Goblin Squad Member
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TL;DR version: Skip down to "Now let's compare to PfO" section and then to "Final Word," below:
DISCLAIMER: This thread is not intended for flames, or ranting, or rude/attacking comments of any kind. This thread is only for the open and thoughtful discussion of the reasons WHY making PfO "could be" a poor idea.
Why? By examining the case AGAINST creating this game, the developers and community alike can ensure that a core set of principles are forged. Despite any scope creep or change in operating structure, these basic tenets can always be represented, all for the purpose of ensuring a fun and rewarding,SUSTAINABLE game experience.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have been playing fantasy RP games since I was introduced to the "red box" basic D&D game on my 8th birthday. I started off playing halflings (that repeatedly died) in my uncle's campaign and after some time started DMing my own campaigns. I DMed basic D&D through Immortals set, played AD&D sparingly, played and DMed 2nd edition throughout its natural life, moved to 3rd edition, DMed 3rd edition through all iterations and books, moved to 4th edition, DMed through that for a year and abandoned it, and moved on to Pathfinder.
I am a Pathfinder Society member and GM, own most of the books and campaign sets, and venture to GenCon every other year. I have GMed many other campaigns in other game system such as Star Wars: Saga Edition.
In the computing world, I have been a tester for many MMOs. I was in beta 4 for EQ, played DAoC, beta-tested WoW and LoTRO, played Rift and a handful of other MMOs such as AC, DDO and Eve. I was an early tester for Star Wars the Old Republic (since July 2011), and I am the guildmaster of a powerful Sith guild on an RP server for SWTOR today. All in all, I was there for beta or at launch for nearly all the major MMOs to release since 1999, although I did miss AC2, EQ2, and Eve (which I joined 2 years ago for a while).
THE ANTI-CASE for PfO:
Initially I was excited at the prospect of Pathfinder Online. The concept of a Pathfinder MMO was shocking to me mostly because of an inherent bias I once had. When my players were talking about Pathfinder's origin, I was the only one that was not sold. As I had followed the various paths of Dungeons and Dragons throughout the years, I had firmly established TSR (and later, WoTC) as the holders of all intellectual property for "true" fantasy RP, or at least a game I would want to play. Sure, I had experimented in other systems, all the way back to the original Marvel Superheroes game to White Wolf and other systems, but at its core, I believed, and expected those systems to be derivatives at best and glorified board games at worst.
Thus, when Paizo really started making a hard run at launching its own game with the release of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, I had to examine my own set of ideals regarding fantasy roleplaying. At this critical point in Fantasy RP history, the giant that was D&D was essentially becoming fragmented, and very few could remain in the middle and stay neutral or favorable to both sides.
I knew some of these people involved in the crossfire. I had the honor one time of playing as a player with Ed Greenwood (creator of the Forgotten Realms). I had many discussions with the creative teams of D&D over the years, and Sean Reynolds had become an iconic hero of sorts, to the point I had him autograph splatbooks in which he was the majority author. These guys were on my facebook, and the marriage was coming to an end.
The point of this section is not to pontificate on my own life but to illustrate an example of what some hardcore fans were going through. This wasn't merely a new edition of the game they loved, such as when 3rd edition was released and people had to ask themselves whether they liked the changes or not. In some ways, this was taking a years' long journey through life merely to end at a doorstep: do I choose door 1 or door 2, and will I be able to come back to this point if I choose either?
We are not making this journey alone. We have friends. They have their likes and dislikes and rare is the group that can shift and just start playing other games if certain players do not like it.
I pushed them to 4th edition and we played for a year. I think the last half was merely to humor me. Although I really liked the changes, and some of my players did, the majority of them did not like the power band, the lack of magic item power, and how "easy" the game was compared to what they had played before. Regardless on anyone else's feelings on the matter, that is what THEY felt.
Thus, we moved to Pathfinder, and we were awash in creative juices. These guys know what they are doing. We loved it, and with good reason: many of the creative people we had come to like with D&D were working with Pathfinder now. Obviously there was synergy here.
Fast forward to modern day, and we are still playing Pathfinder, albeit we have run across the same adages that plagued 3.5e after significant gameplay time:
*Published campaigns end at too low level for our taste. Why build *Rules to 20+ and not publish modules to 20+?
*Gameplay at the high end is very slow.
*Even highly experienced players get bogged down in very obtuse rule lookups.
*Certain character become really broken as they increase in level.
*Monsters and NPCs are difficult to run when they have so many obscure abilities and feats from rarely-accessed books.
*Character development/building is an art form that requires a tremendous amount of research to optimize.
Now, let's compare this to what has been discussed for PfO:
*Persistent, sandbox-style gameworld.
*Real-time character progression in the Eve style.
