2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era

Neranja said:

Hero Engine is $99/year for 2 users, or $149 for 5. Includes hosting in their cloud.

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Yes, I'm well aware that engines exist, that wasn't my point. Anyone who messed around back in the day making areas with OOP on Diku MUDS would understand what I meant. Things like Hero are a good start, but I'm talking an engine that has already done like 95% of the work, so that thousands of dev hours aren't wasted doing from scratch things that have been done hundreds of times before, and often done better. There's a cap on how good graphics and animations can be (photo-realistic) which we're hitting now (well, asians are, lol) there's a baseline for real-world physics, etc. All of that and much more would be built into the ideal engine so all a team really needs to focus on is what is going to be different in their game. Much more about design and lore/story and less about coding basic shit. So much of that basic shit is hit or miss in MMOs, it's ridiculous.

I think there's a market for EQ type MMOs. There was one 20 years ago, why wouldn't there be one now? I don't subscribe to the "kids these days only play X" reasoning, people have all sorts of interests and it's easier than ever for niche games to find their audience.

Of course, it's not as big a market as there is for more accessible games like Fortnite, but there is one. Just because Toyota sells 5 times more cars than BMW does, doesn't mean there isn't a market for both.

mkopec said:

I still think they could do it somehow, im not a programmer but could they not encrypt some of this shit?

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The solution to this is to use a game streaming service like Stadia or the new Nvidia service and deny users the ability to install the game locally. If they were smart they would focus on using it as an anti-cheat, anti-spoiling medium instead of 'gee wiz now you can play Crysis on your phone!' An EQ-like game in particular does not require low latency so it would be particularly suited for those platforms.

Developers could also just hire a large QA team and test everything internally and not have a public beta, but the client will be dissected after launch. They could also not allow clients without access to raid zones to download the zone files until they've gained access. Designing content such that spawns and loot tables change over time would invalidate previously written spoilers. Outlaw data gathering programs that wowhead-type sites use with the cheat detect software. This would all delay the spoiling for awhile at least.

Ravishing said:

I don't buy the EQ mystique as much as some, that's rose-tinted glasses stuff when EQ was <1 yr old.

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EQ wasn't really hacked apart until Velious. I used to make some of the maps ya'all downloaded on eqmaps and some of them are still on those sites. I used CAD software to draw lines from /locs I had logged to map Kunark zones. When Kunark opened, there were no maps or spoilers that I remember. A zone geometry visualization tool was made available later on and I recall Velious zones being spoiled with it.

I just don't like the recent direction of mob mechanics.. FFXIV raiding being a prime example. Its more like playing a platformer than an rpg. Zoom out to birds eye view and dance around the 1 shot mechanics... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I'd rather fucking play Mario Odyssey.

Pharone said:

I just really don't think that people realize just how much you can customize EQ Emu.

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Except you can't monetize it and players will ever take your "game" seriously.

Neranja said:

a) MMOs are the most expensive type of games to make and take the longest to develop.
b) The people who were 15 to 25 year old when EQ launched had lots of time on their hand and could sit on their ass all day. Nowadays they have real jobs and families to take care of (mostly).
c) The current generation of people with time on their hand isn't interested in 1h+ dungeon and/or corpse runs and camp checks.

Look at WoW Classic: You won't get shit done unless you invest at least 20h/week into it. And when the game launched in 2004 it was derided as the "casual-friendly MMO", because you could progress as a solo player.

a and b and c together make MMOs a niche market today that no one wants to invest in when the kids these days literally flood the mobile/microtransaction game market with their cash. When WoW launched everyone wanted a piece of the pie because WoW killed all interest in any other game - people only played WoW and Blizzard made lots of bank. Todays top dog is Epic with Fortnite, making $3 billion revenue a year, and now everyone wants a piece of that pie.

People with cash to invest try to copy the market leader. Simple as that.

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I don't agree with this broad brush treatment that the "current generation isn't interested". There's young people doing all sorts of niche stuff. Plenty of young people play tabletop RPG for instance, and they might be interested in something like EQ. There's all types of investors too. Some just chase what's currently hot, but some invest in high risk/high reward ventures.

A product doesn't need mass appeal, it just needs to be good enough that some small segment of the population will buy it. What constitutes "good enough" is decided by an endless number for design choices and is impossible to nail down. It's why there's a thousand garage bands you've never heard of for every band that actually gets on the radio, and a thousand of those for every Led Zeppelin. But if you set out to just copy Led Zeppelin (like so many MMO's did with WoW) you will never be anywhere near as successful.

