Is it even possible to make brand new AAA MMORPG which will be hugely successful?

UrQuan · May 2015

Audigy wrote: »

That's why Jonathan Wender (former Fatality), started his own business to make a living from promoting his name. He now gives his name to mouse pads, motherboards, soundcards ...

Hey, I have no freaking clue who he is, but I have his headset! Obviously the name that was on it wasn't a factor in my decision to buy it lol

Audigy wrote: »

Sure he won about 400k in the 6-7 years that he was active, but its not enough to rest and make a living from it forever.

If that's accurate, then when you look at it in terms of what that would work out to as an annual salary, it's not bad, but not great either. It's less than 60K annually.

Sausage · May 2015

ESO isnt going to go under the radar any time soon. ES6 is going to boost population alot, its relauch. WoW is losing its grib, how Blizzard can keep players in WoW is going to play major part of ESO's success in my opinion.

krees28b14_ESO · May 2015

Pallmor wrote: »

They only "fail" because every MMO judges itself next to World of Warcraft. If everyone would stop trying to produce the next "WoW Killer" and stop dreaming of millions of subscribers, and instead have more realistic expectations, then there wouldn't be so many of these "failures."

An MMO with 500,000 regular subscribers is only a failure if the developer overspent on development with the unrealistic expectation that they were going to have 5 million regular subscribers.

I would argue that they try to create the next WoW killer because every time a new mmo is released the forums are filled with "In WoW we had this and this game should to" threads. Companies have read the forums of other games and no what people want, which mostly is the same thing that WoW has done. The game industry is becoming more demanding. Graphics have to be top notch, voice overs, absolutely no bugs at all (which will never happen in any game), every feature that every other MMO has ever done in history (cosmetic tabs, group finder, housing, dye systems, etc., and so on. At some point they have to release the game before they completely run out of money. The "basic features" list continues to grow resulting in even larger amounts of money needed to include them all.

Cherryblossom · May 2015

It would appear that it is now impossible to create a game with modern tech that actually works, it's this that is the problem.

I do not remember bugs in the games of my youth.

I blame the education system, it obvious that programmers now do not have the ability to create games any more.

Flameheart · May 2015

The success of WoW was a combination of luck, the right technology base and the capability of Blizzard to take advantage of the moment.

- MMOs are based on existing internet connectivity and the capability to build server farms, which are able to process an maybe even immense number of service requests. Blizzard had the luck to develope and launch WoW at a time, where you are at last able to achieve that. I remember my good old Everquest days, playing an MMO with a 256k modem dial up in raids with up to 72 members where "horrible lag" was something like the default situation.

-Blizzard's MMO was pretty unmatched in those early days. I can't remember any serious rival in the MMO market at that time, maybe EQ/EQ2.

-Blizzard never ever finished tweaking its own MMO. They really care for new content, class and PvP balance upto date. You won't make it right for everybody, but noone can seriously tell, that Blizzard would not care.

- Add to that socialising. Some players in WoW are now playing almost a decade on the same server, in the same guild and maybe even were or became RL friends. On another side...would it be easy or hard for you personally to quit a game and leave behind a beloved and high developed character you invested a decade of time ?

-Blizzard set standards you expect in every other MMO todays, be it certain UI modifications, .lua interfaces, PvE + PvP, itemisation, tier systems etc. etc.

I started with EQ, over EQ2, played WoW for over 5 years (and it was pretty hard to quit the virtual cocaine), changed to LotRO (still a favorite of mine), SWTOR (just my 2 cents: It was not a great idea to outsource certain base game features like the market UI for example on foreign/indian sub developers without any quality measurement...) and now ended up in ESO.

ESO at least imho seems to make a lot right. It won't change the MMO system in total, they just adept and improve some things. I really like the character developement here in ESO and Zenimax proved that good grafics (playing this game on max detail which means ultra+ on a 1440p display with a Titan Classic SLI system on smooth 60 fps) and MMOs aren't contradictions.

ESO now has reached the crucial point, measured in developing new content, fast bug and balance patching and keeping up the pace for that.

Launching a quite good MMO and having high subscriber/buyer numbers for a year ? Not that of an issue, if you have the money to invest.

Keeping those numbers for more than one year, several years or maybe a decade ? That's the contest.

