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LLSix posted:It feels like for the past decade, most new MMOs hit their peak population in the first few weeks and have a lifespan measured in months. What the heck happened? WoW was very much a lightning-in-a-bottle situation that hit at just the right time. Decent Internet connections had become both widespread and affordable enough for mass adoption, and personal computers with the hardware needed to run 3D games were becoming less an anomaly and more a norm. The idea of the Internet as a social space was also something that was still relatively unexplored, barring various disconnected message boards and proto-networking sites like LiveJournal or MySpace, and was a niche that WoW happened to fill better than every other multiplayer game at the time. A megasuccess in the MMO market doesn't happen much these days, both because those same conditions aren't replicable, and because broader consumer tastes have shifted more towards fast-paced action games over time.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:01
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Jackard posted:I don't like mobas or know anything about Riot, could they actually pull it off? Yes. They're genuinely the only company I would trust with developing a large scale MMO at this point. They're packed to the brim with good designers, have an enormous budget, and are highly knowledgeable about online infrastructure and what it takes to make a game run well in multiplayer. Eox posted:Is there a league universe? I thought they just filed the serial numbers off of DOTA characters and worked from there They brought on a full team of writers around 6 years ago to begin fleshing out an actual League universe, which involved dumping almost all of the old stuff save some of the names and places and coming up with a fully-fledged fantasy world. All the info is on the Universe page, which also includes numerous short stories and comics involving the League world.
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Dec 18, 2020 03:25
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Frida Call Me posted:Originally, they charged premium entry to special events that were held once or twice a year. Flat $30 ontop of your subscription fee for getting the opportunity to shop premium goods, and practically guaranteed interaction with GM-controlled NPCs that could change the look of the the things you wore. This was pretty reasonable and a good time was had by all. Remember when we were all sputtering with disbelief 12-odd years ago at Oblivion charging a couple bucks for horse armor?
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Dec 24, 2020 03:48
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kloa posted:Isn’t all that to help combat the gold seller bots though? Correct. The free trial used to not have as many restrictions before they found out that gold selling bots were heavily abusing them and making life miserable for regular players.
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Feb 6, 2021 22:55
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punk rebel ecks posted:How the gently caress is Star Citizen not out yet? It's a money laundering operation. There's basically nothing about its financials that make any kind of sense, even assuming a miraculous drip feed of new people with too little sense and too much money.
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May 9, 2021 00:18
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please knock Mom! posted:Tabula rasa looked cool but died instantly I played in the closed beta for Tabula Rasa, and it was pretty obvious that the team was either new or lacked good leadership. There were the nuts and bolts of a potentially good game - it was basically a prototype for Destiny, in a lot of ways - but they never really cohered, and the lack of content killed the game stone dead fast.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:17
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FreeWifi!! posted:Where the hell is all this money going to? MMOs are a tremendously challenging genre to try and get a game out in. You're typically dealing not only with the demands of a fully-fledged game - usually some vast, open world conceit, especially for those pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter MMOs - but also with the enormous technical demands of network architecture and typical genre conventions that eat into even more development time. Even your average big budget JRPG generally has the characters wearing one outfit the entire time, but it's more-or-less required that your MMO in 2021 have multiple gearsets and cosmetic armor pieces that can be used for player self-expression, a demand that puts enormous strain on the concept artists and modelers. Even if those Kickstarter projects weren't filled with rank incompetence, getting a halfway decent MMO out on a $3-4 million dollar budget would require a vast reduction in scope and experience, and in a market filled to the brim with multiplayer games and other online social experiences, it's unlikely you'd be able to make even a portion of that investment back.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:29
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1stGear posted:I'm really curious as to what the final price tag for the LoL MMO is going to be, because I'm fairly confident it's going to be equivalent to the GDP of a small country. SWTOR was around, like, $200 million, right? I think somewhere in the ballpark of $250-300 million sounds about right.
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Nov 12, 2021 22:54
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Orange DeviI posted:I play XIV on and off and it's a bit weird, on one hand you can play every class/job on one character which is great, on the other hand there's not really any build variety within a job so if you really like one job you can't really switch things up and try a different 'build' or something. But you can put on Vans and a biker jacket It's a way of doing things I largely prefer. I do miss the ability to be creative and come up with your own builds from other MMOs, but the nature of content (re: it's repetitive by design and largely predictable) means that mathematical optimization is going to win out the vast majority of the time. Focusing on a singular vision for each class allows them to create a cohesive play experience where every element of the class feeds into eachother, as well as making inter-role balancing much easier.