*3 main vectors of gameplay. PVE, PVP, and Resource Management in an ecosystem: https://goblinworks.com/images/SandboxEcosystem.jpg
*PVE
- Wandering monsters: Random spawns with security sectors like Eve Online. The further away from civilization you get, the more dangerous.
- Harvesting hazards: Located around mining nodes. The further away from civilization you get, the more dangerous.
- Ruins, lairs and caverns: These are the classic adventuring experiences, essentially dungeons.
- Encampments: Encampments are spawned groups of enemies, that when left unchecked, can grow to dominate an area. When defeated, they are removed from the game world permanently.
*PVP
- Battlefield content: inhibit growth of competing settlements
- PvE encounters that turn into PvP.
- Assaults to gather construction materials for your allied settlements.
*Resource Management
- Resource node exploration: find valuable resource nodes.
- Resource node exploitation: mine resources while fending off PvE and PvP attacks.
- Resource construction: build hideouts, inns, watchtowers, forts, and eventually, settlements.
- Guild account management: sophisticated controls around accounting, manufacturing goals and assigned tasks, and profit distribution to guild shareholders.
- En masse crafting management: construction materials, cooking materials, enchantment components, magical reagents, metals, cloth & leather.
I may be missing a few here or there, but for now let us establish these facets as 12 operating principles of the game. It can be collapsed even further to say that as envisioned, PfO is a fantasy roleplaying game set in Golarion with all of the wonders of the Eve Online economic engine mapped directly to fantasy RP counterparts.
Further collapsed, the game boils down to PvE, PvP, and mining.
What does Pathfinder, the role-playing game, represent?
In the classic "4x" strategy games, you have the following classic gaming vectors: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.
In Pathfinder, three of these are fairly strongly represented, but each has an asterisk:
*Explore: Pathfinder takes the classic fantasy RP genre and overlays it with a popular Pathfinder Society entity, whose mission is to uncover new secrets and delve into lost knowledge. Many games tie into these themes of exploration for fun and profit.
However, this "x" has an asterisk in that although the game world is presented with maps and culture to provide a layer of verisimilitude, actual games represent only a tiny portion of the game world in a more-or-less railroaded plot style: A happened to B. Visit B to learn about C, and kill or talk to everything in your path. Some of these adventurers are more railroad style, such as the Council of Thieves campaign, and other campaigns are more sandbox-style, such as Kingmaker.
In PfO: This "x" is further expanded to include exploration for resource nodes to manage, a concept foreign to Pathfinder gamers and fantasy RP in general.
*Exterminate: Defeating monsters and humanoid enemies is part-and-parcel to the fundamentals of the game. A significant portion of the game (75%??) revolves around the combat engine and combat experience in general, and role playing opportunities are overlaid to provide a theme and enjoyable background for the experience. Character building and design, "return to the home town" role playing experiences and other minor events round out the game experience.
*Exploit: The only real exploitation that occurs in Pathfinder is the accumulation of wealth and magical resources for distribution in the immediate adventuring group. Recovered items are sold, rewards are given by quest "givers" and money is consumed as a resource to procure more powerful mundane and/or magical items to make the party stronger, such that they may begin the exploration/exterminate event again. Countries, economies, mines, and other resources in the game world are rarely, if ever, tampered with except in rare, usually one-time-only situations.
*Expand: Expansion is not represented in the core Pathfinder game, and only through the use of optional books such as Kingmaker is the concept even touched upon.
SUMMARY:
Of the 12 facets I presented for PfO, only 2 of those facets are presented in the standard Pathfinder roleplaying game. One of those facets, wandering monsters, is nearly absent in many games, almost to the level of becoming an optional rule. Wandering monsters are rarely presented in Pathfinder Society sanctioned play, and I venture that these encounters may only represent 5% of all encounters ever presented to any player worldwide. More or less, wandering monsters is a semi-rare event and not core to the game.
Even with expanded rules in the Kingmaker campaign, the most "audacious" attempt thus far to introduce Kingdom management, only 6 other facets are introduced to the game world, and most of them only in very high-level, barely noticeable level of detail. There are rarely mines or other nodes that, once absorbed into the kingdom, provide a barely noticeable bump in overall resources. Even in Kingmaker, resources are only somewhat "gathered" (more like "conquered") and only barely "managed." The levers or controls offered to the group is essentially through the construction of buildings. It is a spend-points, drop-in-instant-building type of fashion. It is more Warcraft (the very first game) than Age of Empires.
So, even by adding the Kingmaker aspect to Pathfinder, only 6 of the 12 facets are strongly represented in the game:
- Dungeons (standard fare of adventures)
- Encampments ("outside" dungeons that once defeated gives resources or joins your kingdom.
- Battlefield content: war with competing baronies/kingdoms through the campaign in simple army unit system.
- Resource node exploration: in Kingmaker, you do explore hexes, so I can see this one. Although once a hex is explored, it is rarely revisited.
