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Stormwaltz
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Reply #770 on: July 03, 2013, 09:20:42 AM

For EQN to be successful, the world is going to have to be very large.

Or individual servers very small. I'd still like to see the "neighborhood" server concept seriously tried. A "soft cap" of ~500 active accounts, beyond which you have to be "invited in" by a guild.

But the "where everybody knows your name" server is my personal pie in the sky.

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shiznitz
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Reply #771 on: July 03, 2013, 09:21:59 AM

Read Ready Player One.  How about joining all MMOs under one unbrella?  Take your panda to Middle Earth and your hobbit to Auraxis.

I have never played WoW.
Malakili
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Reply #772 on: July 03, 2013, 09:25:03 AM

For EQN to be successful, the world is going to have to be very large.

Or individual servers very small. I'd still like to see the "neighborhood" server concept seriously tried. A "soft cap" of ~500 active accounts, beyond which you have to be "invited in" by a guild.

But the "where everybody knows your name" server is my personal pie in the sky.

I would love this.  Back when I played NWN persistent world servers it was basically just like this.  I've been waiting for something similar for a decade.
Sky
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Reply #773 on: July 03, 2013, 09:33:06 AM

I think it's safe to say that there's a huge untapped potential for something REALLY like Minecraft in a shared big universe with a working economy and some safe areas and some wild risk vs. reward vs. random zones. We can discuss forever if what has been done so far tells us anything about it, if UO or EVE or WoW or Runescape say anything meaningful about what THE GAMERS (all of them?) really want. I think, as I just said, that there is obviously room for something that groundbreaking, that shaking and shocking as Minecraft recently, and EVE back in the days, have been. But the combination of expertise, talent and luck hasn't happened yet and there's no way to say when it'll happen again.

Probably not this time around, and almost certainly not SOE and Smed, but I have a hard time thinking five years from now we won't have bigger, more ambitious Minecrafts. Newer, less broken UO/SWG. Or less spread-sheety, less spacey EVEs.

I'm not going to beat this drum too hard (like FFH2 heh), but it is relevant to the topic.

http://nerdkingdom.com/

Because someone is trying. It may (and probably will) be a trainwreck, but I'm a money where the mouth is kind of guy. I want something like this, so I've backed it and I'll try to give some decent feedback and hope for the best. Although we don't know the extent of how big the official servers are intended to be.
Nebu
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Reply #774 on: July 03, 2013, 09:37:33 AM

How do you find a middle ground with a sandbox world?  Give players too much freedom and you get a bunch of walking penises.  Too little and you lose the sandbox feel.  It's a slippery slope.

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Reply #775 on: July 03, 2013, 09:47:46 AM

What annoys me the most is that most people will probably keep thinking huge world sandbox MMOs are not viable... until Blizzard does it.

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Reply #776 on: July 03, 2013, 09:51:22 AM

What annoys me the most is that most people will probably keep thinking huge world sandbox MMOs are not viable... until Blizzard does it.

I have too little faith in humanity to think that a large scale sandbox MMO can be viable.  Too many people derive pleasure from the misery of others. 

The only hope for sandbox games is to keep them in small, regulated environments.  It's never going to achieve mass market appeal due to the simple fact that gamers can't have nice things.  If you don't believe me, just play more pvp games.  You'll see the kind of vermin that love to ruin games.

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Sky
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Reply #777 on: July 03, 2013, 09:57:25 AM

Yeah, I don't really care what 'most people' think. It sucks that it impacts developers with larger budgets, but other than that, the masses will always be tasteless.

Another reason I go on about TUG is the multiple model, it's set like minecraft with single player and private servers; with the official servers being the 'mmo' portion. So you could get some well-moderated smaller servers going. But the team is veeeery academia/naive and thinks pvp is essential to a good multiplayer experience, so I fully expect the bad days of UO to ride again. Which is kind of fun when you know that going in. So far the largest organized group seems to be UO vets who want to push griefing in the tests.
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Reply #778 on: July 03, 2013, 09:59:22 AM

What annoys me the most is that most people developers will probably keep thinking huge world sandbox MMOs are not viable... until Blizzard does it.

