Fires of Heaven Guild Message Board - View Single Post

SirBruce · 05-23-2006, 12:14 PM

Hey guys, just wanted to drop in and read the discussion here. Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative.

I wanted to point out (again) that these are just brief previews; you can see far more extensive previews at other gaming news outlets. Outside of my personal preferences as a gamer, my interests are in what products will actually sell in the marketplace, what products will innovate it, what products will appeal to a broader audience, and so on. Given that, issues like graphics and solo play and fun PvE combat and strong IP licenses are very important. You could make a MMOG with the best quests and coolest gameplay ever, but if the graphics are sub-par and requires groups of 4 to have a chance of living through encounters, it's not going to do well. Games like Horizons and Irth Online and WWII Online all have some really great stuff in them, but there are also reasons why they'll never have 100K subscribers.

I mentioned Asheron's Call 2 in relation to DDO because that was Turbine's previous product, not because that was the graphical standard to aspire to. (Although at the time it came out, AC2's graphics were very nice.) As for the modest success of DDO, I owned up to that prediction in this year's report, and I gave reason's why. Turbine blew it in the beta test. Almost anyone else who beta tested the product will tell you that. DDO is not a fundamentally bad game, and could have been saved with some redesign and a six month delay. Turbine chose not to do so, and now they're scrambling to fix things everyone told them was wrong with the product before release. Still, did any better MMOs come out last year? City of Villians, perhaps, but that's really more of a City of Heroes expansion. Are you all playing Auto Assault?

Anyway, if you're playing a game with only 50K subscribers and you're having fun, that's all that matters. My job is to try and predict which games are going to get 50K subscribers and which ones are going to get 500K, not necessarily which is more "fun". I had more fun playing City of Heroes than World of Warcraft, but WoW still blew everything else away in the market.

Bruce

PS - And the subscriber numbers on the rest of the site are still old. I'm working on a new update currently. WoW is up to 6.5 million...

05-23-2006, 12:14 PM	#30 (permalink)
SirBruce Registered User Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 42 +0 Internets	Hey guys, just wanted to drop in and read the discussion here. Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative. I wanted to point out (again) that these are just brief previews; you can see far more extensive previews at other gaming news outlets. Outside of my personal preferences as a gamer, my interests are in what products will actually sell in the marketplace, what products will innovate it, what products will appeal to a broader audience, and so on. Given that, issues like graphics and solo play and fun PvE combat and strong IP licenses are very important. You could make a MMOG with the best quests and coolest gameplay ever, but if the graphics are sub-par and requires groups of 4 to have a chance of living through encounters, it's not going to do well. Games like Horizons and Irth Online and WWII Online all have some really great stuff in them, but there are also reasons why they'll never have 100K subscribers. I mentioned Asheron's Call 2 in relation to DDO because that was Turbine's previous product, not because that was the graphical standard to aspire to. (Although at the time it came out, AC2's graphics were very nice.) As for the modest success of DDO, I owned up to that prediction in this year's report, and I gave reason's why. Turbine blew it in the beta test. Almost anyone else who beta tested the product will tell you that. DDO is not a fundamentally bad game, and could have been saved with some redesign and a six month delay. Turbine chose not to do so, and now they're scrambling to fix things everyone told them was wrong with the product before release. Still, did any better MMOs come out last year? City of Villians, perhaps, but that's really more of a City of Heroes expansion. Are you all playing Auto Assault? Anyway, if you're playing a game with only 50K subscribers and you're having fun, that's all that matters. My job is to try and predict which games are going to get 50K subscribers and which ones are going to get 500K, not necessarily which is more "fun". I had more fun playing City of Heroes than World of Warcraft, but WoW still blew everything else away in the market. Bruce PS - And the subscriber numbers on the rest of the site are still old. I'm working on a new update currently. WoW is up to 6.5 million...