Scott Jennings: Legendary Failures of Legend, Part One
MMORPG.com columnist Scott Jennings uses his column this week to discuss "some of the most spectacular MMORPG flameouts" in part one of a two part article.
Column By Scott Jennings on January 27, 2010
Part One: What were they *thinking*??!?
Today, let's learn from failure.
Specifically, let's look at some of the most spectacular MMORPG flameouts, and try to find some common cause between them. Warning: This is a two part article. This is the fun part, where I go into great detail about where everyone screwed up and we can all laugh nervously.
advertisement Ultima Online: A Well Crafted Simulation Of The Result Of Man's Best Intentions
Being one of the first MMOs, Ultima Online had the luxury of launching with a community best called "dystopian." Intended to be a fantasy simulation where you could wander the land, killing bears and skinning them to make your own armor and selling the meat to happy farmers, thanks to its somewhat... utopian ideals of allowing players the freedom to do whatever they wanted, UO swiftly became a gangland simulation where you could brave the crowds of pickpockets and suicide bombers at the bank, and then run as quickly as you could past the gauntlet of hidden bandits to your home in the woods, where you would then be beheaded with a halberd while frantically fishing in your backpack for your keys, at which point your slayer would chop you into parts, make a small campfire on the spot, and then eat you.
I am not making any of this up.
Surprisingly, UO actually thrived despite all of this. The players not in roving gangs demanded a "PK switch", or the ability to tell the game that no, I would not like to be raped senseless immediately upon logging in. This was a fairly standard feature of MUDs (UO's immediate precursors), but the UO design team held firm. Until competition arrived in the form of Everquest, which had among its announced features, the ability to do your banking without fear of thieves and/or explosions. In response, UO announced that they would open Trammel, a gangland-free switch... er, mirror... er, FACET. Yes, facet, where players could be free from most of the obvious thuggery. This was roundly despised by every right-thinking UO player and was a horrible mistake, as shown by this chart that showed that subscriber numbers held steady in its wake... OK, next subject!
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Everquest: Men Of The Cloth, Ninjas Of Norrath
Meanwhile, Everquest was busy blazing new trails in man's inhumanity to man, through the mechanism of "the rare drop". Specifically, Everquest designers wanted to ensure that the most powerful items would be mysterious and awe-inspiring by their very rarity, so that someone who possessed one would be a legend on their server. They did so by assigning these items properties that were requirements on raids, such as mana-free resurrection. Thus, to qualify for high-level raiding, priests in Everquest had to obtain an item that the designers made so insanely difficult to acquire that the intention was that most people would give up rather than go through the hell that would be required to obtain them. Specifically, at one point: you would have to kill a dragon (a raid-level boss). Which only spawned 2 to 6 days after a server restarted. And, of course, by you, I mean, your entire guild. Your entire guild then has to wait for a triggered spawn, keeping the area clear of adds in the meantime. For 72 hours. No. I'm not kidding. SEVENTY. TWO. HOURS. At which point, the quest mob spawns, and then you kill him. At which point - thanks to how Everquest's looting worked - anyone nearby could loot the corpse for the quest item. ANYONE.
ANYONE.
After you waited THREE DAYS STRAIGHT for a VIDEO GAME MONSTER to appear.
I am not making any of this up.
SOE (then named Verant) eventually changed the quest into something approaching sanity, possibly due to a fear of frustrated sleep-deprived ninja-looted clerics having access to firearms. And when your quest change makes the BBC News, it's a possible sign of a design failure.
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Dark Age Of Camelot: That Sinking Feeling
Dark Age of Camelot gained many of it's initial 250,000 subscribers from players who looked at the requirements for the above quest and said "Nuh UH." At which point - specifically, the Trials of Atlantis expansion - the DAOC designers looked at each other and said "You know what this game is missing? Insane Everquest-style epic quests for items that totally imbalance PvP! Also, let's put them all underwater in case players don't get frustrated enough." At which point many of DAOC's players looked at each other and said "Nuh UH."
