Blizzards New MMO

[tmp]

I think he can.  As a creative medium, it is dead.  It has been thoroughly flogged to death and beyond.

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

[Nebu]

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

[Dtrain]

Isn't all perception relative?

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

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

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

[Draegan]

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

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

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

Stopit.  It's old to you.  

Edit:

Wow Dtrain said the same thing I just said.

[Mrbloodworth]

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

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

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

Stopit.  It's old to you.  

That was, somewhat my point as well.

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

[DLRiley]

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

[Lantyssa]

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

[Fordel]

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



/rant

[Dtrain]

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



/rant

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

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

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

[DLRiley]

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

When was the last time you played a korean mmo?

[Lantyssa]

Korean MMOs aren't games, they're money-making schemes.

[Fordel]

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



/rant

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

Finite Mana is resource management the same way filling up my gas tank is resource management.

[Ghambit]

Someday I'll check my email, click the "topic reply notification" link, and it'll take me to this very thread wherein posted will be the MMO Blizz is making.  And all will be right with the world.

as for DIKU... to me it's always simply meant a turn-based RPG game wherein player actions are reliant on the game timer and said player's ability to produce as much as possible within the constraints of said timer.
Diku will never itself die, only the worn out settings and engines that use them.

[DLRiley]

Korean MMOs aren't games, they're money-making schemes.

You mean the koreans are keeping it real?

[Venkman]

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

Actually, dikus are more connected with MTX than subs. Subs just mean you can occasionally choose to access something you're paying for. Meanwhile, microtransactions are entirely about getting around game play specifically tuned to annoy you enough to want to get you around it. Sound familiar?

[nurtsi]

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

I have to agree. If Warhammer did something right it was the energy thingy that every class seemed to use. No more retarded mana/health breaks. What the hell is the point of "you had your fun for a minute or two, now you must sit on your ass for 30s to a minute and do nothing".

[Fordel]

Guild Wars is the same way. The 'mana' pools are comparatively tiny, but they regen constantly and rapidly. It's a deceptively simple system that has a lot of depth and variety across classes, simply by manipulating the size of the base pool and the regen rate.

[Furiously]

My guess!

Pony Factory Online.

[tmp]

No more retarded mana/health breaks. What the hell is the point of "you had your fun for a minute or two, now you must sit on your ass for 30s to a minute and do nothing".

Wouldn't that be just case of going "well we copied everything else from D&D so obviously we're copying this, too"? Except with mana mechanics it's more relaxed, not forcing the player to pick a combination of available spells in advance...

[ahoythematey]

I'll jump into this chorus of no more mana.  There already is resource management involved with this shit in the form of cooldown times, don't complicate it with a relic of P&P mechanics.

[jayfyve]

I had a dream last night that it turned out to be a "Lost World" type game. There were no levels, but you had to capture a dinosaur to ride. The bigger the group you had, the better dino you could tame. The bigger dino you tamed, the more likely it was going to eat you. Gear was to upgrade the dino, laser guns, saddles and stuff to make it more tame etc. You got the gear from crafting, killing other dinos and befriending or killing aliens.

No more ritz crackers dipped in melted dark chocolate before bed for me (they taste sooo goood)....

[WindupAtheist]

Leaving aside Blizzard's unrepeatable-by-anyone-else success for the moment, when's the last time a subscription diku launched and was a big smash hit? Looking at the Bruce charts (yeah, yeah, I know) it looks like Lineage 2 back in 2003. Meanwhile we've had AoC flopping miserably, McQuaid shuffling off into an opium stupor after nobody wanted to play EQ1.5, Mark Jacobs doing that whole "We need 500k subscribers to be okay... WOOPS FORGET I SAID THAT!" routine, and that guy in charge of Turbine (whose name I forget) getting shitcanned after LOTRO ended up in the same general subscription-numbers bracket as current-day EQ1 and fucking Tibia.

Am I the only one who's been watching the western subscription MMO industry scream "No, no, there's still lots of money in diku! You can be human, elf, dwarf, or orc! It will be great!" as it drives over a fucking cliff?

[Tannhauser]

Personally, I'd like to see the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay PNP game converted to a MMO.  It's a percentile system.  The greatest warrior in the land, for instance, has at best like a 80% chance to hit.

Or copy the UO system and 'do it right'.  5x GM etc.

