f13.net

So with the upcoming release of both D3 and SC2 we can probably safely conclude that these IP's will not be used for the new MMO. With that said, I believe Blizzard has said on the record that World of Warcraft II was off the table. So what are at least the possibilities for this MMO?

1. They could indeed be going for Diablo or Starcraft IP, although I doubt it (although my greatest gaming wish would be for a Diablo inspired MMO)

2. They could also be working on WoW II and just denying it. WoW II would be a great sequel if done right. My wish would be to add WoW I content that took the game to a higher level and then allowed you, once that level was reached, to ascend into a new world that would in essence transfer your character to WoW II (with new characters also starting at that level).

3. Another Blizzard property? I am not that familiar with Blizzard IP outside of the Big 3 (WC, Diablo, SC) so perhaps there is an untapped IP?

4. A completey new Blizzard property. Would love to hear some rumors

5. A deal with another company to convert thier IP.

Any rumors out there?

The last game Blizzard released before WoW was WCIII. Why do you think that Blizzard won't use the same IP for two different games in relatively close succession?

WoW 2 would be crazy.  Why risk splitting their userbase, possibly failing to recapture the magic and killing the golden goose?  Would have said World of Starcraft but if the OP thinks that's unlikely then I'm stumped.

Also, relatively close in this case means 4 or more YEARS.

So, just to off hand discount Blizzards other established IP's is pretty silly.

WC3 was 2002, WC3: Frozen Throne was 2003, Wow was 2004.

I meant 4 or more years from SC2 or D3 to when-ever MMOX gets put on a shelf.

Quite frankly, I think they are silly to make a new MMO when they have such a brilliant thing going for them.  Its not like they are going to increase their market share by a huge percentage. 

That being said, if they are really doing it, I vote starcraft.

It's been stated it won't be WOW2, but something different.  My money is on an actiony type of Diablo.

What I want to see is a massive FPS Starcraft.  What I imagine we'll get is WoW++, with some non-warcraft skin on it.

I'd say there is a pretty good chance it won't be DIKU.  I'd say there is a decent chance that it will have a totally different art style too.

Wouldn't it be completely insane from their point of view to not make it DIKU?  A DIKU-ish MMO is currently making them an unprecedented amount of money.  Why would they walk away from that?

Because inviting a direct comparison to your own game is about as much fun as poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.

You might have some common design features like groups, classes, loot etc.   But I'd be surprised if the control scheme is exactly the same with the type of targeting, movement, hotbars etc.

Wow burnout will be much more of an issue by the time this new MMO arrives. And Blizzard aren't in the habit of rushing shit out the door.

So, I don't think they will be cutting their own throats, as in killing off Wow, but making sure that something new and shiny is there to catch the potential fall-off in subs that happen due to natural human behavior (get bored, see something new).

As to what the game will be? Does it really matter? If Blizzard announced a game that involves eating your own feces, it would sell like fresh doughnuts.

Hopefully it's based on Starcraft.

I'd like a new IP, but I don't see that happening.

It doesn't matter what it is, everybody and their dog is going to buy it.

Call me names, or simply ignore me, but I think this is the most boring thread ever on f13.
The fact that I can't refrain from posting this shows how bored I am. Meh!

And then we really WOULD see how to polish a turd  :awesome_for_real:

I agree that World of Starcraft is more likely however their current goose is only laying half as many golden eggs as it could be since even though roughly half their players are in mainland China they are getting diddly squat in terms of relative revenue from there cause The9 is getting all but a small portion of it (relatively speaking). Creating a new game, even if it's only WoW II, allows them to negotitate an entirely new contract with an operator assuming they don't simply use some of their accumulated money hats and open up their own ops center over there. I.e. if they did do a WoW II and it took away *all* their WoW I players and added absolutely no new subscribers they would still be ahead in terms of revenue because they would be generating tons more revenue from their China players.

Since announcement, it was destined to be a Diablo MMO. Even thinking something else is strange and unsettling. What? Blackthorne? (Superhero) Justice League? Lost Vikings? Be serious.

The interesting question of "Is it going to be DIKU or UO or EVE (not  chance in hell) skilling?", is the only undecided factor.  I suspect it will have something to do with how D3 is received. Blizzard will design the new MMO for smaller groups of people like in D3. Smaller raiding endgame with perhaps larger groups reserved for auto-matching pvp. WoW is too far in the 40 man situation and their analysts can't be so stupid to notice it's the source of most of their burnout problems. Gamers generally don't like other gamers (in the US), it's a dichotomy that has to be addressed.

Why do you consider Diablo more likely than Starcraft?

And God, I hope they don't go Diablo.  I've never gotten the love behind "click, click, click, loot!" games.  The Starcraft universe could be goddamned cool, though, and wouldn't be yet another fantasy MMO (but this time with demons!).

The gameplay of Diablo I and II has nothing to do with how a potential WoD might turn out. Otherwise WoW would be an MMORTS.

A Diablo mmog, would play exactly the same as diablo does.

A Diablo mmog would be diablo 4 with a graphical lobby.

It won't be diablo.


It will be 'Worlds of Starcraft' and the only question is how much effort they put in to differentiate it from WoW. I wouldn't be surprised if they make it a clone of something other than EQ.

Planetside done right.

It would be interesting to see what Blizzard did with an FPS.

Id play a Starcraft MMOG, if it was a FPS.  :grin:

What is the timetable for a 2nd Blizzard MMO? 2011? 2012?  I vaguely remember people discussing the life cycle of an MMO being around 8 years, that would match 2012.  Also, don't they have Starcraft coming out with multiple versions at different launch points?  Would that run over those releases or would it be perfectly match up to the time scale of WC:TFT and WOW?

Not sure if you could use that for a metric though.  Would Blizzard be releasing multiple SC games in the same time frame?

Talking out of my ass here though, but I'm going to go with a Diablo MMOG which won't be a clickfest.

So... not diablo then?

SC:Ghost died before we got to find out.

My money is on the Starcraft IP though, timed to coincide with the point of WoW's cycle where mudflation and burnout are resulting in a significant dip in subscriptions.

Starcraft I would try with enthusiasm.  Anything WoW v2.0 or alternate fantasy by Blizzard... no thanks. 

I'm going to hope they go Starcraft.  Seems a wise direction.  Sci Fi and Fantasy seem to attract similar, yet different crowds.  Be a nice way to release a second money maker without cannibalizing too many customers from WoW... granted WoW will still take a significant hit.

For a random dart throw at the board: MMOFPS, Starcraft, PC & consoles.

World of Starcraft FPS MMO = They make more money than god.

In fact, they make so much money, they can stack bails of it up until they can climb it to heaven to run a cat5 cable and get god to sign up for his own account.

If I recall correctly wasn't Blizzard hiring graphic and level designers with requirements that sounded suspiciously like they would be working on an FPS?

To be honest I'd rather see some new IP at this point. Blizzard is America's answer to Nintendo for milking old franchises.

Well...... Jeffrey Kaplan Leaves WoW for New MMO (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14990474128)


Untill they make it a Gear based. Watch, they will try.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16155.0

WTB Rock 'N' Roll Racing Online.

mmm... I'm thinking like EVE. But, you know... but with ground and stuff. If their smart they can pull it off.

Negative. Eve is little more than typical MMO combat, target hit ability. Far cry from a FPS, and Gear based (as in +200 to head shot) does not compute.

The only sure fire thing that does not impinge on current userbase at all is WoW console...put that in your mouse and smoke it. :drillf:

WoW2 right now would be stupid. They have no reason to even consider one. The main reasons AC2 and EQ2 were considered good ideas is because their first games were muddled messes of legacy code where expanding upon them took as much effort as making a new MMO anyway. Then they added other reasons later. And so far those are the only examples of sequels in this genre aside from ATiTD. NONE of this is something Pardo would use as examples of why to make a sequel for WoW.


Err, wuh? I've been assuming the next MMO would be Starcraft, and that being based on them launching SC2. SC2 is an interesting case because the biggest market for it wants little more than a new paint job. But for the rest of the world where SC1 is merely played but no longer on the tip of everyone's tongue, there's no real business reason to do a sequel this far after the first unless you have plans to exploit that IP again down the road.

The same could be said of Diablo III.

So to me it's not a question of if these IPs will become MMO. It's more a question of which one comes out as an MMO first.

If its equipment based, but that equipment has REAL utility... as in Nigh vision goggles... or Sure I can pick up the 30lb Gatling gun, but my crosshairs swing all over the place and its really hard to aim because its so heavy... until I get the bionic arm implant. Spy equipment, vehicles, base improvements. I didn't mean combat like eve. I meant items like eve... It, without a doubt would have to be FPS. Like a version of Neocron without all the suck.

Do I have to come into every thread to remind people that blizzard has explicitly stated their next MMO would not be using be set in any existing blizzard game universe?

Jesus you people make me sound like a fanboy here but I didn't even go to blizzcon last year but that was one of their bigger tidbits of info.  So can we please stop useless arguments?

Blizzard is making diablo3 and starcraft2, both of which will have online capability, NO they don't count those as mmo's(whether you do or not) and yes there is ALSO an mmo coming out, in a new universe.

The end.

I had thought that was only speculation, but I did remember hearing that.

I'd bet other people's money that it will be some sort of Future MMO with vehicles/space-craft as the main focus.

Human bi-ped activities plus hop in your ship for fabulous space-fun.

Levels/Skills for you the player with a customizable vehicle as your repository for loot (not much different than Armor/Weapons, really)... the real question is what technology leaps will they make, and what skill/level system will they steal.

I see the near instantaneous proliferation of vehicle based quests/dailies/PvP in WoTLK as a small scale POC for their new MMO.

I too have a vague recollection that Bliz has said that the MMO will be based on a completely different IP (which makes better business sense, as it creates another franchise to mine).

edit: for clarity

So basically you think Blizzard is going to make Auto Assault?

You're naive if believe anything spouted off at a trade show.
The end.

Because blizzard has constantly lied and misled us in the past?

oh, right...they haven't.

Yes they are as fallable as everyone else but literally saying "I choose to disbelieve what the people making the game say...Diaoblo online forever!!!1!!1!" is beyond ignorant.

EVE Online Done Right or Planetside Done Right, please.


...hell, both of them in the same game, please.

That would be very very very hard to do.  You either have to have everyone on the same server or have the universe very very small.

Well I read in the past something to the effect that the IP would be new and that it would not be WoW 2 but I have never seen an official statement (and rarely go to the official site) so I believe that is speculation until I see a credible quote.

That being said, what would we want in a new IP MMO? I see a lot of love for an FPS, but with the exception of EVE, non high fantasy MMOs generally crash and burn. However if anyone can make an FPS or Post Apocolyptic "Mad Max" MMO work it is Blizzard.

Discworld MMO

QFMFT

Other than that, although I know I clicked on this thread to revel in speculation just like the rest of you, here's your best bet.

Heads:  World of Starcraft
Tails:  World of Diablo

Now, just flip a coin and you have a fifty percent chance of knowing more than anyone else alive outside of Blizz HQ/insiders until about a year before it's released.

/thread

whatever it is it won't be an IP they don't control 100%.  And that means ownership and the ability to change it.   So yeah -- Diablo or SC.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/blizzards-next-mmo-will-be-all-about.html (tobold's talk)
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/21/the-many-mmos-of-blizzard/  (Find "existing")
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3171288
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/10/17/blizzard-our-next-mmo-won-t-be-wow2/1  (rumor started last blizzcon)
http://www.gamingsteve.com/archives/2007/12/blizzard-confirms-new-mmorpg-and-i-have-details.php (very nice snapshot of the new MMO's conceptualization timeline, if accurate. plenty of time to settle on a genre)
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/07/07/blizzard-on-diablo-mmo-hopes-new-franchises-and-more/ (notice at the end he says he would roll people off current projects for work on new IP)

Think what you like, ultimately it's not that important or surprising wherever Blizzard goes with it.

Even without Lakov_Sanite pointing out Blizzard's prior stance I would've said they would build an entirely new IP around the next MMO.

The reason it can't be starcraft is their decision to expand the game to be divided into three parts with solid storylines focused on each race and new multiplayer features for the competitive scene.
WoW has issues pushing forward the story of warcraft but not doing it in a way that is satisfactory to long time fans. Blizzard will be less inclined to dick around like that with another established IP.

What also makes me feel it will be a new IP is how some MMOs IP was strictly designed with the technology in mind. By paying attention to the strengths and short comings of programming practices and affordable hardware Blizzard can create an interesting world that doesn't feel like it is being patched up like Gothic architecture.

Out of all the possible types of worlds the IP can be I think BLizzard will go for a modern fantasy (meaning the real world with demons, angels and other fantasy trappings to spice it up) or high fantasy-science fiction (star wars-esque).

Besides the IP you have to wonder what type of system Blizzard will use. Whatever it is it will share very few mechanics from WoW.

I'd thought back around the last Blizzcon they mentioned it was going to be a totally new and unique IP to avoid the expectations of their previous games forcing design decisions.  Things like "you must have this class" and "zomg shaman don't have bloodrage, wtf!?" or "Wtf why is there no cow level?"

For whatever reason, we have this (possibly false) dichotomy between MMOs like World of Warcraft and this newish breed of "hardcore" FFAPVP, skill-based, full loot, MMOFPS like Darkfall, Mortal Online, Fallen Earth, and Earthrise.

If they really are looking into going a different direction than they did with WoW, and there's any truth to this new breed being the polar opposite; all these half-baked, semi-indie, poorly-funded studios should be shitting their collective pants in the years to come.

I wonder how that would turn out, and if Blizzard would follow their lead. There's nothing about a skill-based system that says it has to be full loot. Just as there's nothing about a MMOFPS that says it needs to be FFAPVP, or anything even resembling that. hmmm.

On the other hand we have games like T.E.R.A. which, while apparently remaining Diku-based, does combat more akin to a brawler in an instance-free world (their claim).

So if I had to pick the other types of MMO combat that are different from the WoW-flavor, it'd be FPS (Darkfall, MO, Planetside), Brawler (T.E.R.A., Blade & Soul?), or something similar to EVE Online.

ya I remember that too, now that you mention it.  Hm.

Yea, I remember that. Probably because someone here mentioned having heard it at Blizzcon :-) And while I don't think Blizzard would lie about something like this, they are no more immune to changing their mind than anyone else.

As such, I stand by what I've always guessed. It's just too stupidly easy to expand either of their established IP (relatively-dormant as they are) than create yet a new one.

Unless the assumption about "new" is wrong? What if it's not a new IP, but rather just new-to-Blizzard?

Wishful thinking, but I'd move to Irvine if it would get me into a CoD MMO beta  :grin:

Neither would be mass market at all.  The fundamentals just aren't appealing to the ding-grats millions done right or no.

Blizzard had headhunters sometime last year or two looking for positions for a "new IP" MMO project, also they had similar job postings in the same time frame. I don't know whether they were splitting hairs with the new IP being new to the MMO genre, or completely new to Blizzard but it was out there.

Everquest wasn't mass-market either.

This idea might just be the holy grail of MMOs for me.  Directly lift Eve's politics, economy, and non catass skill development, twitch first person gameplay, and perhaps Guild Wars style ability tweaking/planning (NOT FUCKING GRINDING FOR ABILITIES. FUCK YOU GUILD WARS).   :drill:

Too bad it's probably totally technically unfeasible to be able to cope with tons of people in an open world and twitch gameplay.  That said, I remember Planetside doing surprisingly well lag-wise with 100 people in the same area.

Planetside did well with more than 200 in one area, with battles of 600+ reported over a continent.

PS is called an MMOFPS, but didn't really succeed as one because it wasn't a very good FPS. Definitely a fun game, and I loved it (I loved and still miss my Reaver). But "FPS" nowadays starts with the CoD series, and anything less than that is, well, less.

I also liked the Battle Rank/Skills system, and the lightweight loot system. And yea, battles with more than 200 were common early on, and effective. And this wasn't just 200 largely-cloned-aesthetic avatars. It was humans, ground vehicles, air vehicles, turrets, deployables, and persistent loot drops on death. And it performed mostly freakin' awesome in beta, far better than SB and DAoC did for awhile after launch.

PS is the unsung hero of what could be done, but it's lack of big success keeps it from being referenced the way it should be. And I blame that damnable monthly fee. $4.99 at launch woulda done it. Saying PS offered the same amount and type of game as the other $14.99 game of EQ1 was just wrong.

It won't be a FPS.

Twitch gameplay doesn't translate to casual-friendly and broadly-popular. Especially with women. Not in the sub numbers Blizzard will now be looking for.

Thinking back, I really should have said Third Person Shooter, not FPS. You need to be able to see your avatar in a MMO (or that's a big genre convention anyway).

As for not attracting women: that's MMOs in general before Blizzard came along. They set the design right so that even novice gamers (which include women who didn't get into MMOs previously) can pick it up and play solo / duo and you're set.

I don't think it will be Diablo just for the fact that would be another fantasy MMO in a market that is saturated with them. A MMO set in a different genre would be a better idea (also leaves WoW more alone) but the issue is which genre? If it is space sci-fi, they may as well go with StarCraft. Other settings? Dark modern? Steampunk? Horror (it wouldn't be)? WWII (nope)? Superheroes (heh - if Marvel gives Vivendi back the rights to Marvel Universe Online...)?

If we take for granted that Blizzard polishes up what others do and make it shine, I think they could do the equivalent of making Tabula Rasa engaging for their next game. A lot of MMOs are heading towards being more action-orientated and twitchy. I don't see why Blizzard would try to buck this trend. They could try to make an MMORTS that gets mass market acceptance, but that'd be a very long shot.

OMG THE MAYAN CALENDAR ENDS IN 2012!!! IT MUST BE DIABLOMMO. WE ARE THE MMO!!!!!!!!1!!!

I dunno. It wasn't the monthly fee that caused me to not stick with PS. It was the constant "up" time. That, and I'm about a midlevel skilled FPSer. I can have a good night, and I can spend an entire evening getting roflstomped. Those roflstomp sessions made me question why I was paying to get my ass kicked. I know any one player can't expect to be uberman all the time, but the feeling was still there.

And (IMO) the number of people willing to stick it out < the number of people who will just move on to WoW for some ego stroking mob harvest activities.

I sincerely hope they ripoff a shadowrun type universe and make an awesome mmo out of it in whatever playstyle it may be.

If latest expansion any indication then, yes they are. Activision is calling shots now, shit gets rushed out all the time.

What's incomplete about WotLK?

Read elsewhere that Activision might be looking over Midway's IP catalogue. Mortal Kombat MMO, here we come.  :grin:

*Sigh* No, they are not. Vivendi owns the majority rights to Activision Blizzard. I.e. Vivendi *acquired* Activision and merged Vivendi Games with Activision renaming the Vivendi Games part "Blizzard" since it's a far better brand.

While there's a ton more people, the world we perceive is still a per-server reality not all that different in scope from EQ1. As such, I think you'd be interested to note that according to the Daedelus Project, the male/female ratio in WoW in 2005 (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php) was the same as EQ1 was in 2003 (http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/demographics.html). And a more recent PlayOn (http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2008/07/avatar_survey_d.html) (of PARC) article from 2008 doesn't show a radical shift.

I've always equated the gender split to the type of game this is. It's basically the same as EQ1 up and down the line except that's easier. Being easier doesn't make it magically fun though. It only makes it more fun (or less punitive) for people predisposed to liking this type of game in the first place. And I don't think I'm being politically incorrect when I say it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot more men like swinging swords and committing mob genocide than women.

Note Trippy's note. But also consider that this was a different type of expansion than the bunch of completely disconnected zones and stupidly-arduous keying of TBC. Two new races are a lot easy to developed level 1-20 content than for one new class (and race). Plus the self-consistent rolling narrative of Northrend that simply doesn't exist in TBC. I'm no Blizzard defender, but they made some smart decisions with WotLK because of what they learned from TBC.

The fact that Arthas isn't in it at release, and is merely part of a patch how many months from now? a Failed class balance reset with gear. If you intend to make everything raid easy then you need what 75-150% more raid content to keep people involved. Saying it will come in later patches is folly.

Aside from the fact that everything you say in every post is wrong, I think the lack of Arthas is also heavily by design. They don't intend for him to be in the game at this stage because they don't want anyone killing him yet. It's an artificial way to extend the lifespan of an MMO expension, but less borken than, say, the way that the Rathe Council encounter was initially unwinnable.

The fact that catasses had finished all the raid content within 2 weeks is I am sure of little interest to Blizzard, as they're no longer making the game for you.

To Darniaq and Unsub, I'm sure the ratios are similar to olde-tyme EQ1, but the fact that the numbers themselves have grown so high is of interest to Blizzard. Guessing out of my arse, I could imagine WoW being the second-highest girl-gamer game to Ye Sims series. If that's true, they will take that into consideration when designing the next one, in that a slower speed makes it more accessable to girls overall, and also allows for the social-networking aspect of the game. While WoW os indeed faster-paced than EQ1, it's still a far cry from Battlefield and also doesn't require twitch-level skills and your typical FPS/3PS aiming hand-eye coordination level.

Essentially, we boys will play anything anyway. To tack on, or at least not alienate a potential additional 10%+ of female players is something worth considering at the fundamental design level. Much moreso than the catass demographic, because the catasses will play regardless, but the ladies won't.

I know a huge chink of WoW's 11.5 million players is in China/Korea/etc, but hell, even 4 million players in the West @ 10% gives 400k females. Which is almost EQ1's peak sub numbers... That's money I don't think they will choose to alienate. Not in an MMO, anyway.

Chunk. A huge chUnk.

(http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/fslip.jpg)


Particularly in a more social MMO.

1. A superhero universe

2. An RvR-centric universe with a variety of fighting roles, crafting trades, political and economic angles

I am sure they are conscious of wanting to avoid cannibalizing WoW players, hence they will try to divide up the Bartle scale with WoW in whatever this new MMO is. They also know the value of appealing to both men and women gamers.

