Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

It"s not that it"s been done to death. Nobody is sick of the fantasy setting. They"re sick of the lack of options. There was a veritable deluge of fantasy games in the 80"s/90"s but we didn"t care because for every Pool of Radiance there was a Metroid.

You don"t really have that in the MMO sphere. Your viable non-fantasy based options are Eve which I think in the latest patch notes mentioned that the game now gives off a sterilizing radiation when played to protect future generations from the type of people that play Eve and City of Heroes where you can recreate your gaming experience by downloading a picture of your favorite superhero, opening it in MS word, then typing the number 1 every 15 seconds and pretending everytime you do he punches something for 1/10th of it"s health.

Anyways...polish is one thing, but content needs to be there as well. And I don"t mean just endless collect 10 bear asses quests. LotRo had amazing polish. Damn near flawless release, beautiful environments, relatively fun classes even though they used mana. But then the only thing to kill were orc"s for 50 levels. They occasionally mixed it up by putting the orcs on top of things, or things on top of orcs...but yeah. Orcs.

It seems to be the curse of MMO"s these days. Has content or is polished. You only get to pick one.

Flight said:

It"s that Blizzard are the only ones to deliver a polished, fun product.

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Well, yeah. They"ve done it best so far. But I get your meaning. Either way, at the end of the day, another fantasy game is going to be the same basic shit we"ve seen done over and over since EQ. Different story, same gods and dragons.

Which is why I think the biggest problem is lack of a decent alternative to the occasional "current game boredom". Take Runes of Magic for instance. Pretty decent for a free to play game. Nothing spectacular, but decent. But after 2 days of "collect 10 boar hides", and "kill 20 bats", I realised that what seemed cool at first was nothing more than a minor distraction caused by boredom. The saddest part is, its freakin" free! And yet after 2 days, I went right back to WoW.

So next week, i"m gonna re-up my AO account for a month. Because at the moment, its the best alternative i"ve got.

The problem hasn"t been the "type", it"s been the quality of the games that have turned people away. Warhammer was fucked up with the core game design, it didn"t matter how polished the game was that game was fucked.

Conan for the most part actually had good core design, but didn"t work properly. Conan is a game that with a few changes and an additional 6-9 months of polish could"ve been a successful MMORPG.

Conan should have used about 50 levels and condensed everything instead of trying for 80. They could"ve removed a few classes, and improved class balance. They also needed more starting areas and they needed stats / itemization working (the biggest thing that killed their game).

If that were done, and they had spent more time in beta fixing a lot of the bugs they would"ve done fine. There actually were plenty of raids if they had been working, balanced and itemized properly, and if city sieges had worked they would"ve kept people playing long enough to add content / expansions.

I wouldn"t say Conan was "close", because there was a lot to be fixed but they were about 70% right, and needed additional time testing / fixing bugs. Warhammer was not even close to being right.

It is worth noting I think at least that Aion after only a year or so has about 1/2 the subs WoW does in Asia and is still rising so it"s not impossible to break into the market. Aion is basically a vanilla WoW clone with a major facelift. If they can eliminate the tedious grind post 30 it might do well in the west as well and then we"d have a serious contender on our hands.

Perhaps releasing in Asia first is a valid business model. As long as an MMO is mechanically sound enough to play, looks OK and provide people with unending amounts of things or exp to collect it seems to work fine at generating a profit. Take that time to develop content and release in EU/US a year later with a "finished" game. Voila.

One thing I was wondering earlier, do all asian MMO"s have endless grinding with minimal actual content and cookie cutter classes because asians like it that way, or because asian devs like making their games that way? I mean do they just not care that they have no real character customization (in terms of gameplay, not aesthetics) and do they enjoy killing the same mobs for days on end (oh god lineage 2), or is that just how they build games over there?

Asians play a lot of WoW, so I"d say their tastes differ. I think the fault lay with the developers. The reason these shitty games do so well is likely the absence of well-priced and placed competition. Nationalism is a strong force amongst most asian countries, so the eastern companies probably have advantages infiltrating the market infrastructure, which isn"t based around home computing yet.

