Notably all but one are in production. The good part is that some companies are realizing there are more than the "100K" gamers out there that was mentioned above by someone who enjoy creating their own content. Even Bioware knows this for a fact evidence their NWN and NWN2 games and the worlds that people have created and the players that continue to enjoy that player made content to this day. It's still amazing, though, that some folks (commenting in general here) don't realize that if you put both methods together and polish you'll create a superior product. *shrug*
Too true and better said then I could have
Just wanting to say to Moaky, you told me to get my hand out of the sand earlier. May I suggest you do the very same? And quit harping on your seniority it does nothing to validate what you say. Obviously you haven't been keeping up with current MMO trends because if you had there's no way you would have tried to invalidate what some of us were saying.
No one is advocating a pure sandbox as far as I can tell in this thread, while your points are more then valid your stubborn attempts at negating the popularity of player generated content is short sighted. And instead on relying on your so called experience I'd invite you to visit Bioware and Bethesda's modding communites. Looking up moblin mazes in FFXI and I guess I have to say it again, sandbox ELEMENTS already exist in theme park MMOs and are an essential part of them.
We are not trying to say MMOs should go back to pure shoot yourself in the head in difficulty 'sandbox' game, but a blending of the two genres would make for the perfect or at least a very awesome MMO.
My head isnt in the sand thank ye very much. I have played EQ most my MMO life....that is as "sandboxy" as it needs to get. Which isnt very.
It is the sandbox community that is attempting to saddlebag their gamestyle on something that isnt compatible.
You are trying to confuse the notion of somethings being more open for sandbox play. It isnt the same.
In your sandbox world, all gamestyles are viable. Thus your tradeskillers are to have content on par with adventurers. Makes it a bit hard to have a loot-centric game when Joe-Tradesman needs you to buy his goods...else he doesnt have content.
He also needs advanced wear/tear on gear since there isnt going to be just one trader. The 50/500/5k fellow traders all need content as well to keep them busy.
Doesnt matter that the other 200 or 300k(decent sized MMO) want to loot their items or quest for it,
Lord help the directed content folks if a game throws in things like Docs/Dancers/PB crunchers...for them to have content they need customers....guess who that is? Are we seeing a pattern yet?
Frack Uncle Owen, and the horse he rode in on. For him to have a place in the type of game worlds I enjoy, then it takes away enjoyment from my gaming style. No thanks
And as far as NWN goes....Bad example. Other than a couple of the NWN1 premium mods, I own all of both series(along with BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2/PS:T). The added tools is for folks to make up their own gaming. This is true.
But how many expansions for each game? That would be 2 each plus the download ones for NWN1. It is so folks can have their custom stuff in a game that doesnt have no where near the content of a MMO. YOu are comparing 2 totally dfferent genres.
The tools are good in something like NWN. In a pay based service, the content should be made by the company.
Unless of course that MMO game is a sandbox, where that type of thing is desired.
But dont confuse if a directed content throws in one or 2 items....they still arent legitimizing the existence of Uncle Owen...which in essence is what sandbox is all about. That being "Telling your own story" as the vets pipe up about so often.
Let Owen tell his story in a sandbox game...in the meantime there are plenty of others that wanna devour content with their friends....while not having to deal with Owen, and his pink panties.
Shame you guys just dont understand...the majority of gamers dont want sims in their games. Nor do we want major chunks of sims either. Now why dont YOU get your head out of the sand as I suggested prior...and quit trying to push your gaming style onto others.
While you are at it, insulting folks just for not wanting to play in a "sandbox" is comical at best. You "sandboxers" have a lot of room to grow before thinking about throwing insults. Some havent even quit pining over SWG 3 yrs later. This is read as glass house folks shouldnt be trying to talk down to others.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Meh...This game is gonna be a rehash of all the other failures aka wow-copies out there. No surprises here, the mmo-scene is a sad picture nowadays. Instant gratification wins all the time. Bugger them that want something more in their mmo's than another easymode piece of shit. I hate what WoW made the mmo-scene into. Safe and familiar is the rule..pfft
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs?
{QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft
Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd.
As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn.
Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance.
Lesson Two
According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us."
As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so.
"This is not about getting some more customers -- this the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn.
Lesson Three
"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games."
He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.)
A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.'
With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that."
Lesson Four
One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW."
It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down.
Lesson Five
The next point was another design tip, and became mildly convoluted (like the issue it tackled, ironically.) "Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much sh*t you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!" He judged WoW's interface to be "as simple as it can possibly be and as fun as it can possibly be." An audience member correctly added "...but no simpler." Walton suggested that as hardcore gamers, we forget the painful process of learning interfaces since we did it so long ago -- and to be mindful that gamers come to games much fresher than we do.
At the same time, Walton maintained that a new GUI "had better be 50% better than the current stuff" or players will hate it. An audience member asked about the massive customization and complexity powergamers perpetrate on the WoWinterface. Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked."
Lesson Six
Moving on, Walton wryly noted, "Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over." When asked about procedurally generated content, Walton thought it "doesn't work because it's generic and obvious." He thinks gamers will quickly perceive the pattern of how it's generated: "Somebody just changed the names of the NPC and the names of the places I go to get stuff."
Lesson Seven
Another sticking point for many designers (and gamers) is PVP content. Walton thinks strong PVP is essential. He also offered up this thought: besides the core PVP gamers, "a certain percentage of people [exist who] don't know that they want to compete once they have some mastery." But from a developer standpoint, "it's hard to balance PVP and PVE together."
Also, "if [developers] don't like PVP it's hard to get behind it" but "the nice thing about having bigger teams is that we have enough diversity [to pursue different tracks]." According to Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a quote Walton presented, PVP was made easier to develop in WOW by the fact that monsters and player characters have very similar damage and HP capacities.
Lesson Eight
"Don't tune for the hardcore." Turning to the audience, Walton asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have shipped an MMO? How many of you remember a discussion about making the game harder to keep people in the game longer?" He dismissed those who had but didn't, and suggested that this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you."
When he first encountered WoW, he admits thinking that the game would be over in 50 days -- because it's so fast paced. But when its success became apparent, Walton realized something. "I was thinking about crazy people! Crazy people can finish the game in 50 days, but crazy people are not who we should be thinking about.... where's the real market, our real customers? If anything, I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up."
Lesson Nine
He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "City Of Heroes taught me this before WoW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game."
His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WoW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WoW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want."
Lesson 10
Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games -- and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players' experience of the game, he asked, "Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?" Noting "the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing" he suggested "an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go 'what do I do next?' The vast majority of customers -- particularly when you get out of the hardcore -- need the signposts."
He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, "I can make nine bad choices!" According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, "If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices."
Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton "a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don't really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple."
Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to "think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn't feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you're doing it."
Lesson 11
Taking a page from 1980s ads for the board game Othello, Walton suggested that an MMO should be "easy to learn, difficult to master." Warning that again "it's hard to get inside a newbie's shoes... if you overwhelm them with stuff, people will not learn it all. It's not about how deep it is -- it's about how steep that learning curve is. A shallow learning curve lets people move through it at their own speed." He suggested "Nobody's entertained by feeling incompetent. Feeling competent and gaining mastery is a huge part of game fun for people."