- Resource construction: in this mini-game, you construct buildings to offer additional resources to the overall kingdom at-large.
- Account management: simple controls are offered to the party to show monthly gains in resources that may be spent to construct buildings and/or form standing armies.
Two other facets, wandering monsters and resource node exploitation, are barely noticeable, if at all.
Thus, at its best, it could be said that even emulating the Kingmaker campaign series (a series of 6 adventure modules), Pathfinder Online is decidedly a different game, encompassing not only a significant expansion on what building construction is, but it also escalates the node management from a mini-game to a level equal in significance to PvE content. PvP is almost entirely a new invention on these tenets, and harkens more to other MMOs than has basis in Golarion, or even any Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper game.
FINAL WORD:
In short, the PfO design documents are incredibly ambitious but seem to steer away from the core of what encompasses Pathfinder RPG as a game. Pathfinder RPG is primarily a character-based RPG focusing on small parties of adventurers undertaking very risky missions for profit and/or intrinsic rewards. They are heroes, anti-heroes, or rarely villains, and they build a career on risky ventures as they gain power and magical items.
Only by adding the elements of an optional campaign (Kingmaker) does one even come into the ballpark of what PfO claims: a sandbox-style MMO focused on PvE, resource management, and PvP. The core Pathfinder RPG, at best, only captures one of those elements (PvE), and only via addition of the Kingmaker campaign does it even venture into resource management. PvP is entirely alien to the Pathfinder genre.
Thus, PfO as written becomes an incredibly risky venture. If the focus is placed too highly on resource management, node exploitation, guild/corporation accounting, and PvP, the game that has been released would be fantasy RP Eve Online instead of a Pathfinder MMO. The concepts are neat and refreshing while applied to the Fantasy RP genre, but entirely disassociates and separates itself from what Pathfinder actually represents.
RECOMMENDATION:
Despite all of this, I think that PfO is a terrific idea and should be created. However, instead of focusing so much on delivering the Eve experience to fantasy RP, the focus should instead be on the Pathfinder Society and the exploration/extermination avenue. If PfO had half of the economic engine that Eve had, it would be a terrific game. Pathfinder characters are generally not involved in the fluctuating prices of manufactured suits of chain mail armor, much less the value of trade goods, such that it begs the question of "why?"
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Goblin Squad Member
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(( Okay, so I'm a pedant... ))
As has been discussed from the beginning, the effort involved in having developers create Content of the kind you're advocating ("the exploration/extermination avenue") is prohibitive, and that "Theme Park" style has already been done to death.
It's a pipe dream to think that any computer system today can deliver the kind of experience you're used to getting at the table.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good point Nihimon.
A Pathfinder MMORPG, in essence, should bring a unique brand of gameplay to the MMORPG genre whilst bringing with it as much from the tabletop as required for authenticity and authenticity alone. Eve Online is one of the only surviving and profitable examples of an organic sandbox game; as games copy the WoW formula to guarantee a certain degree of success in capturing MMORPG players, Pathfinder can do not much wrong in bringing much of what Eve has to offer to a fantasy setting. PFO will not be an Eve clone so to speak as it will not be taking core gameplay elements, rather successful economic systems and methods of character progression are areas of Eve which are done extremely well.
What Pathfinder Online should not do is focus on recreating the tabletop experience; the MMORPG should be unique in it's own right as an MMORPG. The idea that Pathfinder Online should seek to recreate the tabletop game online is a little nonsensical as A) It cannot be done and B) Need not be done.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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So many parts of PFO are difficult or impossible to have on the tabletop. There's no way to model an entire economic system without more time and resources than the DM has. PFO doesn't have to model it-it creates an economic system and puts the players in it.
There is very little emergent behavior with a small number of people. Organized play promised to provide emergent behavior, but only small groups ever interacted. Only a MMO currently allows for hundreds of people to freely interact as part of a finite game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good analysis, but your implied assumption seems to be somehow that "PFO should be like playing pathfinder".
What GW are aiming for is not a "pathfinder game" per se, but a (nontraditional) MMO set in the Golarion world, specifically in the same geographic region as the Kingmaker AP (which is the most 'sandboxy' region).
What I'm saying is that if you regard this as a sandbox MMO in a Golarion/River Kingdoms setting, rather than an attempt to remake pathfinder as a MMO, then the anaylsis becomes a bit different and "Fantasy RP Eve Online" does not look so bad.
"Focusing on the exploration/extermination" could to MMO ears sound a lot like grinding. Focusing on interaction, such as making an economy that forces people to trade instead of just selling loot to npcs, sounds like a better bet for a new MMO. After all, the best thing about the pen and paper gaming is the social aspect.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-snip-Thus, at its best, it could be said that even emulating the Kingmaker campaign series (a series of 6 adventure modules), Pathfinder Online is decidedly a different game, encompassing not only a significant expansion on what building construction is, but it also escalates the node management from a mini-game to a level equal in significance to PvE content. PvP is almost entirely a new invention on these tenets, and harkens more to other MMOs than has basis in Golarion, or even any Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper game.