Emma_Overload · May 2015

rb2001 wrote: »

The funny thing to me is that MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) have better mechanics that all the new games, and they are flipping text. Yes, that's why they are vastly easier to make, but the mechanics have been laid down since before your great-great grandma was born.

Containers, putting things in them, equipping things, enemies dropping what they actually wear, rifling through their containers to see what they actually had, etc. etc.... all done 30 years ago better than games today.

I know exactly what you mean. All those old games were balanced according to math and logic... today's games are balanced according to forum grief and YouTube rants.

traigusb14_ESO2 · May 2015

I blame players a lot.

A lot of key systems over the years have gone by the wayside because players didn't like them. A lot of the features had bigger picture connections people never thought about. I'm not a social person. Forced social in EQ1 made me talk to people. I met a lot of good friends in EQ 1 that I play games with now. Same with SWG. I have met nearly nobody in newer games. I just stick with older friends.

PUGs aren't social interactions. Welcome to super-solo MMOS (For good or bad).

This is just 1 system.

Sometimes spinach has vitamins in it... and I hate meting new people ;p

Even concepts like endgame are a giant waste. Skip who knows how much game content so you can sit at the end and do a little bit of content over and over? How did that come to be what people wanted? Outside of people who really identify with their faction (which I can kind of understand), a lot of people won't play 2/3 of ESO's content and would rather grind in Craiglorn. Is ESO not fun to play?

WoW has created and abandoned like 8 endgames. You play an earlier expansion you play like 1/2 of the content and 0% of the endgame people love so much, then skip to the next one until you catch up to 1-2 expansions from whatever is now.

The players made their own games easy, formulaic and boring. Quest hubs and themeparks, Super-solo play, fast leveling, DPS meters, massive Auction house monitoring /price fixing software are all symptoms of players making choices that seem good, but really wreck games in the long run.

Then all those things become mandatory in the next new game and it gets choked by the mistakes made before.

Not all games have to support all playstyles.

Everyone doesn't have to have PVP, Raids, super solo play etc. Game companies should pick an audience and stick to it.Trying to have a little bit for everyone ends up with a lot of nothing for most people (and massive balancing issues that take up a lot of people's time).

Pick an audience.. .any audience... and make them a game, the best game for those people. You will get them.

Modern games are all hash trying to cater to too many groups and holding none of them for a long time.

Ser Lobo · May 2015

The curse of every MMO I've ever played:

- It's nerdy as hell, and almost requires you to be a min-maxer to be successful, first in end-game PvE, and in some games, PvP. This alone alienates the vast majority of people in the world who don't see 'numbers' as equal to 'fun'.

- It's most revolutionary concept is that 'work' equates 'fun', also known to us as the GRIND. Because an MMO makes money off of time played, not the actual enjoyment of the experience, they do a lot to convince you that playing longer is worth it.

- It's one of the few game genre's that's seen almost no evolution in the last decade. The last major advancements to MMO's were phasing and daily quests. Coincidentally, it's also one of the few game genre's that's seen a smaller portion of new adopters versus 'veterans.'

- The largest advertising points of MMO's, the world size and the number of players, are also often their biggest point of alienation for many. The world size creates so many development and server and networking hurdles, that every single MMO in existance is buggy as hell compared to most other game genre's. And it's a proven fact that as the number of players increases in any particular interaction, the higher the likelihood of someone ruining someone else's experience through bad behavior or poor gamemanship.

- Meanwhile, most MMO's have decided to step so far away from the character acting portion of the 'roleplaying game' (which many now translate in error as being about filling a group role or the MMO holy trinity), what with 'darth mauls' and chat spam and out-of-lore holidays, etc, that they have lost that portion of their identity and simply converted to MMOGames.

On the plus side, other genre's are evolving towards MMO territories, with larger persistent world and limited grouping mechanics. These can even be 'massive' and 'multiplayer', but quality of production and fewer development hurdles, as well as limiting factors on social interaction, have helped these games become immensely popular even while MMO's are dying.

WoW took a genre that was largely technologically unaccessible, with a massively confusing assortment of design schemes and internal policies, and homogenized it for the masses. Of course it would be a mistake to allow their numbers advertised to show how popular they are (check in to the asian resub policies which counted every resub as a new account), but the fact would still remain they did what no others could.

