2008 - Year of the MMO?

[Muligan]

I don't believe the upcoming MMO's are set on "competing" with WoW. It's kind of like playing again Michael Jordan in the 80's or Shaq in the 90's, you don't intend on shutting him down because you can't, you hope to just contain everyone else. WoW is going to have millions of subs for a few years and even if they release a major hit and split their sub base let's say WoW get 5 million and Starcraft Worlds (for example) gets 3-5 million, that leaves the most populated sub base of any MMO by a long shot.

I think it's time to take risks and get the creativity going with hopes of making that "next great thing". You try for a solid release and make a good first impression, then over time climb the success ladder. If any of these MMO's reach 500k that's really successful. Finally by word of mouth and effective game updates/adjustments you may get some bored WoW'ers and eventually reach 1 million.

I say all this if you measure success by subscriber numbers. However, being a long time EQ player and now an EQ2 player, I by no means feel that the quality of a game is measured by subs. I think EQ2, at this point, is the best MMO if you really look at every aspect of the game. Let's face it though, it fails in comparison to WoW's business success and unfortunately the industry has guided the media and many newcomers to MMO's to judge a game by it's numbers.

When I played was really into gaming, especially EQ, I don't believe numbers ever entered my mind. It was more about people and the community that discussed and supported it.

[Rayne]

Every mmo harbors a "grind" in one form or another. Truth be told, I think WoW did the best job of masking it though. I certainly didn't mind grinding rep in WoW as much as I did in EQ.

[Zhakran]

If you think barrow downs was good, you should have seen Fornost, the high 40s instance.

Oh my god, that was pure sex if you could do it with a good group. It took 4-5 hours or more to complete, but itwas like the Barrow downs on crack. The high level dungeons, eh, they were okay, but you could tell the best polished ones were Fornost and BD.

LOTRO was good fun, but just too much fluff to really keep too many people playing. Glad I didn't fall for the $199 lifetime thingie.

[Draegan]

I still don't know how people think EQ2 is a great MMO. I mean it's ok, but there are a lot of glaring flaws with the base design.

[Salshun]

It must be really discouraging to make an MMORPG these days with the success of WOW. I forgot where I was reading it but they said it takes like 10 million dollars to get an MMORPG coded and released to the point where it can handle just 100,000 subs.

I really don't know what the trick/technique is for making a successful MMORPG. They've released a couple games with fantastic IP's and even those failed. It must be pure suck working on a game KNOWING, beyond a shadow of doubt, their is a 5-10% chance it will still be profitable a year after release, or that you'll ever earn back the money you spent to make it.

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Salshun

It must be pure suck working on a game KNOWING, beyond a shadow of doubt, their is a 5-10% chance it will still be profitable a year after release, or that you'll ever earn back the money you spent to make it.

I imagine it is. But i'd also think that with extensive research, and reasonable investment return expectations vs. reasonable budget, you could greatly improve your chances of success. Which I think is where a lot of the fault for failure lies. I'm sure every dev house dreams of WoW type numbers. The bigger problem is, so do thier investors.

[Darvain]

Originally Posted by sticktastic

No.


As bad as I hate to say it, because I think they did a lot of good, and bad but WoW is the best MMO ever created. I played EQ for 7ish years, and while it is still my favorite, WoW is the best. It does well in every aspect Makes me ill, but it's true. This year will be chalked full of failures in the mmo business. AoC does not stand a chance, and frankly warhammer has always been a joke imo, anything mythic ever does again will be a joke to me. They had the best pvp game ever, and completly fucked it up. To the point where people who knew anything about the game was asking themselves "does mythic even play this fucking game?". TOA was the nail in the coffin.

Has there ever been another game, or MMO in history where your remaining player base begged for a server that included everything except one specific expansion? It was that level of fuck up. Anyhow, I see WoW remaining king of the hill until they decide to attempt to out do themselves with their next MMO whatever it may be.

Exactly.

-Darvain

[Blumpster]

Originally Posted by Darvain

Exactly.

-Darvain

I agree.

-Darvain

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by Manseed

Moving forward for the vast majority, moving backwards for Dumar and his 7 friends.

Progression.

Nevermind reality, it kinds sucks anyway.

