f13.net

Slate had an interesting article (http://www.slate.com/id/2153757/?nav=ais) 3 days ago (I only read it today thanks to slashdot trackback) about the "lameness" of World of Warcraft. Or better, the lameness compared to the success rate of the product and the potential of the medium.
It's just A point of view, but I really appreciated the last part of it:


What can I say? We all know Matrix Online sucks for millions of reasons beyond storyline, but still it makes me think that Massive Games started with the right foot back in ther nineties and turned to the dark side shortly after that. They are, as of now, wasted technolgy, wasted chances to offer deep and different games.
8 millions user wants to play WoW while not more than 300k wanted to play UO at its peak?
Please, someone protect us from what we want!
And please, Raph hurry up crafting a new game.

MxO doesn't suck that bad (Don't take that the wrong way though. I don't play it). As far as overall design goes, at least.

Raph's next project is not for us (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24).

Indubitably!

That said, my feelings on WoW's lack of...well..."wow" are well known, but to say MxO is better because of the storyline? A stretch at best, seeing as none of the people they've killed have actually managed to stay dead.

Here's a thought;

The masses don't care about 'leaving their mark' in a virtual world, because we're too busy living in the real one.  Games are an escapism, not a need for validation and 'becoming well-known.'

Crazy, I know.

Yeah, but that's why I play EQ2 and PS and CoX...

Those so called games you're talking about have just as many anchors in them to keep people from the "real world". Possibly even more.

Um, yeah.  Problem is, when 7.5 million people all try to make their mark they end up drawing massive phallus shapes....

Game vs world, here we go again.

Xilren

It's much easier to do server wide, world-changing events when your player base can fit in a fucking closet. So I'm not surprised if Matrix Online is more dynamic than WoW.

The game still sucks balls, though. I felt like I was watching a really bad animatic of the Matrix animated DVD more than I was playing a game.

Indeed. And far fewer tools.

I see Worlds as being containers for games, not ideas that are opposed to them. Not only that, but they are containers for many games -- not just one. In this respect, I think Worlds actually represent the "Game" side of the argument better than the "Game" side represents the Game side.

My gaming hypothesis:

People want to be told what to do or at least be given their game within a structured context.  This is key to the success of scripted games vs sandbox games.  Without structure, most people flounder and in floundering they find no fun. 

that article was funny

This is what Dave Rickey refered to as the "directed user experience".  He noted this as an area where EVE could greatly improve and is part of the reason why it might not be a bigger success than it is.

Interview here. (http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=281)

Some salient bits:

Can't there be a game with both structure, but structure in a 'sanboxy' way?

Say a MMORPG with no static quests, instead all are dynamic and geared to the current state of the region.

The state of various parts change with user actions, and then quests adapt to that (in a hard-coded fashion, I'm not talking world AI).

So you have a 'mine', it starts in mode A filled with mobs.  Quests givers in a nearby town give quests to kill mobs in that mine.   When enough quests have been completed, the mine is now in mode B.  Quest givers now give crafting quests, or 'protect NPC' quests where NPCs move items to the mine, or repair machinery.   Some mobs may still (more slowly) respawn, and if not killed, a quest giver announces that.   Etc. etc.

When running, there could be quests to escort ore to town, or bring or escort supplies to the mine, etc.

Obvously this would have to be a huge world with zillions of mines, farms, bridges, remote towns, transport systems, etc to transition the states of each one.   They could revert to an earlier state if certain events happen, or if other random events happen.

I want the above when it comes to single player games. I love that shit.

As far as mmo's go though, that kind of approach (so far) results in some form of static pez dispensing. And when it isn't bland, it's because it's instanced and segregated....Thus defeating the purpose of being a massively multiplayer game.

If rich, scripted experiences could be done within a multiplayer environment, then I'd be all for it. But it seems to me that mmo's would be better off catering to ideas that take community and open endedness into account.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Sunbury;  What you describe is still more 'game' than 'world' because it is structured.  It just has 3 states "PC Controlled", "Contested", &  "NPC Controlled" rather than the single state of most MMO areas.

I still hold that all virtual worlds are doomed to failure.  Without Perma-death and item loss, all exertions are meaningless over time anyway.  When they have both, they will not be an area more than a few hundred would be willing to spend their cash to play in.   They are mental masturbation for those who can't control their own reality.

But that's not why I play MMOs. I don't play because I relish the opportunity to group with some foozle whacker from the other side of the planet. Though that occasionally is nice, I play because it's a shared world. I play MMOs because there is the opportunity to interact with other people, sure, but that's icing on the cake. Not the specific end goal of my gaming experience. If I don't want to be bothered with someone else's drama, I don't need to be. I got enough of that shit raiding in EQ back in the day. I found the experience less-than-thrilling.

I'll take the pez dispensing over the forced-grouping and chats full of Chuck Norris and ORLY? crap that is considered "community" any day of the week.

Well, to be honest, I haven't seen prime examples of either game or world. I'm not going to argue about virtual worlds too much. In theory, I gravitate towards worlds, but in practice, I gravitate towards nothing...So far.

If my choice is pez dispensing or Chuck Norris, then my choice would be single player games. And that ain't bad at all.

Keep in mind that almost everyone on these forums is someone that we could have also met potentially in an mmog.  Yes, there are a lot of prepubescent mouth-breathers in games, but occasionally you have the opportunity to meet a few people you actually respect the ideas of. 

I'm still willing to take my chances.  I've met some outstanding people through gaming that I never would have had the pleasure to know otherwise.

I'm a bit on the fence. Almost anyone that posts here at f13 I'd gladly group with in an MMO or even cozier setting (NWN module, perhaps?). That said, I'd love to be able to play a single player game that has the breadth and depth of say a SWG or even a WoW. The problem with the single player aspect is that sooner or later you run out of ways to skin that cat. The draw of MMOs to me is that new content is added occasionally which makes things interesting again and makes me want to unlock those new secrets. Now sure, this sometimes happens with mods and add-ons and expansion packs for single-player games, but not nearly with the regualrity it happens in MMOs.

I find it interesting all 3 of you are making better arguments for games than worlds.  Games let you control who you interact with and HOW far, far better than worlds.

Now, I completly understand all of your dislike for the current direction of game spaces.  They appeal to a certain player the same way RTS or FPS games do a different segment.  There's no expansion into a multiplayer, constantly-updating game of ANY genre other than RPGs, and there should be.   I don't, however, see how "I like playing with multiple people." and "I don't like RPG-play" translate into "virtual worlds r awesome."

Also, your arguments about the 'community' amuse me.  A different iteration of the same stuff would have popped-up in ANY game/ World/ console that had any kind of presence.  People were bitching in the same manner about the EQ community when IT was the big game in town.

Granted it has a small user base compered to WoW (not sure how it stacks up to MxO), but what about Asheron's call?  Seems like every other week they were introducing new and crazy world events, some of which even had far reaching impacts on the game environment (such as the time when they actually nuked 2 or 3 of the main cities into giant smoking craters).

Sure, it doesent really allow for far reaching changes by individual players, but they really seemed to have a fairly fluid and dynamic world they could mess around with.

Also, what about Ryzome (or however it is spelled) and their new player created content push thing?

Haemish is right on the money, MxO's fun parts were complete "accidents" and not because the world was somehow more dynamic, but because it was tiny.

Everything I remember as fun for the year or so I played was: a) Legion was the only guild with a big interest in PvP R&D and thus was on the cutting edge of PvP research by default; b) we were able to go into a fight outnumbered 2.5:1 and still come out pretty well; and c) the personal and factional rivalries were enhanced because you couldn't help but run into people at events.

Morpheus dieing? That was pretty funny for us (we were Machinists, so that's seeing your No 1 enemy go down), but nothing more then the catalyst for a lot of bad jokes in TS. Ivalesco? Probably the best event they ever had, not because the event was awesome, but because of the animosity between TDA and Legion (Regression) or between Endless Armada and The Collective (Method).

The PvP? It was great because once a rival faction (usually The Endless) reverse-engineered whatever Build/Gear kit we came up with, we had to completely change our fighting style. And this "arms race" happened every week for months, so it kept the PvP fresh.

This is one area where WoW does fall behind MxO, but through no fault of its own. If I figure out some awesome idea, it probably isn't just me finding it. Assuming no one's figured out my "Super Awesome Idea", once some random guy in a BG revere-engineers it, the chances of it coming back to bite me in the ass are minimal.

Also, because there are a lot of people doing R&D, you're going to get people publishing their results, which advances the state of PvP. Because an RE'd idea always came back at us, the biggest disappointment I have is that I wasn't able to publish a lot of my work on Team Patchers (area healers), so I always saw the same critical mistakes over and over again, and it made me slap my forehead (right before the guy got dropped).

Any style of content in a game needs equal visibility. If you want the digital actors of MxO to be on par with the static quests of WoW, then the digital actors need to be as plentiful, and as much on-demand, as WoW's static quests. Otherwise that's just something that you hear about, that someone else did, back when the game launched, that one time.

Nebu and I have talked about this subject at length. And I'm glad he's weighing in here, it gives me reason to show up in a thread I'd normally avoid.

When I want story, I seek story.
When I want sandbox, I seek sandbox.

The problem with MMOGs is if you're going to make a virtual world (the literal term, not the metaphorical gameplay wankariffic term that's tossed around so much by me and everyone else [raph]), you kinda have to pick story or sandbox. You can have both, but no dev team can really pull that off. WoW is, in no way whatsoever, a sandbox. Neither is the Matrix. The closest online games to sandboxes were UO and SW:G and you know how well they held up on the story end - badly. They had to add themeparks and instances (Corvette, etc) to SW:G to add any sort of "thing" resembling a directed user experience.

But anyway, getting back to the point of that last paragraph, an MMOG is used to escape the real world and enter another WORLD. Without both sandbox and story elements that are obvious - it fails to be either. It just ends up as silly as virtual reality as always been. The reason I don't dick around with MMOGs anymore is that they fail at the most fundamental level. They're trying to be a world, but beyond having planets, countries, districts, and a bunch of wandering jackasses, they fail. There's no "love" in MMOGs. That intangible THING that made games like Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, Indigo Prophecy, PS: Torment, Super Mario 3, Trace Memory, etc. be so great.

If games want to force me to create fun, I'll stop playing them. Telling me I demand story won't work either, with the right amount of that THING, I'll spend 100+ hours in a free environment. You think I played Diablo 2 for so long for the story? SimCity 1, 2000, and 3000? Aww, hells no. I played them because they had that THING. WoW almost has that THING. Most Blizzard games have it. They're good at that. Unfortunately, much to WoWs detriment, they have 7.5 million other THINGS that fuck up that one THING. And those other things haven't played enough MMORPGs to see that they're never going to get that first MMORPG experience again. Sometimes I wish I hadn't played MMORPGs until WoW.

Anyway, that THING is "love." And I can tell from a pre-alpha press release whether a game will have it or not. I'm the worst kind of customer and the best kind of customer. I have money and time to blow and friends who will buy things when I say it's worth it. And lots of them.

As for MxO: Less than mediocre. We can discuss all the great things mediocre games do at length, but at the end of the day, all we want is for those bells and whistles to make good games great - cuz nothing is saving a game that starts less than mediocre. Of course, if you want to talk about this shit, I suppose someone needs to write an article about how Horizons is better than most MMORPGs because the crafting was so NEATO when it came out.

Shadowbane had love.

Granted, it was love from an old, piss stinking bum -- but he had a big heart.

Another interesting topic emerging from a thread with a turn-off title  :evil:

You can have both story and sandbox in a game if you adjust the expecatation of "story". We are all protaganists in a way, making our own histories, making our own marks. We evolve in these games, and our histories are stories. Whether WoW or SWG, there are people who've done things that affect many others who tell the story.

The traditional view of "story" though is Ultima III or one of the two hundred Final Fantasies: a defined role in a defined world, more of a choose-your-own-adventure book than a living breathing world. Even the most "living" ones are experiences designed around a single protagnist (you).

That expectation in a persistent state world is unrealistic. The only way to obviously affect the world by your actions is to instantiate it so much it doesn't feel massive anymore outside of whatever economy emerges. That's enough for some people maybe.

To make a world "alive" is to accept the random social nature that is other people. That is where I personally see the divide. There are those who accept and like that and those constantly frustrated by it.

It's not hard to argue which group is larger. Basically, I think a game needs to be about compelling game play. What can emerge from that is story (posts, art, machinima, etc). But to cast the widest net across the most gamers, it can't be about the stories they create but the stories they play.

I think that Schild means polish and cohesion when he says 'love'. Single player games have discrete goals and it's far easier to create a context for a story, or game activity, since your scope is by definition limited to the individual's experience.

Wow 'nearly' has that thing Schild calls love simply because it's polished to death. It presents the resemblance of a cohesive universe, but in the end, you end up with a sense of fragmentation and dissolution of the atmosphere created the minute you step into one of the larger player cities and see everyone screaming about their wares, or the OOC banter in the larger player arenas.

MMOs cannot, by definition, provide a sense of an author's vision or story as can be delivered within an single player RPG. They aren't really meant to, either. They are first and foremost meant to provide a WORLD, or a context within which an adventure or activity can occur. This world cannot be underminded by other players. Secondly, and this varies from game to game, they are meant to provide some form of meaningful activity for multiple players within that context which further gives the impression of the single player's involvement within that world.

The same thing can be said for single player games, except that, of course, single player games do not have to please more than one person at a time. As such, the goal of 'love' is easier to reach.

I personally see a lot of actual love put into various MMOs by their authors. CoX is a good example, with funny well written scripts. WoW has that too. Post Luclin EQ is a prime example of a complete lack of love. The bad quest delivery, the complete abandonment of world cohesion with the introduction of the Wayfarer story arcs, the transparent mechanisms by which the devs interfere with player development simply to keep players playing (aka grindage) all show a fundamentally desperate and ignorant methodology behind the upkeep of a once successful game.

The strange thing is that that didn't prevent EQ from its continued success. Why? Because years of context were already there and social networks were long established. EQ survived for at least 4 expansions of utter crap post-Luclin simply because the game already had a world that was constitutionally able to handle bullshit for a sustained period. In the end, of course, SOE devs destroyed their own creation by no longer having a connection with what made the game successful in the first place.

Schild and I have discussed this very point for hours.  It always interests me as we have such different gaming styles.  The bottom line appears to be that we all look for something different in our games.  I've found that I play online games more for social interaction than anything.  I've even joked to many that online games were (to me) nothing more than a chat room in a 3d environment.  I enjoy the competition, comparing myself to others in game, and the social interactions that come from meeting the few people worth knowing. 

I personally enjoy more open playstyles, but I don't think I can consider any online game I've played to be a world.  Perhaps "less scripted" would be more accurate.  I enjoyed UO, SWG, Atitd, and DAoC the most.  While DAoC may not seem as open as the others, the pvp portion is quite varied and complex.  I also think that I would have enjoyed EvE a great deal had I found some people early that I enjoyed playing with. 

I'm not suggesting that one style of game is necessarily better than another.  That would be like comparing chocolate and vanilla.  I'd just like to see developers do more than emulate the paradigms that have been successful in the past.  From a business standpoint, I understand why they must.  Investors want the safe money.  Perhaps I'm just yearning for days gone by... when people playing computer games like MUDS had some barrier to entry.  The filtering process seemed to produce a playerbase that was a bit more sophisticated and interesting.  Is it too much to want an intelligent and challenging game that not everyone can "win"?  I'm starting to believe that pandoring to the bottom of the curve is where the money is and games that target that audience are all I'll have to look forward to in the future. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

I only care about the stories that I tell. If they happen to relate to the game's plot that's nice, but I'm just as content to tell stories about bugs I exploited and funny player/player (as opposed to character/character) interactions. I don't necessarily have to tell these stories to anybody but myself, but I must be inspired to invent them.

Something has to make me believe that the game has something worth telling a friend about.

That's what I read when schild says "LOVE".

As I play more and more games of a particular type I cease to be surprised by the same old stories and they're not worth telling anymore. That first-MMOG experience was great because absolutely everything about the game experience was new. So something had better be new under the sun (and worth writing home about) or I'm not coughing up monthly bucks anymore...

...whether they're for a world, a sandbox, both, or neither.

I think most players do want to leave a mark.

But they also want to play a non-shitty game. And that is more important. WOW doesn't do everything right. It does a lot of stuff wrong. But it is still better than other games, and that is what matters.

It is kind of silly to use logic like "WOW doesn't let you leave your mark, and it is popular, so obviously leaving your mark is not important." Matrix Online may have some cool elements but in the end it isn't a very good game. That's why people don't play it.

WoW does let players leave their mark. It's just left on other players. I have long believed games can evolve from pure diku to a world and along the way give players more ways to have a virtual life beyond game goals alone. The only games that have done that so far (afaik) are AC1 (Houses, Allegiance) and DAoC (Houses, vendors, etc). Neither had WoW numbers, nor even EQ1, but they placed respectably in their eras.

WoW could go that route too. There's no reason the money they're printing can't go to broadening the experience, instantiated housing, player vendors, player events, etc. Maybe they will or maybe they won't ever see the need for it.

I think this is a better way to go than trying to build a virtual lifestyle experience and hoping the millions come. Sure SL boasts 1.5mil+. Check how many people are actually paying the land-ownership fee though (25k-30k, at $10.95). That's not a model to go by in my opinion. And every single other lifestyle experience has been either below or well below the 300k subscriber mark. Hard to point to that as the success future publishers or VC should fund.

So start with a successful model and then grow it, as the demands of the players grow and/or broaden (if they do).

I have an easier time picking apart what shouldn't be in mmo's, rather than what should be in them.

Like, I'm not going to type up some list of specific 'virtual world' features all mmo's should have, but I don't want to see concepts that actively work against the idea that these are massively multiplayer games either. There's got to be some kind of line drawn between mmo's and single player games --- Else you get something that's a poor substitute for both.

Just to clarify, topic title was a ploy. Maybe not a good one (I am broken too, not just my English), but that was the idea.
Would have it been a little less of a turn-off with a title like "The death of MMORPG Game Design", Darniaq? :) Guess not, I am just not good at titles.
Neither I, nor the article author (I hope) thought for a second about a comparison between the two mentioned games. Just, in my intention, what's about designing massively multiplayer games and what happened in the recent years: you can build one with less and less features than any of its predecessors or competitors, even less than a crappy game like MxO, and it manages to score bigger than free sex.
That was the interesting part to me.

Apparently it's just because of the polish. It's just because of the "look" of the game, the feel of it. Way over than the game itself, its mechanics, its ideas.

The interesting part is that in my opinion World of Warcraft marks the death of game design, year zero. From those ashes it has to slowly born again (we are still talking about MMOs Game Design) and somehow live and grow past WoW. You think I am wrong?
Lots of professional game designers here on these boards could prove me wrong too, so I could finally shut up and go back to my coffin. I am just guessing here. From all those "think outside the box!" I read in their interviews (even Lum shot one of those in his newly reformed "about" page, and by the way I can't wait to learn more about his ideas), and from the fact that the Blizzard guy himself (can't remember the name right now) spent the most part of his recent WoW triumph-toaster to enlighten us about "the Lost Art of Polish".
So, guess how are all those MMORPG's game designers out there feeling about their ideas and theories on crafting a successful MMORPG. Where are they now? They write books, they crunch ideas and give hints of those on blogs everywhere but apparently they can't make a successful game, not anymore. What are they doing now? They are probably working on a new game, sure, but a pre-wow one or a post-wow one? Are their ideas changed because of WoW's quality, or because of the market success of WoW? And did they really know, right after the EQ boom and the first generation of MMORPG, when they supposedly started to work on a new batch and generation (can't stop laugh thinking about Garriot and his 3rd generation Tabula Rasa) of MMOs (some of which we, alas, already played and abandoned in disgust) that the only thing able to really succeed was a new EverQuest with Blizzard graphics?

Guess what it feels like in this age and era to be one of those MMO game designer: you spent the last ten years thinking about your next game, moving from past games ideas to unexplored and uncharted lands, just using the power of this new medium and related technology you have in your hands. Someone thought about sandboxes, someone thought about pvp models and dynamic worlds (yes, Shadowbane), someone thought about complex crafting processes, economic models, evolving storylines... and the one that destroy all your efforts (actually destroys it, because after WoW investors come knocking at your office door yelling that you are an idiot and you better come off with something that can be sold FAST! Even if you are Mr. Ultima I guess... ) is just an iteration of the original simplest model, with better graphic, some talented art guys and a shitload of money to promote and "polish" it.

So, it's interesting (again, but maybe just to me) that the game that won (over-won, ultra-won, Won) the 10 year war of MMORPGs is the one with less features, less game design originality and just with more "polish" and graphical attractiveness.

...

I closed my opening post invoking Raph's originality for a new game able to cleanse and reconcile me with online games as soon as possible. I still do. Problem is, I am afraid, I will love it. But it won't be a financial success :(

Polish has to apply to the game design as well.  It is not just for the art or most basic building blocks.  Imagine a SWG where they had time to polish combat, player cities, and any of its systems that were innovative.  Think about other games which introduced great new ideas but floundered because people couldn't be bothered with the rest of their crappy systems.  Put Blizzard's level of care into those clever ideas as well as the general experience and they would be absolutely amazing.

While I now understand the source of the title ;), I can't agree with this above statement, because experience has shown otherwise.

What you need to do first is break the genre down into sub-parts. Here is when referencing the movie or music industry actually works. Companies can push out $200mil guaranteed/programmed blockbuster movies all day long or some here today/gone tomorrow forgettable "hot" voice". Those things are easy because generic business folks with lots of money can buy the talent they want. They being generic though usually means they heavily compromise the vision of the execution.

The same is happening in MMOGs, and started even before WoW. Consider EQ1 to EQ2. EQ2 was sort of vanilla/generic. It would have done fine if not for WoW, which while following the same formula wasn't strictly vanilla in the sense. There's a lot of creativity in WoW. So much so it compelled SOE to redesign major parts of EQ2.

Now, I definitely agree WoW has less "massive" than the predecessors, but why is that? Is it because Blizzard is less creative? Or are they responding to demand of the players? There's only so often one can look at a number like they have now (7.5mil+) and say "yea? well all those people are ignorant!" ;) Fact is, there's a healthy chunk of veterans who flocked to WoW and are still there, precisely because it lessened some of the more sucky parts of EQ1 and DAoC. And some of those parts include the idea of an all-public-zone world where everyone gets in front of everyone else.

But let's set aside WoW for a second and look at other segments of the genre:

• Virtual lifestyles (UO, SWG still, Eve)- Are these players, the big fans of virtual lifestyle experiences, easily transportable over to WoW? Not always. Eve, for example, is additive to the genre because the game is as fundamentally different from WoW as most of the players it attracts. Could SWG have done the same? Sure. But you only get measured in this space by results. Dreams and whatnot are great for retrospectives and post mortems, but only serve to teach developers what not to do next time.
  
• Building games (ATiTD, SL)- Again, as different from WoW, and therefore additive.

There's other genres not really exploited too much, notably MMOFPS. Maybe Huxley, maybe something else. Probably not Tabula Rasa.

Basically, there's lots of ways to break down this genre. Some people feel success is now measured against WoW. I completely disagree. Success is purely based on properly identifying your target player, building the game they want, and keeping your business scaled to how much money you can expect. WoW was the most expensive MMOG ever made as far as I know. They needed millions of players to buy boxes. And a hell of a lot of people work at Blizzard. CCP (Eve) meanwhile? Very different. Still an MMO. Still successful. Just at a very different level of success.

So success entirely matters on who you're talking to, and ultimately from where you get your development money. Not all of the easy money comes from one place.

DDO has trimmed down 'massive' more than WoW has. CoH to the same degree as WoW probably. It didn't make a huge difference for them.

That's not why WoW is successful.

I think we all either agree in part or in whole on why WoW is successful. As a whole, on a financial level, nobody else can touch what they did unless they're a pharmaceutical company. But that's not the question here.

Rather, it's about what your target wants. Not "people", not "gamers", not "everyone". The ones you want. They can be different, particularly if you can't afford to compete against what some bottomless-pocket developer/publisher can afford to try and get.

And WoW is less massive. But it only is such by having removed some elements. CoH and DDO did it other ways. In addition to boutique personalized adventure zones, neither has/had crafting and as such a fairly one-dimensional (and someone avoidable therefore) economy. At least CoH had random/social public-space encounters though.

I'd say what DQ is talking about gets you a solid game that caters of a specific niche.

World of Warcraft's ludicrous success, however, was a solid game taken to an exponential level of players from simple Blizzard name-brand appeal.  WoW isn't at the #1 spot just because it's a solid game, it's there because it was able to ride the coattails of success of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.  The bandwagon effect also helped considerably.

Developers, make a solid game, but don't expect WoW subscription numbers to happen unless you're Blizzard.

As for Massive, I'd say it hasn't done Dark and Light or Anarchy Online any favors.  Bigger isn't better - go for quality, not quantity.  City of Heroes hasn't torn up the charts, but it has had a very high retention rate that is the envy of many more massive games.  If SirBruce's latest chart (http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html) is correct enough, you'll find an interesting comparison between Everquest (about as massive as it gets) and CoH (a partially instanced game).

I`ve never bought the "people just play wow/Blizzard games because its made by Blizzard" argument. Almost NOBODY actually does that.  The games sell great because they are god damn fun.  None of these people would last more than a month on Wow if it wasnt a fun game to them, name brand be damned.  That argument only works up till the moment they open the box, so maybe you can say initial box sales of Blizzard games are higher due to their good reputation.  They would never have the record breaking sales numbers they get for their games if any of the games were even mediocre.  For me, Wow is innovative to the MMOG scene because it was fun.  The first one!  Hurray!  I`ve played pretty much every MMO up to this point, and after the initial thrill of "wow, a vitual world!" wore off around EQ/UO, I havent been able to stand playing them past the initial free month. 

This is what the polish is that everybody is talking about.  Its not just the way the game looks, Falconeer, its also the game mechanics.  Wow has very polished game mechanics, unlike most other MMO`s that seem to concentrait on creating some grand virtual space where tons of other players can log into the same server, then tacking a half assed game into it.  Im hoping that Blizzards success in the MMO market will show the compitition they need to start working on all the damn aspects of their game, most importantly the GAME part, before they push out what is just another string of half assed implimented mechanics.  So I see WoW`s success as a positive thing for MMO game design ;).

No one ever said people just play them because they're made by Blizzard. HOWEVER, Many many people bought them because they wanted into online persistant gaming and were waiting for a decent one. No shocker that it came from Blizzard. People trust Blizzard. Blizzard is the good housekeeping seal of PC Gaming. They're not the "bad guy."

However, attrition in WoW is probably very low. When you've got 6 Million people in a game, everyone probably has enough friends that Blizzard doesn't even need to create much content to keep people in there. They still have to create some content - and patch like a motherfucker (7 million is a permanent big beta test).

Now as for WoW's gameplay. I suppose you could call it polished. But they're just polishing a turd. Luckily they found 6.what? They're at 7.5M total now, right? So about 6.8 Million players who didn't know anything about this turd. 6.8M players that didn't join Star Wars, Final Fantasy, etc. etc. We know what the biggest name is, Blizzard. There's simply no question any more. So while you can say you don't buy into the "they play just because it's Blizzard," it's not to far a leap that they "paid" and "told all their friends" and "haven't quit yet" because Blizzard plays a huge roll in that. Hell, look at DoTA. There's a fucking music video.

Blizzard is a meme now, there's no two ways about it.

Just cause you don't like it that doesn't make it a turd.

The diku model? No, it's definatley a turd. Any system that hasn't evolved in 15+ years is turdish. You won't hear me support the original JRPG system either. Though, I'll allow Hironobu Sakaguchi to use it at Mistwalker since he invented the goddamn thing.

Turdish? Turdishstan. Hmm.

But that's my whole point:
Designers who tried to evolve failed, some more some less.
While those who just cleaned the turd, even simplifying it here and there, won and became kings, emperors, gods.

Wouldn't that be a little depressing, being a MMORPG designer now?
If I were one, I think I would have gone nuts, as John Carradine's character Dr. Bernardo in that Woody Allen Movie:

Helen: You're insane!
Dr. Bernardo: That's what they called me at Masters and Johnson for creating a 400-foot diaphragm. Contraception for the entire nation at once!

(http://www.thelin.net/laurent/cinema/films/tt0068555/46386.jpg)

I would end up designing the uber uber uber diku with 9999 levels, boob-mobs and physical punishment upon character death.


And P.S: It's not that you fail if you can't beat WoW. You don't fail just because you make an independent movie, get good reviews and money but you don't make the some money as Titanic. I am afraid the gaming industry works different though: mmorpgs, even indie ones, costs "potentially" more than an indie movie where content is the only thing that matters. So if your project it's not marketable, you don't get any funding at all. And while you can make a succesful movie out of pocket money (Clerks, El Mariachi), technology needed to craft MMORPGs still costs a bit more than that.
More, I wonder if a project like EVE could raise any funding today, after WoW. They probably got their money when everything online was a good idea. Would they get investments now, with a project that it's not a WoW clone?

I'm not talking about people failing. I'm talking about that 112.5M per month not being for the rest of the industry.

FYI, it's more like $65 million a month.

The percentage of royalties they get from their Chinese operators is small and the price the mainland Chinese have to pay to play is quite low. The9's revenues from WoW for this year through September was US$29.1 million and Blizzard gets between 22% to ~38% of that (22% for game time card sales, 37.7% or 39% for CD-keys which are 30 Yuan, roughly US$4). The9 is also obligated to make yearly minimum royalties payments up front (US$13 million in 2005, less in 2006 though I'm not sure by how much, probably around US$8 million).

Edit: Actually $65 million a month is still too high. I'll try to get some better numbers later.

That's about as stupid as saying "Developers, make solid Web 2.0 sites, but don't expect Google numbers unless you're Google". That mentality doesn't produce YouTubes or MySpaces. That mentality led to the half-assed execution of SWG. Just saying "we can't do it because we're not Blizzard" is setting yourself up for failure.

"Are we making something that 5 million people will be willing to pay 15$ a month, month after month?" That question must/should have been on the minds of SWG devs, and the answer was a definite NO. So they didn't. Ironic that SOE is one of the few companies that has access to WoW kind of money through their parent Sony, they just weren't willing to campaign for and spend it.

Youtube, Myspace and Google were all created for different things.

World of Warcraft and other Diku-derivitive things are all fighting over the same thing. Though, it's more like the other diku shit is competing for the table scraps under the table that WoW sits at.

When Google, Youtube, and MySpace all start charging $15 a month and all serve the same function, go ahead and make that argument.

I think WoW is actually one of the LEAST fun MMORPGs I've played in regard to "creating your own stories". I think others agree; take a look at the "best MMORPG moments" threads, not many are from wow, and many are from admittedly flawed games.

But, simple as you want to call it, the point others have already made seems to be the important one: WoW is a good game.

If you took what you have there so far, the class options, the art design, the game mechanics, the progression, and turned it into a 5 player co-op RPG people would play it and love it. The fact they have then added to it to make it a MMORPG has just drawn in more people to play it, and give people reasons to keep playing it, but the game at base is very solid.

WoW is a great straightforward RPG with a strong social grounding. Which is what most people want in their games; a bit of fun, some social activity, and things to work most of the time. Why do people keep playing once they've done their 20-30 days /played and seen most of the content? I don't really know. Do they even? Are most of them just not there yet?

That the only thing that puzzles me about WoW. I have no idea why so many got lured into raiding as that seem to be completely at odds with people's normal desires and frustrations. Count up the catasses all you like, most of the 7.5 million WoW players are people with social obligations and interests outside gaming, and the raid treadmill is one I except(ed) them to step off. I'm going to assume they were, and that this is why WoW has been changing over time. If this is the case I think it's a very clear demonstration that the MMORPG aspects of it are not as much of an influence on the success as people are making out.

I think people should think less about the WoW in comparison to other MMORPGs and just think about games in general.

Go has been around for thousands of years. Time does not a turd make. Diku as a system works just fine. Like TCGs or tabletop roleplay games. There's enough love to spread around.

As to your earlier comment about attrition, I think they're going to have a problem pretty soon. Retention for WoW, and the more important re-attraction, is going to be tougher than it was for EQ1 at its height because five years ago there wasn't much competition. And after two solid years, even the greenest newb to the genre can get bored with WoW.

I was under the impression that not even 10% of WoW's playerbase are raiders...?

Go, Chess, Checkers, etc., offer open ended, often unpredictable, and much more organic gameplay than a diku does. Once you crack the diku 'puzzle' (what little there is), you'll know it from the inside out for eternity. It's not even in the same boat as the others. Hell, it's not even in the same ocean.

Exactly. So the other 90%, the huge majority of the 7.5 million subscribers, don't give two shits about the 'endgame'; which as far as WoW goes is the point where they verge very strongly from co-op RPG to MMORPG. So why assume that WoW is a success for its implementation of the MMO aspects?

The fact it's a subscription based game is confusing people understanding of the reasons people play it.

And stop playing games.

There are people, many many people, who only play games when they're good.

When they get bored of their good game that just stop playing games. Completely.

People will get bored of WoW and stop. They wont go play other MMOs unless they're great. If their friends stop they'll stop. If a new expansion comes out they might start again. But they won't by trawling the game world for the next big thing and trowing their subscriptions dollars to the next company to give this MMO thing s go. They'll just stop playing games.

Schild has said it a few times, but WoWs numbers are not MMO numbers, they are 'popular game' numbers. It's like people who don't watch many movies will go and see one that makes a huge splash. But afterwards they don't have a huge interest in the film's genre, or even film in general, they just live their life like they did before.

We don't know if that's true yet. All the MMORPGs released since WoW in NA have been mediocre at best and down right crappy in lots of cases so it's not surprising that they don't seem to have had any effect on WoW's numbers.

We don't?  WoW isn't that great a game.  It's a polished game from a very popular game maker.  I'd argue that WoW is a game on the better end of the mediocre spectrum that benefits from the branding of the name.  The game really isn't all that much better than EQ2, so please explain the huge number differences beyond the brand recognition. 

WoW is a popular game that happens to be an MMOG, not the converse. 

I'm pretty sure I'm right.

EA knows the power of a brand.
Nintendo sells systems - millions of them - based on 3 brands (Mario, Link, Samus).
Sega once knew the power of the brand.

SOE does not know the power of a brand... yet. They need someone there with FUN ideas, rather than ones that simply sound good on paper.

MMOG companies for the most part have no clue how to handle a brand or even make an actual game. I would even go as far to say that the MMOG section of the industry is the most incestual pie piece of the whole. More than that, the vast majority of people in the MMOG industry (though, things are changing) have a crap record for making games. Or they've only made MMOGs. Raph was right when he said people needed to step back and examine what's fun. Dave Rickey was right when he said he needed to make games for other people (if only everyone else did that). I could go on, but there's no need. The amateurs have shown their cards. They got caught with their pants down by a company that "gets it."

It's a shame that company was Blizzard. Only one other company and one other person could have achieved this fame. Those being Valve and Will Wright.

WoW was far superior to EQ2 when they both released at the end of 2004. People say EQ2 is much better now but the improvements came far too late to give EQ2 any traction against WoW.

That might explain 400k vs 100k.  It says nothing about 7 million. 

Brand recognition and marketing.  WoW just isn't THAT good a game and it's certainly nothing new.

EQ2 never had any traction against WoW. Still doesn't. I mean, comeon. EQ2 takes twice the computer to run. And when it came out it was optimized for shit. Just not competition. Not even on the same playing field. It's funny, I've never really met or talked to any of the artists at SOE, but I gotta lay this down: those guys need to reexamine the human body, how it movies, and how it interacts with the world. Also, their males are scary and the females are scarier (across all of their games).

Also, EQ2 wasn't made by Blizzard. Guaranteed, if it said Blizzard on the original EQ box, would have sold a million copies - minimum.

Definitely. I dwindled for EQ2 back in November 2004 whenboth launched and I said the same thing back then.
WoW was not better as an online world, a diku, a massively multiplayer, etc... just a "smoother" overall experience, thanks to the right engine (as opposed to the worst ever conceived by man, woman or dog) but not so appealing to me, having played the same identical model for years before WoW came out. Plus it had queues, loong long queues, that would have killed ANY other MMORPG in the world.


So I agree, brand recognition, marketing, and what Cartman hints to in the Southpark WoW episode:
""Go buy World of Warcraft, Install it on your computer and join the online sensation before we all murder you"

Apparently, no one likes to be left out.

Not ID?

Valve is the new Id.

[edit]

Perhaps Romero really did matter, after all...

I don't think you guys fully understand where this 7.5 million number is coming from. WoW is the first real "international" MMO, having been translated and released in far more countries than any other MMO. Of that 7.5 million, 44% is coming from NA and Europe and the rest from Asia. So if you want to credit Blizzard for their brilliant marketing by making WoW into an international game go right ahead.

However on the brand recognition side, it's not as big an effect as you might think, otherwise you would expect that in S. Korea, where they fricking have television channels dedicated to broadcasting StarCraft matches, that WoW would be the clear number one MMORPG when in fact it's not (it was #3 back in April). It also may or may not be the number one MMORPG in mainland China (it depends on who you talk to and what numbers you are looking at) which is not surprising since it faces stiff competition from other MMORPGs both imported and home-grown. So in both S. Korea and mainland China WoW is one of the leaders but not the clear leader in their MMORPG markets.

In NA and Europe it is a different story. With 3.3 million subscribers combined WoW is far beyond the other major NA and European MMORPGs. If we just look at NA and assume there are around 1.7 subscribers here that's not so ridiculously much larger than some of the other major NA MMORPGs were at their peak -- i.e. it's about 4x bigger than EQ was in NA at its peak (which is oddly enough about the same 4x ratio in your example).

So if you break it down by market, WoW is competitive in Asia (at or near the top) and hugely dominate in NA and Europe but not an order of magnitude dominate as the 7.5 million subscriber figure would imply. Which is why I specifically mentioned NA releases in my earlier post. Other companies have shown they can compete with WoW in Asia and the subscriber numbers WoW is generating there are arguably true MMORPG subscribers, not just Blizzard fanboys. Here in NA, however, the MMORPG releases post-WoW have not been good enough to compete with WoW so like I was saying it's unclear if the WoW players here are just Blizzard fanboys (and girls) and WoW has not in fact increased the size of the NA MMORPG market, or if it's more like Asia and a decent NA competitor just hasn't come along yet to grab some of their subscribers away.

I consider Epic the new id.

LOL@iD. Or rather, no, they aren't. Their shit is far too bloated.

I was always talking about the world market when referring to WoW. Comeon, Warcraft and Asia? Diablo and Europe. Still, brand recognition.

Yes Warcraft (the RTSes) was big in China (go go pirates!) but again WoW may or may not be number one in a very large Chinese MMORPG market which was already huge before they entered and they definitely aren't number one in S. Korea the one place in the world you would expect them to be.

In addition to what schild said about YouTube and MySpace performing a unique service where yet-another-EQ-clone can only cater to niches, I'd like to add that I'm under the opinion that gamers are considerably more finicky about what they play than web browsers are about the pages they visit.

I'd said it before and it didn't harbor much disagreement: If some total unknown developer (or worse, a developer with a bad rep) came out with a game that played exactly like WoW, maybe even improved in a few areas, there's no way they'd get WoW-level subscription numbers.  This is because Blizzard being Blizzard took a solid game much further than it would for most anyone else.

But this isn't a direct insult levied at WoW, the game that would not succumb to my doomcasting it as a short term game at best.  If WoW was anything less than a solid game, Blizzard being Blizzard wouldn't have helped it retain subscriptions.

So now we've gone from, "It's all Blizzard Fanbois!" to "It's just peer pressure. People want to belong!"

Fantatsic.

You all don't like Pop music either, but it sells. Over and over and over.  No love for MySpace, either, but I can find more people who know about it or have a page set-up than know who the House Minority Whip is.  Consider that.

I can explain Blizzard types, Myspace whores, and people who like pop music.

(http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd3815/wicklow-mountains-sheep-58.3.jpg)

Honestly, I wouldn't expect WoW to be number one in S. Korea. It's too goddamned easy and doesn't take long enough. But top tier? Yes. I don't ever trust numbers that include Japan, S. Korea, and Thailand anyway. Too many cafes and shared accounts.

Perhaps they just enjoy those things, as opposed to doing them because "everyone else" is?

Honestly, for MySpace, I am unable to wrap my brain around it.

It's ugly.
It's hard to navigate.
It's spammy.
It's ugly.
It's hard to navigate.
It's spammy.

It's everything THE NEW WEB ORDER shouldn't be. Retention in all MMOGs has always been an "Everyone Else" is sort of thing. You come and go with friends. If you're new to a game, you make friends there and leave when they leave. I'm not saying it's a bad thing with MMOGs, I'm just saying. And when there's millions of people, it's even HARDER. As for Pop music, well, have you heard Gwen Stefani's new song? The state of pop music is fucking terrible. And I like catchy shit as much as the next guy.

The state of pop music has always been terrible.  Out of the top 100 songs in a year, some small number < 6 probably - in a typical year - will be good, and the rest will be crap.  It's always been; it shall always be.

(Sure, there are some years when there are a lot of great songs, but then others when there's maybe 1 great song.)

The parts I love in MMOs - running around as a character, blowing shit up, getting better shinies, big worlds with shitloads of content, and running around with my friends.

But I can't stand 90% of the people. They need to make a game that you can host a server for with just your friends, and go around kicking ass in.

And no, Neverwinter Nights doesn't count. That game is not MMO-ish enough to fit that bill, and the content is too tile-based.

That's one plus point of smaller MMOs, is that you usually don't have to deal with as many people. Those people that stick around, however, are kind of lame.

I remember one time I took a break from WoW (this is about a year into retail - and I had been in beta a year prior), and I went and played EQ2 on some random server. I got into a random guild, and everyone on Teamspeak was like, right past that level of nerdiness that made me uncomfortable. Half the guild was laughing over these bearform jokes that I found mildly amusing the first time I saw them in WoW, a year and a half prior. Most of the general playerbase for EQ2 is WEIRD.

I've found that I can find a more relaxed, asshole-ish set of players far easier in WoW then I can in any MMO prior, I'll give it that.

So you want a game that's just for you and your friends, but which is massive, and if any of you stick around you're lame?

Brand recognition might drive box sales but not retention.

Of course pop music sucks. That's the point. Most pop songs are exactly the same as other pop songs. They are easy to listen to, easy to digest. The musical equivalent of comfort food. I think a lot of people who like only pop music do so because that is all they hear. In a lot of countries people have much more diverse musical tastes, in the US the music you hear on radio or on TV is VERY limited and you can only find anything else by actively seeking it out.

...

Crap, I kind of wrote myself into the corner on that one, didn't I?

I'll reiterate my previous statement.

Small MMO games often have strange subscriber bases. What I'm indicating is not an MMO at all, but an MMO in scale and content update. I'd even pay a monthly fee to be able to update my little world with the latest features and stuff.

Would you still pay that monthly fee if it was basically the entire cost of server upkeep?

Guilds Wars with full instantiation?

More then likely.

I'm such a sucker for new content and new things to keep me entertained - my money goes where the entertainment is.

If this were able to keep me entertained like an MMO, but it was just me and my friends, but with similar landmass size, and able to affect the world on a global scope, then hell yes.

Kinda... but not quite. I want to be able to host the entire thing on a home system. Or, if you don't have a system worthy of a dedicated server that can keep the world running when you're not there, do some sort of a worldsave system that can save the state and pick it back up when you fire it up with your friends.

I'm thinking only the people hosting servers need to pay the monthly fee in order to access the content - maybe the players pay a tiny amount for master server for their character, so if they ever want to move their character to another server, the master server can verify it's not a hacked character or whatnot.

But, I don't want it to be something where your character travels a lot to peer-to-peer games, like Diablo or whatnot. I want it to be a centralized persistent world you just play with a few friends.

I can't think of another way to do this.

> But, I don't want it to be something where your character travels a lot to peer-to-peer games, like Diablo or whatnot. I want it to be a centralized persistent world you just play with a few friends.

What do you care how it is done on the back end?  Ok, so you separate the world state from the character state.  You give the world state a name and password.  Now, you and your friends can join the world, change it as you play.  Sure there could be hundreds of players on your server but you don't even know they exist.  And since world state is separate, you and your friends could play on your own schedules, but if you do play together, you'd be in the world state.

Some days I wonder how many berets and black turtlenecks you folks own.  Really.

One of each actually.

Hm. Good point. Just have a server farm running scalable instanced worlds for you and your friends, if you want to pay the money to have your own world. Maybe tack it on as a premium service. It really starts to overcomplicate it at that point though, really.

The hardest part, really, is finding the cap for the world. I'd like to say, maybe, 40? 50 people? You and your guild (if you're into that - I always find there are people in any guild I hate), or you and your 5 real-life pals.

The world has to scale to be a challenge just for you guys. There's a lot that just really wouldn't work in an MMO setting, which is why it has to be kind of a local thing.

Hopefully NWN2 quilt worlds can do this. But it rarely makes a big splash because, by and larger, player-created (not directed, actually created) content sucks for the masses.

Diku rules vary based on the other players present, just as they do in Go, Chess, etc. The game mechanic doesn't change, but isn't a turd just because its old. That's all I'm saying.

I thought we had been all over this. Brand, yes. Bottomless-well development budget, yes. Hands-off publisher, yes. Years to test, yes. Brand based on a game IP from a company with as recognizable a brand in their own name, yes. Ability to properly manage the world stage concurrently, yes.

Nobody, truly, nobody, else has this convergence of ideal factors. WoW isn't "good game" numbers. Most games don't break a mil, much less many multiples of them. And it's not a game. It's a category, a line of intersecting businesses managed as a business unit unto itself. It has to be to continue running that way, just based on personnel requirements alone.

It's theirs'. They own it, as a generation. Don't expect it to survive further corporatization though. Todays tweens and teens can smell sanitized management-approved content at a thousand paces, and villify it more publicly and faster than any amount of media can counter. They're too connected, and businesses (and pundits) are still trying to catch up.

My point is that diku ages, while the others do not.

So yeah, basically, it's a turd because it's old. It might have been OK at one point in time, but not after a zillion iterations of it (unlike chess or go).

The worst kind of game is the one that doesn't surprise or challenge you anymore. The one where you know exactly how, when, and what do to be successful.

[edit]

Buff > Pull > Tank > DPS > Heal > Ding

It's more of a routine than a game. I might as well be licking envelopes.

Err, so, all of you hate every single RPG and Strategy Game (RTS or Turn Based) that has come out any later than about two decades ago?  Cause all of those have basically been reiterating the EXACT same thing since the 80`s.....

You can't have it both ways.

Damnit, Teleku beat me to it.

RTS titles have evolved a good deal. Now, the classic JRPG? Didn't I already comment on this? You play it for the story, the character, etc. Really everything except for the gameplay. Now, there are hybrid JRPGs like Shadow Hearts and Atelier Iris which are fantastic for their own reasons - many of which include gameplay. The JRPG is in a decent place, there are enough different types among the genre that it's still alive and well. Now, american RPG? Lollercoaster. Are we talking Bioware style? Baldur's Gate and such? Yea, I'm pretty much done with those. Downhill since Torment, as I've said a thousand times. I couldn't even do KoToR. Now, the action RPG - Fable, etc... There's a reason the word action is there. I simply can't clump those into the RPG genre without a tiny bit of anger. They're more "fun" than a baseline RPG.


Actually, with Asia, I might be able to. There's seriously no way to gauge the actual number. It's a problem. And all those other companies reporting, I simply don't trust them. Also, Warcraft being big in China due to pirates doesn't take away from the game being hugely popular. And as for South Korea, no, as I said, I would expect them to be #1 if the game were Starcraft 2, but not quite with WoW. It doesn't fit the South Korean player profile. But you can be goddamned sure between the cafes and the people that it's left a permanent mark. Remember, they don't have consoles. Different world.


No one ever expects Blizzard to make anything less than an AAA level polished experience. But even they have to get the box into someones hand before they hook them.

The ability to log on and enjoy an hour or three of polished entertainment with friends is really the main criteria for retention, I think.  The silly amount of haranguing over world vs. game, diku vs. skill systems, obselete paradigm blah blah etc., are probably differences that aren't very important at all for 90% of your potential subscribers.

We have and I agree with everything you state.  My point was that WoW has the numbers that it has for reasons other than it's the bestest MMOG EVAR.  You seem to agree.

And yet if you don't have these things, the established market for such games meet it with a collective, "Wuh?" and go back to grinding for loot.

I'm keeping an eye on Fury because, in the very least, it looks like I'll be able to body slam opponents into the ground. However, it's not generating a lot of heat because it's not a MMORPG that everyone is familiar with before they even install it.

Yeah, people try to break out of the mold (http://www.atitd.com) once in a while. Those games typically "don't count." Meanwhile, I go to MySpace because when I check my e-mail there, I can see my friends' faces. I remember in the 80's, I listened to pop music because it was easy to listen to. I eat fast food because it's addictive. All this mainstream crap is just too convenient. If we want to break the mold and find the diamonds in the rough, we have to go through a lot of roughage.

I'm too lazy to do that, and so are the vast majority of consumers.

I'm smart enough to know if something's going to hurt me; but when it comes to entertainment, I'll go with the masses sure enough.

2 years ago....Maybe even a year...I would have been totally stoked about Fury. Now it's "I'll wait and see..."

Same with Conan, same with Gods and Heroes to an extent. Those two aren't shifting gears quite as extensively as Fury is, but it seems like they're trying to develop a better combat experience as well.

It isn't that hard to find alternative/fun ideas in games outside the mmo genre. Not everything is so dreadful.

Why mmo's don't follow the same pattern though, I don't know.

YouTube is not the only site for people to share their videos, but they had a good enough service that allowed them to expand the market. They took a niche and made it to mainstream, if you will. Perhaps the advice to budding MMORPG developers should be: take a niche and make it so good you can expect WoW numbers.

About web surfers not being finicky: [Akamai] found 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6131668.stm) Compared to that, a 1-hour queue is an eternity.

Computers do math.  It's far, far, far simpler to say "here's x hps and this mob does y damage while this heal does z every 5 seconds" than to figure out a new paradigm that may or may not get the users to offset the cost of developing this new, unproven idea. 

Also, all games except FPS boil down to the mechanics you gave, and even those use that mechanic to some extent.

Of course, Akamai has a vested interest in the poll results as they are a web accelerator. Even if the poll is legit, just because 75% of people *say* they wouldn't return doesn't mean they actually won't. People say and do different things.

I bet before WOW came out if you asked how many MMO players would wait in a queue for an hour 80% of current WOW players would say they woudn't accept that.

Wha? All computer games use math. And the vast majority of them still present different patterns and scenarios other than a diku does. That statement makes it seems like there's no other design choice than EQ or WoW.


First, I never said I was against HP specifically (it's more like I'm against diku's method of protecting HP). Secondly, you don't have to come up with "new, unproven ideas". There are dozens of alternative ideas that already exist. If that wasn't so, gaming would be dead.

Yep.

However, the point I debate is the "bestest MMOG EVAR" part. There is no absolute hard and fast rule to assess "best". By my measure, WoW is the "best" because it's enjoyed by so many friggin' people. How can they all be wrong? Blizz makes lots of cash, can push out quality content, and has appealed to far more MMOG gamers in the West than almost every other MMOG title combined. People may want Sigil fights to return for a bitmapped-based isometric game, but it's just as obvious how narrow that appeal was. WoW didn't just get some rudiementary game mechanics right. They got an entire business model right. That's critical to this discussion because it applies to other MMOs that are mocked, even with the huge success they enjoy.

In short, it really doesn't matter who here thinks a game sucks or not when there's a few million or scores of millions playing them. Critics and the mass market only mix on occasion, and it's never the critics that matter that much as business evolves. We here can cry for the past or understand why the future chose not to evolve things like:

• Open-template skills-based games (because it confuses players brand new to something marketed as a game)
  
• All public-space content/bosses (because players don't like other players they don't know getting in the way)
• Crafting that matters (because a company can more easily control the collective playerbase tech level more readily through drops, and players have proven far more interested in quests and combat than anvils and hammers).
• Placing your house anywhere (because urban blight sucks and breaks immersion into a fantastical game more than anything)

This isn't because developers are uncreative boobs. It's because they're answering needs.

For example: Eve is certainly something worth emulating. It is not going to appeal to millions. If you've got the budget to make a game that can be sold to millions, what model would you emulate? Meanwhile, if you've got a game that'll only appeal to a few hundred thousand, then you have more options.

You can add creativity to iteration, but you need a more solid foundation from which to grow. WoW with housing, player vendors and a real crafting system would by nature do way better than SWG did, because the latter started with those without getting the most important elements right (combat and questing).

So to me it's not a question of whether a game is best or not. That tells us nothing. What we should discuss are things like:

• Launch requirements for maximum success (and not just "combat done right". How is it done right? What system?
  
• Evolution requirements. What new features. What new systems. Add crafting or fundamentally alter it?
• Trends from other genres. It could be argued that WoW got right a lot of things based on both how small the genre was to that point and what players expect from their vast experience in other gaming genres
  

E-peen waving WoW's suckage is a dead topic, because it doesn't suck, isn't a failure, and the millions that like it aren't sheep.

Correct, they are not sheep. They are worse than sheep. I've been dangling a number of great games in front of WoW playing friends' faces for two years now, for instance. They won't have any of it.

I don't know exactly what that is, but there's something wrong with it. It's beyond sheepdom, and beyond a mere liking for a game. It's borderline psychotic. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's fucking Jonestown.

