In short, it is a really good game. In essence, it has a little bit of everything that every single good MMO has ever had. Recipe for a good MMO if you will.
It has its flaws, as do all things, but the way it is designed is that you find the gameplay, the world, and questing interesting in the beginning. The systems it introduces (fishing, world bosses, farming mats, apartments, crafting, workers, horse training, exploration, nodes, etc...) all are complex enough so that you need to invest time into learning and doing them, but they aren't too complex or time-consuming that you feel like you are wasting your precious gaming time. Another thing that helps with that is the rewards from doing these things. They are also enough for you to keep doing them, and while you are at it, it feels like a really well build open world single-player RPG. The MMO part is not shoved into your face until you want to engage in some specific type of content that requires more than just you and some AI, and there is quite a bit of that out there as well. You end up coming to a point where you feel invested really easily, and investing more (time, money, emotions, what have you...) is just as easy, because there is plenty to do and plenty of people to do it with. You eventually get bored about everything, but personalities and preferences aside, there is something for everyone in this MMO, for a few months at least.
MMO's that have quality content with reasonable rewards and can be played alone, with some friends, or en masse, seem to be the ones that keep their foot in the proverbial door of the MMO market longer than average.
To me AC was the greatest mmorpg of all time regardless of 'generation' I think it is funny when games today offer features that AC had it is looked at as new or moving the genre forward. By old school people usually mean EQ when looking at progressive people usually reference AC. It was,in a weird way, way ahead of it's time.
When I look at MMORPG's like AC and compare it to what's on offer today, when you consider the strides we've made in processing power, highspeed net etc. It makes me wonder what the hell happened.
Is it roadblocks in the coding?
I would have put money down that we'd be so much further than we find ourselves today when it comes to MMO's
That's probably because you are thinking that whatever Asheron's Call had was so awesome (or at least good) that everyone would want to emulate it.
You have to ask yourself why did Asheron's Call fail?
Or to put it another way, whatever game can make money for its company/publishers is going to be the trend setter for other games.
Now, you can make any game you want and say "as long as we make enough money to keep the doors open we're good!" But most companies, especially large companies are there to make money for their investors. They have to.
And even if you don't have investors, you need to make enough money to actually stay open and not rely upon the hope that "this year we don't close."
It's not processing power, it's not graphics, it's whatever will make enough money.
"Well that's not right, big companies blah blah blah."
Great, then people can start their own game companies. But then people DO start their own game companies and there are a litany of players who complain "graphics aren't great" or "I don't care about graphics but animations HAVE to be there."
And then the game doesn't launch or it launches but it's not AAA quality and doesn't get enough players.
The truth is that for a decent amount of people here, what they like is not going to make money. So it's not going to exist. Could there be an outlier? Sure. But we've yet to see one.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Sovrath, its something we can always count on you for.
I should of expressed my thoughts better. I wasn't thinking about a business case, game systems or graphics really. If someone would have asked me twenty years ago where I thought MMORPG's would be in twenty years. I would have replied that they probably would take place on massive open worlds with 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands of players playing in a single instance.
I'm wondering if this would be possible to do today or if there is some kind of technological road block be it hardware or coding
Seeing things like this produced today with over 3.5 petabytes of data being streamed into your computer or console. It leads me to believe that the roadblocks are probably more coding related.
And for people who are going to say that flight simulator is not an MMO, for twenty years we have been able to fly with hundreds of people online in a 1:1 scaled version of the earth. In this new version you will be able to fly over your own home.
BDO has the highest spend per player (talking core playerbase not casuals).
Core players spend $300+ per month - many have spent above $5000 since launch
How - predatory RNG gear upgrade system that makes player spend all their money on blowing up $30 costumes for upgrade stones, and artisan memories (that just got upgraded to 5x durability recovery)
Hmm wonder why BDO devs upgraded them to 5x... oh that's right cha-ching!
BDO drains your wallet dry if your are a hardcore player
Do you mind showing your source for this information?
