EQ Never

Dandai_sl said:

Don't get me wrong, I get your point, but there have been many, MANY more MMORPG's that have failed/sunset than Vanguard in the post-WoW era.

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Name the list of AAA MMORPGs developed post-WoW that haven't 'lasted'.

Etchazz's assertion was 'after a month', but I'll let you have any period of time you like.

Arcaus_sl said:

MMO Games List 2016 | MMORPG.com

How many of those do you think were actually successful?

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Notice how I listed AAA games, not every piece of Korean shovelware you can find.

It's probably true we'll never agree, especially because we're gamers (though many of us honestly aren't anymore) and a lot of our basis is feels based judgements when it comes to the success of a game. I think I'm okay with that, considering it's a discussion not being had in a conference room.

For instance, I felt WAR was a failure because it had a ton of potential and I was super hyped but it was visually way less interesting than the existing IP and felt very empty and soulless and they were having the sync issues. So, yeah, I didn't like it and it didn't become a huge juggernaut I felt I had to at least give another chance, in large part because enough other people were meh on it. I've known people that played it and some that even said it technically made money or whatever, but I didn't care, to me it was a failure.

Only natural that gamers are going to use whether or not they played the game themselves for a long time as a factor in discussions about whether a game was a success. It's like talking to the nerdy girl at work about the latest comic book movie and she says every single on of them was 'really good' and I finally have gotten her to differentiate between when they're actually good, and when she just liked it anyway and felt she got her money worth in entertainment.

Here's an uncomfortable fact for the people who claim modern MMORPGs 'fail' after a month:

At its absolute height in early 2005, EverQuest enjoyed 500,000 monthly subscriptions. Let's look at a game that is universally shat on by 'oldschool' MMO players. SWTOR. Three years after release, the game was still enjoying 1 million unique players logging in every month.

Which 'population spike' behaviour games are we even talking about? The only two of any significance I can remember were Rift and Age of Conan.. Maybe Wildstar? Market conditions are so vastly different these days that it's absurd to say 'EverQuest's mechanics kept people playing'. It's simply not true. The vast majority of players never made it to level cap, and certainly never stayed subbed for extended periods of time.

We were the outliers.

Matrix online and Earth and Beyond are the two I can remember that were massive failures. FF14 was a failure until they basically redid it from the ground up.

Arcaus_sl said:

Matrix online and Earth and Beyond are the two I can remember that were massive failures. FF14 was a failure until they basically redid it from the ground up.

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Both pre-WoW...

But ya, I guess you could count FF14 even though it is currently drowning in cash.

Soygen_sl said:

Matrix was post-WoW.

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Ah, my mistake. I was playing TMO beta before I got my hands on WoW. I suppose what I should have said was that it was released before the 'post-WoW era' that people like to point to as the FALL OF THE MMORPG.

Quaid_sl said:

Here's an uncomfortable fact for the people who claim modern MMORPGs 'fail' after a month:

At its absolute height in early 2005, EverQuest enjoyed 500,000 monthly subscriptions. Let's look at a game that is universally shat on by 'oldschool' MMO players. SWTOR. Three years after release, the game was still enjoying 1 million unique players logging in every month.

Which 'population spike' behaviour games are we even talking about? The only two of any significance I can remember were Rift and Age of Conan.. Maybe Wildstar? Market conditions are so vastly different these days that it's absurd to say 'EverQuest's mechanics kept people playing'. It's simply not true. The vast majority of players never made it to level cap, and certainly never stayed subbed for extended periods of time.

We were the outliers.

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At the time, EQ's half a million subs was probably close to 80% of the entire MMO industry, you fuck wit. Before EQ, most gamers didn't even know what a MMORPG was. There are more people watching baseball now than there were 100 years ago, when baseball was far and away the biggest sport in the country, yet baseball is no longer even close to being the most popular game in America. Understand? Having 500,000 subs now, when there are roughly 400,000,000 MMO players world wide isn't even remotely comparable to the number of MMO players world wide 17 years ago when EQ first launched.

And despite being on the market for 6 years, spawning several competitors and complimentary products, EverQuest and it's ilk failed to expand the market. It took WoW, a 'casual friendly gimme loot now' game to do it. It is still the market leader to this day.

Your opinions are shit.

Quaid_sl said:

And despite being on the market for 6 years, spawning several competitors and complimentary products, EverQuest and it's ilk failed to expand the market. It took WoW, a 'casual friendly gimme loot now' game to do it. It is still the market leader to this day.

Your opinions are shit.

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I blame that on the shit faced entitled "Everyone gets a trophy" fucks thats have crammed that shit into a generation of folks,creating a bunch of entitled lazy half wits.