It takes a game like WoW, so well done, with a few eastern elements to overcome the obstacles and become a hit.

When I played Shadowbane there were quite a few koreans and chinese to fight with. On the rare occasion I was allied with some of them they usually had the same response about the various korean grinders - complete shit. They"re saying that while playing Shadowbane of all things.

Azrayne said:

One thing I was wondering earlier, do all asian MMO"s have endless grinding with minimal actual content and cookie cutter classes because asians like it that way, or because asian devs like making their games that way? I mean do they just not care that they have no real character customization (in terms of gameplay, not aesthetics) and do they enjoy killing the same mobs for days on end (oh god lineage 2), or is that just how they build games over there?

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A bit of both, but due to wow, the asian market has "westernized", Aion is a very soft grind in comparison of the old school asian games like L2 or FFXI. It"s also cheaper to do grinding than questing, for obvious reasons, and there"s not that many company that can do big budget MMOs over there either, even more so because there"s plenty of F2P MMOs for casuals. Then there"s the "fluff" aspect that is mostly unused in western games but is a big part of asian gameplay, the weird outfits, the hats, the emotes etc. There"s a whole universe there where MMOs are used like modern chatrooms(which they are, in a way) and combat is a second thought thing while the main thing is being able to customize your character visually.

However if you check, there hasn"t been that many big scale asian mmos in the past years, since L2 and FFXI. If you"re making a low budget mmo, why bother with content when you can just have grinding and bunny hats.

Pyros said:

However if you check, there hasn"t been that many big scale asian mmos in the past years, since L2 and FFXI. If you"re making a low budget mmo, why bother with content when you can just have grinding and bunny hats.

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Beta testing L2 was the worst 48 hours of my mmo life (minus sitting in EC selling bags of useless shit in EQ). I felt like a Korean sex slave--all business, no pleasure.

God have mercy if Asians ever discover the fps genre. Competitive gaming will mirror the NBA. Someone needs to invent the gaming equivalent of a 3-point line to keep the white man competitive.

Actually, grinding in parties is kinda fine, especially when there are other clans around that you have on KoS list and the danger of PvP in which you can lose something. But you can"t hope to attract more than several hundred thousand people tops. Casuals simply won"t come home, join ventrilo server and grind for 3 hours straight while chatting. Then you have the bot-friendly leveling system, which turned L2 into P2P and then pay more for decent gear, because all the spots were camped by Nihao guys.

Rayne said:

You already have the closest thing to what you described. And its going to be a good long while before anyone tops it. And if somehow it could, Blizzard will trample it with an expansion, or something entirely new, as soon as it looks like it might threaten a noticable chunk of thier market share.

Sci-fi is an acquired taste for sure. But I have little doubt that a good sci-fi or post-apoc game done right could reside right alongside WoW at this point. Why bother with another fantasy game when you"re already playing the best there is? Its pretty well accepted that its going to take a extremely well built and compelling game to topple WoW, or even scratch its market share by any noticable margin. That means a seriously huge chunk of change.

Personally, I can"t think of any dev house with that kind of cash on hand. No, the smart money would go with something thats built as solid as WoW, but different. A lot different. Slaying gods and dragons in one fantasy game holds little difference than slaying gods and dragons in another. Its mostly aesthetics.

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WoW is good, undeniable, but it has a bunch of flaws and it kept adding "shortcuts" to everything so that the journey doesn"t matter anymore to the end (which is gathering new gear) and for me the journey is everything, end content should be the icing on the cake.

I like the combat mechanics of wow, very fun from a certain point of view, but seriously it lacks a lot in many other departments, flavour if you prefer and I"m a bit sick of playing it, but there are no options currently except EQ2, which none of my friends wants to play because they are used to WoW and Lotro that has more flaws than WoW from a general perspective.

