What's the sales figures of GTA games vs some top themepark MMOs?
Really there's only been a couple of true sandbox MMORPGs and most of them from small studios who don't really advertise outside of the market.
The technology is finally squaring away for there to be a good sandbox.
I mean Second Life and it's clones, Eve, Ultima, EQ1 and Shadowbane to an extent proves there's just as many players who like sandbox style game play out there.
For a company to disregard such numbers would be foolish. Copying what's big now works sometimes, but if anyone wants a WoW-killer then cloning it probably isn't the best way to achieve it.
(But we'll see with RIFT. Maybe I'm the foolish one.) (then again, fufufufu.. Probably not, until they come up with a viable F2P model.)
I'm sure it's in the millions. However I never considerd GTA to be sandbox despite it and others say. It seems as linear and story driven as they come to me.
But of course an argument could be make that a sandbox spg is very very different from a sandbox mmo.
Venge Sunsoar
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Dark of age of Camelot still the best mmo out there. It's just too bad that EA killed it.
Age, the ravages of time the unrelenting march of technological progress and in the end an aging player base that was replaced by the new generation of gamers that want something very different to what was previously considered good are what has lead to DAOC slow demise. Not much EA could have done about it.
There are a few things I don't understand about sandboxers and their fans on these threads.
Why do you all seem to think that people that play WoW are all new to MMO's and don't know wha tthe 'golden' era was like. WoW has a lot of players, don't fool yourself into thinking that even a majority of them have played wow as their first game.
You might be surprised at the sheer amount of 'mmo vets' that play wow. Some of us vets grew out of the phase.
What's with this elitist attitude that gives you some misconception that you're better than a WoW player? Don't you realize how petty and ridiculous you sound with this whole preaching your gaming opinions onto other players? You hear all this "omg wow is for easy ppl, when you're ready for a challenge come to a real game" - I bet 90% of you haven't even done a hardmode encounter in wow.
You guys are like the religious fanatics that go to Mardi Gras to try to preach their religion and call everyone else sinners.
Oh and another thing - So some guy posts some random thread about some random friend that says Amazon has X amount of pre-orders and suddenly it's fact? Lol come on now, so my uncle who's a real wiz with volcanos says that a volcano is headed this way! Make sure you buy your volcano insurance !
Ha my step dad works with insurance and theres no such thing as VOLCANO INSURANCE!!! If your going to write BS make sure you get the facts straight first. Makes the rest of your thread seem like a load now
It's a joke from Family Guy. Right over your head apparently. I think it's funny you asked your dad if there was volcano insurance though.
That's kind of the point.. it doesn't exist. Kind of how you're not just supposed to believe some guy when they say a friend said blah blah 300,000 pre orders, blah blah?
lol in trying to be cool you really just burned yourself.
HA i think its funny how the same person thats here defending WOW also gets his jokes from Family Guy. Follow trends much? I dont have to TRY to be cool answering your thread, being cool starts by not getting jokes from Famliy Guy. Oh and the reason i know so much about volcano insurance is because i lost my house to one. So yeah dude nice joke
People seem so comfortable with the fact that because themepark mmo's earn more money than sandbox mmo's, devs lean towards themepark design. We have far too many games launched and in development that are clear results of game companies trying to cut in on WoW's profits by trying to 'steal' their players away with similar game mechanics, and a low difficulty curve. They've all but forgotton what MMORPGs are supposted to be, and how they're supposed to feel. We now have a bunch of single-player-esque lobby minigames calling themselves MMORPGs for no other reason than they are online.
I think you have misunderstood something. Eve is doing as fine or better than almost every other MMO out there.
The truth is that: Shitty games makes less money than good games.
A good sandbox will earn more money than a crap Themepark and the other way around (some possible exceptions).
The reason more devs makes themeparks is that they are easier to make and includes less work. Few people can write all quests for a large game, to make tools for players to create stuff is hard work.
As for what MMORPGs is supposed to be is a fun P&P RPG situations and the the types excists in P&P as well depending on your GM.
I played some heavy railroading P&P games as well as free games than no sandbox MMO could ever make.
There are some companies that are working on sandbox MMOs right now, Bethesda and CCP/White wolf are the 2 most famous. I think they will sell pretty well and prove my point to you.
Oblivion did actually sell better than Dragon age and O is a sandbox.
People seem so comfortable with the fact that because themepark mmo's earn more money than sandbox mmo's, devs lean towards themepark design. We have far too many games launched and in development that are clear results of game companies trying to cut in on WoW's profits by trying to 'steal' their players away with similar game mechanics, and a low difficulty curve. They've all but forgotton what MMORPGs are supposted to be, and how they're supposed to feel. We now have a bunch of single-player-esque lobby minigames calling themselves MMORPGs for no other reason than they are online.
