fill these things out don;t have a clue. Everything these days is determined by marketing data.
Pre-WoW MMORPGs not being polished by now? That's simple. Their dev teams went off to newer, different projects, or maybe even different company altogether.
But the newer, different projects is the main one. Like SOE for instance. They shuffle around people from one game to another, whatever the focus maybe for their lineup. SWG years ago got a big focus on work for them (heh), but they have since moved people away to other games. Right now there's probably a skeleton crew left on SWG just to make sure the lights turn on for the remaining players they have there.
For a dev team to actually stay committed to an older title and keep working on it needs justification, because that's time and effort that could be used somewhere else.
"Is the remaining playerbase big enough to warrant constant patching and additional content?"
Remember people will leave an MMORPG for a variety of reasons. If an old game still has retention of a respectable amount of customers, then they'll continue refining it, maybe add more. If not, then it's bare maintenance (daily / weekly server restarts, maybe a fix here or there). And that's it.
Example: Back when SWG had "some fight" left in it with a worthwhile pop.size, it had 3 Expansion Packs in its first few years ('03-'05): Jump To Lightspeed, Rage of the Wookies, Trials of Obi-Wan. But when everyone left in '05, it has never received any expansions packs or huge content additions. That's "bare maintenance mode."
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)