Goblin Squad Member
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Nice, it'll be good to have him back in the fantasy realm. I alpha-betad TR, and while it didn't connect with the gaming public, it had some innovative aspects to it. The AI was very well done.
I agree, I also thought the combat system was pretty neat, in terms of implimenting pseudo-shooterish aspects into an MMO...pretty on target considering the specific subject matter...and the AI and the little mini-events were cool as well as giving a sense of cooperative play.
My main problem with it, is that there really didn't seem to be much more then that to tie the characters to the game world and more importantly each other....but quite frankly I thought it did some pretty cool stuff and got more of a raw deal then it deserved. YMMV.
Edit: If there is someone (other then GW) that I'd love to see jump into the MMO World, it'd be the guys over at Tale-Worlds though. Mount & Blade is just a masterfull single player game...just started playing it again over the weekend...and I hear their Napoleonic multi-player combat add on is pretty cool. They go more for the historical then the fanciful side...and thier games do tend to be a bit buggy...but in terms of single-player games just hella-fun for me. YMMV.
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Goblin Squad Member
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D&D, and by extension Pathfinder PnP, has always been about the 'small adventuring group' so its only natural to expect a certain amount of that in the game...
Yes and no.
Yes, small group is D&D/PF... BUT in a living organic world that no small group RPG has managed to capture so far, let alone an MMO which about as far from the P&P tabletop experience as possible.
Skyrim came closer but at the cost of being single player.
So unless the players create the content you will never have the organic non-scripted feel of the original. I gladly trade in the "the world revolves around me and only me" aspect for this, but it surely is not for everyone.
So if Mr Garriott succeeds, fine, more power to him, but his game doesn't sound as a competitor to PFO at all.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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The AAA Themepark MMO business model doesn't work.
It costs $100 million (and more - Star Wars cost $350 million) to make one.
It takes 5-7 years to make one.
After you make one, you have to staff up customer support and operations teams to run all the servers that they require, and you have to buy those servers (or lease them, or whatever - theres a substantial operating cost no matter how you cook the lobster).
You need to generate a lot of players to start recouping that $100 million investment + ongoing operations costs. Therefore you need to spend A LOT of money on marketing - you have to do mass marketing because niche marketing won't get you enough players fast enough, and mass marketing is the most expensive, least efficient kind of marketing there is.
Then, all our experience over the past 8 years since the release of World of Warcraft is that you will see a fast spike in players, a short window of success, followed by a dramatic collapse in player population, followed by a consolidation phase where you retain some percentage of that peak but have to fire a lot of operating staff to accomodate your smaller size, with a loss of momentum, and you never regain any growth momentum.
You won't recoup the $100 million or the money you spent on marketing or buying servers, but you will probably be operating on a positive cashflow basis once you gut your staff, since most AAA MMOs seem to be able to hold 100,000 players or so over a long period of time and that's enough revenue to pay for a small staff of developers plus a small staff of customer service and operations staff. It isn't enough cash to pay for the kind of massive content expansions required to re-ignite your player population growth but it is enough to keep a small population of hard-core fanatics engaged over several years of time.
Don't believe me? Ask the people who funded Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, RIFT, Tera, Star Wars Old Republic, EverQuest II, Aion, The Secret World, etc. etc. etc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Mbando put up a link for MMO Charts and it showed almost every one crashing big time after the first 3-6 months. UO held on for a couple of years...a few others. But yes, they crash. Warhammer Online crashed hard after less than a year. SWTOR did too....I was one of those leaving. They engine didn't work for me in and multiplayer setting. And there was only one leveling path.
Same for Conan. LotRO was really fun, but they kept jinking with the Warden Class (my favorite). At least they did have some innovative stuff, like the battle shouts (well used now) and many quests that were pretty original, like the Hobbit quest line that turned you into a chicken.
Still, they all fade pretty quickly.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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Skyrim is a great example of the AAA theme park problem.
Skyrim, as a single player game, is awesome. The world is big enough for you to feel a sense of exploration and accomplishment as you venture forth, and there is enough content to keep you busy for 100 hours of playtime as you work through the main quest.