I think you have misunderstood something. Eve is doing as fine or better than almost every other MMO out there.
The truth is that: Shitty games makes less money than good games.
A good sandbox will earn more money than a crap Themepark and the other way around (some possible exceptions).
The reason more devs makes themeparks is that they are easier to make and includes less work. Few people can write all quests for a large game, to make tools for players to create stuff is hard work.
As for what MMORPGs is supposed to be is a fun P&P RPG situations and the the types excists in P&P as well depending on your GM.
I played some heavy railroading P&P games as well as free games than no sandbox MMO could ever make.
There are some companies that are working on sandbox MMOs right now, Bethesda and CCP/White wolf are the 2 most famous. I think they will sell pretty well and prove my point to you.
Oblivion did actually sell better than Dragon age and O is a sandbox.
To be perfectly fair, Oblivion has been out for 5 years or so now while DA has only been out for 1.5 years. :P
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
People seem so comfortable with the fact that because themepark mmo's earn more money than sandbox mmo's, devs lean towards themepark design. We have far too many games launched and in development that are clear results of game companies trying to cut in on WoW's profits by trying to 'steal' their players away with similar game mechanics, and a low difficulty curve. They've all but forgotton what MMORPGs are supposted to be, and how they're supposed to feel. We now have a bunch of single-player-esque lobby minigames calling themselves MMORPGs for no other reason than they are online.
I think you have misunderstood something. Eve is doing as fine or better than almost every other MMO out there.
The truth is that: Shitty games makes less money than good games.
A good sandbox will earn more money than a crap Themepark and the other way around (some possible exceptions).
The reason more devs makes themeparks is that they are easier to make and includes less work. Few people can write all quests for a large game, to make tools for players to create stuff is hard work.
As for what MMORPGs is supposed to be is a fun P&P RPG situations and the the types excists in P&P as well depending on your GM.
I played some heavy railroading P&P games as well as free games than no sandbox MMO could ever make.
There are some companies that are working on sandbox MMOs right now, Bethesda and CCP/White wolf are the 2 most famous. I think they will sell pretty well and prove my point to you.
Oblivion did actually sell better than Dragon age and O is a sandbox.
All things considered, your posts are some of the better posts in this forum and I'd like to thank you for that. Even when I don't agree, of course. Not the part about a good game doing better than a shitty game, that makes perfect sense.
I don't agree with, I think, a very important part of your post and only want to address that: calling Elder Scrolls IV a 'sandbox'. I don't think that it is a sandbox because there are simply too many quests and the game's narrative is far too strong. The terms 'sandbox' and 'themepark' are thrown around far too much and far too loosely, leaving any real discussion including the terms to be problematic at best due to no real accepted definition. If we are to accept that it is necessary, but not sufficient, to include minimal quests (both in number and richness, time to complete or breadth), a passive narrative (players impact the lore more than the lore impacts the players) and developers including a healthy amount of tools for players to 'play in the sand,' Oblivion is still not a 'sandbox' because it just doesn't fit in with some of the necessary conditions -and I think that we can agree that those necessary conditions aren't together sufficient to capture the term 'sandbox.'
We need to look at having some very serious defitions for 'themepark' and 'sandbox' in order to keep using them, otherwise we're just spewing jargon and talking past each other. Granted, that's par for the course here but posters who take it upon themselves to be more than just internet drivel, like I see you do, owe it to themselves and others to have some sort of real standard and engage debates (or poor threads!) with that in mind.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain. (2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
BUT the players themselves will need to create their own content. What they need to do is make it relevently easy to level to end-game (like World of Warcraft), and then have the end-game be something worth fighting over, such as planetary conquest with control of land and therefore resources and other things. Allow players to feel like they are fighting something that is worth protecting, such as their own survival and well-being, and everything they created would be on the line. My dream MMO is something like what I described with Star Wars Galaxies and my own changes to it, but make it completely and uttlerly IP-less. Allow players to make up their own quests, guilds, and even factions to give and share with other players. Allow players to fight for planetary survival. Make it worth fighting for.
What started out as a very good post, ended with a sisser.
What seems to have potential, is lacking in simple good game play. It is the exact same "idea" AOC promoted: building cities (by gaterhing mats) and then defend them wih your guild, just like you were living in that land and constructed zones.
Reality check: people don't LIVE in cyberspace, they don't eat in cyberspace, they are NOT always there in cyberspace (no matter how few idiots would want to play like this and throw their RL out of the window).
