Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

TJT

TJT

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This is very true. I think they will maintain a niche audience if they keep their expectations low. 1999 EQ worked because options were few and the internet, pcs, and gaming were already a niche nerd hobby.

Today's youth have so many options you will be hard pressed to gain mass appeal. But at the same time it allows for catering to the exact audience you want and you are not forced to appeal to the masses in any way. Kind of a broader discussion but the existence and support of indie [everything] due to the digital age means you can get far closer to your exact personal tastes than you could even a decade ago.
 
Kirun

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And niche is fine, when it's a "one and done" project like a Hades, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc. Live service games require constant engagement, cash shops, subscriptions, etc. to remain profitable. Otherwise, they become too expensive to operate and have to shutdown.
 
Gravel

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Adrullan really scratched an itch, and it seems like it and MnM have a lot in common.

But it seems like every single thing I read about MnM, or video I watch, and the game just seems like a fucking pain in the ass to play with a shit ton of "realism" inserted that just makes things...not fun.

I mean, I'll hold off on judgement until I play it for more than an hour. But it seems like this game is aimed at a demographic that doesn't exist anymore. They're targeting the young adult demographic from 30 years ago, but they're long gone. I read a post on the Discord that mentioned this, and it makes me wonder about a lot of the decisions they're making.

I get it, vanilla EQ had some lightning in a bottle. The MnM people seem to be leaning into copying the monotony of that, when the appeal was really just the novelty of it and not the tedium itself.
 
Quaid

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Kirun said:
And niche is fine, when it's a "one and done" project like a Hades, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc. Live service games require constant engagement, cash shops, subscriptions, etc. to remain profitable. Otherwise, they become too expensive to operate and have to shutdown.
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I'm not sure they care about profitability. They're just willing to die on every hill they possibly can to make the game 'they want', which sounds very nice for them and I'm honestly a bit jealous. I have opened multiple restaurants, it's what I do for a living really. I have thoughts about opening niche concepts that could only possibly appeal to me and a few like-minded retards, but there's no way I can behave that way if I want to ensure profitability in a way that I'm not chained to a kitchen myself all day, soaking labour cost and ensuring peak quality. I've just built myself a jail cell to die in at that point.

They keep saying 'niche' appeal - but EverQuest in 2025 is already niche appeal. What they're proposing may only appeal to a subset of an already small group. Just look at the most populous EQ EMUs. The lowest population ones are the ones with zero QOL enhancements, and the highest one, THJ, is a literal fucking zoomer lobby game circus.

Their net needs to cast beyond the current classic EQ community if these systems remain in place as implemented now. I honestly have no idea how that will go, but Pantheon did it, and 120,000 people bought early access boxes. There must be tens of thousands of lapsed ‘old school’ MMO consumers.

NWC may be ‘fine’ with a game with 800 concurrent players, but that will truly suck in a world as large as they are creating with the features they’ve decided on. So i hope it does do better than that with a wider audience. Time will tell.
 
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Quaid

Quaid

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Gravel said:
I get it, vanilla EQ had some lightning in a bottle. The MnM people seem to be leaning into copying the monotony of that, when the appeal was really just the novelty of it and not the tedium itself.
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I don't even think they're copying much about EQ outside of the classes/abilities and similarities in world/style. Almost every player-facing system, from vendoring to questing to corpse recovery, takes an EQ one and adds layers of complexity and maintenance requirements.

Also, i don’t think i can identify a single QOL addition when i think about it. But maybe I’m forgetting something.
 
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Kirun

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Quaid said:
I honestly have no idea how that will go, but Pantheon did it, and 120,000 people bought early access boxes.
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That number is highly suspect, considering its peak logins were around 6,800 and it has been averaging 600-1000 players per day.

But, even if it's true, box sales don't mean nearly as much in today's gaming world. That's the reason for so goddamn many GAAS now. Box scales are only there to "prove" interest and keep indie studios afloat long enough for their next project, get bought by a bigger studio, fluff a resume, etc. For bigger, AAA stuff, it's mostly there to pay for marketing budgets. The actual profit is typically made off of merchandise, cosmetics, subscriptions, DLC packs, etc. etc.

If <1,000 people are logging in each night, you can't sustain that for long without a team working for practically free and extremely small in size. Which means the game isn't getting many updates, fixes, etc. and it eventually stagnates to the point it has to be shutdown.

The idea that you're going to build "this generation's EQ!!!" using LAST generation's EQ as a design model seems wildly impractical to me.
 
Quaid

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Kirun said:
That number is highly suspect, considering its peak logins were around 6,800 and it has been averaging 600-1000 players per day.

But, even if it's true, box sales don't mean nearly as much in today's gaming world. That's the reason for so goddamn many GAAS now. Box scales are only there to "prove" interest and keep indie studios afloat long enough for their next project, get bought by a bigger studio, fluff a resume, etc. For bigger, AAA stuff, it's mostly there to pay for marketing budgets. The actual profit is typically made off of merchandise, cosmetics, subscriptions, DLC packs, etc. etc.