I don't agree with a lot of what DMKano posts here on this site. That being said, I am one of these players. Once you get to siege guild ready gear levels in BDO you are constantly dumping money into the game for nothing or very small gains. The way the AP system works where if you get just one more point of AP then you get 60 additional as a tier bonus is predatory.
Basically you can make around 1-2 billion silver per week in BDO. This is 1 or 2 attempts to PEN your gear. If you spend some money that can be 3-5 attempts. Keep in mind these are attempts with low probability of success 0%-5% depending on fail stack. Then there are accessory upgrades which if they fail the gear is gone.... poof ...
These may not be 100% accurate stats for today's BDO. I have not played in a year. Once I added up how much i had spent it was game over for me. Destroy all gear, uninstall game.
So you are trying to enchant to the highest level so you can be better at pvp?
Who does that now with he introduction of the buff bot shia ? lol
Wow the fact that you actually wrote that just shows how utterly clueless you are about BDO.
Shai buffs cannot equalize the difference in gear because guess what those top guilds with top 5% gear scores also have the same buffs...
/smh
what class do you play ?
You need to use some new gifts instead of reusing the same one lol, troll better pls
Zerk 62 Ninja 61 Musa 62 Wiz 60 Everything else is at 56 or 57
All classes awakened
Edit - forgot 2
Mystic 59 Lahn 60
Yep all others are minimum 56
I dont know what this is. Is this good or elite or something?
Its really not the successful. Its doing "okay". I don't feel its a legit question (especially due to the source). We all know its the graphics that attracted people. After that its the sunk cost fallacy that keeps people playing.
People play it because they love it. I played it and loved it. I never PvPed but I did all the life skills part and enjoyed it immensely. People shouldn't judge things based on their own narrow ideas of 'fun'.
Not that BDO is entirely without its charms, but it is mostly successful for some of the same reasons mobile games are; it's a cleverly designed skinner box that makes you feel like you must be playing it or you're missing out.
It's a pay-to-fix game first and foremost, which can part you from many hundreds, then it invades your brain's addiction centers and plays them like a fiddle.
I played it for about 6 months some time ago and continued "playing" even after I was no longer playing for some time (afk fishing etc.) finally just hit the uninstall button one day and haven't looked back. It's not actually a good game, but it's designed to exploit some of the uglier bits of human nature.
Its really not the successful. Its doing "okay". I don't feel its a legit question (especially due to the source). We all know its the graphics that attracted people. After that its the sunk cost fallacy that keeps people playing.
The fact that they expanded from a dev team with only about a dozen people, to a company of 300+ that's building their own huge headquarters makes it more than "doing okay". BDO has been a gold mine for Pearl Abyss.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
If you look at the number breakdown of pearl abyss. Only 30% of the revenue is from NAEU. The other 70% is from asia. Those number also includes Eve Online since pearl abyss also owns it. So you can conclude the majority of the revenue from Black desert is from asia.
I dont' know if black desert US market is actually bigger than other big name like ESO, FF, GW2. But even if it's bigger, it is still comparable in number.
Western mmorpg have a hard time breaking into the asia market. Asia player simply don't play western mmo. There are also regulation issue so it is not easy to get into the asia market.
Its really not the successful. Its doing "okay". I don't feel its a legit question (especially due to the source). We all know its the graphics that attracted people. After that its the sunk cost fallacy that keeps people playing.
The fact that they expanded from a dev team with only about a dozen people, to a company of 300+ that's building their own huge headquarters makes it more than "doing okay". BDO has been a gold mine for Pearl Abyss.
BDO made the owner of the company a billionaire, they bought Eve online, and are launching multiple new games, but yeah, it's totally not successful, you guys. /s
I tried 3 or 4 times to play it now across the years. I just cant get into it. I dont know why i cant - combat seems generic, I hate having to read everything in the story, story and missions arent very clear what the expectations are or what it is they are asking you to do and whom to find etc without using the I cant think for myself buttons and routing. Ive tried, I just dont like it. I want to, but nope.
