EverQuest Next, p99, and on

[maskedmelon]

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

Just give me an mmo version of fftactics or ff1 where I only have to do stuff like every 10 mins to level my char.

My favorite part about EQ was that it was no more effort/attention-consuming than D&D. I bought FFXIV hoping that it would be derivative of the single player gameplay, not a button-masher. I was very wrong.

+1

The slow pace of EQ is what makes it appeal so strongly to me. Every new mmo is exhausting.

[One Tin Soldier]

Originally Posted by t0lkien [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yes true if the players on P99 were the only group waiting on such a game. They are a tight core group, and proof of the viability, but are only a very small fraction of the niche demographic I'm referring to. I would guess there are millions at least. I think the first game to hit the right balance will be a " surprise " success so emphatic the rest of the industry will start pumping out clones. As usual.

Let me play devils' advocate here. Who exactly are the "niche demographic" you're referring to? You guess there are millions of them at least, so who are they?

Also, what exactly is the "right balance" for a game? Perhaps more important, would all those millions in your niche demographic agree on the same parameters for a game to be balanced right?

For example, do all those millions of people you suppose are out there yearning for an old timey game agree that melee classes should be unable to bind themselves as it was in good old EQ?

Do they all agree that medding to full should take as long as it did in EQ?

Do they all agree that the death penalty should be just as harsh as in classic EQ?

If they don't all agree about all of these things then what do you do? What do you change and what do you keep the same? If you change anything people will scream that it's not old school enough anymore. If you don't change anything will you really get enough people to play it? Really?

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that your niche demographic is surely not uniform. They also are not new to MMORPGs. People know what they like and what they don't like and can be pretty stubborn about it. I don't think a perfect game could be made because we don't all agree on what "perfection" is.

I don't know, I miss the good old days too and I play on project 99 off and on but I'm not sure if I would pay to play a EQ remake. In fact, I know I wouldn't. While I loved some things about EQ there are other things I hate about it. Playing for free here off and on when I feel like is one thing but I'm quite certain I wouldn't be willing to pay for a new game which is basically classic EQ redone.

[Kevris]

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

The issue is MMORPG's arent the "thing" anymore. MOBA's, FPS's are more popular and are more geared to the younger twitchy/ADHD generation. You will never get another MMORPG that will be the size of EQ or WoW during it peak.Even though i only played EQ for 13 years as i got older putting in the time to do it was not worth it. And companies are in this business to make money.

Kind of true, but keep hope.

Look at say, Elite: Dangerous. There's a genre that everyone thought was dead. Crowd-funding comes along, Braben presents a vision of something, people who are interested in that thing directly make it happen.

If someone comes along with a business model that can sustain an old-school game like EQ, it will succeed.

It's worked for Space Sims, why can't it work for proper MMO's?

[Llurendt]

Originally Posted by applesauce25r624 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

?? Shards Online

Your comment is the first time I've ever heard of it... I'll look into it. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Kalex716]

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

Kind of true, but keep hope.

Look at say, Elite: Dangerous. There's a genre that everyone thought was dead. Crowd-funding comes along, Braben presents a vision of something, people who are interested in that thing directly make it happen.

If someone comes along with a business model that can sustain an old-school game like EQ, it will succeed.

It's worked for Space Sims, why can't it work for proper MMO's?

The business model to sustain is the hard part.

Now a days, without some slightly aggressive monetization angles, you can't provide a game/service that lets its power users play for sometimes more than 200+ hours for only 15 dollars a month and end up being anything more than niche.

Back in the old days, it worked, because plenty of 15 buck a month casual users didn't have options. Most people that played EQ classic, sucked at it (didn't have the time) and were only content with not getting everything out of the game that they wished they could cause they had nothing else to play.

[Zheta]

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

Just give me an mmo version of fftactics or ff1 where I only have to do stuff like every 10 mins to level my char.

My favorite part about EQ was that it was no more effort/attention-consuming than D&D. I bought FFXIV hoping that it would be derivative of the single player gameplay, not a button-masher. I was very wrong.

Shame you(most people, really) never played FFXI(not 15) in its prime.

Actually, FFXI was kind've EQ 1.5. Had all the oldschool grind and socializing, party play, lack of hand-holding, etc. with some really neat features and great graphics.

[jcr4990]

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

I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to refer to p99 players as an "army". There are enough to keep one server filled. A server they get to play on for free.

I don't know how well a real EQ remake would actually do. I have serious doubts if it would be financially successful.