Either way, my bet is they are working on advancing immersion possibilities as well, like leaps in in-game voice masking, and more tactile and kinetic control peripherals that make it more realistic to participate.

- Hasn't everyone wanted to really hurl an energy beam like with Iron Man's glove instead of press "1" on a keyboard?

- Voice masking done right would greatly help breach the wall that keeps most people from wanting to bother with RP or any sense of true immersion.

Some break-through leaps in how a MMO can hook your senses into the game and allow for more natural movement, actions and communications, will lead to the next real evolution of the games.

I just think Blizzard knows there is a market for (1) or (2) if someone came along and did it right.

I'm sure they won't be pushing any technological envelopes, but they have the greatest chance of influencing the future of Online Entertainment.

Me, I'd be happy if they gave us a bit of what was I loved and lost in SWG. I know that's a dangerous name to use on this forum, but it had something that was a bit ahead of it's time and I'm sure Blizzard could finish it off nicely.

Shush.

(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/nuclear_explosion.jpg)

(http://geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/executor.jpg)

If they follow the pattern of WoW, they'll release SC 2, build in some lore, and follow up after they're done releasing content with WoSC, or whatever they wish to call it.

There's a possibility of a WoD, following Diablo 3, but I would personally put that as a low probability, unless it's a wildly different experience than WoW.

Don't you think it'd be hard for Blizzard to do that, specially without having read the thread at all?

WoW II makes the best business sense. Most people don't even know there was a Warcraft before, they think you mean WoW.

WoW is Blizzard's major IP. It has sold more than StarCraft, which is 11 years old and therefore has no brand awareness below 20-somethings (but it would work if they called it World of StarCraft).

WoW is aging. If you're still a WoW player, you probably don't realise it, but your game looks dated now. The expansions too.

WoW was EQ done right. It's going the way of EQ. So from a business perspective, to capitalise on what they're good at, they need to do EQ2 right: WoW II.

Yes, but the entire setting is so overused. I can't be the only person who by now is entirely sick of dwarves and elves.
And who wants to wait until 2011(12,13,..) so they finally can roll gnome rogue and try the new backstab skill in the all new WoW2?

Thinking about this for a bit, I'd guess its either World of Starcraft or (my bet) a brand new IP.
It would offer the most freedom/least baggage during the design phase as well as best hyperbility. Imagine a new game world by Blizzard which is totally unknown and about every tinnsy bit of new information is big news. Much better than "Blizzard Entertainment today confirmed that night elves will be a playable race in the upcoming World of Warcraft II".

I disagree. As I said earlier, there's zero precedence for successful sequels in this genre, so not something you walk into the CEO's office of the world's number one MMO and suggest (and no matter how improved EQ2 has gotten, that is not it). Yes, they know the game will decline eventually. But they're operating and near-50% profit probably because of that. They could lose 4/5 of their players and probably still be profitable, and still have more paying monthly subscribers than anyone else. And at that point they'll be merely servicing their most hardcore conservative players.

WoW made for a rich extension of the IP, but outside of WoW, nobody really cares all that much. So that alone does not make good sense of a sequel.

Nor does offering yet-another-diku with better graphics. The better-graphics angle has been tried, and has consistently failed to be a major draw, in this genre. Most people do not buy uber rigs for MMOs.

So unless it was an FPS set against the Consortium in Netherstorm and in space, I doubt there'll ever be a WoW 2 :-)

We need to start a pool.

I'm putting my money down on present-day fantasy/sci-fi setting with vague ties to the wow universe(titans somewhere maybe) in a diku style for the most part but with more social aspects and less pvp sport.

Put me down for EVE Done Right/Elite Online (as they're pretty much the same thing).

I could of swore I remember reading that their new MMO had nothing to do with any of their past products.  It was something "new".

Well, the only thing for sure is that it will be primarily human-centric with enemies that are organic.

Put me down for an MMOFPS with heavy emphasis on player-politics and crafting.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?

For wows graphics they were a dated when the game was made. But one reason it has such an immense player base is they realized if they made a fun game with good enough stylized graphics that could run effectively and playable on just about anybodies computer it could do really well.

So many games shoot for the most amazing graphic ever only to make games that run like dog shit on most peoples system. I liked AOC but nobody in my guild other than me had a computer that could play it acceptably.

I myself love wotlk my crazy lil guild managed to get all the way to KT last night in naxx. Talk about hard mode seriously a couple of our mages do less damage than my prot warrior let me tell you that makes patchwork a WHOLE lot more exciting. For the last expansion we never got to see the bulk of the content because we would never be capable of the 25 man runs in our family guild but now we can actually see all the content. It takes us longer than other folks but we can actually do it. Its fun to actually see some of the neat stuff like the 4 horseman and saphiron.

I like the concept of the sarth 3 drake stuff let a guild like us kill him the normal way which is hard enough let me tell ya but give extra loot and challange for those capable of more from the fight.

Put me down for a sci-fi DIKU-esque game using a unique IP. 

Me too please.

Or Starcraft. Do want Starcraft MMO. Now please.

*edit*

Wanted to add, that I also thought I recalled them saying that their new MMOG would not be based on an existing IP, and I was sad.

Whatever happened to those rumors about a CoD MMO?

I am going for they create some entirely new IP, even if they had not said it publicly, it makes the most business sense for moving forward. They don't have to fit existing characters into the new world, don't need to come up with viable reasons for shit (a la the Draenei shit), and can write something that works with the concept of a persistent yet evolving world.

They have the money to hire people with creative chops to come up with the framing of the storylines.

My guess it is going to be something that is more contemporary in style, probably more hard sci-fi technologically oriented, and less driven by the DIKU conventions.

And it will come out with either multiple rulesets for PvE and PvP, or will be designed with overall balance in mind.

But that is just me, whatever it is it will probably get me to spend money on it at least at first. So they win already.

that's the sad thing isn't it? even if they get a tenth of wow subs it will still be the second biggest mmo out there.

I don't think Blizzard will ever deliver anything player-driven.  They're pretty expressly stated that they're in the business of making theme parks, not sandboxes.  I'm hoping whatever they do won't be Diku-style.  Because WoW is fine for that and I can see them refining it for years to come.  A new IP would also be a lot more exciting.  Still in Blizzard-time, we're years away at this point so this is too speculative to be very interesting.

Well Tigole is now moving over to the new project. What do you guys think he could bring to the table based on his past work?

I don't expect any ground-breaking innovation from them, since that's not their 'thing'.

It will be some standard paradigm polished to a bright sheen.

However, this will be the 2nd MMO, and even Blizzard may catch "2nd System-itis" where its wildly overambitious.

Here's hoping Blizzard spends $1 billion dollars on developing this new MMO and puts the whole budget contest thing out of range for a good while to come.

Raids, raids and more raids.

Is there another MMO on the market with easier or more accessible raids? If you plan on having any large group content, he's probably a pretty good go-to guy.

Besides, he was the Lead Game Designer; not a Neckbeard and Catass Mogul. Hopefully he's not so tunnel visioned with what he can do, and can figure out proper risk v reward and player incentive structures for any type of content the game features.

Attunements, were apparently his idea.  :awesome_for_real:

And remember the initial raid design was for 40 people, which I wouldn't describe as particularly accessible.

heh well you can't just give him credit for all the crap you didn't like and ignore what was good.

A MMOFPS might be the only game I would play from blizzard, and just because there are no other good MMOFPS games on the market.

A sock to shit in included in the Collector's Edition box.

 :uhrr:

Totally worth the extra 30 bucks  :ye_gods:

I liked Tigole's ice cream.

I think it's going to be a StarCraft Ghost MMO as well.

I think the point that people are making is that WoW's raid game is "easy" and "accessable" in SPITE of Tigole, not because of him.

EDIT: I don't pretend to know how much he's taken to heart that people don't like shit like attunements and that people don't, in fact, look up to bleeding edge raiders as something to strive for. I like to think he's smart enough to have learned that what HE likes in a raid game is simply not something a lot of people do, and you pretty much can't force them into it.

The big question is if there will be the typical "WOW sucks" convo in the general chat area?   :awesome_for_real:

This happened recently, related?


Translated the above (http://starfeeder.gameriot.com/blogs/The-Starfeed/StarCraft-Ghost-as-next-Blizzard-mmo-hinted-at) from the Chinese law site: ChineseCourt.org

Well, WoW started down pretty much the same path that Starcraft:Ghost is now going down.

If Starcraft:Ghost ever sees the light of day it is going to be the second coming of Tabula Rasa. After you have abandoned a game several times, it should be painfully obvious that reinventing it and pushing it out the door is a fucking stupid thing to do.


You've been here long enough to know we can.

Yes.

If memory serves, Blizzard wasn't actually the one making Ghost. So even if they do start a new game and name it that, it wouldn't be like they were dredging up a decade old corpse of a project file and finishing it.

God, I hope so.  :heart:

I actually hope it isn't ghost.  Blizzard generally makes RPGs that play quite well.  I don't like the direction they've gone with WoW, but the game does play nice, no doubt.

I assume its a new IP from their announcement. At least i HOPE its a new IP. I would much rather see the story play out in the native format than have a huge swathe of the story continue in an MMO. I really don't see how they are going to continue WC3's storyline. Seems much easier to just create a new IP that you control from the ground up than having to split your existing and very profitable franchises.

And with the guaranteed success of sc2 and diablo 3 maybe they will try to be a little bit adventurous with their upcoming MMO.

Maybe, but my question is: Why would they try to register a trademark or an e-sport trademark or whatever-the-hell-it-is unless they had solid and definite plans to release something under that same name?

You people are insane.  Try to remember what the world looked like when WoW's first raids were being developed.  Attunements for Vex Thal and Planes of Power were utterly brutalizing assfuckings.  Hundreds of hours camping key shards  for the former, a maze of raid flags (and re-flags, and re-re-flags) that drop from contested, cock-blockable, 3-day-or-longer spawn time bosses.  Once you put up with that, you get mindless zergfest raids for 72 people or more.

WoW chopped raid size almost in half, and reduced attunements to basically nothing.  After they saw how that turned out, they decided to chop raid size almost in half again and remove attunements alltogether.  Given the industry's experience with raiding endgames in 2004, I think it's pretty petty to call him out for not finding the perfect balance right away. Their whole design process is iterative.

Saying Tigole sucks because he took the world from the Elemental Planes to the Vault of Archavon in three steps instead of one is like saying Henry Ford sucks for shitting out the Model T instead of going straight from the Model A to a flying Jetsons car.

Eh?  In case you haven't been paying attention they've been continuing the WC3 storyline very well in multiple formats over the years.  Novels, the RPG and then WoW.  If there ever is a WC4* it will spin-off from wherever WoW is at that point, not where WC3 ended.

* I doubt the future existence of WC4.  RTS isn't the hotness it was 10 or even 5 years ago, so you don't need 2 RTS franchises. That niche goes to the SC franchise for the time being.  If there ever is to be a WC4 it will be long after WoW ends.  Part of the reason I expect to see a new IP for this MMO is because having WOW out there handcuffs development of WC4 and WOW both.   They want to have the story continue, so you either say that whatever happens in the RTS is an alternate dimension (so why should we care?) or you develop both products simultaneously and  release the WC4 updates to WoW after the RTS has been released.  


I just figure with 11mil players worldwide vs EQ's 500k most people just had no fucking clue how bad it once was.  So they're going to bitch about 'inaccessibility' by comparing WoW now to WoW then, once again ignoring the past.  They've heard the rep of the old games and know Tigole's link to them so make assumptions off of that.  You've seen this dance before, ElGallo.

Are you talking about the burning crusade?

My vote is they will release a new IP with a steam punk theme with Mecha.

Girl Genius, the MMO?


Yes please.  :drill: (or should that be  :drillf: )

A 3d action-online based Starcraft game really isn't that far out to imagine.  The only thing really against the idea is that they're making SC2 at roughly the same time which seems a bit much for the IP all at once. 

Having three factions at war at any time, across multiple planets would be pretty cool.  Factions could control a planet and it's resources until another takes it over.  All the typical 'classes' from SC lore could come into play, like Marines and Scouts, Hydralisks and Zerg packs, w/e the Protoss jobs could be.  Though I'd prefer a classless or swappable class system. 

It doesn't seem far off the mark. 

Except that persistent battlegrounds have taught that if things don't start equally among the factions then the losing factions tend to wander off to other characters, or, worse yet, other games. Incentives and the such aside, having open world armed conflict doesn't really work. Smaller scale battles that can affect a larger scale a la Chrome Hounds might be a better way to go, but, again, you're dealing with population imbalance being a major deciding factor for whether people have fun or not.

After that it's people on your balanced population actually playing or not (AFK Farmers).

Thats exactly what i was saying...

I dont see how they can continue the story in wc3 into wc4 due to the entire state of the storyline being light years ahead of where wc3 cliffhanger left us. And that having the same IP being developed at the same time like if WoW was still around and developing wc4 at the same time creates a bunch of hardship for both projects. So why not avoid that and just make a new IP knowing Blizzard has a built in audience and doesn't have to rely on IP recognition for the game to sell.

Err, we're just getting to Arthas again... "soon". And half of BC set like a parallel storyline. That's not "light years".

Besides, they own the entire IP so have all sorts of options to play around with. And, they have the whole underutilized CoT system to drop people back into 10,000 years worth of history.

I don't think there'll be a WoW2. I just don't think them doing or not doing a WoW2 nor WC4 has anything to do with having told the "whole story" of Warcraft.

Over half (maybe more?) of the characters embroiled in the ending of wc3 are dead. Arthas will have fallen (or whatever resolution) will have already occurred. Pretty big gap...



I never said that choice had any relation to the plot of wc3. I brought up why i personally hoped it was a brand new IP. My opinion that its a new IP is based solely on what blizzard announced.

You played WC2, though, right?  How is this any different?  These characters which are all dead in WoW, they mostly weren't there in WC2.  Thrall, Arthas, Jaina, Illidan, the Scourge, all this stuff was created for WC3, and didn't exist before it.  Hell, in WC2, the Orcs were still stereotypical "break their bones and eat their flesh" monsters.  If they do WC4 they'll probably just wind forward the storyline like ten years, just like they did after the end of WC2.  Give the Horde a new Warchief, make Anduin the King (again) and poof, you've got a new setting, and WoW can keep going for decades without butting up against it.

The story in wc2 and its expansion has most of the main characters fate is dealt with. There is no story driven cliffhanger at the end of "Beyond the dark portal". At the stories completion the main antagonist dies (or is assumed to be dead) their armies defeated with the portal (main threat) being destroyed. WC3 picks up 20 or so years later with nothing having changed and continues a character driven plot that didn't exist in previous warcrafts with all the major characters story being unresolved at the end.

Yes they added two new factions. With all new characters (with few exceptions) but the story continued where it left off for both the humans and the orks. Wc3 just introduces the real enemy by its end. Fast forward and the main threat is dead. Illidan is dead. blood elf guy is dead. War with the scourge is pretty much over.

But story/backstory of the Titan War is just beginning. And that gets us back to the real origins of the Scourge (the split between the original three friends, one of which eventually became A'dal). My memory here is a bit hazy, but that actual origin point is outlined in Rise of the Horde (http://www.amazon.com/Warcraft-World-Rise-Horde-No/dp/0743471385/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c). Actually a pretty sad story that, but it provides the proper backdrop for the Draenei, Draenor and therefore the BC expansion. But that's not the important part.

They could easily go back to the true origin through a CoT-like series of instances that retell then what they decide to advance further today.

Also, I don't really get the sense that WotLK "advanced" the story as much as told the other half of it. It's like we were all gunning for Illidan, "but meanwhile, back on Azeroth" stuff is going on we're not living in a parallel timeline.

And yea, sorry about earlier, I read you wrong and misinterpreted what you were implying :-)

Think you a referring to Valen, Kil'jaeden, and Archimonde. And its more a detail of how the eredar became members in the burning legion, Witch is indirectly related to the scourge.

Yea, I think that's right. Valen iirc became A'dar (eventually).

The point is that every single sidenote in the history of Azeroth and Draenor can be fleshed out as an origin to some future phase of the story that would follow Arthas dying (or however that eventual event resolves). And you only need to look to Star Wars to see just how easy it is to pick the most innane detail to wrap an entire multi-book arc around  :awesome_for_real:

Velen doesn't become A'dal, Velen is the draenei racial leader in the Exodar.

AFAIK nobody ever became a naaru in the lore, the naaru are a separate race of already existing folks who showed up and said HEY VELEN DON'T TRUST SARGERAS.

I thought Valen fused with A'dal in the Orc Shaman ghost temple place before they fled Draenor after the Orc attack on the main city? Cannot remember the name of that city. And in fact, I'm all hazy on when The Exodar actually left and landed on Azeroth. I could probably look all this shit up...  :grin:

I don't see how Warcraft has any more room to be expanded on.  They stretched credibility pretty fucking thin with WoW.  Particularly TBC, but to a lesser extent with Wrath and the sudden appearance of giant vikings, walrus people, robotic gnomes, and non-organic dwarves in large and small varieties.  I don't think the universe can take much more expansion without (more) people getting pissed to the point where they just don't care.

I don't much care about the lore anymore (see any of my myriad rants on pop-culture references).  As a game it's still fun.

If they make some of the races I want to be playable, it'll be even more fun.

I think you overestimate how much people care about Warcraft lore.  They could make World of Warcraft: Giant Ponies, and the raiding guilds would be lined up to do the new 25 man pink purple polka dot pony encounter, with strats up on the first day it was live on how to counter is unicorn laser beam.

I imagine the novelizations are a figment of my imagination.

Barring like one or two the text in the original manuals is of far higher quality than the novels. But im pretty sure he meant lore means dick to the players of WoW in their enjoyment of the game. Most of the people i encountered in WoW had very little grasp of the lore from the RTS's. Id be willing to guess a majority of WoW players had a grasp of the lore before the MMO.

Same goes for any MMOG.

Shit, given SWG and LotRO can get away with the liberties they take, it seems faintly ridiculous for anyone to argue that any IP limits what the designers can do with the game.

How do you think Star Trek Online is going to play out?

Prime Directive my ass. That's how.

The people who scream and fight about the lore in WOW are pretty funny.  No one cares.  Really.  No one does.  Pink Ponies or whatever.  People want cool shit to fight and cool looking monsters and it doesn't matter if it's in a raid or a single player quest chain. 

Those are driving more existing fans into the IP than attracting new ones to it. As such, the only truly attractive force to the IP itself is the WoW game. And it's quickly obvious to even the most neophyte player that the lore of Warcraft matters not a whit to successfully playing the game.

Therefore, the lore really only matters to player actively looking for it to matter. Those are probably in the same category as people who roleplay in WoW. As in, not really enough to care about when business dictates you take the in a new direction to sell more boxes.  :grin:

Some people care.  I'm pretty far from a lore nerd, but my enjoyment of the game is in reading the stories via quest advancement.

I could give a shit about raids, and to a lesser extent loot (I love the randomness/opening a present aspect of it).

I'm not saying I represent the majority of players, but there are others like me who actually play the game for the "worldiness" or lore aspect.

I like the stories and lore, I just don't take it all too seriously.

A recurring joke in Sarth with my guild is "Why are we fighting this guy?" "He has loot!"

I'm sure there's a lore reason for it, but no one in our raid group seems to know it.  :awesome_for_real:

Cause he is a black dragon and black dragons are EEVVVVILLL :awesome_for_real:

(http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b190/16509/DKlulz.jpg)

Just to be clear: this is a pvp server.

Lore is one thing, a plethora of races some ridiculous and some not is another.

I mean, crack open any DnD monster manual sometime, there's no 'semblance of reason in those thing, just any creature you could possibly think of. No, don't tell me underground panthers with tentacles make sense but neither do walrus people...though giant vikings do to some extent. In any case all monsters and races are is window dressing to the plot.

I'm not going to argue wows lore though, for the most part it IS childish and simple but no more so than a hundred other fantasy novels/games.

So I guess the question boils down to: "How will Blizzard make this NOT eat WoW subs?" and the answers boil down to:

1) Grab a different Bartle's set.
2) Use an entirely different genre.

Holy crap, they're making Star Wars Galaxies.

As I posted on the first page Blizzard wants their next MMO to eat WoW subs in China -- that means more money hats for them even if it's "zero sum" (no additional subscribers beyond what is stolen from WoW).

I'd be surprised if their next MMO didn't involve RMT.

I don't know much about the WoW novels, admittedly, but if they're anything like the ones WotC puts out tied to D&D settings, all kinds of people read them that never touch the game (despite how terrible they may be.)

Races are lore/setting, story/plot is narrative, both are intrinsically linked.

Underground tentacle panthers?  Yeah, not including those in next nights game because I'm the GM and what I say is law.  Tuskarr?  They're like the Jar-Jar Binks of WoW, with even less explanation.  Kindly fuck off Mr. Metzen.  Vikings living on the fringes of the tundra?  Workable.  Giant vikings as the progenitor of the human race which have been retconned into a barren icy wasteland where previously nothing except fierce demi-humans and undead existed, and which are descended from demi-gods?

Players failing to care about the lore and narrative is mostly because it's been so incessantly clowned up, and it's getting worse as Blizzard decides to go back and retcon it to be more X-treme.

@Ingmar

You might be correct, but then again the barrier to entry for P&P RPG's is far more significant than WoW.  That there is a hidden market segment that actually cares about narrative/lore is pretty heavily indicated by the number of people in that screenshot, the problem is they have a hard time with the way it's presented.  Do I really need to roll another DK and get screenshots of three or four people saying "OVER 9000" to the Tirion/Arthas cinematic to illustrate the point as to what's really fucking wrong with it that people don't pay attention?

That's like saying that the barrier to prepare instant noodles is far more significant than, say, microwaving a frozen dinner.

That isn't even accurate, some of the directions on Frozen Dinners these days are quite involved!

Err, not really. He's right.

Tell me how a PnP game is anywhere near as easy as buying WoW, installing, patching and playing, at your own speed, on your own time, and only talking to other people if you feel like it.