Lesson 12
The 12th and final point was perhaps the least immediately practical. Walton praised Blizzard's reputation for consistent quality products -- "brands matter." He asked the crowd "who believes that there's more than three companies who you'll buy their games sight unseen?" Nobody raised their hands. His slightly depressing (if pragmatic) analysis? "You're not going to kick WoW's ass because you don't have a brand that's good enough to do it. Can you be competitive? Maybe."
Questions and Answers
Here, the formal question and answer time began. The first question was: what was the biggest error Blizzard made with World Of Warcraft? After pondering for a few moments, Walton suggested it might be "not getting experience in database and backend server was their biggest error. The launch was not that nice... backend can kick your butt, can kill your game."
Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial -- though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go -- he suggested that "the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable." Small leaps? Forget it: "Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I've never done before. If nine out of 10 people can't tell it's an innovation, it's not an innovation."
In Conclusion
The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it's about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced.
All of these things have been anathema to MMOs thus far, but Walton suggested that World Of Warcraft threw them into stark relief. In a genre in desperate need of innovation, these words offer hope for a way forward. {/QUOTE}
Now I have seen alot of posts here discussing what is known and not and how one can reach a conclusion this early on. And intially I agree. I dont know to what the OP was refering but I immediately recalled this interview. I also thought of it when I saw countless posts requesting the cartoony graphics be toned down. As we know cartoony graphics was a well known feature of WoW. Ergo we can see looking at this and what little we have as reasons for concern.
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs? {QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd. As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn. Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance. Lesson Two
According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us." As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so. "This is not about getting some more customers -- this the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn. Lesson Three
"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games." He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.) A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.' With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that." Lesson Four
One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW." It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down. Lesson Five
The next point was another design tip, and became mildly convoluted (like the issue it tackled, ironically.) "Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much sh*t you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!" He judged WoW's interface to be "as simple as it can possibly be and as fun as it can possibly be." An audience member correctly added "...but no simpler." Walton suggested that as hardcore gamers, we forget the painful process of learning interfaces since we did it so long ago -- and to be mindful that gamers come to games much fresher than we do. At the same time, Walton maintained that a new GUI "had better be 50% better than the current stuff" or players will hate it. An audience member asked about the massive customization and complexity powergamers perpetrate on the WoWinterface. Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked." Lesson Six
Moving on, Walton wryly noted, "Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over." When asked about procedurally generated content, Walton thought it "doesn't work because it's generic and obvious." He thinks gamers will quickly perceive the pattern of how it's generated: "Somebody just changed the names of the NPC and the names of the places I go to get stuff." Lesson Seven
Another sticking point for many designers (and gamers) is PVP content. Walton thinks strong PVP is essential. He also offered up this thought: besides the core PVP gamers, "a certain percentage of people [exist who] don't know that they want to compete once they have some mastery." But from a developer standpoint, "it's hard to balance PVP and PVE together." Also, "if [developers] don't like PVP it's hard to get behind it" but "the nice thing about having bigger teams is that we have enough diversity [to pursue different tracks]." According to Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a quote Walton presented, PVP was made easier to develop in WOW by the fact that monsters and player characters have very similar damage and HP capacities. Lesson Eight
"Don't tune for the hardcore." Turning to the audience, Walton asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have shipped an MMO? How many of you remember a discussion about making the game harder to keep people in the game longer?" He dismissed those who had but didn't, and suggested that this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you." When he first encountered WoW, he admits thinking that the game would be over in 50 days -- because it's so fast paced. But when its success became apparent, Walton realized something. "I was thinking about crazy people! Crazy people can finish the game in 50 days, but crazy people are not who we should be thinking about.... where's the real market, our real customers? If anything, I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up." Lesson Nine
He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "City Of Heroes taught me this before WoW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game." His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WoW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WoW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want." Lesson 10
Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games -- and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players' experience of the game, he asked, "Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?" Noting "the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing" he suggested "an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go 'what do I do next?' The vast majority of customers -- particularly when you get out of the hardcore -- need the signposts." He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, "I can make nine bad choices!" According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, "If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices." Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton "a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don't really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple." Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to "think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn't feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you're doing it." Lesson 11
Taking a page from 1980s ads for the board game Othello, Walton suggested that an MMO should be "easy to learn, difficult to master." Warning that again "it's hard to get inside a newbie's shoes... if you overwhelm them with stuff, people will not learn it all. It's not about how deep it is -- it's about how steep that learning curve is. A shallow learning curve lets people move through it at their own speed." He suggested "Nobody's entertained by feeling incompetent. Feeling competent and gaining mastery is a huge part of game fun for people." Lesson 12
The 12th and final point was perhaps the least immediately practical. Walton praised Blizzard's reputation for consistent quality products -- "brands matter." He asked the crowd "who believes that there's more than three companies who you'll buy their games sight unseen?" Nobody raised their hands. His slightly depressing (if pragmatic) analysis? "You're not going to kick WoW's ass because you don't have a brand that's good enough to do it. Can you be competitive? Maybe."
Questions and Answers Here, the formal question and answer time began. The first question was: what was the biggest error Blizzard made with World Of Warcraft? After pondering for a few moments, Walton suggested it might be "not getting experience in database and backend server was their biggest error. The launch was not that nice... backend can kick your butt, can kill your game." Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial -- though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go -- he suggested that "the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable." Small leaps? Forget it: "Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I've never done before. If nine out of 10 people can't tell it's an innovation, it's not an innovation."
In Conclusion The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it's about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced. All of these things have been anathema to MMOs thus far, but Walton suggested that World Of Warcraft threw them into stark relief. In a genre in desperate need of innovation, these words offer hope for a way forward. {/QUOTE} Now I have seen alot of posts here discussing what is known and not and how one can reach a conclusion this early on. And intially I agree. I dont know to what the OP was refering but I immediately recalled this interview. I also thought of it when I saw countless posts requesting the cartoony graphics be toned down. As we know cartoony graphics was a well known feature of WoW. Ergo we can see looking at this and what little we have as reasons for concern. For me Ill keep watching and make no commitments
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into.
Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it.
Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month.
Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get.
LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into. Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it. Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month. Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get. LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.
As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
This is going to be a "modern" MMO, like the popular World of Warcraft. This is not going to be a sandbox MMO, like the old Star Wars Galaxies. You will follow the quest lines, have zones that are meant for specific levels, do a lot of soloing, have a crafting system that's no more than a nice extra, have only combat classes, etc. It's true. The only thing SW:ToR shares with SWG is the setting. The games will be nothing alike. If you have not played WoW yet, do so now, and you might be able to enjoy SW:ToR when it is released. I do hope we have a nice community with many SW fans, but if you don't get SWG out of your system you will be disappointed.
I totally agree with this statement. BioWare would be nuts to not copy WoW's model with an IP like Star Wars.
You stirred up the hornet's nest with this post! People are forgetting that this is a forum where opinions are expressed. Chill out SW geeks. Jeeeeesh.
This is going to be a "modern" MMO, like the popular World of Warcraft. This is not going to be a sandbox MMO, like the old Star Wars Galaxies. You will follow the quest lines, have zones that are meant for specific levels, do a lot of soloing, have a crafting system that's no more than a nice extra, have only combat classes, etc. It's true. The only thing SW:ToR shares with SWG is the setting. The games will be nothing alike. If you have not played WoW yet, do so now, and you might be able to enjoy SW:ToR when it is released. I do hope we have a nice community with many SW fans, but if you don't get SWG out of your system you will be disappointed.
I totally agree with this statement. BioWare would be nuts to not copy WoW's model with an IP like Star Wars.