Fixed it for myself.

koro
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Reply #779 on: July 03, 2013, 10:23:50 AM

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

This always surprises me. In twelve years ince its launch I have never met a single person playing Runescape, I've never met anyone playing Runescape, and I've never met anyone who said they at least played Runescape at some point. Did you? Where are these 10 million hiding?

Its basically all kids under the age of 16. You know the demographic people up thread were claiming are too coddled and adhd'd the fuck out to enjoy a sandbox.

This. Runescape is very strange since it's this weird title that kids in their early teens play, get their friends to play, get tired of after a few years... and then another batch of 12-16 year olds come in, play, and the cycle repeats. But it's not marketed toward that demographic at all, as far as I can tell. It's just this thing  that happens.

You never meet them because you're likely of an age where you likely won't have interacted with many folks who have.
dd0029
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Reply #780 on: July 03, 2013, 10:57:15 AM

This. Runescape is very strange since it's this weird title that kids in their early teens play, get their friends to play, get tired of after a few years... and then another batch of 12-16 year olds come in, play, and the cycle repeats. But it's not marketed toward that demographic at all, as far as I can tell. It's just this thing  that happens.

You never meet them because you're likely of an age where you likely won't have interacted with many folks who have.

We have lots of teens into the library playing this. I've also noticed a small number of what I believe are parents playing as well. It's certainly gotten much better looking as time has gone on.
MrHat
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Reply #781 on: July 03, 2013, 11:08:11 AM

Read Ready Player One.  How about joining all MMOs under one unbrella?  Take your panda to Middle Earth and your hobbit to Auraxis.

I think what's been hinting at is more along the lines of the linked personal planets with defined rules.

Basically Minecraft: Galaxy.
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Reply #782 on: July 03, 2013, 11:17:04 AM

A game that fits the needs of the explorer/killer mentality with 500,000 regular subs would be wildly profitable even at a $10 sub mark. You would just have to produce the initial costs on a $30M budget.

Even at a box cost of $30 a margin of 40%, your game is in the black in 8 months.

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Ingmar
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Reply #783 on: July 03, 2013, 12:08:38 PM

500k is wildly optimistic for a killer game. WILDLY.

EDIT: If Pathfinder Online ever actually reaches the market you can watch this in action.

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palmer_eldritch
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Reply #784 on: July 03, 2013, 12:16:54 PM

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

This always surprises me. In twelve years ince its launch I have never met a single person playing Runescape, I've never met anyone playing Runescape, and I've never met anyone who said they at least played Runescape at some point. Did you? Where are these 10 million hiding?


As others have said, it's young people. I think one thing that might have put gnarled old people like me off Runescape is that it was free, back when real MMOs all had subs. That marked it out as a low-quality kiddies game, whether it really was or not. And the fact that it didn't actually have a client and just ran in a browser. It came across more as an alternative to Farmville than an alternative to WoW.
Venkman
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Reply #785 on: July 03, 2013, 12:47:30 PM

Runescape is quite old. It got popular while Zuckerberg was still peddling hot-or-not in college. And it's older than almost every other browser-based online game. Gameplay-wise it's closer to UO than WoW. On paper it's very successful when compared to most other AAA MMOs. But that's why I compare it to Eve in the sense that it's basically its own market. Other browser-based MMOs have gotten popular too, but the market for those is more fickle, so the experiences are completely different. This is why I keep going back to sandboxes as an aggregate of minigame experiences. Because there's precedent for that when we think beyond SWG mission terminals and music script-grinding.

#1-3 are true. F2P is the perfect model for sandboxes, but SOE hasn't shown much expertise on that.

www.planetside2.com

PS2 came out well, and it's a F2P title. But it's not the envy of the genre and not something bound to spawn iteration, any more than PS1 was. I find that unfortunate, because there's elements of MMOFPS that have only ever been seen in the two PS games. But maybe it's just too niche an idea in the age of session-based FPS.

