It's not that mmos haven't evolved at all. I don't know anyone who thinks that. It's that they were evolving very nicely and then most of them started becoming clones of things we already have. Right now, a few games are breaking ground but most of them are not.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
@ WSI Mike - Well said. Although I don't agree with your point on evolution, I completely agree with your DDO point.
In my own words - The P2P model is like an all consuming bio-robot. It feeds its hunger by eating other games. Those games deemed worthy are added to its body as a protein-like muscle. You could assume that WoW would probably be the legs of this bio-robot, walking it in the direction that it does, although it isn't necessarily the best direction. You could also assume that the P2P bio-bot consumes lots of games. The good ones are attached to it and the bad ones are crapped out. In comes the Dung Beetle-Bot F2P model. It picks up the not-good-enough-for-bio-bot CRAP and uses it to fuel itself. It just so happens that they found a very nice piece of crap in DDO and hailed it as their savior. I wouldn't exactly want a giant turd for my savior, but I guess the Dung-Beetle needs to eat too.
I agree with most of this, although the evolution thing is tricky. Many people say the genre has stopped evolving when they mean something else. To put it simply, evolving is actually all the genre is doing at the moment due to WoW. In most cases this evolution is going backwards as well. What people actually want right now isn't evolution though, it's reinvention. Players want something new from the genre that doesn't evolve from WoW but rather does something that hasn't been tried before.
IF F2P did not equal crap anymore then how come more ppl don't play them? When you here stories bout no lifers spending uber cash on cash shops so they can be uber powerful so they can gank and grief lowbies who want to play a F2P just to play I would say that spells crap.
Now if you truly believe that World of Warcraft Invented the Genre then I need to ask your age. Everyone knows that Ultima pretty much invented the Genre or a debatable Everquest but I just don't see how you can say that WoW invented the Genre.
IF F2P did not equal crap anymore then how come more ppl don't play them? When you here stories bout no lifers spending uber cash on cash shops so they can be uber powerful so they can gank and grief lowbies who want to play a F2P just to play I would say that spells crap. <snip>
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Well, yes. MMOs are evolving slowly. But in fact so slowly that if an EQ player would have been frozen in time for 10 years and tried a new game he would only be impressed by the graphics, most features are similar still.
And the games are a lot easier today, that is not evolving. They have cut out so much things to make the games easier, like the fact that you actually can see in what should be total darkness today.
Compared to how pen and paper RPGs have evolved the MMORPGs are still amoebas. A modern RPG game is often far far away from D&D, as soon as Runequest came out were the P&P further evolved than any MMOs and it came out in 1978. Where is our Runequest? It wasn't UO who still is a jump from Meridian and who few games followed. Eve was a jump forward to but none of them changed so mush things as Runequests and P&P games have made many jumps after that with games like Warhammer, Palladium, Amber, Vampire and many more.
MMOs are slowly evolving but MMO devs are traditionalists and the holy Triad rules as much now as it did when EQ came out.
Of course MMOs evolved a bit at first. M59->UO->EQ->DAOC->WoW->A bunch of derivitive crap. I don't see them evolving much anymore. Not in the past five or six years. Graphics get better, but that's about it.
And F2P games are crap. Some might be fun time wasters for a few weeks, but I've yet to try one that's as good as even half the mediocre MMOs out there. And I'd have to say that includes DDO, albeit, largely because it's so dated, and I'm heavily biased against instancing. That aside though, it feels like it says something about how one-dimensional the game it, that I can't even put my weapon away. Maybe it should've been F2P from the beginning.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Well IMHO I don't think your list of gaming misconceptions really has the depth to change many if any opinions on games/gamers. 5. They're just for geeks. Most of the world has shifted closer to geek than shifted away. There is also a pretty good chance in this day and age granny has got a google/yahoo email account where she and 100 of her online buddies all spammng bad jokes and kitty pictures back and forth. If anyone's computer crashes call my mom she's 70 and can have your machine wiped and rebuilt in a few hours. Just think 5 years ago she was calling every other day to pull some virus off. The world has shifted geek. Geek is a growing base no longer a 'niche'. People are far more savvy with tech than they are willing to admit to. 4. Under One Million Players=Failure CCP started small with every intention to grow. Funding, development and launch was a design to start small and grow bigger. Minimize risk all along the way. For CCP it worked. AOC/Warhammer/Aion all started with massive budgets, big features, big marketing, big everything to draw the biggest crowds. Those games might have some success overseas but in North America they tanked, hard and fast. When you get your target audience and they start bailing inside of the 30 'free' days you have failed. Unable to balance factions, game mechanics don't function and game economy tank without the huge player base required. Huge budgets for huge games and peeps show but quit inside of the 30 days=failure. The real point here does the game generate enough cash to overcome the start up costs then hope to work on return on investment with an eye to possible game expansion. If not, it fails regardless of population. So you think under one million players does equal a failure? And you think this because more people quit AoC and WAR than subscribed? In essence, because they had a million try it and lost 750k it failed. Let me ask you this? What if you found out WoW had 30 million try it with only the 10 to 12 million staying? That would mean they may have lost 20 million as opposed to WAR/AoC losing less than a million each. Would anyone doubt that over a million have at least tried EVE? With a free trial, it seems likely - yet they are still at that 300k mark, but EVE is hailed as a great success where WAR is an abject failure. When you apply the same standard to EVE that you do to WAR you should get the same result, over 1 million tried, retained approximately 300k. Yet one is a success story, one is a sign of the apocolypse. It's all hypothetical, but the point is we don't know if AoC and WAR was or was not indicative of market trends, simply because we don't know those types of numbers from WoW, EQ, EQ2, etc. But STO is shaping up to follow the trend. If a 1/3 retention rate is standard, and you don't know if it is or isn't, than WAR and AoC are normal, not failures. Because you don't have enough facts for your hypothesis to flesh out, i.e. the average retention rate for an mmorpg, you are, as the article stated, living under a misconception. 3.Free=Crap About the only f2p site I know of that fired up and never looked back isn't even a mmo. It's pogo.com. I've tried a few mmo f2p's and they all sucked balls. DDO as the shining example of a successful f2p? Someone here has already mentioned it. DDO was a failure p2p. A mish-mash of D&D rule sets launched with 2 weeks content, massive lag problems and broken ex-pac after broken ex-pac. Turbine did the only thing left for them to do to scrounge cash. That was to relaunch as a f2p. Even with the new rush of f2p players Turbine wont have the population to rebuild the lost servers or revenue. I just think DDO is a bad example of a f2p because really if you want to do anything in that game guess what your paying. Mind you that is the trap of all supposed f2p. F2p as a concept is a market ninjas wet dream. It is all free to play unless you want to have fun then guess what, you are paying. Explain this again, I'm confused. How exactly does DDO's struggle as a P2P prove that it isn't successful as a F2P? The logic doesn't stand up unless there is a missing piece you aren't explaining. And besides that, it has already been publicly announced that DDO has had 1 million new accounts created since it went F2P - more than any sub mmo save 1. It seems a little ludicrous to say 'turbine won't have the population to rebuild the lost servers or revenue' when you actually get the facts isn't it? 2.MMOs aren't Evolving There are not evolving. They are grabbing concepts and themes from those the have preceded them. The whole mmo genre is in a straight jacket. The start up costs are so out of this world you have to stay in the steps of those before you. No investor is gonna dump 20-50 million on you because you have a dream to do it all different. Furthermore we as players are straight jacketed by the way we think and react. We all are just wired little hamsters more than willing to hop on the hamster wheel if it means x number of revolutions = y rewards. Change the hamster wheel to a pair of runners and point at a road to jog and bang it don't happen. To much of a change. The number of miles pounded out for the reward of better health and fitness is blurred, so our little hamster brains scream danger be afraid be very afraid. BTW there are many great articles on the web on this very topic. Web search gamer theory, gamer theory rewards etc. They all stick to the tried and true, keep it in the middle of the road. That way it is all familiar to the investors and familiar to the hamsters. I think the problem with games nowadays is the cliche', familiarity breeds contempt. You need a dictionary. Your second sentence is EXACTLY what the word evolution means. Humans didn't pick parts from fish and birds to evolve from, we grabbed pieces and parts from the primates that preceded us. Sorry, they are evolving. Maybe not at the speed you want or the direction you'd hope, but it is clear you are under this misconception as well. I think in essence you are wanting instant dynamic mutation but you are left with the slow hum drum natural shift we call 'evolution'.
