Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

WAR was very nearly there. They had very impressive numbers at launch, just no immediate retention. Weren"t they at 850k or something like that?

Palum said:

WAR was very nearly there. They had very impressive numbers at launch, just no immediate retention. Weren"t they at 850k or something like that?

Click to expand...

Not sure what the actual numbers were. But I wasn"t surprised when it didn"t meet expectations. For exactly the reasons I stated earlier.

Random factor: Since it"s going to be 9 months or so until we even hear what the IP"s name is (judging by them coming into the thread a few months ago and saying it wouldn"t be up for a year), I"d be shocked if the game is out in the next 3-4 years. Unless they"re just playing their cards really super-ninja-close to their chest.

Which is plenty of time for the MMO landscape to be a completely different beast, or for WoW to do something stupid enough to impale itself (GoD 2.0).

Or for Blizzard to time its next MMO"s release to strangle Curt"s game in the crib like Sony (unsuccessfully) tried to do to WoW with EQ2"s early launch.

Kuro said:

Or for Blizzard to time its next MMO"s release to strangle Curt"s game in the crib like Sony (unsuccessfully) tried to do to WoW with EQ2"s early launch.

Click to expand...

Not only can I see this realistically happening, but i"m expecting it.

Kuro said:

Or for Blizzard to time its next MMO"s release to strangle Curt"s game in the crib like Sony (unsuccessfully) tried to do to WoW with EQ2"s early launch.

Click to expand...

Remember however that wow also did an early release because EQ2 released, they just had a better polished product by that time than EQ2 was.

I think the biggest issue the last "wave" of MMOs had is they were fun for the first few levels, and got terribly shitty after that. Too much emphasis on testing the starting zones and shit like that, or bad progression planning later on.

For AoC, Tortage was great, and arguably the game was ok for a little while after too(the race specific areas for 20-30) but it quickly became a pile of shit where you had to grind because of a lack of quest, unfinished instances, lack of end game content(no pvp system at all, untested sieges) combined with very bad class issues that showed as you went on(hi one shot DW barbarians, and basically every class but ToS/PoM/Necro/Demo for leveling because all that mattered was AEing).

In WAR, the game was awesome from 1 to ~20, then you entered tier 3. The xp curve slowed a lot, the maps were too spread out and badly designed, such as most people ended up doing Tor Anroc even though it sucked, CC and AEs started to become much more prominent, and even overwhelming(enough tactics for rain of fire/pit of shades shitstuff, lots of snares AE stuns and AE knockbacks, combined with the lava etc). The game ended up as a mess in tier4 where CCs were way too common and powerful, AE and burst DPS too high especially due to some stupid mechanics(hi engineer/magus AE pull) and even worse, it was laggy as shit in sieges, partly due to UI mistakes(spell updates) but the rest due to simply having too many people in the zone lagging the shit. Add terrible reward vs time invested on keeps, terrible pve and well, here you go, everyone leaves after their first free month.


At wow launch, the endgame was terrible. There was no pvp, and almost no pve. MC was unfinished(Ragnaros wasn"t killable) and Ony was a buggy pos, as well as totally untuned. However the leveling was mostly good until the end, which means "casuals" would still stick around. Also, and that"s very important to note, back then there was not many alternatives. You looked at EQ2 but it wasn"t much better. The other games were old, and that was it. You can"t repeat that same thing nowadays simply because well, there"s wow, there"s lotro, so for most gamers, there"s options to fall back on if the game suck.


That said, I agree, unless Copernicus is much further in dev that I believe it is, there"s a good chance it"ll compete directly, or close enough, with Blizzard"s own wow killer, which isn"t a position I"d envy.

WoW was delayed several times actually. If anyone was rushing it was SOE. Blizzard would have done just as well releasing the first 2 or 3 times it was scheduled to, if the product was ready.

I still maintain EQ2 went down to the murky depths on its own. I actually decided I was going to go with EQ2 as my main MMO at the time only to be completely blown away by WoW in comparison. The muddy quasi-realistic graphics that killed my computer on anything but the lowest settings had nothing on how fluid WoW was. And that"s not polish, EQ2s ridiculous "everything has a cast bar" combat, mediocre art style and chuggalicious client exist to this very day even when they"ve turned the game around to actually be almost passable.

Wow"s endgame was completely passable at release. "Ragnaros was unkillable" "Onyxia was buggy and unkillable" don"t give me that, there was plentyof shit to do besides the two 40 man raids, and Ony was buggy but it mainly "worked", MC had some bugs but nothing worse than any EQ raid we were accustomed to. Nobody was in either of these zones within the first few months that wasn"t used to far far far worse, and the endgame level 60 dungeons were amazingly well made at the time. They were actually challenging too!

If there are Rangers in this game, please don"t make them pansy"s. Each time I log into EQ to play my ranger, I feel like I need to put on a pair of pink panties....

....not that there"s anything wrong with that....

I think you and I have a different idea of passable my friend. Passable doesn"t mean having to sacrafice a virgin gnome to the gods of raid ID"s in the hopes that your entire guild zones into the right one. Used to it or not it"s not like these issues were fixed inside a month or two. It took them almost a year to nail down stability issues and 5 years later that"s still an issue on many servers.

Not only that, but WoW continued to have raid issues for over a year past launch. BWL and AQ40 were both atrocities in some manner or another and even Naxx had it"s issues. We were treated to some pretty terrible shit in TBC for that matter as well.

Strath/Scholo were challenging in much the same way that getting your car to start with no engine is challenging and I would hardly consider those raid content. Fuck, even I was ready to slit my throat after our 5th upper spire run and by the time I"d done my 40th I wanted to kill some motherfuckers.

WoW"s endgame was pretty much non-existent. What made it "passable" was that nobody gave a fuck because the journey to 60 at the time was so fresh and enjoyable and 90% of the playerbase couldn"t amass the raid size to even do 40 mans so the 15 man BRS was their end game and that zone was working fine.

Fuck, this may be a first for me. Actually defending EQ. Son of a bitch I feel dirty. I witnessed some pretty fucked up shit in EQ. Even a dev once joined our raid just to witness how fucked up their own shit was during GoD right before I quit. But for all it"s faults, never did this happen to me in EQ:

Ahh now that brings back memories

Never hugely effected our raids on MC, but I do remember some apps of ours getting stuck out by it and having to sit out 6 of the next 7 days and hope they can get a spot on Ony to show their stuff. Blizzard was far from perfect in their original approach to raids, however much like in EQ, most people never got to experience how buggy this shit was. What about certain gates in BWL not working properly when it first came out (Vaelastraz I believe? fuck it"s been so long lol).

Prior to WoW, people always thought no game could compete with Everquest. The fact of the matter is that Everquest in the past and WoW currently are not "destroying" these games, they are losing subscriptions because of fundamental flaws that exist in the game design.

A lot of these games are trying to focus on the PVP market to "avoid" competition with WoW when it starts them off at a disadvantage because developing a PVP MMORPG is harder then developing a PVE MMORPG and the potential market is smaller.

It"s far smarter to make a PVE focused MMORPG with some PVP built in. Basically, making a game similar to WoW"s. The market can easily support multiple titles, the only reason the subscriptions are skewed so heavily in WoW"s favor is because there is practically no competition. The core game design of WoW is very well done whereas all of these other games have huge flaws in major aspects of the game. People are even willing to deal with bugs if they have to provided the core design is good.

If the game is designed well, it will succeed. The market has shown that there are plenty of players out there to sustain multiple games, the key is putting out a quality product which these other companies are not doing. I wouldn"t even worry about WoW or any other game Blizzard wants to release, just worry about making sure your game is a quality product and people will play it.