@Sheepherder: What are you trying to tell me with that screenshot? Seriously, I can't figure it out :-) They appear to be in Stormwind Castle headed toward the King, but otherwise I don't get it.

I think it's because they're all uniformed up.  And therefore, it'll be something nerdy and lorey, like those fucking stormtroopers in SWG.

Christ, the prequels must have fucked those guys in the ass.

Four death knights in Stormwind castle doesn't strike you as a little odd, if you keep WC3 in mind? And they're walking, the hallmark of the srs arrpeer. :awesome_for_real:

In short, Blizzard have jumped the shark massively and nobody seems to give a damn, not even those who ought to by preference.

Atleast that's my take.

Give a WoW disc to your grandmother who never used a computer before.

Now ask the same grandmother to join your PnP table. "All I gotta do is pretend that I'm an elf archer?"

She'd likely accuse you of worshipping Satan, and get all :uhrr: when you told her to roll a d20.

Are you kidding? The RP crowd had to be falling all overthemselves to play the ultimate tragic backstory/outsider type character of WoW the minute it was announced.

The RP crowd killed my enjoyment of RP. :cry:

Jeezus, that was green right?

If not, you're insane. Or I can't divine the special plane of existence you live on where a computer illiterate grandparent is going to want to play a face to face roleplaying game with a bunch of people. You think there's anywhere the world that's going to queue up D&D over Bingo?

You're talking about an edge case so edge it fell over the freaking edge.  :awesome_for_real:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJDNkX6rCNM

There is a deceptive number of people who actually care about the lore, or at the very least have the sense to enjoy what is supposed to be a dramatic scene.


It's the best they've managed in recent years.  So yeah, given the story in War III was pretty decent I'd say they've jumped the shark on this one.  It doesn't mean that game is going to collapse, it's just they've wasted potential for retention and Bioware seems to be swooping in to scoop up the people interested in a story.


Not ultimate, that would be demon hunter.  Which we're likely not getting because that ship probably sailed with TBC.

I've flipped through this thread a bit and I'm seeing a lot of WC and WoW discussion.  Blizzard's already said their next MMO wont have anything to do with Warcraft (definitely not a WoW 2) so why the hubbub?  Let us speculate somewhere else.  The dead-horse has been beaten.

Still though, if it's anything but a Starcraft MMO Blizzard will be making a mistake IMO... although that genre looks to be quite flooded once JE, SWTOR, and STO get released.

Not a single one of those titles would have any noticeable effect on anything Blizzard releases. Ever.

Blizzard would sell more boxes in a month than most of those games would sell over their lifetime. WoW has primed them for success on their next game even if its a dismal failure.

Whatever they do they are going to explore some path previously thought to be "impossible" and stomp the dogshit out of anyone who has tried to or is currently trying to travel the same path.

Example: Planetside/ww2o that works and greater than a double digit population. Eve with actual ship controls and massive battles. Guildwars with fun and without stupid cardlike skills. Hell, even some mass multiplayer RTS hybrid game. Whatever. You get the picture. IP doesn't matter one bit.

I'd agree with you if it was any other genre besides Sci-Fi.  Also, SW and ST (as cursed as they are) are still huge IPs.  Small genre with 3-4 heavyweight titles and there's a problem if 2 of them are moderately successful. 
I guess the odds are in Blizz's favor though that the 3 other sci-fi titles that get released will bomb anyways.  Not to mention they're scheduled for release way before Blizz's.  So I guess yah, Blizz will do just fine - as long as they release the game more polished than they released WoW.  The public put up with WoW for the 1st 6 months because it was fresh and new; they wont do it again regardless of if it's Blizz's baby or not.

The latter is absolute bull. They didn't put up with nothing. WoW had well over a million subscribers four months after release. In six months it had subscriber levels that Brad McQuaid had only hallucinated about in his highs of morphine.

And the subscribers will "put up" with it again.

Doesn't matter if they bomb or not, Blizzard will spank the shit out of them by virtue of being Blizzard.

WoW at release was the single most polished MMO experience I had had ever at the time, so I am not sure what this is about. There were some performance issues around their shitty Oracle 10 implementation but it blew away anything that had come before in terms of polish. Like different universes entirely.

If we think that Blizzard really doesn't originate but just polishes up a trend til it shines, then their next MMO will probably be a very action-oriented title with social networking capabilities and RMT to an extent. But IP does matter, because it frames everything else.

It's one of the reasons I won't be shocked if Vivendi comes out with, "Remember that exclusive MMO deal with Marvel Comics we used to have? It's back. Guess who is doing the MMO?". It's a new IP for Blizzard; it doesn't have to be an unknown IP for the rest of the world.

Marvel is actually on my very short list of possible IPs.

That made me look up who published MUA. Activision.

What is Pardo's Blizzard's experience with other people's IP?

Why would they take another IP when they've got two others they can push into three different genres to master those (again)?

The "new to Blizzard/not new to the world" thing we've discussed. It's plausible, but I'd put it in the same realm of probability as SC or Diablo MMO, for the sheer fact that they could probably do as much business with either of those as they could with a higher-selling-potential IP that gets offset by IP royalty payments.

Everything you said here supports my claim.  Namely stuff like "ever had at the time,"  and "..had come before in terms of polish" etc.  The online verse is a different animal now.   The loot lag, server overloads, lack of endgame, pvp, and quest polish wont fly anymore.  All of which WoW was rife with at release.  Teh shinay newness wont help their next title, it'll have to be better.

According to MobyGames, he's got some third party experience (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,12797/), but not much for a while. But I thought Kaplan was leading this new MMO, not Pardo.

They'll take another IP because they've said it won't be one of theirs. It'll save time on development and someone like Marvel can provide them with a lot of pre-production support.

Oh, hey, look, none of it mattered.

I'm not defending WoW, I'm just pointing out that you're talking about this without thinking, like, at all.


Barely. I'm not even really sure it has to be at all.

The more I think about it, the more that makes an incredible amount of sense.  PLEASE be this...

First part's a maybe. But second part is, err, not.

Having a major IP holder looking over your shoulder at all does not "save time", like, ever. And "pre-production" support is actually the mythical alignment of someone with clout to be autonomous, knows how to channel info into a persistent world, the flexibility to react to your schedule on your schedule, and do so while keeping the rest of the IP team mollified (and out of the way). All while working with a company renowned for telling everyone else, including retailers, to stand the hell in line, the game will be released when its good and damned well ready.

This is not a powerful alignment of two pliable forces :-)

If Vivendi bought back the rights to the Marvel MMO which they lost to Microsoft (which then abandoned their project) that would've made the news, at least from Marvel.

It'd be news only if it went through official channels. Blizzard (to my knowledge) typically doesn't leak info. Marvel will probably want to avoid announcing anything until they've got material to show. It also helps that DCUO and ChampO (and MxO, to some extent) can show any future MUO what traps they should avoid.

Plus I think Blizzard is big enough now to tell Marvel it'll ship when its ready too. Or they'll dump the license and release a Mutants and Masterminds MMO (MMMMO for short :awesome_for_real:).

It might not be Marvel. I thought that Marvel would be developing a version of MUO in-house using their own studio after pulling it from Cryptic, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that's been happening.

Blizzard has shown with wow that freedom with a license is a very good thing and while there is a possibility of them taking an established IP i would highly doubt it would be something so significant as marvel simply because their hands will be tied in the way SWG was and blizzard isn't that dumb.

Blizzard has a trump card.

"Look, you've had what, three, four, failed attempts at MUO?  Can't keep track of it.  We've got a game that dwarfs all other MMOs combined, the money to make dozens more, and the experience to do it right.  We'll launch when we want as we want.  You'll get money hats and we'll get money hats for our money hats.  Shut up and do as you're told."

"Yes, Mistress.  May I have another?"

Probably. But the thought of a Blizzard MMOG set in the Marvel universe feels pretty blah. (And I realize it wouldn't have to be an RPG...) Just... that's like the last IP I'd be interested in for online gaming.

Meh.

The thought of it doesn't do anything for me either.  I wouldn't bet one way or the other on it at that.  But if they were in talks, it'd go pretty much like that.  Maybe a little more grovelling on Marvel's part.  If I had an IP, I'd get a tingle in my happy place just thinking about them considering using it.

Ya Marvel MMO does not really seem very appealing to me either. I dont see why Blizzard would want to deal with all the added difficulty (I am assuming) by using the Marvel brand. Its not like they need the name recognition or anything.

When a major IP licenses itself to be used in MMO's do they tend to just receive a flat price for the license? Or are they entitled to a % of the profits?

Any IP holder worth their weight in lawyers would go for the ongoing revshare from the recurring fees collected. After an up front payment.In this type of licensing discussion, not really. You're talking about an IP holder that started in the last Depression and has managed to keep selling their story through the emergence of home radio, movies, TV, computer and internet across a bunch of different media. To them, Blizzard is like a successful kid, but still a "mere" software provider on a single platform that is only really relevant to big media because of the online services and the fees attached to them.

Meanwhile, Blizzard thinks they are king of the hill. Most likely because they are. And it cannot be overstated that they're sitting on two other major IPs that probably strike a closer cord with the gamers of today than anything Marvel has done besides some some semi-ok movies for the last decade or so.

Marvel would likely expected their right due as a major IP holder. But you probably couldn't pay Blizzard enough to have them shelve Diablo and Starcraft in favor of something that has no history of ever surviving first contact with the actual development phase. Seriously, the failure-to-launch has got to have something to do with what Marvel is doing that DC has not been doing.

The Tuskaar, I believe, existed in WC3. The non-organic dwarves existed in fuckin' Vanilla. Have you not done Uldaman? The earthen is actually Blizzard revisiting that lo these many years later (open Uldum already Blizzard  :cry2: ). The giant vikings, I don't really see what's so weird about them, aside from why they're all WOO LICH KING (I assume they think he's one of their gods). The robot gnomes are pretty wtf though.  :heart:

Really, TBC was waaaaay more "what lore?" to me.

EDIT: Also, I really doubt they'll do an MMO based on an IP that isn't completely theirs. I'm sure they'd do a bang up job with them, but I think they would want the freedom for their lore people to pull completely random crap out of their ass (hi draenei!) if they so desire.

Ah, but what an ass it is...

1. I mentally blanked the Tuskarr, mea culpa.  Still a stupid race.
2. The non-organic dwarves should have stayed in their damn ruins where they belong.  They're supposed to be mostly extinct, remember?
3. Vikings make sense.  Giant vikings is excessive, like the Death Knight Dragonball-Z cinematic at Light's Hope Chapel.
4. TBC was just  :uhrr:
5. I so wanted to play as a mutated scythe-blade wielding abomination.  Blue space goats are okay, but the backstory is just terrible.

I have no doubt that Marvel are extremely problematic to work with. Their fidding appears to have caused three previous versions of their MMO to be put down.

But, at the same time, they want a MMO. DC is going to get one before them and that has to sting. They will try again and going back to Vivendi (and through them, Blizzard) isn't a bad place to start.

One factor I don't think anyone at Blizzard really knows is how important the Warcraft IP was to the WoW's success. A whole bunch of factors went into making WoW as big as it is, but the exact power of the IP probably isn't known. Now, Blizzard can probably whip up their own IP, but that will mean building a new world, which is something they appear to hesitate in doing regularly - they prefer sequels or to take huge chunks out of existing texts and adapting them enough to avoid being sued at least in the basic state (e.g. Warcraft ~= Warhammer, Starcraft ~= Warhammer 40K).

If I thought Blizzard were working on their own IP I'd say Starcraft was their best shot, but they say they aren't. Looking around at other IPs, Marvel (or something like it) gives them instant recognition with all those people who saw Spider-Man and X-Men movies but weren't interested in playing a fantasy MMO. It's also a genre that is fairly empty of competition compared to the fantasy and sci-fi genres, which will count for their follow-up MMO (because unless it gets 20m players, it will be seen as a failure compared to WoW).

It'll be interesting to see what they do. Regardless, on the day the new title is announced, MMO developers worldwide will weep into their stimulants and wonder how many players they'll lose to the new Blizzard title.

Where/when did they say they werent working on a Starcraft MMO?
Only thing I've seen them say they werent working on was another Warcraft or Diablo MMO.

It won't be diablo or starcraft lets just ignore what blizzard did or did not say and just think about it for a moment. They are going to be milking SC2 and D3 with expansions for YEARS to come. It just doesn't make sense for them to introduce an mmo with that ip when those games work well on their own. Sure they could wait until after the D3/SC2 franchise starts to wear down but whatever new mmo they make they are going to want to release way before then.  Wow is definitely starting to peak and it's a much better idea to start filtering customers to the new mmo now while they can advertise and you're still associated with the company.  Once people start leaving for other games/genres/real life then it becomes that much harder for blizzard to bring people over.

I would expect blizzard to make an annoucement about their new mmo, at least the basic name/title around this time next year when they are announcing the new wow expansion.

WoW is peaking?

Exactly. You said what I was trying to say.

The only reason the Warcraft IP mattered to WoW is that Blizzard themselves created the fucking thing a decade, +/-, before. They fucking created it. They can do whatever the fuck with it they want with it.

It would be fucking stupid to take WARHAMMER, or some other equally worthless (BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T CREATE THAT SHIT!) IP and be constrained. And!! And then have to deal with a dicksmooch on the caliber of that youtube video posting guy being sent from Games Workshop in over to "oversee the process" and "make sure they are doing the intellectual property right."

God damn it.

edit: I guess IP does matter. It makes your game worse if you have to deal with the creators or current owners of the IP.

Giants and the Norse go pretty well hand in hand, so giant vikings does not even come close to setting off any "what the hell is this bullshit?" bells for me. Not like, oh, the completely unlikeable dickhead of a king Stormwind is stuck with now. That's totally a personal taste thing though. :)

Oh, I will say I don't think the earthen being all over the place in Northrend is all that freaky. Sure, they were thought to be rare (especially after we kinda sorta killed a LOT of them while we explored Uldaman *cough*) but I don't think it's sore-thumb-sticking-out-lore-bending for us to go to a barely explored continent and discovering that there's a LOT of them in the area where the Titan shit isn't ruined like Uldaman is. It is possible they don't bother me because I have robot gnomes looming there, staring at me with their creepy robot gnome eyes.

It wont be Diablo, but it very likely WILL be Starcraft.  A gimpy little one-shot wonder RTS like Starcraft isnt going to stop them from producing a world-class Starcraft MMO.  Matter of fact, it'll HELP sales of the MMO.  RTS sales peak quickly after release and then bomb out to a trickle (along with the hype), therefore there is no market for the MMO to leech from aside from WoW; they're 2 different genres for christs sake.  Let alone the simple fact that SC2 will probably be released a full YEAR before the MMO would.

A smart business man will leverage the hooplah gained from SC2 straight into an MMO (just like they did with Warcraft/WoW).  So again, that's where the smart money was, is, and will be:  "World of Starcraft"
I'd go as far as saying Blizz will "blend" the RTS and MMO somehow, perhaps into the RTS's ladder system or some such thing, gaining gear or special priveledges whence the MMO releases... turning people into rabid dogs for SC2 so they can get a leg up for WoS .  At least, that's what I would do.

It's a shame they dont want to do a Diablo MMO though, because I still believe a next-gen top-down view game is the way to go for the future of MMOs.  Perhaps the Starcraft MMO would be top-down as well though.  Phuck the 1st person!

That may be true of RTSes in general (actually that's true of most games) but that's not true of StarCraft which is *still* in the Top 20 of PC games sold.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57222

This thread is proof why blizzards next mmo will also be hugely successful, confidence.

Almost every prediction by people in this thread comes with their desires for what they want in an mmo. This isn't so surprising but what is, is that everyone wants blizzard to focus on their interests because they believe the company will do it right.

Can you imagine that? Before the name of the game or any info has even been released people believe it will be good. That sort of hype and word of mouth is just crazy and yet, they have it.

Blizzards third mmo may crash and burn, their second may not even be all that great(which no one believes) but regardless it will make lot of money.

Because of the Asian markets.
And that being the case, there's nothing that says the RTS in Asia would suffer at all even if simultaneously released with the MMO.  One could say that market actually prefers such a plan.

That's US sales.

Ghambit, you're just going to have to accept that Blizzard is NOT like other gaming companies.

They produce masterpieces and hits that have the longest tails in the industry. Period. No exceptions.

There's also the fact that SC2 is going to be released in three installments a year apart.  They won't release Galaxy of Starcraft for at least a year after that, which means a minimum of four years from now.  Now they may very well do that, however that makes me think it isn't the game they are refering to working on now.

That's fine. I plan to have a longer and stronger relationship with Diablo3 than I have had with some past girlfriends. 4+ years away for another mass multi timesink (MMTS) is perfectly fine.

I believe Diablo was a far more successful franchise than Starcraft was if you remove the fact that Starcraft was the nation pastime of Korean.  I also wouldn't call Starcraft a gimpy little one shot RTS given its development history.  After the initial "Warcraft in space" response, they spent a shitload of time improving the engine to make it the game you know it is.
However, I really don't buy the whole "World of Starcraft" claim.  If anything, its popularity is why they delayed so long in expanding the franchise.  It's solid enough of game that it can support itself without having to build a sequel to boost the franchise.  The same goes for Diablo II.  Warcraft was fading from the picture due to the popularity of those other two, so by building an MMO, they can guarantee revenue from that IP and then work on the IPs that werre already successful.

I still don't get why people are even talking about Starcrat given that they've said 123423424 times that they are working on another IP.

Because not only are they good at secrets, they're good at lying.

I'd really, really like to see an original IP. Has anyone looked through the Activision/Vivendi back catalogue though? They have access to a shitload of great stuff now. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the merger deal - using an Activision/VU IP for the next MMOG.

SC2 has been in development since 2003 (though not full production until 2004). WoW took around 5 years to develop. I would shocked if Blizzard managed to release their 2nd MMO with less than 5 years of development.

Show me the article that says that please.  The articles I have all say no WoW 2 and no Diablo MMO (per interviews with Blizz people).  They say nothing of no Starcraft (unless you take a bloggers word as gospel).  They do say they plan on doing something revolutionary though.

Is there where we talk about the Wrath announcement?

Robot gnomes were explained in Storm Peaks, I believe. I didn't pay much attention to those quests.


Ooh, I like this theory.  Pitfall or Zork: the MMO.  OOOh, or... MechWarrior!  :drill:

Activision lost the rights to computer versions of BattleTech a while ago to Microsoft (who are currently licensing those rights to Smith & Tinker).

I don't discount that, however I think that if they are working on it (since they could easily be in pre-production for several), they haven't ramped things up to the point of this mystery MMO.  Unless they're lying.  I'd be quite happy with that, but it's so far down the line I don't think they would be mentioning it as "the MMO we're working on that isn't a prior IP".

What i would do for a Shadowrun MMO. The setting is so easily adapted to a MMO format. Christ, give me an updated version of the genesis shadowrun game with co-op and it would be fine.

Ya and in most PC sales charts i view Blizzard accounts for like 5-6 of the top 20. Warcraft battlchest still shows up every once in awhile and that games ancient.

Battletech MMO, please.

Always with the elves...  :oh_i_see:

Elves in the context of shadowrun is completely acceptable. As is magic and dragons.

Judging from the job opportunities page for Blizzard it definitely seems like they're ramping up for this new game:
http://www.blizzard.com/us/jobopp/

We can glean a bit from what they're looking for specifically in new hires.
The game's gonna be written in C+ with probably a custom game engine.
It'll be dual-core capable (SIMD/multithreading).
It'll have positional audio (ala an FPS).

So, that's basically every new game out there... (sigh)  no good clues

I know. It's the high fantasy game that pretends to be streetwise. Still high fantasy.

There's no way Microsoft is going to let Vivendi print money hats using their FASA electronic game rights.

While it is high fantasy the cyberpunk influence is strong enough to make it still a very unique setting. It doesn't play or feel like fantasy at least.


When FASA got the axe after Shadowrun the FPS was released (what a fucking travesty that way) they reverted the license back to weissman and crew. They created a company called Smith and Tinker that has the rights for battletech,shadowrun and the other FASA IP's.

And console support.  :awesome_for_real:

Having looked around, I can see lots of stuff about "cool, new, next gen" (http://www.vg247.com/2008/11/12/blizzard-coo-our-new-mmo-is-cool-new-different-next-generation/) and quotes[/quote] like this:

 (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/qa-blizzard-ceo.html)
Not much on the new IP - that appears to be more driven by journalist commentary (unless someone can prove me wrong with a direct quote).

However, if it launches before 2012, that'll be a big surprise.

I'd love that. That'd force the fuckers to keep memory usage at a reasonable level.

There game will be Starcraft Online.  They will be using engine components from their decommissioned Ghost.

Perhaps.


wut  :uhrr:

MS still owns the rights. They've licensed a, uh, license to Smith & Tinker (as I mentioned above) but that doesn't preclude MS doing other things with their rights.

Given that consoles have improved, it wouldn't be bad, although, depending on time period when such an MMO is released, that console may become the thing preventing them from making much needed updates, like FFXI.


Doubtful, if they decide to do StarCraft online, which I doubt they will, they would simply repeat what they did with WoW - use the same for the MMO that they do for the RTS.

Im sorry i didn't notice you mention Smith & Tinker. I was under the impression all of the old FASA gaming rights were granted to Smith & Tinker. And MS cant really do much else because they only owned the rights to make games. The IP's other formats i BELIEVE are owned by completely different people.

MS owns the rights to the "electronic gaming" versions of the FASA games. The PnP/tabletop rights for BattleTech and Shadowrun are now owned by WizKids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASA#Current_status_and_intellectual_property

The only real point of licensing an IP is to get noticed, and blizzard doesn't even remotely need that when they release their next MMORPG. Outside of that you gain some backstory 90% of which is lame and self-contradictory (eg. Marvel) and a huge bunch of limitations from both the IP owners and the fan expectations. It would also limit how far you can push the IP in terms of things like CCG's, books and comics. I would be amazed and disappointed if Blizzard did not spin an entirely original IP. They certainly have all the resources to do so and will be able to invent one that fully suits the kind of game they're making.

