The Elder Scrolls Online

[Nebu]

In fact, I've become so disgusted with the "games is same as movie" conversation that I'm shunning everyone that brings it up. 

How about games as art?   

/ducks

[Typhon]

 

[HaemishM]

Here's my problem with the subscription part of the MMOG's.

I've been playing the same goddamn MMO since Everquest, only with a different skin. The only experience I can consider "different" enough from that experience in the 12 fucking years since I quit EQ1 is Shadowbane and either of the Planetsides. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed some of them, because I have. But the burden a subscription places on me as a consumer is that I must get something approaching "my money's worth" out of the experience - so there is an unconscious commitment to play this game over anything else. In the absence of good single-player, non-sub games, that's not a problem. But I've missed a lot of great games over the years because I wanted/needed to play a subscription MMOG over single-player stuff (both Baldur's Gates and Planescape Tormet just to name a few things). Even Secret World, which was a good bit of a departure from the typical MMOG progression system, still had all the markings and trappings of an EQ-clone. The gameplay experience just hasn't been different enough from MMOG to MMOG that I am willing to give a company $60 AND chain myself to a subscription fee. I will never be able to play fast enough in one free month to get my "money's worth" out of the free month.

And here's where F2P comes in. I don't feel the crushing necessity to play this game in exclusion of all else on F2P - unless it's really all I want to play. I can see if the game is worth my time before I ever spend a dime. If the game IS worthwhile, I have the choice to spend money as I wish within the game's restrictions. If I don't like it, I'm not out $60, just time.

Nothing I've seen in Elder Scrolls Online makes me think this experience will be different "enough" from the previous 12 years to make me even begin to entertain the notion of spending $60 AND paying a subscription before I can figure out if I'll even like the game or not.

[Abelian75]

Strictly speaking, all of that mostly only applies to subscription models that ALSO charge a normal fee for the box (or an extra 45 dollars for the first month, however you want to look at it).  Which admittedly is every subscription MMO ever, as far as I know.  I get why, since companies want that massive, immediate cash injection from the box price (or massive splurge purchases, in the case of F2P), but it would be cool if there was a subscription-based game that you just kinda started paying a subscription for in order to be able to play it, or at least had a much smaller initial fee.  (The new FFXIV does this, sort of, in that at least it is only 30 dollars for the box, which includes one month subscription)

It always kind of drives me nuts how much people use the term "free month" to describe the included 30-day subscription (notably, I've never seen the games themselves call it a "free month").  Particularly when people use it to justify a poor launch (this is the free month!  You can't complain about it!).  The first month is the MOST EXPENSIVE month.  There is nothing free about it!

Edit:  Btw, Haemish, I wasn't targeting you with that free month rant specifically, in case it wasn't obvious.  You weren't really using the term in the way that I find annoying.

[Ingmar]

How many hours of entertainment is enough that $60 is worth it to you?

[HaemishM]

A fuckload. More than any game has given me in years but I don't tend to buy even single-player games at full price because I'm a cheap fucker.

[Senses]

I can't wait till they apply this logic to Pizza Delivery and I can get a free cheese pizza delivered in a box that offers to sell me parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes for 50 dollars.

[Kail]

I can't wait till they apply this logic to Pizza Delivery and I can get a free cheese pizza delivered in a box that offers to sell me parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes for 50 dollars.

Typhon, I'm blaming you for all these retarded analogies.  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE CAN'T DO THE MOVIE ONE ANYMORE.   

[Venkman]

How many hours of entertainment is enough that $60 is worth it to you?

Feh. 10-50. You buy a game, you play a game, you finish a game or get bored by it. Only because Steam or XBL tells you the number of hours you played is this even a fucking question. Without that piece of info we'd do what we've always done forever and always: play until boredom and yea that company don't suck maybe I''ll buy their next game/sequel.

[Rendakor]

How many hours of entertainment is enough that $60 is worth it to you?

Feh. 10-50. You buy a game, you play a game, you finish a game or get bored by it. Only because Steam or XBL tells you the number of hours you played is this even a fucking question. Without that piece of info we'd do what we've always done forever and always: play until boredom and yea that company don't suck maybe I''ll buy their next game/sequel.

Um, lots of single player games keep track of your time played on your save files and have since at least SNES days. This is not new.

[Ingmar]

How many hours of entertainment is enough that $60 is worth it to you?

