Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online

[Sjofn]

I think the point is that while they may be repeating the same marketing mistakes, that doesn't really mean anything game-wise. That doesn't mean the game will be awesome, it's just that the game mistakes are going to be entirely independent of their marketing ones. 

[Ingmar]

Yeah I'm certainly not saying the game is probably going to be good, or even has much of a chance of being good. Most MMOs aren't. But there's really no reason to get all doom and gloom over a bunch of marketing talk, which is always 90% bullshit for any game anyway.

[Modern Angel]

I'm completely aware of the distinction. Remember, I'm on record as saying that early WAR was the best MMO I ever played... for a two weeks. If 40K ends up being WAR except not fundamentally broken I'll be first in line. The quality of the game is completely separate from the presentation and silly rhetoric.

[Malakili]

I'm completely aware of the distinction. Remember, I'm on record as saying that early WAR was the best MMO I ever played... for a two weeks. If 40K ends up being WAR except not fundamentally broken I'll be first in line. The quality of the game is completely separate from the presentation and silly rhetoric.

I actually think that the WAR beta was better than launch by a wide margin for a single reason: Nothing "mattered."   War really was everywhere, because noone cared to farm for levels, or loot, or anything else.  It was simply fighting for the sake of fighting, basically what warhammer is supposed to be.  The change from beta to release was absolutely gigantic. Suddenly just doing what was fun didn't matter. First leveling had to be done as efficiently as possible, then you had to start grinding out your rune gear so you could fight effectively, and so forth.   WAR was really the final straw for me having any MMORPG PvP for that reason.  I think PvP MMOs going forward are going to have to be shooter or maybe RTS oriented (if End of Nations can pan out), or in generally have less emphasis on character progression.

[Bzalthek]

I think individual character progression is a mistake for PvP, especially in 40K.  I would think that unlocking different units of various race armies would be more interesting.  I mean, you could start out as a grunt, but after a while you earn the points to enter the battlefield as a mekboy or whatever.  Get enough points to unlock the battlewagon and a few more points to make it red cause red is fastah!  Probably have a point system for the battlefield controlling respawn rate and higher rated units would take longer to respawn but grunts are like locusts.  Just a thought.

[Megrim]

One of the better ideas for a 40k mmo that i've read, did away with the idea of a single avatar entirely. Every player controlled squads of characters ala-DoW2 and leveling involved upgrading the whole team with wargear, perks, custom skins, etc... Balance would have to have been resolved through point cost/power ratio; marines would have fewer units in a squad and be a bit more powerful 1-for-1 but an ork player would have a dozen more orks under his command. Multiplayer pvp would then go by points-oriented battleground. So for example, people could opt to pile into a 1000 point battle. You'd potentially then have a smaller number of players controlling a large number of troops (tyranids, orks) versus a larger number controlling a smaller number of units (sm, chaos).

Of course, this is nothing like WoW.

[Ratman_tf]

One of the better ideas for a 40k mmo that i've read, did away with the idea of a single avatar entirely. Every player controlled squads of characters ala-DoW2 and leveling involved upgrading the whole team with wargear, perks, custom skins, etc... Balance would have to have been resolved through point cost/power ratio; marines would have fewer units in a squad and be a bit more powerful 1-for-1 but an ork player would have a dozen more orks under his command. Multiplayer pvp would then go by points-oriented battleground. So for example, people could opt to pile into a 1000 point battle. You'd potentially then have a smaller number of players controlling a large number of troops (tyranids, orks) versus a larger number controlling a smaller number of units (sm, chaos).

Of course, this is nothing like WoW.

See, at that point, I'd rather they chucked the whole thing and emulated the table top game.

[Megrim]

Who's to say (trick question) we can't have the best of both worlds? Persistent leveling and customization on the 40k platform, with battles for territory on different planets - everybody wins. But, it's not going to happen.

[UnSub]

See, at that point, I'd rather they chucked the whole thing and emulated the table top game.