I also think they've been working on this for quite a while. If I had to guess as to where they set it I would doubt fantasy (since they have WoW) or far sci-fi (Starcraft) but a near sci-fi or present day game could be possible. Hellgate done right maybe.

I am really torn on whether this is going to go beyond the traditional DIKU mode.  On the one hand, you could argue that trying something bold like an MMOFPS is ok because its Blizzard and everyone will buy it (plus, you have less cannibalization of your existing WoW base if the new MMO is perceived as "WoW 2").

On the other hand, the suits and lawyers will say that since Blizzard does DIKU so well, why risk doing anything else?  EVERYONE will buy the new MMO and money hats will be had by all, while MMOFPS or MMORTS or whatnot might be epic fail.

 My money is on the suits and lawyers, but its a close call.

With WoW,Starcraft2 and Diablo 3 im sure the lawyers will be willing to let them splurge when developing their new title.

I wouldn't expect anything radical.

Oh I am sure the money will be there.  But I think the suits would have panicked at messing up a "sure thing" if the creative types came to them saying "lets do an MMOFPS!"

Viking Giants were one of the three main factions in the Everquest expansion WotLK is ripped off from 'inspired by'. The other two were ice-dwarves and various dragonflights based out of a temple with draconic necropoli nearby. There was also an out-of-place jungle-surrounded-by-tundra...and walrusmen, too.  :grin:

I asked my guild if anyone though that or Grizzly Hills was odd about a week ago.  Evidently growth past a well defined tree line doesn't strike anyone as odd.

Really, which expansion was this?

Scars of Velious. Although I don't remember the ice giants there being Vikings, he's dead on with everything else.  To a degree I hadn't even considered until he mentioned it. That's hilarious.

Even moreso since that was about the time Tigole became well-known and moved on to Blizz.

Everyone says they took EQ and made it better...

http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?id=5526
Viking-ish. Probably as close as Verant could get at the time.

Who, WoW?  I always think WoW gave us a paradigm shift whereby rather than grinding mobs for levels and loot, you quest for it. They are both DIKU-style MMOs with a heavy emphasis on raiding, but really, a solo person in WoW can quest their way not only through the levels, but their entire end game can be questing.

Every diku game ever would've liked to have you quest from 1-Max. Writing Quests and doing all the work relative to them costs money. Lots of money. Money that didn't exist when Everquest came out.

Also, you're still grinding for levels and loot in WoW. You're just grinding quests instead of mobs. Which probably entails a lot more walking back and forth rather than just forth.

I'm not knocking WoW for this, good on them for doing it that way. But let's try to see the forest for the trees, please.

As opposed to the graphics engine, database code, etc... which was free?

I think it's more the cost of hiring people to think about the quests and write them down. 

Hence the reason why user-created quests are the way to go (ala Face of Mankind).  Have the higher-ups produce faction (or not) related quests for the underlings.  Higher-ups gain power/rep, underlings gain xp.  Cap the amount of quests able to be created and completed (minus quest chains) and voila.  No cost of hiring people and a simultaneously ever-evolving plethora of quests that are never the same.

I bet the entire system could be coded in a day, assuming there's an existing quest and rep. system in place.  (and yes, I've thought this through)

Until it starts raining Penis.

no no no... the user wouldnt have access to any kind of assets that arent already dev-created.  Just simply a quest UI that allows others to accomplish predetermined goals of your choosing, complete with fancy enterable quest lore.  The flavor text is where it can get tricky, but that of course would have to be overseen by GMs.  (GASP)  Woah, a job GMs can ACTUALLY do!  [aside from spamming the usual custserve crap]

e.g. you're still killin boars, but instead of paying Tigole to write the quest, you're just letting your players do it.  The writers can use NPCs or kiosks (ala SWG) for quest turnin.  In a nutshell, you're basically turning the quest system into a crafting system, and vice versa.  Slick devs would interweave the economy into the thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPMud

You are severely under estimating how much effort goes into even the most mundane of quests. At least those that aren't kill 10 boars and move on. Shitty RP text doesn't make a Boar collection quest any more fun.

What will be interesting to see if it works is the quest rating system in CoX.

Also seriously underestimating the amount of time and creativity a user will spend to get penises to show up in game in some form.

Sporn?

In theory, allowing player generated kill quests *should* allow for the developers to concentrate on improved story based quests.

Not only that, but it autocreates in-depth factional politics along with meaningful reputation gains.  If the server is PvP it also gives a reason to fight.

Since blizzard has had the opportunity to stare deep into the madness that is its user-base I would guess that user created content never even crossed their minds.

I don't see a place for it anyway. Blizzard has the money, time and attention to detail that they'll carefully craft the user experience.

I don't entirely buy this, just because there were lots and lots of quests in, say, DAoC. But they were SO fucking annoying to do for (usually) jack shit reward, no one did them. So then, I am sure, the people making the game thought, "Man, so not worth putting time and money into quests, no one does them."

WoW made quests worth doing. They weren't actually the first, CoH made missions worth doing before WoW did.

Also, am I the only one who uses "grind" as in "boring shit I don't want to do?" Because I don't FEEL bored doing quests to level in WoW, so I don't consider it a grind at all. Playing the early scenarios in WAR was fun, so I didn't consider that a grind. Sitting in one place for two hours for a bubble's worth of XP, though? Yeah, that was a grind.

It's an old idea that's been kicking around for a while, hence the link to LPMud.  However, you wouldn't want to give this power to just anyone, even if they are high level.  You'd want to fashion to identify the players who aren't douchebags and can design a quest that fits in with your world.  In small community MUD, this is fairly easy.  In an MMO with several hundred thousand subscribers split across various worlds, well I'd be interested in hearing how'd you filter people.

Considering how many people want to be game designers, I find it hard to believe that a company couldn't hire people by the barrelfull for nickels and dimes to spin that stuff out.

Hell, I bet Blizz could do a "Write a quest!" contest, put a disclaimer that all submitted materials become property of Blizzard, give the winners their prizes, and have warehouses full of quest writeups.

AC made missions worth doing before CoH even.  But both AC and CoH's missions were too repetitive.  Whereas WoW had ENOUGH quests worth doing (and pretty much bug free) that you could make your way from 1st to max level entirely by questing (without repeating any, and soloable even just to rub it in).  Nobody else before or since has given us that much working content at release. 

My definition of "Grind" is having to repeat content or "make up my own by repetitively killing some optimal mob" just to advance my character to where it can handle the next tantalizing bit of content.  WoW at release, and EQ2 many years after release, have enough content that you can't possibly do all of it while it's level appropriate.  EQ2 even lets you turn off combat exp and you STILL out-level content faster than you can finish it!  Granted too much of that content is still walking back and forth between quest hub and mob area to kill first one set of mobs, then another, then another...  which becomes grindy in itself.

Probably the single biggest cause of churn in DDO, AoC (post level 20) and possibly WAR as well was the lack of sufficient content to get you from one level to the next without having to repeat it.  Content is king (and Polish is Queen).  Content and Polish cost money.  Blizzard spent lots more money on content and polish than anyone else, and guess what?  They made lots more money than anyone else as a result.  They will not be dethroned until someone steps up to the plate and at least matches them.

CoH/V says, "Hello". (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16290.0)

I wonder about this. How hard would it be to set up a system similar to that of the EverQuest Guide 'entrance exam' type thing? Admittedly, you had your couple of bad apples as with anything, but with the content controlled by the GMs and the like, and no real power to the players.. *shrug* Of course, never underestimate the one asshat who will spend a year trying to find the loophole to screw over everyone else.

Paul Barnett, Senoir Game Designer.

The MMOG masses cannot spell. Who's going to sub-edit the quest text? And even if players can write better than expected, who's going to sub-edit the penises out of the quest text?

"im lookin for som wolf peltz u think u can get 10 of em for me?  lolthx"

Perhaps it is time we embrace the penis aspect of innovative game design

Well, it is a driving force of human behavior.  Many seminal discoveries and achievements are known to have had the desire for procreation at their root.  Just imagine the monuments that gamers would erect to their libido were this aspect deeply delved.

it's called second life, don't go there.

Do we have a whooooshing over the head icon?

Your use of 'seminal' in the midst of a phallic symbol discussion was a nice touch.

Actually a smiley freud face would be better. I admit that the pun I missed(good one) but what I was trying to point out puns aside, is that there are quite a bit of outlets for gamers to express themselves and all those outlets have proven thus far, is that we shouldn't ever let them do that.

I tend to agree. But I think user initiated content (PvP is just one example, since it's the one that gets used the most) would be an interesting avenue to explore more fully.

User-directed content (SWG) and user-generated content (SL) are mutually exclusive. User-directed is much safer for IP holders to explore because they can control what content appears in the game and all of the constraints for how those assets interact. User-generated is much more risky, because of how this is explored in SL.

But yes, there's a LOT of room for growth here. It's not for everyone. But if you can get enough people to care, you've created a "repeat play" experience that is a clear alternative to normal competition for placement in a grind. Releasing assets with rules is probably less expensive than creating more scripted-raid content too, and maybe even than further PvP zones. And it doesn't need to be all about home decorating either, as CoX is showing (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16290.0) (of course, CoX already had "home" decorating :-)

Will it draw in 11 million people? No. But can it help to retain more of those people? Yes.

Face of Mankind's system was proven to be the most successful element of that game (that's probably not saying much, but).  It's only natural that other games adopt similar systems.  We're only talking a simple mission generator here guys (I guess like CoX), not player generated graphical space penixes floating inside a purple haze.

We also need to see crafting systems with less Dev. control  (similar to old SWG).  All they should be worried about is the algorithms that control baseline elements and then the loot tables.  Beyond that, let the economy run itself and let the crafters make varying degress of products as they see fit.  There's no need for some poxfaced programmer to sit there and eek out each and every recipe and reward.

Lastly, PotBS's system of allowing player generated graphical content for their ships was a nifty idea.  Any "static" object that doesnt require animation can easily be produced by the public; and then reproduced by the devs.  This takes the creative load off and allows more gear variety and more community personalization.  Fit into the crafting system and you're set.

--there's a damned recession out there, time to slim down and get more communistic up in here  (the way MMOs were originallly designed to be)

Well we can scratch out the fantasy of Blizzard doing the Marvel MMO. (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=355603)

Any new theories?

Did someone suggest that was even a possibility before?

 :awesome_for_real:

Blizz does best when it refines.  Not wholly innovating.

Vehicle based or vehicle-assisted combat.  Scifi Eve rip off is my bet now.

Man, there's a whole youtube's worth of self-important ego driven PVPers out there!

Full loot, FFAPVP, Sandbox MMO!

SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!  :heartbreak:

... however, I also expect Gazillion to not pull off the Marvel MMO license either, so maybe, one day...  :grin:

RISE UP FROM THE DEAD.

Link (http://wow.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blizzard-new-mmo-based-on-new-ip/)

From a Blizzard blue poster:

I really have no friggin clue what they're developing.  We should have some kind of f13 prize for the person who guesses correctly  :drill:
They're really harping on math and physics (engine) oriented design qualifications in their jobs section, so I'm inclined to believe it's going to be an MMOFPS or some kind of MMOSim... (either flight, space, or car). 

It being an MMOFPS though seems a bit far-fetched because they're doing the game completely from scratch.  There are so many great FPS engines out there that it'd be a tremendous waste of time and money fleshing out a new one that does basically the same thing; the room for something revolutionary is small in this genre (unless it's combined with many other elements).  I think also that this thing probably wont be DIKU.

Some kind of hardcore Sandbox simulation maybe?  Spore done right?  Auto-Assault redux?
(sigh)

someone in this forum knows the damned answer...

If there is one thing Blizzard is good at (and they are good at more than one thing) its keeping their people in the know from telling stuff like this.

Who knows what it could be but my mind is buzzing right from the idea someone else implanted in me where BLizzard outdoes and polishes the Puzzle Pirates concept.

I'll toss my money down on Cyberpunk.  Not because I have any inside information, but because I want it.

Hey, I'm right there with you (as you already know).  My shelf is full of Cyberpunk stuff.  But, that's not exactly a completely original IP.  Broad enough to come up with something original I suppose, but it's still all generally derived from one place.  Someone in here said Blizz was great at lying, so they may indeed just be dusting off a prior franchise and just blowing smoke up our asses with this originality crap.

Honestly though, wouldnt it be somewhat of a letdown if they do a Cyberpunk game and it's not Shadowrun?  Of all the stuff I've got S-RUN still dominates it all as potential for a game.

Also, by the time this thing comes out will it still be "next-gen?"  hmmmm

Dunno, but I suspect I'll be wearing grampons.  Not just for raiding, either.

Don't think there's anything that could be considered "completely original" at this point. Fairly sure their idea of "completely original" is more along the lines of "not another iteration of stuff we've originally ripped off 10+ years ago".

Not that there's anything wrong with it  :why_so_serious:

It's not going to happen but my dream would be for them to rip off Deadlands and do a "Weird West" MMORPG (yes I know there's supposedly a real Deadlands MMO in the works).

I want Blizzard to smash the "Sci-Fi MMOGs can't do big bucks" concept into itsy-bitsy pieces. I think that would be super keen.

That'll be World of StarCraft after they finish with StarCraft II.

I'm willing to put money on ripping off an existing genre and/or IP and making a really polished easy to play MMO that isn't good because its long list of associated buzzwords but because it actually plays like a game that you don't mind playing.

It's never been "Sci-Fi MMOGs can't do big bucks." It's ALWAYS been "Bad games don't do big bucks."

Exactly. But the "It's gotta be dunjuns and drayguns" gets trotted out enough for me to (http://omg.wthax.org/facepalm.gif)

I still maintain that Battletech Online would be a money printing machine.  Hell, combine it with something like Jumpgate/Eve (without the suck) to provide a grander context to the whole war.  Air/ground rivalries, all that good stuff.  Make mercenary companies actually mean something.

Blizzard is capable of doing any story genre and big enough they don't need to license an IP to get attention. So they could do mecha but probably not Battletech mecha.

Cyberpunk is a bit old-school now, and I'm still not convinced it isn't because the genre is pretty confining and a lot of it not well suited to a group game (eg. hacking without coming across as incredibly corny).

You would be referring to BattleSpace (currently out of print) combined with Classic Battletech and Mechwarrior.
Many of us in here (you included) have said a mecha version of WW2O would be insta-win... i agree, but there are no plans for one   :heartbreak:

Hmm, which genre is left for Blizzard to rip off homage?

I'm still up for superheroes as a strong possibility. Perhaps giant robots.

Only Blizzard knows.

I have a theory.  People are focused on Blizzard's next MMO, which is, to be sure, titillating.  However, I think the real cannibalism to the WoW player base is going to come via Diablo 3.  I think games like Diablo 3, that have all the trappings off MMO's with less of the (first) 'M' are the future.  As WoW's player base ages, 5 hours Ulduar runs will hold less appeal on the main.  Games like D3, with a custom tailored single player experience, and polished multiplayer endeavors without all of the bullshit will come to the fore.


At least, I won't be playing MMO's anymore.  No clue what ya'll are gonna be doing.

Blizzard buying an IP license is a massive waste of money for them and will never happen. Their own brand is all the name recognition they need for marketing. And I strongly suspect they don't want their creativity stifled by somebody else telling them what or what not they can do in their game worlds.

TheTruth.com

Blizzard has no reason or incentives to deviate from the diku model consider the flaming car wrecks recent attempts at "pvp done right" has been. My guess is that they finally figure out that the first M in Mass Multiplier Online Game is overrated and develop a game from there.

I'll almost certainly be playing both.  :drill:

Developing a fresh IP totally from scratch is a helluva lot more expensive than franchising one, along with the proprietary tech to make it.  Blizz. has the money though, so they can do that.  Their intentions as they say were to "revolutionize the genre."  That doesnt come cheaply, and most who have tried have failed and gone bust.

Note:  WoW was not revolutionary in the slightest, it was just well executed.  This new project of Blizz's, if you believe what they're saying, looks to be something more beastly.  Although I tend to agree it'll still be mostly a ripoff of prior lore/tech.  ala every game they've made.  Who the hell knows.

This was largely the same thing we've said since before WoW, so, replace WoW with EQ2 and Diablo 3 with Diablo 2. Coincidentally, around that time some of us were predicting a looming split in the genre between the AAA subs-based core and a new audience with different expectations and preferences. And years later, that's exactly what we've got. Free Realms and Fusion Fall are somewhat in the middle technically, but really, the success has been in the outliers. WoW for the AAA subs-based veteran crowd and any number of browser-based lighter-weight persistent worlds for the kids.

When WoW has run it's course I don't think it's infeasible for some new hard-core (and yes, by comparison, WoW is hardcore) to replace it. But only for that market, whatever size that may be. WoW is big in terms of paying subscribers, but there's a lot more games with a lot more eyeballs on them (though of course monetized differently and those eyeballs aren't 1:1 to those paying money). We're already at the point where businesses don't aspire to be WoW. Maybe one or two companies are that confident in their IP. The rest go for the easier and less risky plays, and have been doing very well at it, relatively speaking.

Over the last 10 years the trend has been to longer, more intensive raids.  The first 'raid' content, the plane of Hate in EQ1, was do-able in 1.5-2 hours if you were organized.

I was going to say something about the number of 'boss' mobs with good drops per run has increased since then to compensate but then I remembered that you got all the best class armor off the 'yard trash'.

Yeah good point.  I mean I wasn't predicting that I'd win the Nobel or anything for that baby.  Also, I'm not talking about a giant killer, I'm just saying maybe people are focused on the next great (Blizzard) MMO leeching a lot of customers, when it might not be.  And I base that off of nothing but my own particular preferences, which I assume at least some others must share.

You'll both be paying them 29.99 a month for the Blizzard 'Station Pass.'  So will everyone else.

*waits, not so patiently, for Diablo III*

What really hurts is that knowing Blizzards track record D3 is at least 2 years away.

It's possible Blizz may get caught outside the Singularity with this title, as will Bioware with SWOR and anyone else with a publishing date beyond 2 years from now.  The way tech. is currently changing, there may not be much demand left for dusty old-tech PC titles.

If we follow Moore's Law, it's obvious that unless dev-cycles trim down they'll get left behind (they already are really).  It was okay for WoW 10 years ago, but in today's world it's not.  And in tomorrow's world even more-so.

Well, Moore's Law might continue but 2 years into the future the average PC user will still use systems from 3 years ago.
Blizzard isn't immune to failure, yes, but I doub't it's comeing from that angle.

I'm more coming from the Singularity rather than Moore's Law.  Moore's Law simply focuses on processing power/speed; from this angle we agree.  BUT, from the angle of what types of I/O devices people are using to entertain themselves, the tech. is more likely to leave some studios behind.  The market will have shifted to something more modern (better consoles, portable gaming, augmented reality, etc.), and MMO devs will have to try their best to stay close to the curve.  Right now it seems they're content with just making their games playable on Consoles.  But, if they dont make their dev-cycles shorter and their games cheaper to make, they will die.  The Creativity aspect I suspect will help keep some groundbreaking titles afloat, but the money-hole will swallow many others.

No reason to when the consumers don't.

(WoW didn't chase the bleeding edge, they aimed at the average machine awailable at typical household. This didn't change much)

Indeed. Plus the current economic environment is going to bite into people's computer-replacement budgets.

More importantly, when it comes to bang for your buck gaming enjoyment, computer technology reached diminishing returns more than a decade ago. The amount of money you spend keeping up with Moore's law is worth less and less. Staggering as graphics, AI, and group dynamics can be, it's not like people are going to abandon your game because it hasn't got enough real time dynamic foliage. There's only so much digital magic you can add before it fades into the background.

When the difference was between an Atari 2600 and the Nintendo, or a 386 and a Pentium, you were giving up a lot of pizazz to play games built for five-year-old tech. The difference between games from 2004 and games from 2009 just isn't that striking.

The vast majority of WoW's content is soloable, which I'd expect would carry through to any new MMO they did.

As for raids, it is being developed by those raised on EQ's raids and then who developed WoW's raids to what they are. Plus the actual proportion of players who do those extended raids is very small vs the total player population. It's not a big factor.

Diablo 3 will appeal to a slightly different market than whatever MMO they create from here on in.

While this is true, none of the content that matters is soloable.  This is the essence of why I keep quitting these games. 

FIFY

Wow is reasonably balanced in that you can make progress through PvP, PvE Raiding, PvE teaming (badges) and even PvE solo (factions rewards). If someone comes up with a new way that limited dev resources can keep the progression oriented happy outside of the raid model I'm fairly sure WoW will implement a superior version in the next expansion.

Considering most other MMO's seem to launch with the end-game "TBD" let alone novel I'm not seeing too much challenge to this model around.

The relevance of content is entirely based on whether the observer has a shot at achieving it. The shit buried twelve tiers deep in whateverzone don't matter to the folks who will never get there. Because they know their lifestyle, playstyle, and/or social circle are not compatible with getting there.

The only truly frustrated are those who used to be able to get there but are just coming to the realization their life has changed too much to ever do it again.

Everyone else is either there are an outsider and knows it.

I don't know if they'll make it as much of a DIKU. I expect some reasonably significant shifts. Blizzard doesn't innovate a whole lot by creating new shit from scratch, but they do bring things together in ways that others haven't tried much before.

I expect this comes from the people making the games actually being people who play games, and thus get bored with just throwing out re-badged sequels. They'll probably move in a direction they tried with WAR3, trying to inject a whole lot of new fun stuff drawing from other genres and other MMOs, then dial it back in to something safe and fun by the final release.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, though.

I can further say none of the content that matters is available after the first hour of the game. Which is why I don't playing mmos longer than the free trial.

The next Blizzard mmo will be a diku. If it isn't its because someone else was successful with an incomplete version of what is probably the next generation of mmo's.

I'd be willing to bet money that this will not be a DIKU.

I'm willing to bet that won't happen for at least 10 years.