[DLRiley]

Leaving aside Blizzard's unrepeatable-by-anyone-else success for the moment, when's the last time a subscription diku launched and was a big smash hit? Looking at the Bruce charts (yeah, yeah, I know) it looks like Lineage 2 back in 2003. Meanwhile we've had AoC flopping miserably, McQuaid shuffling off into an opium stupor after nobody wanted to play EQ1.5, Mark Jacobs doing that whole "We need 500k subscribers to be okay... WOOPS FORGET I SAID THAT!" routine, and that guy in charge of Turbine (whose name I forget) getting shitcanned after LOTRO ended up in the same general subscription-numbers bracket as current-day EQ1 and fucking Tibia.

Am I the only one who's been watching the western subscription MMO industry scream "No, no, there's still lots of money in diku! You can be human, elf, dwarf, or orc! It will be great!" as it drives over a fucking cliff?

The sad fact is the western mmo subscription industry is in direct competition with the eastern free2play industry and the f2p games are winning. So what happens now? Do we simply go back in time and figure UO clones will be fun? What are the alternatives to the diku, what conventions do we keep and throw away. It's really not a matter of whether diku's can be ball smashing hits again, its really a matter of whether or not the alternatives can be ball smashing hits, because if all your planning on making is a niche game with a couple million dollars behind it then there is no real reason not to make a diku if you really want to bring millions of dollars to the table . At least ff11, lotr, coh/v has proven that you can still make a profit if you really want to make that type of investment. Eve is the closest to a million dollar successful non diku, but that success hasn't been replicated.

[Sir T]

If eve launched today it would crash and burn. "Over a year to be in a capital ship??? Fuck that" etc

[Fordel]

EVE nearly crashed and burned to begin with. CCP ended up buying the rights from their publisher or something to keep it alive, no?

[NiX]

Not sure if that's true or not, but the beta/launch was atrocious. Doing anything resulted in error boxes that lead to other error boxes.

[gryeyes]

Does anyone have any numbers on the revenue generated by the huge f2p games?

[Ghambit]

Personally, I'd like to see the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay PNP game converted to a MMO.  It's a percentile system.  The greatest warrior in the land, for instance, has at best like a 80% chance to hit.

Or copy the UO system and 'do it right'.  5x GM etc.

Works well for grittier, deadlier types of systems that require more "thinking" and gameplay-speed... and less min-maxer, demigod types.  But, that doesnt fit the persistent diku model and one thing I've learned from AoC is that injecting decimals into stats isnt a solution.  RuneQuest started the % system I believe.

Personally, I think the ORE system is the greatest pnp system ever devised and probably the best system possible to translate into a truly turn-based game (like a webgame).  But, it'd be slow obviously - since much of the strat and half the fun is in manipulating/reading the dice before and after; many times cooperatively.  The act of simply trying to accomplish something becomes a minigame to actually doing it.  Which is cool.  And there's much to be said about systems that have "degrees of success" rather than just pass/fail and +/-dmg mods.

Overall, best wargame that should be converted to an online game (MMO or not) is Warmachine/Hordes... rules and all.  Dawn of War gave a similar system a shot and failed.

[UnSub]

EVE nearly crashed and burned to begin with. CCP ended up buying the rights from their publisher or something to keep it alive, no?

CCP bought it off Simon and Schluster, who also shut down their games division shortly after, iirc.

The fact that EvE exists today is due to that fact - the CCP walked away from it with a launched title and no debt for the development, as far as I'm aware. I think they paid cents in the dollar to acquire the rights.

[WindupAtheist]

All I know is that if Schilling reveals his secret project and it's another "Humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs fight over a medieval world for fifteen bucks a month!" diku, anyone who predicts anything other than utter flop is getting a faceful of my dick. Maybe the future is Runescape or Maple Story or something else I haven't heard of yet, but companies are not going to keep flushing money down the toilet on shit like Warhammer and Conan.

[Zzulo]

EVE only survived because it was the only game of its kind that people noticed, and the MMO genre was still relatively young in relation to the average MMO gamer.

The game hardly had anything fun to do for the first two years of its life. I'd very much say that if EVE launched like EVE launched back in 2003 today, it wouldn't survive 6 months.

[Kageru]

Diku is not dead until there's actually an alternative that works.

Warhammer and Conan are evidence that badly designed and constructed games will have retention issues. Nothing more and nothing less.

[NiX]

Diku is not dead until there's actually an alternative that works.

It's dead. Just a lot of necrophiliacs on the internet.

[UnSub]

Diku is not dead until there's actually an alternative that works.

It's dead. Just a lot of necrophiliacs on the internet.

Diku-style has kept the pnp roleplay industry alive for decades. It isn't dead, not by a long shot.