Elder Scrolls Online

[Genedin]

Originally Posted by Uteunayr [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yes. When you're a noob in the Oasis, you have fun killing orcs and alligators while dodging around giants. Until you see that badass dude on the center island killing those really creepy spectres. Until you find that enchanter coming along and mind controlling the giants that have been fucking with you. And you think, "Holy shit. I want to do that one day."...

And then one day in the future, you've spent likely months leveling. And then someone says "Hey, you should try killing spectres or giants in the Oasis.", so you return there, and now you're the person killing those awesome things. Noobs look on and get motivated to level, thinking that one day they will do what you do.

That type of world design just doesn't exist in modern MMOs. It is really sad. You're more like a tourist in the WoW model, because you go to each place once, just to see and exhaust the experience of being there. With games like EQ, and SWG, you're not a tourist, you're someone that lives here. You interact here. You need to know how to get from Highkeep to Qeynos, because you're going to go by there a lot. It's a lot more like learning your neighborhood that you just moved into. The exploration is learning every knook and cranny, every trick to travel around, all the secret places any given area has in plenty. It isn't about consuming a quick experience and saying "Well, that's everything", it's about the complexity and beauty of making a place into your home.

Damn son. Every post you make fits the sentiment of most everyone I game with and probably everyone who plays p99. Problem is it's a niche market or at least the companies think so. They are all about getting people playing and since wow was so successful with the fastfood quest model they are copying that. I'm kind of hoping this will fail and show they mmo production companies (if there are anymore) that they need to change things.

[moklianne]

Originally Posted by Smedy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

agreed, sub model is the only way, the pay to win is retarded

/agree

The problem is that everyone is afraid to use a sub model anymore. F2p has been around for a while and too many people will just refuse to play unless its free.

I'd like to see subs come back to MMO's. It'll keep some kids and griefers out.

[Grubbz]

Originally Posted by moklianne [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

/agree

The problem is that everyone is afraid to use a sub model anymore. F2p has been around for a while and too many people will just refuse to play unless its free.

I'd like to see subs come back to MMO's. It'll keep some kids and griefers out.

I thought the same thing till i resubbed to wow back in january......... Game was filled with kids and trust me, it was not worth playing. Makes me wonder how all these kids can afford a sub in this day and age.

[stormlord]

Meh, I think ESO - if it fails - will do so because the market for these kinds of games is near exhaustion and everybody is entrenched. It's hard to pull players from other games without cloning their game and it's hard to keep them playing if it's mostly a clone. People keep going back to their beloved bunkers where they play their favorite games and it's almost impossible to change them to liking something else. I think EQN is going in the right direction with its turn towards sandbox features because I think things are getting sour and overbaked. HOwever, I think a lot of this will be won on the social media sites and on portables and on consoles. Unless a game can be truly modern and appeal to many different audiences it's going to be shoved back in the dusty room with the cobwebs where all the entrenched gamers and doom fills the air.

On teh subject of F2p, one good thing about F2P is it allows you to test the game fairly well to see how well it runs on your system and whether it's stable or not. Still, the whole F2P thing is lame to me, since why should it be free?????? Why should someone else give me something for free, unless they think I'll keep playing and eventually spend enough money to make up for the time I spent F2P?

I think the real story behind F2P isn't playing for free but the micro-transactions. The micro-transactions are enabling these companies to make far more money from their wealthy players than they did previously. So if you have a player that's rich you can get them addicted and spending more than $15/month, more like $100/month or more. This allows you to make some of the game free to new players while also gaining more profit.

All you gotta understand is hte rich players weren't being fleeced properly before on the subscription model. Some of them boxed, but boxers are more technical and have the time for it and are fewer in number. There're a greater number of non-boxer casuals who can now be thoroughly molested. If 20% of our population has maybe 80% of the wealth then there's no need to hire a math wiz to figure out what it means.

[Uteunayr]

Originally Posted by Genedin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Damn son. Every post you make fits the sentiment of most everyone I game with and probably everyone who plays p99. Problem is it's a niche market or at least the companies think so. They are all about getting people playing and since wow was so successful with the fastfood quest model they are copying that. I'm kind of hoping this will fail and show they mmo production companies (if there are anymore) that they need to change things.

