Nah, mmorpgs don't preform like they use to. Big bunch of us traditional mmorpg players have done the whole mmorpg thing the same over for over a decade now. Its stale. You can impress for a few months a lot of people by spending insane amounts of money on the game, but nothing worth major investment.
No one ran off with anything. Quite the opposite I think. No one wanted to touch it. No one wants to touch mmorpgs in general unless your an upstart crowd fun favorite. Expectations, costs, and downright complication makes mmorpg games a losing proposition.
I'm really sad about it, I had hopes eqn would be the last great mmorpg, I knew for a while now the big names were going to stay away and make more focused games. When a fraction of a mmorpg game mode instance can be tweaked into a major game for a fraction of the cost, with low expectations and high returns on spending...and you cant even convince enough people to pay $15 a month to fill your only server up, and the damn game cost 10 times more to make and took twice as long to make....why put up with it as a company? Ditch the expensive projects stick to focused games that don't need 100k people playing+paying to stay afloat. That's what happened.
Games are made for profit, like everything else in the world.
If the game can't make a profit or becomes too expensive to create when the market is saturated then you can it, who cares what the fans want when you have to worry about your company, and your workers not losing their jobs. Everquest next was canned for multiple reasons and they were almost certainly correct to do so.
Lets just hope someone picks up the core concepts of EQN that got everyone excited about it in the first place, like the intelligent AI.
Interesting maybe for gamers (though I don't know the exact implementation of it), but not so much for companies, cause it's not proven.
It is likely that Storybricks did not work as advertised and that is why the company folded and the staff dispersed. AI is an intractable problem, particularly when you have to run tens of thousands of instances of it, all the time even when there are no players in the area. Throw in the need to keep updating the database with the state of every AI instance to allow for shutdown recovery and you have a major workload that might give a game server lag before any players log in.
Compromises need to be made and what you are left with may look just like scripted pathing etc. only with more complex code and higher server load.
Wow the OP is obviously young and talking about history he did not experience and knows nothing about. The reality was a Shakespearean drama akin to Hamlet, sex, violence, and murder. Three ugly horny young nerd (princes) who suddenly had a little money, had a taste of power and went mad with it, all vying for the same crown. A very intelligent semi attractive women that wielded in house sex like a sword, laying waste all about her. Jealousy, rage, and murder ( of careers ). A division among the army all backing different princes rather than coming together under one King. It was all very bloody and archaic, add in the fact that nobody knew what the hell they were doing, it had never been done before, everyone was learning as they went along. People would come in and lie about their experience and the people hiring them had no experience themselves so did not know the questions to ask or anyway to catch the liars in their lies. Server techs and people with less experience were made managers and project leads over the few people that actually knew what they were doing. That caused a rot, an anger, and a festering wound that effected almost every project.
how is it anything that goes wrong people blame smed lets not forget without him there be no EQ and no WoW (if you think otherwise go watch evercracked! and you see brad gives praise directly to smed for the idea and wow devs clearly say without EQ there be no WoW) so love him or hate him he made mmorpg mainstream but directly and indirectly. some bad decisions made sure he is human.tried to hype his product to gain attention .er all companies do this for all products yes i am sad to see the once great verrant then soe then daybreak be a total shadow of itself with holly as exec producer for both EQ games left /shrug.but hey we will remember them as we remember ancient rome - an empire dead but one that brought new wonders to the world
You have to blame the guy at the top.....always. Its his or her job to see, when the people working for him in general, no matter how big the company is, are making the wrong decisions, and here's the key word......GLOBALLY.
A company can always recover from a few bad decisions at lower levels, but recovering from globally bad decisions is almost impossible.
Whatever happened to that company and to Smedley, their biggest mistake IMO was turning the whole company into a F2P dispenser. Designing new games and changing all their existing games to become cash grabs was the first step to their demise. That terrible decision led them head on to ruin.
