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  #31  
Old 03-23-2011, 10:06 PM
Kyden Kyden is offline
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I am wondering how many more times this article is gonna be pulled up on the web and posted on this forum. Guess what, the replies are always the same too.
  #32  
Old 03-23-2011, 10:58 PM
Bubbles Bubbles is offline
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Kunark's biggest issue re: the level grind was...

Replayability.

In Classic once you hit 50 you couldn't wait to start another toon and get it to 50, too.

In Kunark, once you hit 60 the LAST thing you wanna do is start up an alt, at least to seriously level beyond just donking around soloing.
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  #33  
Old 03-24-2011, 04:12 AM
Jarnin Jarnin is offline
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I like how Thott completely ignored all the outdoor zones where level 50-60 players can get exp. Apparently you can only level to 60 in dungeons.
  #34  
Old 03-24-2011, 09:08 AM
Leokaiser Leokaiser is offline
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Leveling hasn't gone away, no, but the pacing of leveling and the rate of reward has changed dramatically. Sometimes the only notable progress you made during a lengthy session in EQ was seeing a bar fill up - regardless of the fun you might have had, the end result isn't as satisfying for most people compared to when you actually gain a tangible benefit from your play to carry on to your next session ("just want to ding, then I can log"?). Things like AAs or faster leveling rates and the consistant stream of gear/ability upgrades were the solution to this, to make (almost) every session a rewarding one in terms of character progress.

The problem is that as rewards become more frequent, they become less significant, so it is a hard formula to balance.

I'm fairly certain that no game hoping for commercial success will adopt a classic EQ approch to leveling, where A) groups are pretty much required for certain classes, yet there are no tools for ensuring the players will find one, B) progress is slow to the point that all you might get from hours of play is 10% of a level and some coin or C) the possibility to actually lose progress from a session due to exp loss on death (while danger and the fear of death are good, you are mad if you actually enjoy suffering a death penalty).

As someone sussinctly put it, that shit don't fly no more. Game budgets are huge these days, so you need to reel in the punters, not a niche who enjoy corpse runs and waiting 30 mins on boats. This server, which is free to play, developed and ran by hobbyists using an exisiting game client, and aimed at people who loved EQ classic (flaws and all), cannot be held up as proof that a similar commercial game released today could survive in the difficult market of MMOs.
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  #35  
Old 03-24-2011, 09:33 AM
Scroll Scroll is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
I'm always in the minority when I say I loved PoP. Flagging and clearing time was probably up there with my favorite raids in EQ. I will never forget the rathe council.
PoP was my favorite too, and a perfect ending once I finally left EQ1.
  #36  
Old 03-24-2011, 09:55 AM
yorumi yorumi is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Leokaiser [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
I'm fairly certain that no game hoping for commercial success will adopt a classic EQ approch to leveling, where A) groups are pretty much required for certain classes, yet there are no tools for ensuring the players will find one, B) progress is slow to the point that all you might get from hours of play is 10% of a level and some coin or C) the possibility to actually lose progress from a session due to exp loss on death (while danger and the fear of death are good, you are mad if you actually enjoy suffering a death penalty).

As someone sussinctly put it, that shit don't fly no more. Game budgets are huge these days, so you need to reel in the punters, not a niche who enjoy corpse runs and waiting 30 mins on boats. This server, which is free to play, developed and ran by hobbyists using an exisiting game client, and aimed at people who loved EQ classic (flaws and all), cannot be held up as proof that a similar commercial game released today could survive in the difficult market of MMOs.
I think you're honestly only seeing what you want to see and ignoring the rest. It is possible to make a commercial success on the EQ model of slow leveling, harsh death penalty and nearly necessitating groups. I said it before but FFXI is a perfect example. Until a later expansion soloing was impossible for all but one class, fairly harsh death penalty and you could lose a level and all gear was level locked so you could find yourself unable to equip your gear. Granted they've killed it now but it was a big commercial success. Ironically the same thing killed both eq and ffxi, dumbing the game down, making travel trivial, less exp to level, easier to solo etc.

I would also point to vanguard, rather large popularity when it was announced that it would be a game similar to classic eq. Why did most people leave when beta started and it launched, "this isn't classic eq it's a wow clone." Granted the bugs and extreme system requirements didn't help but if it had truly been like classic eq I bet people would have had a lot more patients with the game and let them fix that.

And honestly look at how many failed wow clones are out there. There's more failed wow clones than eq clones. That's not to say a classic eq game is going to become the next wow but I don't believe the evidence supports the notion that a game on classic eq's model will automatically be a commercial disaster.

Just because the toyoda corolla(or whatever go with it for example sake) is the most popular car doesn't me we shouldn't make mustangs because the market is smaller.