World of Warcraft, and most of the AAA Theme Park games have a total server capacity of about 3,500 concurrent players (note that's server capacity, not zone capacity, as in at max load, there are 3,500 players logged in to the whole server).
Can you imagine what Skyrim would feel like if there were 3,500 other players in the game world? Even assuming a fair number down a hole in an instanced dungeon?
That's the problem. You can make Skyrim, a great single player game, for between $35 and $50 million. It made something like $650 million in revenue.
It's just a much better risk / reward calculation than an MMO. Plus there's virtually no operating costs (you're not running the servers, you don't have customer service or GMs on staff, etc.)
If Zenimax puts the whole Skyrim province into Elder Scrolls Online, it will have to be about a 10th of the total game area to dilute the population down to something that won't feel ridiculous. It's a virtual certainty that Elder Scrolls Online is going to have a budget closer to Star Wars Old Republic ($350 million) than 38 Studios' Project Copernicus ($100 million).
Skyrim sold 6-8 million units. Elder Scrolls Online, if it is the biggest hit in a 5 years, will sell half that. If it's an average hit it will sell, over 3 years, about 2 million units. It's a very, very hard path to realizing the kind of profit with Elder Scrolls Online that they already achieved with Skyrim the single-player game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Ryan,
What you said about the current AAA Themepark model makes alot of sense to me. I do wonder about a couple things though...
- I'd have to think that by now there would have been developed some rather sophisticated technologies to proceduraly build terrain and maps and possibly even populate them with mobs? That's an assumption on my part, as I know knothing about the MMO world but I know alot of those sort of technologies do exist for GIS and scientific modeling and I can't imagine there wouldn't have been a demand to apply them toward gaming?
- I also know that with the advent of the cloud services model you can get CPU cycles, RAM and Storage very inexpensively, more importantly it works great for the sort of spike traffic that I imagine would be typical of MMO's, as you only pay for what you actualy use...not unused capacity. There's a performance hit there due to the layers of abstraction...not sure if that would be a killer for an MMO. We're business services here, so a bit of a delay in response is not a big deal for us.
Anyways, that doesn't address the kind of super-polished, voice acted, quest/story based content that traditional AAA Themeparks go for. However, the above combined, I would think would allow for pretty huge maps that could help address the crowding issue. I probably sound like the village idiot here to someone actualy on the inside of the MMO world... but I run Network Ops for my company (which is business services...so entirely different vertical and therefor ballgame, I know)...and I've often wondered about why MMO's seem not to be able to run larger maps.
P.S. I know WWII Online, which I believe is 10 year old technology at this point, has a map that includes all of Belgium, most of Holland and parts of Germany, France and Britain at 1/2 scale. Supposedly it's something like 350,000 square km. So I would think it's at least theoreticaly possible for other MMO's to support that?
Edit: If there is someone (other then GW) that I'd love to see jump into the MMO World, it'd be the guys over at Tale-Worlds though. Mount & Blade is just a masterfull single player game...just started playing it again over the weekend...and I hear their Napoleonic multi-player combat add on is pretty cool. They go more for the historical then the fanciful side...and thier games do tend to be a bit buggy...but in terms of single-player games just hella-fun for me. YMMV.
I agree. I've no clue how their engine would make the transition to MMO, but if just for the mounted combat, I would love to see them try . I think some wicked large scale battles could take place there.
@Ryan,
What you said about the current AAA Themepark model makes alot of sense to me. I do wonder about a couple things though...
- I'd have to think that by now there would have been developed some rather sophisticated technologies to proceduraly build terrain and maps and possibly even populate them with mobs? That's an assumption on my part, as I know knothing about the MMO world but I know alot of those sort of technologies do exist for GIS and scientific modeling and I can't imagine there wouldn't have been a demand to apply them toward gaming?
P.S. I know WWII Online, which I believe is 10 year old technology at this point, has a map that includes all of Belgium, most of Holland and parts of Germany, France and Britain at 1/2 scale. Supposedly it's something like 350,000 square km. So I would think it's at least theoreticaly possible for other MMO's to support that?