I agree. Lets bet the farm on F2P and Early Access. Globally bad decision, unless you have the disposable labor and lack of ethics for intellectual property that fuel the eastern F2P market you don't stand a chance.
Using Trion as an example, they took sub games and converted them to F2P, then brought on more games that started as Box plus sub games, then are now tossing in other F2P games they imported from overseas. They are also a publisher now of sorts and less of a developer so we will see how they do long term. So far they have managed to stay in business, how profitable though I don't know. But since their next release is NOT F2P, there is probably a chance they are in good shape.
Wow the OP is obviously young and talking about history he did not experience and knows nothing about. The reality was a Shakespearean drama akin to Hamlet, sex, violence, and murder. Three ugly horny young nerd (princes) who suddenly had a little money, had a taste of power and went mad with it, all vying for the same crown. A very intelligent semi attractive women that wielded in house sex like a sword, laying waste all about her. Jealousy, rage, and murder ( of careers ). A division among the army all backing different princes rather than coming together under one King. It was all very bloody and archaic, add in the fact that nobody knew what the hell they were doing, it had never been done before, everyone was learning as they went along. People would come in and lie about their experience and the people hiring them had no experience themselves so did not know the questions to ask or anyway to catch the liars in their lies. Server techs and people with less experience were made managers and project leads over the few people that actually knew what they were doing. That caused a rot, an anger, and a festering wound that effected almost every project.
I see psiic definitely has an insiders knowledge. Partying like a rockstar and working hard to develop a game cannot go hand in hand.
Where it all began... the 80s. The movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas.
Smedly got himself a game engine. ran the company like a 80s stock. Hi Profits and Low Margrins. If it did not make mega cash, no risk was taken to make it make mega cash.
We can match up every single game rise and fall according to market trends. Games with huge IP's got Zero overhauls to the game engine or just flat out shut down. When shooter games topped the charts in sales, he went right for cashing in on Shooters, (planetside and H1Z1). When more graphic intense RPGs started to show up after 10 years of no progress, he decided to create EQ Next knowning the graphics was not next gen. Instead of putting together a team of advanced graphic designers and innovation, he decided he would squeeze one last cash in on the outdated engine he had. NO update to engine, just like games, no updates, just close them and let them crash and burn.
After successfully getting Landmark marketed, they cracked open the campaign bottles and celebrated much like the disgraced "too big to fail" companies did after the bailout. Then they marketed the company to the highest bidder capitalizing on hype with the investors of daybreak. Once they gained full bailout they wanted to stay on as CEO of the company. Dint work to well, and took their golden parachute. Once they discovered that the game engine could not compete in the future Daybreak had no choice but to retire EQ NEXT.
That my friends was the way Smedly Madeoff with EQ Next!
Full of misinformation or ignorance of the subject. I will correct you on one key point as I dont have time to get into your whole post. Forgelight 2 engine just came out this year and was updated on their gamers running that engine. EQN was also getting that update. Only reason EQN was shut down, was because the Voxel engine working with Forgelight engine was not working. Lag and lag and lag. They would not build the game they wanted. As the world got bigger the game just become unplayable. Its why Landmark is made up of small islands.
I've been around this topic since 2005... when the nge hit SWG.. in my experience the only people who hate him are those who just can't accept a business made a bad decision. They did what any one steering a ship would do, they saw a leak and tried to plug it, it didn't work. Hating them over it is juvenile.
I think you are oversimplifying the situation and I disagree with your summary.
to begin with, there are people that hate smedley who never played swg, let alone the NGE.
If you really were around SOE topics since 2005, you would find almost every one of their games has had their own NGE moment(s). basically SOE making promises and guarantees while behind the scenes working on exactly the opposite and throwing their players into the fire, usually in some effort to attract new players.
sure the NGE is the biggest example of a company making an epic mistake, but it doesn't mean it was a one time incident for SOE or Smedley.