About the bugdet, that's honestly their own problem. Eq was ambitious but it wasn't system busting when it launched. MMOs don't necessarily have to cost unholy amounts of money. Look at the success of the free korean mmos, yes they problems with their core game design, but they use lower quality stylized graphics that are much cheaper to produce and many of these games are more successful than big budget subscription mmos. With more affordable 3d engines out there now, many that come with built in camera systems, physics effects, particles, and more, it's much more possible to make an mmo that isn't tens of billions of dollars to start up.

Is a low budget game going to be the next wow, probably not, but then is anything? I mean I suppose something is but look at how many of have tried and failed so horribly. There's a market of poeple out there that want a harder mmo that isn't instant gratification, this is evidenced by ffxi, vanguard, and the success of soe progression servers as well as this server(no advertisment private server and it's got a respectable population). A game like that is going to be almost uncontested in the market, whereas a wow clone has thousands of mmos both subscription and free out there already.
  #37  
Old 03-24-2011, 11:00 AM
Envious Envious is offline
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Ninnu did 50-60 in like, 2 weeks or less? He and some light necro got it within a few hours of each other, and were the first 2 lvl 60s by almost a full level, if not more.

On a live pvp server~
  #38  
Old 03-24-2011, 01:52 PM
Leokaiser Leokaiser is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by yorumi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
<snip>
Yeah, I should maybe have quantified that I'm speaking about AAA titles here, and by commercial success I'm not just meaning anything in the profit margins, but something that meets the expectations of the developers and their backers (hence I don't consider WAR particularly successful, for example, even though it probably turns a profit).

FFXI, like EQ, was released at a time when MMOs were still a relatively niche market. The reason so many emulate WoW (I feel the term 'Wow clone' is applied too liberally) in many respects is due to the fact that WoW brought the genre into the mainstream by cutting out a lot of things that kept it niche. Pretty much any big developer who wants to release an MMO which is successful by the standards of 2011 (rather than 1999 or 2003) wants a slice of that mainstream audience. From what i've seen of FFXIV (I could be totally wrong here), it doesn't seem as if Square were very confident the FFXI formula would work for them in today's market.

Vanguard is actually the perfect example of what I'm talking about here. It started out on a path towards The Vision, and I doubt they strayed from it because they themselves lost faith rather than caving in to the demands of the mainstream audience they hoped to attract and/or the finacial overseers.

If someone comes out with a low budget game that aims to make a large profit from 100k subs or the equivelent in item transactions (see: Korea), I'm not going to know their relative success, but it's not really on the scale I was talking about considering the size of the MMO market.

The most interesting blip on my gaming radar at the minute is the MMO under development by Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. Here is a guy who loved EQ, who also loves WoW, and is a player first-and-foremost rather than a developer; here is a player putting his money, time and reputation on the line. Will his game be more comparable to EQ or to WoW? No one knows at the minute, but if someone like him isn't going to bring back corpse runs and 40 minute hoofs across a continent to get a group, I wouldn't be too hopeful that any other big players will.
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  #39  
Old 03-24-2011, 03:12 PM
yorumi yorumi is offline
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I still don't think you're giving credit where credit is due. FFXI was released in north america mere months before WoW, and for pretty much all of it's life was in direct competition with WoW. The various census data they put out reported over a million active subscriptions at it's peak. Perhaps it was just getting stale but the game didn't start to die until things were made more WoW like, you would think if anything that should increase subscriptions.

EQ was the same way, again perhaps it's age but when did it start to die? As soon as it was made easier. SWG was supposed to be the anti-EQ, which is sort of what you're arguing that WoW did, it died a horrible death(i know it's techincally still around but lets be serious), they even tried to outright copy WoWs design and its STAR WARS, and they could get a population worht anything. Vanguard goes to be like WoW, they're not running two servers and only one is populated.

I guess my question is how many games do we have to make like WoW that are horrible failures before we stop saying WoW is the only way to make an mmo? Obviously WoW did a lot right, but you can't just completely ignore other games that have had success, and a game isn't a complete failure when it doesn't have 10 mil subscriptions. You'd actually probably be amazed how many games out there are around the 100k mark and the profits are amazing.

I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.
  #40  
Old 03-24-2011, 06:02 PM
mwatt mwatt is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by yorumi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.
I think the real problem is that the mmo industry is basing their game design ideas off of game mechanics and themes found within WoW, because of it's huge success. They give no consideration to the idea that a major reason for the huge success of WoW is not just WHAT it is, but also WHO produces it. Blizzard consistently produces engaging products that are mature enough to be released and it does not make a habit of pissing it's customers off as time goes on. They have an excellent reputation within the gaming industry. This has a Synergistic influence on their gaming populace.

So far, every company that has tried to copy the WoW formula has produced a WoWish game, but without the backing of a Blizzard. Who wants to play a game that is already like an existing game except that it is worse and is run by corporations that sink because of inadequate bank or like SOE, generally just fuck up their games and piss their customers off?
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