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Shadowbane: SB.EXE
Shadowbane's launch is a textbook example of how to foul up a launch eagerly awaited by a rabid community as quickly as humanly possible through the means of poorly written code. In a player-vs-player game that focused on getting as many people as possible to fight massive battles, if too many people were in one place, the game would crash with a cryptic "SB.EXE error". Other causes of SB.EXE errors included network instability, server instability, general instability, phases of the moon, and something you did you know what you did don't lie. SB.EXE quickly became shorthand in the PvP MMO community for "Oh god, no." Shadowbane eventually fixed their technical issues, possibly through the expedient of quickly no longer having enough players for server instability to be an issue any more.
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So many old wounds re-opened :(
What's this article doing here? It makes far too much sense for this site.
I eagerly await the second part and the conclusion.
A guy in my guild actually owns a collector's edition of Auto Assault that he bought as his first MMO before he met any of us. The only things worse than buying it was telling us. He will never ever live it down in vent.
DAoC: Dark age of camelot actually gained quite a few subscriptions in the year following trials of atlantis. It was the catacombs expansion that during the first month boosted subs by a few thousand and then dropped them by over 50k by the same time the following year. I feel this was because of two primary reasons, the mass instancing that turned a massive multi-player game into a small online co-op game, and the introduction of a few insanely over powered classes which would go on to dominate in pvp for years to come. These classes included the warlock and vampiir which on occasion managed to kill full groups single handed.
SB: Lets just get one thing out there right away. SB.EXE was a full fledged shadowbane feature up to the point it went free to play and eventually shut down in 2009. If they fixed one cause for it, 3 new ones sprung up. Also the launch of the game was rampant with dupers, hackers and corrupt customer support, which you covered with your buggy launch statement but its worthy of noting on its own imo.
As for the other games in your article, while I've played most I'm not nearly as knowledgeable on and will refrain from commenting. All in all quite funny and an enjoyable read.
You forgot one, Warhammer. Break away from the 3 realm success of DAoC for a two realm one in Warhammer, add in many of the mistakes they made in pvp and expound on it and you have the mess they have now.
It is only a matter of time before EA pulls the plug on Mythic. EA is not one to take consistent loses sitting down.
"DAoC: Dark age of camelot actually gained quite a few subscriptions in the year following trials of atlantis"
Now that comment is a load of nonsense. Within 3 months of the Age of Atlantis expansion, Mythic dropped literally half it's subscription base and never recovered from that. Catacombs had nothing to do with loss of subscribers.
Actually on UO, the Age of Shadows expansion was the one that caused many of the suscribers to leave. They tried to make UO more like EQ by making equipment more of a determining factor in a fight than skill. That and the fact that the servers were down more than they were up for two months following the release of the expansion.
BTW Scott excellent acticle.
I also agree with what Lokto said below.
There was a lot more that caused the failing of AC2 then the chat.
AC1 still existed (and still exists) and was popular. AC2 made what was a skill game into a class game, mistake number one. It split the user base between two games, mistake number two. It was forced out the door by Microsoft when it was far from ready (in fact reports came out that the entire project was rushed along by Microsoft, there wasn't time for docs etc etc.) so the amount of issues with the game was staggering. And finally, once they got the issues worked out, they gave up on it instead of trying to build back up a user base. Now I realize pretty much no game has gone on to boost up it's numbers to huge levels after failure but they could of at least tried.
A very interesting read. As a UO PvPer, I think I'm one of the few that actually liked the introduction of Trammel. While suddenly (and with the highest level of shocking behaviour possible) massacring a clearing of picnicking roleplayers never ever gets old, I can clearly see how that was a lot more fun for us than for the group that did not expect dismemberment to be part of the evening's activities. When the server split to Trammel (consensual PvP) and Felucca (FFA PVP), it created a distinct line that wasn't really there before for many players. Prior to Trammel, there was the deceiving illusion of safety at times.
After the split, it was very clear - if you are in Felucca, you are choosing to be freely attackable. It made PvP a lot more enjoyable because you knew your opponent was up for combat - he may not necessarily be alert and aware, but you knew he made the conscious decision to be in a PvP zone.