Lambourne said:

I don't agree with this broad brush treatment that the "current generation isn't interested". There's young people doing all sorts of niche stuff. Plenty of young people play tabletop RPG for instance, and they might be interested in something like EQ. There's all types of investors too. Some just chase what's currently hot, but some invest in high risk/high reward ventures.

A product doesn't need mass appeal, it just needs to be good enough that some small segment of the population will buy it. What constitutes "good enough" is decided by an endless number for design choices and is impossible to nail down. It's why there's a thousand garage bands you've never heard of for every band that actually gets on the radio, and a thousand of those for every Led Zeppelin. But if you set out to just copy Led Zeppelin (like so many MMO's did with WoW) you will never be anywhere near as successful.

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I agree with it. The numbers for the top 2 MMO's are small, and fall off a cliff after that. WoW itself would be on life support if Blizz didn't drop trou and pinch out Classic. Classic doesn't count in this conversation because they rereleased a game that was already made.

You missed his point that MMO's are expensive and time consuming to produce. No one is going to fund one for a niche audience. You aren't going to build a small MMO without a giant budget.

Further, you are comparing small, easily funded projects like pen and paper games and garage bands to huge project like making an MMO. You know how they fund garage bands? By working at Wal Mart. Do you know how long you'd have to work at Wal Mart to save up enough money to fund an MMO that would have a decent shot at surviving the first year after release? It's a long time. Can you imagine 6,000 years?

There are plenty of decent MMO's out right now, but their numbers are falling because no one is interested anymore. The whole notion behind them is boring, too. Leveling sucks. Dungeons and raiding sucks. Grinding for tiny bits of gear sucks. Why do any of that when you can hop into any other game and have fun right away?

I didn't miss it, budget is mostly a design choice. If you want to make a copy of WoW, yes it is going to be expensive. But if you let go of some aspects, there's ways to do things for a fraction of the price. There's certain inherent costs that aren't there with a single player title sure, but they don't require dropping $300m on a AAA title.

The market currently sucks because everone is trying to do the same thing (ape WoW). It needs fresh ideas more than it needs fat stacks of investor money.

You can always point out another reason why something can't be done, but people do manage to capture that lightning in a bottle from time to time. I've pointed at the success of Legend of Grimrock before, which was basically a revival of a genre that died in the early 1990s. Very much a niche title, but it broke even within a week.

Lambourne said:

I didn't miss it, budget is mostly a design choice. If you want to make a copy of WoW, yes it is going to be expensive. But if you let go of some aspects, there's ways to do things for a fraction of the price. There's certain inherent costs that aren't there with a single player title sure, but they don't require dropping $300m on a AAA title.

The market currently sucks because everone is trying to do the same thing (ape WoW). It needs fresh ideas more than it needs fat stacks of investor money.

You can always point out another reason why something can't be done, but people do manage to capture that lightning in a bottle from time to time. I've pointed at the success of Legend of Grimrock before, which was basically a revival of a genre that died in the early 1990s. Very much a niche title, but it broke even within a week.

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You still don't get it.

The market sucks because no one is making a new MMO. At least not in any serious manner.

I know we'll be telling you until the end of time, but MMO's are not cheap to make. You aren't going to get one out the door without a giant pile of cash.

Why do you keep bringing up projects that take almost no money to fund?

Long string of shitty MMO's that everyone rushed to publish to cash in on what WoW brought. Been so long since a lot of people have seen or played a good MMO. Not counting those too young.

Fucker said:

You still don't get it.

The market sucks because no one is making a new MMO. At least not in any serious manner.

I know we'll be telling you until the end of time, but MMO's are not cheap to make. You aren't going to get one out the door without a giant pile of cash.

Why do you keep bringing up projects that take almost no money to fund?

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You keep throwing around the term "not cheap" like it means anything without context. Compared to a $300m AAA budget, $50m is cheap, but so is $5m.

I'll grant you that you probably can't do it as cheaply as you can do some Unity shovelware, but a game does not need to be a quarter-billion dollar AAA title to get financed or make money.

Neranja said:

When WoW launched everyone wanted a piece of the pie because WoW killed all interest in any other game - people only played WoW and Blizzard made lots of bank. Todays top dog is Epic with Fortnite, making $3 billion revenue a year, and now everyone wants a piece of that pie.

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At best they're just dogs fighting over stale crumbs fallen from the master's table. The pie is a lie until you bake your own.

So like Second Life but...worse.

Thanks for the nightmares.