Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Quaid said:

Where is the data posted?

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It was on Shawn's Twitch stream. I'm sure they'll post it in the next couple days.

Quaid said:

Where is the data posted?

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Saw some of it. Same issue again.

Of the 7700 unique accounts played, 3900 (~50%) played 5 hours or less over the course of a week. 35% played 2 hours or less.

5 hours is not enough time for a new player to reach level 4.

Not entirely sure where this assertion Shawn makes that ‘the people who logged in this week weren’t MMO fans checking out the new thing, they were OUR fans’ comes from. These gameplay patterns don’t say that at all to me. MMORPG players don’t play three one-hour sessions over the course of a week in any game they care about.

Sylas said:

The last game that launched an EA not on Steam in this style of game was Embers adrift, I think it had a max of 1k players.

I think this game is about the same point as far as development, core audience, etc. So I think this game will maybe have 1k players.

That supports 1 developer.

The last game that launched an EA on steam in this style of game was Pantheon, and it hit 7k players peak January 2025, maintains around 700 players daily peak and has an estimated 100k users who paid $39.95 to play it. A ready conversion rate of no box price but 15/month could be made and the number is certainly far higher than 1k players. Probably 10-20k monthly subs.

Even losing 30% to steam off the top, these developers are full fucking retarded if they opt to not launch on steam. But given many of the multitudes of decisions they've made about the game, i'm guessing full fucking retard is right up their alley.

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i think embers had way less content, class design and level range by the time it released not-on-steam. i don't think they even had like...spellcasters right? it was just people doing fitan magic and inspirational leadership? Though embers was more...questchain narrative focused than mnm. and i think it did have like....2 (or 3?) very big dungeons to launch.

... said:

i think embers had way less content, class design and level range by the time it released not-on-steam. i don't think they even had like...spellcasters right? it was just people doing fitan magic and inspirational leadership? Though embers was more...questchain narrative focused than mnm. and i think it did have like....2 (or 3?) very big dungeons to launch.

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Embers Adrift is specifically a "no magic" setting. There were three classes on launch, with each class having three specializations you unlocked as you leveled. It is not quest chain narrative focused (there were only a handful of quests on launch) and there were a few big dungeons, but they all used the same visual assets, which became pretty boring. It took them a few months before they made their first dungeon using new art assets. I do agree with you that Embers was definitely lacking in the content department on launch, though comparing it to the current state of M&M, M&M already has more content and more interesting content.

Quaid said:

Saw some of it. Same issue again.

Of the 7700 unique accounts played, 3900 (~50%) played 5 hours or less over the course of a week. 35% played 2 hours or less.

5 hours is not enough time for a new player to reach level 4.

Not entirely sure where this assertion Shawn makes that ‘the people who logged in this week weren’t MMO fans checking out the new thing, they were OUR fans’ comes from. These gameplay patterns don’t say that at all to me. MMORPG players don’t play three one-hour sessions over the course of a week in any game they care about.

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Yeah, there was also something about these under 30 minute play sessions I think.

What it tells me is that people logged on, decided to look for a group, had no luck and said fuck it. Or logged in, looked around and thought "anything I do is going to take an hour to get going and I'm already bored thinking about it" and logging off.

Neither is good. I fall into the second camp with this game constantly. I'm bored, want to play something, and so load this up. I look around and think "fuck, I really don't want to deal with these systems and log off 2 minutes later."

Actually, this is what happened today. My 18 elementalist is logged out at the Glass Flats goblin camps. I logged in, decided I might grind out half a level. Pulled first mob, but it was a little early on the pathing so I got an add. Ran to the zone line nearby, and zoned out and back in. Mobs looked like they were going to take a good 5 minutes to saunter back to camp so I said fuck it and camped out.

Locnar said:

Lots of online games have these things called Daily Quests, where you just log in, do the daily quest, then log off. Sounds like what you are looking for.

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What if just want to cyber with hot wood elf chicks

I logged in for about an hour to create a wood elf and see the progress made to the Kelethin city. A lot had. It seemed playable with plenty of mobs and NPCs populated.

