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So much fail in the industry...
Dwarfman420
Member Posts: 207
When will Ultima Online 2 sandbox be coming out to save it?
(provided it's every bit as addictive/massive/fun to play as Ultima Online Pre Renaissance was)
Comments
Every MMO that has come out in the last few years minus Rift, has all practically fallen on their collective faces going F2P.
- Conan f2p
- Lotro f2p
- DC Online f2p
- anything under John Smedley over at SOE actually (Everquest 2, soon Vanguard, etc)
- Star Trek Online f2p
- Aion online f2p
-Soon (tm) Star Wars: The Old Republic will be f2p
I am prolly even missing a few.
Long story short, lot of us vets are spent on themeparks.
Exploring, crafting, community, adventuring sounds more fun these days then hardcore raiding for better gear.
I really miss housing (non instanced) also. Lots of good fluff out there besides useless vanity pets/outfits/mounts.
You know, finding a treasure map, deciphering it and searching the world map for the treasure... Forging weapons to fight goblins in caves. Carving wood to make a table in the middle of a city, putting a baggamon game on the table and having fun with real roleplayers. Creating your spells... building your house.
Now its about farming recipes for crafting, farming monsters for leveling, farming gold to buy items, farming bosses to get better items. Farming your life, the game is not a second world... its a new job.
Thier going F2P has more to do with F2P taking over the market than their being Themepark games.
Runes of Magic makes more in profit a year than SWG did during its best year. So what does that say about sandbox games?
F2P created Nexon...a company that generated over 1 BILLION DOLLARS in revenue last year...200 million from free games.
Companies are tired of fighting over the scraps that subscription base games are being thrown, there is no point in struggling to get, let alone keep 300-500k subscriptions when there are over a dozen F2P games with 3+ million players occasionally buying from a shop generating MORE money.
A game needs around 1 million players to top $150 mil a year, and it wont be all profit...few sub games will ever retain that many players...some poorly made F2P games top and retain 1 million easily. So companies are seeing that all it takes is a good shop and a decent game to make more money.
And then there are the SWTORs...selling over 2 million and lose most of them due to piss poor gameplay variety. If they had gone B2P, they would still have most of those players and would be making far more with a decent shop because the game is far better quality than most F2P games making hand over fist.
So because something, regardless of how succesful it was, going free to play is a failure? Almost every game you have listed has seen improvements after going free to play, I see mroe life in AoC and LotRO now than I did when they were subs.
And EQII was hardly a failure leading up to the free to play...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Actually UO 2.0 was in development in 1997-2000, but was scrapped due to the player upheaval of UO players screaming that they were replacing UO. Instead the dev's reinvested their efforts into the original.
Meanwhile EQ rose to be the goliath that it was on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of players that slowly trickled into the brand new genra. Many of those players had orignally come to the genra after reading intervews and news articles about UO2 in magazines like PC gamer and the net.
Every mmo I listed above started as subscriptions.
F2P being $$$ maker I don't care about.
Going F2P in the gaming community eyes is a sign of failure to retain enough subs.
If swtor was B2P I would still not be playing it. example: Diablo 3
Like I said, a lot of us vets, that remember how insane fun a good fantasy sandbox was (UO1 pre-renissance) are tired of themepark rides.
To sum up the experience:
Repetative questing (collect 10 more please! slay 10 more please!) to get to max level, grind for faction rep for gear or hardcore raiding for gear, pvp in arena/battleground (not openworld) when pve content is maxed for gear/achievement purposes, roll alts, repeat (if your an alt person), if not, drop subscription till xpansion.
As lakoka mentioned, in a good sandbox, there are lots n lots of things to do. Such as:
-Deadly Poison Food n wait for people to eat it (hopefully a crafter = dead) for laughs
-Stand at the blacksmith while training to do repairs for adventurers in need (before deeds)
-Set up vendors to sell your items
-Place, decorate (later design) ones own house in the open world was really a great feature.
-Houses decayed n fel to the ground with priceless objects the previous owner kept were sought after by players.
-Fishing for Message in a Bottle for treasure maps, to sail to the with your sextant, pulling up sea creatures was awesome
-Pvp of course, only openworld
-Player run auctions
-GM events that intertwined with the changing history of the very land itself (Minax invasion)
etc etc etc
Also, Everquest 2 was a good game for a number of years, anything under soe is f2p almost by default.
I agree with the above comments. I do think GW2 is heading in the right direction. The truth is, though, that game developers are not stupid. They know that a full loot-type open world PvP style of gameplay leads to less revenue than structured PvP where players don't lose items.
To me, the best part of Ultima Online was combating, stealing, and adventuring. Before there were "bless" deeds, you could lose ANYTHING. I loved the feeling of being scared to die, and I enjoyed killing a grey or a red and taking their Industructable Vanq bow even more.