You stirred up the hornet's nest with this post! People are forgetting that this is a forum where opinions are expressed. Chill out SW geeks. Jeeeeesh.
If calling everyone you disagree with geeks makes you beleive your point has more vaildity then do what you must.
I actually however see a very good counter arguement to your post. That a IP with as much weight and popularity as SW is wasted on copying a seen it all before mould that many players are beconing increasingly bored of. There have not been too many games that have been really outstanding based on the SW IP. And two of thise rare gems that are were KOTOR and KOTOR 2. I then get the feeling it would be a double disapointment for many people who loved Biowares unique and innovative take to get all coy and jump on the WoW bandwagon.
I will say while I beleive this I could tolerate a good WoW clone in SW guise to an extent basically because while WoW has been copied to death they have all been poor. Though I still advise against this. The interview even says you wont knock WoW off it perch anytime soon. Best utilise the SW franchise for something unique like SWG did. Ok your sick of hearing that, but... I never actually played SWG. I was going to but that was after CU were I was advised not to. And these days it seems dated.
And so really SWTOR could fill the gap perfectly and get far more success than being yet another WoW clone. Besides there was one thing to me that WoW never managed... to be interesting. I have tried it more than once on different servers and archetypes and it still baffles me how people find it entertaining. I found it so dull. If they had to go WoW clone they would have to pick up the pace.
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs? {QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft <snippet> Seriously, why quote the entire post just for some comments on it's content
Well, this dev missed some points here and there.
Solo play is all well and good, but if you can solo the entire game and give a bugger to all grouping then what's the point of playing an mmo in the first place? Mmo's are about the social aspect and losing yourself in a virtual world. Yes, world not game.
I can partly agree with not tuning the game for the hardcore, but the endgame, raids and so on must be tuned for them. They are the ones that do all those raids and drag the casuals with them. If the content is too easy, it would be done too fast and then forgotten about being a waste of time for the hardcore and a showstopper for the casual player that want to see that content atleast one time cause the hardcore wont bother running it. Easy raids sucks monkeyballs aka Naxxaramas in WoW. That was the hardest raid pre-bc but post-wotlk it's so damn easy it became boring. One of the things from the whole wotlk package that made me quit the game for good.
Sure, make the leveling easier. Doesn't mean crap to me personally and the casuals will love it for that, but the endgame must be though.
Less choices in an mmo. Right, this one don't need a comment at all. The sheer ignorance speaks for itself.
I will keep watching this game, but reading what a leading dev at Bioware thinks about mmo's paint a bleak picture for the future of this game.
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs? {QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft <snippet> Seriously, why quote the entire post just for some comments on it's content
Well, this dev missed some points here and there.
Solo play is all well and good, but if you can solo the entire game and give a bugger to all grouping then what's the point of playing an mmo in the first place? Mmo's are about the social aspect and losing yourself in a virtual world. Yes, world not game.
I can partly agree with not tuning the game for the hardcore, but the endgame, raids and so on must be tuned for them. They are the ones that do all those raids and drag the casuals with them. If the content is too easy, it would be done too fast and then forgotten about being a waste being a stopper for the casual player that want to see that content atleast one time. Easy raids sucks monkeyballs aka Naxxaramas in WoW. That was the hardest raid pre-bc but post-wotlk it's so damn easy it became boring. One reason from the whole wotlk package that made the quit the game for good.
Sure, make the leveling easier. Doesn't mean crap to me personally and the casuals will love it for that, but the endgame must be though.
Less choices in an mmo. Right, this one don't need a comment at all. The sheer ignorance speaks for itself.
I will keep watching this game, but reading what a leading dev at Bioware thinks about mmo's paint a bleak picture for the future of this game.
I couldn't agree with you more...
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~Ernest Gaines
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs? {QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd. As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn. Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance. Lesson Two
According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us." As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so. "This is not about getting some more customers -- this the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn. Lesson Three
"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games." He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.) A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.' With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that." Lesson Four
One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW." It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down. Lesson Five
The next point was another design tip, and became mildly convoluted (like the issue it tackled, ironically.) "Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much sh*t you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!" He judged WoW's interface to be "as simple as it can possibly be and as fun as it can possibly be." An audience member correctly added "...but no simpler." Walton suggested that as hardcore gamers, we forget the painful process of learning interfaces since we did it so long ago -- and to be mindful that gamers come to games much fresher than we do. At the same time, Walton maintained that a new GUI "had better be 50% better than the current stuff" or players will hate it. An audience member asked about the massive customization and complexity powergamers perpetrate on the WoWinterface. Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked." Lesson Six
Moving on, Walton wryly noted, "Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over." When asked about procedurally generated content, Walton thought it "doesn't work because it's generic and obvious." He thinks gamers will quickly perceive the pattern of how it's generated: "Somebody just changed the names of the NPC and the names of the places I go to get stuff." Lesson Seven
Another sticking point for many designers (and gamers) is PVP content. Walton thinks strong PVP is essential. He also offered up this thought: besides the core PVP gamers, "a certain percentage of people [exist who] don't know that they want to compete once they have some mastery." But from a developer standpoint, "it's hard to balance PVP and PVE together." Also, "if [developers] don't like PVP it's hard to get behind it" but "the nice thing about having bigger teams is that we have enough diversity [to pursue different tracks]." According to Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a quote Walton presented, PVP was made easier to develop in WOW by the fact that monsters and player characters have very similar damage and HP capacities. Lesson Eight
"Don't tune for the hardcore." Turning to the audience, Walton asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have shipped an MMO? How many of you remember a discussion about making the game harder to keep people in the game longer?" He dismissed those who had but didn't, and suggested that this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you." When he first encountered WoW, he admits thinking that the game would be over in 50 days -- because it's so fast paced. But when its success became apparent, Walton realized something. "I was thinking about crazy people! Crazy people can finish the game in 50 days, but crazy people are not who we should be thinking about.... where's the real market, our real customers? If anything, I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up." Lesson Nine
He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "City Of Heroes taught me this before WoW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game." His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WoW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WoW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want." Lesson 10
Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games -- and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players' experience of the game, he asked, "Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?" Noting "the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing" he suggested "an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go 'what do I do next?' The vast majority of customers -- particularly when you get out of the hardcore -- need the signposts." He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, "I can make nine bad choices!" According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, "If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices." Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton "a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don't really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple." Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to "think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn't feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you're doing it." Lesson 11
Taking a page from 1980s ads for the board game Othello, Walton suggested that an MMO should be "easy to learn, difficult to master." Warning that again "it's hard to get inside a newbie's shoes... if you overwhelm them with stuff, people will not learn it all. It's not about how deep it is -- it's about how steep that learning curve is. A shallow learning curve lets people move through it at their own speed." He suggested "Nobody's entertained by feeling incompetent. Feeling competent and gaining mastery is a huge part of game fun for people." Lesson 12
The 12th and final point was perhaps the least immediately practical. Walton praised Blizzard's reputation for consistent quality products -- "brands matter." He asked the crowd "who believes that there's more than three companies who you'll buy their games sight unseen?" Nobody raised their hands. His slightly depressing (if pragmatic) analysis? "You're not going to kick WoW's ass because you don't have a brand that's good enough to do it. Can you be competitive? Maybe."