Is it possible for someone to release a AAA MMORPG today? You bet. They simply have to ignore almost everything that WoW did, and pay attention to what other genre's are doing. Advances in communication, limited social interactions, smaller group encounters and focus, shorter play times, faster play speed, less grinds, more horizontal advancement, more vanity/social mechanics, less screen clutter, etc.

In many, many ways, ESO is a huge step in the right direction, and I would admit that ZOS's only fault was releasing this game to the already jaded and dreadfully unevolving PC crowd, instead of taking the extra year and releasing a purely console-based title that I feel will shine above and beyond as possibly the game of the year.

ESO's failure, in my opinion, is not the things it evovled, but the things they didn't. Veteran rank grinding. Zone-wide interactions (chat spam, etc). Groups over 6 players. Not enough social content (mini-games, houses, etc). Focus on poorly achievable large-scale PvP.

UrQuan · May 2015

Cherryblossom wrote: »

It would appear that it is now impossible to create a game with modern tech that actually works, it's this that is the problem.

I do not remember bugs in the games of my youth.

I blame the education system, it obvious that programmers now do not have the ability to create games any more.

I guarantee that there were bugs in every game you ever played. You may not have noticed them (partly because there was no internet where tons of people would point them out), but they were there.

Remember Space Invaders, where the aliens started moving faster the more of them you killed, making it more challenging? That was a bug. When they realized it was happening and figured out why (it was basically a hardware issue - the processors could only handle moving them at a certain speed when there were a lot of them on the screen, but when there were fewer of them on screen the processors could handle them moving faster - the software hadn't been written to restrain them to a slower speed, because they didn't consider that the speed might change as fewer were on screen), they decided to incorporate it as a feature to keep the game interesting, but it was still a bug.

As games became more complex pieces of code, bugs inevitably became more common (and it has nothing to do with the education system or programmers not knowing what they're doing), but there have always been bugs in virtually every piece of software ever since punch-card computing.

P3ZZL3 · May 2015

I think the players certainly have a lot of involvement in it......

Meanwhile, back in 1987......

OMG Capcom, srsly....Hadouken so OP....pls nerf!

wilsonirayb16_ESO · May 2015

Only five fantasy MMOs stood the test of time(and by that I mean as a fan favorite - not necessarily still in service):

EverQuest
Warcraft
Star Wars Galaxies
Final Fantasy XI
EverQuest Online Adventures

No other MMOs have the same cult following and nor will they probably ever again. It was a different time then. These worlds were fresh and exciting - even more so because they were exclusive to those in an age when not everyone had a computer or the internet.

Fast forward ten to fifteen years : Between the natural progression of more people indulging in these games and large companies allowing corporate executives to run projects rather than developers, we've end up with a string of regurgitated MMORPGs games, where occasionally one or two come along and promise to break the mould - when in fact they just put together a hand full of gimmicks to cover up the same fundamental flaws.

Unfortunately for every neat thing ESO does, it did two bad things - most of which are because they turned their back on what makes TES games so popular.

At the moment there's only one game that might restore some of the MMO glory from the early to mid 2000s, and that's Pantheon.

Sadly, budget, resources and time are working against non AAA studios. Just look at all the failed kickstarter and indie steam projects...

Thank God for Project1999.com

Netswine · May 2015

In my opinion what gives MMO's staying power is endgame content. Continuously added, good quality, expensive to develop endgame content.

doggie · May 2015

I think a game can have 2-3 million subs in the future. But the game has to have all game systems players excpect at launch, and the basic game has to work.

This first year Zenimax has spent fixing the basic game, and released very little content. They've had to redo many quests to fix the group instancing and that's taken resources from DLCs. Yet they charged everyone 15 bucks a month while did it. So players left. Now that the game i b2p they still don't release DLCs.

And they're not finished finetuning the game, the veteran ranks are still not removed. If they don't remove them it's because they no longer have the manpower to do so. It requires them to tweak a lot of stats, and rebalance all dungeons.

When I played WoW back in 2005 every patch had some new content, either a dungeon, new zone, a new faction or some recipes. I think they released 3-4 new zones, 4 raids, and many dungeons between 2004-2006. and that's just some of it.