Age of Conan and Warhammer were steaming piles of shit. They were not anywhere close to being quality products. They did not "die" because of WoW, they died because they were steaming piles of shit. People need to understand the difference.

Kuro said:

Random factor: Since it"s going to be 9 months or so until we even hear what the IP"s name is (judging by them coming into the thread a few months ago and saying it wouldn"t be up for a year), I"d be shocked if the game is out in the next 3-4 years. Unless they"re just playing their cards really super-ninja-close to their chest.

Click to expand...

Didn"t Curt or Glen or someone say in an old interview that they planned on releasing 2010? I thought their whole thing was that they wanted it to stay very quiet until just before release so expectations etc wouldn"t get to high and people wouldn"t over analyze things etc.

Mippo is basically correct, in my opinion. And it was AoC/War and most likely Aion (though I have at least some hope for the game due to the rate at which they are patching fairly impressive changes in. We"ll see how that goes after the NA release, however) that have been the biggest offenders. WoW is a primarily PVE based game with PVP tacked on in various forms. It offers tangible rewards from PVPing that can increase the PVE effectiveness of many a player. PVP is pretty much risk free (aside from what, busting a Symbol of Kings or 4 to bless the kids in AV with some Kings?) and the negligible loss in time is basically counteracted by the fact that even in losing BGs, you still get tokens and honor. It is effectively a completely positive gain in player power from PVPing. This is in addition to a much more regulated PVE game where progression and character power can be measured in tiers that denote a significant increase in player power as he/she progresses through them.

To compete with WoW is to improve upon their model. This would of course require a large amount of resources post release that most games appear to lack. They seem to always be waiting on all those box sales before they actually finish their initial release, which has proven to be disastrous in basically every single incident. (VG/War/AoC for starters) In order to "beat" wow, you have to provide a 99% bug free game experience for the vast majority of your playerbase. This means that if you cater to PVPers, there better sure as shit be some serious failsafes and balance in your PVP system at an absolute minimum. If you cater to PVE, then your quests better not have spelling errors, complete correctly and offer rewards that don"t make your playerbase collectively go "wtf, more paladin healing plate shit for leveling?!" Initial execution is actually far more important than endgame content.

Pro-tip: if a tester can get max level in sub two weeks and is bored with nothing to do, your game doesn"t have enough content and the leveling curve isn"t long enough. WoW actually had too short of a leveling curve at release and would have benefited greatly (imo) from a slightly longer 1-60 leveling time. This would have enabled players to become more familiar with the world and would not have resulted in the "lfm ubrs" plague that infested the servers a few weeks after release. While you are buying time putting in your awesome raid content, you had best made certain that if any % of your population reaches that content, it is mostly finished if only slightly overtuned. (It sucks, but WoW has proven that overtuning then nerfing is the best way to handle encounters. If everything was shit easy, people would leave the game in droves a few weeks after each patch, which they don"t in any appreciable numbers)

Simply put, even if you do something completely different from WoW, you aren"t competing with them in any real sense (really, why aim for niche?) unless you are actively addressing issues that result from how WoW was launched and its current issues. Sucks for developers, but that is the sad reality of things. Unless of course you cater to a few 100k people across the globe who like boring fucking space combat. Hi EVE!

Players have shown that they will deal with bugs if they are minor so if the core of a game is well designed, they"ll accept a quest or two being broken provided they can advance their characters without them.

Primarily you need a proper system of risk vs reward where players are being rewarded for their time. WoW actually has a wide variety of systems rewarding people for their time. Gearing up through tradeskills, arena"s, battlegrounds, dungeons, and raiding. If you haven"t noticed, almost every single way you can gear up your character all provide rewards along the way with a system to measure advancement. People know in advance how much time they need to put in to get an item, and in a lot of cases the main advantage of being a more skilled player is simply the ability to bypass some time associated with the gearing up process and a slight advantage in gear, but not enough to discourage the masses from gearing up. Other games would do well to copy the system of positive reinforcement.