Decent point.  But do you think there is anything to the fact that D3 will be sort of an "MMO lite" and if so, won't that be more compelling to a lot of people than a full fledged MMO?  I guess then the counterpoint would be "yeah, but both games will be on the same platform (b.net) which will serve as a sort of retention wall."

Since this is Blizzard, these are not mutually exclusive statements.

Blizzard are in a curious and enviable position in this current economic environment. In fact, cynically speaking, this is the greatest thing that could possibly happen to them. More and more people are going to catch on to the fact that on a dollar for dollar, cent for cent time:investment return, there is no cheaper entertainment than a $15 monthly MMO subscription. I'd actually expect to see a fairly significant rise in player accounts over the next year.

$20 for tf2 says otherwise  :drill:

You need to rethink your "fix".  I've soloed four toons to the endgame in WoW only to realize that my gear is worthless compared to those that group or raid.  The token system makes this less of an issue in pvp, but WoW is hardly any kind of pvp game. 

Why do you think you should be comparatively rewarded with more collaborative players in an MMO when you are willfully avoiding collaboration?  Honest question.

I get that raiding isn't for everyone.  And I'm not asking for a delineated list of reasons you don't like it.  Just why you (and lots of other people) think itemization should be handled differently than that.

My guess is just like the old solo'ers vs group players debate that WoW capitalized on by making a game that can be solo'ed up until the end game, hence ending phase 1 of that debate started way back in EQ1. Phase 2 is what Starcraft mmo (or whatever they based their new mmo on) will capitalized on, whether solo players should get the same end game rewards as players in a group. My guess just like WoW did, Starcraft if it wishes to be wildly successful, will be on the side of the solo'er.

I could list a lot of reasons but ultimately, because we're paying the same $15 a month.

Thank you.  I shouldn't be excluded from experiencing content because I have limited playtime.  I also shouldn't be forced to group with players noone else wants to play with because of my limited gaming time.  Not that I care that much about loot, but in a pve game why does it even matter that I have access to the same drops?  It's not like it affects the play of anyone else. 

My biggest reason for wanting access to content solo is to be able to see everything the game offers as a paying customer.  I don't think that is a lot to request. 

Or as I stated in the Darkfall thread...

This again brings up the idea of having "scaled" dungeons and areas.  If you want to team up with 50 people, have the mobs and difficulty scale for that.  If you want to run it alone have it scale for solo.  I don't know why that would be so hard.  I'm with you, I don't have time to wait for a raid every night to see all the nooks and crannies in Karazhan or whatever dungeon is the next thing. 

Ultimately, I see this as a crap argument to be honest.  If 2 people have a gym membership, and 1 person goes every day, and the other goes twice a week, they will both get something out of it, but one person is going to get a lot more out of it than the other, yet they both pay the same fee for the membership.  Should the twice a weeker complain to the gym staff that he isn't in as good shape as the every dayer?

You could make an argument that equal time put in should = similar rewards, and that solo players don't get that.  However, that seems like an awful stretch in an online multiplayer game to complain about having to actually, you know, play multiplayer.   If the genre doesn't suit your style, play other games.   Thats fine and there is noting wrong with that.

Also for context:  I used to be a pretty regular raider in vanilla WoW and BC.  I burnt out pretty bad in BC and took the better part of a year off WoW.  I got Wrath about a month ago, leveled up to 80 and have just been doing heroic 5man content a couple times a day.  My gear is crap next to the people who even do Naxx 10 on a regular basis let alone 25, and both those raids are pretty easy.  But I don't care.  The reason you need the best gear in the game is if you are doing teh content tuned for that gear.  My gear from heroics is getting me along just fine and I'm perfectly happy playing that way. 

Cause your dealing with a persistent world and that would only works flawlessly in a instanced dungeon. WAR PQ are actually areas in the game that can be done organically, meaning that players in the area are instantly apart of the party. The problem is there is the number of players in any given PQ designated area can fluctuate wildly. Which means the math and instances (how many people in the area at any given second/minute) checking behind scaling the difficulty of the zones isn't always easy and not always accurate. And when its not accurate either the players exploit the area, or complain about the difficulty.

Malakili again the solo'er vs group argument. Back in the day guys like you argued that players who play solo shouldn't be able to advance at any pace faster then a snail. WoW came along and made a game where you can go from 1-max solo. How many subs does WoW have again?

Top 3 wishes for Blizz-

Wild West
Car Wars (NOT Auto Assault!)
Shadowrun (or cyberpunk, but SR has more character archetypes)

Whatever they do, please lose DIKU. Give me skill based progression, with skill use coupled with advancements purchased with XP to advance. Give me meaningful open world PvP. Give me a robust economy. Give me unique and useful crafting. And a pony. Everyone wants a pony, right?

They could work out scalability with PQs very easily.  Just have the mobs scale difficulty depending on how many are present in the area.  Regardless, I was talking about instanced dungeons and I like solo content.

The other argument you could make would be something like : I played Wow for a long time, mostly as a casual-core. I played a lot, but never raided much. I had alts, rerolls, whatever you want. I was pretty hardcore when leveling, spending lots of time in dungeons, even with inapropriate group settings (and basically learning a dungeon is way harder than farming a 80 zomg heroicz in full purplez). I tried raiding, and sorta held my own, except I pretty fast became tired with the logistics and guild politic.

But as soon as I dinged 60, 70, 80... I stopped playing after a few weeks. Sometimes because I was lonely, sometimes because my group of friends was disrupted because some of them wanted to raid, etc.

I cancelled once again two months ago, and i'm pretty sure I'm done with Wow, except if they overhaul the whole endgame threadmill.

I would be pretty happy to pay Blizzard 15 bucks a month, except a few weeks after my warrior became 80, I lost interest in the game. I farmed dailies to get a decent starting stuff, went to a few heroics, looked at the drop rates, and saw

I had a few friends playing on my server, and that was nice, but we never were quite enough do to full guild runs. So we had to sit our ass in town, LFG. And PUG. Like if we were three friends, couldn't the game let us do something ? Nah, you have to be 5. Well it would be the same if by chance we happen to be 6...

I may not fit the mold, but I think there are LOTS of players like me. Who will happily pay for a MMO that let's them play and progress without forcing on us a playstyle that we don't enjoy, or for which we don't have time.

Ouch, was that a rant ?  :drillf:

If you are going to invoke WoW for its subscription base than I can just come back and say "In WoW solo players will never have the loot of group players.  How many subs does WoW have again?"

I think both of those are stupid arguments though.

I can see the merit of this argument, especially in vanilla and BC, where pugging could be truly disastrous.  However, I've been pugging regularly in Wrath and I can count on one hand how many groups I had that were really really terrible.  The content is easily enough that most people can complete it, even with strangers.  They've made it easy to find groups too.  The LFG interface is greatly improved.   4/10 classes can tank and 4/10 classes can heal, each of which are entirely viable now.  With dual specs  hybrid classes can fill more than one role pretty much at the drop of a hat, which means you don't need to be very picky with who you get.  I mean, it just seems to me that Blizzard has gone out of their way to make the content as accessible as possible, and I actually commend them for that.

There isn't a huge fundamental difference between 3 and 5 players really so they could probably make some 3 man dungeons, but its really really trivial to find 2 more people if you have a group of 3, at least in my experience. 

Did I suddenly travel back in time to 2001? I'm not surprised I have to explain my point, but hey we aren't all made with an understanding of where the money is. The only innovation WoW made was betting on the solo player. That's it. That alone netted them their current playerbase. So by understanding the lesson from that example it tells me that the next game that bets on the solo player is going to make substantial more money then the game that didn't.

The gym membership is the worst analogy I see thrown around in these discussions.  It's entertainment, not self-improvement.  If you pay more you should get more, if you pay the same you get the same, just like all other forms of entertainment out there.   Or are we going to say that investing all those hours raiding in video games actually enhances a person and their life?

I must admit I left before 3.1, and had made a 2 month break just after the expansion too and had changed server, so I was somewhat out of the loop. Still, what if I don't want to PUG... Sometimes it's fun to play with new people, sometimes it's a chore. I guess when leveling, you can just group with someone to down an elite, or try to clean a few quests faster. You don't have a comitment to spend an evening with them. If the guy you're killing giant wasps with is an asshole, you just leave the group. I guess I'd like the endgame to offer something like this. Something like War PQ maybe, if I get the concept.

I'm not trying to bash Wow, I love this game (well mostly the feelings I got discovering Azeroth, learning to heal then to tank...), and Blizzard made efforts to make the game easier on the player. I can salute that. But they still didn't get the endgame well for players like me. Maybe it's a question of content. Even with lots of money they can't compete with all the other games out there, offering new shinies... After a point the only meaninful content is the people you play with. I mean after two weeks of admitedly intense (from my perspective) grinding, I had bought almost the best stuff I could get with crafting (I missed a trinket i think). I didn't have much time to raid, so was I going to farm heroics and hope for lucky drops and badges ? Yep, I hit the cancel button after a shitty Strat, telling myself "I'm not going through that again", and went on to finish The Witcher.

I love dikus, i don't even mind tank / heal / DPS but then it doesn't work without the regular ding and shiny loot.

What I'd like to see is new ways to allow people to play together. The way Wow does it is too rigid : you have to be 5, 10 or 25.

I'm perfectly fine with people wanting to fit in the mold.

Me ? I can't be arsed anymore, and well I guess the first MMO to allow for more flexibility than Wow is going to succeed (on a relative scale). Maybe what I'm looking for is Diablo 3 indeed.

This topic always seems to end up with the 'should every game try to serve every market segment?' argument. I'm not sure it is possible for a game to be all things to all people.

It's going to be a Free Realms clone, complete with microtransactions.
And I'm being totally serious here.

It is going to take more than just that. City of Heroes, for example, has been more flexible than WoW all along.

I think it's more than fair to speculate that if City of Heroes was more along the lines of GENERIC FANTASY than HOPELESSLY NICHE it would actually be a serious ankle-biting contender in the MMO big leagues. As a system it's brilliant and versatile, it just doesn't have the manpower Blizzard throws at WoW to maintain long lasting depth unless you're really into Superheroes (hell, it's kept me entertained for nearly 5 years).

As it is, it's entirely self-sustaining and while Paragon Studios will never be swimming in money, they'll consistently turn a profit for years - I highly doubt the upcoming Champions Online and DCU will poach and retain enough of the CoX playerbase to put them out of business, for example.

My ultimate MMO would be a combination of WoW's depth, storyline and questing with the speed and versatility of CoX's engine and their unbeatable character customisation (I'd say something about the superior stability of WoW except that went to shit after 3.1).

But I'd like a fair crack at any loot, regardless of my ability to solo or raid. There needs to be viable alternatives to attaining things besides endless raiding. A new game would do very, very well to intelligently address this, perhaps in similar ways to City of's current Merit system.

This.  In a pve game, there's no reason that everyone shouldn't have a shot at good gear.  My having good gear has no effect on the next person, so why the hell not make it at least attainable through different pathways?

The stock answer is, they don't want people to ignore the group content. That has always rung a little hollow to me.

In a purely PVE game, of course, you only ever need gear as good as is required to do the content you're doing, if that makes sense, so the flip side of your statement is why do you need the gear necessary to do the group content if you're doing the solo version, or whatever. Presumably for many (most?) players, it is some kind of epeen comparison thing, and they want to look as awesome as Timmy the Raider when standing around in town. I don't know; it is an interesting problem to try to solve, particularly because so much of the issue is tied up in player psychology.

I guess the question then is are you paying for the content or are you paying for access to the server?  What about single player games that are just plain really hard and most people that play the game can't finish them?

Point taken, maybe I should try it. Super Heroes aren't my thing though, even if the movies are pretty popular, guys in pantyhoses just aren't part of my culture. And the explorer in me is just not tempted.

Heck, I got carried, of course I don't have any insight of what the next big thing will be. I guess I just want a MMO that lets me progress solo, with the accessibility of Wow. A game which understands why I play online : to be able to interact with people, but without the hassles. A game designed around this idea from the get go. Wow did a lot, but then it was built where making Everquest more accessible was a new feature.


Well we're talking about Blizzard's next : at the time of its release, Wow was pretty much that, at least during leveling. Heck, I'm not even asking for a game catering to both the raiders, the PVPers and people like me... I wouldn't miss the raids or PVP all that much, I don't mind them though.  :awesome_for_real:

Excellent point here.  It's all about the carrot and the perceived value of the carrot that will keep players jumping through hoops. 

If it takes a lot of time/coordination, this is a value-added process in the mind of the gamer.  I just never seem to connect gaming with self-esteem building.  This is likely where my confusion with current MMO philosophy stems from. 

I'm not going to try and pull a fast one here and say that to many people, including myself, there isn't a bit of peacocking going on, because pretty much all players, be they casual, hardcore, strict carebears or PvPers, want the best for their characters - otherwise, why play? At all? I go out of my way to obtain things, as you've probably seen - things some people don't even like that much ( :heart: my Nether-ray) - to me, this is no different in terms of a time:money investment as people who like to 25-man Naxx 5 days a week - the difference is I get to dictate how and when I obtain what I want rather than either A: diminishing my own life outside the game or B: putting others out because I can't honestly keep up with their schedules.

I think the real trouble with the whole solo vs group loot attainment scenario is that developers need to find a sweet spot between having players feel like they're playing a game and feeling like they're logging on to a job. It's a fine divide and there will always be dissent on either side of it - god knows there's been days when I've logged on to do faction dailies and sighed - but I honestly do feel that should I want [Greatstaff of Momentous Area of Effect Panty Removal] or equivalent that currently only drops from Hugebastard Toptier McRaidonly, I could go on a different path towards getting it than raid raid raid, RNG need/greed fail.

This said, I pretty much hate all the Ulduar gear. Ugly ugly ugly. I'll raid Ulduar if it's fun, but I can't say I give much of a damn about the gear drops!

Also, you are vastly underestimating how accessible the WoW group content is compared to some of those older MMOs.

Raiding is a giant time sink created to soak up time while they make new content (anything, that is, that required more than one run). Offering another path to get the rewards, would main no one would raid. To a point.

If offering an alternate path means that noone would raid, doesn't this say a lot about how players (aka customers) feel about the raiding game?

This derail brought to you by the sheer level of awesome that implying business decisions should factor in an imminent singularity creates.

Sooort of. The problem with raiding isn't so much the raiding itself, it is the administrative overhead - scheduling, managing loot, making sure you have the right lineup, running a vent server, etc., etc., etc. Even if the raiding itself is fun (and I think it is for the most part), that stuff will put a certain number of people off if they can avoid it by getting the gear solo.

And have other players grief it just as easily by being present in the area and doing nothing more.

There are ways around that - make people flag themselves as participants in the PQ, and aggro mobs to participants on spawn, etc. There's a ton of ways you could stop that sort of griefing.

All of which would look good on paper and fail miserably in practice.


Its not really about whether you wish to appeal to everyone. You can appeal to everyone as long as you establish what your core game is. You build a core game and have it stand alone, be it able to function on its own merit. Then add what you will from there. Its really about building a good game first before worrying about who doesn't want what.

Yep.

This just turned into a hardcore vs. casual aka group vs. solo content piss fight!  WOO!  I havn't been part of one in a while.

Some people LOVE group content so they get gear to do group content.

You only like soloing.  You have finished all you can do solo.  Why not quit?  Some people are very content doing dailys, collecting pets and doing all the other little things in the game. 

If you don't like group content why do you want gear meant for group content?  You know how DIKU-MMOGs are.  You know what you were getting into.  I don't see why you're railing against it.  Blizzard's actually done a lot to uncockblock the end game for most players.  More and More people are getting teh shiny.

It's pointless complaining that you can't do Ulduar because it's raid based and you want to be able to solo it.  It's actually silly.

I quit WOW because I don't like dealing with random raid guilds and I had completed everything else I wanted to do in the game.  Simple as that.

I don't consider raid content, group content.

Draegan, You're perfectly right in a sense. There are other games for us soloers to play. Well, maybe there lacks a solo game with other people doing their stuff around the player, which is maybe what I long for.


I'm not railing against Blizzard, I'm just trying to put into words the reason I left Wow... I'm not bringing anything new to the table, I'm perfectly fine about it. But if they want me to spend time with their new MMO (which is mostly going to be a day 1 buy, if it comes out before the world ends), they better change the formula. They don't even have to get rid of the diku mechanisms, I enjoy them for the most part until the solo content ends more or less abruptly. I don't really give a damn about Ulduar. Well, if you could get into raids more or less like you enter a BG, maybe I would care about them. Anyway I respect people raiding, I don't mind about them.

But saying that Diku-MMO have to involve raiding as the endgame is like saying Diku MMO need forced grouping from level 1.

Of course content is finite, of course the way Wow and other dikus are made implies giant time sinks in the form of raids.

Well, some of us just hope someone will find a way to make these games another way. I guess while talking about a "next gen" MMO we know nothing about, that is a valid, if a little derivative topic.

I mean, there is plenty to do while still giving things to do for both groups of players.   WoW HAS done a lot for solo players in the end game.  I'd be willing to bet that you could outfit your character entirely in "purples" without ever joining a group if you put your mind to it.  Not to mention the various endgame collection mini games like pets, vanity items, mounts, etc which can mostly be done solo.

I guess my problem is that having seen WoW drastically skew towards giving solo players more and more options for both getting their shiny purple gear and having goals to work towards at max level, it seems like people just wanting to do the exact same content as group players seems silly.  Maybe its just a case of people always wanting what they can't have, even when they have plenty of good stuff in front of them.

I would not go as far as calling the solo endgame of Wow good. Sure, you can grind, you will always have something to do. But once you hit 80, there's not much fresh things to solo. Of course, the game has to end... But

But to be frank, it's not only a soloer's problem. It's the grind. There must be more creative ways to iterate content...

I'm not even that much a solo player, my last main was a tank 10-80. I love to group. I'd just like to do it on my own terms (with 3, 6, or 14 players, for ten minutes or three hours...). I'd like the game to adapt to my schedule. Not the other way around. It's not always possible, but it should be pretty up in the developer's concern (if they want me as a player). So yeah to public quests, easier loot (so I wouldn't be regarded as negligible by players with more playtime when they need a tank and end up with a retard in T-whatever the latest)... yeah to a design that does not totally makes older zones negligible (some sort of newgame + ?)

I admit I must sound like someone who wants everything catered to him. At least I can wish.

My suggestion to you Solo folk is for Blizz to design some big purple semi-invisible Tram ride that goes through all the Raid instances.  This way, you can experience all the content just like the groupers w/o investing time, patience, and social stability.  Just sit back and watch the fireworks.  Maybe put a crafting station in it and you can drop pots on the folks below.   :why_so_serious:

I realized shortly after I posted that I was gonna be sorry.

Do you pay 15$ for access to gear?  Or do you pay for a commitment to ongoing content creation?  Because if your complaint is that there isn't enough content for solo players, I might be with you.  But the argument that solo players in an MMO should have access to equal gear because they're paying customers is just silly, and you both know it.  You don't want to play an MMO.  You want to play Diablo 2 on Battle.net.

I've always thought of raiding as sort of an e-sport.  More like an e-rpg playing league.  Where you have teams (guilds), who play games (raids).  You have a team captain (Guildmater/Raid Leader).  You have your assistant coaches (Officers).  You have a League (Developer) who handles all the rules, enforcement of such, and the greater health of the League.  You have to pay the League an association fee (monthly fee).  So you pick a team, and commit to coming to games.  Of course you're free to find a team that best suits your style of play within the League.  Some teams are more competitive.  Some are more laid back.  Or you can even start your own team.  But just because you paid the fee doesn't guarantee you get to hit home runs every time at the plate.  That's crazy.  Who would even want to play in that league?  Not me.  Not you either.

I had to check the timestamp on this thread to be sure. Only thing I can think is that so many people showed up new to WoW, or were early EQ1 quitters who found religion in it :wink:

Seriously. And the analogies don't change much either.

The we're-all-paying-the-same thing is a red herring. You're not paying Blizzard to get guaranteed access to every bit of code they put into the software. You're paying to access their service in which you choose how to play. If you choose to play alone, then you get content appropriate to how you chose to play. You can get the best content in the game for how you play, and that's all you need. When you choose to play a different way, you'll get new content appropriate to that new way. And when you've finished the game the way you play, time to reroll or move on.

To think otherwise is merely the emotional investment you brought all by yourself to a game that nowhere lists it as a requirement.

I pay $15 for enjoyment of a game.  Nothing more, nothing less.  If your game gateways or locks me out of something because of my play style, and another opens itself up to accommodate that play style and doesn't lock me out of others, I'll go to that other game.   This was part of the reason WoW was so successful to begin with.   Fewer gateways, easier access.

The F2P games get this and allow it through game play and microtrans. I agree that one of them will be the "next big thing" but we simply haven't seen it yet.

I'd say we haven't yet seen it for us. Plenty of f2p games attract and retain others, just not at the revenue range WoW operates at, which makes them feel less relevant. But then, nobody else operates in the realm of WoW either, so we'd have to think every other game including Eve was less relevant too. :wink:

I've said it a million times already, I guess I'll say it again.  There are reasons why soloers enjoy playing MMO's as solo games.  I'm sure that you can figure these out.  MMOs offer gaming dynamics that can't be found in single player games.  An economy is just one of them.  

As for your other point, why (other than e-peen) do you even care what gear I have in a pve game?  Why does it even matter beyond the economy?  Is it because I bypassed some painful cockblock that was added to the system to help create a class structure among the playerbase?  

What Darniaq said makes a lot of sense.  It explains my gaming habits in recent history.  I play until I have exhausted the solo content in these games and then leave.  I guess when a company decides that they want to have more of my money, they'll stop treating me like a second class gamer.  

But you are a second class gamer. You play MMO's solo you are an irrelevant aspect of the playerbase.


You want gear to be defaulted to you merely for purchasing the game? While the rest of the playerbase actually has to fucking play the game to achieve similar things. The entire playerbase already has equal access to the content. Your inability to achieve whatever goal you want in game is due to choices you have made.