Yeah smedley crucified christ . Was an advisor to Hitler and created Isis and engineered brexit. Damn you smedley damn you...
ROFL, if that was true (about him engineering Brexit) then we'd have carried him around the country on our shoulders like a hero O.o I would have characterised him as the chief Remoaner
Whatever happened to that company and to Smedley, their biggest mistake IMO was turning the whole company into a F2P dispenser. Designing new games and changing all their existing games to become cash grabs was the first step to their demise. That terrible decision led them head on to ruin.
I past though here and being me couldn't resist adding my 2 cents worth smile: EQN was promised and we paid into it expecting their company was good to it's word. What for me was a great deal of their demise was there lost of trust.....I dumped money into it, on the promise of a game and it wasn't delivered. Now them and even Brad for me have lost my confidence. I won't dump money again into a game that they have anything to do with until I see that it's a viable game. Pantheon was mentioned above....looks really good, but they want seed money that I won't put up until they actually have a game. Now if this is just me it's no major, but if they lose a lot of their old supporters to this way of thinking it will and seems to me has cost them in their credibility and that costs them money.
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This have been a good conversation
Nah, mmorpgs don't preform like they use to. Big bunch of us traditional mmorpg players have done the whole mmorpg thing the same over for over a decade now. Its stale. You can impress for a few months a lot of people by spending insane amounts of money on the game, but nothing worth major investment.
No one ran off with anything. Quite the opposite I think. No one wanted to touch it. No one wants to touch mmorpgs in general unless your an upstart crowd fun favorite. Expectations, costs, and downright complication makes mmorpg games a losing proposition.
I'm really sad about it, I had hopes eqn would be the last great mmorpg, I knew for a while now the big names were going to stay away and make more focused games. When a fraction of a mmorpg game mode instance can be tweaked into a major game for a fraction of the cost, with low expectations and high returns on spending...and you cant even convince enough people to pay $15 a month to fill your only server up, and the damn game cost 10 times more to make and took twice as long to make....why put up with it as a company? Ditch the expensive projects stick to focused games that don't need 100k people playing+paying to stay afloat. That's what happened.
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
If the game can't make a profit or becomes too expensive to create when the market is saturated then you can it, who cares what the fans want when you have to worry about your company, and your workers not losing their jobs. Everquest next was canned for multiple reasons and they were almost certainly correct to do so.
Compromises need to be made and what you are left with may look just like scripted pathing etc. only with more complex code and higher server load.
You have to blame the guy at the top.....always. Its his or her job to see, when the people working for him in general, no matter how big the company is, are making the wrong decisions, and here's the key word......GLOBALLY.
A company can always recover from a few bad decisions at lower levels, but recovering from globally bad decisions is almost impossible.
I agree. Lets bet the farm on F2P and Early Access. Globally bad decision, unless you have the disposable labor and lack of ethics for intellectual property that fuel the eastern F2P market you don't stand a chance.
Using Trion as an example, they took sub games and converted them to F2P, then brought on more games that started as Box plus sub games, then are now tossing in other F2P games they imported from overseas. They are also a publisher now of sorts and less of a developer so we will see how they do long term. So far they have managed to stay in business, how profitable though I don't know. But since their next release is NOT F2P, there is probably a chance they are in good shape.
I see psiic definitely has an insiders knowledge. Partying like a rockstar and working hard to develop a game cannot go hand in hand.
If you really were around SOE topics since 2005, you would find almost every one of their games has had their own NGE moment(s). basically SOE making promises and guarantees while behind the scenes working on exactly the opposite and throwing their players into the fire, usually in some effort to attract new players.
sure the NGE is the biggest example of a company making an epic mistake, but it doesn't mean it was a one time incident for SOE or Smedley.
I get that he is a personable guy, but EQN was a train wreck under his leadership. same with SOE overall.
Ya ha, kinda like Smithers from the Simpsons. Actually they're the same characters.
I would have characterised him as the chief Remoaner