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Dec 10, 2021 00:25
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Mister Olympus posted:people have different bedtimes and different work schedules, and a LOT of people play on NA servers from OCE or EU because they built their friend networks before their regions had servers Yeah, the prime time queues don't exist in the morning for NA, at least. I wake up at the equivalent of 10-11 AM EST most days, and the largest queue I've had to face down after the start of early access was 45 people.
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Dec 10, 2021 03:34
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I think the only way to do that kind of "living world" stuff in a sensible way is with PoE-style seasons to avoid the unfortunately inevitable result of early economic accumulation leading to exponential economic accumulation and subsequent control. It "works" in real life because people have to live in the real world and must regrettably play ball with monarchies and oligarchs, but a video game trying to survive on those same standards is gonna be down to early adopters and niche diehards in no time flat.
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Dec 14, 2021 18:24
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Magic: Legends is one of the most baffling products put to market in recent memory. An ARPG with randomized skill draws during missions is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of the core gameplay loop of ARPGs that it begs the question of whether any of the developers ever even played one.
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Dec 21, 2021 21:50
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eonwe posted:So, I've been playing the Ruined King game by Riot, and if I had to guess, their MMO is going to look and feel like this (but with non turn based combat). It already feels like an MMO world to me, but just designed to be navigated in single player. As mentioned, Airship Syndicate are the brains behind it, but I broadly agree in the sense that it's a good aesthetic showcase for what Riot's nailed down for the look and feel of League-adjacent projects. Bilgewater feels like a real place despite the limited scale, and the overall tone and feel of it - kitchen sink fantasy that's punched up substantially by excellent character and world design - is something that's easily transferred over to an MMO's design. Truga posted:still waiting for yoship to figure out gw2 is just an elaborate series of fate chains and finally give us a good open world expansion. bozja was neat but still nothing close to what gw2 does in a few maps For better or worse, the open world in FFXIV will always be more a means of establishing place and providing the grounding for certain side activities (gathering, sidequests, FATEs), instead of being the main draw. The story, dungeons, and raids are all what keep people coming back to the game in droves, and they also consume the most significant amount of dev time. They're also likely hamstrung by the age of the engine and the fact that it's really only designed for the kinds of activities you can already do; you'd need a redone engine (which may well be coming in 7.0, given the fact that the current one's nearly 9 years old and is badly showing its age) to make broad exploration not a huge pain in the rear end.
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Jan 1, 2022 19:49
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Kaysette posted:dark souls mmo with tab targeting this is what true dark souls gamers who played all three with KB+M (re: me) were already doing
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Jan 3, 2022 18:11
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The PS1 aesthetic's been around for several years now, though I've only really seen it done much in the context of horror games, since the fuzzy pseudoimpressionist style of PS1 low poly works great for creating an unreal, dreamlike atmosphere and blurring the details of the monsters to sell the horror better.
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Jan 12, 2022 22:45
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eonwe posted:I wish they'd leaned more on the shooter aspect and less on the MOBA aspect. I feel that this was a fundamental issue with their design philosophy. To be clear, I'm perfectly fine with MOBA design - I play League more than any human ought to - but it was clear almost from the start that Blizzard didn't really know what kind of game they ultimately wanted to make. People like to harp on Brigitte, but the problem really goes all the way back to Reinhardt and how he drastically warped the game's design and pacing. Having frontliners that can soak up damage and use short-duration contextual abilities to increase their survivability is a MOBA staple, and it's a reasonable enough concept in an FPS, but having a frontliner that can protect their entire team until their shield breaks causes massive pacing issues. The theoretical solution to this - having skirmishers that flank on the sides to try and disrupt the formation and take out key backline members - falls apart when you've got poo poo like McCassidy's stun at the ready, not to mention the enormous amount of healing the average support could pump out. The end result is what the game inevitably turned into: a shield-shooting stalemate that got progressively worse as they added in more heroes with Reinhardt-esque shields to try and give alternatives to just playing Reinhardt, all of which heavily deemphasized the FPS element. A part of me is deeply curious as to how many internal design divisions there were post-launch. It's weirdly inexplicable that, for a game that leaned so heavily on the FPS element in its marketing, the only heroes that even remotely played ball with FPS design post-launch were, like, Ashe, Ana, and Sombra. It feels like there was a strong push from the more diehard FPS designers for the initial game who then got slowly whittled down by more senior design voices that wanted to make the game more broadly accessible and popular by pushing simpler hero designs that required none of the aiming skill of the core DPS roster.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:55
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There were a lot of design red flags in OW, really. The fact that they were apparently designing the game initially around the idea of mid-match hero swapping is bafflingly stupid for reasons of gameplay (ult charge being king), mechanics (mastering a hero sufficiently takes hundreds and hundreds of games), and psychology (people want to play the champions they like in a hero shooter). The truly fantastic art direction, sound design, and engine did the loving labors of Hercules in helping to paper over the more fundamental design flaws rotting the foundation away.