I tried 3 or 4 times to play it now across the years. I just cant get into it. I dont know why i cant - combat seems generic, I hate having to read everything in the story, story and missions arent very clear what the expectations are or what it is they are asking you to do and whom to find etc without using the I cant think for myself buttons and routing. Ive tried, I just dont like it. I want to, but nope.
I have never read a single quest in BDO since launch... it's not required at all. Everything is on the map as a yellow circle... and autopath makes it all just fast click and no reading.
Also once you learn the inventory expansion quests you can only do those and otherwise grind from 1-56 in a few hours.
The games combat is good graphics are nice costumes are very good but the game is all about who has the most PENS and the Highest AP/DP and Level.
The games RNG is shit meaning the enhancement system the PVE the very little there is gets boring and its mindless grinding with no thought the PVP system is trash no balance then again what game is i don't really like PVP not much of a competitive person so i don't really care for it.
If they would just add a lot more PVE things to the game and real group content and made the enchant system better the game would be a lot better IMO.
I really like the game still play it here and there but cant take it for longer then a half hour to a hour before it bores me and i logoff.
I liked it for the open world Feeling. Something that is lacking nowadays.
I quit because of content besides grinding. (Dungeons, quests beside main quest) and because I didnt like the housing system (I only want to have 1 house) and the Worker system.
Comments
It has its flaws, as do all things, but the way it is designed is that you find the gameplay, the world, and questing interesting in the beginning. The systems it introduces (fishing, world bosses, farming mats, apartments, crafting, workers, horse training, exploration, nodes, etc...) all are complex enough so that you need to invest time into learning and doing them, but they aren't too complex or time-consuming that you feel like you are wasting your precious gaming time. Another thing that helps with that is the rewards from doing these things. They are also enough for you to keep doing them, and while you are at it, it feels like a really well build open world single-player RPG. The MMO part is not shoved into your face until you want to engage in some specific type of content that requires more than just you and some AI, and there is quite a bit of that out there as well.
You end up coming to a point where you feel invested really easily, and investing more (time, money, emotions, what have you...) is just as easy, because there is plenty to do and plenty of people to do it with.
You eventually get bored about everything, but personalities and preferences aside, there is something for everyone in this MMO, for a few months at least.
MMO's that have quality content with reasonable rewards and can be played alone, with some friends, or en masse, seem to be the ones that keep their foot in the proverbial door of the MMO market longer than average.
I should of expressed my thoughts better. I wasn't thinking about a business case, game systems or graphics really. If someone would have asked me twenty years ago where I thought MMORPG's would be in twenty years. I would have replied that they probably would take place on massive open worlds with 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands of players playing in a single instance.
I'm wondering if this would be possible to do today or if there is some kind of technological road block be it hardware or coding
Seeing things like this
And for people who are going to say that flight simulator is not an MMO, for twenty years we have been able to fly with hundreds of people online in a 1:1 scaled version of the earth. In this new version you will be able to fly over your own home.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
So... why don't you tell us the titles of some of the games you have been involved with.
Whats your expertise?
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
- top notch grafhics
- enjoyable combat
- regular patches
- no bullshit communication
- they listen to feedback
- extreme amount of content ingame
i think bdo the second best succesfull mmorpg out there. wow ofcourse still the leader
BDO made the owner of the company a billionaire, they bought Eve online, and are launching multiple new games, but yeah, it's totally not successful, you guys. /s
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
The games RNG is shit meaning the enhancement system the PVE the very little there is gets boring and its mindless grinding with no thought the PVP system is trash no balance then again what game is i don't really like PVP not much of a competitive person so i don't really care for it.
If they would just add a lot more PVE things to the game and real group content and made the enchant system better the game would be a lot better IMO.
I really like the game still play it here and there but cant take it for longer then a half hour to a hour before it bores me and i logoff.
I quit because of content besides grinding. (Dungeons, quests beside main quest) and because I didnt like the housing system (I only want to have 1 house) and the Worker system.
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon