Blizzard: Conan stole our WoW players

[Venkman]

EDIT: And anyone thinking to make a DX10 game is really aiming too high, half the tiny fraction of computers with DX10 cards are not running Vista.

Most people do not buy PCs to play games on them. They buy PCs to also maybe play games on them. More than likely though, they have a PS2 for the four or five games they own for it, and play online games occasionally on their laptop. THAT is the mass market.

Everything else is us. Anyone making a DX10 game is going for a market so small they almost can't afford to make games for them.

[MahrinSkel]

Everything else is us. Anyone making a DX10 game is going for a market so small they almost can't afford to make games for them.

Does your gaming rig run Vista?  I have one computer that runs Vista, a laptop with a touch-screen that doesn't have drivers for XP.  I'm seriously considering downgrading my daughter's laptop to XP, it's either that or upgrade the memory as it has "only" one gig.  I have a hard time imagining a game so cool that I'd inflict Vista on my gaming rig to play it.

--Dave

[MahrinSkel]

that survey is based on an engine used in designing browser based games...

And therefore is going to skew slightly away from the kind of people who upgrade their system for a game, yes.  That's the point, that this is the "mass market" who can't even consider playing current MMO's because their hardware can't handle anything better than 90's level graphics, and they're not going to upgrade.

--Dave

[sinij]

Vista is a stillborn product, so is DrectX10 as long as its tied to it as far as gaming is concerned. Soon Nvida/AMD will force MS to release DX10 for XP and that will be it for Vista. I think PC hardware has peaked, not because there won't be new products but because progress curve is a lot less steep. Top-of-the-line rigs today still will be able to run everything that comes out for next 5 years.

[Venkman]

Everything else is us. Anyone making a DX10 game is going for a market so small they almost can't afford to make games for them.

Does your gaming rig run Vista? 

I have Vista, but it's sitting in an unopened box. I've got a pretty good rig I'm not willing to hobble with it. And honestly, I see no real world reason to install it.

[Trippy]

Raph just linked to a survey by Unity 3D.  Nearly 1/3 of the million computers they checked have some version of Intel's on-mobo graphics.  Nearly all support pixel fill rates of under 2 giga-pixels per second.  That's really low by the standards of a modern card, nobody even manufactures a card that slow anymore as far as I know (only the Intel on-board is going to be that slow on a new system).  Which means the overwhelming majority of people are running on the graphics that came with their computers, and those are at least a couple of years old.

Worse than the fill rate is the lack of hardware T&L on those fucking Intel "GPUs".

Here's Valve's latest hardware survey for comparison. Obviously people who play on Steam tend not to be "casual gamers":

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

[Trippy]

How hard is it to scale graphics? I ran Planetside way underspec, and had to turn everything off. And it looked like crap on a crap cracker. WoW with stuff turned down still looked decent enough.

Man, as long as the textures look nice and the poly count means I'm not playing in cubeland, I'm a pretty happy camper.

It depends a lot on the art direction. Guild Wars looks beautful on GeForce 2-class GPUs but that's cause the models, textures, and environments were designed to look good with low(er) poly counts and without any "eye candy" (shaders, etc.). WoW works the same way (as long as you don't mind the cartoon look).

[Trippy]

Badges, I mean Achievements will help this.

How good are the rewards? I haven't been following that side much beyond the just-like-LoTRO surface stuff. Do they give actual useful rewards? Or is it more lateral customization (ie, no power gain but you get a cool title)?

No clue. But if done "right" it can keep people playing the same character even after hitting the level and equipment cap

[sinij]

Here's Valve's latest hardware survey for comparison. Obviously people who play on Steam tend not to be "casual gamers":

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

I weep for 9,817    of you, 33.6 Kbps in 08. Ouch.

Surprisingly 4 core adoption is also super-low, 4.36 %

[Trippy]

I weep for 9,817    of you, 33.6 Kbps in 08. Ouch.

Surprisingly 4 core adoption is also super-low, 4.36 %

It doesn't show the adoption rate, though. I.e. what would be more interesting to see is of the new systems that have been surveyed so far in 2008 what percentage of those have quad-core CPUs.

[Brolan]

I expect WoW to do an EQ Shadows of Luclin someday. Or they'll just replace it with SC MMO and hope to drag everyone over. Because history never repeats itself in this genre...

Yes, you have a point. The SOL thing was terrible... I, by no means, want them to adjust the graphics in such a way that it raises the minimum system requirements... SOE were idiots for that. I installed SOL and canceled my subscription a week later.

I remember that mess.  When SOL came out my wife, myself, and two of my kids had EQ accounts.  Of the four computers we had only one of them could run EQ decently after SOL.  We ended up closing two of our accounts and it put us on the track to closing them all in a year or so.  Once we couldn't play together the motivation to play at all went away.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Higher up someone mentioned that many pc's could play age of conan and that it was perception that was keeping the playerbase low.

That is completely wrong. It;s not about perception, it's about how good a game looks while you're playing it. Yes it's true many systems could play age of conan but it's also true those lower end systems would have to play with the graphics turned to "glossy shit" it's a common setting.

Turning the graphics down on aoc does not make it look like wow or eq, it makes it look worse. Game that are designed to run on a certain setting will just not ever look good on the lower ones. So you can critiize wow's graphics or artstyle but it looks the way it's supposed to and people notice that.

I don't think all games have to have wow's cartoony style though but I will argue the "next gen" of mmo's doesn't necessarily mean the graphics need to be top of the line. That's the kind of thinking the spurred on EQ/AOC and other assorted 'meh' games. I'm not entirely sure where the idea comes that pushing graphics to the extreme always results in better sales, because it simply doesn't and games like wow or hell even guitar hero prove over and over again that fun trumps all because newsflash people....


they're 'games'

[Tarami]

How hard is it to scale graphics? I ran Planetside way underspec, and had to turn everything off. And it looked like crap on a crap cracker. WoW with stuff turned down still looked decent enough.

Man, as long as the textures look nice and the poly count means I'm not playing in cubeland, I'm a pretty happy camper.

It's pretty hard. In general, the more "realistic" the art direction is, the uglier it'll be scaled down. Perhaps an argument against realistic graphics, but not every game should have/want the cartoony look. Conan looks terribad at low settings, LotRO looks less terrible and WoW looks okayish (I honestly can't say WoW looks okay on low settings - it's just less of a fall from top settings).

Also, there are some fairly hard restrictions on how much you can scale certain things - DirectX and shader model support are very much all or nothing, for example. It's what hurts LotRO the most when you start tweaking the graphics - the glossy water disappears, weather effects get ugly and so on.

I didn't say "OMFG MAKE WOW DX10!!!" I just said improve the graphics.

Just implementing HDR would be a huge boost, and would have no impact on performance. They could even hide the the option to those people that didn't have HDR compatible vid cards.

You're missing the point. When they start branching their graphics, they'll suddenly have to check off every spell effect, zone, every new art asset against some very different conditions. Every "not used by 95% of the player base" option will add iterations. Some companies don't care, but I get the feeling Blizzard does. WoW's strong point is consistency and that'd be ruined if too many fancy effects sought their way into the rendering pipeline.

[CharlieMopps]

that survey is based on an engine used in designing browser based games...

And therefore is going to skew slightly away from the kind of people who upgrade their system for a game, yes.  That's the point, that this is the "mass market" who can't even consider playing current MMO's because their hardware can't handle anything better than 90's level graphics, and they're not going to upgrade.

--Dave

And you're one of those people that still consider maple-story and MMO. I think the quicker we get you developers to knock that shit off, the better off we all will be. Maplestory is to MMO's as ping pong is to tennis. Yea, you can make a lot more money selling millions of crappy ping-pong balls to 10 year olds, but stop insulting us tennis players by calling it "Table tennis." The game is a glorified chat room designed to suck money out of the pockets of children that have borrowed their unwitting parents credit card.

[Numtini]

The other thing about AOC's graphics was that you couldn't just turn them down, you need to go get a PhD in Conanology from the message boards in order to figure out what to change to what because "low" vs. "high" were pretty much meaningless in terms of speed.

[Dren]

The other thing about AOC's graphics was that you couldn't just turn them down, you need to go get a PhD in Conanology from the message boards in order to figure out what to change to what because "low" vs. "high" were pretty much meaningless in terms of speed.

This.  I had the box in my hand at a Best Buy and did not purchase because of this.  I've outgrown dinking around with this stuff.  I just don't have the patience or time for it.  I certainly didn't want to go through all of that and find out the game looks like crap once I was able to run it.  From everything I've read, that would be the case for me. 

[Tarami]

I don't think all games have to have wow's cartoony style though but I will argue the "next gen" of mmo's doesn't necessarily mean the graphics need to be top of the line. That's the kind of thinking the spurred on EQ/AOC and other assorted 'meh' games. I'm not entirely sure where the idea comes that pushing graphics to the extreme always results in better sales...