1. World of Warcraft Invented the Genre. WOW didn't invent the genre but you sure have to give credit where credit is due. They certainly grabbed the best designs and themes and refined them to a point where is all runs on a toaster giving access to the largest player base available. WOW has it down to a science on x revolutions = y rewards. Cheers all.
Interestingly, most who have tried to disagree with his 'misconceptions' I think have instead done an excellent job of illustrating the authors point.
Cheers too.
4. I think CCP is a fantastic success. Start small, grow big and still growing. CCP is in the gravy. They started small with smaller budgets and are building a successful game.
Warhammer went big, spent big, launched big and a year or so out head honchos shipped out in office and servers merged in game. 300,000 is a lot of users and Warhammer is certainly a solid game and going to be around for awhile. But IMHO it did not meet the expectations of the massive budget. Its not maintaining 1 million users so fail. I don't mean it so harshly really. And yes Im fuzzy on the 1million be total fail because how can you not call users in the hundreds of thousands bad. But I feel 300,000 low for what was put into the Warhammer title. Here's the hypothetical . So you have 1 dollar to invest in CCP or WAR and you get the same cut, you know both games approx 300,000 users. So do you invest in the company that spent several millions expecting to build slowly to 300,000 or do you invest in the company that spent 10's of millions, expecting a million and settled to 300,000?
BTW I think if I had bankrolled WoW and 30 million people tried it and 10 million stuck is pure win. The game is bought and paid for pretty quick with those numbers. If I spent 50 million and only had 1 million try and settled at 300,000 I'd be bummed. Sure i'll get my money back but a longer haul then some of the other titles that I'm in direct competition with.
3. I did pooch that part didn't I. Ok I'll fess up using start up kind of money for a p2p only to have your model struggle so you repackage as f2p, well it's not fair dam it. Stomp for effect! But on a more serious note i did play for the first year of DDO. It has no problems retaining people the niche it s designed for the d&d crowd. But first hand it needs more help retaining people new or wanting to try the genre. Hopefully f2p does that for them/
4. So in evolution terms we have jumped from single cell (muds) to multicell(rpgs) to virus(mmos) now we grind side ways for the next million years. Thats surviving not necessarily evovling. We need a mutation soon. In the right here and now I'm bored being a virus.
Once again DDO is used to say that the F2P model is working fine, excuse me but it had triple AAA funding and is still a subscription game. Also to say you can just follow their route and you will do fine is absurd, the revenue model change was not even done a year ago and he is claiming it as an unqualified success. The staff writers seem desperate to make us believe that all is well within the world of F2p when most of us know it is a bag of crap.
MMO’s are evolving according to Mr Murphy. Please use a dictionary some time; you are confusing the word ‘changing’ with the word ‘evolving’. Yes MMO’s have changed, but to evolve they must be getting better and more fit for purpose. To do this the WoW clones that keep coming out would have to consistently be better games than WoW. The new MMO hybrid species like STO would have to be a great success. This is patently not happening. MMO’s are changing often for the worse; they are not evolving into better games.
I would like to see a mutation soon too Greefeen, fed up of being a virus myself.
I've been reading The Greatest Show on Earth and comparing the succession of mmos to what I understand of evolution in the Darwinian sense.
From a human point of view (I still have some of my humanity intact despite the years wasted on games), mmos are actually devolving, because socialization is essential for our survival, and modern mmos are increasingly "together alone" experiences, eschewing truly social growth ideas for enclosed (instanced), individualistic bubbles.
But from a dollars and cents perspective, sure, mmos are evolving.
Of course MMOs evolved a bit at first. M59->UO->EQ->DAOC->WoW->A bunch of derivitive crap. I don't see them evolving much anymore. Not in the past five or six years. Graphics get better, but that's about it. And F2P games are crap. Some might be fun time wasters for a few weeks, but I've yet to try one that's as good as even half the mediocre MMOs out there. And I'd have to say that includes DDO, albeit, largely because it's so dated, and I'm heavily biased against instancing. That aside though, it feels like it says something about how one-dimensional the game it, that I can't even put my weapon away. Maybe it should've been F2P from the beginning.
DDO was a failure as P2P because of several factors, heavily instanced when most MMO's it was competing with were more open-world, a snobbish early-adopter crowd that looked down on anyone without a heavy P&P knowledge, and a very very small gameworld (it is still really bloody small, at least it feels that way, even claustraphobic).
As a F2P/MT game DDO excels exactly because it is so heavily instanced, it is the perfect design to use as a basis for "chopping the game up" into purchasable chunks while keeping it's core gameplay unchanged, typically less heavily instanced games have to build handicaps into the game that are overcome with cash shops, that essential difference in game "feel" is what seperates DDO from all the crap F2P games, so "most" of DDO's model just won't work the same way in games that do not use a lot of instancing.
I'm a big fan of DDO, love the game for what it excels at - providing fun "dungeon crawls" as a group based dungeon-crawler it is in many ways the very best in the genre, where it falls down, in my opinion, is the real lack of a sense of scale to the world, it feels like you are in a prison town, move this game to a modern setting & it would work perfectly as an "Escape from New York" world that you only escape when you log out.
@ WSI Mike - Well said. Although I don't agree with your point on evolution, I completely agree with your DDO point.