So I guess I fall into that 35% group that didn't play much. But I will play at release of EA. There's just a lot less reason for me to try to grind out some levels on a character that will be wiped especially when I can watch streams of people who are in different areas and different level ranges.

Ya I also fell off early cuz I know I’ll be playing this on release anyways and the lag on this alpha was often horrendous, sometimes unplayable in the city. They really gotta get a handle on that before release or they will lose quite a few people.

Feels like this game was designed for me, the zones are massive and there’s so much content relative to the number of people playing, that most everything is still a mystery. Friends of mine finding new quest chains randomly all the time. I like the mud aspects personally. It’s the game pantheon was supposed to be

Kirun said:

I get the point about friction versus tedium. I'm not arguing that some level of challenge or interdependence is inherently bad. The problem is that EQ-style "friction" has almost always been implemented as artificial barriers or punishing tedium, not as meaningful gameplay. Running across a zone to recover a corpse or spending hours waiting on a mob to spawn isn't clever friction. It's a convenience tax dressed up as social design.

And about your examples - Vanguard and Pantheon are cautionary tales, not proof the formula works. They struggled for reasons far beyond "tedious mechanics". The design philosophies they borrowed from EQ simply don't scale in modern gaming ecosystems. People have choices now, they won't endure archaic busywork in the name of nostalgia.

Friction can create social moments. Tedium rarely does. The problem seems to be that most modern devs don't know how to separate the two. If your claim is that modern MMOs could resurrect EQ-style design and it would flourish? I'd love for you to show me evidence beyond the niche survival of TLPs and small indie experiments. The market has already spoken: EQ-style mechanics are a dead end. The only thing keeping them alive today is sentimentality and a willingness to tolerate outdated, inefficient gameplay.

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Vanguard and Pantheon were failures at implementing the EQ model - Vanguard being completely overscoped and undelivered and Pantheon losing direction almost immediately and floundering past that. Neither of them accomplished the charm and world feel of EQ and certainly don't have the same staying power.

Regarding social 'friction', it's the same as any other game mechanic. If you can freely fast travel around the world you're never going to ask anyone for a port, if you have GPS mapping built into your UI you aren't going to ask for directions, if you auto-rezz immediately you don't need corpse retrieval or rezzes, if it's faster to play alone you're unlikely to attempt to get a group together. If those mechanics seem boring and antiquated then I'd say it just doesn't cater to your gaming preferences - there are plenty of fast paced games in the market that serve high-paced, zero friction, fast rewards gameplay that only require socializing for raid content (in fact I'd say that's most MMOs these days)

It really was frustrating because those games have/had so many other problems than just mechanics that its hard to compare them to EQ. Pantheon being 10 years+ of dev time for very little return and Vanguard I remember buying a new computer specifically just to play the game only to still have it be a stuttering mess. Embers adrift had no magic and looked like it was trying to rival FFXIV 1.0 for copy pasta zones. They're all terrible games for reasons other than just mechanics.

Agreed - I followed Vanguard and played some of the alpha when it was around but it didn't really capture anything close to the same feeling for me. Pantheon feels like a smaller scale Vanguard to me and the pace of development feels like a crawl at this rate.

I don't think anything is guaranteed with MnM but I feel like their trajectory is at least in line with what I'm hoping from a more modernized EQ experience that isn't just running a character on P99 or something (which I still enjoy, but it's the same content every time)

Hadden said:

Vanguard and Pantheon were failures at implementing the EQ model - Vanguard being completely overscoped and undelivered and Pantheon losing direction almost immediately and floundering past that. Neither of them accomplished the charm and world feel of EQ and certainly don't have the same staying power.