I don't know if this is a homebrew program or if its a package they bought, but if you look at the KS video seen Here , it shows them working with the terrain, adding features and such. It looks pretty easy to work with, past the learning curve I'm sure. Love their physics!
I beta'd WWII online way back in 2001. Was actually flying a Spitfire over France on 911 when all that evil happened. The world is really massive, I've wondered why other games never used similarly sized maps. I don't get how Corned Rat could get away with it when other companies never seemed to be able to?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Ryan,
What you said about the current AAA Themepark model makes alot of sense to me. I do wonder about a couple things though...
- I'd have to think that by now there would have been developed some rather sophisticated technologies to proceduraly build terrain and maps and possibly even populate them with mobs? That's an assumption on my part, as I know knothing about the MMO world but I know alot of those sort of technologies do exist for GIS and scientific modeling and I can't imagine there wouldn't have been a demand to apply them toward gaming?
P.S. I know WWII Online, which I believe is 10 year old technology at this point, has a map that includes all of Belgium, most of Holland and parts of Germany, France and Britain at 1/2 scale. Supposedly it's something like 350,000 square km. So I would think it's at least theoreticaly possible for other MMO's to support that?
I don't know if this is a homebrew program or if its a package they bought, but if you look at the KS video seen Here , it shows them working with the terrain, adding features and such. It looks pretty easy to work with, past the learning curve I'm sure. Love their physics!
I beta'd WWII online way back in 2001. Was actually flying a Spitfire over France on 911 when all that evil happened. The world is really massive, I've wondered why other games never used similarly sized maps. I don't get how Corned Rat could get away with it when other companies never seemed to be able to?
Yeah....I've played Infantry over there for maybe a total of 12 months over the years (long breaks with spurts of playing)....and it always amazed me how much detail and variety they were able to work into the terrain for technology that old.
P.S. I universaly suck at flying, so never tried that in WWII Online...but we were always gratefull to see you flyboys around when enemy Stuka's were making our life miserable...or when faced with an advancing panzer column and all we had was a couple of 2-pounder noise-makers.
So if Mr Garriott succeeds, fine, more power to him, but his game doesn't sound as a competitor to PFO at all.
I watched a video interview with LB where he explained SOTA in more detail. It's not a MMO, as they said, actually it's a single player RPG. But you can connect to a online server and play with preassigned friends in an online version of the game. The characters don't transfer between the single and multi player versions. The game will be story driven like the other single player Ultimas were, but Ultima is owned by EA? So they can't use any of the lore from the series.
It looks to be a fun single player game though. LB is a legend, it'll be cool to see what he creates.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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- I'd have to think that by now there would have been developed some rather sophisticated technologies to proceduraly build terrain and maps and possibly even populate them with mobs?
Sure. Look at something like Dwarf Fortress, which is completely procedurally generated. The technology is available.
The problem isn't making a lot of space populated with procedural content. The problem is that the very definition of Theme Park implies a hand-crafted experience. There's a lot more art than science in making a great zone for an MMO. It's hard enough to do for a single-player game, but MMOs multiply the problems.
Just a sample:
You cannot have a place a character can get to but can't get out of. It's ridiculously easy to do this if you have Z axis terrain; you fall off a ledge to a place you can't climb up from.
You cannot have a place where a character can stand and kill enemies without threat. Also incredibly easy to do on accident.
You need to think about the threat radius for mobs. Have it too small or too big and you constantly have problems with individuals creating huge trains of mobs that TPK everyone in the zone, or you let characters get way too close to a mob before there's any reaction allowing them to have nearly perfect alpha-strike tactics.
You want to craft the zone so that at every point the players have a sense of where they're supposed to go and what they're supposed to be doing. This is usually accomplished by the geometry of the space and visual clues - two things that need human intervention to make work correctly.
But the hard costs for Theme Park content is art. Theme Parks almost always create new art assets for most of what you see in a zone. They do this because recycling art in a Theme Park is a prescription for being horribly denigrated by reviewers and by players. "Art" in an MMO is a big term. It has a whole series of steps, each requiring specialists: Concept, modeling, animation, shaders, and whatever programming is needed to make special effects, visual effects, and AI work correctly.