Questions and Answers Here, the formal question and answer time began. The first question was: what was the biggest error Blizzard made with World Of Warcraft? After pondering for a few moments, Walton suggested it might be "not getting experience in database and backend server was their biggest error. The launch was not that nice... backend can kick your butt, can kill your game." Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial -- though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go -- he suggested that "the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable." Small leaps? Forget it: "Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I've never done before. If nine out of 10 people can't tell it's an innovation, it's not an innovation."
In Conclusion The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it's about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced. All of these things have been anathema to MMOs thus far, but Walton suggested that World Of Warcraft threw them into stark relief. In a genre in desperate need of innovation, these words offer hope for a way forward. {/QUOTE} Now I have seen alot of posts here discussing what is known and not and how one can reach a conclusion this early on. And intially I agree. I dont know to what the OP was refering but I immediately recalled this interview. I also thought of it when I saw countless posts requesting the cartoony graphics be toned down. As we know cartoony graphics was a well known feature of WoW. Ergo we can see looking at this and what little we have as reasons for concern. For me Ill keep watching and make no commitments
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs? {QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd. As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn. Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance. Lesson Two
According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us." As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so. "This is not about getting some more customers -- this the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn. Lesson Three
"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games." He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.) A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.' With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that." Lesson Four
One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW." It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down. Lesson Five
The next point was another design tip, and became mildly convoluted (like the issue it tackled, ironically.) "Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much sh*t you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!" He judged WoW's interface to be "as simple as it can possibly be and as fun as it can possibly be." An audience member correctly added "...but no simpler." Walton suggested that as hardcore gamers, we forget the painful process of learning interfaces since we did it so long ago -- and to be mindful that gamers come to games much fresher than we do. At the same time, Walton maintained that a new GUI "had better be 50% better than the current stuff" or players will hate it. An audience member asked about the massive customization and complexity powergamers perpetrate on the WoWinterface. Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked." Lesson Six
Moving on, Walton wryly noted, "Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over." When asked about procedurally generated content, Walton thought it "doesn't work because it's generic and obvious." He thinks gamers will quickly perceive the pattern of how it's generated: "Somebody just changed the names of the NPC and the names of the places I go to get stuff." Lesson Seven
Another sticking point for many designers (and gamers) is PVP content. Walton thinks strong PVP is essential. He also offered up this thought: besides the core PVP gamers, "a certain percentage of people [exist who] don't know that they want to compete once they have some mastery." But from a developer standpoint, "it's hard to balance PVP and PVE together." Also, "if [developers] don't like PVP it's hard to get behind it" but "the nice thing about having bigger teams is that we have enough diversity [to pursue different tracks]." According to Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a quote Walton presented, PVP was made easier to develop in WOW by the fact that monsters and player characters have very similar damage and HP capacities. Lesson Eight
"Don't tune for the hardcore." Turning to the audience, Walton asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have shipped an MMO? How many of you remember a discussion about making the game harder to keep people in the game longer?" He dismissed those who had but didn't, and suggested that this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you." When he first encountered WoW, he admits thinking that the game would be over in 50 days -- because it's so fast paced. But when its success became apparent, Walton realized something. "I was thinking about crazy people! Crazy people can finish the game in 50 days, but crazy people are not who we should be thinking about.... where's the real market, our real customers? If anything, I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up." Lesson Nine
He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "City Of Heroes taught me this before WoW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game." His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WoW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WoW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want." Lesson 10
Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games -- and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players' experience of the game, he asked, "Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?" Noting "the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing" he suggested "an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go 'what do I do next?' The vast majority of customers -- particularly when you get out of the hardcore -- need the signposts." He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, "I can make nine bad choices!" According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, "If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices." Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton "a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don't really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple." Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to "think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn't feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you're doing it." Lesson 11
Taking a page from 1980s ads for the board game Othello, Walton suggested that an MMO should be "easy to learn, difficult to master." Warning that again "it's hard to get inside a newbie's shoes... if you overwhelm them with stuff, people will not learn it all. It's not about how deep it is -- it's about how steep that learning curve is. A shallow learning curve lets people move through it at their own speed." He suggested "Nobody's entertained by feeling incompetent. Feeling competent and gaining mastery is a huge part of game fun for people." Lesson 12
The 12th and final point was perhaps the least immediately practical. Walton praised Blizzard's reputation for consistent quality products -- "brands matter." He asked the crowd "who believes that there's more than three companies who you'll buy their games sight unseen?" Nobody raised their hands. His slightly depressing (if pragmatic) analysis? "You're not going to kick WoW's ass because you don't have a brand that's good enough to do it. Can you be competitive? Maybe."
Questions and Answers Here, the formal question and answer time began. The first question was: what was the biggest error Blizzard made with World Of Warcraft? After pondering for a few moments, Walton suggested it might be "not getting experience in database and backend server was their biggest error. The launch was not that nice... backend can kick your butt, can kill your game." Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial -- though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go -- he suggested that "the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable." Small leaps? Forget it: "Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I've never done before. If nine out of 10 people can't tell it's an innovation, it's not an innovation."
In Conclusion The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it's about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced. All of these things have been anathema to MMOs thus far, but Walton suggested that World Of Warcraft threw them into stark relief. In a genre in desperate need of innovation, these words offer hope for a way forward. {/QUOTE} Now I have seen alot of posts here discussing what is known and not and how one can reach a conclusion this early on. And intially I agree. I dont know to what the OP was refering but I immediately recalled this interview. I also thought of it when I saw countless posts requesting the cartoony graphics be toned down. As we know cartoony graphics was a well known feature of WoW. Ergo we can see looking at this and what little we have as reasons for concern. For me Ill keep watching and make no commitments
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Originally posted by ktanner3 As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into. And why should I pay $15.00 a month to provide someone whom I'd otherwise cross the street to avoid with content? Honestly, do you have difficulty making friends or finding someone to play with... unless it's forced upon them? I certainly don't. Mind you, I'm not opposed to *some* content being group-oriented, but by no means should it be compulsory or gate progress. Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it. Who elected you spokesperson for PvP enthusiasts? Or how 'bout this, can you name *any* PvP that is universally regarded as good? Can you? Universally?? Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month. You oh so conveniently left out the part about "don't tune for the hardcore." The days of putting the 40+ hour a week gamer on an exalted pedestal are behind us. Get over it.
You also left out this part, "...I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up." If the content is there, then what's the problem? Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get. LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it? Again, I think you missed his point. "He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.)" Frankly, if it boils down to either being honest with your playerbase and taking the risk they might quit, or stringing them along from month to month with empty promises, which would you rather? Yeah, how well did that work out for SOE? Or how 'bout Age of Conan?
I don't get where people think having a game focus on group-content means the same thing as forcing people into group-content. I'd like a game that offers a good amount of both; too often I'm either forced into one or the other; WAR as example as being forced into group content and Age of Conan (PvE-wise, anyway) for being forced into solo content. Honestly, if WAR or WoW or any MMO for that matter gave me a choice such as, "Hmm... well, today should I solo or join a group?" I'd probably subscribe to them for alot longer than I have.
EDIT, REGARDING WALTON'S "LIST": Honestly, all I could read from that entire thing was "WoW". I don't see this game being anything else but with a different skin if he is serious about that, it makes it grossly clear. It's a shame that all these companies seriously think that copying something that is already vastly in control of the market will get them a bigger profit than something completely different and original from what's on the market, but what can you do? What annoys me the most is that he and the rest of Bioware will try to justify this game as unique, like every other MMO that has ever been created past WoW's success, just because they added one or two new du-hickies here and there. Ugh...