In short, the PfO design documents are incredibly ambitious but seem to steer away from the core of what encompasses Pathfinder RPG as a game. Pathfinder RPG is primarily a character-based RPG focusing on small parties of adventurers undertaking very risky missions for profit and/or intrinsic rewards. They are heroes, anti-heroes, or rarely villains, and they build a career on risky ventures as they gain power and magical items.
Only by adding the elements of an optional campaign (Kingmaker) does one even come into the ballpark of what PfO claims: a sandbox-style MMO focused on PvE, resource management, and PvP. The core Pathfinder RPG, at best, only captures one of those elements (PvE), and only via addition of the Kingmaker campaign does it even venture into resource management. PvP is entirely alien to the Pathfinder genre.
Thus, PfO as written becomes an incredibly risky venture. If the focus is placed too highly on resource management, node exploitation, guild/corporation accounting, and PvP, the game that has been released would be fantasy RP Eve Online instead of a Pathfinder MMO. The concepts are neat and refreshing while applied to the Fantasy RP genre, but entirely disassociates and separates itself from what Pathfinder actually represents.-snip-
Really interesting read, and I learn some interesting things about Pathfinder.
Thing is in the first paragraph, the whole "construction" addition as you note is necessary because players are actively building the world. That can all be done on the side I imagine ;) with the RPG. But for this virtual world it has online in-world assets that the players create or destroy or bicker over.
This leads to, Pathfinder RPG, is party system. I think it's been mentioned the Party is the core grouping intended. So this WILL be present in PfO but the above is providing the context, the ecosystem between settlements and the wilderness - both contribute to adventures directly or indirectly. So online you have to have the whole resource management thing?
As to PvP, again it's necessity that the players are the key content units with which to build the world. Nothing else comes close, so pvp is a necessary part of that interaction and conversion and competition for non-uniform distribution of resources and dungeons etc.
Ideally the whole of the above will act as the backdrop so any one player + friends might find that they can adventure/explore (that missing facet) with the whole kingdoms, wars, resource trading etc as a backdrop to that "heroes" level.
This is all a guess from what's been said in the blogs, not an apologist but the idea of an ecosystem where players can find their natural niche and collectively affect the world and as by-product emergent (organic) stories are created. Something like that.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Arliss- Noted.
Now please comprehend that they aren't trying to replicate the table top experience inside an MMO.
They are trying to create an MMO that is unqiue with Pathfinder flavor. Taking as much from Pathfinder as they can and adding it to their vision of the MMO.
They have already stated that they know some people who love Pathfinder won't love PFO and may not even try it. They are fine with it. So am I.
You made a brilliant arguement... against points that were concede from the very beginning. I too felt as you did once upon a time, I got over it. I hope you do too, because you seem like the type of person that the PFO could benefit from.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Arliss- Noted.
Now please comprehend that they aren't trying to replicate the table top experience inside an MMO.
They are trying to create an MMO that is unqiue with Pathfinder flavor. Taking as much from Pathfinder as they can and adding it to their vision of the MMO.
They have already stated that they know some people who love Pathfinder won't love PFO and may not even try it. They are fine with it. So am I.
You made a brilliant arguement... against points that were concede from the very beginning. I too felt as you did once upon a time, I got over it. I hope you do too, because you seem like the type of person that the PFO could benefit from.
The majority of responses thus far seem to be in the light that I want PFO to be a replacement for the tabletop game. I certainly do not.
However, my concern is that if the game is decidedly too different from the Pathfinder RPG, then it could run into some serious issues, such as:
- It could fail to target the core audience of Pathfinder.
I feel like I would be a member of the core targeted audience for a game such as this. Although I am very excited and supportive of the game, I do have some serious reservations. If I have those reservations, then I have to presume others in the core targeted base would share similar reservations as well. - If the core Pathfinder audience that plays online games would scoff at this game, then it could be very damaging to the games' pre-release reputation. I certainly do not want to see that happen either.
- I would regret people saying "PfO is merely Eve wrapped around fantasy RP." This kind of dismissive talk could do a lot of publicity damage to the title as well.
- When the GW blog started I had 0 reservations at all. However, as post after post started rattling off, I noticed that almost every conversation piece was about construction, node resource management (discovery, exploitation, and defense), all for the purpose of building marketable objects for a player-run economy. If the game truly came down to 50% resource management with 25% PvE to support the resource management and 25% PvP to defend the resource management, would I come to love (and stay to support) a game that wasn't focused on Pathfinder's lore or even adventuring for personal reward?