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Jan 19, 2022 07:24
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30.5 Days posted:Did they never add anyone like the soldier who instantly shoots powerful slow projectiles? Pharah was in since beta, but the high presence of hitscan DPS like Cowboy Man and Widowmaker meant that she usually got blown out of the sky before getting to do anything.
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Jan 19, 2022 08:08
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The pro Overwatch meta has mostly swung between various iterations of dive comps and shield comps depending on what's strongest. Brigitte was originally intended as a way to forcibly break the dive meta that had emerged, which then made GOATs the premier meta for a couple seasons. Again, the fact that the game's balance centers so heavily around the presence of team-protecting shields - either stacking them or completely bypassing them - is part of the core design problem, since it restricts team comps, narrows future hero design space, and deemphasizes traditional FPS elements in favor of either slow wars of attrition or big ult deathballs.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:43
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Third World Reagan posted:I have this toy for you it requires a gaming pc plus a bit more power oh and is hella expensive and maybe requires more space than most people have I honestly think the space thing is the biggest limiting factor for continued VR growth. Even if you knock the price of headsets and rigs down through some miracle of engineering, the average young person interested in the novelty of it is either gonna be stuck in their room or sharing an apartment with someone, both of which are situations where the space to wander around like a dumbass is at an absolute premium.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:12
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It's a real shame. I had a fun 15-20 hours with TERA back in the day, and Sage is still one of the most fun healing classes I've ever played in an MMO. I think we're finally at the point where a full action MMORPG is truly viable with the technology available, even for non-localized internet markets like NA and EU, but my guess is that it'll take until the League MMO for us to see it. Mr. Neutron posted:How the hell is Rift still going? Most older tab-target MMOs cost peanuts to run in perpetuity. Whether they actually stay up mostly seems to be some combination of individual company whims and financial situation (cutting out "dead weight" products to look more appealing to shareholders).
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Apr 20, 2022 16:40
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DaitoX posted:In other news, Guild Wars 1, the really old game, is getting (or just got) a new data-center in Korea. They recently hit new records of concurrent players during the 2022 Lunar New Year event (about triple from the amount of players in early 2018, I didn't see exact numbers). Apparently they have needed to scale up infrastructure a couple times since 2018 (the year they picked active development back up, which consists mostly of tweaks and fixes) and now a whole new data-center location. That's pretty nuts, yeah. My guess would be that PC bang culture's behind it, since GW1 is close to the perfect game for one to offer: multiplayer, super low specs, tons of content to get through, and no major EXP/loot grinds that eat into paid time.