You need four hours per session and other people will argue with you about which units actually got hit in real time? 

[slog]

Did they release anything on Raids yet?  I wonder if they will support both 10 mans and 25 mans for each dungeon?

[5150]

See, at that point, I'd rather they chucked the whole thing and emulated the table top game.

You need four hours per session and other people will argue with you about which units actually got hit in real time? 

I'd play way more if [my] games only took 4 hours instead of an entire day!

[5150]

Now for tabletop wargaming you need that. It would be a royal pain in the arse to set out rank after rank of infantry minatures only to have your opponent plonk a diplomat down and say he's come to negotiate a trade treaty.

Now I want a figure for a water caste envoy. 

Would be something like this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?VISuperSize&item=330446750809

[Lakov_Sanite]

Why is everyone here spelling "orcs" wrong? 

[Rendakor]

Because in 40k they spell it Ork?

[IainC]

DM:O is going to be a masterpiece

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is "very friendly to the WoW player" and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

"Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself," Bilson told CVG. "I'm a diehard MMO player myself - going back to EverQuest. I've spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I'm going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It's very friendly to the WoW player."

[Shatter]

DM:O is going to be a masterpiece

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is "very friendly to the WoW player" and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

"Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself," Bilson told CVG. "I'm a diehard MMO player myself - going back to EverQuest. I've spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I'm going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It's very friendly to the WoW player."

I hope he isnt serious.  Although have to give him cred for not saying they are makign a wowkiller but rather a WOWtaketheirsubsiller

[Jimbo]

Why is everyone here spelling "orcs" wrong?  

[DLRiley]

DM:O is going to be a masterpiece

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is "very friendly to the WoW player" and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.
"Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself," Bilson told CVG. "I'm a diehard MMO player myself - going back to EverQuest. I've spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I'm going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It's very friendly to the WoW player."

I hope he isnt serious.  Although have to give him cred for not saying they are makign a wowkiller but rather a WOWtaketheirsubsiller

its not unreasonable? where else is 3 million players going to come from? Are there even 3 million pvp'ers between all the none wow games put together? Its not impossible for a game to cannibalism a little from WoW, aoc and war did it at launch. And there is no real new market for the game they are trying to make. The people who bought 1 million boxes when aoc launched are the same people who bought 1 million boxes when war launched and was the same people who purchased boxes when aion launch. If they expecting to grow, they going to thinking in terms of taking chunks out of wow. The only way i see them getting past that obstacle is to appeal to the tf2/cod crowd, but we should all know they aren't making that type of game so.... i mean the fact that this is subscription narrows you down to the eve,aoc,war folks and wow.

[Cadaverine]

The issue isn't that they won't be able to cannibalize players from WoW, it's will they be able to keep them for more than 30 days.

Magic 8 Ball says not fucking likely.

[DLRiley]

Than it will go into war and aoc hell. There ARE no other players to draw from especially for the numbers they expecting. The kids these days, you know the ones that sane companies really want to target, are growing up with f2p. You are making subscription. You want to make pvp roar roar and pve meow. When the majority of the mmo playerbase is pve carebears who want to roar roar but in the context of pve. Is a wow friendly game going to attract tf2 and cod players? Err no. So after you raped and pillaged the sub bases of every other pvp non-wow game, where will this grow?

[Lakov_Sanite]

WAR and AoC were shitty games after about 30 days of play, there was just no depth to keep people from going back to things like wow. 

Now if 40k could make a good, rated M game that catered to adults and was of wow quality or close, I would play in a heartbeat. Right no im looking for alternatives, not straight clones.

[DLRiley]

WAR and AoC were shitty games after about 30 days of play, there was just no depth to keep people from going back to things like wow. 

Now if 40k could make a good, rated M game that catered to adults and was of wow quality or close, I would play in a heartbeat. Right no im looking for alternatives, not straight clones.