I didn't actually talk about the "evolution" bit... I think that was the post immediately after mine. Thanks though :-p. In my own words - The P2P model is like an all consuming bio-robot. It feeds its hunger by eating other games. Those games deemed worthy are added to its body as a protein-like muscle. You could assume that WoW would probably be the legs of this bio-robot, walking it in the direction that it does, although it isn't necessarily the best direction. You could also assume that the P2P bio-bot consumes lots of games. The good ones are attached to it and the bad ones are crapped out. In comes the Dung Beetle-Bot F2P model. It picks up the not-good-enough-for-bio-bot CRAP and uses it to fuel itself. It just so happens that they found a very nice piece of crap in DDO and hailed it as their savior. I wouldn't exactly want a giant turd for my savior, but I guess the Dung-Beetle needs to eat too.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
IF F2P did not equal crap anymore then how come more ppl don't play them? When you here stories bout no lifers spending uber cash on cash shops so they can be uber powerful so they can gank and grief lowbies who want to play a F2P just to play I would say that spells crap. <snip>
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Of the three games you listed, only 1 of them was designed with the intention of being F2P, and that's Allods.
DDO was designed as, and remained, a P2P MMO up until Turbine switched to F2P because it wasn't doing well enough with subscriptions. (Others and myself have already pointed that out in other threads... won't rehash it here).
Spellborn was, to my knowledge, not decided to be a F2P/Microtransaction MMO 'til late in its development after it was picked up by Acclaim.
Allods is the only game in that list that has been F2P all along, and is a rather tragic one to use. It's a game that is better known among F2P right now for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, having exposed in a big way the true greed that belies the whole "Free To Play!" setup F2P's shovel out with their advertising.
They did so by setting item shop prices that were beyond obnoxious. Even some of the most stalwart defenders of Item Shops said "uh... what?". People called them out on it, and only after the backlash, did they say, basically, "Oh, oops! (damn we hoped no one would notice). Oh, fine, we'll lower the prices... There, see? We did it. Will you play our game now? It's Free!!" (no, that's not a direct quote... just a sarcastic summary of what pretty much went down).
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Once again DDO is used to say that the F2P model is working fine, excuse me but it had triple AAA funding and is still a subscription game. Also to say you can just follow their route and you will do fine is absurd, the revenue model change was not even done a year ago and he is claiming it as an unqualified success. The staff writers seem desperate to make us believe that all is well within the world of F2p when most of us know it is a bag of crap.
I'm glad someone else has noted that (or at least one other person in this thread , because I've been thinking the same thing. Seems I'm seeing a lot of "staff articles" (or otherwise posts by site staff) gushing over F2P and citing DDO almost every time as "proof" of its success, etc... across the different MMO and gaming sites.
Aioshi is... well... he wears his bias on his sleeve, along with this arrogance and passive-aggressive derision of any who don't agree with his views. If nothing else, at least he's consistent.
However, coming from another staff writer here now who also seems to gush over this whole "DDO is proof that F2P works!" while conveniently ignoring the circumstances behind Turbine's move to F2P with that game in particular, and how DDO was doing leading up to that...
Again, the move of DDO was not some indication of Turbine's "wisdom" or "brilliance" or "recognition of the legitimacy of F2P". It was, when one looks at the game's history on balance, more likely an attempt to save a slowly sinking ship. If they were truly "embracing" the F2P setup, they would have done the same thing with LoTRO. Yet, LoTRO remains a subscription-based MMO and, at least to date, no mention of them moving it to F2P. Why? My guess is because it's not necessary because the subscription model is doing just fine for them. I don't know that with any more certainty than anyone else... but looking at the big picture... putting 2 and 2 together (as in, game not doing so well with subs becomes F2P, game doing well with subs remains sub-based... both games developed by same developer...), it seems at least more likely than not.
Anyway, I've see the same "push" on other sites as well from members of their staff.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
#4 - I agree, as do most here. You're preaching to the choir. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the CEOs of these AAA corporations, as well as their shareholders, of the same. This message will self destruct....
#1 - Until the CEOs and shareholders realize this, it might as well have. Every major market endeavor will continue to closely mimic it because they want a piece of the pie. Sad thing is they will produce a game that is probably as buggy if not more than WoW was at release which will turn that target audience off and send them back to WoW. If anything these last couple of years have shown is that you truly never get a second chance to make a first impression so those games most likely never get back to near the number of subscriptions they have at launch.
My sentiments exactly!
Side note: To go with #1, I am sad that STO was such an epic pile of garbage on launch, but I'm also sort of glad it was, as it's so highly visable as an IP to the casual consumer, and also to the shareholders, executives, and marketing dunders that push for a rushed development in search of a quick buck. Hopefully somebody has learned something.
Ugh, what a poor list. Talk about overcompensating for lack of site content.
MMORPGs ARE just for geeks, it's just that there are more geeks in the mainstream that previously thought. Just because [insert random celebrity here] plays MMOs doesn't mean they aren't geeks. F2P's ARE crap. DDO comes close to being ok, but it's fully instanced and hardly an MMORPG. The rest are boring, trite, cash shop drivel. MMOs AREN'T evolving...and least not now (they might in the future, let's hope so). Pick a recently released MMO and tell me how it's significantly different than its predecessors. You can't. As for future MMOs, they are vapor until they go beta, so sorry, you can't rely on those.
I repeat, "Ugh."
Your first point on Geeks is somewhat true, but I would like you to define your definition of geek, if by geek you mean in love with video games then sure, most people who love videos have an affinity to MMOs, On the other hand I have many friends who casually play games, not to the geek standard, yet they still somewhat enjoy the concept of logging a couple of hours on an MMO. So for the most point your right.
F2P, yes this is also true and untrue, Item Mall is a bit of a mess but you don't need a subscription or any item from item malls to become successful in MMOs, it may take a bit longer but the result is the same.
Now I can't pick a recently released MMO but I can pick a upcoming MMO. If you recall Mabinogi and Mabinogi Heroes. Take a look at this gameplay video for
Mabinogi:
Now look at Mabinogi Heroes:
This is probably the best example of how MMOs are evolving. Not only does it look good, its going to be F2P so I will be enjoying the NA release as much as I did the KR release
And No Mabinogi Heroes doesn't count as a future MMO because it has already been released so I think relying on this game is no problem.
If this doesn't convince you that online games ARE evolving then I dub you too difficult to deal with. Lol
Anyone who disagrees with this list should probably improve the quality of mmorpg communities by ceasing to play any mmorpgs out there.
The list speaks pure truth.
For 5: I know A LOT of people who are not geeks and yet enjoy mmorpg games. For some its like casino, for others its an insight into society and economic design(I know quite a few marketing/economy students who play EVE for this reason alone). Yes, MMO games WERE for geeks, however I think that the overall gaming community has already began to "bypass" the stereotypical outlook to mmorpg genre.
For 4: I both agree and disagree. If company developed a game to be "over 9000" player type, then it IS a failure. However yes, games don't need to have "uber big" population to generate income (Funcom's AOC and all PWI games are best examples in this).
For 3: I wholeheartedly agree. OF course there are still f2p games made purelly for making $$$ from cash shop, by making it into totally-must-use thing(looking at you TQ and IGG games). However a lot of currently appearing mmorpg titles could rival and dethrone a lot of overrated p2p titles. Let's face it - p2p is a thing of the past. The quality, thinking outside of the box and market elasticity lies inside f2p.