If <1,000 people are logging in each night, you can't sustain that for long without a team working for practically free and extremely small in size. Which means the game isn't getting many updates, fixes, etc. and it eventually stagnates to the point it has to be shutdown.
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6800 concurrent actually indicates 110k almost exactly according to MnM Shawn’s experience. He mentioned this formula in the same stream i watched.

His formula is Concurrent peak users x 4 = daily unique users (so, 27,200), and then daily unique users x4 predicts monthly uniques (so 108,800). It’s actually wild how close his formula was to what steam trackers report for Pantheon.

He’s got a lot of experience so definitely speaks with some weight on the topic.
 
Del

Del

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Quaid said:
Watched the most recent stream.

Banks are not linked as of now, and it doesn’t sound like they intend them to be.

In a round-about way, without adequate preparation, this also adds to potential death penalty.

A lot of people expecting a ‘spiritual successor’ to classic era EQ are in for a real surprise if these decisions all make it in.

The increases in zone size, death penalty, and night danger are going to have enormous impacts on how the world feels. There will be a much much greater focus on survival and preparation elements, and it will shrink the world the player engages with significantly. EQ never really felt like that to me. If someone forgot something it wasn’t a total catastrophe that resulted in my gameplay being disrupted for 30 minutes. I never felt like i had to stay close to my preferred city/hub. If i was soloing in Overthere and got a /tell to join a SolB group, i simply ran to Skyfire and got a port. Now I’m going to have to first travel to a specific bank to grab who knows what I’ll need for a potential corpse run.

These all sound like intentional strategies at this point, but i really haven’t heard much design philosophy behind the decisions. If i were to guess it’s about content consumption rate and player interaction.

But yeah, this game is going to be a lot more about survival elements and preparation for adventuring than any classic EQ players are used to. We’ll see where it all shakes out.

I love playing classic EQ to this day, and as such I was hoping to be the target market for this game, but i just don’t think I am. I really only have 3-4 hours a few nights a week these days, after the kids go to bed and my obligations are satisfied. I have zero desire to devote 25%+ of a given play session to traversal, preparation or survival elements.

Funny enough, this game may be positioned for much younger or much older men, or ones who have 25+ hours per week to devote to it.

*EDIT* I just realized maybe he meant banks are not linked between characters, rather than cities. He didn't specify and I may have misunderstood. I'd have to rewatch, but I probably won't. Either option sucks, one just sucks more.
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You're making far too big of a deal out of this. All you need is 1 person in your group capable of CR in the rare case of a full wipe, and in some cases you don't even need that, you just need to find someone in the area who can invis you. In general, you'll probably look for groups in the areas that you already are near to. And you'll bind outside of the dungeon that you're currently running. Also, teleports exist here too.

The gameplay is so easy that if you're going to wipe, you know that it's coming with enough time in advance to either run out of the zone or gate/evac, etc.

I don't really play this game any differently than I played EQ back in the day and I've not had any troubles. Rarely die and when I do, getting the corpse back has always been simple enough, which will only get easier as time goes on.
 
Locnar

Locnar

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Death needs to sting. If that means running through Kithicor (without zone walls to hide up in), naked and blind. So be it.
 
Kirun

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Death stings like a motherfucker in Elden Ring...if you do it wrong. But it doesn't require I go retrieve my shit naked, blind, and afraid.

There are ways to make death "sting" without making it something that is highly annoying/frustrating/time consuming as a new player, but so piss easy it might as well not exist as a veteran. That backwards design mentality is precisely why MMOs can't hold onto new players long enough to keep their games from dying to attrition.

Game's should slowly get more difficult and challenging as you progress, learn systems, understand your class/abilities and its limitations, new challenges/problems to overcome are introduced, etc. - until they reach a good equilibrium at the "end game". Instead, it takes the EQ approach of the game actually becoming easier as you progress. Because now you've reached a level where you can basically just flat ignore systems that are disguised as difficulty, but were actually just tedium. And once you get to a certain power level, you get to just skip said tedium.
 
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Quaid

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Del said:
You're making far too big of a deal out of this. All you need is 1 person in your group capable of CR in the rare case of a full wipe, and in some cases you don't even need that, you just need to find someone in the area who can invis you. In general, you'll probably look for groups in the areas that you already are near to. And you'll bind outside of the dungeon that you're currently running. Also, teleports exist here too.

The gameplay is so easy that if you're going to wipe, you know that it's coming with enough time in advance to either run out of the zone or gate/evac, etc.

I don't really play this game any differently than I played EQ back in the day and I've not had any troubles. Rarely die and when I do, getting the corpse back has always been simple enough, which will only get easier as time goes on.
Click to expand...

Almost none of this applies to anything i said, but i appreciate you.
 
F

forehead

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Kirun said:
Game's should slowly get more difficult and challenging as you progress, learn systems, understand your class/abilities and its limitations, new challenges/problems to overcome are introduced, etc. - until they reach a good equilibrium at the "end game". Instead, it takes the EQ approach of the game actually becoming easier as you progress. Because now you've reached a level where you can basically just flat ignore systems that are disguised as difficulty, but were actually just tedium. And once you get to a certain power level, you get to just skip said tedium.
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I don't know about that. EQ's biggest carrots many times were getting items and abilities that made the game easier. The game was more fun once I had peg cloak, jboots, and invisiblity clickies. Being too low to acquire those items made me want to log in, level up and try to get them.
 