I think the point still stands, Aoc and War didn't attract 2 million new players to the genre according to what their initial sales would have you to believe. Fact is the 1 million that bought Aoc also bought War and in doing so leaving AoC. The market is small, even if those two games weren't pile of turd if you go by "very few mmo'ers hold subscriptions to 2 different game" theory than at best both games could have hoped for is 500k users(that's assuming no sudden gains prior launch of course). Much better than they have now, but once you add in aion than the numbers get even more wonky. the market is crowded with the only breathing room being wow players.

[Malakili]

WAR and AoC were shitty games after about 30 days of play, there was just no depth to keep people from going back to things like wow. 

Now if 40k could make a good, rated M game that catered to adults and was of wow quality or close, I would play in a heartbeat. Right no im looking for alternatives, not straight clones.

M rated game?  So what, it has more blood and boobs?  If the game play sucks who gives a shit what rating it is.

[Bzalthek]

The market is huge and it is constantly expanding.  AoC and War were both essentially mom and pop shops trying to compete next door to wal-mart.  They can survive and be slightly profitable just off the people who refuse to go to wal-mart because wal-mart is a conformist corporation pig dog.  But they both just boil down to diku fantasy subscription-based MMOs and WoW already provides those services and more, plus it has a floating, smiley-faced mascot.  AoC and War either relied on suckering enough people into trying it for a short while to become profitable, or they tried to bite off more than they could chew.  Either way their lack of blockbuster success is not indicative as to the size of the MMO market out there, they just failed to create something that appeals to that market.  As technology becomes cheaper and more wide-spread, more and more children will be entering that market while many in the existing market won't "grow out" of gaming.  The average age of gamers is becoming older and older.   

Remember when about 500K was all the market could sustain during EQ?  The argument is still not valid.  Problem is, either you make a game that is so outstanding it makes WoW look like a mom-and-pop shop, or you look at alternative ways to tap the market.  All people are doing right now is trying to copy WoW with maybe a few twists. 

[DLRiley]

The market is huge if your make an mmo that takes one genuine albeit relatively small step toward gamers and less toward the mud re-visioned crowd. Its small otherwise. Again its not like AoC and War were going to attract 2 million new players to genre if they succeeded. 40k being made in the exact same vein won't do any better besides take from the existing audience hungry for that game type done right. Even WoW cannibalized heavily from  the existing mmo's, only attracting the significantly larger playerbase because it was more gamy than its predecessors and thus appealed to the "EQ but without most of the asshat" that mmo's pre WoW didn't manage to do.

At this point the next big thing is probably going to be the next "pve done right" game. I have a sneaking suspicion that WoW hasn't truly capitalized on the pve market much like EQ didn't. The number of people interested in a pvp game has been pretty consistent since UO. The only way i see 40k changing that is if they attract the tf2/cod players but again the past would probably repeat itself considering the Unreal/CounterStrike weren't interested in planetside or ww2o.

[Bzalthek]

I suspect PvP in MMO's are going to remain relatively niche for a while.  The ever-present diku leveling scheme coupled with subscriptions is not an incentive to the tf2/cod crowd.  I'm biased, but I always held that the pvp crowd in MMOs were the type that couldn't hack it in shooters and needed a playground where they could grief others with advantages like level and gear.  People who pvp for the sake of pvp already have their games.  (This is a generalization.)

I think you are correct about the pve landscape.  WoW did a good job but it's like they took one step forward and kinda stopped.  There's probably a whole lot more that can be explored in that area, but there's a question of incentive at the moment.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I suspect PvP in MMO's are going to remain relatively niche for a while.  The ever-present diku leveling scheme coupled with subscriptions is not an incentive to the tf2/cod crowd.  I'm biased, but I always held that the pvp crowd in MMOs were the type that couldn't hack it in shooters and needed a playground where they could grief others with advantages like level and gear.  People who pvp for the sake of pvp already have their games.  (This is a generalization.)

I think you are correct about the pve landscape.  WoW did a good job but it's like they took one step forward and kinda stopped.  There's probably a whole lot more that can be explored in that area, but there's a question of incentive at the moment.