For 2: Yet again wholeheartedly agreed. Of course people might think that mmorpg genre does not evolve...IF they are only looking at the overrated huge sharks like WoW. However in last two yeras mmorpg genre has already moved away into the next generation of gaming. Let's just compare an old game like WoW to something like EVE or Age of Conan to some of current in-development innovative mmorpgs like Forsaken World(with the outside-of-box-style interactivity), Mabinogi Heroes(With its destructible environments and real-time combat) or any of hangame games like Tera or C9. Not to mention Funcom's Upcoming Secret World which promises an entirely new features to MMO genre.
For 1: I can do nothing but agree. WoW is overrated and overrplayed shark with nothing new brought to the genre, If anything Blizzard did with WOW, it was to degenerate the awesomeness even more than they did with Wc3. Sadly WoW is "reality tv shows" of gaming industry - it will never die and continue to be overrated by mmorpg elitist public.
# A GRIM, ODD, ARCANE SKY # ANY GOD, I MARK SACRED # A MASKED CRY ADORING # A DREAMY, SICK DRAGON
I don't understand why people get so mad when people compare new games to WoW. Blizzard may not have invented the mechanics of MMO gameplay but they sure did refine it to the point where it should be the basis of comparison for any game like it.
Here's an analogy:
Back in the day Sony took a $#!T on a plate and served it up as food and EA pissed in a cup and served it up as a drink and thats all everyone could eat and drink for a very long long time. Then Blizzard came along one day and looked at this mess and said I'm gonna use this stuff and turn it into something better.
So they take the $#!T and piss and turn it into furtilizer and spread it across their field and grow a bunch of vegetables, some grape trees and some grass for the cows to eat. In a couple of years they harvest everything they have grown and come to the table with a plate of steak and veggies and a glass of wine and people go absolutely gaga for it and its something that almost everyone wants.
Now many years go by and lots of people are happy eating their steak and their are even some $#!T still out there when a new chef comes up with a new plate. This chef comes to the table with some bacon wrapped steaks, veggies in spices and cream sauces and $200 Cognac.
Now all the steak eaters start drawing comparisons to how the new chef added stuff to their steak and veggies and whether the changes are for the better or worse. This vexes the $#!T eaters to no end and they scream and shout and stomp their feet claiming they were the first and their $#!T should be held in the highest regard and put at the top of the pedestal even though their creation was just broken down excrement of another plate of food.
Originally posted by Oyjord Ugh, what a poor list. Talk about overcompensating for lack of site content.
MMORPGs ARE just for geeks, it's just that there are more geeks in the mainstream that previously thought. Just because [insert random celebrity here] plays MMOs doesn't mean they aren't geeks. F2P's ARE crap. DDO comes close to being ok, but it's fully instanced and hardly an MMORPG. The rest are boring, trite, cash shop drivel. MMOs AREN'T evolving...and least not now (they might in the future, let's hope so). Pick a recently released MMO and tell me how it's significantly different than its predecessors. You can't. As for future MMOs, they are vapor until they go beta, so sorry, you can't rely on those.
I repeat, "Ugh."
Speaking of "Ugh" I'm really tired of all of the individuals leaving lame initial posts on the MMORPG.com forums (containing not one ounce of tangible proof) aimed at directly discrediting a writer's article. Selfish points of view and illogical conclusions are NOT proof, by they way, they are individual opinions and ignorance culminating into a gigantic ethereal wall of misguided blabbering.
First of all, MMORPGs are NOT only for geeks. I know quite a few people (Doctors, Police Officers, Business Owners, Professional Athletes) personally who are far from being geeks and yet still enjoy a "night out on the [fantasy] town" every now and again. The bottom line is that the above logic is much like the first incorrect logic sentence we all see in grade school, which is, "If all birds can fly, and all penguins are birds, then all penguins can fly." Being a geek and exerting stereotypically geeky behavior are often two different things; but on a larger, more-general and applicable scale the columnist is correct in stating that the paradigm is shifting. Years ago, playing video games on computers was commonly considered nerdy and, due to the drastic increase of internet popularity (and thus internet gaming), that view is indeed shifting. Score: William Murphy 1, Opposition 0.
One topic Oyjord didn't touch on was determining MMORPG success. I've read the other posts though and I have to say that success really isn't based on subscriptions alone. If we all stick with "the bottom line" numbers we need to consider not only base production costs but also marketing costs, bugs, promise/content delivery, etc. A game that is capable of breaking even, while not a complete failure, is by no means a success. Alternately, pulling in under 1 million subscribers is NOT a failure so long as the game's development studio didn't pitch a different number to investors (or themselves). All cost-related analysis aside (because it's boring), the numbers "are what they are" and what makes them a success or failure isn't how important they are to us but how close they match up to their investor's expectations. In other words, sub 1 million active subscriptions does not, in any way, always mean the game is a failure. Score: William Murphy 2, Opposition 0.
I really don't have to touch the topic regarding the quality of F2P games, but I'm still going to risk over-repeating myself by saying that they are simply NOT crap. I'll be honest, there are a large number of free MMORPG's that I simply can't stand, but that doesn't mean that they're horrible games. Dungeon's & Dragons Online, while not everyone's favorite title, is still a top-notch, high-quality game offering amazing and original concepts, incredible graphics, DDO 3.5 themed rules for the passive DDO P&P fan as well as a host of many other benefits. The same could be said for Runes of Magic, The Chronicles of Spellborn, Eternal Earth and many other titles. Grant it, perhaps none of these titles "float your boat" but that in no way makes them complete crap. The aforementioned games draw in a respectable crowd and deserve a healthy following for the content they present for FREE. One last point on the subject: Just because a game became F2P doesn't mean it's not still F2P. Whether new to the market, modified to become part of the market or otherwise, F2P is F2P and that's final. So, Turbine's shifting of DDO to a F2P model made the game accessible, popular and (most importantly) sustainable and we'd all benefit if more studios followed suit, hands down. Score William Murphy 3, Opposition 0.
On the topic of MMO evolution I find it hard to let go of my own convenient misconceptions and truly view the world of MMORPGs objectively enough to derive such a conclusion; however, letting go of my very particular set of standards it's easy to see how this concept is true to a very large extent. DDO incorporated Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules into their active combat system, The Chronicles of Spellborn invented a rolling abilities bar, Mortal Online has gone with a first-person combat system based on a player's own talent and finally Fallen Earth found a way to incorporate both an MMO and an FPS into one game with the tap of the [tab] key. The theme, setting, storyline, commands, point-of-view, and more are all being pushed an pulled in varying directions and before us, right under our noses, we're being drowned in the muck that some of us can only hope evolves into a tangible game worth all of our time and the subscription fees. Score: William Murphy 4, Opposition 0.
I have nothing more to say about the WoW comparison statement other than it's completely incontestable. WoW is huge, ushered in a world of n00b-age and consequently floods the online community with a tsunami of vastly-inexperienced opinions. Although it makes me sick to read WoW comparison after WoW comparison it has helped me do at least one thing . . . skip over n00b-fest commentary. "Oh, let's see here, this guy thinks this futuristic FPS/Real-Time strategy game based on the Dune series is a . . . OMG, a WoW knock-off? What the . . . ?" ::: skips over to the next post :::
Final Score: William Murphy 5, Opposition 0.