Skyrim, for example, has a small number of hand-crafted "dungeons" and a procedural-generation system that creates all the other "encounters" you can locate and explore. They recycle art for all the procedural stuff, which cut the art budget down considerably. There's enough hand-crafted content to make the world seem varied and interesting, but you only play it for a max of 100 hours.
Most MMO players would quit the game at the point where they got bored and find a new game to play, where they're getting "new" content more frequently (until they exhaust that game too). An average MMO player in a new game probably puts in 100 hours in less than a month, which is why you see the sharp 3-6 month spikes in player graphs for AAA theme park MMOs. The churn is ferocious.
Until someone figures out how to procedurally generate a tremendous amount of cool art assets, this problem will likely limit the future fundability of AAA Theme Park MMOs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I watched a video interview with LB where he explained SOTA in more detail. It's not a MMO, as they said, actually it's a single player RPG. But you can connect to a online server and play with preassigned friends in an online version of the game. The characters don't transfer between the single and multi player versions. The game will be story driven like the other single player Ultimas were, but Ultima is owned by EA? So they can't use any of the lore from the series.
It looks to be a fun single player game though. LB is a legend, it'll be cool to see what he creates.
That sounds a lot like the original Neverwinter Nights. I never played much of the single player campaign, but I really enjoyed some of the persistent servers that people set up. I guess they were closer to MORPGs than MMORPGs, because they couldn't handle many people at a time.
You need to think about the threat radius for mobs. Have it too small or too big and you constantly have problems with individuals creating huge trains of mobs that TPK everyone in the zone,
...
Perfect example, Castle Mistmoor in EQ (I believe that was its name), the entire entrance from the drawbridge to the zone line, people exiting the dungeon would charge out screaming "TRAIN TO ZONE!" And drag a huge mob of really mean high level Vampires and assorted other undead who, once the people fleeing would leave the zone, would set about slaughtering everything in sight as they made their way back to their spawn points. Man it was rough.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You need to think about the threat radius for mobs. Have it too small or too big and you constantly have problems with individuals creating huge trains of mobs that TPK everyone in the zone,
...Perfect example, Castle Mistmoor in EQ (I believe that was its name), the entire entrance from the drawbridge to the zone line, people exiting the dungeon would charge out screaming "TRAIN TO ZONE!" And drag a huge mob of really mean high level Vampires and assorted other undead who, once the people fleeing would leave the zone, would set about slaughtering everything in sight as they made their way back to their spawn points. Man it was rough.
Haha. Now if PFO could implement something along the lines of nudging the Escalation cycle towards a desired "train crash" then we're talking.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The failure of the 'train to zone' emergent behavior was that crossing the zone line was an effective way to disengage.
More specifically, it was the only way for many players to disengage. The monsters had no "escape radius," beyond which they would give up the chase and go back to their starting point (or maybe they did, but the players were too slow to get out of the radius). They only stopped chasing when the player disappeared across the zone line, and then their hostility to other players was in full force while they made their way home.
I was a train wreck victim many times over in the Estate of Unrest. It became second nature to sprint for the zone line when I saw anyone running suspiciously toward it. Frustrating, but hilarious.
P.S. I universaly suck at flying, so never tried that in WWII Online...but we were always gratefull to see you flyboys around when enemy Stuka's were making our life miserable...or when faced with an advancing panzer column and all we had was a couple of 2-pounder noise-makers.
I kept sucking while trying to fly again and again. Finally I broke down and bought a Thrustmaster Combat Joystick, and a set of Thrustmaster rudder pedals and I can't tell you what a difference it made to my gameplay in the air. It was like night and day, really. But at the time the connections used were like 16 pin game port connectors that hooked to a game card. That was right before everyone made the transition to USB. thrust master made the switch and decided that anyone who had game port connectors was just SOL. They wouldn't do a thing for us poor saps. $300 down the drain. Needless to say I don't buy TM products anymore! But really, if you've an interest in flight, give a joystick and pedals a shot, they make a world of difference.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Then, all our experience over the past 8 years since the release of World of Warcraft is that you will see a fast spike in players, a short window of success, followed by a dramatic collapse in player population, followed by a consolidation phase where you retain some percentage of that peak but have to fire a lot of operating staff to accomodate your smaller size, with a loss of momentum, and you never regain any growth momentum.