So I don't feel that proves or disproves SOE's expertise in managing a F2P game.
Sky
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Reply #786 on: July 03, 2013, 12:55:16 PM

I think the point is they've implemented the cash shop well in PS2.
Merusk
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Reply #787 on: July 03, 2013, 02:07:00 PM

Probably not this time around, and almost certainly not SOE and Smed, but I have a hard time thinking five years from now we won't have bigger, more ambitious Minecrafts. Newer, less broken UO/SWG. Or less spread-sheety, less spacey EVEs.

I'm really too lazy to use the search function, but I'll see if Evernote will let me tag this one for laughs.  This discussion has been had before. It's always "next time!" or "Well they ALMOST had it!  They just needed more time/ focus/ budget/ carrots/ unobtanium"

I really feel bad for you sandbox believers sometimes.

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Reply #788 on: July 03, 2013, 02:35:48 PM

It's not that I am hoping. I would just be surprised if it didn't happen.

About the "almost had it", I disagree. The most notable sandbox MMOs I can think of are UO, SWG and EVE, which means they stopped developing that stuff about ten years ago. What some of us have been waiting for has been for big companies to stop chasing and reproducing WoW, and start trying something different and ambitious, a sandbox with the technology and know-how of today. The afore mentioned games "almost had it" for many reasons (and for their time), but it's not like many tried and failed recently. They just didn't try.

Since "sandbox" is becoming a fad (most notably because of Minecraft, but not just) and a hot word every idiot and their friends like to use, you can be assured we'll see lots of attempts at it in the next few years. And by increasing the flat amount of tries, the chances for a decently exectured and succesful one increase too.

I am cheering, sure. But I don't know what's coming. I am just talking about increased possibilities and chances. And yes, sure, let's mark this post. I don't get paid to be right or kicked in the shins if I am wrong. I'm with you, let's save it for laugh, I'll laugh either way.

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Reply #789 on: July 03, 2013, 02:47:20 PM

How do you find a middle ground with a sandbox world?  Give players too much freedom and you get a bunch of walking penises.  Too little and you lose the sandbox feel.  It's a slippery slope.

I think sandbox worlds brought to you by major video game publishers is likely an impossibility. They HAVE to control the walking penii or risk the bad PR - which means they HAVE to stifle creativity to some extent. And they have to make sure any creative tools they add don't break the game.

Real sandboxes are going to be the neighborhood variety, run by people who buy the server/server tools and run the world as a mini-GM. The tech isn't there yet for anything more complex than Minecraft style games, but those games are a good start on the ultimate vision.

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Reply #790 on: July 03, 2013, 03:06:23 PM

You don't have to go to Minecraft building-block level to have a sandbox. Let people build through pre-fab pieces and have a mechanism for creative types to get their designs added to the list of building blocks the way Valve does with community-designed skins and weapons in DOTA2/TF2.

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Mrbloodworth
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Reply #791 on: July 03, 2013, 05:42:26 PM


PS2 came out well, and it's a F2P title. But it's not the envy of the genre and not something bound to spawn iteration, any more than PS1 was. I find that unfortunate, because there's elements of MMOFPS that have only ever been seen in the two PS games. But maybe it's just too niche an idea in the age of session-based FPS.

So I don't feel that proves or disproves SOE's expertise in managing a F2P game.

It makes money. and is very popular. Your not exactly the spokesman for FPS, and that seems to taint your thoughts. The comment was SOE does not do F2P well. They do.

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Reply #792 on: July 03, 2013, 06:51:28 PM

You don't have to go to Minecraft building-block level to have a sandbox. Let people build through pre-fab pieces and have a mechanism for creative types to get their designs added to the list of building blocks the way Valve does with community-designed skins and weapons in DOTA2/TF2.