After watching it from the beginning, I began to wonder how much focus was really being placed on the intellectual property of Golarion/Pathfinder, a world rich in different cultures, characters, abilities, and such. This made be start to suspect that this game was a lot less Pathfinder MMORPG and a lot more Pathfinder MMORTS.
I really support the candor and the brazen creativity that the early development discussions have brought about. I was on vacation and out of town when Kickstarter began...I'm off to lend my support as well!
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Goblin Squad Member
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The majority of responses thus far...
I think most people are responding to what you seemed to be suggesting as a solution. I know I was.
... a lot less Pathfinder MMORPG and a lot more Pathfinder MMORTS.
As someone who's been pining for a lot more RTS in my MMO for years now, that doesn't really bother me.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Forgot to say, Somewhere it was said there's an intention for there to be some stories which will develop entirely depending on the actions of players that "run into these" iirc? This might be of more interest to Pathfinder RPG'ers? And they also mentioned down the list the idea of "modules". These could be very atmospheric but for me the equivalent of the GM in the RPG is the emergent stories from interactions of players in the MMO: This is where I see the creativity in the one and in the other.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon- See, now I have you quoting people ;)
@Arliss- If $50,000 in less than 24 hours doesn't state loudly enough that it has enough support from it's fan base, I don't know what will.
Golarian lore is important, and please note that there is a distinct difference. D&D Lore isn't necessarily Faerunian Lore. They placed us in a area that has not had a lot of impact. It isn't a hallowed battleground, a crowning jewel of a kingdom, or any other place of massive significance within Golarian. We will write the lore of this place... through our actions.
We all have reservations. As far as "dismissive talk" doing publicity damage. There was just as much, if not MORE dismissive talk about Pathfinder itself when it first emurged. Proof is in the pudding, nay sayers be damned.
If this game fails, it doesn't mean that Pathfinder RPG is doomed. Pathfinder will still be around.
If the game succeeds, there will be those who like it and those who don't. Personally, I hope it is nothing like Pathfinder MMORPG. I'm tired of "MMORPGs". I hope this game is like Pathfinder Online. Something that is a little bit outside the box in the spirit that going outside the box can be a sometimes be way better than being in the box.
Goblinworks Founder
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I won't repeat what others have already said but I do want to point out one thing that stood out for me. That PfO might not get enough following from the Pathfinder fanbase. I believe it has already grabbed the attention of enough of us to have the foundation set. Getting support and catching the attention of new blood however might improve both pathfinder RPGs and pathfinder online sales by expanding the exposure of the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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- It could fail to target the core audience of Pathfinder.
I feel like I would be a member of the core targeted audience for a game such as this. Although I am very excited and supportive of the game, I do have some serious reservations. If I have those reservations, then I have to presume others in the core targeted base would share similar reservations as well.
In a way it can only target the audience of pathfinder so much. The main draws of the pathfinder tabletop game are pretty much imposible for an MMO, IMO the only thing that is remotely transitional, is the world, which they seem to be focused on bringing in.
If the core Pathfinder audience that plays online games would scoff at this game, then it could be very damaging to the games' pre-release reputation. I certainly do not want to see that happen either.
Any topic will be scoffed at pre-release, whether it is good or not. I recall many fans of the old warcraft games scoffing at the concept of WoW, but that didn't hurt the sales significantly
I would regret people saying "PfO is merely Eve wrapped around fantasy RP." This kind of dismissive talk could do a lot of publicity damage to the title as well.
Again every MMO has had that issue. WoW is just EQ in new wrapping, The star wars MMO is just WoW in a star wars setting etc...
The fact is there is no shortage of people who actually very much want eve in a fantasy setting who aren't even familiar with the idea of tabletop gaming. The sci fi world just dosn't entertain some people, but many like the idea of fantasy. The pathfinder franchise will draw the game a bit more attention, but the important thing is, if it can stand on its own merits. Essentially GW working with Paizo, gives both companies a bit of free advertising to people who haven't really tried the other style of game. There's no shortage of MMO players who will try out the new MMO and have litterally never heard of tabletop gaming, and numerous tabletop players who have never really tried MMOs. The partnership will encorage many people to try the type they haven't played before, whether they are similar or not, which in a way is very win win.
When the GW blog started I had 0 reservations at all. However, as post after post started rattling off, I noticed that almost every conversation piece was about construction, node resource management (discovery, exploitation, and defense), all for the purpose of building marketable objects for a player-run economy. If the game truly came down to 50% resource management with 25% PvE to support the resource management and 25% PvP to defend the resource management, would I come to love (and stay to support) a game that wasn't focused on Pathfinder's lore or even adventuring for personal reward? ...