Feh. 10-50. You buy a game, you play a game, you finish a game or get bored by it. Only because Steam or XBL tells you the number of hours you played is this even a fucking question. Without that piece of info we'd do what we've always done forever and always: play until boredom and yea that company don't suck maybe I''ll buy their next game/sequel.

That's not why I was asking the question, which I would have thought the context would have made clear.

Haemish's point was that he couldn't fit enough play time in the first month to make that 'free' first month of MMO worth the box cost even if he didn't keep subscribing, and I was just wondering where that threshold is for people.

[Margalis]

I think the difference with an MMO is that the fun is not very concentrated.

I'm fine with 10-15 hours for $60 of a single player game. I don't have a lot of time to devote to gaming anyway. But in an MMO 15 hours of gaming is going to be like 3 hours of fun.

[Signe]

Haemish kind of sums it up for me.  Since so many games have gone f2p, I've felt more comfortable giving them a fair shot.  When I find one I enjoy,  I'll spend the odd bit of currency on it through the cash shop.  I don't mind the f2p + sub choice as long as they don't charge for content or essential items needed to progress.  I'm okay with paying for expansions unless they're trying to make me pay as much as a full game.  Then I just wait for a sale.  The mere fact that I can play as I want, with no worries of either wasting money or having to sub and unsub over and over, definitely makes the game more palatable to me.  I have a short attention span and I'm fickle, but it the game is interesting, I can go back to playing it for years.  I also don't find 10-15 hours of game to be acceptable unless there's lots of replay value in the game.  $60 has become rather dear in my new all alone life so I have to be careful not to waste it.  And having to pay a console fee while PC players don't, pisses me off, too.  Srsly, what??  I might as well live in Australia and play vanilla games for premium prices when they bother to let me play them at all!

[Modern Angel]

The other thing is that I think the sub emphasis games on the horizon (TESO and WildStar) are going to be incredibly disappointed at what player expectations are now that free is more the baseline than sub. Either you've got youngsters coming in who are used to free being stigma free or old folks who just can't be bothered to devote themselves to that money to time ratio which Haemish is mentioning. Both games might crash on those rocks.

[HaemishM]

Let's look at it this way. LOL is a free game. I started playing it with the intention of never spending money.

Over 2 years later, I've probably spent at least $200 on champs and skins. Just in season 3, I've played over 400 games at 40-50 minutes per game. So in the time since I started playing for free, I've spent the equivalent of 4 new games worth of money, and gotten an absolute fucking overload of playtime. An MMOG that costs $60 for the box + $15/month would have to keep me subscribed for close to a year to be worth the same to me as a consumer.

I haven't had a year long subscription to an MMOG since Lord of the Rings Online. Secret World lasted 3 months. Even F2P offerings like EQ2 haven't kept me interested that long. And this game doesn't look like it's anything that different from any of the long parade of MMOG's I've played over the last decade. If the entry was free, I'd give it a shot and it MIGHT get money out of me. Box fee? Fuggedaboutit.

[Draegan]

Let's look at it this way. LOL is a free game. I started playing it with the intention of never spending money.

Over 2 years later, I've probably spent at least $200 on champs and skins. Just in season 3, I've played over 400 games at 40-50 minutes per game. So in the time since I started playing for free, I've spent the equivalent of 4 new games worth of money, and gotten an absolute fucking overload of playtime. An MMOG that costs $60 for the box + $15/month would have to keep me subscribed for close to a year to be worth the same to me as a consumer.

I haven't had a year long subscription to an MMOG since Lord of the Rings Online. Secret World lasted 3 months. Even F2P offerings like EQ2 haven't kept me interested that long. And this game doesn't look like it's anything that different from any of the long parade of MMOG's I've played over the last decade. If the entry was free, I'd give it a shot and it MIGHT get money out of me. Box fee? Fuggedaboutit.

Unfortunatly all the games on the horizon offer nothing different in terms of gameplay, so a sub is out of the question for me at least.

[Threash]

A true three sided realm war pvp game might be able to pull off having a sub if they did not mind being niche.  I doubt an elder scrolls game is shooting for niche though.

[Nebu]

ESO is banking on the popularity of its single-player success to bring it into the MMO market.  I think this is a very naive view.  It's one thing to make a successful single player RPG and quite another to make an MMO.  Very different designs, strategies, and approaches.

