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Will SOE learn from its mistakes this time?
jdevo2004
Member Posts: 8
It seems to me that SOE has been releasing games without thought or care for the players for the last 10 years. Flop after flop, bad game play, bad bugs, bad design. Over promising and under delivering. Rushing games out the door for a quick buck. SOE seems to run its games division like it runs its movie division. It will give a title a certain budget and a time limit and damn the consequences it will be released on time and on budget and they will take a win or loss on what they have at that point. More often than not it has been losses thus far,. Not for them, but for us.
Lets take a look at SOE latest release Planetside 2. Another MMO from SOE that promised it all and under delivered by a long shot. Beta testers were screaming not to release the buggy unrefined game lacking in so many of the features that the previous version had. Instead the big wigs at SOE released it anyway because the budget was blown and the time limit was up.
Sure SOE loved the fact that the game initially was a cash cow with cash shop idiots spending a bundle, but they found out quickly that when people quit a buggy boring game, they usually do not come back. No players means no spending at the cash shop. Sure enough, they have decided NOW is the time to fix the performance issues that everyone wanted fixed BEFORE release. Too little to late though, just another dying SOE failure.
Will SOE ever learn? Will they take a page from their Japanese brethren at Square Enix (who shut down FFXIV spent the cash and time, and fixed what was wrong) and do the right thing? WoW is the most popular MMORPG of all time and one of the biggest reasons it is so is because Blizzard listened to its beta testers and delayed the release by a year to FIX the buggy and boring aspects of the game. WoW was a polished game upon release and had tons of working features to engross the player. It delivered on its promises. Will SOE take its time this time? Can they hold on to their dicks for the time it takes to make a good game instead of blowing their load for quick satisfaction?
I personally hope EQN is delayed at least a year for release in 2015 if it assures us that all the features that are promised are properly implemented and polished. Please SOE, think about the long term rather than the short term just this once. Spend the little bit more cash and time it takes to do it right. The MMO community is ripe for the picking with a polished AAA title. Just give us something that is not the garbage that we have been force fed for the past 10 years.
That is all.
Comments
Really? Square Enix? Their games have been garbage. FFXIV was so bad they had to shut it down and completely revamp it. PS2 was fine for a free to play game. Vanguard was a disaster. EQ2 was a flawed concept, gotta agree with you there. EQ and PS were both pretty well done.
Square Enix shut down its game and spent the cash and time to fix it and do it right. EQ and PS were the glory days of SOE, since then its been all crap.
i think its called personal view.
I liked PS2 and i'm not the usual player who likes shooters.
And i liked some aspects of EQ2 and some not.
DCUniverse had its fun moments too.
and you have to see if a game was released by SOE or developed. Its not the same.
Developers who got realesed by an publisher have most of the times a time limit. A Developer who is also the Publisher is more flexible. And exactly that the case for Blizzards WoW(before the Activision/Vivendi crap) and now for SOE's EQN.
Heck, EQN is even in its third iteration, scrapped the work of over two years. Thats nothing you could do if you wouldn't develop and publish the game.
Before complaining over unlaid eggs, wait until you see actual stuff. Maybe its not so bad you imagine.
Whatever else EQN does it is actually trying to revolutionize the genre and that is more than almost all these terrible WOW clones have tried to do. It can fail and still be the biggest success we've seen in the past 5 years just because it moves the genre in a better directions than the crap we've seen lately.
None of the big developers will really, some of them put out a new mmo a year possibly more than 2 at a time. They are trying different combinations of other games along with a very non hostile player environment in hopes of getting WOW numbers the easy way. When I look a the top ten games on the hype list its the same old tactics. A few game with player looting and crafting, a couple of DAOC clones, and now the new trend to basically make minecraft and put a pve map in it and no EQ Next isnt the only one doing it, just the most money.
As long as they can depend on a popular IP to get early box sales I dont think the owners of these companies honestly care. These games seem to be built for short term high level box sales, cash shop and then bottom out with 300k users since they have either given up on trying to compete with WOW or not trying to make a great game to begin with. Some of these "games" I woldnt buy if they were single player much less multiplayer.
They all seem to be wanting to put out games that are PG13 with less than two handful of skills requiring a Super Nintendo controller.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
While I share concerns over the end product, dramaticizing isn't helpful.
Unfortunately, it is still wait and see. Aside from words, we have nothing substantive to go on.
oh yes, box sales....you know that EQN will be free to play?
please stop being cynical and get your infos straight.
Like a previous poster said, games are a failure if they don't make a return on investment and shut down. Quite frankly I'm getting a little tired of all the armchair game designers on this website. No company has unlimited amount of resources to spend. They make do with what they got being their budget, time, and human resources in the form of talent and quantity.
Sometimes it's just a matter of luck in finding the right talent and making good choices early on. The OPs thread is the kind I've seen over and over again on all game forums. "Blizzard, Anet, Trion, SOE, sucks because the game is buggy and they need to spend more money to give me exactly what I want! You greedy bastards only care about money! Oh and PVP isn't balanced!" Pretty much sums up all the company/corporate hate threads out there.
Oh really? Planetside 2 is fun to play and I loved SWG. Don't see anything wrong with SOE.
Better be concerned about Bioware and SWTOR, if you want to see an MMO in trouble
This has me worried, One being Smedley the Great Game Destroyer onboard, the other being "f2p".
I wonder how they implement this, like Gw2 with fluff stuff and boosters in their shop or a EA/SWTOR shop model, which makes people run from the game even faster then the sub model.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
a game can also flop by not producing the sales that are expected.
[mod edit]
Many people loved and still play/talk about Everquest/SWG.
I also play EQ2 still to this day from 2004,although not anywhere as much as I once did.This is because the way SoE has dumbed the game down to solo play.THIS is where I fear for EQN and the whole genre.'Action combat' 1 hotbar,linear quest hubs,no trinity or just as bad " I can play every class on 1 toon!" gameplay is for me where games are failing.
I could ask the same from any mmo company ..
EQ2 fan sites
I think Smed has learned some stuff. Now it all depends on what SOEs goal is with eqn. Do they want a casual game with a massve player base, or a fully realized living world we can immerse ourselves for hours at a time? Some combination of tuese or something that none of us expect? I hope we get something unexpected.
@OP: I have never played PS2 so I would not know what the beta testers reported as bugs or concerns. Are you sure that all the beta testers reported the same bugs and issues? Was that info presented in a well written manner? Were they written as suggestions or as "this is how I would build the game"? Again I was not a beta tester nor have I played the game, but I have been on a team that has released a video game (or two) and I can say that beta tester feedback is a crap shoot. Some feedback is pure gold with complete, clear, and easy to understand information. Unfortunately this is only about 0.001% of the feedback with 99% of the feedback being more like "your grass is the wrong color green." and no I am not making that piece of feedback up. Couple the fact that probably half the beta testers do not report any issues at all, and the ones that do contradict each other all the time.
That being said, I am praying that SoE releases EQ:N when it is well done and complete ... instead of good enough. I think they will deliver a good quality game as this is their signature game.
How about including nothing wich made the original everquest succesfull into eqnext? EQ1,2,OA share the same world/lore with EQnext. But the games look and feel nothing alike. They might as well called it random world x next. If you ask me the title is a total sellout used purely because people know it. other then that it has little to do with everquest.
BG music was a huge part of my EQ experience. Hopefully they get that part right.
As far as will they learn from their mistakes? NO
Why? Because they are foolish enough to think that a system of "one character plays all classes" will last. It won't. They blew up replayability which means that all the noob zones will be ghost towns after the first four months.
This is true. The fact that EQN was even made is already the result of a very long and painful learning process the mmo-industry had to go through. They only learned after being punched in the face - very hard - and repeatedly. We have seen it several times: Someone has the great idea to make a game just like WoW only with minor tweaks to make it even more successful, and the end of the story is: the company the game crashes and burns, the company goes bankrupt and everyone loses his job. Just ask the former employees of Funcom and Mythic.
And even after this EA/Bioware hadn't learned anything. They thought it would work if they only blew 300 mil $ on it. As we all know this ended in them losing as much money as everyone before them combined and SW-TOR being probably the single biggest failure in the history of video games as much as the financial loss is concerned. The company only stayed afloat due to its sheer size.
So considering the learning abilities of other companies SOE is almost the overachiever of the class. At least They never got really involved in the whole WoW-clone business.
If SOE fails they fail for different reasons. Just compare the staff of Trion Worlds and SOE for a second. They look different and they talk different. For some reason everyone at Tryon always wears black and no one seems to have any hair and they tend to talk like a bunch of accountants. These people play it safe. On the contrary at SOE everyone has great hair and a permanent smirk on his face. They are showmen, they never play it safe. The problem with them is that their slogan is: If you can't make it - fake it.
So if EQN fails it will at least fail for the right reasons. There is nothing worse then failing because you refused to take a risk. EQN could still release as a horrible mess, but unlike Rift it will at least be remembered.
Under delivered on Planetside 2?
Any and all changes to the game so far have been made simply because people asked for it. The roadmap and the discussions and implementations thereof are simply genius.
Still not satisfied? Still calling it "a failure"? I guess you already have your answer. No, they will never learn. Unless they do exactly what you want them to do. Because that's how you roll.
PS2 wasn't that bad in terms of gameplay, but I agree the performance issues should have been addressed sooner.
its moreso the FTP business model that I am worried about. PS2 nickel and dimed the player for everything and was very much Pay2Win. People who paid a 6 month sub progressed up to 300% faster than free players.
OP Guns were released so everybody bought them then they were nerfed a little while later. suddenly a new OP gun was released that everyone now had to buy and rinse repeat.
I have serious concerns about SOE's ability to create a non-pay to win game. I think they are more interested in creating an addictive slot machine than they are in selling a game that people buy based on its merits.