FC-FamineFuncom Community ManagerMemberUncommonPosts: 278
Well of course you know, a good portion of us have been playing F2P concepts forever. Like MTG and D&D in Hobby Shops.
Good read!
Glen ''Famine'' Swan Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Well, yes. MMOs are evolving slowly. But in fact so slowly that if an EQ player would have been frozen in time for 10 years and tried a new game he would only be impressed by the graphics, most features are similar still.
In a fit of nostalgia I resubbed to EQ a couple months ago. Started off as a Wood Elf in Kelethin just like I did over 10 years ago. I have to strongly disagree with your statement above. The MMORPG genre is lightyears ahead of what it was back when we all played EQ.
And as far as "evolving" goes... I think MMO's are still evolving, but the sublte changes being made are less obvious in the short term and add up over time. The evolutionary process isn't always blatantly obvious, but is really there.
IF F2P did not equal crap anymore then how come more ppl don't play them? When you here stories bout no lifers spending uber cash on cash shops so they can be uber powerful so they can gank and grief lowbies who want to play a F2P just to play I would say that spells crap. <snip>
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Of the three games you listed, only 1 of them was designed with the intention of being F2P, and that's Allods.
DDO was designed as, and remained, a P2P MMO up until Turbine switched to F2P because it wasn't doing well enough with subscriptions. (Others and myself have already pointed that out in other threads... won't rehash it here).
Spellborn was, to my knowledge, not decided to be a F2P/Microtransaction MMO 'til late in its development after it was picked up by Acclaim.
Allods is the only game in that list that has been F2P all along, and is a rather tragic one to use. It's a game that is better known among F2P right now for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, having exposed in a big way the true greed that belies the whole "Free To Play!" setup F2P's shovel out with their advertising.
They did so by setting item shop prices that were beyond obnoxious. Even some of the most stalwart defenders of Item Shops said "uh... what?". People called them out on it, and only after the backlash, did they say, basically, "Oh, oops! (damn we hoped no one would notice). Oh, fine, we'll lower the prices... There, see? We did it. Will you play our game now? It's Free!!" (no, that's not a direct quote... just a sarcastic summary of what pretty much went down).
Don't get me wrong, I understand that (and you are correct when you say) that TCOS was originally NOT intended to be a F2P game. I was in Beta, and as usual the payment model wasn't decided on for a while. DDO of course wasn't F2P at launch. Needless to say as far as development progressed they ended up going F2P, and to me, thats a good thing for the F2P market. If free to play games with triple A quality exists, perhaps it will edge out all the other weak free to play games that just mash together games with a keyboard and a spoon and expect us to give them money.
Three years ago, F2P had no lasting appeal for me personally, but the turnaround on it in such a short time, where now I have three games I feel are worthy of anyones time (be it they were originally developed for this payment model or not) speaks a lot for me. I still won't give these games my money, but I will consider giving them my time... so I guess thats something.
MMOs are becoming more mainstream, but a large part of that is that those of us who were "geeks" and played games of all types are now adults. Did the abnormal success of WoW and its accessibility help to bring games more into the mainstream? Yes. So did XBox live and dozens of other small things, but the fact remains that games overall are no longer a "niche" thing for basement-dwelling socially inept 14-year-old virgins.
I couldn't agree more. This absurdity that games are for geeks is so jaded. I was one of the most popular in my high school, was often told I looked like a young Tom Cruise, played three sports, was arguably the best player on my football team and one of the fastest kids in the state my senior year. I almost always had a girlfriend who's looks made me the envy of my friends and was always in attendance at parties and social gatherings.
Labels suck! When are we as a society going to learn that labeling people is fruitless? It takes a plethora of qualities to make up an individual and I would argue, goes to show just how ignorant a person truly is, that chooses to use them.
Have to say i sort of disagree with #2 aswell, at least where the big name companies are concerned as most of the inovation seems to come from the smaller games if only in drips.
you can pretty much in one way or another say that every one every single human being short of the parolized in in one way or another are a geek about something or other its just the way we are whether we want to admit itor not hell even the parolized look at Stephen Hawking even the "jock" is a geek they geek out about sports trekies geek out about star trek furrys geek out about anthropomorphics gamers geek out about the latest video games or mmo's techie geek out about the latest and greatest technology has to offer and not all geeks only geek out on one subject very rarely does any one person only geek out about only one subject but we do tend to have our true preference on what subjects we geek out over more the odd part is the extreme in most of these will tend to dislike villainize or debase one or more of the others simply out of misunderstanding or false stereotypes or preconceived prejudices and mostly out of ignorance to the subject mater .
but thats a different conversation all together and im getting off my point but it makes for an interesting observation of an occurrence that is completely devoid of logic yet it still happens lol :P and is likely the source event that created the current slang definition of the word geek used to debase a "geek" by what other wise is just another form of geek lol :P (we humans are strange and illogical creatures :P )
my point is this every one in one way or another can be considered a geek its just the way we are we find things that excite us or stimulate our intellectual interests and we stick to them passionately and some times even in rare cases violently
yes i quoted my own post :P sad i know but wanted to add to it with out editing :P since most people are way past that page by now :P
as for mmo's evolving i submit this to you yes they are evolving but at an extremely slow pace
much slower then they should be
one has to admit that for the most part every mmo that has come out for the past 2 years is on a fundamental level exactly the same
the reason i will point out hear is the marketing trying to push them selves into the game design with a great over use of "Focus groups"
mmo development should be solly in the hands of the creaters and not in the hands of focus groups and marketing
for example take swg
what a lot of people dont realize is that the NGE came partly and completely on the design level as a result of sony and LA having "Focus groups"
the thing about Focus groups that make them a bad thing on an mmo is this
play style
play style is way to diverse to be covered by focus groups and if they want to " go the focus group route" the only acurit way to do it would be in game poles for all the players not just a sample
any ways
the geek thing is fact by current definition "one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things" it fits every living person on the planet (since we as human beings all have our obsessions)
how ever the slow evolution due to the use of Focus Groups by marketing is just my opinion and observations and should only be taken as such
Comments
It's not that mmos haven't evolved at all. I don't know anyone who thinks that. It's that they were evolving very nicely and then most of them started becoming clones of things we already have. Right now, a few games are breaking ground but most of them are not.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
@ WSI Mike - Well said. Although I don't agree with your point on evolution, I completely agree with your DDO point.
In my own words - The P2P model is like an all consuming bio-robot. It feeds its hunger by eating other games. Those games deemed worthy are added to its body as a protein-like muscle. You could assume that WoW would probably be the legs of this bio-robot, walking it in the direction that it does, although it isn't necessarily the best direction. You could also assume that the P2P bio-bot consumes lots of games. The good ones are attached to it and the bad ones are crapped out. In comes the Dung Beetle-Bot F2P model. It picks up the not-good-enough-for-bio-bot CRAP and uses it to fuel itself. It just so happens that they found a very nice piece of crap in DDO and hailed it as their savior. I wouldn't exactly want a giant turd for my savior, but I guess the Dung-Beetle needs to eat too.