If ESO had worked from Day 1,No Veteran levels, had better crafting system, better economy, pvp arena/ ranking. They would have done much better.

olemanwinter · May 2015

nastuug wrote: »

failure to properly patch game

THIS ^. EXACTLY THIS ^

Most of the other problems wouldn't exist without this problem!

Poor customer service is less of an issue when there are fewer customer complaints. Ever notice how the same companies (in any industry) have both the best rated products and best rated customer service?

And if they weren't busy "patching", "fixing" , "rebalancing" and even "relaunching" their originally broken game, they would have more time to develop and release additional content.

Instead, those not driven off my the "broken" aspect of a flawed game release eventually leave anyway due to lack of new content.

olemanwinter · May 2015

"Pallmor wrote: »

An MMO with 500,000 regular subscribers is only a failure if the developer overspent on development with the unrealistic expectation that they were going to have 5 million regular subscribers.

Nonsense. Every game needs A-list actors to do voice acting. Spare no expense. lol

I was shocked when someone told me Kate Beckinsale was the voice actress for the queen. I like Kate Beckinsale, but she doesn't have a "unique" voice. (Unlike the voice actor for Molag Bal). How much was spent to get her to voice act the queen when any random (but competent) actress with an English voice would have worked?

I did the entire AD quest line twice and never knew it was her voice acting until someone told me...and I actually thought they were joking.

MercyKilling · May 2015

ruze84b14_ESO wrote: »

Advances in communication, limited social interactions, smaller group encounters and focus, shorter play times, faster play speed, less grinds, more horizontal advancement, more vanity/social mechanics, less screen clutter, etc.

See, these are the things I think are RUINING mmo's these days. With one exception. Less grinds do not ruin an MMO.

Zanen · May 2015

I think a lot of what's being expressed here is really more about the players than the games. The MMO player base has been chasing the dragon for a decade now.

Recent titles have actually been pretty amazing IMO. ESO, SWTOR, these are games that the gaming community largely consider failures, and they're amazing games that represent an enormous creative achievement. In both cases it's clear to me they were released a year too early, which IMO is the major problem with the industry at the moment. Eventually you'd think they'd figure out that if they have a AAA title that's actually ready to play at launch there's a huge market for it and that last 10% invested would pay off in spades if they actually tested and polished their games before they released them so the reviews aren't all about how broken stuff is.

I think it's interesting that two of the biggest recent MMO releases actually had to go back into development for a year and then be re-released. FFXIV and ESO essentially did the same thing except they kept the servers open the whole time. When they announced the long delay of the console release, when the game was obviously designed from the beginning as a console title, everyone should have understood what was happening. I find it interesting that the community seems to see console as a distraction at this point.

ESO though, there's stuff about this game and its development I just don't get. Early on in beta erroneous tooltips were reported, I know the defensive stance/posture tooltip errors were reported many, many times and then the game launched with the very obviously bad/typo'd tooltips a YEAR later. At launch, many of the tooltips didn't accurately reflect what the abilities actually did.

And now, ANOTHER YEAR later, there's still typos and significantly erroneous information in the ability tooltips, some of the tooltips have even gotten less helpful than they used to be, like armor passives...

I just don't get how you create a world like they have, all the amazing artwork and writing and voice acting and coding, and then fail so spectacularly to get such a small amount of text correct at the primary user interface, it makes no sense. It seems as though there's a lot of really obvious issues with basic things like that, or making rewards meaningful,(congrats on completing all three factions questlines hero, here's a 37g vendor trash green ring as a reward) or passives balanced, that anybody who plays the game more than a few hours can see yet persist for years, and it's really hard to understand considering how much the same development team did right.

Dixa · May 2015

People can sit here and wax poetic about how developer don't care or care too much or don't do enough yadda yadda...

...and it is quite hilarious that so few understand that the almighty dollar drives EVERYTHING today, from the price of gas being nearly what it was during the great recession in spite of the price of a barrel of oil being at only half that value for the same term, to game development.

They have investors to make happy. Investors with big bucks who can make life terrible for these companies if they don't put out something within a certain window. The only exceptions to this are the kickstarter projects.

Dixa · May 2015

What catapulted WoW was not just timing - broadband had only very recently become affordable to the western masses - but it's built-in and EXTREMELY large warcraft and starcraft fanbase.

It brought in many based on it's brand alone.