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Kriptini

Kriptini

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Quaid said:
Watched the most recent stream.

Banks are not linked as of now, and it doesn’t sound like they intend them to be.

In a round-about way, without adequate preparation, this also adds to potential death penalty.

A lot of people expecting a ‘spiritual successor’ to classic era EQ are in for a real surprise if these decisions all make it in.

The increases in zone size, death penalty, and night danger are going to have enormous impacts on how the world feels. There will be a much much greater focus on survival and preparation elements, and it will shrink the world the player engages with significantly. EQ never really felt like that to me. If someone forgot something it wasn’t a total catastrophe that resulted in my gameplay being disrupted for 30 minutes. I never felt like i had to stay close to my preferred city/hub. If i was soloing in Overthere and got a /tell to join a SolB group, i simply ran to Skyfire and got a port. Now I’m going to have to first travel to a specific bank to grab who knows what I’ll need for a potential corpse run.

These all sound like intentional strategies at this point, but i really haven’t heard much design philosophy behind the decisions. If i were to guess it’s about content consumption rate and player interaction.

But yeah, this game is going to be a lot more about survival elements and preparation for adventuring than any classic EQ players are used to. We’ll see where it all shakes out.

I love playing classic EQ to this day, and as such I was hoping to be the target market for this game, but i just don’t think I am. I really only have 3-4 hours a few nights a week these days, after the kids go to bed and my obligations are satisfied. I have zero desire to devote 25%+ of a given play session to traversal, preparation or survival elements.

Funny enough, this game may be positioned for much younger or much older men, or ones who have 25+ hours per week to devote to it.

*EDIT* I just realized maybe he meant banks are not linked between characters, rather than cities. He didn't specify and I may have misunderstood. I'd have to rewatch, but I probably won't. Either option sucks, one just sucks more.
Click to expand...

I do not mind increased travel/preparation mechanics as long as the game's economy supports it. I sympathize with people like you who only have 3-4 hours to play and don't want to spend it doing prep work. If there are systems in place to outsource that prep work to poopsockers that play for 10+ hours a day, then I'm into it. For example, you're in City A but you want to go adventuring in a dungeon later that's super far away, but closer to City B. If there was a system in place that allowed you to hire another player to be a porter for your bank items from City A to City B, so that all your stuff was there when you're ready to log in and play, I would think that's a really cool thing and would help make the game feel more alive.
 
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Quaid

Quaid

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Kriptini said:
I do not mind increased travel/preparation mechanics as long as the game's economy supports it. I sympathize with people like you who only have 3-4 hours to play and don't want to spend it doing prep work. If there are systems in place to outsource that prep work to poopsockers that play for 10+ hours a day, then I'm into it. For example, you're in City A but you want to go adventuring in a dungeon later that's super far away, but closer to City B. If there was a system in place that allowed you to hire another player to be a porter for your bank items from City A to City B, so that all your stuff was there when you're ready to log in and play, I would think that's a really cool thing and would help make the game feel more alive.
Click to expand...

Yeah that sounds great, provided the hiring doesn’t require an exorbitant amount of plat, which in itself has playtime determined value.
 
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Kithani

Kithani

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Kriptini said:
I do not mind increased travel/preparation mechanics as long as the game's economy supports it. I sympathize with people like you who only have 3-4 hours to play and don't want to spend it doing prep work. If there are systems in place to outsource that prep work to poopsockers that play for 10+ hours a day, then I'm into it. For example, you're in City A but you want to go adventuring in a dungeon later that's super far away, but closer to City B. If there was a system in place that allowed you to hire another player to be a porter for your bank items from City A to City B, so that all your stuff was there when you're ready to log in and play, I would think that's a really cool thing and would help make the game feel more alive.
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Meh setting aside that a game aimed at grown ass adults does not need to be built to occupy 10+ hours of their time, which might have sounded cool when I was 13 but now that I pay taxes I have a different perspective on these loafs… I think in reality the poopsockers with 10+ hours to play end up being the ones that “pay” the casual who has less time to do more menial tasks like Dial-A-Port or whatever.
 
Kriptini

Kriptini

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Kithani said:
Meh setting aside that a game aimed at grown ass adults does not need to be built to occupy 10+ hours of their time, which might have sounded cool when I was 13 but now that I pay taxes I have a different perspective on these loafs… I think in reality the poopsockers with 10+ hours to play end up being the ones that “pay” the casual who has less time to do more menial tasks like Dial-A-Port or whatever.
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Regardless, I think it does a lot to help with the immersion of the world. I think MMORPGs need to be much more immersive today than they did yesterday because of all of the out-of-game connectivity tools (like Discord) that ruin immersion. Without enough systems in place that make the players feel like important parts of the world that keep it alive and running, the game will be viewed as just another "lobby simulator" like any other MMORPG on the market.
 
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