Tearofsoul
Ancient MMO noob
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- 1,257
EQ Never
- Thread starter Convo
- Start date
Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Are you a gaming dev? If you are, then are you willing to tell us what you are working on? What is your vision for the game? What do you promise to deliver? When are you delivering it? etc, etc, etc.
Are you willing to take the withering critisism when your game isn't what you promised? Especially since no game ever has been or ever will be what is promised? Of course you won't. Because either you are smart enough to have learned from Brad's painful lesson that the gaming public isn't capable of understanding.. or you are a coward.
Unless you are a gaming dev willing to put your vision out in a public forum (which of course you have never done and will never have the courage, intelligence or creativity to do) then my statement wasn't addressed to you.
And since you are obviously not a gaming dev, where in my statement did I say you owed Brad anything? Your inablilty to read basic english is getting tiresome.
Lol, true. Regardless of his past history with the game, EQNext is about the future. And the powers that be seem to have decided that Brad has no part in it.
On the topic of time, I don't have a lot for gaming anymore. I get home from work around 11pm and depending whether or not the wife is up the available time gets whittled down even further. Also, two little girls makes it close to impossible to game during the day. I'm not reliable in groups or raids and I'm unable to play violent games during the day.
Modern day EQ is actually extremely forgiving to my current lifestyle. A lot of the things that I found charming about the game back in high school would absolutely turn me off today. It's like the game grew up along with me and continued to provide options as my time in game dwindled.
Modern day EQ is actually extremely forgiving to my current lifestyle. A lot of the things that I found charming about the game back in high school would absolutely turn me off today. It's like the game grew up along with me and continued to provide options as my time in game dwindled.
Quineloe
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 6,978
- 4,464
But see here's the thing.I don't care about your lifestyle, and game design shouldn't either.
Designers shouldn't design to a demographic, to all demographics in order to get as many people to buy their game as possible. As that article I linked mentioned, they use all of the statistical indicators to measure quantities they think they can relate to the 'fun' word, and then through marketing to all demographics, use the euphemism of accessibility.
From a gamer's perspective, you can call thisobjectively dogshit design. Because they're no longer designing for the game's sake, they're designing to an audience, to all audiences, for money. They're not making a great game and hoping to make a lot of money because they think it's a good product. They're making a game based on indicators in order to make as much money as possible.
There's a difference, an objective difference.
This is why Blizzard sucks as a game developer today. This is why SOE sucks as a game developer today. This is why most all social games suck as games today. This is why the industry as a whole is mostly absolute dogshit today.
Rob Pardo and his bros can snort coke off hooker ass in their Ferraris all day, but it doesn't change this fact: they sold out.
Ok first off, Minecraft says hello. So does Mark of the Ninja, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Angry Birds, and various others.
Secondly, nobody is suggesting the game should look shit. What I suggest is something like Portal and Portal 2. They still looked good and nobody complained about graphics, and yet they used an old engine that they just tinkered with. SoE already have the engine from Planetside 2, all I'm saying is that they should just focus on making the game and don't add all the flash that other games do - so no voice overs, less music, etc. IE: More like the original EQ and less like TSW/SWTOR/GW2 etc.
Thirdly, you should spend some time looking at mmo charts. Those games didn't actually hit a million, more like 800,000 max, but they also did not settle at 300-600k. AoC sold well but was down to 100,000 almost instantly, and never recovered. Warhammer clung on a bit longer while dropping, but soon enough it ended up 100,000 too. Rift, its peak was 600,000 and in less than a year it was down to 250,000.
EverQuest however, did extremely well. It grew slowly up to 400,000 in the first two years, then it plateaued but held strong for the next FOUR entire years, and then shot up steeply to 550,000 and didn't dip below 400,000 until 2006. My point is that a new game which aims deliberately at those kinds of players, could realistically get at least 500,000 players and hold them for several years. And if you add that up, it's far more profitable than the games which come in big and are dead a month later.
Oh and lastly, if it wasn't for 'Neckbeards', Smed wouldn't even have his job.
Rezz
Mr. Poopybutthole
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You should start a kickstarter for a game where the primary point is that the developers don't listen to any feedback or take into account any market/trend/other games before/during/after the design process. Then use the kickstarter money to hire said devs and run the infrastructure and the "company" and show us how your idea is correct.
Because all evidence in the history of gaming points away from this. Like.. all of it. Designing for the game's sake? You don't think a single developer in Trion/Blizzard/whatever had an idea for a game somewhere mixed in with the pie charts and graphs? Like... at all? And you don't think anyone involved in the development and marketing of UO or EQ looked at any pie charts or graphs... at all? I mean being delusional is fun and all and I fully support it, but at least have the decency to realize you are being delusional. Your opinion is that all games are shit. The vast majority of gamers would disagree. Given your delusions, I would have to put my support behind like... all of gaming history.
But you're probably right somewhere in your head, and there is definitely a group of developers who will work for peanuts to produce a game that will be difficult to recoup initial investments on let alone keep running for any reasonable length of time. I'm sure they are out there, somewhere. They never existed in UO or EQ, but I'm sure they are out there (in fantasy land) just waiting to work on the project. Here's hoping they put in for your kickstarter! And I'm dead serious about the kickstarter. That's the only way "nobody's" game is going to get made.