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Venkman
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Reply #793 on: July 03, 2013, 07:02:30 PM


It makes money. and is very popular. Your not exactly the spokesman for FPS, and that seems to taint your thoughts. The comment was SOE does not do F2P well. They do.

Let's go back to what I first said: "F2P is the perfect model for sandboxes, but SOE hasn't shown much expertise on that" (emphasis mine). PS2* makes money. All f2p games make money by default of existing. Does this mean they can make EQ Next awesome? Not by default. Which is why I said "doesn't prove nor disprove". PS2 making money is just a fact.

But you mention a bias, and i have a few minutes to correct you, so let's do it.

I don't have a bias against FPS games. I like 'em and am as likely to pick up BF4 as I will SW:BF as I did BF3, 2, and everything up until MW2.

Instead, my bias is against the idea that MMOFPS is going to become something big. Because the tech has been there for half a decade, and it hasn't happened yet and as much as I enjoyed PS2, it's not doing it either (which is why I said it doesn't inspire iteration).

There's something about the genre that keeps people instead leaning back to the session-based multiplayer variety of Halos, CODs and BFs. In the early 2000s when PS1 launched, I thought maybe it was the tech. Then in the mid-2000s I thought maybe it was marketing. But it's almost the mid-2010s, and we're still not seeing a massive migration to MMOFPS.

* Glad they're coming out with the Sony PS4, because everytime I think "PS2" I think Playstation. But you know what I'm talking about

It's not that I am hoping. I would just be surprised if it didn't happen.

About the "almost had it", I disagree. The most notable sandbox MMOs I can think of are UO, SWG and EVE, which means they stopped developing that stuff about ten years ago. What some of us have been waiting for has been for big companies to stop chasing and reproducing WoW, and start trying something different and ambitious, a sandbox with the technology and know-how of today. The afore mentioned games "almost had it" for many reasons (and for their time), but it's not like many tried and failed recently. They just didn't try.

Quote
Since "sandbox" is becoming a fad (most notably because of Minecraft, but not just) and a hot word every idiot and their friends like to use, you can be assured we'll see lots of attempts at it in the next few years.
I've not followed this closely, but a lot of the purportedly MC-like games I've seen have all borrowed the graphics and some of the building tools but then bolted on directed gameplay. Is there a growing movement of MC-like games with undirected gameplay ala Vanilla or basic Survival?

There's a bunch of sandbox-y MMOs, mostly in the indie category. Companies keep trying, but not companies with nigh on bottomless pits of marketing. On that point ("waiting for ... big companies to ... start trying something different and ambitious) I totally agree. I just don't think sandboxes aren't being tried, because they are.
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Reply #794 on: July 03, 2013, 08:18:53 PM


The best part of a new MMO release is seeing all these hopes and dreams getting stomped by the reality of what will actually emerge.

The EQ franchise is an ancient historical relic, SOE is a small beer company that rarely gets it right... this is our hope for innovation?

Even PS2 should have done better because "Massive online battles" is, I think, going to be big in the future. But instead they made it a mindless shoot-out at the crown or randomly capping undefended bases in the hopes of getting the CoD crowd.

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Paelos
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Reply #795 on: July 03, 2013, 08:39:54 PM

Oh it's going to be shit. They were paying off reviewers to give fictional reviews to vapor. I think that opinion is pretty well established. We've moved beyond that point and we're now discussing what it means for people to jump back into the sandbox idea, not just this game specifically.

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Reply #796 on: July 03, 2013, 10:27:50 PM

We already have that. That's the point of this whole discussion. Making lobbies for matching is fine in a achiever dungeon crawl. It's not in a sandbox.
Yes, but I think we have that as result of the opposite having been extensively tested by older games and ultimately found too annoying to put up with. Bringing it back again won't make it the next big thing, but just remind people why they disliked it in the first place.
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Reply #797 on: July 04, 2013, 03:34:19 AM

Probably not this time around, and almost certainly not SOE and Smed, but I have a hard time thinking five years from now we won't have bigger, more ambitious Minecrafts. Newer, less broken UO/SWG. Or less spread-sheety, less spacey EVEs.