I think World of Warcraft has done a lot of damage to the MMO genre, actually. Before WoW's release, a large, successful MMO had a couple hundred thousand players. That's actually also true after WoW, but what changed was the perception of "success." Now, a game is seen as an utter failure if it doesn't break a million active players. And nobody wants to invest their time and effort into a "failing" game, so players jump ship in droves, making the problem worse.
It doesn't help when investors also think that all MMOs are WoW, and base their budgetary plans on WoW-like subscription numbers. The Secret World is, imho, a fantastic game. It's a very niche game though, so it's unlikely to attract huge crowds. Imagine my surprise that it was revealed that Funcom had expected 1.5 million subscribers. That's ridiculously unrealistic.
The simple fact of the matter is, that the potential playerbase for the MMO genre just isn't very big. There are never going to be several successful multi-million-subscriber games existing side by side. And, in fact, I'd venture that many of WoW's players aren't actually MMO players. Once they grow tired of WoW, 15+ million players aren't going to migrate to the Next Big Thing. A large percentage of them are going to stop playing MMOs altogether.
Sandbox model aside, the thing that makes me the most hopeful for PFO, and that suggest that GW 'gets it', is that they aren't designing a game around having millions of players around. That's fantastic and, from what I can tell, near-unique in the current market.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...That's actually also true after WoW, but what changed was the perception of "success."...
I'd say that is a bit too easy. The MMO crowd has become much bigger than it was back then and much much more experienced.
When back then everything was new and had to be tested by the players, nowadays most MMOs are same old same old and players RACE through the content meaning new themepark MMOs need to be released with a lot of content up front driving up the costs exponentially.
Take DAoC for instance. It was easier to level than EQ but still the first people did not reach the highest levels until after almost a year when today the crowd would blast through exactly the same content in weeks.
When DAoC was realeased the higher level dungeons were not even itemized, most classes had no working high level skills, there were no high level items. This was all introduced after the game launched. Impossible today!
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Goblin Squad Member
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One of the factors that I think many people never take into account when comparing WoW and many of the games that preceded it is the difference in POTENTIAL market size.
Specificaly think about the number of households with access to a computer and the number of households with access to reliable internet, both here in the US and abroad.
Taking nothing away from WoW itself, it does a good job at what it aims to be...and I certainly had fun for the year and a half or so I played it, BUT it did come along at EXACTLY the right time to be successfull. It was one of the few offerings of it's type just when computer ownership and reliable internet access was exploading.
It's hard to imagine today, but back in '97 when Ultima Online released, private computer ownership and reliable internet access just wasn't all that common. Kinda difficult to sell an MMO subscription to someone that can't access the internet or doesn't even own a computer.
People really need to consider that when thinking about WoW's numbers in comparison with previous products. Like many successfull products, WoW saw a benefit from being in exactly the right place in exactly the right time and they capitalized on it.
Later entrents had to battle both against WoW's established brand recognition and against all the other new competitors flocking into the market to gain thier portion of market share. That's a MUCH tougher position to be in.
So even if the Themepark model wasn't broken (and I think Ryan makes a good case that it is).... it's a really good idea to try to go after a market segment that isn't currently oversaturated with offerings the way the Themepark crowd is.
Given what Ryan has just pointed out, I'd wonder if the future of Themepark style gaming isn't more along the lines of smaller Co-OP style games. Say something like Skyrim with multi-player mode...where a player can host his own server and run it with maybe 5-6 freinds either peer to peer or through leased servers like FPS games do.
Where the expectation is that you and your "party" run through the 100 or so hours of play that can be produced for a reasonable cost and wait for the next "module" in the series to come out for you to plunk down your $30-50 to play again?
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Goblin Squad Member
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QFT!