Possibly, I think that is the idea behind the partnership, it will get people to try out things a bit outside of their comfort zone and make a game that's concept has barely been done. If you do want to try a game that is purely about dungeon crawling, set instances etc... give Dungeons and dragons online a shot, it's rules and mechanics also are very familiar if you want an MMO that strongly mimics D20 rules. Or one of the many other MMO's out there with a PVE focus. What goblinworks does not want to do, is put yet another MMO with the same style of gameplay as the 10,000 other MMOs currently on the market and hope the pathfinder brand name will be what keeps it alive.
I suppose one other good analogy, The tie in between the book and movie Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, and the actual candy products. Obviously 2 completely different genres, and there are no shortage of fans of one that will never like the other, but the name recognition helped both products reach audiences that would not have tried them otherwise.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While the OP's concerns are interesting, I think we should be more worried at the present state of investment in the MMO industry in general. First SWTOR laying off massive amounts of staff and now Studio 38 folding ingloriously in what can only be described as a total cluster. Check out Broken Toys for a good analysis of the situation:
http://www.brokentoys.org/2012/05/25/the-week-the-music-died/
All this makes Goblinworks task of getting investment that much harder. Though on the plus side I suppose there are a lot of game designers on the market at present.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While the OP's concerns are interesting, I think we should be more worried at the present state of investment in the MMO industry in general. First SWTOR laying off massive amounts of staff and now Studio 38 folding ingloriously in what can only be described as a total cluster. Check out Broken Toys for a good analysis of the situation:
http://www.brokentoys.org/2012/05/25/the-week-the-music-died/
All this makes Goblinworks task of getting investment that much harder. Though on the plus side I suppose there are a lot of game designers on the market at present.
I agree with your concerns about the MMO industry in general. I believe that new "niche" products may have a significant opportunity with free to play with monetized in-game incentives if handled correctly. I believe about every F2P product I have actually played I ended up spending approximately $20-$25 in. For certain offerings, this kind of cash inflow may be more substantial than a traditional monthly fee offering.
I remember when DDO went F2P, they stated that their actual profits tripled. It seems to have worked out for them, and their cards are still for sale in Wal-mart and Best Buy.
That being said, SWTOR was originally only expected to have in the realm of 600-700K sustained subscribers, so they did quite well. Most estimates have their numbers still just over 1 million subscribers, but I imagine that this number will slowly dwindle to a "stable" population more in the 750K range, which will place their monthly revenues at around $10M, give or take.
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Goblinworks Founder
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The layoffs at Bioware probably aren't anything out of the ordinary. They would have been all hands on deck with developers, artists, public relations and marketing, Quality Assurance prior to launch and after launch they would not have needed all of them so they basically cut the excess fat and keep the good meat. Studio38 folding is surprise news to me though, they were doing the MMO for Kingdoms of Amalur? Do you think it's a coincidence that both of these companies sold their soul to EA? Mythic, Bioware and 38 Studios all in EA's back pocket. EA is like a sphere of annihilation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the straight up facts are that people aren't going to be interested in playing a game that is simply the best replication of a Pathfinder table-top session an MMO can pull off. By the time you put in all the limitations forced upon you by the fact its run by a computer and not a Dungeon Master, you are going to find you prettymuch have another cut and dry theme-park game. In-fact its probably going to work almost exactly like DDO.
What we are instead being given is a new and innovative MMO offering us complete freedom and the ability to create our own story within the Pathfinder universe.
That's far more interesting to me. I'll admit I've actually never played PF, just standard 3.5. But that in my opinion is a case for the good PFO does. Because of this game I'm now interested and engaged in the Pathfinder universe. I've been reading about it online and even considering buying the player's manual and looking into whether there are any campaigns in the Anchorage area.
That kind of cross-advertisement will make PFO and regular Pathfinder really benefit a lot from eachother's existence.
If you simply made PFO, the themepark, I wouldn't have any interest in this game whatsoever.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As soon as the pvp blog was posted all my hopes and dreams od this game recreating a table top experience were dashed. But I realized i had unrealistic expectations of what an mmo could accomplish and I've embraced the direction this game is headed.
At the very least, it should be better than DDO ever was.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I've been playing WoW on a RP server (EU-Argent Dawn) for over 7 years now (and have been playing, and am still playing, various "traditional" roleplaying games -- everything from Basic D&D / AD&D to Pathfinder and indie RPG's -- for about 30 years and counting).
The biggest issue a themepark MMO like WoW (and I've played many on the side during those years) has, is the static nature of the world. Even EVE Online has that somewhat, if you're not in 0.0 the world is still pretty static.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from my fellow online roleplayers is that whatever you do, the world is either unchanged, or resets once you move out. You cannot drive the Horde from Ashenvale as a Night Elf, you can just play through a set of scripted events (quests) to enjoy the story playing out.
Other zones make heavy use of "phasing", which means separating people on different stages of the in-game story, and still having no organic way to influence it.
Even a more PvP oriented game like Warhammer Online doesn't change this, there are large swathes of unchanging PvE content (all themed for WAR), with some smaller areas of PvP you can win over ... until one side sort-of wins, the timer ticks and it all resets so you can start again.