This.  Especially the last sentence.  Wow actually took several steps forward at once, none of them minor.  Almost all quests in the game working at launch.  Enough quests to level from 1 to max solely by questing (remember when grind meant repetitively killing mobs to level because you had run out of quests?). Ability to solo from 1 to max. Enough content completed and debugged to go from 1 to max AT LAUNCH.  Sufficiently complete and cohesive sets of classes, races, sides, skills, statistics, abilities and everything else that goes into an MMORPG, all relatively well balanced. Was it perfect?  No.  But in every part it was far better than barely good enough, and it did a good job of filling in most weak spots over the next couple of years.  Nobody else has shipped an MMO with more than a month or so of content AND without gaping holes in any of the basic game systems at launch, before or since WoW (Aion cheated by making it take a year to consume their month's worth of content).  Everybody wants to emulate WoW's success, but nobody wants to emulate the WORK it took to get there.  And thus nobody comes close to replicating WoW's success. 

PvE is about content.  And not just content in the traditional sense of quests and zones and npcs and loot, but also in terms of all the systems (classes, combat, looting, bank, broker, travel, etc) that need to work reliably individually and as an interrelated whole in order for the traditional content to be consumed.  Content that doesn't work (broken quests, missing loot tables, incomplete quests or story lines, incomplete classes, broken core systems, etc) not only doesn't count but negates some of the benefit of ALL other content in the game as it both creates a bad experience itself and leads to doubt and distrust in every subsequent encounter with new content.  Content, whether a quest or a class design, which is incomplete is like shipping a game of chess, but only with pawns, Kings and Queens, all else to be implemented later.  And then charging a subscription to play it while they finish it.   

Content is expensive, but content is everything. 

Sadly, in spite of their claims, most developers use PvP as a crutch to make up for not providing enough content of sufficient quality to start with, i.e. they can't be bothered to actually ship a complete game so they toss in PvP in the hopes it will distract folks long enough for them to finish their game after launch.  Which MMO history, now that there is some, demonstrates is a stupid plan for a multitude of reasons, including minor things like PvP being harder to do right than PvE, player resentment at bait-and-switch tactics of having to PvE in order to PvP (or, being left with nothing but PvP after getting hooked on PvE), the mismatch in play styles and cultural norms between PvP and PvE players, tuning a game's PvP often breaks its PvE and vice-versa, etc, etc, etc.

As far as incentive being lacking, you'd think WoW's success would be incentive enough.  But everybody just whines about how they can't afford to do it right, so they do it half-assed and fail instead.  Surprise, surprise.  I think Blizzard is the only ones really lacking incentive, since they've already got their money hats!

[Malakili]

Well generally speaking I think its those systems you mention that matter the most.  I look at a game like Darkfall (a game that lots of people love to hate) and think they at the very least have the right idea about content.  Rather than putting in loads of quests they simply have a ton of systems in place that the players then use to do stuff.    In fact quitting Darkfall for me had more to do with the fact that there was TOO MUCH to do and keep track of and I didn't have the time to play it the way I really wanted to, not that there wasn't enough. 

People might say there is "too much grind" in Darkfall, but to me having an NPC tell me to kill 10 whatsits is actually a worse scenario than "Hmm, I'd like to level up alchemy, I should go kill some whatsits because they drop some ingrediants" and then I also skill (level) up by killing them.

I know spawn camping an monster spawn for 10 hours like in EQ isn't a good solution either, by the way, but I'd much prefer to "create my own" quests because the game just has "stuff to do" and not be an errand boy from 1-max.

Or even looking at a game like World War 2 Online (the MMO I'm currently playing).  Its 100% PvP (0 quests, a very small number of AI in every town, but thats a bit different, they are token defense to make sure you don't just waltz into town, the smallest amount of paying attention lets you avoid or kill them easily), the game world hasn't changed appreciably in the better part of a decade, but there is never a lack of stuff to do because the game systems in place make it so. 