Quaid_sl said:

And despite being on the market for 6 years, spawning several competitors and complimentary products, EverQuest and it's ilk failed to expand the market. It took WoW, a 'casual friendly gimme loot now' game to do it. It is still the market leader to this day.

Your opinions are shit.

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You're a moron. Warcraft was a well more established IP than EQ. Shit, most of my friends who bought WoW didn't even know it was an MMO, they just knew the name Warcraft from playing the other Warcraft games. They literally tried to explain to me about this "virtual world" and how it worked and I would explain to them that I had been playing an MMO for 5 years already in Everquest.

And you still haven't successfully defended your argument that EQ "only" had half a million subs when, at the time, that number represented a lion's share of the market, and that a game that has the same number of subs now, is not even remotely as successful.

Sure, Warcraft was a bigger IP.

The real factor, though, was that WoW was just a superior gaming experience in almost every measurable sense.

So, an early iteration of a product had a huge market share, and then later iterations came and built off that success to gain wider appeal and more mainstream success. Sounds pretty common. They were both highly successful in their own time and in pretty spectacular ways for those times. Not sure how WoW's success takes away from EQ's success in the minds of anyone who isn't just looking for a reason to call other people's opinions shit.

It's a strange habit for people to diminish the success of early iterations of a product or idea just because the later iterations did exactly what they're designed to do which is improve and expand a market. Few products manage to be the early iteration and the one to change the marketplace and the one to become the mainstream success. Yeah, EQ is Myspace compared to WoW being Facebook, but that doesn't mean Myspace wasn't the go-to for quite a few years.

It's no coincidence that around 4-5 years is when the decline/dumbening starts to occur for continuing games. Companies opt for a smaller investments while trying to retain a "healthy" population that still brings in some steady money while developing the next games (except for SOE's case, they failed horribly at that). The biggest problem these days is new releases can't get close to that stage because they crash and burn in the first year with not enough to keep people interested. The distance between content patches & expansions increasing does not help either and when that rare game like FFXIV does push material regularly you see exactly how retarded the constant reset treadmill is.

Need good release + progression with no reset bullshit + shorter content release periods.

Still waiting for that list of failed AAA MMORPGs that followed WoW's gameplay formula.

Pulling up a list off wiki the only stuff I see at a glance that we really cared about here since warcraft are: Warhammer, Vanguard, Conan, Aion, Champions, Allods, Elderscrolls, and Wildstar.

Some of those go in a very different direction and may take little or no influence. One was so similar it spawned a great comic on the subject.

Defining 'failed' here is difficult as well. Is Shutdown a failure? Warhammer has an emulator server, and Vanguard has one in the works.

For many I think failure is if our little community gets bored and leaves. What we think matters little in the grand scheme of things, but that's probably the best metric I can come up with.

Changing the subject slightly, my recent Ludum Dare game got me thinking about some of EQ's design elements that lie disused in a bin. Some of that stuff was so addicting, and might be great in a little niche single player or group rpg.

Erronius_sl said:

I can agree with much of what you said, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it perfect.

FFXIV was probably the worst game I've played in this regard. No one seemed to care about any runs they did, and people just jumped into random group shit constantly. It was full-on zerg mode. Oh, you all wiped? No worries, just try again with your 'echo' buff until you beat it! I mean FFS, one of the first PUGs I ran in that game I almost pulled my hair out. I'd been watching YouTube videos on the dungeon to know what to do, and the other people in the group just ran around randomly. I ended up asking friend if that was normal, and they all said yes.

I'd like an MMO that can strike a good balance, but I don't really see players ever asking for that. People usually either seem to gravitate towards one extreme or the other. It's almost like politics in that you probably need to find a compromise, but people end up digging their heels in and turning these things into ideological debates.

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Criticizing FFXIV about difficulty in irrelevant dungeons/raids PUGs with Echo enabled...

See, you had this balance you are claiming to want in FFXIV, but couldn't be bothered to look for.

Progression content like Coils (and even more in Savage mode) was really hardcore WHEN it was relevant.

Echo was a catch up mechanic that was enabled on OLD content in order for the more casual player base to see it.

None of the scrubs being retarded in your pugs would have seen any of that content when it was a current raiding tier.

WoW is good for a month or so of "Im bored, lets see what WoW's like now." But I have to admit that Black Desert Online has picked up some very good ways of prolonging a game far past the leveling experience. I dislike that it doesnt have a traditional dungeon, raid or meta - but if a game ever resembles BDO and has those things then Im going to be so deep into that game that Im going to revert back to teenage neck beard status.

I was interested in the path that EQ:N was taking, but it didnt really "feel" like EverQuest when they showed or talked about it. Whether that was in spirit or function. Making a game and calling places, classes and people the same as they were in EQ1 just wouldnt have had the same effect for me.