I am interested in seeing how Elder Scrolls Online (or what it is called) will do. Afaik this could be "the last AAA themepark MMO" that releases. And though it starts with a strong support (just as SW:TOR did) I guess it also will fade into obscurity in 3 to 6 months.
The market is no longer there, this is the proverbial dead horse.
New MMOs will try and define themselves as different from themepark, which likely means sandbox, a broad category.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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The huge increase in console gamers over the last half a dozen years also takes away from the MMO population base. Agreed that we will never see another WoW.
Your logic is flawed.
MMO player numbers have steadily increased every year.
Subscriptions flattened in 2011. But Free To Play is growing rapidly and now accounts for more than half of the total market.
There will be another WoW. Actually, there are already 3 other WoWs. The biggest MMO in the world is a game called Giant Online, and it has 40 million players, almost all Chinese. There are two other games bigger than WoW in China as well.
When I worked at Wizards of the Coast, the conventional wisdom in the gaming industry was that "there would never be another Magic: The Gathering". Of course lots of people tried, but by the late '90s most people had conceded that there was no chance of making a game bigger than Magic.
Then Pokemon happened (about 4-5x Magic). People though "well, that was a one-off". Then Yu-Gi-Oh! happened (about 10-20x Magic). So now, nobody thinks that anymore. They think it's a very high bar, and there's a lot of theories about what is required, and many of those theories involve "a miracle occurs", but there's nobody who would seriously entertain the idea that it cannot be done.
There will be a western MMO bigger than WoW. It won't be a WoW-clone. It will be something that comes at the genre from an unexpected direction, and it will be something that engages with a huge latent audience of people who the WoW phenomenon just missed, or just doesn't target.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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To stick and oar in and mix more metaphors than Pillsbury mixes cake..er.. mixes:
I would note that every real-world theme park in the last decade (or more?) is tied to other entertainment content. Hook 'em on Harry Potter, then make a place the kiddies can bludgeon the parents with requests to visit. If I were to try to build a "ride and experience" venue around, say, my cousin, no one would come. Or very few. You can make a lot of money with less-than-perfect entertainment, provided it piggy-backs on a previous phenomenon, like a movie franchise (which was piggy-backed on a book series, etc.).
It seems to me that funding a successful game is like launching something into space. Once it's high enough, it can coast along without constant thrust. But to get it beyond the pull of Earth gravity, you need to either boost it with enormous amounts of thrust, or find a way to achieve constant acceleration without huge booster rockets (like a space elevator).
Now, in that example:
let Booster Rockets = Cash/Time/Personnel
let Space Elevator = Kickstarter/Crowdsourcing
Both methods can get you past the gravity well, but do it on different time scales (fast and huge energy expenditure versus slow but more efficient, economical energy expenditure). Once you are in open space, you get some options, like solar sails (Free-to-play with Subscription options), burst thrusts (like micro-transactions), etc. Those are great for sustaining the voyage, but you'll never get free of the gravity well on those alone.
Okay, I think I've lost my own point... but it was damn relevant!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suspect it was something like... as the culture changes, so too must its entertainment? I know a database must evolve with the processes it models or it becomes obsolete, like a fossil.
Let's continue the space analogy.
WoW made the moonshot based on the suborbital rocketry and then orbital flights that went before it.
Are we content with the spacelab, or do we want Mars?
I don't think we are welcome on Mars :p
Wow used the success of the single player game to boost their product. Although it seems that Wow the MMO kinda killed Warcraft the single player game. But I guess the sacrifice was worth it to Blizzard.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@Valandur - I do not believe the existence of the single-player Warcraft brand was meaningful. That was the conventional wisdom in the industry (it may still be) but I have never agreed with it. Warcraft didn't help Diablo or Starcraft, after all. Blizzard had a track record of delivering really high quality games. That Blizzard equity was more valuable than the Warcraft equity.
If you think about the fact that all MMOs have a ferocious attrition rate, and you consider that WoW launched after UO and EverQuest, you can project that something with WoW's level of initial first year success was highly likely as soon as someone got all the pieces right in the Theme Park design. There were easily a million people who had tried an MMO by that point and at least half of them had already quit because of problems with the existing offerings. WoW was first to market with the correct solution, and they therefore captured the existing lapsed market of MMO players who tried and quit (or tried and were tired of) UO and EQ. After the first year, WoW became a phenomenon on its own and attracted the bulk of its players organically.