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Apr 20, 2022 19:49
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Vinestalk posted:I'd love to read about this. I never played TERA but do remember all the pre-launch hype. It was actually "Mystic" - I've been playing too much FFXIV  - but its main gimmick was that most of its heals were untargeted effects that depended on good aim and positioning to get the full value from them. You could create small healing and mana orbs ala old Mistwalkers in WoW, had a charged damage AoE that then comboed into a healing AoE, and, most importantly, had a boomerang-like projectile that dealt damage and healed on both pulses. The last skill was what really won me over, because it made you think about where you had to stand in a way I don't think I've seen much in any other MMO, since you needed to position yourself both to stay safe from telegraphs and be able to hit targets with both pulses, and while you had some mobility to help you with it, it still required a good amount of forethought. It was a really fun skillset to master, but it's also one that I think most MMOs have little interest in, since the failure rate for untargeted heals is really high for the average player, and that's not gonna cut the mustard with the standard MMO damage paradigm where healers are there to both reverse unavoidable damage and compensate for party mistakes. Vermain fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 02:59
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I play healer primarily because of the significant run-to-run variation you get depending on the competence of your team. Healers in MMOs are generally the only role that gets a truly dynamic experience in each dungeon, since the amount you have to work can vary from "autopiloting" to "furiously coming up with a plan on the fly," and I find that a lot more engaging than the relatively smooth experience most tanks/DPS have. I also usually like playing them because they tend to be one of the roles that people don't optimize a ton on, and I fully admit to enjoying the experience of mastering the role and impressing other people when I show that I know what I'm doing. v  v
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Apr 22, 2022 16:41
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Yeah, GW2's still doing plenty good. It's not my cup of tea, but it's probably in the top 10 as far as currently active MMOs go.
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May 5, 2022 01:30
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Zil posted:That is cool as hell. How do they pull the data for that? Submitted logs or is the API FF14 provides that open? FFXIV has no actual API to speak of, but the network data it sends is easy enough to read. The main program people use for parsing, ACT, reads network data for the purpose of more accurate logging, and I believe it tracks X/Y coordinates when recording individual events like taking/dealing damage or gaining statuses, so you can extrapolate from there.
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May 25, 2022 01:36
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There's a not-unreasonable possibility that the League MMO might jumpstart interest in the genre again, but anything even MMO-adjacent right now is some flavor of live service or DoA Kickstarter stuff.
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Jul 20, 2022 17:18
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IIRC, the design process for FFXI was, quite literally, sending the team over to NA to bootcamp for a couple of months playing Everquest - itself already heavily derivative of MUDs - and taking as many notes as they could.
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Aug 7, 2022 01:39
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FFXIV 1.0 was more-or-less a retread of FFXI, which is the big reason it flopped so hard. Part of 2.0's initial development process was doing the same kind of bootcamping that had been done for FFXI, but with WoW as the new market standard. The only real DNA FFXIV retains from FFXI are references and the occasional attempts to reconnect with past modes of MMO gameplay like with Eureka, which were a set of special zones based around gaining EXP for Eureka-specific levels in groups via grinding monster camps, dangerous overworld exploration, and quests with vague direction that occasionally required community help to complete.
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Aug 7, 2022 06:27
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I said come in! posted:I see people on Youtube shilling for Ashes of Creation. This game has been in development since 2016, and the devs keep extending the development and feature creep in order to keep funding going and avoid any sort of accountability. Is this game actually not a scam? Its still in alpha with nothing to show for it that i'm aware of. it's 100% a scam, or, if you want to be more generous, a product that is impossible to deliver on there's a reason modern MMOs aren't made that much if they're not gacha vehicles, and it's because they cost an absurd amount of money for the final result. trying to make anything approaching those games with kickstarter money is already a dicey proposition, but promising the moon and the stars of a living world beyond that is pure pie-in-the-sky nonsense
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Aug 11, 2022 20:05
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I think a consistent, relatively frequent update schedule is a necessity in modern non-legacy multiplayer games if you want them to last. It's just way too easy to lose your install base if it looks like you're letting the game rot on the vine, and it's drat hard to recover the numbers after. FFXIV and League both benefited enormously from having consistent, predictable drips of content that kept players interested and continued to generate interest in the broader gaming scene.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:55
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doomisland posted:Riots big advantage is Runeterra already existing as a driving creative force in their design. Hopefully they can place a MMO over it but who knows!! I'm sure the same could be said about every other existing IP made into a MMO I'm fully confident they'll be able to deliver on the promise of a well-polished F2P themepark MMO. Their biggest advantage is that League's already got huge penetration in major mobile markets like China, so developing an action MMORPG that can also be played on a phone - something that a lot of past big IP MMOs like SWTOR never had - is guaranteed to be a huge moneymaker.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:11
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Groovelord Neato posted:As much as I enjoyed Warhammer for the brief time I played my biggest takeaway was how was this made by the people that did Dark Age of Camelot. Probably top-down demands to make it "the next WoW" and the thing being a development disaster behind the scenes. IIRC, they had to largely scrap and redo the whole project midway through development, and the open beta test they ran mere months before launch was absurdly glitchy.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:20
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Classic WoW was pretty different from vanilla because people had 15+ years or whatever of knowledge from private servers and theorycrafting so practically nobody engaged with the game the same way they did with Vanilla. You didn't have people running weird frankenstein builds or doing unconventional things, everything was down to a science of what was optimal in a way that was not actually present in any real form during the actual release. The overall level of the average MMO player has also increased in a way that's simply impossible to recreate in the modern era without a brand new naive population. Molten Core was cleared in something like 2 days after launch on Classic because all of its "hard" mechanics were laughably simple for a population of people who'd been handling far more complex gameplay for years by that point.