Sad story is that WoW is no "progression", its only the accumulation of things that were already there in other games. You have to give WoW 2 things: First its nearly perfect at what it is. The reason so many games fail is that they try to beat WoW in being WoW. You cannot make a game that beats wow with lovely look/setting/worlddesign, quality (!) and mindless and unchallenging grind that makes everybody feel like a winner. The moment your game gets difficult/challenging/good, you wont get that successful. People will lose, feel bad and play something like wow that makes them feel like winners again.
The second thing you have to give to WoW, no matter if you like it or not, is that it brought 10 Million new players to MMOs that never played one before. When I tried to get my friends play MMOs back in the old days they were like "im never going to pay monthly to play a game! thats insane!". Then WoW hit the shelf and everyone was playing it. And it was perfectly fine to pay more than the older games took every month.

If you want to talk about "progress" wait for the first third generation MMO to hit us, but not wow. Makes you look kinda...

[Awake]

Originally Posted by Draegan

I have to agree with the Chinaman. I also predict Aion will be interested to play, if those sneaky Koreans don't fuck up the control scheme.

It's WSAD (keyboard) and the mouse. Just like in WoW.

Couple of more things to add under Aion:

Asia's top New Age musician, Yang Bang Ean, whose work includes compositions for television, feature films and anime series such as the The Twelve Kingdoms (Juuni Kokki), provides an amazing original score for the game.

The Balaur are NPCs and cannot be chosen at the character creation screen. They have artificial free will, and are designed to be unpredictable when they appear, for example, they may side with you during a skirmish with the opposing faction, but afterward they may decide to turn on you. They are described as Draconic-like beings (which is also suggested by their name, as "Balaur" is the Romanian term for Dragon).

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

The reason so many games fail is that they try to beat WoW in being WoW.

Name all the games that have launched since WoW and failed because they tried to 'be WoW'.

Tired of this little copout line used everytime someone wants to make a McDonald's analogy.

So go ahead and name all the 'WoW clones' that have failed.

[Draegan]

The only MMO that's been released in the last few years that has "failed" is VG and maaaaybe TR (but it's still early!).

[Wilfan]

H:L?

[Twobit Whore]

And none of those games failed because they tried to 'be WoW'.

The only 2 games that you could even debate drew heavily from WoW are LotRO (the 2nd most popular western MMO according to reports) and the revamped EQ2 (which most people who play it would argue it's much better now than it was prior).

Other than that there have been no major MMO releases.

[Pyros]

There's been pirates stuff, but definitely not a wow-like game. Also EVE relaunch thingie, but both those are in totally different leagues.

There was Rising Rome Heroes or whatever the fuck the name was, that never launched, it was trying to be wow meets caesar, and failed before launching(it was fucking terrible though).

Hellgate can't really be considered a mmo, at least to me it wasn't. Same as fury can't be called a mmo, if you want to play on semantics I guess they are, but they're not really rpgs even if they do take some elements from it, so it makes them mmoactionrpg and mmofps.

The only thing devs do that you could call trying to be wow, is stop having retardedly hard leveling systems, punishing death systems and overall just try to please casuals by making leveling easier/soloable. To be honest I never liked EQ or DAoC leveling system because it forced you to group, which I disliked(and somehow I still managed to play FFXI until lvl 70something at release, I guess it had to do with my char being a sexy catgirl with a red skimpy outfit). Taking this into account is by no means trying to be wow though, it's just trying not to be retarded and make vanguard2(which while it promoted hardcore pve, still had a decent solo leveling system).

Being in both AoC and WAR beta, I can say I'm not really waiting for much this year, but WoTLK if blizzard actually releases it this year, and Aion if the pvp proves to be fun enough. I'm not too affraid of the grind because it's korean, last korean mmo I played for 2months, the grind wasn't all that bad and it was pretty fun(Granado Espada, on the SG server). I quit due to the game lacking good pvp though, it was a goddamn lagging zerg fest because the server couldn't handle 100people playing3chars each in the same screen area. But I grinded the last level 99-100 in like, 4hours, which is pretty fucking reasonable even to me who would rather fly for 40mins all around the world to complete quest instead of grinding 30mins in wow.