However it is silly to pine for the old systems. The old systems were designed to punish players left and right, force them to spend substantial amounts of time on the most tedious of activities. Attitudes in western coporations were also different then as we had just come off the one-two punch of the dot com bust and the post 9/11 wrecking of the economy. Today, even after the great recession western workers work more for less money and therefore have far less time to enjoy these games than they did back when meridian 59 landed in 1995, ultima online in 1997, eq in 1999 and even WoW/EQ2 in 2004.

Most of those old systems will not fly now, as carbine found out the hard way.

Those old enough to remember the old ways don't have the time, those too young want league of legends or minecraft in everything.

KerinKor · May 2015

NerZhulen89 wrote: »

I began to think about completely new MMORPG releases in general. In last two-four years plenty of new MMORPGs were released in the western world, all of them pretty much failed in terms of amount of players which would invest longer time than few months into the game.

The sort of AAA MMO you're alluding to is a thing of the past because they require players with attention spans longer than a goldfish's and there's plenty of evidence that many 'modern' games players fail in that department.

Pallmor wrote: »

They only "fail" because every MMO judges itself next to World of Warcraft. If everyone would stop trying to produce the next "WoW Killer" and stop dreaming of millions of subscribers, and instead have more realistic expectations, then there wouldn't be so many of these "failures.".

Like the 4m players FFXIV has perhaps?

ESO should have at least 2m given its pedigree and ancestry, which is equal to the FF 'franchise', it doesn't and ZOS should be seriously asking themselves why.

bertenburnyb16_ESO · May 2015

ESO is failing in 2 mayor parts for me
1. inabillity of Zos to fix ALOT of buggs and game performance (cyro is laggin like sh*t)
2. isuficcient end game content/addition of new content to keep people playing (pve only has a couple of raids, Cyro is a mess, and how long has it been since we had some new playable content? adding the option to steal stuff, CP system and things like that isnt new playable content)

Pallmor · May 2015

olemanwinter wrote: »

"Pallmor wrote: »

An MMO with 500,000 regular subscribers is only a failure if the developer overspent on development with the unrealistic expectation that they were going to have 5 million regular subscribers.

Nonsense. Every game needs A-list actors to do voice acting. Spare no expense. lol

I was shocked when someone told me Kate Beckinsale was the voice actress for the queen. I like Kate Beckinsale, but she doesn't have a "unique" voice. (Unlike the voice actor for Molag Bal). How much was spent to get her to voice act the queen when any random (but competent) actress with an English voice would have worked?

I did the entire AD quest line twice and never knew it was her voice acting until someone told me...and I actually thought they were joking.

I think the only voice actor I ever actually recognized in an Elder Scrolls game was Patrick Stewart. Anyone else was overkill on Bethesda's part.

P3ZZL3 · May 2015

^^ Really? What about John Cleese? Cadwell is a Winner!

Robotmafia · May 2015

I think the whole free to play flood and over all flood of options has on one side brought people to expect content for free and not want to pay monthly fees and secondly its splitting the player base more so than 10-15 years ago...

Pirhana7_ESO · May 2015

NerZhulen89 wrote: »

I began to think about completely new MMORPG releases in general. In last two-four years plenty of new MMORPGs were released in the western world, all of them pretty much failed in terms of amount of players which would invest longer time than few months into the game.

I want to hear your opinion about this.
Is it because all new gamers are playing MOBAs? (the most popular one reported 27 million daily players, last year january), where they can eventually make it to professional level and make it a living? Since only way to make real money by playing MMOs will usually result in a ban. Also there are no tournament possibilities which could have been streamed in ESO and similar new MMORPGs. All things you can stream are usually boring compared to other stuff you can watch on the Twi*** tv.

Is it because the most popular MMORPG (not sure if I can name it here) was simply so popular only by artificial hype, maybe by accident? MMORPG is simply D&D brought to a virtual level. D&D was always popular only amongst the nerdiest nerds, so why the MMO made by "icestorm" company made such a huge success?

Probably most of you know that the "icestorm" company was developing a second MMORPG for many years, and this winter on their "icecon" event, it was announced that the project is over, because they did not manage to make the game fun. So after making the most successful MMORPG of all times, they admit that they actually do not know how they made it successful. Money or lack of creativity could not have been the reason for cancel, since they are well supplied and experienced from other projects.