"Endgame content" really refers to what"s available beyond max level and actually is vitally important to maintaining a playerbase. It"s not an area to leave out of a released game. Even if the raids are only being completed by a small percentage of the playerbase, the simple fact that they are there keeps the proverbial carrot in front. If a player feels like he can"t further his character the achievement portion of why people play is no longer valid as he feels he has achieved everything there is to achieve. That"s when people quit. In most cases even if the players dont participate in the raids themselves, the simple fact that they exist and there is more to do will keep people playing.

Another way to find out how important the raiding game is by judging traffic to item sites. The main guilds in Everquest, the ones posting all of the new loot, had tons of traffic which would indicate that a large portion of the playerbase was very interested in what was dropping, even if it wasn"t obtainable by the majority of them.

Having a good 1-max level game will get people to play, but having a proper endgame is much more important in regards to keeping them playing. A good example of this is LOTRO where most people enjoy the game but quit after hitting max level.

Endgame focus can"t be ignored during the design process; I think we would agree completely on that fact. Having enough things to do when players hit max level is pretty key to keeping interest in any given game. But it is equally as important as to where you focus your efforts as to simply having them in place. A big reason why War/AoC failed to varying degrees is the fact that PVP centric games weren"t ending in a realistically balanced and moderated PVP manner. AoC simply lacked any testing past like level 55 (let alone any siege conflicts prior to their release) and War didn"t think it"s PVP endgame through enough to really see the faults inherent in their system.

Edit: Looking at EQ centric loot sites is a bit misleading, as the entire focus of EQ was the Raid game, while WoW"s focus is stylistically more ambiguous. People F"n love the carrot, but if the carrot is too hard to get to, they tend to forget about it. That is one area in which EQ got right: the carrot increased with every expansion, there was little to no leveling action during the expansion process. Guilds stuck in time were still stuck in time when GoD was released, it didn"t suddenly negate the importance of doing Time. WoW takes a vastly different approach in which it mostly negates previous content in favor of recently developed content.

Mippo said:

Players have shown that they will deal with bugs if they are minor so if the core of a game is well designed, they"ll accept a quest or two being broken provided they can advance their characters without them.

Click to expand...

Exactly.

Everything else you mentioned rests firmly upon this. But for a new title, even if they get everything right, its still going to be a rough road. People have had 4+ years of fantasy done at its best ever. And its hard to walk away from that. With EQ, it was easy once you actually played WoW. Perhaps they"ll get lucky and pull it off.

But they can"t just do what WoW did a little better and expect to grab a decent chunk of the fantasy genre. They HAVE to go above and beyond, AND get everything as right as they can. We"re talking near perfection here. Anything less, and players will feel they may as well stick with WoW after a week.

These guys really have thier work cut out for them. They"re in for a pretty rough ride, and I don"t envy them one bit. Personally, i"d have gone a different way.

Honestly high fantasy has been done to death at this point. Unfortunately I see a lot of studios still going for it. I have to imagine that this is based in timid executives and even more timid investors who get sold the bullshit line about "just like WoW but BETTER" and a tech demo that was probably in .avi format.

Palum said:

Honestly high fantasy has been done to death at this point. Unfortunately I see a lot of studios still going for it. I have to imagine that this is based in timid executives and even more timid investors who get sold the bullshit line about "just like WoW but BETTER" and a tech demo that was probably in .avi format.

Click to expand...

Well, for a HUGE majority of the MMO market, WoW was their first MMO. They haven"t been playing other Fantasy MMO"s for years prior to WoW being released. So as far as the majority of the player base is concerned, Fantasy MMO"s haven"t been done to death.

High fantasy != fantasy. AC was unique fantasy done well. It had great story, lore and characters without feeling too alien. Not even counting WAR, LotRO, EQ(2) and others WoW is enough to have "done it to death".