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How did such a good game go bad?
Geeky
Member UncommonPosts: 451
To all the hatorz out there, keep moving plz.
To the rest:
HZ was a great game, I've never had a high end PC and yet never had any type of problems running this game. I liked the look and feel of this game from the get go, it had very good graphics when it first came out, and however many years later still looked fine. It had lots of races to choose from, all of which I think were quite well done, and very diverse.
The world was large, but they did so many things right with it. They had the areas where the WA were taking over and make it a living world. More of a living world MMO and any I have seen before or since.
One problem maybe have been the way the mobs spawned...Where you'd have to go to an area and wait in that area before the mobs would start spawning, then they'd spanw (about a dozen or so) right on top of ya...lol.
The character progression was wonderful in this game, you could be ANYTHING.
I don't know why but this is never going to be known to the masses, but the loss of this game is a silent loss of a great chance for MMO's.
I hope someone makes a game EXCATLY like this, because it was a great game...and I don't know why it never took off. I guess word of mouth can be a killer, because this great chance...never got one.
Oh and btw...movement speed increase on the roads is pure genius...why all games don't do this is unbeknowst to me.
Comments
I played exclusivley on Blight the testing shard
I saw what Tulga was working on and what was coming
now under Andercheck Blight is no more and I dont for an instance believe Anderchecks bullshit about internal teasting and patching
With Andercheck in control the game is now a petrol less vehicle on a steep hill which is a great pity
I agree the game has/had ?? some unique ideas and enjoyed my almost 3 years there , that is until Dec 27th 2006 when Blight was shutdown and the subsequent non refunded overbilling that took place.
if you are playing it good luck and watch your credit card statements closely
Cheers
Theros Ironfeld - former Blighter and Warleader of Blights Conclave of Shadows
When the merger happened, they took quite a bit of hardware offline, if I recall correctly, and that meant they no longer had the hardware capable of keeping the mobs up and running all the time, so they went to the spawn system that's in now where mobs don't appear until someone's there to see them.
I went back the other day and read some of my old forum posts (on other boards) and it was almost painful how excited I was about Horizons at launch, and how very badly things turned out. I admit I'm one that gave up about 4 months after launch, tired of the bugs and database problems, tired of the incompleteness of the world. You asked why Horizons never caught on. Well, it's because they never finished the game. People waited for months after launch, suffering from horrendous database lag that could turn 10 minutes of crafting into an hour. I remember running around and tapping a bunch of nodes, running back to the craft station, getting up and making a sandwich, sitting back down, eating half my sandwich, then boom....the tin finally appears in my inventory. Combat lag made every encounter a frustrating crapshoot, especially if there was more than 3 or 4 players involved. After a few months of waiting for AE to get it fixed, get the world populated, and give the game a feeling of completeness, people started leaving. I was one of them.
I tried to come back a couple times, but every time there was a major bug that drove me away. I came back for the final time just before EI bought the game. Though the population was low, and the game was still a little buggy, Tulga and the enthusiasm of their employees really gave me hope that the game was going somewhere. I had no expectations that it would be an EQ competitor, but subscriptions WERE on the rise, and I had hopes that it would get some improvement and live as a small, slightly profitable, niche game.
Then came EI, and all hope was abandoned. Between the lying, the thieving (billing), the cruel termination of two shards, and the plain old lack of communication, it became blatantly obvious that this game was dead. Now it's just waiting on someone to unplug the life support. Hopefully someone else will pick up the concept of Horizons and run with it. Until then I can only mourn the loss and move on.
The game failed plain and simple.
It had GREAT theory and concept but absolutely one of the worst implementations of MMO theory and concept I have ever seen. What was on the drawing board didn't even come close to being implemented.
That is the only reason the model failed. People just aren't willing to put up with poor quality titles these days.
The game itself was alright but the people that ran it from TulgaAE to now PME/EII just did not have the fuzzies to pull it all off. Plagued by some problems from start to near eventual finish.....
Now if another game comes out with some of the ideas minus the massive grind that Horizons has always been and actually works semi well I would play it yes.
But no the MMO community is no worse off once the game finally dies( probaly worse off actually). The community in general needs to be rid of crooks like Tulga's former CEO and the worse crooks that now have it. That way perhaps venture capitilists will want to again invest money in small studios without fears of their money being taken and having nothing to show for it. Right now thanks to devs like Tulga and the amazing bag of morons that had Mourning and TOC venture capital money is few and far between to even find. So all we have left is large studios pumping out one clone after another right now. The game Horizons and titles like it did more to hurt the industry than help it. For their legacy is one of bankruptcies , unpaid bills and ripped off investors.
Living world? That's so blatantly false that I'm speechless.
The game failed, and failed badly. Investors lost millions backing this loser, and David Bowman and crew dodged their legal debts by unethical tactics that should have landed them in jail.
David Bowman completely and totally screwed everything up about 4 months after launch and continued to do so until the company went under.
I really wish someone would take the horizons concept/idea and update it to today's standards. It was one of the better games that I have ever played, regardless of the bugs/lag monster, until the developers screwed it up completely... After EQ2 came out most people abandoned Horizons... this was about the time everything went to hell.
I would strongly disagree that everything was the same unless you were dragon. The classes and races were probably the most properly balanced of any MMO to date. Yes, the road speed bonus was a genius idea and I would agree that Istaria was a living world in various ways... it was dead in others though. The game was awesome... the lack of proper programming, updates and management caused the game to fail and fail hard as mentioned above.
Good ole'Horizons
Toppint out at less than 40k subscribers, everyone pretty much abandoned this dog during beta when it was obvious the developers were in over their heads. It looked like crap and played like crap. It had many good ideas but never came close to realizing those ideas. It was a scam from start to finish.
The developers had revolutionary ideas...
Obviously people didn't abandon it during beta because it had a subscriber base of 40K, which is a decent number before MMORPGs became popular in the gaming community.
The graphics were great considering the time period that it was developed.
The lag problems caused the game to play like crap the majority of the time. (If you played on 56k you were screwed)
Horizons was published, purchased and played by 40,000 people who all have realized the ideas of Horizons.
It was never a scam... just shitty really really shitty management and a lack of proper updates to fix problems.
Many of us actually enjoyed Horizons regardless of the bugs and crappy management. We all bailed out when it went to hell around 8 months after launch.
The developers had revolutionary ideas...
34,000 boxes sold at release. Down from well over a 100K during beta. Those numbers were lost because Bowman told the beta testers they were smoking crack and that the game was indeed going to be ready for a Dec 8th 2003 launch. I guess we know who was the one smoking the bad crack eh ?
Ideas mean nothing if they are not implemented and put into action. Heck the average MMO player can come up with kickass ideas for an MMO. But unless they are taken action upon and effectively deployed they mean bo diddly squat.
It did look like crap and played like crap only because of the poor development process and lack of expertise that went into the game. Had those ideas actually been put into the hands of a competant dev team and effective leadership and management the game would have been a real success.
But I guess that didn't happen huh ?
This was my first MMO, what sold me on it was the dragons. I got the game on launch day, created my dragon, but after walking about ten steps the server crashed and I was unable to get back in until two days later.
For a while I was entertained by the game, but problems such as the database lag were quite annoying.
I really liked the cooperative projects, such as the tasks of having to build bridges, but they required an incredible amount of effort. You needed protectors, crafters, and haulers.
These bridge projects were often protected by high level monsters who regularly spawned, so if our protectors get bored of defending us, the project had to be called off for the night.
If the protecters and the haulers were there, but there were no crafters to install the pieces, the project had to be called off for the night.
So as you can see, a lot of organization and time was required.
When we reached the higher levels, it became clear that there was no content at the end-game.
There were like only two mobs to fight, wolves and rock monsters.
We kept asking the developers to introduce more mobs, but they didn't listen, and many of us got tired of waiting.
One of the highpoints of the game when I was playing was when they finally implemented the Dragon rite of passage, flying felt so great.
It turns out that even flying can get boring. A weird thing about being a dragon was that we were so much bigger than the humanoids, but we actually felt weaker than them.
One of the other highpoints of the game was when we freed the Satyrs. I immediately rolled a Satyr, and I chose the dark soul-looking powerset, I felt so much more powerful than my dragon.
Anyways, one day I was out hunting with a ranger friend, and she got so jealous of how much more powerful I was than her that she told one of the devs, and my powerset was nerfed. That was the end of my Horizon days.
Horizons was one of my favorite MMOs. I played it during the latter stages of the Tulga days and was really getting into it when the billing bombs fell with the new company. It had a great deal of charm and some really unique concepts and it ran very smoothly. When they brought in the new quest writing dude, I thought it would finally get a little questing going to add to the wonderful (second only to pre-CU SWG) crafting, great profession/skill system and completely open playstyle. With no PvP it was just about the perfect game for me. Then, it suddenly just went away.
From what I've read, it seems the game was plagued not so much by bad coding as by bad companies right from its inception. I didn't find it to have very many bugs or many latency issues, and it certainly had unique concepts. Being a dragon, the multi-class system, fighter/crafter at the same time with no loss to your fighting skills and my two absolutely favorite implementations:
1. The hotkey bars that you could put in separate windows and place anywhere on your screen in either vertical or horizontal orientation;
2. Invisible Helmets. You spend all that time in character creation to create faces and hairstyles, etc. only to always cover them up with a faceless chunk of metal or leather. I LOVED invisible helms.
Sadly, I haven't been back 'cause I haven't been able to get the 3 accounts working again. This poor game has just been suit-killed from the start, it seems, and that's a real shame. Maybe, if I win the lottery...
-- Xix
"I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"