The Warcraft IP did almost nothing for WoW in that first year. None of the backstory was meaningful. It wasn't an RTS. There wasn't any Horde/Alliance warfare with persistence. There was no meaningful link even to the events of the third Warcraft RTS and most people I played the game with had not been Warcraft RTS players.
WoW was just "the best MMO from a company with a sterling reputation for making games" - it fell neatly into a huge need/gap and filled it nearly perfectly. Had it not been WoW, I'm certain some other game would have filled that need/gap in the same time frame. Blizzard just got there first.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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let Booster Rockets = Cash/Time/Personnel
There comes a point when it no longer makes any sense to add more fuel because the fuel itself adds more tonnage you need to lift. That's probably analogous to the problem with trying compete with WoW. It got in orbit when expectations weren't so high, and has been adding modules ever since. Now the total tonnage is bigger than anyone can launch.
I do wonder if Elder Scrolls Online will capture the RvRvR dynamic that Dark Age of Camelot had. Warhammer Online might have done better if it had broken its armies into more than two realms. WoW already does the 'Cowboys & Indians' game, but a 3+ faction game doesn't allow the runaway domination that an early lead can give when you only have one opponent. In a 3+ sided war, if one faction gets significantly ahead, the others can gang up on it.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact, it's cold as hell.
WoW was just "the best MMO from a company with a sterling reputation for making games" - it fell neatly into a huge need/gap and filled it nearly perfectly. Had it not been WoW, I'm certain some other game would have filled that need/gap in the same time frame. Blizzard just got there first.
I can understand that, sort of a situation where the player base was there and ready. Just waiting for the right game to come along that gave them what they needed at just the right time. Blizzard did have a good reputation for making quality games. I remember The first time I ever played through the night was when playing Warcraft 2. I looked up and it was 4am, I had to be at work at 8. That was a long day.
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Goblin Squad Member
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WoW was just "the best MMO from a company with a sterling reputation for making games" - it fell neatly into a huge need/gap and filled it nearly perfectly. Had it not been WoW, I'm certain some other game would have filled that need/gap in the same time frame. Blizzard just got there first.I can understand that, sort of a situation where the player base was there and ready. Just waiting for the right game to come along that gave them what they needed at just the right time. Blizzard did have a good reputation for making quality games. I remember The first time I ever played through the night was when playing Warcraft 2. I looked up and it was 4am, I had to be at work at 8. That was a long day.
I was following another mmo in dev before wow came out, and the comment that made me realise wow would be the successful one when people were dicsussing which new mmo looked like it would be the big hitter: "... but I can't shake the feeling that Blizzard just know how to make great games." It was along those lines and unfortunately wow was a game I did not like the look of even the first screenshot I saw, but I knew the writing was on the wall so it was many years later that I played a mmorpg.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's hard to imagine today, but back in '97 when Ultima Online released, private computer ownership and reliable internet access just wasn't all that common. Kinda difficult to sell an MMO subscription to someone that can't access the internet or doesn't even own a computer.
Great point. Looking back on the year and a bit I played UO, and it was generally with my 'geek' friends who had already owned PCs for several years, or the guys I was at college with (IT degree - so geeks again ;)). Fast forward almost a decade when WoW came out, and everyone and their dog had a PC and pretty good Internet connectivity.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The huge increase in console gamers over the last half a dozen years also takes away from the MMO population base. Agreed that we will never see another WoW.Your logic is flawed.
MMO player numbers have steadily increased every year.
Subscriptions flattened in 2011. But Free To Play is growing rapidly and now accounts for more than half of the total market.
There will be another WoW. Actually, there are already 3 other WoWs. The biggest MMO in the world is a game called Giant Online, and it has 40 million players, almost all Chinese. There are two other games bigger than WoW in China as well.