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Aug 30, 2022 20:00
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I think the general trend has been to move away from Christmas tree questing, yeah. I recall the FFXIV devs saying that people getting to a new town along the MSQ and unlocking a half-dozen quests that pop up on the minimap made them feel obligated to try and clear them all out, which slowed down the pacing and made people feel burnt out after doing a few hubs in a row.
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Aug 31, 2022 18:58
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They're really trying to juggle keeping their core grognard crowd satisfied by contorting Wrath to fit their memories of it instead of the actual as-was experience while simultaneously adding in poo poo like paid boosts and cash shop mounts. Makes me wonder what the hell they're gonna do once they hit Cata, because that's where all the WotLK and below diehards will jump ship, and if they're catering to them that hard, then it begs the question of who's gonna be left to keep the servers at a playably active level.
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Sep 4, 2022 01:48
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:fwiu it's not so much that the ffxiv team doesn't believe it's an MMO as that they want to future-proof as much casual content as possible by making it soloable, so that when the game's finally on maintenance mode in the distant future people can still play through the whole thing as if it were an ordinary numbered final fantasy even if the playerbase is nonexistent I think it looks weird from the outside if you think of FFXIV as being "just" an MMO, but it's easy to forget that it's a mainline numbered Final Fantasy title, and they take the brand's ongoing integrity very seriously at SE. Not being able to play through a numbered FF game even a decade down the line won't fly, so they're doing the work now of ensuring that it'll always be accessible, even if the lights go off at some nebulous point in the future.
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Sep 7, 2022 01:07
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The only reason that gear is boring in MMOs is because the drive for optimization will eventually reduce it to a numbers game. Devs certainly can create hundreds of items with unique effects, but the list of viable options will eventually be pared down to a small handful, with every other choice becoming a trap option for unaware players. The only way to overcome this is with content that has enough per-session variability that calculating optimal values becomes challenging (see: something like League), but that's a tall ask for PVE content. Maybe we'll eventually hit a point with machine learning where dynamic L4D-style content on a grander scale is possible, but it probably won't be for a while.
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Sep 15, 2022 18:59
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gaj70 posted:IMHO at least, it's entirely possible to have many local optimums (vs. just damage-per-second against eHP). It's not even really that damage is the best point to optimize in every circumstance, but rather that the optimization is trivial to figure out. Even if you have encounters that favor different local optimums (e.g. CC duration, debuff strength, etc.), all you end up with after is, effectively, FFXI, where everyone has dozens of different gearsets that are optimal for specific encounters. The reason why I mention L4D and League is that you need combat encounters that aren't trivially solvable to be able to create opportunities for creative expression with gear, since it's harder to mathematically determine whether option X is better than option Y when the variables change enough from session-to-session that having extra movespeed or stronger CC actually is optimal under certain conditions.
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Sep 16, 2022 01:19
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drat Dirty Ape posted:God I remember some pvp map where I would spend the entire time booting people off a bridge into lava over and over and it was kind of great for me but probably sucked a lot for them. The pvp stuff was fun but the leveling quickly became tedious in that game. That was the level range where I quit the game, because I made the foolish decision to play Destruction, and Ironbreaker - which Destruction had no equivalent to on launch - had this incredibly strong knockback (which I think was AoE) that made every single battleground in the magma map completely onesided. Just one of those things that inspired zero confidence in the dev team going forwards, so I ditched while the ditching was good.
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Sep 28, 2022 03:50
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