I have a feeling that ESO will learn this the hard way.

[Abelian75]

I realize this is beating a horse to a bloody pulp, but what's particularly strange about that plan is that the single-player games are all about the mechanics and massively open-ended, sandbox-y nature.  Not the actual world, which imho is "meh" at best.  And pretty much nothing other than the actual setting seem to be carrying over into the MMO.  Do fans of the Elder Scrolls series, in general, give two shits about the history of the world?  I mean, I sort of PRETEND to invest myself in the setting whenever I play one of the games, but it never sticks.  Not even sort of.

[rk47]

If they start charging the same price of movie tickets for games, I wouldn't mind at all. 
Gotta love those steam sales and humble bundles.

[KallDrexx]

People are looking at this WAYYY too logically (and I"m not being sarcastic).

People aren't logical.  We *all* do stupid shit that doesn't make sense in hindset.  We are emboldened to emotions and marketing.  When you put a subscription game up against a whole plethora of non-subscription games, it doesn't matter what the actual entertainment $ per hour you get for it, what matters is it requires realizing before you play the game that  it's going to be an extra monthly bill if you decide to play it. 

This is different from games like GW2 or free to play games where even though in the long run you might actually spend more than you would on a subscription, you can play and buy the game without a nagging feelling like you are adding another bill to your monthly queue.  You might throw some money at the game later (more than a subscription stats show) but that's fine in your head because you are getting something immediately that you didn't have before.  With a subscription you are paying each month for the same thing you've had.

There's a HUGE mental difference that has nothing to do with logically comparable prices with other entertainment types.  Since the days of UO people would scoff at me paying $10-15 a month ot play a game while they'd spend much more on other forms of entertainment (or even non-MMO games).  The only difference now is companies found out how to make money without charging a subscription, which makes people do a double take on subscription even more.

[Hawkbit]

If any game is good enough to make me want to play it like I did my first few years of EQ or WoW, then I'll gladly pay upwards of $50/month. 

The real trick is making a fun game that puts me back in that mindset, and none of these current iterations appear to be getting close. 

[Spiff]

If any game is good enough to make me want to play it like I did my first few years of EQ or WoW, then I'll gladly pay upwards of $50/month. 

The real trick is making a fun game that puts me back in that mindset, and none of these current iterations appear to be getting close. 

I don't think that's a game you want, it's a time-machine.

The bizarre thing is this whole discussion seems to revolve around the assumption f2p vs sub has some sort of a relation to quality, simply because one of the longest running sub MMO's is a good (the best?) one out there.

Perhaps games go f2p because one of the single most important things about an MMO is having enough people play it, even if some of them don't bring in revenue. In a way WoW did that even though they had/have a sub by being good, but much more than that they did it by being early; they were able to reach some sort of critical mass before the market got swamped with alternatives and now it's an MMO everyone knows always has huge numbers.

The really cynical side of me is saying these new MMO's probably already have f2p plans ready and they're just launching box+sub 'cause someone estimated that's the fastest way to recuperate the investment, then 6-12 months in you just do what everyone does and swindle your customers into f2p.
5 years ago launching box+sub, then changing to f2p in the first year seemed like a failure or a panic move, now I wouldn't be surprised if it's a business plan.

[rk47]

This won't even have as much free content updates as Skyrim IMO.
That's why I don't see the appeal unless you really need people to travel around with you and raid bosses.
And if the art style sucks, too bad, you can't download a mod to improve it.

[satael]

This won't even have as much free content updates as Skyrim IMO.
That's why I don't see the appeal unless you really need people to travel around with you and raid bosses.
And if the art style sucks, too bad, you can't download a mod to improve it.

What I look for mostly in MMOs these days is large scale pvp. I still like pve but I have no interest in doing the same content repeatedly when it offers no real variation. RvR was what kept me playing GW2 actively far longer than I thought I would (getting into a proper guild was essential for that). The same is true for ESO, if it offers a decent large scale pvp then I'll be playing it for an extended (meaning past the first two months) period of time but otherwise I'll probably skip it unless I have nothing better to play at the time ESO releases.