My logic is quite often flawed :)
I guess I was applying my own experience to my statement. Through the late nineties and for around a decade, most of my friends had a PC and did everything on that. A rough estimate would be that half of them now have consoles and use those for their gaming. My nephews and all his friends do not even own a PC, only consoles and tablets. I was extrapolating that out, but had not thought about other regions around the globe. China, India, Indonesia and the like would be incredible markets to tap into.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.In fact, it's cold as hell.
Well, maybe all we need, besides time, are some spaceships to start pushing asteroids into the Mars gravity well to gradually increase its mass by about a third, then nudge Europa to slingshot out of Jupiter's orbit and put it into orbit around Mars. Wait long enough and Europa's water ice, warmed by the sun and tidal friction will gradually migrate to Mars and start to replenish its biosphere, warming it up and giving it more moisture. The tidal forces of the new moon (Europa) should get the plate techtonics of Mars active again, and hopefully begin to generate a magnetosphere to help with the radiation. If we cultivate a 'greenhouse' environment it will gain warmth, even as far away from the sun as it is.
Eventually someone will be able to live there if we just take these few simple steps.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Rapid scale stellar movement is hard, and moving Europa from Jupiter to Mars would require both solving the N-body problem for large N and measuring the initial conditions very accurately. It would be a very small difference in initial conditions between missing Mars orbit entirely and entering an orbit which terminated in impact either immediately, or, worse, in a few thousand years.
Despite NASA's (Never A Straight Answer) rather lame insistence that there's no water on Mars, numerous Sat. Images show pretty clearly that although its frozen, there is quite a bit of water on Mars. Just need to rethicken the atmosphere again to warm the place up. For years it was known that there was Water on the Moon, NASA again, wouldn't admit to it until they were faced with being made fools of by the truth being revealed to the world as a result of the flurry of missions sending satellites to the Moon during the 2000's. they were forced to announce that "Wow there's water on the Moon!".
It's possible that the gradual warming that's taking place in the solar system would eventually do the trick, it will take a looooong time though.
Buuuut I've gotten off topic.... Again :p
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Goblin Squad Member
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Despite NASA's (Never A Straight Answer) rather lame insistence that there's no water on Mars, numerous Sat. Images show pretty clearly that although its frozen, there is quite a bit of water on Mars. Just need to rethicken the atmosphere again to warm the place up. For years it was known that there was Water on the Moon, NASA again, wouldn't admit to it until they were faced with being made fools of by the truth being revealed to the world as a result of the flurry of missions sending satellites to the Moon during the 2000's. they were forced to announce that "Wow there's water on the Moon!".
It's possible that the gradual warming that's taking place in the solar system would eventually do the trick, it will take a looooong time though.
Buuuut I've gotten off topic.... Again :p
Hmm... trying to restrain from making big, definite claims until they are well-tested sounds like science to me. If you want absolute answers given without error bars (caveat emptor on the amount of error they actually contain), then you'll have to ask religion, either in it's traditional form or its modern pseudoscience guise.
NASA did give a direct answer about the 'Mayan Calendar Apocalypse' bunk, though. Given all the evidence available, 21 Dec. 2012 looked like it would be just another day, with no rogue planets bearing down on us or anything. Granted, it was a safe bet, since, if they were somehow wrong and a unpredictable disaster destroyed the Earth, no one would have been around to care anyway.
Still, even with a direct answer, many newage and ufologist people just said it was a coverup for a conspiracy of silence. Maybe the idea that we're basically a bunch of balding bonobos doing the best we can to figure out our cosmos just scares some of us on a Lovecraftian scale? For me, not knowing something inspires curiosity to learn and to question. There's also some sadness in realizing that I'll never be able to learn all I could want to, but I don't think the unknown is scary.
Hmm... to make some vague attempt at getting back to a gaming topic, who has taken the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology?
I got 100% Explorer, 53% Achiever, 40% Socializer, 7% Killer. I tend to think of 'achievements' as things to help me explore and other players as either companions for exploration or another area of study, but I definitely skew towards cooperative rather than competitive play. It would be interesting to see where others focus, and to know where the various guild/CC/settlement groups like TEO, PAX, 7V, MAGI, KotC, etc. are planning to focus.