I guess my point is, to me PvE content, moving in a positive direction would mean LESS reliance on the game telling you where to go and what to kill, and just having a world thats worth doing stuff in.

[DLRiley]

While Malakili is busy talking about games no one plays, come to think of it 5 years from now subscription gaming will probably be between WoW and various niche hellzones fiefdoms that house 40 year old wargamers with neck beards and "i suck at most forms of comeptitive gaming but i pwnz them noobs" thirteen year olds who think f2p gaming and wow pvp servers are for pussies....

Anyway back on topic, its not that an mmo company isn't willing to put in the work (unless talking about cryptic), the diku model they are trying to emulate just burns all their cash. the conventional wisdom that no one can compete with wow deep pockets is true but this isn't really a matter of tossing money bags at a game till it works, its about finding cheap solutions to complex problems and most of these companies don't even bother, instead trying to find cheap solutions to expensive problems (the chess board with nothing but pawns, king, and queen because the other pieces are too expensive). Mythic had a "cheap solution to complex problem" type idea with the public quest but they were to busy shoehorning in the diku model to realize what they've done.

[Malakili]

its about finding cheap solutions to complex problems and most of these companies don't even bother.

I think making robust game mechanics that allow for tons of content is a lot more cost effective than trying to pump out more and more quests and the art/text/etc that goes along with that.  But then again, no one likes the games I like.

[eldaec]

That is certainly more cost effective to build, but in no way effective to market.

See: EVE Online.

[Malakili]

That is certainly more cost effective to build, but in no way effective to market.

See: EVE Online.

I suppose so, but it doesn't NECESSARILY have to have the parts of EVE/Darkfall that make it unpopular (steep learning curve, full loot PvP, etc).   I've always assumed that was the real reason those games are held back.

[DLRiley]

I think its a matter of, you interact with the world and the world looks at you. Like building a sandcastle in a sand box the sand castle doesn't do anything until someone runs up and kicks it over. The only meaningful interaction with the world is with other players but that ultimately doesn't provide much despite what it sounds like in theory. For example in most of those games your individual progress is nonexistent, you must pony your balls to organization or a group in order to accomplish anything collectively and have that accomplishment felt. Its only fun when playing in a group is not a good thing to say about an mmo made in 2010. The only way to get your "importance" is to play the economy game, but even than you can't really do anything with the earnings besides spend on fluff or more eco (for example its not like you can raise a private army if your really good at being donald trump). Guess how many people really play a game because the crafting eco shit is good?

A system that can gain popularity is a system where the sand castle does something independent of you. You interact with the world and the world (not some kid kicking your sandbox) interacts back, sure that ultimately wouldn't give more significance than the former but at least it gives you an illusion that that you are important and hence will be more appealing.

[Malakili]

A system that can gain popularity is a system where the sand castle does something independent of you. You interact with the world and the world (not some kid kicking your sandbox) interacts back, sure that ultimately wouldn't give more significance than the former but at least it gives you an illusion that that you are important and hence will be more appealing.

I'm sure you're right, I just can't quite wrap my head around it.  I mean, I guess history has shown that people are willing to a million guys as long as an NPC is telling them to, but as soon as they have to do it of their own accord the game "has nothing to do but grind."  I guess I just don't share the way of thinking about games that leads to that conclusion.

[Rendakor]

Speaking personally, I vastly prefer questing to grinding. In EQ2 at launch (when I was admittedly quite the catass), quest XP was nonexistent and the best XP to be had was in Permafrost, so that's where we went; 6 of us ran circles around the upper level of this dungeon for hours and hours just to gain a single level. It was INCREDIBLY boring, but it was the best xp so that's where we stayed, because we all wanted to be the first to 50. When I finally hit 50, I quit within a month because I was so burnt out from that grind.

Comparing that to WoW's (or even present day EQ2) quest-to-max, you see a lot more diversity and as a result the journey feels a lot less tedious to me.