[Khaldun]

If someone made an MMO where the world was procedurally generated, where there lots of NPCs with procedurally generated Maslow-style 'needs hierarchy' AIs and NPC factions, where there were procedurally generated 'events', where there were relatively small numbers of players in a very large world, and where the emphasis of play was on manipulating, changing and deforming the world instead of levelling up a character and loading him up with gear, I'd pay a big monthly fee to play even if it needed a lot of work. Otherwise, it's not about a price-to-time-played question any more for me: even if I played for 30 hours and was thinking, "Well, this is better than going to the dentist, I guess", there is something so depressing about the inability of developers to even *iterate* the design precepts in your average DIKU-inspired MMO that I end up feeling sad and bad both that the game exists and that I played it. I find myself trying to be excited now when I look at an MMO about something as simple as "Well, that grouping mechanic is slightly different" or "well, the art assets on that boss weren't half-bad" or "well, I cared a teeny bit about that NPC while I was doing the quest, nice writing."

[Merusk]

and a pony.

[waffel]

ESO is banking on the popularity of its single-player success to bring it into the MMO market.  I think this is a very naive view.  It's one thing to make a successful single player RPG and quite another to make an MMO.  Very different designs, strategies, and approaches.

I have a feeling that ESO will learn this the hard way.

Isn't that why they brought in Matt Firor to help steer the game in the correct direction?

[Draegan]

If someone made an MMO where the world was procedurally generated, where there lots of NPCs with procedurally generated Maslow-style 'needs hierarchy' AIs and NPC factions, where there were procedurally generated 'events', where there were relatively small numbers of players in a very large world, and where the emphasis of play was on manipulating, changing and deforming the world instead of levelling up a character and loading him up with gear, I'd pay a big monthly fee to play even if it needed a lot of work. Otherwise, it's not about a price-to-time-played question any more for me: even if I played for 30 hours and was thinking, "Well, this is better than going to the dentist, I guess", there is something so depressing about the inability of developers to even *iterate* the design precepts in your average DIKU-inspired MMO that I end up feeling sad and bad both that the game exists and that I played it. I find myself trying to be excited now when I look at an MMO about something as simple as "Well, that grouping mechanic is slightly different" or "well, the art assets on that boss weren't half-bad" or "well, I cared a teeny bit about that NPC while I was doing the quest, nice writing."

EQN is talking up this pony, or supposedly they are talking about part of it. I just don't know if it's the head part or the ass part.

[shiznitz]

The idea of many shards of large worlds with low player populations on each shard is an interesting one.  With hardware costs as low as they are, I wonder how economically viable this would be.  Imagine a world the size of launch day EQ2 but only 500-1,000 players?  The ability to allow those 500 to really shape the topography and events would be incredibly compelling.  I just think the potential work required to babysit 200-300 shards would be organizationally daunting for a game company.

[Typhon]

I was thinking of something similar in regard to the Wildstar, "is sub model dead" conversation.  I think if a company created a game and allowed guilds/federation of guilds to have a lock on a specific instance, and specify some of the rule set for that instance, that that would probably be a pretty big success story for a subscription based business model.

[Abelian75]

The idea of many shards of large worlds with low player populations on each shard is an interesting one.  With hardware costs as low as they are, I wonder how economically viable this would be.  Imagine a world the size of launch day EQ2 but only 500-1,000 players?  The ability to allow those 500 to really shape the topography and events would be incredibly compelling.  I just think the potential work required to babysit 200-300 shards would be organizationally daunting for a game company.

There's nothing particularly technically challenging about this in general.  Each "server" doesn't actually correspond to a physical server, and it may even be easier to run two copies of the world with 500 players each than one copy of 1000 players.  Would probably depend on the game, but other than having to run more NPCs it would generally be easier to have players isolated from each other.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I was thinking of something similar in regard to the Wildstar, "is sub model dead" conversation.  I think if a company created a game and allowed guilds/federation of guilds to have a lock on a specific instance, and specify some of the rule set for that instance, that that would probably be a pretty big success story for a subscription based business model.

You are under the assumption that sub based models even need incentive beyond the normal game.

Also, your idea is terrible and you should feel bad.

[Typhon]

Oh noes! Someone disagreed with you on the internet and now your feelings are hurt!  Grow up.

[Lakov_Sanite]

   I thought I was the was disagreeing with you.  I mean, you honestly think guilds should be allowed to lock instances for themselves in an mmo?  Why not let looting in pvp steal rl money out of bank accounts while we're at it.