It is my hope PFO offers some interesting gameplay that is lacking in the above. EVE has some of it, but it's an older game, and ... to be honest, I loved Wing Commander when I was younger. Space fights in EVE don't have that satisfying feeling to it. And I like interacting with other players as humanoid avatars.
Which is why I hope PFO will work out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Arliss Drakken - here's how I'd suggest you think about Pathfinder Online:
[FURY]You're taking your first steps into a larger world.[/FURY]
Instead of a game that JUST has adventurers, this game is bigger. Much bigger. It has all sorts of people in it who would, in a traditional tabletop RPG, be NPCs. But in Pathfinder Online, those characters are real people.
And what's better, those real people want to make content for you to consume. Helping them achieve their goals opens doorways for you to achieve yours.
The defining features of Pathinder Online are:
* Exploration
* Adventure
* Development
* Domination
Of those 4, the only thing you get in a traditional tabletop RPG is Adventure. (You might think there's exploration, but it's an illusion. The physical space you "explore" is effectively Adventure content except in very rare cases like Kingmaker, and even then your exploration is mostly just revealing Adventure content.
In the MMO, you get access to all 4 features. Which doesn't diminish in any way the amount of Adventure content you get. The other three aspects of the game enhance that Adventure content.
They make it meaningfull. Other real people will be affected by what happens when you adventure. Stir up an Orc horde and real people will be hurt - unless you can smash it. Unchain a demon and souls will be corrupted - unless you figure out how to destroy it. Wake a dragon, and the hillsides burn - unless you are capable of becoming a Dragonslayer.
They make it persistent. Others will find the husks of the orc village - or the smoking ruins of the nearby Settlement. Even after a demon is destroyed, the taint of its evil may linger. And who knows what powerful - and dangerous - treasure you could recover from a dragon's horde, and what further adventures might spawn from that discovery?
They make it fulfilling. Other real people will hate you for your failings, or love you for your successes. Like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, your actions will resonate, reverberate, and echo across the land. Who knows how many lives you'll touch? Far more than a traditional small group of friends you might throw dice with, to be certain. The sense of accomplishment, magnified by the response of the community, is awesomely rewarding. It's a rush like no other.
We're on the cusp of a new kind of human experience. For some people, many more than you might expect, the lives of their characters will be more meaningful than their real lives. They may work at a boring service job, but when they log in, they are transformed into epic heroes of legend. The friendships they make in the game world are just as strong, just as real as any other. People will learn skills that become a part of them; leadership, communication, discipline, analysis, and many others that will aid them in the voyage through their real lives.
A hundred years from now, people will think of this time the way we think of the birth of movies. Even from this distance we can see the power in a silent black & white film and understand what a transformative effect it had on society.
Tabletop RPGs were the first step on this path. They laid the foundation that MMOs need to build on. So there's little risk that any successful MMO will ever fail to deliver a great roleplaying experience. The only real question is how much further can the envelope be pushed.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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For the record, Alaumar wasn't an MMO. It was originally intended to be, but turned into an closed RPG at the end.The studio was developing an mmo based off the single player game
No KoA was originally intended to be an MMO. The original concept was MMO. It turned into a single player. They may have intended to pick up on the orginal game plan, but it's really immaterial now. They weren't going to develop an MMO based on a single player game that was originally suppose to be an MMO... that makes no sense.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Obakararuir - I have some inside knowledge so I can tell you exactly what the plan was.
38 Studios was created to make an MMO. The code name of that MMO was Project Copernicus. The design for the backstory, the look, and the proper nouns were all created at 38 Studio.
38 Studio got the opportunity to buy Big Huge Games when THQ decided to close it. BHG had a single-player RPG in development already, and the people working on it were some of the original folks who worked on the Elder Scrolls games, so that RPG had a lot of momentum.
After acquiring BHG, that RPG was redesigned to be set in the same world as Project Copernicus. It's production timeline was ahead of the MMO, so it became the first released content for that world. Meanwhile, 38 Studio continued to work on the MMO.
BHG's RPG was published by EA. In a traditional developer/publisher deal, the developer usually doesn't share in the upside of a title unless it spectacularly outperforms expectations, which BHG's RPG did not. So that game didn't ultimately have the ability to provide capital to 38 Studio; but on the other hand, it probably didn't cost 38 Studio a lot of capital either (due to EA's contributions as publisher).
38 Studio just ran out of money before they were ready to ship their MMO. Classic curse of the Theme Park - it took too long, and cost too much, and the company simply couldn't finish it.
All water under the bridge, of course, but I wanted to set the record straight.
Ryan,
The biggest thing I can think of would be for the big cities to keep records that reflect what you indicated two posts above that can be researched through in-game. Who was the first to carve out a barony in (hex 325)? What is the history of that settlement since (expansion 1: The Settling)? These are the kinds of records that should and would be kept.