"I don't like it, so you all are fucked uP for liking it."

Your arguments get worse over time.  Just avoid the topic.


At the level you boiled it down to?  "All you do is get the power up, stay alive while you kill things, then and hit the next level. It's crap." 

Buff > Pull > Tank > DPS > Heal > Ding

You can fit that model in part or whole to ANY game with combat. It's a gross oversimplification to the point it's not worth discussing.

[edit] Fuck that, Merusk. I'm not biting.

I'll just say this: I know enough that you're a very exacting person, and seem to want every post be a treatise. I'm just not going to articulate everything to the extremes for you though. You know very well that I'm specifically addressing a hate for diku aggro management (and whatever kind of combat that entails). You don't have to twist shit here. It's unnecessary.

Gah. Can't resist.

Perhaps you're reading my example wrong ("Buff > Pull > Tank > DPS > Heal > Ding").

I never said I had anything against a game with those elements. What I'm pointing out is that specific order of things. I said it's a routine, instead of a game. I'm still saying that. Once you figure out how to pull and tank, there's no puzzle or challenge left. Every encounter remains the same throughout the entirety of your experience. Rarely does the formula get mixed up, rarely do mobs do things that throw the players off -- People can always maintain that same basic strategy and, more or less, succeed.

That's a big difference, between say, a game that requires you to repeatedly block or avoid a monster until he gives you an opening in some kind of critical area. Say, for example, Rhino in Ultimate Spider-Man: You do not tank him. You don't even want to be hit once by him. You avoid his charges, avoid him when he hurls cars at you, and only at special times can you jump on his back to hit him in a soft spot. Rinse, repeat, until he falls down.

Or Mike Tyson's Punchout: Same principle. The Bald Bull. When he does that bull charge, you've got to time that stomach punch just right or you lose. And even more to the point: Every fighter fights you differently. You can't use the Bald Bull strategy on Piston Honda.

Is Patriot Games better than Wuthering Heights?

The Olivier version of Wuthering Heights will make a grown man cry. So to answer you question: No.

This isn't either/or though. This is game vs shit.

It's a game when different types of mobs or bosses lay the groundwork for how you must beat them (instead of the other way around). It's shit when you can just tread through the entire process treating every encounter the same.

It'd be a game, if, for example, undead type mobs fucked you up in undead specific ways....And when there's a specific way to beat them that your team has to figure out. It's not a game when undead mobs can be beaten the same as humans or the same as spiders and venom.

You need filler though. You can't create content quickly and keep it interesting. They can do more with boss fights and instance areas though and, if the info comming from TBC is any indication, they are.

Fair enough. I'm not sure how to reply to that.

Personally, I would prefer a more challenging and unpredictable game experience, which in turn, could possibly require the same amount of time that a "filler" experience does. Maybe even longer.

So a good game would be all Avoid, Avoid, Avoid, Smash, Rinse, Repeat?

I am sure you mean to mix this up so each encounter is a little different, but how many variations can we have?  Are all characters in a MMORPG supposed to be the same or should there be differences?  Do we want all players to be the same, if not, how can each have a chance to handle this encounter?

It might well be.  Hit points are an overused simulation in MMOs.  No one has really been creative enough to think up anything else for MMOs yet.  A system that focused (at least partially) on defensive moves and counters could be part of the next round of fantasy-themed MMOs.

I can imagine a game where a class system makes different offensive and defensive options available.  For example, a classic 'fighter' class would focus on numerous hotkey parries and strikes, while a 'magic user' would have fewer strikes and parries, but more MMO-traditional spells.  And I'm sure other people can run with that same idea.

As for how many variations?  Well, how many styles of martial arts are there? 

Almost.....But not necessarily. Some scenarios could be played out where you have to avoid some kind of attack scheme until an opening presents itself, and other scenarios might require a certain attack combo from you that makes your opponent let his guard down in more lethal areas. As well as others..

And really, the sky's the limit. There are so many settings and combat styles imaginable that things would never really get old. A Bubba Fett fight in a Star Wars platformer could play out just like the Rhino fight from Spider-Man, for instance.....But yet, it wouldn't feel exactly like it. In that scenario, the basic idea could be having to take cover from Fett while he's rocketing and gunning you from the air......When he lands, you have a small opportunity to attack.

What games were these out of curiosity?

Anyways, I can understand you wanting more out of encounters other than the tanking thing, and would be happy to see newer MMOs try to improve on this for fights.  However, this is actually what you get with the high end instances ;) (at least the newer onces like AQ and Naxx.  Fuck you MC).  Boss fights have alot of variation and movement, often not relieing having a tank hold the agro somewhere the whole fight.  The raid often has to be fluid, avoiding the boss and staying alive till there is a time where he opens himself up to attack.  With the reduction of raids to 25 mans, Im sure this will only increase in BC raids.  Im pretty sure the 5 man instances will have better scripting as well for boss fights.  They have been getting more creative with their boss encounters with every new release it seems.

Well, all martial arts just boil down to punch>Kick>block>Throw`ing things.  Some just do more of one than the other. ;)

You don't want to request a list of games that are/were more interesting to play than WoW. More fulfilling too. it would be the equivalent of popping the seven seal. Suffice it to say, every gamer that is nearly exclusively playing WoW is missing out on what I consider to be the greatest period in gaming I've seen since the SNES.

Not exactly. Martial Arts were founded on the idea of counter-attacking and response. Not initiation. It's about intercepting, and knowing when and how your opponent is projecting a move before he even does it.

It's pretty relevant to what we're talking about actually.

SOME martial arts were founded on that. Some were founded as a form of exercise, or of meditation. Some focus on counter-attack or counter-punching (the tactical view that an attack leaves you vulnerable). Some on overwhelming offense. Some on misdirection, some on immobilization...

I think taste in video games, taste in books, taste in movies,  music, martial arts, pretty much anything-- all the same thing. You like what you like, and can't see what others see in crap you don't.

Some people like Kendo, others Iaedo. Kung-fu versus aikido. WoW versus EVE. It's just taste. I try not to claim "X is a better game than Y" when what I really mean is "I like X more than Y". (Not that you can't make a case -- there are some fairly objective metrics like "How buggy is it" and the like).

Does experiencing that require me to buy new hardware instead of using the old computer I have for web browsing? Or does it provide essentially the same experience as TV only requiring more input from me?

tkinnun, if that was my answer I wouldn't be able to see a reason to game at all. None. Zero.

I'm pretty sure Dwarf Fortress (very strong contender for Game of the Year if there were any justice in the world) could be run on an old browsing-the-web doorstop of a pc...it might take a while to set up the world in the first place (which only needs to be done once in a blue moon). Start that up, let it run for half an hour or so then go play.

And Stray - you might want to take a look at the 'Kharazhan preview' thread on the WoW sub-board to see how WoW isn't tank'n'spank, and hasn't really been 'pure' EQ-Style tanking once you get past Molten Bore.

Hell, even EQ moved past that dynamic (in raids, at least) a while back.

(http://www.flipsidesports.net/cobrakai2.jpg)

I think my point is being missed.

Variety is great, and I would love to see more.  In a single player game it is a lot easier to do though.  How do you come up with a combat system in a MMORPG that incorperates a wide variety of styles without ending up with repetative gameplay anyways?  It might be NEW repetition, but how do you keep it fresh through the entire game?

- Latency causes design problems.  Differing latency between players causes more.
- Any limited class or skill system is going to impose constraints.  I love open systems, but companies are scared of them.
- Do you want soloability such that any character can enjoy the content?
- If yes then how do fights scale, especially this new innovative combat?  Five against one with six unique styles and each opponent adding another!?
- How do you balance a monstrosity of that magnitude?  Most games have difficulty with a handfull of classes much less dozens.
- Do you force grouping and watch a new holy trinity form?
- Can you convince the publisher this new system is something people will play?

If it were so easy, why hasn't one of us come up with something, patented it, and gotten rich by selling the rights to the next big AAA title maker?  I just don't think it is going to happen without someone having a eureka moment and also having the personality to push the idea.  Saying we need something different is easy, actually doing it not so much.

It's not about your character's skillset or moves so much as it is the mob's. Skills and controls would be different, of course, but not necessarily more complex. Gameplay lies in what the mob is presenting to you.

In a way, you wouldn't even need to change controls at all. The kind of encounters I'm talking about could exist in WoW (as they supposedly do in high level dungeons).

Some low level dungeons in WoW do it to a small extent already as well, but not enough to really notice. In one of the Scarlet Monestary dungeons, for example, the last boss (Herod) does a spinning sword attack thing. The traditional approach to tanking doesn't work here....What your party needs to do is stay out of his way until he winds down....Then you proceed to beat on him.

All mobs should fight like that to some degree (And they still need to be more interesting and not so easily evident as well. Herod's a piss poor example, even though the basic idea is right). There should never, ever, be gameplay that relies on the traditional tanking paradigm imo.

Considering that this form of gameplay has been in place from Donkey Kong to Gradius to God of War, I think so.