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Didnt Walton work on SWG also?
Yes, he did. Brief (very brief) biography is on wikipedia here.To my knowledge he had no part in the NGE. I think he left SOE just before or just after the CU.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into. Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it. Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month. Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get. LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Didnt Walton work on SWG also?
Yes, he did. Brief (very brief) biography is on wikipedia here.To my knowledge he had no part in the NGE. I think he left SOE just before or just after the CU.
This is going to be a "modern" MMO, like the popular World of Warcraft. This is not going to be a sandbox MMO, like the old Star Wars Galaxies. You will follow the quest lines, have zones that are meant for specific levels, do a lot of soloing, have a crafting system that's no more than a nice extra, have only combat classes, etc. It's true. The only thing SW:ToR shares with SWG is the setting. The games will be nothing alike. If you have not played WoW yet, do so now, and you might be able to enjoy SW:ToR when it is released. I do hope we have a nice community with many SW fans, but if you don't get SWG out of your system you will be disappointed.
I won't be disapointed, because I won't play it for 2 reasons :
1. It is not a sandbox
2. I won't invest time and effort in an mmorpg which may be influenced by Lucas Arts ever again, the danger that the game may radically change at any point in time with no input from the playerbase is just too great.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site : http://mmodata.blogspot.be/ Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into. Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it. Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month. Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get. LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
I WILL say it
MMORPG's should be more about grouping, you should be forced to group if you wan't to accomplish something bigger.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site : http://mmodata.blogspot.be/ Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
My post was made because I was getting a bit tired with all the SWG-vets being disappointed/angsty with every bit of news that suggested SWToR wouldn't be like SWG.
So I overreacted a bit. After seeing so many "I don't think it's blue, I doubt it will be blue, this doesn't look blue to me" messages I really felt the urge to post "IT'S RED!!".
Anyways, even though I still agree with my post in general, it did not have to be so provocative in tone.
Originally posted by GrumpyJester This is going to be a "modern" MMO, like the popular World of Warcraft. This is not going to be a sandbox MMO, like the old Star Wars Galaxies. You will follow the quest lines, have zones that are meant for specific levels, do a lot of soloing, have a crafting system that's no more than a nice extra, have only combat classes, etc. It's true. The only thing SW:ToR shares with SWG is the setting. The games will be nothing alike. If you have not played WoW yet, do so now, and you might be able to enjoy SW:ToR when it is released. I do hope we have a nice community with many SW fans, but if you don't get SWG out of your system you will be disappointed.
Put down your imaginary crystal ball, everyone knows that SWTOR won't be a sandbox, but everything else is speculation from this point on. I believe the game will work and play a lot like Mass Effect more than KOTOR 1/2, Mass Effect doesn't have the turn based queue system and is faster paced with some better interface (weapons & powers wheel) but basically have the same looting and crafting and skills choices as KOTOR 1/2.
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into. Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it. Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me? No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month. Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get. LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
Woah Woah calm down there Bobby Knight! I didnt take a shot at you and nowhere did I say that you did say anything about forced grouping. I ASKED IF YOU HAVE PLAYED FORCED GROUPING. It was an attempt to talk about this MMO. I felt that soloing had to have a intricate part of this game, but not hamper you from being able to play the rest of the game. Good lord, chill out man.
Plus, Gordon Walton has worked with some great IP's. But you cant take everything this guy says literally. Yes WAR and AOC have, but doesnt mean every body else lives and dies by Walton's words. Its a guideline to build an MMO and his own experiences. Nowhere does it suggest that this is the only way that you can build an mmo. I have faith that people know that difference.
If nothing at all this is proof that everyone is trying to find something about SW:TOR that they have to take Gordons lessons and say that this is the way Bioware is goin and chosen. Its absolutely speculative to believe it. Bioware has told you their direction and we have to wait to see more. To me, they havent given me enough to hang my hat on. I like story and have played most of Bioware's games. I love the way they have done story. I would assume that their version of story is going to blow most people away, but what I am most curious about is... How they plan to implement the PVP and RVR that they have talked about. Im willing to see which way this goes.
James: One of the things we've been doing is that we're making sure that when we're building content we have different representatives of the different play styles. Whenever we're doing design discussions or implementing a system, we have the different player types involved. There's the solo player type that hates other players and is very anti-social...
BioWare is creating their game with all play styles in mind.
It's funny, because there are a bunch of players like this in WoW where they don't like to hang around with other players but love to show off all the cool stuff that they have.
Then there are the players that like to adventure with their buddies. They have their own group of friends, and they just like to adventure with those players all the time.
Then there are players that like to join guilds and are social butterflies and like to adventure with people from their guild. They like to be part of these big huge groups that go out and play in major events like raids.
We want to take all those players and make sure that each of those player types has fun in our game. I can't go into details about all the systems, but we have made sure that those player types are thought about when we're building the game.
Here is a nice little recent quote if you all missed it about grouping ect. www.tentonhammer.com/node/47133 James: One of the things we've been doing is that we're making sure that when we're building content we have different representatives of the different play styles. Whenever we're doing design discussions or implementing a system, we have the different player types involved. There's the solo player type that hates other players and is very anti-social... BioWare is creating their game with all play styles in mind.
It's funny, because there are a bunch of players like this in WoW where they don't like to hang around with other players but love to show off all the cool stuff that they have. Then there are the players that like to adventure with their buddies. They have their own group of friends, and they just like to adventure with those players all the time. Then there are players that like to join guilds and are social butterflies and like to adventure with people from their guild. They like to be part of these big huge groups that go out and play in major events like raids. We want to take all those players and make sure that each of those player types has fun in our game. I can't go into details about all the systems, but we have made sure that those player types are thought about when we're building the game. OMG, Game for all play styles? NO WAY!
Thanks Tillaman! But you know since they referenced WOW, this game is going to be exactly like WOW right? You know this right? All they had to do was say WOW once. Game over man!
Here is a nice little recent quote if you all missed it about grouping ect. www.tentonhammer.com/node/47133 James: One of the things we've been doing is that we're making sure that when we're building content we have different representatives of the different play styles. Whenever we're doing design discussions or implementing a system, we have the different player types involved. There's the solo player type that hates other players and is very anti-social... BioWare is creating their game with all play styles in mind.
It's funny, because there are a bunch of players like this in WoW where they don't like to hang around with other players but love to show off all the cool stuff that they have. Then there are the players that like to adventure with their buddies. They have their own group of friends, and they just like to adventure with those players all the time. Then there are players that like to join guilds and are social butterflies and like to adventure with people from their guild. They like to be part of these big huge groups that go out and play in major events like raids. We want to take all those players and make sure that each of those player types has fun in our game. I can't go into details about all the systems, but we have made sure that those player types are thought about when we're building the game. OMG, Game for all play styles? NO WAY!
Thanks Tillaman! But you know since they referenced WOW, this game is going to be exactly like WOW right? You know this right? All they had to do was say WOW once. Game over man!
I can pull other articles, quotes ect where they referenced lots of other games as well. LOL I’m a walking Google engine. So no I don't think it's game over, maybe for some people it is.
Comments
Too true and better said then I could have
Just wanting to say to Moaky, you told me to get my hand out of the sand earlier. May I suggest you do the very same? And quit harping on your seniority it does nothing to validate what you say. Obviously you haven't been keeping up with current MMO trends because if you had there's no way you would have tried to invalidate what some of us were saying.
