Quote:
Originally Posted by Rayne  Bullshit. Did you even bother to consider the astronomical costs associated with building some of the games you mentioned? WAR, Conan, Vanguard, and other high end games like them, won't likely ever see any considerale profit relative to thier development costs.
They failed BECAUSE they shot for the bar and missed. By a country fuckin' mile. |
I think you're over generalizing. Vanguard was a complete failure, yes. Between client problems, polish issues and generally unfinished content it was never going to be anything.
WAR, on the other hand, did not fail because they 'missed the bar'. WAR had a small number of crippling design decisions that killed it. For all the retarded UI responsiveness, stock PvE and repetitive BG grinding, it was
fun and would have succeeded. It didn't because of, IMO, two very simple reasons. One was the destro bloat (entirely expected by everyone BUT mythic and no contingencies planned) and the second was simply the EXP grind required to get to the fun part of RvR, especially when no one else is on to RvR with.
AoC was also fun but suffered from some ridiculous bugs like female combat animation delays and the complete lack of content between 50-60.
None of those would have killed WoW, but there have been many MMOs that have been so
very close to becoming a critical success and opening up the genre to more investors. The main issue is studios keep making games people don't want to play. WoW is a huge enabler to the gaming population because its a game made by people who want YOU to play it. Gone are the days where you can make really shitty game mechanics and annoy the everliving crap out of anyone trying to achieve anything in your game and retain subs. Can you imagine if a game got released with the downtime and obfuscated mechanics of EQ today? It would get ravaged and canceled faster than HGL.