Remember player expectations have a lot of weight here; small moves need to be made. Before DAOC, it was expected that monsters follow until you or they die. I remember when DAOC launched, a lot of people thought it was a bug that monsters stopped chasing you. Nowadays, it's the standard. Additionally, WoW makes it clear to the player when different behavior is intended. "You won't pull me from my lair with your feeble DIKU tactics!" screams the boss of Alterac Valley.

I'd be in favor of warriors doing DeePeeEss as well as tanking, and designate rogues to just stealing shit and finding traps. Unfortunately, most players would be confused as hell, and smoke would come from their ears and they'd be all like "Illogical! Illogical!" and their heads would explode.

The Donkey Kong analogy is a solid one, but radically new game systems need to be marketted carefully, so you don't get players expecting your druids to shapeshift and your shamans to drop totems.

There needs to be an overwhelming need to change a paradigm before the big money is going to bother. As evidenced by the success of WoW, that need does not exist in this genre.

Yet. It's coming though. Get passed WoW and you see a lot of innovation here or coming. People like to lump "MMOGs" altogether, but that only exposes those who've only played the diku-inspired titles. That's definition by horse blinders.

What people seem to want is an alternative to diku that is as successful as diku. That you won't get any time soon, as evidenced by titles more successful than WoW but really only with business models and graphics to differentiate them from WoW.

This is like anything, from books to TV to music. You either like what most other people are liking or go after the more fringe elements and accept it.

Edit: to add stuff

I want to see more differentiation at the level I play at. It's fine to claim the raid game beyond Molten Core in WoW is different from pull/tank/DPS, but the fact is nowhere near everyone is going ot see that. So to them, most of WoW is pull/DPS solo and pull/tank/DPS in groups. That's fine because it works, but it's a system easily, err, "systemized".

I want quests resolved based on choices, not only pull/tank/DPS. But I don't expect that in WoW. There's no need.

Yet.

(again)

Ummm...this is human nature. They are doing something they enjoy. You are dangling something in front of them that they might potentially enjoy. You're asking them to set aside something that is a known to try an unknown. Most people won't do it. MMOs make that tendency worse since there is usually that feeling of "if I stop I'll fall behind the curve."

Honestly, I feel sorry for you guys that have such a hate-on for Blizzard that you're blinded to WoW. It's not the most original game out there but it has been hands down the most fun I ever had in a diku-model game. And for me no non-diku model game has yet been stable and fun enough to compete.

Seriously, I echo whoever it was asking about berets and black turtlenecks. You people remind me of exactly that crowd. Which is all the more ironic considering how Schild is such a Nintendo and Sony fanboi.

I'm not asking anybody to set aside a known for an unknown. These people I'm talking about were once well rounded gamers. They used to be the ones who introduced me to all kinds of games. One of them, for example, was a strategy buff. Another was such a rabid console gamer that he had Japanese and U.S. versions of every single console starting from the NES.

Besides that, what the hell is so "unknown" about the every other game out there besides WoW? You make it sound like gaming is some brave new world, and that World of Warcraft is the alpha and omega of it. As if all other gaming ideas on planet Earth are untried and untested vagaries, not worthy of anyone deviating from grinds and foozle whacking.

The funny thing is there are fights in wow that are almost exactly like what you describe and of several dozen other types also.  Tank and spank went out of style after one or two EQ expansions, wow dropped the ball in molten core but almost every boss in bwl/zg/both aqs and naxx is as complicated as single player games. 

When I compare MMOGs to games, I like comparing them to shallow platformers and 20 year old "fighting" games too.

Bad angle there, Stray.


I don't get it.

I'll give some credit for that, but for the most part, my answer is.....So? Players still have to grind through 60 levels of the other stuff, get in a guild that can stick together, deal with their class being pigeonholed, and make it past MC and other low lvl raids.

And it's not like raiding guilds are common manifestations of how people want to play. I think a number was being thrown around somewhere that only 8% of WoW's entire playerbase has seen a raid. And hardly any guild that does raid makes it to Naxx or AQ40. Even after a year of investment.

Getting to Naxx or AQ would take even the most determined player a long time to get to. I could pop in just about any action or handheld title and get that kind of gameplay within 20 seconds.

[EDIT]


Hmm.... Old or not, the basic principle behind Punch Out is no different than a God of War boss: Gameplay revolving around "pattern recognition", as Raph would put it.

Games are designed for 10 or so hours of play. A good MMO is designed for 500. There's a big difference. WoW has at least 10 hours of content as compelling as you'd find in any game. But that's a mere percentage of the overall otherwise-fairly-mundane experience. Some players live for those exceptions. Other players find those exceptions really annoying because it gets in the way of their loot.

The very motivation behind playing an MMOG for a long period of time is fundamentally different. As such, they are designed different.

How many games have you played for years? This isn't a personal question. Rather, it's an invitation to look at the differences at a different level.

Yes, you are. They are having fun. They know when they log in tomorrow they will probably have fun. You're trying to get them interested in something that is not that and being pissed at them for essentially going "um, I'm enjoying this, thanks."

It's the same thing as you're in the middle of some console game you love and some dude is like "hey, come play this other game." Your response will probably be "not right now I'm enjoying this."


You're not getting it. The unknown is very simple. "Will I have as much fun with this other game I haven't played as I am currently having with WoW." Not to mention the other point I made which is the "left behind" factor.

Hi. You don't know my friends. I don't need your advice.

Besides, I'm only trying to get them interested in things that they themselves got me interested just two years ago.

Hell, the guy with the console fetish: It was ME who told him about MMO's.


No, it's not the same thing. Because I don't even do that. Whatever anti-social inclinations you may have --- Don't project them on to me.


Telling a guy about Rome:TW or Medieval:TW, who at one point in time, introduced me to Shogun: TW is NOT telling him about an "unknown".

Well, since according to you your friends are worse than sheep and borderline psychotic I don't know what else to tell you.

Screw it. I give up. You're right. Because your friends are enjoying something you aren't and don't want to do other things that they did in the past (other games in this case) then clearly WoW is evil and only sheep enjoy it and you might as well go bomb the Blizzard server farms for the good of humanity.

Thanks, I know  :-)

Actually it is, because to a few folks, I'm that friend. I got my friends into RtCW/ET and BF1942 and then I went on my MMO binge. BF2 and BF2142, haven't touched them. WoW's here, my guild's full of great guys, and I don't have to regain my atrophied FPS skills to have fun.

I know I'm crazy, but I guess I'm worse then sheep too.

Good post Caladein. Stray will of course ignore you and decide you are wrong and stupid since you like WoW.

 :-D
I agree, I agree!

(http://kayumi.pyoko.org/Donald%20Sutherland.jpg)

Since we are apparently playing the editing quotes game:

But Riggs said that right at the beginning of his second paragraph. Your jab, it doesn't cut very deep.

Grow Up.

And when not taken out of context Riggs was clearly disagreeing entirely, and thought that his interlocutor was wrong.

I was playing Hearts of Iron II a couple of months ago and really enjoying it, then I got distracted by a  :nda:.  After seeing most of the content in the :nda: game, I just couldn't convince myself to start playing Hearts of Iron II again.  So instead I have been watching BSG, Hero's and this new studio 60 thing, wtf is wrong with me?

Well, you're quite clearly a canine in a flatcap.

My answer is No.

But just to be serious. That stupid quip has nothing to do with my post. Suggesting that people take a look at other things in the world has nothing to do with being immature. I'm not forcing other games down people's throats, as you might have misread. I'm saying to a friend who once liked these type of games more than I: "Hey dude, check this out." Or "Look at this for a sec." Nothing more. Bringing a God of War or Dawn of War disc to one of their houses has less to do with me and more to do with how fucking great those games are.

You guys might think these guys actually enjoy playing WoW, but I can assure you, they do not. One of them gets his 7 year old son to grind for him (no kidding). Another has literally spent thousands of dollars of real life money just to get BWL runs for Bloodfang armor (I'm talking 1000 gold a pop, without rogue drop guarantees -- he's up to 5 pieces now).

I don't think you're being told to grow up because you're trying to get your friends to look at these games. I think you're being told to grow up because of the attitude you have about it. IE, they're not interested in it so they're obviously sheep.

No shit he was disagreeing, and just trying to make a joke. I was responding in kind.

Oh God. I think it's you guys who need to grow up then. This is a messageboard. It's fun to be provocative. Read between the lines....You'll find that I'm not quite as passionate or headstrong as you think I am.

Or something.

It's just games. Not politics.

Since we're editing quotes, it's time for the return of WUA Subliminal Vision, this time in new "Picking on someone besides Signe" flavor.


He's forcing other games down people's throats, as you might have read.  He's saying to a friend, hey dude, check this out or fuck you.

Stray, your friends got addicted to a singular experience. It's less about WoW being a good game now. It's more immersive than that.

MMORPGs are really not "games" in the traditional sense, as often discussed. They can be played that way to be sure, but the primary allure and resultant retention does not come because people are actively engaged in the same way they are to playing other more traditional "games". In an MMOG, you're almost always doing exactly the same thing with a different backdrop, unless you're PvPing. In that case it's the exact same thing with a different backdrop and AI that constantly learns. It's sorta Slot Machines and Boardgames, respectively.