No one is advocating a pure sandbox as far as I can tell in this thread, while your points are more then valid your stubborn attempts at negating the popularity of player generated content is short sighted. And instead on relying on your so called experience I'd invite you to visit Bioware and Bethesda's modding communites. Looking up moblin mazes in FFXI and I guess I have to say it again, sandbox ELEMENTS already exist in theme park MMOs and are an essential part of them.
We are not trying to say MMOs should go back to pure shoot yourself in the head in difficulty 'sandbox' game, but a blending of the two genres would make for the perfect or at least a very awesome MMO.
My head isnt in the sand thank ye very much. I have played EQ most my MMO life....that is as "sandboxy" as it needs to get. Which isnt very.
It is the sandbox community that is attempting to saddlebag their gamestyle on something that isnt compatible.
You are trying to confuse the notion of somethings being more open for sandbox play. It isnt the same.
In your sandbox world, all gamestyles are viable. Thus your tradeskillers are to have content on par with adventurers. Makes it a bit hard to have a loot-centric game when Joe-Tradesman needs you to buy his goods...else he doesnt have content.
He also needs advanced wear/tear on gear since there isnt going to be just one trader. The 50/500/5k fellow traders all need content as well to keep them busy.
Doesnt matter that the other 200 or 300k(decent sized MMO) want to loot their items or quest for it,
Lord help the directed content folks if a game throws in things like Docs/Dancers/PB crunchers...for them to have content they need customers....guess who that is? Are we seeing a pattern yet?
Frack Uncle Owen, and the horse he rode in on. For him to have a place in the type of game worlds I enjoy, then it takes away enjoyment from my gaming style. No thanks
And as far as NWN goes....Bad example. Other than a couple of the NWN1 premium mods, I own all of both series(along with BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2/PS:T). The added tools is for folks to make up their own gaming. This is true.
But how many expansions for each game? That would be 2 each plus the download ones for NWN1. It is so folks can have their custom stuff in a game that doesnt have no where near the content of a MMO. YOu are comparing 2 totally dfferent genres.
The tools are good in something like NWN. In a pay based service, the content should be made by the company.
Unless of course that MMO game is a sandbox, where that type of thing is desired.
But dont confuse if a directed content throws in one or 2 items....they still arent legitimizing the existence of Uncle Owen...which in essence is what sandbox is all about. That being "Telling your own story" as the vets pipe up about so often.
Let Owen tell his story in a sandbox game...in the meantime there are plenty of others that wanna devour content with their friends....while not having to deal with Owen, and his pink panties.
Shame you guys just dont understand...the majority of gamers dont want sims in their games. Nor do we want major chunks of sims either. Now why dont YOU get your head out of the sand as I suggested prior...and quit trying to push your gaming style onto others.
While you are at it, insulting folks just for not wanting to play in a "sandbox" is comical at best. You "sandboxers" have a lot of room to grow before thinking about throwing insults. Some havent even quit pining over SWG 3 yrs later. This is read as glass house folks shouldnt be trying to talk down to others.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Meh...This game is gonna be a rehash of all the other failures aka wow-copies out there. No surprises here, the mmo-scene is a sad picture nowadays. Instant gratification wins all the time. Bugger them that want something more in their mmo's than another easymode piece of shit. I hate what WoW made the mmo-scene into. Safe and familiar is the rule..pfft
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Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
Well I wonder how many of you recall this interview with a lead Bioware dev in discussions about MMOs?
{QUOTE=}AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft
Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd.
As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn.
Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance.
Lesson Two
According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us."
As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so.
"This is not about getting some more customers -- this the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn.
Lesson Three
"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games."
He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.)
A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.'
With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that."
Lesson Four
One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW."
It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down.
Lesson Five
The next point was another design tip, and became mildly convoluted (like the issue it tackled, ironically.) "Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much sh*t you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!" He judged WoW's interface to be "as simple as it can possibly be and as fun as it can possibly be." An audience member correctly added "...but no simpler." Walton suggested that as hardcore gamers, we forget the painful process of learning interfaces since we did it so long ago -- and to be mindful that gamers come to games much fresher than we do.
At the same time, Walton maintained that a new GUI "had better be 50% better than the current stuff" or players will hate it. An audience member asked about the massive customization and complexity powergamers perpetrate on the WoWinterface. Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked."
Lesson Six
Moving on, Walton wryly noted, "Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over." When asked about procedurally generated content, Walton thought it "doesn't work because it's generic and obvious." He thinks gamers will quickly perceive the pattern of how it's generated: "Somebody just changed the names of the NPC and the names of the places I go to get stuff."
Lesson Seven
Another sticking point for many designers (and gamers) is PVP content. Walton thinks strong PVP is essential. He also offered up this thought: besides the core PVP gamers, "a certain percentage of people [exist who] don't know that they want to compete once they have some mastery." But from a developer standpoint, "it's hard to balance PVP and PVE together."
Also, "if [developers] don't like PVP it's hard to get behind it" but "the nice thing about having bigger teams is that we have enough diversity [to pursue different tracks]." According to Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a quote Walton presented, PVP was made easier to develop in WOW by the fact that monsters and player characters have very similar damage and HP capacities.
Lesson Eight
"Don't tune for the hardcore." Turning to the audience, Walton asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have shipped an MMO? How many of you remember a discussion about making the game harder to keep people in the game longer?" He dismissed those who had but didn't, and suggested that this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you."
When he first encountered WoW, he admits thinking that the game would be over in 50 days -- because it's so fast paced. But when its success became apparent, Walton realized something. "I was thinking about crazy people! Crazy people can finish the game in 50 days, but crazy people are not who we should be thinking about.... where's the real market, our real customers? If anything, I think people should make games that level faster than WoW -- that have the right content to hold up."
Lesson Nine
He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "City Of Heroes taught me this before WoW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game."
His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WoW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WoW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want."
Lesson 10
Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games -- and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players' experience of the game, he asked, "Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?" Noting "the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing" he suggested "an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go 'what do I do next?' The vast majority of customers -- particularly when you get out of the hardcore -- need the signposts."
He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, "I can make nine bad choices!" According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, "If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices."
Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton "a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don't really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple."
Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to "think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn't feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you're doing it."
Lesson 11
Taking a page from 1980s ads for the board game Othello, Walton suggested that an MMO should be "easy to learn, difficult to master." Warning that again "it's hard to get inside a newbie's shoes... if you overwhelm them with stuff, people will not learn it all. It's not about how deep it is -- it's about how steep that learning curve is. A shallow learning curve lets people move through it at their own speed." He suggested "Nobody's entertained by feeling incompetent. Feeling competent and gaining mastery is a huge part of game fun for people."
Lesson 12
The 12th and final point was perhaps the least immediately practical. Walton praised Blizzard's reputation for consistent quality products -- "brands matter." He asked the crowd "who believes that there's more than three companies who you'll buy their games sight unseen?" Nobody raised their hands. His slightly depressing (if pragmatic) analysis? "You're not going to kick WoW's ass because you don't have a brand that's good enough to do it. Can you be competitive? Maybe."
Questions and Answers
Here, the formal question and answer time began. The first question was: what was the biggest error Blizzard made with World Of Warcraft? After pondering for a few moments, Walton suggested it might be "not getting experience in database and backend server was their biggest error. The launch was not that nice... backend can kick your butt, can kill your game."
Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial -- though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go -- he suggested that "the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable." Small leaps? Forget it: "Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I've never done before. If nine out of 10 people can't tell it's an innovation, it's not an innovation."
In Conclusion
The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it's about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced.
All of these things have been anathema to MMOs thus far, but Walton suggested that World Of Warcraft threw them into stark relief. In a genre in desperate need of innovation, these words offer hope for a way forward. {/QUOTE}
Now I have seen alot of posts here discussing what is known and not and how one can reach a conclusion this early on. And intially I agree. I dont know to what the OP was refering but I immediately recalled this interview. I also thought of it when I saw countless posts requesting the cartoony graphics be toned down. As we know cartoony graphics was a well known feature of WoW. Ergo we can see looking at this and what little we have as reasons for concern.
For me Ill keep watching and make no commitments
As some of the attitudes expressed in this article are EXACTLY the reasons for the sad state of the MMO genre right now:
Lesson 4:Let's make everything soloable. Why should I pay $15.00 a month to play a solo based game? That defeats the entire purpose of the MMO world and isn't what many envisioned when the first games were being created. Solo based games are made for consoles. Taking Grand Theft auto with all it's soloness and forcing people to pay $15.00 a month for it wouldn't make it an MMO. But that's exactly what the industry is turning into.
Lesson 7: The PVP in WOW is not universally regarded as good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no risk vs reward. In fact, WOW is the example of how NOT to do it.
Lesson 8: THis one is the kookiest. Make it even easier and faster to level than WOW? Are you friggin kidding me?
No one's saying make it as hardcore as EVE. But geez, if it's that easy to breeze thru you won't keep people subscribing for longer than a month.
Lesson 9: Let them quit. Yeah okay, then as soon as they all quit and word spreads that this is just another cookie cutter MMO, you'll be out of a job smarty pants.Ask anyone that played one of the many WOW ripoffs made by companies that did exactly as you suggested. Perhaps another lesson to add on is that word travels fast in the MMO world. Those millions of players that quit WOW that you seem to not give a hoot about won't play anything that resembles WOW because they've played that game already. They've been there and done that. Why would they pay money to relive the same experience. That's the point these developers don't seem to get.
LOL. Let them quit. Yeah, that worked SO gret for SOE didn't it?
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.
As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
I totally agree with this statement. BioWare would be nuts to not copy WoW's model with an IP like Star Wars.
You stirred up the hornet's nest with this post! People are forgetting that this is a forum where opinions are expressed. Chill out SW geeks. Jeeeeesh.
I totally agree with this statement. BioWare would be nuts to not copy WoW's model with an IP like Star Wars.
You stirred up the hornet's nest with this post! People are forgetting that this is a forum where opinions are expressed. Chill out SW geeks. Jeeeeesh.
If calling everyone you disagree with geeks makes you beleive your point has more vaildity then do what you must.
I actually however see a very good counter arguement to your post. That a IP with as much weight and popularity as SW is wasted on copying a seen it all before mould that many players are beconing increasingly bored of. There have not been too many games that have been really outstanding based on the SW IP. And two of thise rare gems that are were KOTOR and KOTOR 2. I then get the feeling it would be a double disapointment for many people who loved Biowares unique and innovative take to get all coy and jump on the WoW bandwagon.
I will say while I beleive this I could tolerate a good WoW clone in SW guise to an extent basically because while WoW has been copied to death they have all been poor. Though I still advise against this. The interview even says you wont knock WoW off it perch anytime soon. Best utilise the SW franchise for something unique like SWG did. Ok your sick of hearing that, but... I never actually played SWG. I was going to but that was after CU were I was advised not to. And these days it seems dated.
And so really SWTOR could fill the gap perfectly and get far more success than being yet another WoW clone. Besides there was one thing to me that WoW never managed... to be interesting. I have tried it more than once on different servers and archetypes and it still baffles me how people find it entertaining. I found it so dull. If they had to go WoW clone they would have to pick up the pace.
Well, this dev missed some points here and there.
Solo play is all well and good, but if you can solo the entire game and give a bugger to all grouping then what's the point of playing an mmo in the first place? Mmo's are about the social aspect and losing yourself in a virtual world. Yes, world not game.
I can partly agree with not tuning the game for the hardcore, but the endgame, raids and so on must be tuned for them. They are the ones that do all those raids and drag the casuals with them. If the content is too easy, it would be done too fast and then forgotten about being a waste of time for the hardcore and a showstopper for the casual player that want to see that content atleast one time cause the hardcore wont bother running it. Easy raids sucks monkeyballs aka Naxxaramas in WoW. That was the hardest raid pre-bc but post-wotlk it's so damn easy it became boring. One of the things from the whole wotlk package that made me quit the game for good.
Sure, make the leveling easier. Doesn't mean crap to me personally and the casuals will love it for that, but the endgame must be though.
Less choices in an mmo. Right, this one don't need a comment at all. The sheer ignorance speaks for itself.
I will keep watching this game, but reading what a leading dev at Bioware thinks about mmo's paint a bleak picture for the future of this game.
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Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
Well, this dev missed some points here and there.
Solo play is all well and good, but if you can solo the entire game and give a bugger to all grouping then what's the point of playing an mmo in the first place? Mmo's are about the social aspect and losing yourself in a virtual world. Yes, world not game.
I can partly agree with not tuning the game for the hardcore, but the endgame, raids and so on must be tuned for them. They are the ones that do all those raids and drag the casuals with them. If the content is too easy, it would be done too fast and then forgotten about being a waste being a stopper for the casual player that want to see that content atleast one time. Easy raids sucks monkeyballs aka Naxxaramas in WoW. That was the hardest raid pre-bc but post-wotlk it's so damn easy it became boring. One reason from the whole wotlk package that made the quit the game for good.
Sure, make the leveling easier. Doesn't mean crap to me personally and the casuals will love it for that, but the endgame must be though.
Less choices in an mmo. Right, this one don't need a comment at all. The sheer ignorance speaks for itself.
I will keep watching this game, but reading what a leading dev at Bioware thinks about mmo's paint a bleak picture for the future of this game.
I couldn't agree with you more...
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~Ernest Gaines
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Didnt Walton work on SWG also?
I don't get where people think having a game focus on group-content means the same thing as forcing people into group-content. I'd like a game that offers a good amount of both; too often I'm either forced into one or the other; WAR as example as being forced into group content and Age of Conan (PvE-wise, anyway) for being forced into solo content. Honestly, if WAR or WoW or any MMO for that matter gave me a choice such as, "Hmm... well, today should I solo or join a group?" I'd probably subscribe to them for alot longer than I have.
EDIT, REGARDING WALTON'S "LIST": Honestly, all I could read from that entire thing was "WoW". I don't see this game being anything else but with a different skin if he is serious about that, it makes it grossly clear. It's a shame that all these companies seriously think that copying something that is already vastly in control of the market will get them a bigger profit than something completely different and original from what's on the market, but what can you do? What annoys me the most is that he and the rest of Bioware will try to justify this game as unique, like every other MMO that has ever been created past WoW's success, just because they added one or two new du-hickies here and there. Ugh...
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Didnt Walton work on SWG also?