Irrelevent?  I'd like to think that the goal of any business is to make money.  There are a lot of gamers out there that would spend their money were there more options for spending it.  The question that we should really be asking is: how much does offering a solo play path affect the bottom line of a group focused game?


Do you see something wrong with alternate routes to the same end?  I believe that grouping should enhance efficiency.  Groups doing group content should have access to rewards faster.  I have no problem with solo play requiring a longer and more difficult path to an end result.  I'd just enjoy the opportunity to face a different type of challenge beyond cat herding. 

Offering a wider array of playstyle options seems to make good business sense.  What am I missing in this assumption?

Out of curiousity, would you want the same level of gear as the people who group/raid? Or do you just want your own loot progression so you have shit to do?

I ask because the highest level of stuff I do in WoW is 10 man raids for the most part (I do sometimes join 25 PUGs, but it's rare). It has its own loot progression. My gear isn't as good as the 25 people, but I don't actually care because I'm not doing 25s, and it's good enough for the stuff I DO do. If there was a heroic dungeon progression, I'd probably do that on some of my characters and be happy with that.

I'm a big soloer in MMO's while leveling up, by the way. One of my biggest gripes about LotRO is that I cannot do the epic story solo. Even if I've outleveled it by a good chunk, their elites may still kick my ass. I wouldn't cry if MMO's stopped hiding their most interesting story bits behind group content, but I know THAT is a pipe dream.

Ummm... what's to stop the Raider from dipping into Solo content as well?  Regardless, the group player will ALWAYS be more "content-complete" no matter how resolved the devs are to catering to soloers.  That's just a fact.  So therefore, there's no point in trying to wave a magic wand and make solo play as rewarding as group.  It's impossible.

The main complaint here seems to have been gear, which I suspect is just "I ran outta crap to do and they don't add anything for meeeeee." Which I totally understand, that's the place I was at in Vanilla WoW. One could only run Stratholme so many times.  :uhrr:

The only MMO elements truly built for soloers are crafting, trading, economy, building, etc.  Beyond that, one can never expect much of anything from an MMO... or ANY game for that matter.  Even a game like Fable or Oblivion will eventually run out of solo content (most times way sooner than an MMO even).  At least with an MMO you're given the chance to grow with the game, whereas most single-player RPG you're just stuck with the purchase.

A smart soloer would just unsub. as soon as they've been through all the content and just wait for a content update.  Or learn to be a skilled pvper, crafter, etc.  Become a gold farmer and corner a few markets or something.  Respec or pop a new toon, whatever.

Impossible, no.  Unlikely to happen, yes.

The only reason why solo content doesn't have the same rewards as raid content is that noone would ever raid if they could get the same gear solo.  Perhaps this is a signal to game designers that few players want or enjoy raid content.  Given alternative paths to the same end, most players would avoid raids.  Doesn't this tell you something about current MMO implementation?  My take is that it's all stuck in the 90's.  In a pve game group play should be significantly more efficient.  I don't see what's wrong with this. It rewards teamwork without mandating it.  

Having multiple paths toward the same goal would offer a wider variety of gameplay options and styles.  Forcing players to play the game only one way seems a bit archaic to me.  Mythic got my money for almost 5 years (I quit during ToA's early days).  As a solo player I could experience the endgame in a wide variety of ways that all lead to the same rewards (RR's and ultimately token gear).  Granted, the endgame was pvp focused. 

I believe Nebu means that he should be eligible for the same loot eventhough he's playing alone, even if that means he has to juggle a herd of rhinocheros wearing a blindfold to match the "difficulty." As is, he can't under any circumstances obtain rewards of the same quality as those inclined to group.

Diku-MMOs aren't really group efforts as such, you don't play with a group to improve the group, you play with a group to get a personal (even inseparable) reward. It's more akin building a toolshed in your backyard. You can build it yourself, taking longer, or pay off a friend with beer to have him or her help you. Some prefer doing it themselves, some prefer having a friend over. The result would be roughly the same in the end.

Hell, raiders run out of content too.  If you look at the top end raiders, they complete the content in DAYS at this point and then grind the same places over and over for months (or eventually stop) until the next raid gets released.   If anyone, raider or solo player, decides they've run out of things to do, they can cancel their subscription until something new for them comes out.  If people want an endless stream of content and progression, you will never ever find any game that does that.

I guess my point is, I'm not sure what you are REALLY asking for here.  The new raid instances have generally been released with a some solo and small group content.

Do solo players really view the raids as some endless stream of new and exciting content?

Way wrong. MMOs are as much an amalgamation of features and systems as they are to Achievers who come from a wide swath of lifestyles.


Actually, it's more because these systems all have completely different reward systems in modern MMOs, and mostly because the stats are as different between them as the players who are motivated to partake.

• If you can solo to the end of the levels, it's because the game provided the right kind of drops in the right kind of progression for you to get there. There is a clear end here.
• Meanwhile, raid drops are all about you continuing the raid to the end, and then going to the next tier of raiding.

If a raider takes their raid gear out to the solo space, it makes winning solo PvE fights easier, but it's not a requirement. Besides, a raider in solo space is either there to kill time or to grind something that'll ultimately make it easier to raid.

Other separate systems are Arena-like PvP and BG/RvR large-scale PvP. What needs to happen in these environments are as different from the needs of a solo environment and a raid environment. So it follows that the type and pace of rewards would all be different too.

Yes, you are playing a game focused and based on group interaction yet don't want to play with others. You are 100% irrelevant. And in theory i would have no problem what so ever with a solo path that entailed the same amount of investment and effort and offered similar rewards. The only problem is cant see how such a path is possible just making it soloable automatically decreases the "difficulty". How can you tune a solo encounter to being possible for every class yet difficult enough to equate to raiding progression?  No amount of "grinding" is equivalent to raiding. Yet you would be forced to make it the center piece of your "alternative" path. You are not guaranteed gear by raiding. If you fail to kill anything you get no reward. It is not just merely a factor of "trying". And even if you could magically make this happen it still would not be a good idea. It would undermine all of WoW's raiding content. Who the fuck would do the far more tedious and difficult task of working with a group of retards if they can accomplish the same thing by themselves?

You are asking for something impossible while being representative of a negligible amount of people. WoW has tons of content for the "solo" player.

What mechanic would work for separating gear from raids and solo content the same way resiliance works for PvP or do we just slap some sort of  "This item requires you to be near someone else wearing an item of this kind to work" and "This item does not work when near other magic items" or some stupid mechanic.

1) I believe that you're assuming both parts of this with no real data to back yourself up.  How negligible is the solo player?  Is there any real way to know this in a world of MMO's that derive their gameplay from an archaic construct of the past?  I contend that the solo market represents a real market, particularly as the EQ and UO crowds age.  Games that entertain this market will have an audience.  There are many people that enjoy group content that would also enjoy having alternate gameplay choices.  I believe both can coexist without negatively impacting the other.  I happen to think that this is very possible to create.  

2) I'm not here clammoring for a change to WoW.  That's a waste of time.  Rather I'm asking why there don't exist more gameplay options than what we've come to accept from the MMO market.  

You could simply create a trait like resiliance that acts as boss resistance in raid encounters.  It would make raiders more impervious to raid boss mechanics without giving them an advantage in solo or pvp situations.  Ward gear in WAR contains aspects of this... it's just poorly implemented.  You can also add titles, character appearance items, and trophies.  Crafting drop rate increases would also be a great added bonus to raiding (that is if crafting in MMO's were made to be meaningful). 

Red Herrings hate America.

What I don't get here is why, in a PvE game, YOU care how your gear compares to the raiders. Like I said, if you just want your own little progression path, I am totally with you, because running out of shit to do sucks. If you want the same exact gear, I'm not sure I understand why, since half the reason behind the raid gear is to gear up for the next raid, which you would not be doing, because you don't raid. I don't actually care what your gear level is, as in a PvE game it doesn't really matter to ME, I just don't understand why you want the same exact gear progression and NO COMPROMISE RAAR. 'Cause that "it doesn't really matter" goes both ways. Why do you care if I have shit that helps me raid easier?

Also, as other people have pointed out, it's less "raiding sucks" and more "organising a raid sucks." I like to solo, do groups, AND raid. I would do all three, although I wouldn't raid as often if I could get the same stuff solo. It's not because RAAR RAIDING IS ASS, it's because getting together people I like in one place at the same time just doesn't work out all the time, especially as my guild gets older (age-wise).

And to whomever it was that wanted to know if soloers really think raiders get an endless stream of content ... they do as compared to soloers and single-groupers. Releasing a new 5 man dungeon is, in fact, rare in WoW, to an infuriating degree. Besides which, raiders can do ALL the content released by Blizzard, solo, group and raid, so by default they get more content anyway. But who gets the big new dungeon every content release? The raiders. Everyone else MIGHT get a new slew of dailies. If they're feeling really super extra sassy like they were with Sunwell, they'll release a new 5 man dungeon, but most of the time, it's either jack shit or a new daily rep to grind. I can TOTALLY understand why non-raiders think that is bullshit. Because it is.

To play barbie. Raiding sets look cool.

That's an excellent point.  Mostly, I want to be able to enjoy similar content without the need for organizing massive amounts of people.  I think you're right in calling me on the whole gear issue as I may not have realized how much I want equality among vastly different things.  If the gear only enables further raid content, then there's no need for a soloer to have it.  I'd just like to have access to a path that allows me to solo more difficult content with time beyond the standard level progression.  I guess I'm just asking for there to exist a solo endgame that has a duration and interest level similar to that of the raid endgame.  It seems simple to create solo versions of raid content that would reward players with gear that would allow them to progress on a solo raid type path.  Perhaps I want too much. 

My typical progression in an MMO is to level to cap and then either reroll or quit.  If they gave me more to do at the endgame beyond reroll, I may be happy to give them more money.  I'm betting that I'm not alone in this as even raiders might also enjoy the challenge of a solo progression path as well. 

The urge to compare dicks is just too deeply rooted part of the human psyche. It doesn't matter how many times you say 'i don't get it' or 'it makes no sense', it's just the way things are.

There's no real achievement in a game or MMO.  All it comes down to is time spent and how much bullshit players are willing to put up to see the rest of it.

But anyway, while I know Nebu and his gaming habits to make the following assumption (and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong), he plays until he runs out things to do.  And he's not alone in that regard.  Studios would do well to note that there are more players like him than there are of you.


These two statements contradict one another.  Can you figure out how?

I can!   :yahoo:

He was right about me though and I owned up to it.  Giving it thought, I'm fine with not being equal to raiders.  They put up with an excessive amount of crap to have their shiny.  I just want a game that gives me something interesting to do solo once I hit the level cap.  The ability to do solo instances with a small, yet beneficial gear advancement path would be sufficient.  I think that having soloable dungeon crawls at cap would attract more than just the solo players as well.  Seems like a nice feature for all gamers.  Soloers have something to do with their newly leveled toon and raiders have something to do when their groups aren't available to do group/raid dungeons.   

The problem is the only repeatable end game content in WoW is the raids. I even have the sneaking suspicion that the popularity of pvp servers in WoW has much to do with how little end game content there is for solo'ers. Of course this isn't such a problem WoW is bleeding subs at any significant rate. There just a general level of dissatisfaction when it comes to Wow end game that no one has put their finger on because no one is really asked to think that hard. Again the problem with WoW ultimately competing with itself, since no mmo developer seems to understand the gaping hole in Wow armor, Blizzard can take its time patching the issue with figs leaves.

Yah i was talking in general; but i think that's what --again, in general-- it ultimately boils down to. We can tell ourselves as many times as we want that it's just virtual pixels and how it's not needed etc, but the id isn't sophisticated enough to recognize such difference, and it throws a tantrum at the sensation of being stuck with lesser equpiment. Especially when 'everyone pays the same'.

I absolutely would love for this to happen, and I don't actually think it is Impossible like some others here. It's less impossible and more that there's no will among devs to take a chance on the time involved in making some. But, as you said, it's not just soloers that would use that content, and I hope that realisation helps ease nervousness about that. I've already seen people on this board say the only thing they log in to do right now is Ulduar and nothing else, because there's nothing else for them to really *do*, because I'm apparently one of the only people in the world who doesn't totally hate the Argent Tournament (although I don't think it's really that good, either).

The people saying there's nothing else to do also aren't achievement whores.  Those little dings fucking tickle my achiever complex in a very pleasing way.

The pisser for the soloer is the solo content in WoW that's added later in the game life (like Argent Tournament) is going to take you a shit ton longer to complete than it ever will the raider.  Even with the same /played hours I will cream you in completion simply because I raid.  I cream over-world mobs in 2-3 hits right now. Folks in solo-obtainable gear will kill one mob in the time I've killed 5+.

There's no reason to not have multiple achievement paths.  None. It's a video game, folks.

I also disagree that NOBODY would raid if equal gear were obtainable solo.  I like seeing the bosses, the environments and learning the encounters.  It also gives me something to do with friends as a group.  It's running the same thing 50-60 times that gets old.

.  

I happen to believe in unicorns. What you have failed to do is explain how its possible. Ive explained why it does not work and that there is no "equal but different" comparing activities that require 100's of communal hours like raiding to anything a single person can accomplish. Maybe elaborate beyond "i think its possible".


WoW is one probably the single most accessible mainstream MMO on the market. It has content for a wide variety of "play styles" including people who like to play by themselves.  Expecting the same achievements of others without investing the time and effort is not a "playstyle".

I don't think anyone has any problem whatsoever with solo content.  If they do they're dumb.  I'd be fine if the rewards from solo content were passable but not equal to current tier raiding gear.  Sort of a way to ensure that anyone who wants to go on a raid has sufficient gear to do so.

See, I have a heart.

A huge part of the duration of raid content is gearing up other people.  If it was just gearing up yourself, it wouldn't last nearly as long.  People continue to go for months and months to get a single piece for their main, while some peopel start bringing alts, other people gear up their mains, etc etc.  

You really can't have all that interesting fights solo, also.  There is only so much you can do with a fight that is going to be done by someone who can not heal themselves,  wears cloth armor, or has a very  "squishy" spec (like arcane, as compared to frost, for a mage).  Some classes are objectively superior at solo content than others, and to balance this content so that it can be competeably by any class would be almost impossible.  I guess the next idea is that you have different solo content for each class, but not you are talking about multiple full length "raid like" dungeons for each class.  Lets say their are 2 dungeons for each class (for "progression").  Thats 10 classes x 2 dungeons = 20 dungeons for them to create, which is clearly unfeasible.  

I mean, there is plenty to do content wise now.  Northrend is absolutely CRAWLING with repeatable daily quests that you can solo.  This can earn you money, gear, vanity items, mounts, and pets.  That IS the solo end-game content, and we are talking about ONLY solo content, not even the very easy to Pug instances that are technically group content but still logistically easy to form up and fairly easy to complete at this stage of the game.

Think about all the changes that WoW has made over the years since its release.  Most of these have been done to make things more accessible, way more viable crafting professions which produce quality, epic gear even without having to farm for rare recipes, summoning stones that actually summon people to instances, removing attunements for the majority of their instances, adding tons more vanity pets/mounts which add uniqueness to your character.   Viable specs almost across the board.  Fast instances which can be competed in less than an hour almost universally.

Remember vanilla WoW?  Having epics outside of a raider was unheard of.  Even the small group content like Stratholme and Scholmance and BRS was in some cases very HARD, and not puggable realistically, and some times took hours even with a good group.  Crafting recipes were relatively rare and the good ones needed to be excessively farmed for or came exclusively from raids.  Repeatable/daily quests didn't exist at all.  Even then it was accessible compared to the other games that were out, and it has gotten progressively easier/more accesible and generally all around more playable for their "casual" playerbase.

That, is a GOOD thing.  This game, an MMO, is way more playable solo than almost any other game of this genre, and that is a GOOD thing.  I'm not arguing for a crazy raid centered only game, but I'm saying what they have already contains a good deal of content for almost every style of player, and that if most of the people who are complaining about lack of content might just be looking at the wrong genre.

Merusk said everything right here.  It's a game.  If you care about anything beyond your own enjoyment, you're doing it wrong.  Sjofn did a good job of helping me remember this.

Gryeyes: I've already offered up some suggestions in my posts above as well as many over the years in other threads.  If I thought you weren't just waiting to nitpick anything I was likely to post, I might rehash some of that here.  Considering the tone of your posts toward me, it just doesn't seem worth the effort. 

This is where I disagree. An MMO is more like a solo game with the option to group with other people than the other way around.

Mostly this.  As I said when I kind of launched this rehashing by saying we all pay the same $15 is that there are other reasons.  Lots.

I can say this though, since I'm going through WoW again on a new server.  I'm slow to level.  Most everyone I know there is at or near the cap.  The people who started around the time I did leveled twice as fast.  My options are to solo while chatting with people I know, or to play with strangers and completely ignore the people I'm there for.  That means I'm just doing quests.  Instances?  Ha!  Either I outlevel them by enough they aren't a challenge or someone is just blitzing me through.  Getting some gear upgrades is nice, but just doing something with a little more scripting and that is self-contained is nice to break up the monotony.

Y'all understand I had been asking for a month to be run through Zul'Farrak?  Just run through, not even doing it for real.  Had there been a way to solo it, then I wouldn't have needed to wait for someone to take pity on me.  (Get to do it again with Sunken Temple soon.  Whee!)  Yet some of you think that's good game design?  In a DIKU it's a damn waste once your playerbase has moved past that level of participation.

Maybe if I reach the cap I can join in on the current fun.  Get in on that grouping I'm "supposed" to.  Y'know, after somehow gearing up on my own after being forced to not enter instances no one else is doing.  Maybe I can drag nine other people on pity runs instead of just one person so I can reach a point where I contribute.  Hope it doesn't take nine months to gather that group.  That's if I can make it that long.

So let me ask in all earnestness:  Why the fuck is excluding me from content because of my forced and/or desired solo play a good thing, especially if it blocks me from joining groups when I might actually want to?

What are you talking about?  You can level 1-80 by yourself no problem.  If you are really complaining about not seeing 4+ year old mediocre instanced group content while you are leveling, then I don't know what to tell you.  Asking to get run through ZF for a month?  Hell you can level 1-80 in a month without making a big deal of it.  Once you hit 80, if you want to find groups for heroics, there are people doing them all the time, and you'll be able to pretty much gear yourself up enough leveling to 80 that you will be ready for them without having to "farm instances" no one is doing.

What content are you being excluded from?  I really have no idea where you are going with this post.

This might be a new concept for you, but some people play the game to have fun, not to blitz to the level cap.

That said, if we're going with our "alternate paths" theory, I would say you (Lant) should just accept that ZF/ST and those things are not on the solo'ers path. You can't ask for them to make everything this game has to offer enjoyable and accessible to you, because you're not the only one they're trying to please. I totally agree, though, that there needs to be way more emphasis on repeatable solo content at the cap that isn't just running daily quests for cash.

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.   It has nothing to do with getting to max level just to see the number 80, thats where the majority of the playerbase is, and that is where the fun is.  If you have a group of friends where all the people are disciplined enough not to out level each other, sure, yu can have fun going 1-80 doing every instance you want and more power to you for it.  It sure doesn't sound like anyone is having fun spending a month trying to get a ZF run.  This is just being realistic about the state of the game.

Sorry, let me say this in a less offensive way - people don't all find the same enjoyment from the same things.

I was just trying to make you understand why someone would be upset with not being able to do something right in front of them. I think level-up dungeons are stupid design for precisely the reason you mentioned, someday everyone will be at the cap and there'll be no one doing them.

So you spend the minimum amount of time in the majority of the content so you can get to the end fast and spend the majority of your time in a minimal amount of content?  Broken system is broken.

The easy way to do a "solo" progression path is just to emulate raids with bots.  You enter the instance, you choose your role, and the rest of the experience is designed to challenge you in a realistic way while eliminating some of the the more RNG aspects that could be problematic while dealing with bots.

So you can sit there healing an NPC tank for an hour? Yeah, that sounds exciting. You know, there used to be this game that had certain things in common with WoW, but which was much more fun and rewarding to play solo.

(http://macapper.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/diablo2.jpg)

But hey, it didn't have dedicated healing classes and "raids" and all that other stupid diku shit. Which is why no one ever played it multiplayer with their friends, amirite?  :awesome_for_real:

Fuck Act II. Worst part of the game, in my view.

And hence why I always say, the only content that exist is endgame content. 1-79 is tutorial and that's it. Players I think get a feeling that statement is true, but very rarely are they going to come close to putting it in words.

And healing people is jolly good fun?  Or is it the fact that when your raid is composed entirely of people you can't delegate the shit jobs to bots which makes it such a thrill?  It's not like Blizzard is just going to roll back WoW and install D2 on there servers, right?

Fixed.

Why spend such an amount of money for early content that players are going to rush ? I know they tried to make you come back to earlier zones of the expansions, but why can't the dev find a way to make older content still useful. Maybe I'm bored soloing the same dailies for weeks, but would be pleased to go back to earlier content... Wow has a lot of content. Most of it is mudflated to death. But it doesn't have to be that way. Hell, you don't even have to get rid of the diku mold to solve that, you just need to tweak it in order to let the content be useful : use time travel (when you were level 20, you did this quest : flashback...), instance the zone and spawn bigger and meaner monsters... Be creative with older content, you don't have brute force your designers for them to create new zones from scratch every month... Of course such innovations would be expensive, but we're talking Blizzard here. And I'm not sure reworking older content is that much more expensive that producing brand new raid zones.

There was a problem with the soloing in WOTLK. When I hit 80, I had a shitload of quests remaining. Elite ones, long chains leading to dungeon quests... All of which gave completely obsolete rewards when I finished them. By the time I got to end the Arena in Ice Crown, I had crafted and / or looted much better stuff. I did the quests mind, because I enjoyed them. But the lack of loot meant something : there won't be anything more for you if you follow this path, your character evolution is basically over. Time to join a regular guild buddy.

I just hope in a next gen RPG, that kind of problem will be adressed from the start.

Healing is more fun for some players than tanking or dps.