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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I think one important aspect of EQ also was the speed of content additions. Sure some of it was broken, bugged or even unavailable. And I remember banging my head against PoEA while the whole event chain was bugged to hell, but they came out with whole expansions in less then a year for several years in a row iirc? Thats alot of content to see and even if you just pass through it adds variety and scope to the gameworld. Looking at WoW the average between content patches and expansions must be half a year at least and the content patch is usually a dungeon, raid and some dailies? I never played Rift past a month but I hear they are better at adding new stuff. Anyway, If you were a top guild you got new stuff with several zones once a year, and if you were casual or a scrub you never even saw all zones you could access, let alone those you didnt get keys/flags for.
Just looking at GW2 the thing I'd like most is just more zones similar to Orr in difficulty/annoyance but other visuals to explore. A huge desert area with mountains and oasis(es?) for example. I feel its more important then adding new instanced grinds with patches like WoW does.
Just looking at GW2 the thing I'd like most is just more zones similar to Orr in difficulty/annoyance but other visuals to explore. A huge desert area with mountains and oasis(es?) for example. I feel its more important then adding new instanced grinds with patches like WoW does.
Blackyce
Silver Knight of the Realm
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Says you. Personally I like AC's graphics from that era more than EQ's. AC had a harder time than EQ because yes it had it's own world and lore as well as not being based off of traditional fantasy. Another issue was Microsoft as the publisher and them not pushing the game at all.
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That was more timing and happenstance than anything else, though. EQ wouldn't make those numbers in today's world. You can't go back nearly 15 years, to a world without any real staple MMO, and say "hey, but it did really well" without taking that into account. You really think that if you took every semi-successful MMO out there and started them all at the same time, with the same footing, that EQ, as it was back in 1999-2003, would be out in front (or anywhere near the front) of the pack?
Royal
Connoisseur of Exotic Pictures
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Minor quibble that doesn't really alter your point but the 550K figure was always, in my opinion, a bit bogus. At the time that chart came out, Sir Bruce explained that the sudden and otherwise inexplicable increase in EQ's sub numbers was due to SOE changing their definition of what constituted an active subscription. Considering that it roughly coincided with the release of WoW, I always felt it was done to mask the exodus that was beginning in part to the anticipation of the new king ascending the throne (the other cause being the shitty implementation of the GoD expansion).
Royal
Connoisseur of Exotic Pictures
- 15,077
- 10,642
Part of the reason for the debacle though is the lack of resources to sustain it's development long enough to deal with the glaring issues revealed in the beta. The game was going to end up being so expensive to produce that what McQuaid was saying back at the time about some games being like a hamburger w/fries (translation, WoW) but some people were more "selective" and wanted to eat steak (Vanguard) was beginning to sound like utter lunacy. You can't dump the same amount of money into developing a game for all those selective steak connoisseurs that you can on building the better hamburger. That's part of why the game ended up being released in the state that it was.
To be fair the huge jump to 550,000 was due to all the alts who were left on 24 hours a day in the Bazaar when Luclin was released.
EQ was a fucking pernicious game to attract half a million players. That's hundreds of thousands of people staring at a spell book for 35 levels, logging off in disgust after not being able to find a healer, losing their corpses in the dark of gfay and tox. I wonder what kind of numbers EQ would have done back then with just a few easy tweaks to stop the game from punching you in the balls. (e.g. no spellbook med, darkness a little lighter, bind wound slightly more functional).
Also, DAoC was a pretty good game that failed to kill EQ, and recall plenty of people were looking at it as the EQ killer. I don't think the no-competition rationale for EQ's dominance holds up. Rather EQ's fall came as a perfect storm of a shitty expansion, EQ2 breaking people's ties with original EQ while providing a pretty meh game, and WoW scooping up leftover players with a game that fixed a lot of the broken stuff in EQ, added a level of polish EQ never had, and took away interesting parts of EQ many people still cherish.
Also, DAoC was a pretty good game that failed to kill EQ, and recall plenty of people were looking at it as the EQ killer. I don't think the no-competition rationale for EQ's dominance holds up. Rather EQ's fall came as a perfect storm of a shitty expansion, EQ2 breaking people's ties with original EQ while providing a pretty meh game, and WoW scooping up leftover players with a game that fixed a lot of the broken stuff in EQ, added a level of polish EQ never had, and took away interesting parts of EQ many people still cherish.
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
- 279
- 39
Games and products are killed by the changes in the market. MMOs thrived because people got their first always-on connection. Today the same change is happening in the tablet market. Witness Angry Bird (downloaded a billion times) and Clash of Clans which is a hardcore pvp game that is making more money on iOS than all EA's gamesput together.
Markets evolve so should your design. Having said that there is a cluster of PC gamer that are ok paying $200 for a badass game and they stick around - and they are easy to acquire than your $0.02 mom that buys virtual cats.
Related:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5l-nnR4Bx0