Yes, he did. Brief (very brief) biography is on wikipedia here.To my knowledge he had no part in the NGE. I think he left SOE just before or just after the CU.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Yeah, this interview is why I lump Walton in with my list of concerns. "More directed, more accessible, and faster-paced" are three points I have issue with in the context of how they are being implemented in games today. Those words essentially have become a fancy dressing for the word easier.
This article soldifies for me that Walton is just as enamored with WoW as Smedley was and will guide TOR along the same playstyle path as WoW, but with a few twists here and there to make it look starwarsy. Add to that Vogel's apparent dislike for an involved crafting system (because it's not heroic) and, well, it adds up to an MMO that has nothing I'd like to participate in.
I love the SW IP, which is why I keep coming back to this forum, but I hate the direction. To those that suggest we know nothing about this title, read the above interview. It gives you a good idea of what you'll be getting. A game made with Gordon wearing WoW-goggles. Know, if you like WoW, cool, and if you like SW then you should be happy. I, however, don't like WoW (though I don't berate it) and have no interest in something that is super similiar to it, like the direction Walton believes in evidence the above.
Didnt Walton work on SWG also?
Yes, he did. Brief (very brief) biography is on wikipedia here.To my knowledge he had no part in the NGE. I think he left SOE just before or just after the CU.
Thanks for the Info!
I won't be disapointed, because I won't play it for 2 reasons :
1. It is not a sandbox
2. I won't invest time and effort in an mmorpg which may be influenced by Lucas Arts ever again, the danger that the game may radically change at any point in time with no input from the playerbase is just too great.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site :
http://mmodata.blogspot.be/
Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
I WILL say it
MMORPG's should be more about grouping, you should be forced to group if you wan't to accomplish something bigger.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site :
http://mmodata.blogspot.be/
Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
Hey hey, the OP here.
My post was made because I was getting a bit tired with all the SWG-vets being disappointed/angsty with every bit of news that suggested SWToR wouldn't be like SWG.
So I overreacted a bit. After seeing so many "I don't think it's blue, I doubt it will be blue, this doesn't look blue to me" messages I really felt the urge to post "IT'S RED!!".
Anyways, even though I still agree with my post in general, it did not have to be so provocative in tone.
Bottom line, we know it won't be a sandbox.
Seriously guys give it a break,
ITS BIOWARE, they know how to make incredible games its based on their kotor genre/style they wont ruin it,
They are taking it to the next level, you need to have trust in them,
Would you want to have a game that looks and plays like AOC
Or a game that looks like wow and plays like star wars,
Im for the star wars guys.
As far as lesson 4 is concerned I would have to disagree to an extent. Have you played a game that was based on forced grouping.. Meaning that the only way to level or quest was to do it in a party of 6? I only ask cause, i have experienced it in FFXI. The problem is that if it is forced grouping it starts to hamper your ability to do anything outside of the group or when members are not online. You become absolutely dependant on the group. So I believe this has to be a little bit of a mixture of types of quests/missions (grouped) and (soloable) missions. I can understand the argument about playing a soloable game, but I believe the ability to do things on your own does not mean you cannot do them with friends. Just means if they are not on at the time that you are... You can still do what you want.[/quote]
[quote]As far as the rest, I cant complain one bit with any of your arguments. I agree with leveling too fast. I agree that PVP in WOW wasnt that great.
But as far as lesson 9 goes, I believe there are various reasons for this. Fickle players or Haters should not drive the creative thinking of th devs. if the game is good, then I would to trust the devs to do the same. As far as the other companies that you were referring to... I assume it was WAR and AOC.. Yes they tried to take some of the WOW magic and do it on their own, but their failure wasnt cause of the players wanted desired content. It was because the game generally sucked. No one wants to play a shitty game. WAR's issue was lack of content and AOC's was bugged/ said that things were implemented that were not. As a result, Funcom lied about the ability to put that content out and paid the price for lying. Neither of these companies were at fault because the players requested content that they wanted. They were at fault because lack of content & implementation.
Nowhere have I ever said that a game should be forced grouping. Bu t the way this guy explains it, solo should be the be all and end all of MMOs. At least that is what I gathered from what he wrote. We've seen that and it hasn't worked.
Fickle players is all the latest MMOs seem to have been catering to. Again, that is the kind of players who don't care about the virtual world and only care about the quick fix. That is the kind of crowd that this person is catering to. Just read what he said. It screams "Let's make a cheap thrills game that hooks people for a month and to hell with everyone else." That just rubs me the wrong way. Warhammer failed because it was a cheap knock off of WOW with some RvR thown in. That's not being original. WOW was original for its time. THAT's why it succeeded. If WOW had copied Everquest down to the last detail it would have failed. What other companies are doing is copying WOW and throwing in a thing here and there and calling different. Players aren't that stupid. They know a cheap knock off when they see it. If TOR takes these suggestions and copies WOW it will fail like all the others.
This game would do best to avoid SWG(as all games should) and WOW. Again, we've played that game already. Give us something different.
Woah Woah calm down there Bobby Knight!
I didnt take a shot at you and nowhere did I say that you did say anything about forced grouping. I ASKED IF YOU HAVE PLAYED FORCED GROUPING. It was an attempt to talk about this MMO. I felt that soloing had to have a intricate part of this game, but not hamper you from being able to play the rest of the game. Good lord, chill out man.
Plus, Gordon Walton has worked with some great IP's. But you cant take everything this guy says literally. Yes WAR and AOC have, but doesnt mean every body else lives and dies by Walton's words. Its a guideline to build an MMO and his own experiences. Nowhere does it suggest that this is the only way that you can build an mmo. I have faith that people know that difference.
If nothing at all this is proof that everyone is trying to find something about SW:TOR that they have to take Gordons lessons and say that this is the way Bioware is goin and chosen. Its absolutely speculative to believe it. Bioware has told you their direction and we have to wait to see more. To me, they havent given me enough to hang my hat on. I like story and have played most of Bioware's games. I love the way they have done story. I would assume that their version of story is going to blow most people away, but what I am most curious about is... How they plan to implement the PVP and RVR that they have talked about. Im willing to see which way this goes.
Here is a nice little recent quote if you all missed it about grouping ect.
www.tentonhammer.com/node/47133
James: One of the things we've been doing is that we're making sure that when we're building content we have different representatives of the different play styles. Whenever we're doing design discussions or implementing a system, we have the different player types involved. There's the solo player type that hates other players and is very anti-social...
BioWare is creating their game with all play styles in mind.
It's funny, because there are a bunch of players like this in WoW where they don't like to hang around with other players but love to show off all the cool stuff that they have.
Then there are the players that like to adventure with their buddies. They have their own group of friends, and they just like to adventure with those players all the time.
Then there are players that like to join guilds and are social butterflies and like to adventure with people from their guild. They like to be part of these big huge groups that go out and play in major events like raids.
We want to take all those players and make sure that each of those player types has fun in our game. I can't go into details about all the systems, but we have made sure that those player types are thought about when we're building the game.
OMG, Game for all play styles? NO WAY!
Thanks Tillaman!
But you know since they referenced WOW, this game is going to be exactly like WOW right? You know this right? All they had to do was say WOW once. Game over man!
Thanks Tillaman!
But you know since they referenced WOW, this game is going to be exactly like WOW right? You know this right? All they had to do was say WOW once. Game over man!
I can pull other articles, quotes ect where they referenced lots of other games as well. LOL I’m a walking Google engine. So no I don't think it's game over, maybe for some people it is.