Regarding social 'friction', it's the same as any other game mechanic. If you can freely fast travel around the world you're never going to ask anyone for a port, if you have GPS mapping built into your UI you aren't going to ask for directions, if you auto-rezz immediately you don't need corpse retrieval or rezzes, if it's faster to play alone you're unlikely to attempt to get a group together. If those mechanics seem boring and antiquated then I'd say it just doesn't cater to your gaming preferences - there are plenty of fast paced games in the market that serve high-paced, zero friction, fast rewards gameplay that only require socializing for raid content (in fact I'd say that's most MMOs these days)

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I think this is where I push back the hardest. Framing Vanguard and Pantheon as "failures to properly implement EQ" is just another way of sidestepping the uncomfortable truth: maybe EQ's model itself was never sustainable outside of its very specific moment in history. If multiple projects, decades apart, with different teams, resources, and technology, all collapse when trying to recreate that template, at some point you have to stop blaming execution and start questioning the design itself.

And on the point of "friction equals socialization," I don’t buy it. There's a difference between mechanics that enable interaction and mechanics that simply force it through inconvenience. A lack of maps doesn't create meaningful social bonds, it just makes people tab out to a fan site or Discord. Corpse runs don't build community, they just add a chore before you can get back to the actual gameplay. When players remember their EQ memories, they don't wax nostalgic about begging for ports or spamming /ooc for directions. They remember the people. If a mechanic needs tedium to generate those moments, then maybe it was never about the mechanic at all.

A lot of the arguments for "friction" boil down to wanting the game to force other players to socialize with you. Ports, maps, corpse runs, none of that is meaningful interaction. It's all just leverage. It puts other players in a position where they have to talk to you, not because the gameplay naturally encourages cooperation, but because the game punishes them if they don't.

If you actually believe in social play, then the mechanics themselves should be engaging enough that players choose to group, trade, or cooperate because it's rewarding in its own right. If the only way you can get people to talk to you in a multiplayer game is by making solo play miserable, that's not proof of a brilliant design, it's proof that the design is leaning on artificial scarcity to cover its weaknesses.

So when people defend "friction," what I really hear is: "I don't trust the game to be fun enough on its own, so I need it to punish players until they interact with me."

This guy getting torn to fucking shreds lmao

It's funny, that person thinks it's just his own issue with being an adult and not being able to dedicate a solid 4+ hours to a group uninterrupted. The reality is the entire audience for this game is that person now. Which is why I asked a while back who they think their intended audience actually is.

It's certainly not going to be anyone under the age of about 35, since they're relying solely on nostalgia for this. Honestly, it seems like they're targeting either retirees or people on welfare, and I'm not sure either of those groups is large enough or is dedicated enough to cram through the hours in this. But then again, they keep saying they're only looking for a few thousand people.

Which then brings up his other concern, that this game is absolutely crushing for a solo player. If you don't have a large enough population to make grouping easy at all levels, it's going to lose players at a massive pace. Which just makes the problem get worse until the game folds entirely.

Ironically, reading the comments, they don't seem to connect the issues either. Lots of comments about his complaint of there being too many people in the noobie yard, saying that at EA there will be multiple starting areas. Which then spreads the population even thinner in your "grouping required" game.

Gravel said:

Which then brings up his other concern, that this game is absolutely crushing for a solo player. If you don't have a large enough population to make grouping easy at all levels, it's going to lose players at a massive pace. Which just makes the problem get worse until the game folds entirely.

Ironically, reading the comments, they don't seem to connect the issues either. Lots of comments about his complaint of there being too many people in the noobie yard, saying that at EA there will be multiple starting areas. Which then spreads the population even thinner in your "grouping required" game.

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A viable solo path is incredibly important for MMORPG population health, even in group focused games.

Put in as much content as you want, slow leveling to a crawl so it's consumed slowly, make boat rides four hours, not of it will matter. The most important content is other players in the world. The number one concern should be ensuring that there are enough of them.

Let’s also not discount the fact that an enormous percentage of MMO players are deeply introverted at best, and real-talk autistic at worst. Sometimes you just don’t wanna talk, ya know?

I think if the devs solely rely on places like their Reddit and Discord for feedback, the game is doomed. Hopefully that's not the case, because they did fix things like the gamma issue.

But those places are just full of people who want the griefiest game possible. And it's going to drive the normies far away from the game.