I don't know about that. If not stupid is trying to squeeze as much money out of players at the expense of the game, then yes developers are not stupid. If making a great game is the first priority, then developers are stupid.
And UO did quite well with full loot attaining hundreds of thousands of subscriptions when most people didn't even know what an MMO was. The fact that gear was fairly easily replaced with npc or crafted gear meant that the cost of dying was not too great. But it is valuable to have a cost to dying. Dying should hurt. But it should not really be looked at as dying, because there is no death in a game, it's only a temporary loss. It's when thoughtless players began to equate getting murdered in the game with getting murdered in real life instead of temporarily losing, that they began to cry that they shold never lose.
What kind of game do you never lose at? A boring one.
Although I agree with your comments, I must take exception. UO did quite well because they were the only kid-on-the-block. (Meridian doesn't count, neither does The Realm, lol) . Everquest did astronomically well, and they started heading the direction of lossless death. Soon after, WoW did even better, and we know the direction they took!
The fact is it's a small percentage of the MMO crowd (some would call this the "hardcore" crowd) who enjoys having a cost to dying that is actually significant.
Oh, and I don't think many players equate getting murdered in a game to getting murdered in real life
lol
I've asked this same question many times, and now that I'm part of the industry, I've given myself an answer. The answer is... never. The "genre" was moved past games like UO. Could you imagine taking the mmorpg population and dumping them into a pre-uor game? It wouldn't be roleplaying and living in a world... it would be tears and giant gank squads 100 people strong from zerg guilds. UO can't support the population, or the type of player, the mmorpg genre now ecompasses. There is a niche for private servers, and that is where this game is going to remain for the forseeable future.
That's a very good point, and you don't even have to be in the industry to realize it. If you've played the games since back in those days and have seen how it's changed over time, and how WoW really ushered in a new era of MMOs with an entirely different type of playerbase than had traditionally playedthem.. it was pretty clear to see when the change really started in earnest. People assume it's a derogatory remark when people say "everything changed with WoW", but it's actually very true, for a number of reasons.
You can see it in the things that so many people find important these days. The focus has changed. Priorities have changed. Values have changed.
I came to the party a little late, starting with with AC2, Anarchy Online and Shadowbane - before finally trying FFXI, which hooked me for years (unlike most, it seems, my "first love" in MMOs was not the first one I played.. it was the 4th). But even then, you could see how different the community was. In all my times sitting and reading chat, or participating myself in AC2, AO, SB or FFXI, I don't think I recall anyone ever discussing what the fastest way to get to level cap was. I don't remember anyone ever claiming that "end game was what MMOs are all about". I don't remember people being single-mindedly focused on "leveling as efficiently as possible", to the exclusion of anything else that didn't aid in that goal. I'm sure it existed, but it was not, by a long shot, the norm at that time.
In my experience (and this is not just "rose colored glasses" - this is how it was), people were more interested in whatever they were doing "now". If they logged in and someone was getting a group together to go do a certain dungeon run in AC2, then that's what they were focused on. Getting the most enjoyment out of that activity that they were about to engage in. Even if they didn't get their "loot" or didn't "level up", they had fun being challenged and getting through it with other cool people on their server. I remember people standing around Arwic in AC2, talking, goofing around, putting groups together. I remember asking if someone wanted to do some Vault runs and immediately getting replies like, "Yeah! Let's do it!". They didn't need anything from them. There was no "epic drop" they were after. They were in it for the fun.
The idea of xp loss wasn't like kryptonite to Superman. It's not that we were all "masochists" back then, as many these days like to so dismissively characterize it. It's that we weren't in a hurry like people are nowadays. Our enjoyment of the game wasn't dependent on how many levels we got before we logged out, or how many epic drops we got in a dungeon run. The problem with people these days saying "anyone who's okay with xp loss is a masochist with no life" is that they're seeing it through the lens of someone who values the destination over the journey. They're all about "reaching the finish line as fast as possible." It simply was not that way. If you died and lost xp.. So what? You were hanging out with cool people, having fun with whatever. If you lost xp it was just an excuse to hang out and have fun longer. The concept of reaching level cap was an abstraction for many people. It was something you knew was there, and that you'd reach it eventually. It wasn't the all-encompassing focus of every waking second you were logged in to get there.
Another common argument is "well people back then lived with their folks and didn't have the responsibilities they do now that they've grown up". Nonsense. For as long as MMORPGs and, indeed, MUDs before them have existed, there have been people with families, full-time jobs, businesses and other responsibilties limiting their time. And they still played. The difference is, again, their expectations were different. If they logged in for an hour on a given night, it wasn't a "requirement" for them to be able to level up in order to feel they "accomplished" something. They logged in to do whatever they could do in that time-frame, and then log out. Everything wasn't so "finish-line centric" back then. That difference in perspective and attitude made a huge difference in the way these games were played.