I agree with most of this, although the evolution thing is tricky. Many people say the genre has stopped evolving when they mean something else. To put it simply, evolving is actually all the genre is doing at the moment due to WoW. In most cases this evolution is going backwards as well. What people actually want right now isn't evolution though, it's reinvention. Players want something new from the genre that doesn't evolve from WoW but rather does something that hasn't been tried before.
IF F2P did not equal crap anymore then how come more ppl don't play them? When you here stories bout no lifers spending uber cash on cash shops so they can be uber powerful so they can gank and grief lowbies who want to play a F2P just to play I would say that spells crap.
Now if you truly believe that World of Warcraft Invented the Genre then I need to ask your age. Everyone knows that Ultima pretty much invented the Genre or a debatable Everquest but I just don't see how you can say that WoW invented the Genre.
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Well, yes. MMOs are evolving slowly. But in fact so slowly that if an EQ player would have been frozen in time for 10 years and tried a new game he would only be impressed by the graphics, most features are similar still.
And the games are a lot easier today, that is not evolving. They have cut out so much things to make the games easier, like the fact that you actually can see in what should be total darkness today.
Compared to how pen and paper RPGs have evolved the MMORPGs are still amoebas. A modern RPG game is often far far away from D&D, as soon as Runequest came out were the P&P further evolved than any MMOs and it came out in 1978. Where is our Runequest? It wasn't UO who still is a jump from Meridian and who few games followed. Eve was a jump forward to but none of them changed so mush things as Runequests and P&P games have made many jumps after that with games like Warhammer, Palladium, Amber, Vampire and many more.
MMOs are slowly evolving but MMO devs are traditionalists and the holy Triad rules as much now as it did when EQ came out.
Of course MMOs evolved a bit at first. M59->UO->EQ->DAOC->WoW->A bunch of derivitive crap. I don't see them evolving much anymore. Not in the past five or six years. Graphics get better, but that's about it.
And F2P games are crap. Some might be fun time wasters for a few weeks, but I've yet to try one that's as good as even half the mediocre MMOs out there. And I'd have to say that includes DDO, albeit, largely because it's so dated, and I'm heavily biased against instancing. That aside though, it feels like it says something about how one-dimensional the game it, that I can't even put my weapon away. Maybe it should've been F2P from the beginning.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Interestingly, most who have tried to disagree with his 'misconceptions' I think have instead done an excellent job of illustrating the authors point.
Cheers too.
4. I think CCP is a fantastic success. Start small, grow big and still growing. CCP is in the gravy. They started small with smaller budgets and are building a successful game.
Warhammer went big, spent big, launched big and a year or so out head honchos shipped out in office and servers merged in game. 300,000 is a lot of users and Warhammer is certainly a solid game and going to be around for awhile. But IMHO it did not meet the expectations of the massive budget. Its not maintaining 1 million users so fail. I don't mean it so harshly really. And yes Im fuzzy on the 1million be total fail because how can you not call users in the hundreds of thousands bad. But I feel 300,000 low for what was put into the Warhammer title. Here's the hypothetical
. So you have 1 dollar to invest in CCP or WAR and you get the same cut, you know both games approx 300,000 users. So do you invest in the company that spent several millions expecting to build slowly to 300,000 or do you invest in the company that spent 10's of millions, expecting a million and settled to 300,000?
BTW I think if I had bankrolled WoW and 30 million people tried it and 10 million stuck is pure win. The game is bought and paid for pretty quick with those numbers. If I spent 50 million and only had 1 million try and settled at 300,000 I'd be bummed. Sure i'll get my money back but a longer haul then some of the other titles that I'm in direct competition with.
3. I did pooch that part didn't I. Ok I'll fess up using start up kind of money for a p2p only to have your model struggle so you repackage as f2p, well it's not fair dam it. Stomp for effect! But on a more serious note i did play for the first year of DDO. It has no problems retaining people the niche it s designed for the d&d crowd. But first hand it needs more help retaining people new or wanting to try the genre. Hopefully f2p does that for them/
4. So in evolution terms we have jumped from single cell (muds) to multicell(rpgs) to virus(mmos) now we grind side ways for the next million years. Thats surviving not necessarily evovling. We need a mutation soon. In the right here and now I'm bored being a virus.
Cheers
Once again DDO is used to say that the F2P model is working fine, excuse me but it had triple AAA funding and is still a subscription game. Also to say you can just follow their route and you will do fine is absurd, the revenue model change was not even done a year ago and he is claiming it as an unqualified success. The staff writers seem desperate to make us believe that all is well within the world of F2p when most of us know it is a bag of crap.
MMO’s are evolving according to Mr Murphy. Please use a dictionary some time; you are confusing the word ‘changing’ with the word ‘evolving’. Yes MMO’s have changed, but to evolve they must be getting better and more fit for purpose. To do this the WoW clones that keep coming out would have to consistently be better games than WoW. The new MMO hybrid species like STO would have to be a great success. This is patently not happening. MMO’s are changing often for the worse; they are not evolving into better games.
I would like to see a mutation soon too Greefeen, fed up of being a virus myself.
I've been reading The Greatest Show on Earth and comparing the succession of mmos to what I understand of evolution in the Darwinian sense.
From a human point of view (I still have some of my humanity intact despite the years wasted on games), mmos are actually devolving, because socialization is essential for our survival, and modern mmos are increasingly "together alone" experiences, eschewing truly social growth ideas for enclosed (instanced), individualistic bubbles.
But from a dollars and cents perspective, sure, mmos are evolving.
Yes you can, /sheathe
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DDO was a failure as P2P because of several factors, heavily instanced when most MMO's it was competing with were more open-world, a snobbish early-adopter crowd that looked down on anyone without a heavy P&P knowledge, and a very very small gameworld (it is still really bloody small, at least it feels that way, even claustraphobic).
As a F2P/MT game DDO excels exactly because it is so heavily instanced, it is the perfect design to use as a basis for "chopping the game up" into purchasable chunks while keeping it's core gameplay unchanged, typically less heavily instanced games have to build handicaps into the game that are overcome with cash shops, that essential difference in game "feel" is what seperates DDO from all the crap F2P games, so "most" of DDO's model just won't work the same way in games that do not use a lot of instancing.
I'm a big fan of DDO, love the game for what it excels at - providing fun "dungeon crawls" as a group based dungeon-crawler it is in many ways the very best in the genre, where it falls down, in my opinion, is the real lack of a sense of scale to the world, it feels like you are in a prison town, move this game to a modern setting & it would work perfectly as an "Escape from New York" world that you only escape when you log out.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Of the three games you listed, only 1 of them was designed with the intention of being F2P, and that's Allods.
DDO was designed as, and remained, a P2P MMO up until Turbine switched to F2P because it wasn't doing well enough with subscriptions. (Others and myself have already pointed that out in other threads... won't rehash it here).
Spellborn was, to my knowledge, not decided to be a F2P/Microtransaction MMO 'til late in its development after it was picked up by Acclaim.