Well, before I write my response to this, I'd like anyone passing through here to check out Jim Sterling's amazing discussion on Survival Horror. Now, I know Survival Horror isn't the thing for everyone, but the point he makes about Survival Horror is something that is very similar to the "niche" market that we make up.

Note this is going to be a very long post, as I sort of just started writing about developers and niche markets, and then shifted into the single greatest reason why WoW was successful, and finally made some notes as to why I have hope for EverQuest Next, even if it isn't exactly the EverQuest we remember.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...ival-of-Horror

"This is an industry that would rather make no money, than some money. That would have nothing if it couldn't have it all."

"Another silly reason is based on this belief that the audience will be turned off and bored if you're not waving combat in its face like some massive swinging dick."

So, with that, I will respond.

Yes, the type of game we want is not the massive, wide spread game that will usher in a new era of gaming. Sadly, that's never going to happen. WoW was perfectly timed to catch the influx of gamers into the market that are more "casual" about their attitude toward gaming. Gaming isn't their sole form of entertainment, nor does it necessarily become their most dominant form of entertainment, and that's fine. For such people, a game like EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, DAoC, and the rest... These games do not work for them at all, because generally, you need to spend a great deal of time. Perhaps not all day, of course, but the majority of your entertainment time should be devoted to these experiences.

And when WoW was released, internet was reaching a point in which pretty much everyone had it, most people had a computer that could run it, and, most importantly, it was rooted in a game that had a huge fanbase on the basis of Blizzard among many gamers. So gamers were more easily able to get their friends into World of Warcraft, hence the boom of population to around 4.5 million in the first two quarters WoW was out.

Gamers could get their casual friends who now have computers, and now have internet. And because they could get them into it, and because the game is designed to be more easily consumed than the experience offered by EverQuest/SWG/DAoC, etc., WoW exploded in population.

Now, in this way, I am talking entirely from personal experience, rather than just theory about the growth of WoW in its market. I operated a guild in WoW for 3 years, and raid lead it to be in the top 3 of my server, so what I describe here, I know to be true, at least for my server. What you have is a population that perpetuates itself. You have 10% of the population quit, and then as they quit, they go on in their lives, but want to see their friends again. What is the best way? To play games with them. What game do the majority of their friends play? WoW. So they rejoin WoW, because it isn't about the game play, it isn't about the play style, it's about their friends being clustered in the game. So as that 10% return, another 10% quit, and continue the cycle.

We have seen steady increases, and since Lich King, steady decreases, as people are breaking into and out of this system.

The problem is, every game since then has been trying to recreate WoW, but no game that is created now will have the social, or economic temporal positioning to become WoW. You just can't. So what do you do?

Game developers have decided that if they can't have it all, they'll accept nothing. So they make WoW clones. They appeal to players on the grounds of "Star Wars > Warcraft", they appeal to "You're not in Azeroth anymore!", they do all this stuff to try and defeat WoW at its game, but they fail to realize that you can't beat WoW at its' game, because WoW doesn't have a game it is playing. It really doesn't. It is the people concentrated into one place. If you took the entire WoW population, transferred them to a new MMO, it doesn't matter how bad that MMO is, so long as all their friends are there. Even shitty content is made really, really fun when you have friends with you.

So, game developers keep seeking the Holy Grail, they keep seeking to supplant the population of WoW, which is fucking stupid.

There is a class of gamers out there who love MMOs. Who played old school EverQuest, SWG, DAoC, who remember what MMOs used to be before they all tried to be WoW. We are out there, we are starving for a game that will let us do something other than WoW.

Game developers now think that every MMO player will get bored if you don't give them quest, after quest to handle and deal with, rather than just letting them explore the world and progress in their own time.

We are a starved part of the market. We're not just a niche market, because there are many of us out there who want something better from the market, but the market isn't providing it because every game developer is going after their Holy Grail.

This is why my sole hope right now is for EverQuest Next. The developers have been talking, less along the lines of "Lets kill WoW!", and far more along the lines of "Lets make a game that appeals to a corner of the market, and we can make profit off of that.". SoE is now a company that, although they have betrayed us time and time again in trying to achieve the Holy Grail (look what they did to EQ and SWG to try and stop the expansion of WoW, the CU and NGE and shit), I think they have realized they can't. I think SoE has realized that if they make a great game that appeals to a small corner of the market, making some money is better than making no money.

