Rift: Planes of Telara

[kildorn]

You know, that spot would have been fine with ANY OTHER TEXT involved. Like "The start of a new adventure" or anything besides trying to mock the people who even if you are wildly successful will still dwarf your subscriber base.

Is the current industry idea still "I know, let's try and poach all the people who don't like WoW! By.. making WoW with a higher poly count!"

That said, I'm miffed I've never gotten a beta invite to this. :(

[Nightblade]

RIFT TV spot.

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsf8LnThk5Y&feature=related

[Kitsune]

The thing is, if a game really pulled off a dynamic world, I'd totally be in.  And not "dynamic" like occasionally a monster spawns somewhere, but real dynamic like demons invade the Miffertons' farm, smash the place to build an altar to evil out of their skulls and set their cow on fire, and the Miffertons do not respawn the next day.  If a different family moves in and takes over the farm after adventurers clear out the demons, that's fine, but it shouldn't be an immediate sort of thing.  If a game had a constant stream of dynamic events occurring in place of static quest chains, I'd be pretty thoroughly impressed.

It would also help if the core gameplay beat out WoW.  I enjoyed class mechanics like Warlocks stealing souls and the seal/judge system for Paladins, anything that got away from the basic 'hit auto attack, then hit the 1 key as soon as the cooldown ends, while occasionally pressing the 2 key'.

[Paelos]

How much is it going to cost me to try this?

[Ingmar]

Bear with me if this is a stupid question, but what happens 6 months in when the lower level area is deserted and that 500,000 hp boss starts stomping things? Too bad for any stragglers still leveling there? Is there a mechanic to deal with this?

That was always the #1 problem with PQs, that without a certain minimum amount of participation they were unusable (this happened a lot especially in ChampO.) Isn't that problem going to be much much worse when the PQs come to you instead?

[Mrbloodworth]

They can change that stuff on the fly. No downtime needed.


Interesting note: End of nations is using the same tech.

[Modern Angel]

And there's an illustration of the inexplicable badness of the communication on how rifts work. That's been answered three or four times just HERE. Despite the obvious that answering things on forums is always problematic it shouldn't need to be asked anyway. There should be an insanely thorough guide on the mechanics on the Trion website. Transparency on this thing.

Thinking further about the commercial, it strikes me that it's completely counterproductive to do the "We are not Azeroth" and especially the "Azeroth is stupid" things because the entire point of the MMO is to identify closely with the product. That's the whole reason the arguments are the exact same in MMO general chats everywhere. If you take as a given that people who have played WoW for any length of time feel strongly about it, maybe even identify with the world and their characters deeply, the last thing you want to do is run the risk of insulting them or their intelligence.

Thinking about the strength of my reaction I think it was partially that. It made me feel stupid on some level. I felt they were calling me stupid for logging on yesterday and I they were calling me stupid for scheduling a five man later today. That's not the totality because it's bad for a lot of reasons but that was definitely part of it.

[Mrbloodworth]

Most readers won't understand, or care what that means. (The server side change on the fly thing)

[sam, an eggplant]

That TV spot would have been A-OK if Rifts was bowel-clenchingly awesome and about to take WoW's lunch money.

"Look out bitches, new Sheriff in town. We are going to kick WoW's ass."

Cool beans, if only Rifts wasn't about blowing the same goats we've been fellating for the past decade. My jaw is getting tired, and I think I'm coming down with strep throat.

I realize they all sunk several years of their life into the game, and they're sure to be the biggest Rifts evangelists around, but the reality is that Rift is not going to fare well in a direct comparison to WoW. Trion needs to control or indeed outright replace their marketing firm. Their message simply didn't fit the product.

Baaaaa. <spit>

[Modern Angel]

Most readers won't understand, or care what that means. (The server side change on the fly thing)

You can write it so they will understand. Forcing caring is a little different

[Ingmar]

The ad wasn't as bad as the posts about it led me to believe, but the whole 'take the bull by the horns' thing never really pays off for people very often, they should probably stick to the merits of their own project. I mean just mentioning Azeroth in it will probably get some people thinking "hey, I should check out WoW again". 