Allods is the only game in that list that has been F2P all along, and is a rather tragic one to use. It's a game that is better known among F2P right now for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, having exposed in a big way the true greed that belies the whole "Free To Play!" setup F2P's shovel out with their advertising.
They did so by setting item shop prices that were beyond obnoxious. Even some of the most stalwart defenders of Item Shops said "uh... what?". People called them out on it, and only after the backlash, did they say, basically, "Oh, oops! (damn we hoped no one would notice). Oh, fine, we'll lower the prices... There, see? We did it. Will you play our game now? It's Free!!" (no, that's not a direct quote... just a sarcastic summary of what pretty much went down).
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
My sentiments exactly!
Side note: To go with #1, I am sad that STO was such an epic pile of garbage on launch, but I'm also sort of glad it was, as it's so highly visable as an IP to the casual consumer, and also to the shareholders, executives, and marketing dunders that push for a rushed development in search of a quick buck. Hopefully somebody has learned something.
Your first point on Geeks is somewhat true, but I would like you to define your definition of geek, if by geek you mean in love with video games then sure, most people who love videos have an affinity to MMOs, On the other hand I have many friends who casually play games, not to the geek standard, yet they still somewhat enjoy the concept of logging a couple of hours on an MMO. So for the most point your right.
F2P, yes this is also true and untrue, Item Mall is a bit of a mess but you don't need a subscription or any item from item malls to become successful in MMOs, it may take a bit longer but the result is the same.
Now I can't pick a recently released MMO but I can pick a upcoming MMO. If you recall Mabinogi and Mabinogi Heroes. Take a look at this gameplay video for
Mabinogi:
Now look at Mabinogi Heroes:
This is probably the best example of how MMOs are evolving. Not only does it look good, its going to be F2P so I will be enjoying the NA release as much as I did the KR release
And No Mabinogi Heroes doesn't count as a future MMO because it has already been released so I think relying on this game is no problem.
If this doesn't convince you that online games ARE evolving then I dub you too difficult to deal with. Lol
Anyone who disagrees with this list should probably improve the quality of mmorpg communities by ceasing to play any mmorpgs out there.
The list speaks pure truth.
For 5: I know A LOT of people who are not geeks and yet enjoy mmorpg games. For some its like casino, for others its an insight into society and economic design(I know quite a few marketing/economy students who play EVE for this reason alone). Yes, MMO games WERE for geeks, however I think that the overall gaming community has already began to "bypass" the stereotypical outlook to mmorpg genre.
For 4: I both agree and disagree. If company developed a game to be "over 9000" player type, then it IS a failure. However yes, games don't need to have "uber big" population to generate income (Funcom's AOC and all PWI games are best examples in this).
For 3: I wholeheartedly agree. OF course there are still f2p games made purelly for making $$$ from cash shop, by making it into totally-must-use thing(looking at you TQ and IGG games). However a lot of currently appearing mmorpg titles could rival and dethrone a lot of overrated p2p titles. Let's face it - p2p is a thing of the past. The quality, thinking outside of the box and market elasticity lies inside f2p.
For 2: Yet again wholeheartedly agreed. Of course people might think that mmorpg genre does not evolve...IF they are only looking at the overrated huge sharks like WoW. However in last two yeras mmorpg genre has already moved away into the next generation of gaming. Let's just compare an old game like WoW to something like EVE or Age of Conan to some of current in-development innovative mmorpgs like Forsaken World(with the outside-of-box-style interactivity), Mabinogi Heroes(With its destructible environments and real-time combat) or any of hangame games like Tera or C9. Not to mention Funcom's Upcoming Secret World which promises an entirely new features to MMO genre.
For 1: I can do nothing but agree. WoW is overrated and overrplayed shark with nothing new brought to the genre, If anything Blizzard did with WOW, it was to degenerate the awesomeness even more than they did with Wc3. Sadly WoW is "reality tv shows" of gaming industry - it will never die and continue to be overrated by mmorpg elitist public.
# A GRIM, ODD, ARCANE SKY
# ANY GOD, I MARK SACRED
# A MASKED CRY ADORING
# A DREAMY, SICK DRAGON
I don't understand why people get so mad when people compare new games to WoW. Blizzard may not have invented the mechanics of MMO gameplay but they sure did refine it to the point where it should be the basis of comparison for any game like it.
Here's an analogy:
Back in the day Sony took a $#!T on a plate and served it up as food and EA pissed in a cup and served it up as a drink and thats all everyone could eat and drink for a very long long time. Then Blizzard came along one day and looked at this mess and said I'm gonna use this stuff and turn it into something better.
So they take the $#!T and piss and turn it into furtilizer and spread it across their field and grow a bunch of vegetables, some grape trees and some grass for the cows to eat. In a couple of years they harvest everything they have grown and come to the table with a plate of steak and veggies and a glass of wine and people go absolutely gaga for it and its something that almost everyone wants.
Now many years go by and lots of people are happy eating their steak and their are even some $#!T still out there when a new chef comes up with a new plate. This chef comes to the table with some bacon wrapped steaks, veggies in spices and cream sauces and $200 Cognac.
Now all the steak eaters start drawing comparisons to how the new chef added stuff to their steak and veggies and whether the changes are for the better or worse. This vexes the $#!T eaters to no end and they scream and shout and stomp their feet claiming they were the first and their $#!T should be held in the highest regard and put at the top of the pedestal even though their creation was just broken down excrement of another plate of food.
Now which is the logical comparison?
Speaking of "Ugh" I'm really tired of all of the individuals leaving lame initial posts on the MMORPG.com forums (containing not one ounce of tangible proof) aimed at directly discrediting a writer's article. Selfish points of view and illogical conclusions are NOT proof, by they way, they are individual opinions and ignorance culminating into a gigantic ethereal wall of misguided blabbering.
First of all, MMORPGs are NOT only for geeks. I know quite a few people (Doctors, Police Officers, Business Owners, Professional Athletes) personally who are far from being geeks and yet still enjoy a "night out on the [fantasy] town" every now and again. The bottom line is that the above logic is much like the first incorrect logic sentence we all see in grade school, which is, "If all birds can fly, and all penguins are birds, then all penguins can fly." Being a geek and exerting stereotypically geeky behavior are often two different things; but on a larger, more-general and applicable scale the columnist is correct in stating that the paradigm is shifting. Years ago, playing video games on computers was commonly considered nerdy and, due to the drastic increase of internet popularity (and thus internet gaming), that view is indeed shifting. Score: William Murphy 1, Opposition 0.
One topic Oyjord didn't touch on was determining MMORPG success. I've read the other posts though and I have to say that success really isn't based on subscriptions alone. If we all stick with "the bottom line" numbers we need to consider not only base production costs but also marketing costs, bugs, promise/content delivery, etc. A game that is capable of breaking even, while not a complete failure, is by no means a success. Alternately, pulling in under 1 million subscribers is NOT a failure so long as the game's development studio didn't pitch a different number to investors (or themselves). All cost-related analysis aside (because it's boring), the numbers "are what they are" and what makes them a success or failure isn't how important they are to us but how close they match up to their investor's expectations. In other words, sub 1 million active subscriptions does not, in any way, always mean the game is a failure. Score: William Murphy 2, Opposition 0.