You get to make the occasional decision for one thing.

Tanking is a shit job.

DPS is a shit job.


The only roles in an EQ clone that even arguably aren't shit are healing and cc.

But that isn't the problem, the problem is a design based on required classes for raiding that makes everyone sit around till they find them.

Hey look, it's 2002 in this thread.

Is not, it's 1999.

Why have 79 levels of not fun then, and force people to go through them?

I hate to say it, but that's shit design. Oh wait, i don't.

I loathed them when I first tried the quests and I still consider them C team output, but one thing that really is nice is how fast you can gear up from them. As long as you don't care about rediculously overpriced pets or flying mounts getting 25 tokens for a weapon is pretty trivial. I laugh when I see people paying 40 tokens for a blue pet while my alt gets their 25 token weapon after a little more than a week of jousting. The weapons may be sneered at by people with access to Uldaur gear but I'm quite happy with an ilevel 200 hammer for my shaman or a similar axe for my warrior, neither of whom will I be raiding on.

Well I'm happy Nebu owned up.  As I was catching up with the thread he went from somewhere I was ready to argue with to a place where I was coming from.

I think WOW should implement Zelda like dungeons for solo players at the level cap.

--

As far as leveling dungeons are going, you can't expect people to be doing 4-5 year old content.  Plus you can easily go back and do it yourself at a later date if you wish to explore it.  That or have your friends that raced to the cap help you at that time.  If you can't find anyone, well, tough.

1-79 is tutorial and that's truth

The funny thing about being the hamster in the wheel is that you never realize that your on a wheel. Maybe the smart rodents would figure out that their not moving but at best their logic would have them conclude they should move faster and try harder. This is where the majority of players in mmo's are at. Some are smart enough to figure out that 1-79 is not the game, but they can't come to a logical conclusion what to do with that data. At best they would figure that having 1-79 is the only logical way to keep players paying $15 a month for a game and are generally satisfied with that reasoning. If more people understood that the game actually shrinks the higher up the ladder you go, having to pay $15 dollars for 1-79 wouldn't sound to reasonable after all.

It is a glorified tutorial really.  Thats the design they've chosen at this point.  You can argue about whether that is a good choice or not.  It probably isn't.  I mean, I enjoy leveling up new characters still, and I don't necessarily "rush" but I don't wait around looking for a group to do content that I know I won't do in any reasonable time frame.

They've made the leveling process way faster, they've added Bind to Account items that give you more experience points when wearing them, they clearly think that leveling should be as quick and painless as possible while still teaching the character to play their class.

Maybe I have a hard time relating because I did all this content the first time around 4+ years ago, but it just seems like its unreasonable to ask Blizzard to go back and continue to make old content viable this long after release when the vast majority of their playerbase has already done it and/or doesn't care to do it.

We might agree on the fact that 1-79 is a tutorial. That's a damn expensive tutorial tough, and damn long too : if new players need a tutorial, make it 10 to 20 hours, and actually learn them to play their classes in a way that will help them when they reach the "true game".

To be frank, I don't care if they can't change Wow at that point. The game was (and still is) perfectly fine for what it is, but evethough it was a shining success doesn't mean it didn't have design flaws, which can be prevented now that they've been exposed (but as always with success, weren't they obfuscated by the 10 + millions sub ?).

You have two problems to solve when you build an MMO.

First, players who want or sometimes don't want to play together. They're your customers, so the best you can do is accommodate them. Want to play with 2 friends, and only with them ? Fine. It's quite hard to balance, but the first thing a MMO designer has to ask himself is : "How will I help people cooperate ? How will I incite (not force) them to ?" So use scaling, tutoring, whatever to achieve that. Easier to say than to do, I know.

Second, your ressources are limited. Even when you're Blizzard. So use them carefully, try not to waste them. I mean what percentage of Wow's assets are still relevant today ? A lot of work has been thrown away, and is actually useless now. That's a very wasteful design. It's not really surprising, as it is how our consumer society works : if it's too old or broken, don't mend it, throw it away ! Produce more, always more. Actually, it doesn't have to be like this. I don't have a solution obviously, but why couldn't a MMO consider the land it builds as maps rather than actual places... People are perfectly (more or less) happy to play in fucking Warsong four years latter. Instead of making Westfall a 10-20 zone, why don't treat as a map, that you happen to visit when you're 10-20 but have an opportunity to go to at max level ? The zone in itself is pretty interesting, would it be that expensive to tweak it for higher level players ? Same thing with dungeons. Maybe in a game designed as Wow it is, but then I'm not talking about Wow, as I said earlier.

I bear some responsibility for this.  It's not what I intended.  I realized it when it was already too late.

Soooo.

Casuals and Cats can live together.  Next topic.

---

The thought of a new IP for the next MMO is exciting no?  Please speculate oh how you'd love a 'steampunk' setting.

OH I KNOW WHAT WILL GET THIS TREAD ON TRACK!

Steampunk is stupid.  It's a stupid word.  STUPID.  Why is there a world full of copper tubing and punk rockers?  Do punks have a secrit plumbing society?

1-59 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 60.
1-69 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 70.
1-79 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 80.
1-(n-1) is the tutorial, the real game begins at n.

Funny how that line of thinking causes them to expand the game by increasing the number of tutorial levels with each expansion.

Blizzard themselves recognizes the problem, else DKs wouldn't start at 55 and the refer-a-friend program wouldn't offer triple xp and gifted levels.  Now they may not want to spend the resources to make the old content relavent again, but I can guarantee you that having wasted content (how many years of effort went into the 'tutorial' again?) isn't seen as a good thing.

DAMN YOU!

You can't even say it's the tutorial, really. Not when the player is told to skip the group content until they're at level cap as way to get through it. Because with this setup the supposed tutorial teaches the player nothing about how to play in group, which is one of the "fun" activities they're expected to take part in, once they hit that l.80 or whatever.

Sorry, when I'm in a grumpy mood I don't stop until the stupid is throughly crushed.

Also we have nothing to go on, so speculation threads are pretty pointless at this stage.  I'd rather analyze where they have room for improvement in the next iteration.

Maybe Blizz is making something further along technologically, like an Augmented Reality console.
Perhaps we shall be raiding together in community gyms all over the world with our wooden Bluetooth swords!   :grin:

I'm curious as to what genre Blizzard is going to cover with this new MMO.

They have two genres of fantasy covered with Diablo and Warcraft, so yet another variation on fantasy somehow seems unlikely. They have sci-fi covered with Starcraft.

They like having total creative freedom, so doing anything based in modern day seems unlikely. Maybe some weird alternate reality modern day?

Lets not beat around the bush - Blizzard needs to make their new IP be a cyberpunk IP.

No. Fuck all that shit. The whole raiding/diku dynamic needs to go have a seat. It's a relic. If raids and anything else offered the same level of reward, 95% of everyone would do the "anything else" and forget the raiding game even existed. And we all know it.

"But WUA!" someone will say. "Raiding should offer the best rewards since it requires lots of logistical overhead and organization!"

Who really cares? A game's job is to entertain people, not train them in logistical coordination. What exactly is the rationale behind the idea that using loot to browbeat people into cooperative activities (that they likely wouldn't bother with if all things were equal) is a good idea? If it's a case of "Well then players will form social bonds, and those bonds encourage retention, and the end result is that we'll eventually make more money!" then I'm calling bullshit. That's no different than the rationale behind forced grouping, downtime, and all that other diku-related crap that has already fallen by the wayside.


Blizzard isn't going to make any real drastic changes to the status quo this late in the game, so who gives a shit? I'm talking about MMO design in general, and if one game's solo content plays like Diablo 2, or God of War plus loot, or whatever? And the other game's solo content is SimRaid with you plus 24 bots? Yeah, I think I know which one more people will want to play.

Raids started as dungeon romps. Players themselves brought the desire to endlessly repeat the damned things. And that desire came from the reality that at the level cap, the desire to continue improving a character ran head first into the lack of new levels to attain. What was left was gear that was originally intended to be rare. But long before TCGs reminded everyone, rarity isn't a state as much as it sets up a goal.

Fast forward two decades and you get people wanting to raid but not being willing to adjust their lifestyle and/or expectations to do it. But they still retain the desire to continue improving their character, because that's what a casino does to people. It's never about the current win, but the next one. Just one more job. MMOs are not unique in motivating people like this.

WoW has a solo endgame. It's called faction grinding and Battlegrounds. Oh, yea, BGs require other people, but you don't need to give a shit who shows up, and in some cases, not even really care how well they do their job. So it's solo against NPCs with player names instead. That was before Wintergrasp though, a place I haven't been, so this rule could be different now.

Which doesn't answer the statement that you cannot create a "solo" endgame in a DIKU without grind and/or lowered expectations on the players, which mine did.  There's one huge problem with the endgame in D2 though: Blizzard didn't include a CD-Key for my expansion in the battle chest.  Motherfuckers.

Personally, I think the most well setup group dungeon experience is DDO.  But, I havent played that game in ages.

Large Raids, however, could easily (to me) just be morphed into elaborate public quests - which is where you see a lot of companies going with design.

And if you really get down to why some folks dont like raiding, it's usually because of the pain in the ass it is to find a nice guild and/or group of people to play with.  Has nothing to do with the philosophy of the raid itself.  That's why PQs are pretty much the future, because they give the option of being guilded or not.  They just need to be implemented a bit more elaborately then they are currently.

I am entertained by tanking, healing, logistical overhead, and organization.  I am not insulted that you find me batshit insane.  In fact I may well be.  But dude, get the fuck off my lawn.

Everyone wants the next game to be their lawn, though.  And everyone is insulted when someone else wants to change what they perceive as their lawn.

Because people are self-centered shit bags.

I don't think it's a matter of solo vs group as much as a matter of accessibility. Raids are incredibly unfriendly to most players because they need heavy logistics and specific class distribution, with all the headaches that ensures. Whereas content that can be approached in a more impromptu manner (by giving one the option of joining alone into a group activity without needed a preformed group) should be much more attractive to the majority of players - public quests and battlegrounds are a good start, just need to polish and scale them properly. After all, why are battlegrounds at least if not far more popular than 5 man arenas, even though they have 2-3 times more players in them?

To hear you guys talk it's almost as if you believe there is a game buried any place in WOW.

The reality is that levels 1-79 are the tutorial and then the game ends.

I enjoyed the tutorial.

UO does this with PVE in what's called the Doom Gauntlet. It spawns a number of bosses proportionate to the number of players present, each of which has a certain chance of horking up an item for anyone who does (or is grouped with someone who does) over X amount of damage. So there's basically havoc as three or four bosses are fought simultaneously by maybe a guild group of 5 people, a couple groups of 2 or 3, and half a dozen loners.

The fights aren't as elaborate (or gimmicky, depending on your point of view) as modern diku boss fights, but the encounters can be relatively unpredictable in a "Oh shit that newb pulled all 3 over here at once, move!" sort of way, which can be fun in itself.

The tutorial was a better game than the majority I've ever played.  It also kept me entertained longer than any other game has.

Hmm... maybe the level system is a left over from old conventions. It's good for a single player type of game that's meant to played until the main story arc is over, but using a limited scale when faced with infinite playtime?
Even in single player Fallout 3 people complained because the levelcap was set too low...It seems obvious this is no good mechanic to port into an open-ended game.

UO and EVE may have some hints already: Gear breaks and needs to be replaced, exponentially increasing skill costs, war that eats up resources...

Different point: In a game that will run for years and constantly be balanced and always changing, skill points that can be put into talents and relocated are far superior to "I rolled a warrior and now I am always going to be a warrior"

*/end rant; gets  glass of milk*

Officially seconded. 

Also, Blizzard must have some sort of formula for what makes a 'heroic' dungeon at level 80, i.e. the difference in hit points and mob damage of say the original Nexus run, and it's heroic counterpart.  I don't see what they cant just add that to all their dungeons, from SFk, to Maraudon, right through to Burning Crusade content.  Have the bosses dish out badges of heroism, and there you go.  I mean, I'm not even insisting they convert them all at once, start one at a time and do it piecemeal.  i mean, this is hardly a novel suggestion.  Of course, it would be a problem for the level appropriate suckers toons running the dungeon on pvp servers, with level 80 asshats standing around outside of them, but that's not a big enough reason to hold them back.

What is the motivation for soloers wanting an endgame? Is it that they want to continue growing their character beyond the cap? Is it because they want a reason to stay in the same game their casual acquaintences are staying in to raid?


I also think it's funny how often this is said. Maybe it applied in EQ1 because you needed to group frequently there. But how can anyone say soloing from 1-79 in WoW "teaches" anything about raiding? Everyone here can answer that question but I'm asking it anyway. You show up at the cap with a number of expectations from the rate of reward to the time commitment needed to achieve. What you learned about both of these things in no way applies to raiding.

Once again: raiding is just a very different system than the other parts of the world.

You don't learn much about raiding no, but I think that you get an idea about your character's abilities, talents and so forth.  It probably prepares you for small group content more than raids (especially now), since small group content is relatively trivial.  Granted, i think one of the biggest problems, at least theoretically, is threat/aggro, these mechanics are, as far as I know, never explicitly explained.

Anyway, its fairly obvious when you run into a an e-bayed character, so the 1-79 experience is teaching people SOMETHING.

Leveling to cap in WoW teaches you little to nothing about group mechanics.  If it's meant as a player tutorial, it's a terrible tutorial.  The solo pve is so easy, you need do little more than walk up to a mob and hit a couple of buttons repeatedly.  The game doesn't even force solo players to use all or even most of their group abilities.  When I got to cap and began grouping with some of the f13 folks, I had to use knowledge from past games to help me along.  WoW really doesn't promote situations where you NEED to use all your abilities.  I think this is one of the games shortcomings.  You're given access to abilities and then have to go to the forums to understand how to use them to their potential.  They should have some quests in game that provide players with this experience and information. 

Besides, the combat isn't what makes WoW a well-crafted game.  The combat is really pretty bland. 

Yes.

Edit: and I don't mean "growing" in the sense of piling on more fluff that's just for looks. I'm talking stats that affect gameplay going up.

Exactly. And that's why the game ends at the cap. Because unless you've got a company with nigh unlimited resources to throw at solo faction grinds, or can rely on that player to join PUG PvP like a BG, the game is over. It's just that no company has a marketing team dumb enough to come right out and tell the player that  :wink:

They've tried that with the hunter and Priest 60 epic weapon quest. That's pretty much it.

if you guys dont enjoy the tutorial why are you bitching about what comes after?  you're probally playing the wrong game then. 

wow is diku.  diku is old.  get used to it or play something like spellborn.

I think when people want a solo endgame, they don't really ask for a single player game with no end. They wouldn't play a MMO if that was the case. Mostly, they want to continue playing the way they did during the leveling phase which is a mix of solo and group activity, with regular gratifications. They're not staying just for the gameplay at that point, they are bound to have social ties. And they want to keep these ties, but not to the point of committing their life to the game.

I guess what I'm asking for is a game that lets me play without too much unnecessary time commitment at the level cap. Hey, even finding an instance group can be painful at times, and we're talking about the most successful online game ever.

Besides, I'm perfectly aware that content is finite, but I'm pretty sure it could be better designed from the get go to allow replayability. There are lots of possibilities. For instance, try to make a more dynamic game : let the hardcore shape the politics (isn't it how Eve works ?), but then leave a space for the casuals to watch and participate when they feel like it... At least the people farming PVP / raid instances could be useful to the playerbase as a whole, instead of pawning everyone else during PVP and sporting really glittery pieces of armor in front of the bank. I know a lot of things like that were tried these past few years, and that didn't always work, but well, factor in the Blizzard polish or something.  :oh_i_see:

I believe that's exactly what Blizzard intended the daily quests and their cash/rep grind to be.

This is basically exactly what I was going to say.  Northrend is crawling with solo daily quests that can be used to earn cash, rep, etc.  Yes, its repeatable, so its not like the endless 1-79 content, but then again, raiding and dungeons  in general are very repetitive too. 

Daily quests are fine, but there aren't enough of them, and they only take place on a few selected zones. Maybe I'd like a reason to revisit Duskwood or even Desolace, instead of spending my evenings in Ice Crown. And I'm not talking about leveling an alt. The endgame could use more than a few zone.

Of course that would be problematic with the way servers are populated : these zones would be empty. Then again, I'm using Wow as a reference but we're rambling about a next gen MMO.

This.

Inactiviste, think of it this way: what is raiding but the exact same thing over and over. That has been the middle for a long enough time now that the "endgame" is synonymous with repeating the same thing endlessly, and long the way accruing some progress towards periodic goals. The big difference is the of those rewards.

Content is expensive, as you note. It's also based on a very specific formula of development. What you talk about is what many have talked about over the years, some cross-section between procedural content, procedural missions, and rewards to match. The best examples are the old UO News Posts which would send you to an area in <variable> direction for <variable> distance to <save|collect> <variable> from <variable>, culminating in something like "Head northwest for a bit to save the Princess from the Orcs". This was later revisited in AO with dynamically generated levels and goals and then again in SWG with mission terminals.

The problem is that it doesn't feel authentic nor finite. The underlying formula becomes obvious so quickly players will end up gaming it for the XP, loot or other rewards if the mission terminal is the easiest way to get those things. It in no way creates compelling stories that players care about because it's too predictable in how it builds the story.

The next step would be to create an entire ecosystem where every moving part is connected to every other moving part and all things can be affected by players. They can barely get that right in a game with one player though, much less thousands  :grin:

Doesn't mean the goal isn't worth pursuing of course. Just means we ain't there yet by a long shot.

And of course, create retention by making people log on every single day for a short but habit-inducing run in the squirrel wheel.

Sorry, I just had to point out that dailies aren't really about giving solo players "something to do." It's about giving solo players angst because they aren't doing something today.

Maybe the problem with Blizzard is that they want the content they release to be "perfect". Of course, with the level of success they get, you can't blame them... But from time to time, I'd rather try a "not that great" rehash of an older instance (Say Deadmines with meaner mobs) than a "perfectly tuned" (for people with level appropriate gear, said level being outdated in a few months) instance for the tenth time... Just throw in a few designers and let them try, how much would that cost ?

Of course it wouldn't be perfect, but I'm pretty sure that with right rewards it could entertain us "casuals" between expansions... A lot of developers reuse their assets in a clever way : think FF X-2 (whatever you think of the game itself, it's a rather interesting way to reinvent the places they built for FF X), the way the Megaten series reuses mobs that were designed for SMT 3...

Edit : I hereby predict "sustainable development" to be a MMO buzzword, uh, sometime in the future.  :drill:

They may have intended dailies as a solution, it wasn't a very successful one though. The grind was too thinly disguised and the gratifications were not appealing at all to those who had access to group content. Admittedly, WoW's focus is not what Inactiviste describes and even Blizzard's resources are not infinite, so I don't blame them. It would be nice if their next MMO had the resources that went into the creation of say, Ulduar, used to craft content that doesn't need a preformed group.

Waste of resources, because "not that great" gets quickly ignored. At any given time, there's "not that great" in some form in WoW. And entire other MMOs are, well, the reason why WoW is so popular  :grin:

The point though is that the dailies are grindy but built to be soloable with immediate, short and longer-term rewards. Just like raids without the group, and rewards at a different pace. And this is important to realize because the "endgame" of a diku-inspired MMO is exactly this of repeatable content. Whether it's dumping players into a daily, BG, Arena or Raid, it's all repetition with reward payouts that slow down.

It's not ideal, but to do anything else would require the rethink I mentioned above. Short of that it's the same old formula of static content rollout and tuning how often the player needs to see the same of it. And so far it has worked well enough for newer companies to enter the space with the same old formula and still make good money at it.

So what, exactly, is "wrong" here? :wink:

Once everybody has reached top level and has the best gear, the ones that don't immediately start an alt just stop playing. Blizzard released the Deathknight as a "hero class", a powerful soloer that starts at level 55 ,precisely so that it would make a quick alt once a player's main was finished at 80. In terms of crafting content that doesn't need a pre-formed group: From what everyone says, THAT WAS WRATH OF THE LICH KING. Until Ulduar people were running PUGs through basic instances, heroic instances, and both 10 and 25 man versions of Naxx. Apparently tanking is as easy as DPSing now, and that takes most of the brainpower pressure off healers as well.

The response? Practically the entire playerbase finished every bit of the expansion's content in record time and demanded more. So Blizzard cranked up the difficulty on Ulduar and released the half-ass patch job of dailies that is the Argent Tournament. They cannot produce quality content fast enough to keep everyone entertained. In other words:
...because otherwise they'll ignore the game entirely and decide to let it go next time their subscription comes up for renewal.

I imagine one of Blizzard's central focuses on the next game is implementing strong tools and a modular graphic framework that will allow them to produce content more quickly.

Yes but content was decimated through even before WotLK - unless there was an intentional cockblock. That will happen no matter what, and I agree with you 100% they need to push out content faster. The difference is this time it's not just the 0.01% of the playerbase who gets to see the arch villain. I'd say that's a good thing, and I'd love to see the game they could craft if they set their full attention on this approach from the start, not just trying to splice EQ's genes.

I personally hope whatever the backend of their new game is, that it's well-coded and tougher to fuck up. Either the people taking care of WoW are complete retards or their backend/client is a fucking mess. The weirdest shit happens with their patches. Right now various abilities flat out quit working in some instances (notably naxx, which I got to tank without Shockwave last time thank to these weird bugs. Supposedly Shadow Priests and some other classes have random skills stop working too), entering instances flags everyone for PVP, mobs will start sidestepping the tank or moving/twitching oddly for no real reason (even when you have them planted in place), etc. etc.

There have been minor patches where completely unrelated skills and spells bug out and do totally different things. Weird shit like a specific -rank- of paladin blessing summoning a Draenei mount or other completely random things.