I'm really too lazy to use the search function, but I'll see if Evernote will let me tag this one for laughs.  This discussion has been had before. It's always "next time!" or "Well they ALMOST had it!  They just needed more time/ focus/ budget/ carrots/ unobtanium"

I really feel bad for you sandbox believers sometimes.

To be clear, as far as I'm concerned UO and EVE were a success, and SWG probably could have been if not saddled with Star Wars. EVE had 45k people logged on in euro prime last night.

If someone wants to make something like those games, but a bit better and shinier there is no reason they can't succeed.

However, I really can't imagine EQ, the ultimate not-sandbox, spawning that.

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Lantyssa
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Reply #798 on: July 04, 2013, 05:07:30 AM

SWG was a success, it just wasn't a WoW-level success.  Baby-bathwater-etc.

We like to think of it as a failed game because it didn't live up to some mythological potential, but it still had subscriber numbers greater than most everything out there.

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Reply #799 on: July 04, 2013, 05:24:25 AM

I'm not entirely convinced that Eve and Runescape don't fit the definition of MMOs but whatever else we want to call them, they are sandboxes and they have been successes.

You can talk about the specific circumstances that helped those games, but you could do the same with successful theme parks too. I think we all agree that if World of Warcraft launched today in the same way that it launched in 2004, the outcome would be different.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of themepark games that failed.

I don't think the evidence backs up the thesis that sandbox games can't succeed.

Whether any MMO of any description can succeed in today's market might be debatable.
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Reply #800 on: July 04, 2013, 06:26:35 AM

SWG was a success, it just wasn't a WoW-level success.  Baby-bathwater-etc.

We like to think of it as a failed game because it didn't live up to some mythological potential, but it still had subscriber numbers greater than most everything out there.

No, I think of it as a failed game because it was radically changed and then closed.

I'm not entirely convinced that Eve and Runescape don't fit the definition of MMOs but whatever else we want to call them, they are sandboxes and they have been successes.

You can talk about the specific circumstances that helped those games, but you could do the same with successful theme parks too. I think we all agree that if World of Warcraft launched today in the same way that it launched in 2004, the outcome would be different.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of themepark games that failed.

I don't think the evidence backs up the thesis that sandbox games can't succeed.

Whether any MMO of any description can succeed in today's market might be debatable.

My contention is Falc is wrong that in 5 years we'll have another big sandbox, not that the ones that are already out there aren't successful. 

The forum has had this argument before, as far back as 2004 but I can't be arsed to search for it.  What sandbox has arisen in those 9 years that leads anyone to believe we're going to see another big success in the next 5?  Particularly since, as you allude to, MMOs in the traditional sense are dying.  Lobby-based microtrans games are the future of the next 5 years.  (Which is why I suspect Blizzard scrapped Titan, which was likely following the old model.)

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Reply #801 on: July 04, 2013, 08:04:35 AM

No, I think of it as a failed game because it was radically changed and then closed.
I consider SWG and SWG-NGE different games.  Really the only thing they shared were graphics and 'secondary' systems such as crafting and housing, which weren't considered secondary in the original incarnation.

SWG died because of executive greed and mismanagement, not because it was a failure.

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Reply #802 on: July 04, 2013, 11:16:24 AM

So EQ next is going to be the new "Wish"?  Ohhhhh, I see.
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Reply #803 on: July 04, 2013, 11:28:00 AM

So EQ next is going to be the new "Wish"?  Ohhhhh, I see.

I was going to say Wish, but then I was like "Nah, SOE's not THAT pants-on-head silly."  But then maybe they are.   why so serious?

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Numtini
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Reply #804 on: July 04, 2013, 01:35:04 PM

SOE is too stupid to cut their losses like Wish did.

If you can read this, you're on a board populated by misogynist assholes.
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