Five or ten years from now when (settlment 325) has changed hands 357 times, it would be nice to dig around in the Halls of Records and find those persons' names - maybe we'll see them on the streets or in the deep wilderness carving out another settlement in (hex 767).
This should expand to cover the other elements mentioned as well. A shared experience game is all fine and dandy until you realize that there is no way for newer players to get ahold of that information. This would be a real shame.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I also reject this 'play like a tabletop' mentality; WHICH tabletop? I have played at a lot of different tables over the years, and the variances were gigantic. So 'playing like a tabletop' is a pretty unreliable measure.
Even within our group, the two GM's have a markedly different style.
It needs to play like a game in its own right.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Of those 4, the only thing you get in a traditional tabletop RPG is Adventure. (You might think there's exploration, but it's an illusion. The physical space you "explore" is effectively Adventure content except in very rare cases like Kingmaker, and even then your exploration is mostly just revealing Adventure content.
Correct (mostly) for D&D, Pathfinder, and other "classic" or "mainstream" RPG's. Development got touched upon in the Birthright D&D spinoff, and all of these features get ... um ... featured in indie RPG's, some of which might hardly be recognisable as an RPG to players of the mainstream games.
Which doesn't mean those features (as presented in those indie RPG's, however well they work in the contexts of those games, or however fun they are) can be copied over as-is to a computer-driven shared world, and still be expected to work. Just as the pen-and-paper "tabletop" Pathfinder rules need some translation to be fun and engaging for use in an MMO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So what does this mean for the KoA game itself?
The MMO. Not gonna happen. The RPG, don't expect a whole lot of support. At least that's my take.
@RyanD- Thanks for the update. I knew bits and pieces since I follow Salvatore almost regularly. I didn't know that the RPG was someone elses work reskinned. Sucks for 38 though.
Furdinand: because the game's legacy should persist past the players that inevitably move on to the Next Big Shiny.
This would also provide the developers control over the feel/look/wording/style of these archives.
Having said that, I love the idea of Pathfinder Chroniclers being in-game! Even if it only starts with the relevant Craft and Profession skills. :)
Hrmmm .. maybe. "Chronicler" analagous to the intrepid reporters of galactic affairs in EVE, ones that turn in their reports to one, two or all three of the NPC cities.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think that 'theme park' MMOs are now dead in the water. I truly cannot see a future where there isn't a Blizzard theme park MMO kicking around and as long as that happens, they will ALWAYS have the lion's share.
This means that other MMOs must find their niche markets, and I'm glad that is what Goblinworks are setting out to do from the start. No one can really stand up to the marketing behemoth that is Acti-Blizzard. Blizzard will continue to make mass-market, casual MMOs that will make tons of money.
We need to support Pathfinder Online so that we can play the kind of MMO that we want to play, and show the investors that this is a worthwhile risk. We might manage to bring along some of the casual market in the future following release but I don't think PFO will ever truly see beyond a million subscribers and I'm fine with that!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think that 'theme park' MMOs are now dead in the water. I truly cannot see a future where there isn't a Blizzard theme park MMO kicking around and as long as that happens, they will ALWAYS have the lion's share.
This means that other MMOs must find their niche markets, and I'm glad that is what Goblinworks are setting out to do from the start. No one can really stand up to the marketing behemoth that is Acti-Blizzard. Blizzard will continue to make mass-market, casual MMOs that will make tons of money.
We need to support Pathfinder Online so that we can play the kind of MMO that we want to play, and show the investors that this is a worthwhile risk. We might manage to bring along some of the casual market in the future following release but I don't think PFO will ever truly see beyond a million subscribers and I'm fine with that!
I'd go further than this and say a selective assortment of players (that manages to grow over the minimum viable population for an mmorpg to be sustainable) is a better potential for the game than soaring high numbers or randomly assorted players (mainstream) - the rules of interaction between players can only prompt so much. These types of community interactions additional to the group organizations possible and structuring of such, are not necessarily reflected in such positive figures as "total subs", "revenue rates" etc. If players can find a unique experience in an mmo it will be because the mmo 1) allows these interactions to flourish through the rules as much as 2) the actual players being conducive mediums to this positive experiences potentially arising.
It's no surprise that a few other mmorpgs have tried (imo still very slack) ways of angling this; although more as marketing trickery than actual selective sampling for a best fit player base. I'd suggest PfO's slow allowance of players is conducive starting point but that selective sampling of players should not be underestimated. Maybe that's creating a tightrope to get those profits purring, but if this sandbox allows players great flexibility to interact (limiting the curse of ganking/social parasite load) it might be pivotal to the experience for any one player and that is something no amount of metrics will inform why a player leaves a game even if metrics help predict when they leave.