Emergent gameplay !  :ye_gods:

Fucking wah. I may not like that raid/diku has devoured all gameplay in WoW like a hungry shark, but I'm not willing to say "Throw that baby out with the bathwater!". I've raided and liked it and *gaspzors* had fun! So there! I'm also on a break from WoW, playing Eve because I realize that doing Anything for months on end is boring, and you need to take a break and do other things. (I also picked up a starter guitar set. See! I'm not a total catpiss man!  :uhrr:)

This is actually precisely what blizzard tried to do with their meeting stones (better known as "retard rocks"). The idea was you click on it to register and it constructs a group for you. Problem is the player-base strongly rejected the algorithms used to match players, the lack of control over who joins and the fact it treated players as interchangeable. Trying to do a heroic and get some casual soloist in green gear? Blizzards algorithms didn't have a problem with it, but the players sure did. End result being no one used them apart from those who couldn't get groups any other way.

As to the other discussions I like WoW dailies. If I'm only on for a half hour I can still do something that progresses my character. I'm in a raiding guild and I still do dailies and can work towards things I want. That said, if all you want is a single player RPG why the heck are you paying a MMO subscription?

I'm also playing CoX and I do enjoy the scaling instances and the fact groups are more freeform and the XP return encourages people to fill groups. All of these do place limits on balancing the challenge of the encounter though.

At any given time you are paying for 10% of the game.

Right, but when the new content for my 10% of the game sucks, then I'm not going to playing it.  I'm going to be complaining about it.

Actually the meeting stones utterly failed because they were implemented in a very retarded way. The system had two huge flaws: 1) it required you to actually go and click the stone outside the dungeon just to enter the group "queue" - nobody did that, spamming LFG was way less time consuming; and 2) the algorithms completely disregarded specs and gear - picking feral druids for healers and fury warriors for tanks. The player base rejected the system because it was stupid, not because it matched them with a green geared player. The proof of this being that after subsequent patches where meeting stones being changed to basic summoning stones, and the LFG system reworked to be more flexible, most players now use the system quite happily.

Anyway,  it's not a single player RPG that I want, there are plenty of those around. I rather want an MMO that doesn't force me into a rigid schedule amd a rigid preform group if I want to progress past a certain point. WotLK got a bit better, but WoW started as a "Raid or DIE" game and it's extremely hard to move it off those tracks. Allow me to give an example of the type of behavior that I'd like to see: joining battlegrounds. Ofcourse organized groups perform better and that's how it should be, but the possibility of participating in said content just by hitting the Join button is there. And that explains why BGs are vastly more popular than 5 man arenas, the latter simply take so much effort to organize that virtually nobody bothers.

Now, is it possible to take that ease of use and accessibility and apply it to a PVE regular gratification system without running into the balancing issues that you mention? I'd say yes, but it would require to be built as the core of the game experience, and more resources spent on designing and balancing the system from the start, not just throwing out a painfully formulaic mission generator.

I think your missing the point. I pay for your game. I pay for 99.99% of it, at the very least I paid for 60% because I can respect somethings in game that I just won't do, but other people will do. If I'm paying for 10% of the game  I question why I keep paying, like smart consumers do. In the typical mmo players head new content is simply there to replace the odd shit. Like buying new furniture. Which is cute, but leads to credit card debit or in the players case wanting more content then any sane studio can be expected to make it.

Instead you will get  painfully formulaic boss fights, as they'd have to be dumbed down if you had an open group system where any moron capable of wiping the group can join. Hell they'd probably do it just to greif you. Look at the difference between the new Vault boss and the old one. On my server the previous one was pug'd daily. Now, the success rate seems to be about one group in five where you can be assured of someone who can change targets when required.

Well, to be fair, you actually only pay for > .00002% of the game you are playing.

Technically, everyone else is subsidizing your subscription costs.

If the game has more than 10x the amount of stuff you could feasibly do it would seem to me that you're getting a good deal on your money. You can't look at it like you look at a pizza and say "well if I pay for the pizza I should get the whole pizza". You're paying for access to a service that includes many features you will never utilize. You're paying a reasonable fee to access said service even if you only utilize a small portion of it. Rather flipside, the people who utilize MORE of the service are simply getting a better return on their investment.

To quote a line from Fight Club, you decide your level of involvement. Blizzard says "here's the service, here's the fee, have at it". Anything beyond that is up to you.

I don't really care what anyone in particular enjoys. As a system of game design, diku is done. Exhausted. Tapped out. There's Blizzard and their success which no one else will ever duplicate, and beyond that the subscription MMO industry has been nothing but a giant bloodbath ever since, with all the usual suspects burning millions and millions of dollars pitching one derivative diku flop after another. The futile hope of stealing away WoW players has kept developers shoveling money into what is, outside of WoW, a nearly dead genre.

While I agree with you 100%, I think you're speaking into a void.  The box sales of AoC and WAR will provide enough incentive to keep diku development going for years to come. 

Yeah, you can't really say "Its dead", when you, yourself are not a normal user. History shows this model has many, many more years in it.

I think he can.  As a creative medium, it is dead.  It has been thoroughly flogged to death and beyond.  From a financial standpoint, the cart still has wheels.

Given things like Aion and Blade&Soul wouldn't say so; they still look for ways to push it in various directions.

Perhaps my perception is relative.  I've been playing in diku models for some 30+ years.  I'm ready for something fresh, but lose sight of the fact that there exists a market of 15 year olds out there that find this stuff to be brand new. 

Isn't all perception relative?

Anyways, I think the term "diku" is the trap here, as much as it does save time in these discussions. Everyone knows diku-inspired gameplay when they see it, but I bet we would all define the term to our own standards. It would be much easier to discuss these topics if people just said:

"I no longer have patience for games where the objective appears to be 'get more powerful.'"
or
"This multi-user game is undesireable because the only social interactions it encourages are time consuming raid encounters."
or
"My character has 3 dozen stats and they all mean nothing while burning my eyes."
or
"I hate being given a sword/gun/pie/kryptonian lineage/whatever and dropped into a field full of nonsense creatures."
or even
"Recent attempts at providing a quest based narrative to obscure the game mechanics behind a meaningful story are, with a few notable exceptions, no better than a field full of nonsense creatures."

Then again, maybe we're all burnt out with being mmo burn outs and it's just easier to make diku a four letter word.

It IS relative.  There are always ways to improve design and add in different systems to the DIKU genre.  Do you want me to arm chair design a few for you?  We can rehash a shit load of stuff.  

I just hate it when people who are vets of the genre say shit like "DIKU is so old, stop making it!  Class systems are over done!  Mana is such an old mechanism!"    :oh_i_see:

Stopit.  It's old to you.  

Edit:

Wow Dtrain said the same thing I just said.

That was, somewhat my point as well.

No one on this board is an "average user", not by a long shot.

The subscription model is kinda co dependent on the diku. If you ask people (with money) how to make people pay $15 a month, they will come up with a diku 9/10. The rest of the ideas are sandbox. Your right the diku model is an evolutionary dead end but that won't stop people from making them, won't stop players from wanting them, and won't stop the majority of them charging a subscription from flopping. But f2p dikus has proven that there is still a large market for dikus in general.

They're also showing how to start moving away from the conventions which have been held for so long and making better games for it.

Mana IS an old mechanism. Or Finite mana is. I have never seen a game be better for having it, only worse and frustrating.



/rant

Resource management can be fun. But not having anything worthwhile to contribute to a multi-player game is just a bad idea.

Turn 1:
Wizard: I cast magic missle
DM: You slay an orc!

Turn 2:
Wizard: Next level I can do that twice. But for now, I brood at the back of the party.
DM: The party laughs at you.
Friendly Elf: You can use your crossbow! Of course you have about a 1 in 20 chance to hit anything, but don't lose hope!
Wizard: I can't wait until I don't need them anymore.

When was the last time you played a korean mmo?

Korean MMOs aren't games, they're money-making schemes.

Finite Mana is resource management the same way filling up my gas tank is resource management.

Someday I'll check my email, click the "topic reply notification" link, and it'll take me to this very thread wherein posted will be the MMO Blizz is making.  And all will be right with the world.

as for DIKU... to me it's always simply meant a turn-based RPG game wherein player actions are reliant on the game timer and said player's ability to produce as much as possible within the constraints of said timer.
Diku will never itself die, only the worn out settings and engines that use them.

You mean the koreans are keeping it real? :awesome_for_real:

Actually, dikus are more connected with MTX than subs. Subs just mean you can occasionally choose to access something you're paying for. Meanwhile, microtransactions are entirely about getting around game play specifically tuned to annoy you enough to want to get you around it. Sound familiar? :wink:

I have to agree. If Warhammer did something right it was the energy thingy that every class seemed to use. No more retarded mana/health breaks. What the hell is the point of "you had your fun for a minute or two, now you must sit on your ass for 30s to a minute and do nothing".

Guild Wars is the same way. The 'mana' pools are comparatively tiny, but they regen constantly and rapidly. It's a deceptively simple system that has a lot of depth and variety across classes, simply by manipulating the size of the base pool and the regen rate.

My guess!

Pony Factory Online.

Wouldn't that be just case of going "well we copied everything else from D&D so obviously we're copying this, too"? Except with mana mechanics it's more relaxed, not forcing the player to pick a combination of available spells in advance...

I'll jump into this chorus of no more mana.  There already is resource management involved with this shit in the form of cooldown times, don't complicate it with a relic of P&P mechanics.

I had a dream last night that it turned out to be a "Lost World" type game. There were no levels, but you had to capture a dinosaur to ride. The bigger the group you had, the better dino you could tame. The bigger dino you tamed, the more likely it was going to eat you. Gear was to upgrade the dino, laser guns, saddles and stuff to make it more tame etc. You got the gear from crafting, killing other dinos and befriending or killing aliens.

No more ritz crackers dipped in melted dark chocolate before bed for me (they taste sooo goood)....

Leaving aside Blizzard's unrepeatable-by-anyone-else success for the moment, when's the last time a subscription diku launched and was a big smash hit? Looking at the Bruce charts (yeah, yeah, I know) it looks like Lineage 2 back in 2003. Meanwhile we've had AoC flopping miserably, McQuaid shuffling off into an opium stupor after nobody wanted to play EQ1.5, Mark Jacobs doing that whole "We need 500k subscribers to be okay... WOOPS FORGET I SAID THAT!" routine, and that guy in charge of Turbine (whose name I forget) getting shitcanned after LOTRO ended up in the same general subscription-numbers bracket as current-day EQ1 and fucking Tibia.

Am I the only one who's been watching the western subscription MMO industry scream "No, no, there's still lots of money in diku! You can be human, elf, dwarf, or orc! It will be great!" as it drives over a fucking cliff?

Personally, I'd like to see the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay PNP game converted to a MMO.  It's a percentile system.  The greatest warrior in the land, for instance, has at best like a 80% chance to hit.

Or copy the UO system and 'do it right'.  5x GM etc.

The sad fact is the western mmo subscription industry is in direct competition with the eastern free2play industry and the f2p games are winning. So what happens now? Do we simply go back in time and figure UO clones will be fun? What are the alternatives to the diku, what conventions do we keep and throw away. It's really not a matter of whether diku's can be ball smashing hits again, its really a matter of whether or not the alternatives can be ball smashing hits, because if all your planning on making is a niche game with a couple million dollars behind it then there is no real reason not to make a diku if you really want to bring millions of dollars to the table . At least ff11, lotr, coh/v has proven that you can still make a profit if you really want to make that type of investment. Eve is the closest to a million dollar successful non diku, but that success hasn't been replicated.

If eve launched today it would crash and burn. "Over a year to be in a capital ship??? Fuck that" etc

EVE nearly crashed and burned to begin with. CCP ended up buying the rights from their publisher or something to keep it alive, no?

Not sure if that's true or not, but the beta/launch was atrocious. Doing anything resulted in error boxes that lead to other error boxes.

Does anyone have any numbers on the revenue generated by the huge f2p games?

Works well for grittier, deadlier types of systems that require more "thinking" and gameplay-speed... and less min-maxer, demigod types.  But, that doesnt fit the persistent diku model and one thing I've learned from AoC is that injecting decimals into stats isnt a solution.  RuneQuest started the % system I believe.

Personally, I think the ORE system is the greatest pnp system ever devised and probably the best system possible to translate into a truly turn-based game (like a webgame).  But, it'd be slow obviously - since much of the strat and half the fun is in manipulating/reading the dice before and after; many times cooperatively.  The act of simply trying to accomplish something becomes a minigame to actually doing it.  Which is cool.  And there's much to be said about systems that have "degrees of success" rather than just pass/fail and +/-dmg mods.

Overall, best wargame that should be converted to an online game (MMO or not) is Warmachine/Hordes... rules and all.  Dawn of War gave a similar system a shot and failed.

CCP bought it off Simon and Schluster, who also shut down their games division shortly after, iirc.

The fact that EvE exists today is due to that fact - the CCP walked away from it with a launched title and no debt for the development, as far as I'm aware. I think they paid cents in the dollar to acquire the rights.

All I know is that if Schilling reveals his secret project and it's another "Humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs fight over a medieval world for fifteen bucks a month!" diku, anyone who predicts anything other than utter flop is getting a faceful of my dick. Maybe the future is Runescape or Maple Story or something else I haven't heard of yet, but companies are not going to keep flushing money down the toilet on shit like Warhammer and Conan.

EVE only survived because it was the only game of its kind that people noticed, and the MMO genre was still relatively young in relation to the average MMO gamer.

The game hardly had anything fun to do for the first two years of its life. I'd very much say that if EVE launched like EVE launched back in 2003 today, it wouldn't survive 6 months.

Diku is not dead until there's actually an alternative that works.

Warhammer and Conan are evidence that badly designed and constructed games will have retention issues. Nothing more and nothing less.

It's dead. Just a lot of necrophiliacs on the internet.

Diku-style has kept the pnp roleplay industry alive for decades. It isn't dead, not by a long shot.

It's not dead.  I might wish it was, but it's not.  Even if the games I want are made, there will still be a market for DIKU-style games because not everyone's taste is the same and not everyone is at the point of needing the same things from their games.  Hopefully there will at least be some further iterations to make them better though.

Diku is not dead, nor is it a losing model.  You people are just cranky.

THIS.  (unless you're being sarcastic)

Any learned PnPer knows that digital gaming has yet to even scratch the primordial surface of what DIKU has to offer.  Matter of fact, I'll say right here and now that vid. gamers can currently only DREAM of the kind of gaming that's possible in these "analog systems."  Basically, what you have now in vid.gaming is just the chicken-scraps of pen&paper left-over from the pen-protector geeks of the early 80's; those guys who loved their D&D and wanted it represented online.

Well, the gaming world isnt that simple and many a gaming historian has realized that those pen-protector geeks didnt really succeed in doing what they intended, largely because the technology wasnt there.  You hear a LOT of designers holding onto those original ideals simply because they believe they can do it right with current tech.  BUT, they do it wrong... 'cept for Blizzard so far and they're still only really working with scraps - they just made gravy from it.

I think you mean to say that DikuMUDs barely scratched the surface of what role-playing games have to offer. Most modern MMORPGs offer more sophisticated combat models than most DikuMUDs did/do.

You'd figure that not learning from the geekiest form of gaming known to man is a good thing... I'm still waiting for the day when mmorpg's actually play like the rpg's i grew up playing during the snes era let alone feel like the rpg's during the ps2 era.   

I don't think anyone can easily bridge the huge gap between MMO and single player RPGs.

Also, can anyone give a clear  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diku)definition  (http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/lpvdiku.shtml)of diku (http://www.brandeis.edu/pubs/jove/HTML/v2/keegan.html)? I'm thinking it should be somewhat more specific than "fantasy hack'n'slash with character advancement", but at the same time it transcended the original dikumud.

Diku is basically character development based on numbers.  First come levels in terms of advancement then comes gear.  What differs from game to game is what you're using that stat aquisition for.

Mana is not a limiting factor in most games. It was there to prevent constantly available alpha strikes. That concern has been controlled with timers now. If a game had no mana and just timers, it would play the same if balanced properly. Instead of mana regen, there would just be timer "regen". EQ2 has both, for example.

I kind of like the way 4th ed, D&D went. Every class starts with:

1) 2 powers that can machine gun forever. The damage does scale a little with levels.
2) 1 encounter power. In MMO terms, call it a 3-5 minute recharge. This power does 2-3x the at will dmg with a buff/debuff atached.
3) 1 daily power. Slap a 30-60 minute re-use on this in MMO terms. This will either do 3-4x the at will dmg and comes with a better buff/debuff.

You get more Encounter and Daily powers as you level.

From a game playing perspective, if you can save your Dailies as you work towards the boss, then the boss fight becomes a lot easier. If the group has to spend some Dailies to get there alive, then the fight becomes harder.

Now, that is not a lot of powers but D&D can deal with that because the battles have a strong tactical aspect to them that would be hard to implement in a real-time MMO combat system.  It could still be diku'ed easily enough, not that it should be.

The mana system in WOW, for example, is used to limit the time you can spend in an encounter.  So basically you can't spam heal endlessly since you have a finite recourse pool.  You have to play more strategically, or whatever you want to call it.  It add situational awareness sometimes.  (I have to admit I havn't healed in WOW in 3 years so it could be different now?)

There are other systems that work too.  I don't think any particular system is better than the other.  Just one has been used more often.

And EQ2's combat system should not be used as an example for anything.

It's not strategic.

It's time cockblock to keep you from advancing too fast -and- provide a money sink for pots.

Edit:  The whole I'm shooting fireballs from my fingertips and whacking on giant fucking rabid weasels for too long, therefore I must rest mechanic is just fucking stupid.

Could have sworn i had seen Gandalf, Merlin, and Harry Potter become winded after a long battle.

Actually no.  In some fights I remember having to choose between spells due to mana usage not counting different ranks because of mana consumption.  It's probably different now though.

You can rail against it all you want but there is a strategic metric to it though.  You have a finite amount of resources and your regeneration rate varies.  You have to keep that in mind so you're not constantly casting the best spell over and over again.

Also mana pools give you another stat point to differentiate yourself from others.  The more mana the longer you can last in battle thus making your character better.  Typical Diku model.

Mana is losing strategic value now that enrage timers on bosses are becoming the norm to prevent people from cheesing encounters(stacking healers/regen) and boring a boss to death.

With that out of the way it's simply a money/time sink and a way to force downtime on classes who use it as a resouce.  It tries to provide some pseudo-balance in downtime between classes who use it and those who don't.  Classes who don't use it are mele and are presumed to have downtime due to needing to eat/bandage after a few fights.  Since ranged/mana using classes can often kill mobs without taking any damage or quickly heal up in a spell or two if they do, designers felt that making them rely on a finite resource was the only way to balance the downtime.

I think many people would now agree that it is a poor design on many levels.  First, because it really hasn't done a very good job of balancing downtime, which was it's intended purpose.  Second, because it makes trying to balance classes (in PvP and PvE, but espcially PvP) even harder than if they all used a similar resource system.  Third, because designing significant downtime, espcially forced downtime into your game is boring and a crappy mechanism for trying to keep players from going through content too fast.

All of those 'strategic metrics' can be given with a infinite resource pool as well with the added bonus of never going dry and yanking yer Johnson while you wait.

It's an old and busted mechanic, it needs to die. It exists in WoW "because", nothing more.

So were Boromir, Lancelot, and some fighter guy from the HP universe.

Someone made an Advanced Squad Leader MMO while I wasn't looking?

Diku usually seems to be used as shorthand for "classes and levels".

/amen

So bored with elves and wizards, and medieval worlds…

…still waiting for a polished Wild West MMO motif, with gunslingers, wagon trains, indian spirits, etc.…

…or something further back on the historical scale — Greek/Egyptian/Roman mythology, primitive man (evolve your species and slaughter the biological "competition"!), reniassance/age of enlightenment, modern day RPG, etc.…

Fantasy India. It could be made so awesome, and I can't think of anyone that's *ever* done it. I was hoping Guild Wars would get around to it eventually since they did a pretty nice job with their Asian and African/Middle East themed campaigns, but no.

Funny you should say that, Curt Schiling's company, Multi-Man Publishing, publishes ASL nowadays.

DUN-DUN-DUNNNN!

Oh god. Incoming 750 page manual.

I can't wait to see character creation broken down with sub-sub-sub-headings and clauses.

3.1.1.2a - Selection of hairstyles (male)

Oh noes, our LP MUD was a diku.  :ye_gods:

Both systems work, I'm not poo-poo'ing either. 

That being said mana is old, obviously, but it isn't busted.  It's just another part of resource management. 

If you get rid of that maybe you're playing the cooldown game?  Or maybe health is and old mechanic in yours eyes?  You just don't like the system, which is fine, but sayings it's old and busted is just stupid.

37 customer support technician LFG

Will be probably launched right after Slave Trader MMO launches their Underground Railroad expansion.

By that definition, UO was a DIKU.  Character development was based on numbers, your advancement was your GM skills.  It's a computer game, it all comes down to numbers in the end unless it moves to the boundary boxes and hit detection of FPS games.*

Folks say DIKU they usually mean distinct, predefined classes and levels that provide an increase in power beyond whatever 'skill system' that may or may not be attached.  It may or may not have an level-cap mechanic to advance your character and loot may or may not be part of character advancement.  i.e. WoW vs CoH, both of which are DIKU but are different games.


*Tangent:   In that case, prepare for lots of nerd rage as one of two things must happen.  1) The games return to the early days of FPS where a shot in the toe is as lethal as a shot in the head because it all has to be handled server-side or be prone to ridiculous levels of hacking  2) Put up with ridiculous levels of hacking because you've put important bits client side and pretend that it's not happening as you try to catch every last hacker.  Good luck.


Tangent2:  Schilling's game is going to be DIKU elves orcs and goblins.  It's what he enjoys, it's what Salvatore writes. They might not be called elves orcs and goblins, but I wouldn't put money against it.

Laugh all you want... this would be my robot jesus.  I played Squad Leader to death as a teen.

To fuel the diku definition discussion (what hasn't been said already...), I think an important aspect is that the classes need to have symbiotic rock/paper/scissors-type abilities. One class provides rocks, another paper. Only together they have enough of a toolbox of abilities to beat boss encounters.