What I don"t like much in WoW is how old content gets unused after every xpac, it kinda makes the whole world pointless if you think about it. In EQ it took several expansions to make the previous ones less worthy (and not totally useless still).

Miele said:

WoW is good, undeniable, but it has a bunch of flaws and it kept adding "shortcuts" to everything so that the journey doesn"t matter anymore to the end (which is gathering new gear) and for me the journey is everything, end content should be the icing on the cake.

I like the combat mechanics of wow, very fun from a certain point of view, but seriously it lacks a lot in many other departments, flavour if you prefer and I"m a bit sick of playing it, but there are no options currently except EQ2, which none of my friends wants to play because they are used to WoW and Lotro that has more flaws than WoW from a general perspective.

What I don"t like much in WoW is how old content gets unused after every xpac, it kinda makes the whole world pointless if you think about it. In EQ it took several expansions to make the previous ones less worthy (and not totally useless still).

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Well, I can"t say I disagree with much of what you say. But thats not really the fault of the game. As for the journey, there is enough rerolling variation and incentive for the general populous to have multiple max level characters. I have 3 myself. And as I understand it, thats a bit low. But I tend to focus on each character in more lengthly spurts than most do. I know people in my guild that have thier accounts full of 80"s. Some split 50/50 horde/alliance, others with a horde toon or two, and vice versa.

EQ took a lot longer to outdate previous content, mostly because the leveling curve was a lot steeper. And since some of the higher content was either broken or grossly overtuned, some guilds couldn"t get past it until they completed some of the newer content, and then went back and finished it.

For all the flaws WoW may have, its core gameplay and exceedingly high polish easily makes up for them. And thats what every dev house coming down the pike has to contend with. They only compound that by creating within the same sub-genre. If STO, JGE, SGW(?), or SWToR are even close to the level of polish and core gameplay that WoW launched with, they"ll have a much easier time competing for a chunk of WoW"s market share, "mostly" because they"ll add a significant choice to the mmo genre.

People try new things every day. When I started playing AO, most of the people in my org at the time were also playing EQ. So it remains to be seen if the next wave of mmos may shift the balance of the genre. If it shifts only 5%, i"ll be pleased as hell. Because it"ll at least prove that other settings can and do survive alongside fantasy.

We should all hope it does. Regardless of our preferred sub-genre.

Miele said:

What I don"t like much in WoW is how old content gets unused after every xpac, it kinda makes the whole world pointless if you think about it. In EQ it took several expansions to make the previous ones less worthy (and not totally useless still).

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This keeps being brought up. Until the CT revamp, I never stepped foot in Fear again after the release of Kunark*. After Velious I never saw VP ever again except when iron manning it with some friends during PoP. In Luclin, that was the end of NToV for me. PoP saw the end of VT as well.

The only reason old expansions stayed mildly viable is that it was the only source for end game gear for second/third rate guilds. From a design/scaling standpoint, WoW and EQ are no different with one exception, you could get cockblocked. If only one guild per week could do Ulduar, we"d be seeing the same shit. If you removed heroics from the game we"d probably still see people doing Sunwell as well since that gear lasted until ilvl 200 blues hit.

And again, enough people are achievement whores and you have tons of people who try to iron man content such that shit like MC, Ony get done nearly daily.

You"re making a problem out of nothing. If people want to go back and see the content they missed, the option is there for them. Between inflated levels and mudflation they can take 15 people and go do it. PUG"s do that shit almost weekly. I"ve killed Kael"Thas a couple times on a couple characters just for a shot at the phoenyx mount.

I"m just not expected to farm that content because the resident Euro guild has Ulduar and Naxx on lockdown. And if the price we pay is that people who started playing yesterday have the option of skipping it, so fucking be it.

*Edit: With the exception of doing my wizard epic which was lame. "Here, go farm content you could give a shit about for a stupidly overpowered item you won"t get to replace for nearly 3 years."

Exactly. People make this assumption that people raided VT during PoP/GoD because it was fun. Here"s a hint: it was not. They did it because it was that or nothing.