Heck, EQ Live is still around, and still profitable. It may not be WoW profitable, but it is profitable.

So my hope is that SoE is making a game that appeals to our community, to this side of the market, while at the same time trying to reach out to the Minecraft/Rust style market to introduce them into MMOs. Those players know hard work, they know challenge. When you spend 40 hours building a mega fortress in Rust, or mining shit in Minecraft to build a great cathedral, you learn what it is like to "grind", to work to achieve something. That's a market that isn't looking for a "casual" gaming experience, and I think SoE realizes that if they can make a MMO that is interesting, and fun to our side of the market, as well as grab another market that respects challenge, and difficulty, that they can make another profitable game to add to their large selection.

The story of EverQuest has always been in the background, it is nebulous, its in the environment for you to go out there and find, rather than being consumed and then ignored. Mix this with a market of people who like to build stuff on a voxel style world... Well, it is easy to see how these styles are not mutually exclusive, and how it is plausible that there can be a profitable game like this. It brings together two markets that probably never would have met before now. Rather than grinding out quests on the world, the gameplay is something entirely new, something dynamic, something that can be challenging and unique enough for us (the p99 style players), while being dynamic enough for the Minecraft/Rust players that are used to constantly changing worlds.

I can only hope SoE has failed at killing WoW enough that they realized they need to stop trying that.

[Grimfan]

I think EverQuest Next is going to appeal to a different kind of community all together. Personally, I really want to believe in Pantheon, Brad McQuaid's new game. But if you look at Brad's kickstarter video you start to see some issues.

It's developed in Unity. There's no problem with Unity but it's a pretty outdated engine already. It's meant to be easy to develop in and isn't really what I would consider a solid MMO engine. Then, he says, "People beg me to take today's technology and re-make EverQuest." or something like that. The issue with that is that he projects his game sometime in 2017. Brad dude, if you're expecting a game like traditional EverQuest to still be a thing in 2017... we might have some issues. You're going to be living in a world with procedurally generated content, advanced AI, and destructible terrain. MMO's with vast open worlds and brand new things to constantly explore. The competition you'll be facing in three years is going to be... the future.

I don't see him doing any sort of future proofing, and I realize that is harsh of me. I honestly think we're on this edge where we're about to get a new World of Warcraft and it might not be everything we want, but it'll be better than ESO, it will be better than WoW and all the WoW clones out there, and it will be different.

This is why my sole hope right now is for EverQuest Next. The developers have been talking, less along the lines of "Lets kill WoW!", and far more along the lines of "Lets make a game that appeals to a corner of the market, and we can make profit off of that.". SoE is now a company that, although they have betrayed us time and time again in trying to achieve the Holy Grail (look what they did to EQ and SWG to try and stop the expansion of WoW, the CU and NGE and shit), I think they have realized they can't. I think SoE has realized that if they make a great game that appeals to a small corner of the market, making some money is better than making no money.

Yeah SOE is making the future of MMO's. That's why I am excited about EQNext. They're also future proofing it in a way by allowing players to generate content. They are picking an art style that ages well into the future. They are making a lot of smart decisions but they're also making a lot of decisions that players are afraid of. If you look at their roundtables they do believe in some very traditional WoW like MMO shit like faucets and sinks. But whatever, they are really making the future and even though I'll be playing ESO, I also anticipate that I will be playing the shit out of Landmark and when Next actually comes out, I'm hoping that will just be my game for the next 10 years or whatever.

But you can tell it's making other game companies panic, EQNext, that is. It's making them re-evaluate what a future MMO will look like, and that is brilliant.

[QuantumZebra]

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

he says it'll fail cause of the sub model? thats pretty dumb imo. its things like pay to win, and station stores that ruin games.

15$ a month is less than 4$ a week. if you dont get 4$ a week of entertainment, then dont play it.

but personally i prefer sub model > everything else ive seen

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[moklianne]

Originally Posted by QuantumZebra [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

he says it'll fail cause of the sub model? thats pretty dumb imo. its things like pay to win, and station stores that ruin games.

15$ a month is less than 4$ a week. if you dont get 4$ a week of entertainment, then dont play it.

but personally i prefer sub model > everything else ive seen

Same here.

[Grubbz]

Awwwww yeah
http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/new...cast-announced

Anything with kate beckinsale in it via body or voice has my endorsement =)

[citizen1080]

Oh my