But purdy graphics do sell boxes, albeit not subscriptions. In retrospect, good for Funcom!

Awesome graphics don't belong in MMOs as we know them for many reasons. It should run on a variety of systems, but also because the "better" a game looks, the longer will additional content take to create and the larger will the patches become. If Conan released significant content updates, they'd be 2 GB and up. Those are some hefty downloads on DSL-speed connections.

Edit:
WTF, wrong button.

[UnSub]

that survey is based on an engine used in designing browser based games...

And therefore is going to skew slightly away from the kind of people who upgrade their system for a game, yes.  That's the point, that this is the "mass market" who can't even consider playing current MMO's because their hardware can't handle anything better than 90's level graphics, and they're not going to upgrade.

--Dave

And you're one of those people that still consider maple-story and MMO. I think the quicker we get you developers to knock that shit off, the better off we all will be. Maplestory is to MMO's as ping pong is to tennis. Yea, you can make a lot more money selling millions of crappy ping-pong balls to 10 year olds, but stop insulting us tennis players by calling it "Table tennis." The game is a glorified chat room designed to suck money out of the pockets of children that have borrowed their unwitting parents credit card.

Both table tennis and tennis are Olympic sports. What is popular in one region might not work in another, but there is room for both.

Also, MMOs are glorified time sinks designed to suck sub money out of the socially inept who want to feel that they can win at something - anything - in life. See what I did there?

[cevik]

There probably is enough content to keep you going if you consider grindy and dull missions as content, but what service he is on about I have no idea.

Blizzard gets about as personal to it's customers as a Pest Controller does to his Roaches and has about as much respect for them too.

Anecdotal Story:  I came home the other day and my wife was cooking dinner.  She asked if I could take over for a sec so she could check her computer because she had an open petition.  I didn't even know she knew HOW to open a petition so I'm like "Uhh, why do you have a petition?"  She said "I bought something at the auction house and instead of putting it in my inventory I accidently deleted it, so I peitioned."  I said "HAHAHAHAHAH, The GM is going to tell you you are an idiot and you need to stfu noob."

So anyways, she goes upstairs to the computer, I cook dinner.  When dinner is ready she comes down and I say "Hear anything from a GM?"  Her response:  "Yup, he restored my item and said have a nice day."

Now, the point of all of that:  Blizzard's service is far above and beyond the service from any other mmog I've ever played.

Hell in EQ if your account was hacked and your character deleted, the official CS response was that you shouldn't share your password with people and make sure you have a virus scanner installed, hope you have better luck with your next character!

[Dren]

Here's my story on WoW CS.

I was in a Gruul's raid and the leader gave himself my item.  He said, "Petition and I will petition to move the item from me to you."  I was doubtful, but I did it and put in all the information I could muster.

Next day:  I had the item in my inventory.  I didn't have to stay online or anything.  They just as we asked to correct a mistake WE DID. 

I've had a few other instances like this.  I really do not have anything bad to say about their CS and I've been playing the game since launch.

[MahrinSkel]

And you're one of those people that still consider maple-story and MMO. I think the quicker we get you developers to knock that shit off, the better off we all will be. Maplestory is to MMO's as ping pong is to tennis. Yea, you can make a lot more money selling millions of crappy ping-pong balls to 10 year olds, but stop insulting us tennis players by calling it "Table tennis." The game is a glorified chat room designed to suck money out of the pockets of children that have borrowed their unwitting parents credit card.

Actually I'm not, that would be Raph.  There's something interesting happening with Maplestory, but it's more that it's an MMO without the G than anything else.  Or a social networking site crossed with "let's pretend".

--Dave

[Jayce]

Here's my story on WoW CS.

I was in a Gruul's raid and the leader gave himself my item.  He said, "Petition and I will petition to move the item from me to you."  I was doubtful, but I did it and put in all the information I could muster.

Next day:  I had the item in my inventory.  I didn't have to stay online or anything.  They just as we asked to correct a mistake WE DID. 

I've had a few other instances like this.  I really do not have anything bad to say about their CS and I've been playing the game since launch.

Hilarious.  I'm glad we're graced by the like of Rake who can tell us about the bad customer service and boring content that the 11 million people playing aren't aware of.  Otherwise, left with nothing but reality to judge by, we might get the wrong idea.

[Slyfeind]

Here's my story on WoW CS.

I was in a Gruul's raid and the leader gave himself my item.  He said, "Petition and I will petition to move the item from me to you."  I was doubtful, but I did it and put in all the information I could muster.