Miele said:

What I don"t like much in WoW is how old content gets unused after every xpac, it kinda makes the whole world pointless if you think about it. In EQ it took several expansions to make the previous ones less worthy (and not totally useless still).

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It get"s unused by the legacy gamers. WOW as a game is still growing and plenty of people are experiencing that content for the first time.

My biggest problem isn"t the legacy content, it"s replaying said content if you want to max out another character. I"d love for them to have a new dungeon/system for leveling that isn"t repeating the same stuff over again. Maybe steal Darkness Falls from DAOC and make it better?

Blizzard has a nice workaround to this in their "buy a second account and triple your level speed" implementation, but that isn"t feasible for those on a budget. Even with the faster leveling we still are pigeonholed into a limited amount of content. I like to play different classes, but after leveling up several times on both sides, there isnt anything new for me.

Gecko said:

My biggest problem isn"t the legacy content, it"s replaying said content if you want to max out another character. I"d love for them to have a new dungeon/system for leveling that isn"t repeating the same stuff over again. Maybe steal Darkness Falls from DAOC and make it better?

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On one hand I can see why Blizzard isn"t going to add any new 20~70 and subsequently 80 after wotlk content. On the other, after having leveled every class to at least 70 (How else do you think I survived 300 wipes on M"uru), I would have killed for a fucking alternative to thousand needles for levels 30 to 33.

WOW"s old they will never add new content for pre 60. You"re most likely going to see a way to create a level 60 character of all classes if you have an 80 already on your account.

Draegan said:

WOW"s old they will never add new content for pre 60. You"re most likely going to see a way to create a level 60 character of all classes if you have an 80 already on your account.

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They are for sure going that route given that any character level 68 or higher that is on an account with a level 80 is now going to be able to access a flying mount for WOTLK content. This is ok IMO if they are not going to add new content, especially in a expansion that pretty much has enough content to do only one trip without repetition.

That said I would love if a MMORPG could find a way to include a type of remortation that gave a type of rebirth to the earlier levels of content within a expansion. The best expansion in an MMORPG I have seen to date was Kunark because it gave EQ a new lease on life at all level ranges. Part of this would be due to the fact that I joined a new server at the exact same time as Kunark was released, but an expansion combined with remortation would in effect create the same fresh start.

Miele said:

What I don"t like much in WoW is how old content gets unused after every xpac, it kinda makes the whole world pointless if you think about it. In EQ it took several expansions to make the previous ones less worthy (and not totally useless still).

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Part of what I would like to see is a shift in expansions from being solely the "new continent rises from the sea" type of creation and instead sometimes creating a range of new content within the existing content. What I mean is that instead of adding 12 new zones and 40 new dungeons all on a new island create that same amount of content as additions to the previously existing content as a continuation of the storylines that already exist. The Culling of Stratholme is a good example of new content created within the old content. The huge door guarded by giants in Tanaris is also a prime example of where content is just being begged to be added. Some higher level content could be added to Teldrassil bring new life into a phenomenal city and island that is tremendously dead. The addition of the new blood elf content within the old world was a huge boost imo, along with Zul Aman.

I would love to see a game that is created from the ground up with the architecture in place to expand within the existing world, locked doors and blocked passages that can be opened up and new content added via expansions that bring back or maintain new life in old areas of the world. The lore can be in place and hints given of the things yet to come.

They actually mentioned Grim Batol in a recent interview. Who knows, maybe they got all their coders a new batch of ADHD drugs and/or chained them the fuck down, so they"d work on existing shit rather than chasing the next "Ohh Shiny." More realistically, its probably a matter of not trusting the current Z-team with building brand new content, instead let them wrap up all the unfinished things floating around.

But yeh, filling out existing plot and dungeon hooks would be money. Hell, they could even use that expansion as the one they rebuild old world to make it flyable. Monkey with zone boundaries a bit and there is at least 3-4 zones worth of space freed up from its "steep mountain/no man"s land" purgatory.