[Threash]

The ad wasn't as bad as the posts about it led me to believe, but the whole 'take the bull by the horns' thing never really pays off for people very often, they should probably stick to the merits of their own project. I mean just mentioning Azeroth in it will probably get some people thinking "hey, I should check out WoW again". 

The add isn't bad, it's calling out WoW that's bad.

[sam, an eggplant]

Well, the CG is shit compared to what we're used to from Blur et al, but that's not what pricked my thumbs when watching it.

[waylander]

Lets see here....the last two WoW killers AOC and Warhammer.....

AOC devs said they were steak and WoW was a hamburger. I guess Ronald McWoWDonald won that one with the value meals. The few people willing to eat AoC steak are keeping the lights on since the other 1.2 million people who bought AoC copies quickly fled the game.

Warhammer was billed as the next WoW killer.  I think it sold 800k copies and had lost over 50% of its launch day customers within 90 days, the colorful Mark Jacobs got canned and his company gobbled up, and 2 years later Warhammer struggles to keep a few small servers running.

If you are going to even appear to take on WoW you need to offer a compelling and different style of gameplay, a game that performs well on average computers, and a good end game.  If you can't do that then people will quickly bail on the game, and you'll be wearing a clown suit at the end of the day.  

People don't give you a year to fix your game or make it fun anymore, and these days you are lucky if you even have 90 days. If your game looks like WoW, plays like WoW, and feels like WoW then people will play or return to WoW instead of sticking with your game.

[sam, an eggplant]

Nah, it's possible to make a superior clone and beat them at their own game. Heck, that's what WoW itself did with Everquest.

That strategy does not work with an inferior clone.

[Typhon]

You know, that spot would have been fine with ANY OTHER TEXT involved. [snip]

Completely agree.  A shame.

[Mrbloodworth]

Using that text also assumes that you will some how peel players off the 3-4 years of time investment they have invested in the game.

They likely won't. Something "better" could come along, however it may only knock wow down to 7 million users. But they will be back.

[Hoax]

The thing is, if a game really pulled off a dynamic world, I'd totally be in.  And not "dynamic" like occasionally a monster spawns somewhere, but real dynamic like demons invade the Miffertons' farm, smash the place to build an altar to evil out of their skulls and set their cow on fire, and the Miffertons do not respawn the next day.  If a different family moves in and takes over the farm after adventurers clear out the demons, that's fine, but it shouldn't be an immediate sort of thing.  If a game had a constant stream of dynamic events occurring in place of static quest chains, I'd be pretty thoroughly impressed.

It would also help if the core gameplay beat out WoW.  I enjoyed class mechanics like Warlocks stealing souls and the seal/judge system for Paladins, anything that got away from the basic 'hit auto attack, then hit the 1 key as soon as the cooldown ends, while occasionally pressing the 2 key'.

How much is it going to cost me to try this?

Realistically I don't think it matters anymore what I think as I may just be too far removed from the $60 box + $15/month crowd to ever come back.

[Mrbloodworth]

Games stable enough to have a free trial right out the gate.

[Paelos]

I can put it this way. I'm not tossing down $50 up front to take a chance on this.

[sam, an eggplant]

You didn't get into the beta? I got into beta3 like 4 days after applying, and got a free VIP key from fileplanet from this thread the next week.

I guess I could just be lucky, but with my karma.... no.

[Hawkbit]

This thread needs more tired analogies.  Let's see, we had steak a few pages ago, McDonalds and blowjobs on this one. 

[Modern Angel]

If the steak to McDonald's analogy is tired blame Gaute Godager. That's verbatim what he said. That's why it gets repeated here, because it's the gold standard of incredibly fucking stupid comparisons in MMOdom.