Last possible reason that comes to my mind is that for every single gamer only one MMORPG can be truly fun. Usually the first one he played. Sure there are some differences, but in the end every single MMORPG out there is eventually exactly the same. And after you spend your time on your first, loose few years of life, and realize what happend, your brain simply becomes immune to repeating it again. Which would eventually mean that it is simply impossible to make really big AAA MMORPG anymore, which would get played by the masses.

Alot of us like 3way siege warfare and are just hanging in here with ESO until Camelot Unchained launches next year

nastuug · May 2015

Pirhana7_ESO wrote: »

NerZhulen89 wrote: »

I began to think about completely new MMORPG releases in general. In last two-four years plenty of new MMORPGs were released in the western world, all of them pretty much failed in terms of amount of players which would invest longer time than few months into the game.

I want to hear your opinion about this.
Is it because all new gamers are playing MOBAs? (the most popular one reported 27 million daily players, last year january), where they can eventually make it to professional level and make it a living? Since only way to make real money by playing MMOs will usually result in a ban. Also there are no tournament possibilities which could have been streamed in ESO and similar new MMORPGs. All things you can stream are usually boring compared to other stuff you can watch on the Twi*** tv.

Is it because the most popular MMORPG (not sure if I can name it here) was simply so popular only by artificial hype, maybe by accident? MMORPG is simply D&D brought to a virtual level. D&D was always popular only amongst the nerdiest nerds, so why the MMO made by "icestorm" company made such a huge success?

Probably most of you know that the "icestorm" company was developing a second MMORPG for many years, and this winter on their "icecon" event, it was announced that the project is over, because they did not manage to make the game fun. So after making the most successful MMORPG of all times, they admit that they actually do not know how they made it successful. Money or lack of creativity could not have been the reason for cancel, since they are well supplied and experienced from other projects.

Last possible reason that comes to my mind is that for every single gamer only one MMORPG can be truly fun. Usually the first one he played. Sure there are some differences, but in the end every single MMORPG out there is eventually exactly the same. And after you spend your time on your first, loose few years of life, and realize what happend, your brain simply becomes immune to repeating it again. Which would eventually mean that it is simply impossible to make really big AAA MMORPG anymore, which would get played by the masses.

Alot of us like 3way siege warfare and are just hanging in here with ESO until Camelot Unchained launches next year

Read about that. Will definitely keep an eye on it.

ItsGlaive · May 2015

The difficulty comes in where you put the bar to determine "success". WoW skewed the perceptions of MMO success drastically in the eyes of developers and maintstream gamers, unfairly so imo.

Other than WoW, to my knowledge no MMO has ever accrued a player base in the millions. It's an aberration, success is a player base totalling a hundred thousand or so, that's where the bar was and should still be. Ignore the WoW numbers, they're the exception by a long margin, they were never the rule.

nastuug · May 2015

Xabien wrote: »

The difficulty comes in where you put the bar to determine "success". WoW skewed the perceptions of MMO success drastically in the eyes of developers and maintstream gamers, unfairly so imo.

Other than WoW, to my knowledge no MMO has ever accrued a player base in the millions. It's an aberration, success is a player base totalling a hundred thousand or so, that's where the bar was and should still be. Ignore the WoW numbers, they're the exception by a long margin, they were never the rule.

FF14:ARR was at 1.8m subbed players.

Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/13/5405344/final-fantasy-14s-playstation-4-launch-is-just-the-start-for-naoki

MercyKilling · May 2015

Dixa wrote: »

People can sit here and wax poetic about how developer don't care or care too much or don't do enough yadda yadda...

...and it is quite hilarious that so few understand that the almighty dollar drives EVERYTHING today, from the price of gas being nearly what it was during the great recession in spite of the price of a barrel of oil being at only half that value for the same term, to game development.

They have investors to make happy. Investors with big bucks who can make life terrible for these companies if they don't put out something within a certain window. The only exceptions to this are the kickstarter projects.

So much truth.

The only people responsible for the things happening today are those paying for it. You don't like it? Don't pay for it. Convince others to boycott/embargo/not pay for it as well, and make it known WHY you aren't paying for it.

badmojo · May 2015

I couldn't stand all the self censorship, so I stopped reading half way through.