It's really been rather sad seeing the genre change, and the players - for the most part - move away from that more laid-back, community-centric, "let's just log in, get some people together and have fun doing whatever we decide to do" mindset.
And the thing is, from the outside, having seen and personally experienced the other side of the story, when someone asks "why do people hop from MMO to MMO so much these days, while people spent years and years playing the old ones?", the answer to me is completely clear. It's not "because there weren't as many options back then". That's a false answer for two reasons. For one, the option to not play any of them at all was always there. For another, some of the people who played those games for years have done so even while all these new MMOs have come out. They've tried the newer MMOs, and find them wanting. You can't say "well there just aren't as many options", because there's tons of them now. The options just do not match up to the experience these people have found, and continue to find in many cases, in the older MMOs.
Again, because the focus, the drive and the values are different. What we wanted and expected out of MMORPGs back in those days is completely different from what people want and expect out of them now.
Okay peoples, time to lay some knowleged on you.
Want to know why the MMO industry is failing and F2P is the eventual fate of most, if not all, of the recently released MMORPGS?
Complete and utter lack of originality
Its that simple. Game after game, clone after clone has been pumped out of the anus that is the MMO industry, all in the hopes of copying WoW to beat WoW. You cant hope to do something new when you just keep repeating the same formula over and over again. WoW is WoW, nothing can beat it and copying it is a recipie for disaster. Why would players want to leave WoW and play another game that is essentially WoW and have to start all over again, when they can just stay on WoW and keep playing their already established character in their already established guilds? The answer is, they wont. Sure, they'll come over to the new game, try it out, and then realize, wait a minute, this is just WoW but with a different skin, and then go back to WoW.
Why do developers keep doing this? Because they do not believe there is any other way of making an MMORPG. All they know is the WoW/EQ model. It also doesnt help that RAGING JACKASS companies like Aventurine and Star Vault making half assed, Alpha Quality, bug ridden, pieces of shit like Darkfall and Mortal. They see these UTTER FAILURES and think "Holy moley, no way in hell am I making a game like that, it will just fail and my career will be ruined".
Because of these factors, developers just keep reproducing the same crap over and over again. Not a lot of people remember Ultima Online and how successful it was. When developers research UO today, all they get is the neon item ridden, item dependent, World of Ultimacraft it is today and think, whats so special about this? It follows the WoW formula like every other game.
Either that, or when they to launch inquiries into UO's history, they are bombarded by asshat carebears who whine and cry about servers overrun with PKs and how it was impossible to do anything without getting ganked, which was completely untrue. Thanks to these whiney tall tales, it deterrs developers from wanting to even give making a decent open PvP sandbox game a shot.
So, they play it safe and stay with Theme Park MMOs where PvP only happens in a battleground instance, gear is never lost and everyone is their faction's hero and next great savior of the world, blah blah blah.
They dont know about being able to build one's character the way they see fit by choosing their skills and playing a role. They dont know the fun of being a pure crafter or how open PvP and item loss makes crafters 1000x more valuable. They dont know the thrill of being a thief or of the risk of being stolen from, how it kept people on their toes and gave people a reason to keep a close eye on their equipment and on who was around them. They dont know the freedom and excitement of an open world where you dont have to worry about wandering into an area that's level is too high and getting one shotted by a level 29 rat because youre a level 12 rogue.
They dont have the cunning, creativity or imagination to think outside the WoW box, and that, my friends, is why the market is dying. Break the cycle, be original, and take a chance. Sure, you might not hit the moon, but at least you'll be amongst the starts. If an open sandbox open PvP MMORPG made at least 500k subs, that would send a message that it can be a success.
The players out there would give it a chance and it would appeal to more people than anyone knows. Why? Because its something different. Its an actual challenge, its a functional world.
Give players a world, not another game. But this can only happen if the world is well built and functions properly. Dont make the mistakes made by aventurine and star vault. Test the game properly, find investors who will give you the time needed to make sure the game is PROPERLY alpha and beta tested and released only when the game is 95%-100% ready. Do this, and we will see the first highly successful open sandbox world in nearly 14 years.
Then, and only then, will we see SANDBOX WORLDS take their place over THEME PARK GAMES.
It does not matter how many kids are on the block when the number of houses to trick-or-treat at is expanding exponentially, which is what happened with subscriptions. UO was left behind because not only did it undermine its current player base by completely changing the rules and game to copycat others, but it also did not update to newer 3d graphics and technology.
I, for one, would certainly still be playing if it were a medevil sandbox, 2d or not.
As far as thinking many players were not equating getting murdered in a game to real life, you must have not been at the UO forums. Every day some retarded player would be screaming bloody murder and demanding that they stop allowing "murdering" in the game.
EA listened to these retards, and the challenge became nothing.
EA Games - Challenge Nothing.