[kildorn]

My issue with the response that rifts can be changed on the fly (ooh, hotfixes, so novel and new?) is that they need to be changed automatically. Not "hey, this quest has sucked for a month, we should alter the difficulty", but "so a rift spawned, and only two people are participating. The game should dynamically change the spawn rate/spawn difficulty to account for the low participation, and re-evaluate later if more people join"

Basically, the way WoW deals with it's respawn rate adjuster, but for boss level mobs in open world areas. 300 people running around? That rift needs to be pouring out mobs like crazy. Some couple leveling alts in 4 months the only people in the zone? Spawning a 4,000 man invasion on top of them is a kick in the "we should play something else, honey" region of the brain.

[Draegan]

Bear with me if this is a stupid question, but what happens 6 months in when the lower level area is deserted and that 500,000 hp boss starts stomping things? Too bad for any stragglers still leveling there? Is there a mechanic to deal with this?

That was always the #1 problem with PQs, that without a certain minimum amount of participation they were unusable (this happened a lot especially in ChampO.) Isn't that problem going to be much much worse when the PQs come to you instead?

Events are smart enough to scale to the amount of people in the region.  Or so they say.

About the TV ad: 
Obviously I'm extremely biased but here's my opinion.  I thought the commercial was fine.  The text at the end didn't really bother me, it got me to chuckle.  I'm not as bitter as the rest of you to get all upset about a tag line in a 30 second spot.

[Threash]

I'm not upset, i just think it's a horrible idea.

[Mrbloodworth]

My issue with the response that rifts can be changed on the fly (ooh, hotfixes, so novel and new?) is that they need to be changed automatically.

Its not a hotfix. Its a dynamic change from the server including values, textures and assets. With out bringing down the server. AFAIK they can add a new mob if they want.

[Ingmar]

My issue with the response that rifts can be changed on the fly (ooh, hotfixes, so novel and new?) is that they need to be changed automatically.

Its not a hotfix. Its a dynamic change from the server including values, textures and assets. With out bringing down the server. AFAIK they can add a new mob if they want.

But it is still a person having to sit down and do it? That is what you are making it sound like.

[Modern Angel]

It's both. It's dynamic on its own the way WoW's spawn adjustments are (though I think they manually set it each downtime or something) AND it can be done realtime with no downtime on the fly.

[kildorn]

My issue with the response that rifts can be changed on the fly (ooh, hotfixes, so novel and new?) is that they need to be changed automatically.

Its not a hotfix. Its a dynamic change from the server including values, textures and assets. With out bringing down the server. AFAIK they can add a new mob if they want.

... Hotfix, live patch, hot swap, whatever you want to call it. It's a hotfix if someone is sitting down and going "update X" and it happens. We do it all the freaking time in every industry.

A hotfix is a change applied to a system WITHOUT DOWNTIME. It's not "a change that doesn't involve textures, values, or assets" or anything else. Rifts supports hotfixes. Whee?

As an aside: a hotfix involving texture changes will actually be considered a client side hotfix, because the server doesn't give a fuck what texture is involved, it's just telling the client what texture is involved and possibly supplying a download path to the client to get said texture if it doesn't have it.

[Mrbloodworth]

 

[Lantyssa]

But it is still a person having to sit down and do it? That is what you are making it sound like.

This is my concern.

Being able to have a person adjust the spawn on the fly is great.  Can the  computer do it without any human intervention though?  That is what is required for day-to-day operation.  Every time someone brings it up though, they make it sound like a person has to be pushing that button.

It's not eye-roll worthy because it's an important distinction.  Requiring GMs to babysit forty zones across a couple of dozen servers means adjustments will not happen in any responsive fashion.

[sam, an eggplant]

Obviously these events aren't triggered by humans, since they occur all day long. The devs claim to have a whole dynamic emergent system ready to go, and I see no particular reason to doubt that, since it's a central feature of the title and it doesn't seem like it would be so difficult to implement assuming they planned it from the get-go and didn't tack it on last minute. Since the game is called Rifts, my guess is they thought about it.

I still don't see why random events with multiple waves of monsters would hold player attention over time, even when you get 2-3 of them and they all fight each other, but I think my opinion on the game is pretty clear. Generally competent, but I won't be playing.

[Mrbloodworth]

Like I said, NVM. Go on.

[Modern Angel]

I just said it's both. It's not just human intervention.