I really don't have to touch the topic regarding the quality of F2P games, but I'm still going to risk over-repeating myself by saying that they are simply NOT crap. I'll be honest, there are a large number of free MMORPG's that I simply can't stand, but that doesn't mean that they're horrible games. Dungeon's & Dragons Online, while not everyone's favorite title, is still a top-notch, high-quality game offering amazing and original concepts, incredible graphics, DDO 3.5 themed rules for the passive DDO P&P fan as well as a host of many other benefits. The same could be said for Runes of Magic, The Chronicles of Spellborn, Eternal Earth and many other titles. Grant it, perhaps none of these titles "float your boat" but that in no way makes them complete crap. The aforementioned games draw in a respectable crowd and deserve a healthy following for the content they present for FREE. One last point on the subject: Just because a game became F2P doesn't mean it's not still F2P. Whether new to the market, modified to become part of the market or otherwise, F2P is F2P and that's final. So, Turbine's shifting of DDO to a F2P model made the game accessible, popular and (most importantly) sustainable and we'd all benefit if more studios followed suit, hands down. Score William Murphy 3, Opposition 0.
On the topic of MMO evolution I find it hard to let go of my own convenient misconceptions and truly view the world of MMORPGs objectively enough to derive such a conclusion; however, letting go of my very particular set of standards it's easy to see how this concept is true to a very large extent. DDO incorporated Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules into their active combat system, The Chronicles of Spellborn invented a rolling abilities bar, Mortal Online has gone with a first-person combat system based on a player's own talent and finally Fallen Earth found a way to incorporate both an MMO and an FPS into one game with the tap of the [tab] key. The theme, setting, storyline, commands, point-of-view, and more are all being pushed an pulled in varying directions and before us, right under our noses, we're being drowned in the muck that some of us can only hope evolves into a tangible game worth all of our time and the subscription fees. Score: William Murphy 4, Opposition 0.
I have nothing more to say about the WoW comparison statement other than it's completely incontestable. WoW is huge, ushered in a world of n00b-age and consequently floods the online community with a tsunami of vastly-inexperienced opinions. Although it makes me sick to read WoW comparison after WoW comparison it has helped me do at least one thing . . . skip over n00b-fest commentary. "Oh, let's see here, this guy thinks this futuristic FPS/Real-Time strategy game based on the Dune series is a . . . OMG, a WoW knock-off? What the . . . ?" ::: skips over to the next post :::
Final Score: William Murphy 5, Opposition 0.
Well of course you know, a good portion of us have been playing F2P concepts forever. Like MTG and D&D in Hobby Shops.
Good read!
Glen ''Famine'' Swan
Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
In a fit of nostalgia I resubbed to EQ a couple months ago. Started off as a Wood Elf in Kelethin just like I did over 10 years ago. I have to strongly disagree with your statement above. The MMORPG genre is lightyears ahead of what it was back when we all played EQ.
And as far as "evolving" goes... I think MMO's are still evolving, but the sublte changes being made are less obvious in the short term and add up over time. The evolutionary process isn't always blatantly obvious, but is really there.
I'm not a fan of cash shops. In fact, if you check my post history, you'll know I'm strictly against them in most cases. F2P games I usually stay away from with a 60 foot dinosaur, but I'll be the first to say that DDO unlimited, Allods, and The Chronicles of Spellborn are some very strongly coded and entertaining free to play games. They are worth the play even if you never spend a dime on them, and though you may get bored after the first month or two, they are really more than I expected to find from F2P games.
Of the three games you listed, only 1 of them was designed with the intention of being F2P, and that's Allods.
DDO was designed as, and remained, a P2P MMO up until Turbine switched to F2P because it wasn't doing well enough with subscriptions. (Others and myself have already pointed that out in other threads... won't rehash it here).
Spellborn was, to my knowledge, not decided to be a F2P/Microtransaction MMO 'til late in its development after it was picked up by Acclaim.
Allods is the only game in that list that has been F2P all along, and is a rather tragic one to use. It's a game that is better known among F2P right now for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, having exposed in a big way the true greed that belies the whole "Free To Play!" setup F2P's shovel out with their advertising.
They did so by setting item shop prices that were beyond obnoxious. Even some of the most stalwart defenders of Item Shops said "uh... what?". People called them out on it, and only after the backlash, did they say, basically, "Oh, oops! (damn we hoped no one would notice). Oh, fine, we'll lower the prices... There, see? We did it. Will you play our game now? It's Free!!" (no, that's not a direct quote... just a sarcastic summary of what pretty much went down).
Don't get me wrong, I understand that (and you are correct when you say) that TCOS was originally NOT intended to be a F2P game. I was in Beta, and as usual the payment model wasn't decided on for a while. DDO of course wasn't F2P at launch. Needless to say as far as development progressed they ended up going F2P, and to me, thats a good thing for the F2P market. If free to play games with triple A quality exists, perhaps it will edge out all the other weak free to play games that just mash together games with a keyboard and a spoon and expect us to give them money.
Three years ago, F2P had no lasting appeal for me personally, but the turnaround on it in such a short time, where now I have three games I feel are worthy of anyones time (be it they were originally developed for this payment model or not) speaks a lot for me. I still won't give these games my money, but I will consider giving them my time... so I guess thats something.
I couldn't agree more. This absurdity that games are for geeks is so jaded. I was one of the most popular in my high school, was often told I looked like a young Tom Cruise, played three sports, was arguably the best player on my football team and one of the fastest kids in the state my senior year. I almost always had a girlfriend who's looks made me the envy of my friends and was always in attendance at parties and social gatherings.
Labels suck! When are we as a society going to learn that labeling people is fruitless? It takes a plethora of qualities to make up an individual and I would argue, goes to show just how ignorant a person truly is, that chooses to use them.
Your fail comment, failed.
Have to say i sort of disagree with #2 aswell, at least where the big name companies are concerned as most of the inovation seems to come from the smaller games if only in drips.
yes i quoted my own post :P sad i know but wanted to add to it with out editing :P since most people are way past that page by now :P
as for mmo's evolving i submit this to you yes they are evolving but at an extremely slow pace
much slower then they should be
one has to admit that for the most part every mmo that has come out for the past 2 years is on a fundamental level exactly the same
the reason i will point out hear is the marketing trying to push them selves into the game design with a great over use of "Focus groups"
mmo development should be solly in the hands of the creaters and not in the hands of focus groups and marketing
for example take swg
what a lot of people dont realize is that the NGE came partly and completely on the design level as a result of sony and LA having "Focus groups"
the thing about Focus groups that make them a bad thing on an mmo is this
play style
play style is way to diverse to be covered by focus groups and if they want to " go the focus group route" the only acurit way to do it would be in game poles for all the players not just a sample
any ways
the geek thing is fact by current definition "one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things" it fits every living person on the planet (since we as human beings all have our obsessions)
how ever the slow evolution due to the use of Focus Groups by marketing is just my opinion and observations and should only be taken as such