So keep on dreaming. "Meaningful" by owning zones 24/7 and "living" for it is not good video game design at all.
Comments
The King has to ask..
What's the sales figures of GTA games vs some top themepark MMOs?
Really there's only been a couple of true sandbox MMORPGs and most of them from small studios who don't really advertise outside of the market.
The technology is finally squaring away for there to be a good sandbox.
I mean Second Life and it's clones, Eve, Ultima, EQ1 and Shadowbane to an extent proves there's just as many players who like sandbox style game play out there.
For a company to disregard such numbers would be foolish. Copying what's big now works sometimes, but if anyone wants a WoW-killer then cloning it probably isn't the best way to achieve it.
(But we'll see with RIFT. Maybe I'm the foolish one.) (then again, fufufufu.. Probably not, until they come up with a viable F2P model.)
I'm sure it's in the millions. However I never considerd GTA to be sandbox despite it and others say. It seems as linear and story driven as they come to me.
But of course an argument could be make that a sandbox spg is very very different from a sandbox mmo.
Venge Sunsoar
Dark of age of Camelot still the best mmo out there. It's just too bad that EA killed it.
Read my blog http://sanmonocobra.blogspot.com/
Age, the ravages of time the unrelenting march of technological progress and in the end an aging player base that was replaced by the new generation of gamers that want something very different to what was previously considered good are what has lead to DAOC slow demise. Not much EA could have done about it.
HA i think its funny how the same person thats here defending WOW also gets his jokes from Family Guy. Follow trends much? I dont have to TRY to be cool answering your thread, being cool starts by not getting jokes from Famliy Guy. Oh and the reason i know so much about volcano insurance is because i lost my house to one. So yeah dude nice joke
I think you have misunderstood something. Eve is doing as fine or better than almost every other MMO out there.
The truth is that: Shitty games makes less money than good games.
A good sandbox will earn more money than a crap Themepark and the other way around (some possible exceptions).
The reason more devs makes themeparks is that they are easier to make and includes less work. Few people can write all quests for a large game, to make tools for players to create stuff is hard work.
As for what MMORPGs is supposed to be is a fun P&P RPG situations and the the types excists in P&P as well depending on your GM.
I played some heavy railroading P&P games as well as free games than no sandbox MMO could ever make.
There are some companies that are working on sandbox MMOs right now, Bethesda and CCP/White wolf are the 2 most famous. I think they will sell pretty well and prove my point to you.
Oblivion did actually sell better than Dragon age and O is a sandbox.
To be perfectly fair, Oblivion has been out for 5 years or so now while DA has only been out for 1.5 years. :P
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
All things considered, your posts are some of the better posts in this forum and I'd like to thank you for that. Even when I don't agree, of course. Not the part about a good game doing better than a shitty game, that makes perfect sense.
I don't agree with, I think, a very important part of your post and only want to address that: calling Elder Scrolls IV a 'sandbox'. I don't think that it is a sandbox because there are simply too many quests and the game's narrative is far too strong. The terms 'sandbox' and 'themepark' are thrown around far too much and far too loosely, leaving any real discussion including the terms to be problematic at best due to no real accepted definition. If we are to accept that it is necessary, but not sufficient, to include minimal quests (both in number and richness, time to complete or breadth), a passive narrative (players impact the lore more than the lore impacts the players) and developers including a healthy amount of tools for players to 'play in the sand,' Oblivion is still not a 'sandbox' because it just doesn't fit in with some of the necessary conditions -and I think that we can agree that those necessary conditions aren't together sufficient to capture the term 'sandbox.'
We need to look at having some very serious defitions for 'themepark' and 'sandbox' in order to keep using them, otherwise we're just spewing jargon and talking past each other. Granted, that's par for the course here but posters who take it upon themselves to be more than just internet drivel, like I see you do, owe it to themselves and others to have some sort of real standard and engage debates (or poor threads!) with that in mind.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain.
(2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
What started out as a very good post, ended with a sisser.
What seems to have potential, is lacking in simple good game play. It is the exact same "idea" AOC promoted: building cities (by gaterhing mats) and then defend them wih your guild, just like you were living in that land and constructed zones.
Reality check: people don't LIVE in cyberspace, they don't eat in cyberspace, they are NOT always there in cyberspace (no matter how few idiots would want to play like this and throw their RL out of the window).
So keep on dreaming. "Meaningful" by owning zones 24/7 and "living" for it is not good video game design at all.
Good forum name btw: sanity.
Please reset and come back to earth I would say.