Next day:  I had the item in my inventory.  I didn't have to stay online or anything.  They just as we asked to correct a mistake WE DID. 

I've had a few other instances like this.  I really do not have anything bad to say about their CS and I've been playing the game since launch.

I was in a very similar situation; player bids for item he already has, it's supposed to go to the next-highest roller, we petition, the next-highest roller got it the next day.

Also of note, one of the last times I raided Onyxia, the server crashed and everybody lost their loot. The GMs went through all the players and made sure we all got the stuff we were due.

Heh, this is kinda turning into Starship Troopers where one person bad-mouths the lieutenant and everybody steps up to defend him.

[Slyfeind]

And you're one of those people that still consider maple-story and MMO. I think the quicker we get you developers to knock that shit off, the better off we all will be. Maplestory is to MMO's as ping pong is to tennis. Yea, you can make a lot more money selling millions of crappy ping-pong balls to 10 year olds, but stop insulting us tennis players by calling it "Table tennis." The game is a glorified chat room designed to suck money out of the pockets of children that have borrowed their unwitting parents credit card.

It's true that the Maple Stories shouldn't be marketted towards us, but at the same time, that doesn't mean we should purge the world of Maple Stories and never make another one. And I'm sure there are things that can be learned from them. Case in point is this whole conversation; what if WOW could be run on a web browser? And is WOW as simple as we can get, without becoming Maple Story? Or could there be another intermediary-level game between the two?

[Mrbloodworth]

Wow could be run in a browser. All games can.

I think people mix up "Its in a browser" with "Its a browser delivered app". The second one puts the most restrictions on any project thats going to be run, and distributed in a browser.

[Ingmar]

I run Vista on my gaming machine and it hasn't caused any problems. That said, Age of Conan fails for me for *other* reasons, so really their market is even more constrained, because even drilling down to that small group, people's tastes differ immensely. People with DX 10 cards and Vista that actually like their game or genre or whatever.

[cevik]

Heh, this is kinda turning into Starship Troopers where one person bad-mouths the lieutenant and everybody steps up to defend him.

I think CS, especially post TBC, is one of the things Blizzard really nailed.  Before Blizzard customers were a bunch of filthy catass gamers that should be treated with scorn, player mistakes must not be fixed or else all the damn dirty welfare queen players who live in their mother's basements will petition all the time asking for free stuff, and game errors shouldn't be fixed because the game is bug free therefor anything that goes wrong is an act of God. 

Hopefully other companies will see the change in attitudes as a reason for Blizzard's success and treat us more like customers and less like walking wallets.

[Lantyssa]

It depends a lot on the art direction. Guild Wars looks beautful on GeForce 2-class GPUs but that's cause the models, textures, and environments were designed to look good with low(er) poly counts and without any "eye candy" (shaders, etc.). WoW works the same way (as long as you don't mind the cartoon look).

Design philosphy seems to go two ways on this:

1) Put a lot of effort into making it look spectacular, but only the high-end machines will be able to see it, and the low end cards will look like ass because it wasn't designed with them in mind.

2) Make the low-end have a nice style which look good but maybe isn't hyper-realistic.  Those with high-end machines will like nicer and be able to run with whatever bells and whistles you provide.

Conan looks amazing, and while I appreciate the graphics, during regular play I don't tend to notice them.  Guild wars looks really good to me with its solid art direction, and runs like a dream on my machine, but I know everyone else is able to have almost as good performance without suffering a huge decline in graphics quality.  I really appreciate GW's focus on art direction.

[Ratman_tf]

Guild Wars is an excellent example. To my eye, it looks beautiful. And AoC which does not look any better to me has higher system requirements?

Why?

To what end?

Shucks, maybe PixelShader 3028.1515 with the razmatazz glaven feature lets you see the flecks of color in a goldfishes eyeballs, but I don't give a crap.

[Goreschach]

I don't understand why everyone keeps saying AoC has such great graphics to begin with. Crysis has great graphics. That's because there's actual art direction behind Crysis. AoC just has high resolution textures and lots of polygons.

[Margalis]

I find graphics comparisons on the PC kind of silly as different games aim for different hardware profiles. I can't run Crysis so to me the graphics aren't great, they are non-existent. Comparing games on one console makes a lot more sense.

[Engels]

There is an overarching point being made, however, that you can make great art, of both the 'cartoony' variety and the 'realistic' variety without using bleeding edge graphical engines or components. AoC, while having pretty awsome art direction, overbloated their game with high end graphics features that unecessarily cut out a big block of potential customers. It could have been avoided, but it may have been more work.