Like T0lkien said it's not only the active P99 players that have been waiting for an oldschool slower paced less hand-holdy MMO to come out. That's just a small portion of the people out there that have been wanting a game like that for years. I mean hell look at Nostalrius (RIP) there was like 10,000 active players if you count pve and pvp servers every single night playing Vanilla WoW. Granted Vanilla WoW is a bit more hand holding and faster paced than EQ is but it's much less than current modern MMO's are. If you need further proof look at the success of the Dark Souls series. There is ABSOLUTELY a market out there. Just nobody has really gone after it and provided a decent product for that crowd in many many years.

[jolanar]

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

+1

The slow pace of EQ is what makes it appeal so strongly to me. Every new mmo is exhausting.

OMG I'm not alone in this. I can't stand the modern MMO idea that you have to dodge abilities usually indicated by a red circle on the ground. I don't want to have to dodge shit, I'm playing an RPG not Street Fighter.

[Swish]

Originally Posted by applesauce25r624 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

?? Shards Online

Historically, if it has "Online" as part of the title...it's going to be bad [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Calthaer]

Originally Posted by jcr4990 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There is ABSOLUTELY a market out there. Just nobody has really gone after it and provided a decent product for that crowd in many many years.

A lot of this gets back to the business model of massively multiplayer games. People don't just buy the game once - they keep paying, month-after-month, for these games. It's not unreasonable for people to expect that, if they keep paying money, there should be new stuff to do with every installment of their payment.

Companies seem to solve this in a few different ways:

• "Mudflation": Make lots of new content that is just an order of magnitude higher (but effectively the same) as old content.
• Grinding: Take a little butter of content and spread it thin over a lot of bread simply by making you experience the same content over and over for a long time before you can hit the next piece.
• Player-versus-Player: In this model, other players are the content. EVE Online seems to have executed on this one pretty well.
• Expansion Packs: Make people pay a premium, additional fee for new content and a monthly fee just for access.

What it seems like nobody has done really well in an MMO is create a system for compelling and dynamically generated PvE content. Some single- or multi-player games have done this really well - e.g., the "random map" generators in things like Terraria, which manages to create a compelling-but-slightly-different world with each new event, and each world takes like 10-20 hours to complete. Dynamic content in a MMO might look like:

• A living economy that automatically creates "money sinks" to prevent inflation, and carefully manages supply and demand for items, money, etc.
• NPCs and NPC factions that have goals and aims and pursue them in various ways.
• A robust crafting system where the items that can be created are not fixed, but not entirely random, either. Minecraft's enchantment system does something a little like this.
• A game that intelligently takes into account the "metagame." E.g. - if too many people are playing magic-users, then more magic-resistant enemies start showing up. Don't constantly, manually tweak the classes to balance them - create rules so that the classes balance themselves (e.g., all "trainers" for Rangers now offer skill X that is designed to help correct trend Y shown in the play-data).

In short, the game should balance itself. "Zones," in this world, that are empty become gradually filled with harder (and wealthier) enemies until players show up to plunder it. Those enemies might not be the same every time - maybe new and different types of mobs would move in from adjacent areas (say, for example, that the orcs of Everfrost Peaks moved in and booted the gnolls out of Blackburrow). There should be advantages to keeping zones clear, and it should be hard to do so - enemy armies perhaps generate to swarm particular areas at certain times. Maybe creatures can gather resources and "farm" players the way players farm creatures - strategically preying upon weaker players to gain strength. "Good" NPCs should perhaps auto-write their own stories and interactions with players (like this chatbot, but dynamically written).

There is no practical way for any team of people to keep generating enough content for a player-base sizable enough to support them. Even with really great content scripting and generation tools. Make the system make its own content, give it the power to change the game, and give options to manually tweak as necessary. Take the principles of agile development and apply them to a living game world. Get routine feedback from players: randomly ask them "Did you have fun in the last hour / last night? How much (scale 1-5)?" and then correlate that with an event log to see what events occurred to create that fun. Create customer personas so that you can see what % of the player-base enjoys social functions, what % enjoy loot, what % enjoy high difficulty, what % enjoy crafting, what % are casual vs. "hard-core." In short: use the last 15-25 years of data analytics to the advantage of the developers so that they can know what to add or subtract to the world to maximize revenue while creating maximum value for the players.

No one out there seems like they're even thinking along these lines. MMOs are all intent on creating something like a theme park - the boring kind where you go with you drive hours to get to with your kids on a long, hot summer day and you stand in line on a concrete floor sticky with spilled soda and popcorn and condiments just to enjoy a one-minute ride. The kind of theme park with big, expensive roller coasters that are difficult to build and install. No one wants to pay for that any more. The digital world is learning to adapt through rapid change and analytics; subscription games that can't keep pace are going to be left in the dust.

Create an experience that is worth that fee, and people will pay it.