[Ghambit]

I find these graphics vs. performance arguments inherently moot.  I applaud all designers that push the graphics envelope because quite frankly without designers doing this it'd stagnate the hardware market as well as slow-down the speed of software progress (one reason why software lags behind hardware increasingly more every year).  Yes, you'll have games that approach genius-level and find that happy-medium between art direction, graphics, and performance... but that level wouldnt be reached w/o apps like Crysis, AoC, FSX, etc.  Not to mention hardware prices would drop more slowly w/o apps that could use them.

I remember having these arguments back when I had a Tandy 1000 and a 2400 baud modem.  It never stops.  I couldnt play the latest version of King's/Space Quest because it wasnt perdy enough, if playable at all.  Enter DX2... and on and on.  I didnt appreciate Space Quest less just because it wouldnt play on my frakkin Tandy box properly!

WoW is successful because it caters to the masses of mediocrity that pervade the gaming public in the US.  It's a smart financial move.  It's not groundbreaking 'cept to show everyone where the "sweet spot" lies.  It serves to "bring balance to the force" so to speak.  Yes, indeed we can look at WoW like we look at Anakin Skywalker... popular, powerful, and shiny but evil incarnate, setting back the galaxy 1000's of years and enslaving billions - turning back to the Good only when he dies, so the Galaxy can move forward.  (okay a bit extreme)

Scandinavian game designers rarely if ever make games for the masses.  It's NOT their style and I applaud them for it.  AoC is no exception.  They design games to push envelopes, not to necessarily make the most dollar initially.  Sure, they can get a bit off-the-wall sometimes but at least they're daring to be different.  And in the end a new Chosen One will emerge and a bigger, better "Sweet Spot" will be found and all will be right with the world.  More people will have DX10 rigs, 21" monitors, raid managers, geek vernacular, etc.  and we'll all look upon this "Space Quest" period and laugh as we simultaneously decapitate our bosses playing an Augmented Reality version of Bushido Blade in the office on a wearable Voodoo rig.

Games like WoW may bring these people to the table, but you're not going to sell them a better Vacuum without having something shiny to show them... regardless of art direction.

[ajax34i]

So, iyo, for a developer it's a question of whether he/she wants applause or hard cash as the reward for his/her efforts.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I find these graphics vs. performance arguments inherently moot.  I applaud all designers that push the graphics envelope because quite frankly without designers doing this it'd stagnate the hardware market as well as slow-down the speed of software progress (one reason why software lags behind hardware increasingly more every year).  Yes, you'll have games that approach genius-level and find that happy-medium between art direction, graphics, and performance... but that level wouldnt be reached w/o apps like Crysis, AoC, FSX, etc.  Not to mention hardware prices would drop more slowly w/o apps that could use them.

I remember having these arguments back when I had a Tandy 1000 and a 2400 baud modem.  It never stops.  I couldnt play the latest version of King's/Space Quest because it wasnt perdy enough, if playable at all.  Enter DX2... and on and on.  I didnt appreciate Space Quest less just because it wouldnt play on my frakkin Tandy box properly!

WoW is successful because it caters to the masses of mediocrity that pervade the gaming public in the US.  It's a smart financial move.  It's not groundbreaking 'cept to show everyone where the "sweet spot" lies.  It serves to "bring balance to the force" so to speak.  Yes, indeed we can look at WoW like we look at Anakin Skywalker... popular, powerful, and shiny but evil incarnate, setting back the galaxy 1000's of years and enslaving billions - turning back to the Good only when he dies, so the Galaxy can move forward.  (okay a bit extreme)

Scandinavian game designers rarely if ever make games for the masses.  It's NOT their style and I applaud them for it.  AoC is no exception.  They design games to push envelopes, not to necessarily make the most dollar initially.  Sure, they can get a bit off-the-wall sometimes but at least they're daring to be different.  And in the end a new Chosen One will emerge and a bigger, better "Sweet Spot" will be found and all will be right with the world.  More people will have DX10 rigs, 21" monitors, raid managers, geek vernacular, etc.  and we'll all look upon this "Space Quest" period and laugh as we simultaneously decapitate our bosses playing an Augmented Reality version of Bushido Blade in the office on a wearable Voodoo rig.

Games like WoW may bring these people to the table, but you're not going to sell them a better Vacuum without having something shiny to show them... regardless of art direction.

Sorry I couldn't hear you over the pompous