Although nothing had changed about the mechanics of Felucca, the population and perception changed. The facet was comprised of that 5-10% of the playerbase that was interested in FFA PvP. For my personal approach to PvP, that worked out very well. For MMO PvP as a whole, it was a landmark change that clearly showed the distinct difference in numbers between people that prefer FFA PvP and people who rather not get torched and beheaded during their monthly guild picnic.
never got to play it but do have 3 14 day trial keys and apprently lineage trial and cox trial forgot i had those
lol says trial code exp[ired hum wonder why lol though there is no expiration on these keys lame
I wonder, how many people agree with me when I say: The new SWG is better. InB4FlamePreWasBetter. I honestly used to play it back when it was new, and I wasn't impressed : / it was quite boring and the combat was wonky and felt awkward. The only good thing about SWG before was the social aspects and RP opportunity. I was in it for action and I didn't really get it. I know i'll get flamed for saying all this but it's just my opinion.
The "NGE" / "CU" made the game more fluid for me, and I'm not afraid to say, simpler. Before you ask, yes I rolled a Jedi on my 2nd time around. I mean really, what is Star Wars without Jedi? I understand the whole time frame issue people have with Jedi being so common but really, SW-Jedi=Just another Space Opera. I do understand the whole "we just bought an expansion that doesn't apply anymore wtf?" and I agree that the whole implementation of the patches was done in a crude manner, don't get me wrong here. Whoever was in charge of that could of done it better. All in all I prefer the way SWG is now to how it was way back when.
If I forgot anything, please let me know. I'm not afraid of criticism or flamers. :]
InB4LolNoob and Wtf1stPost. Been playing MMOs for a very long time, been through hundreds of them, literally. Still not impressed with MMOs as a whole, but still I continue... : /
Likely it was a tossup between that and TR, which got the "meh" award. TR gets the win for having bled much more quickly, methinx. WAR is going the SWG route... not with a bang, but with a whimper. And of course, a long "mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"...
I think that giving Cryptic the Star Trek IP belongs on this list.
Yes, yes, yes. Those guys are crooks.
To think I almost pre ordered that game.
"Other causes of SB.EXE errors included network instability, server instability, general instability, phases of the moon, and something you did you know what you did don't lie."
Simply classic.
... And sometimes when it's really dark and scary in my room I can hear the echos of screams from the poor people who were trying to siege only to have the server crash and they come back to a tree that'd reset.
Let's not forget Anarchy Online.
Arguably the worst MMO launch in history, and just when it recovers and is becoming a solid game, they tack an ENTIRE FANTASY GAME right onto a sci-fi game.
I mean, it's like duct-taping an asshole on your forehead. It doesn't belong there, it's ugly, and stupid, and pointless.
And let's not forget to mention that entire realms of this phantasy game were incomplete, broken, and in some cases not even there....to the point where the quest givers were intentionally missing or broken to prevent players from discovering that they'd been RIPPED OFF, by being sold an "expansion" that wasn't even finished.
And STILL is not finished, years later.
Of course, we could also talk about Funcom's other bomb.....Age Of Conan....but I think we all know what happened there. Let's not beat a dead horse, eh?
Probably about 3 ;). I'd agree with you that the CU had the potential to make the game better, though, had they worked on fixing the bugs it created instead of scrapping it for the crappy NGE.
The part about EQ (original not EQ 2) made me laugh but that was only the tip of the iceberg that sank EQ. If the insanity had been isolated to a handfull of one-time quests it might not have been so bad but their entire endgame was centered on that kind of insanity.
And remember, back then we had no clue what was in store for us. People started EQ and discovered a game which was primarily focused on a kind of casual, get in get out, small group game. Log in, go where you want, hook up with a group, have fun. That's the EQ that people fell in love with.
But as the game evolved the high end game turned into something entirely different. It was all about raid, raid, raiding. Join a raiding guild or hit a brick wall. Have an in-game boss (guild master) treat you like his bitch and put up with it or you're out and right back up against that wall again. It was no longer about logging in and out when you felt like it; it was about showing up for raids when you're told to and putting in your required time. It was about sitting around for hours of <hurry up and wait> crap. It was about DKPs or the other systems guilds experimented with. It wasn't about fun and adventure anymore.
My God, I don't think the insanity of EQ raiding can be exagerated. Oh, the horror! I could rant and rant about it but I'll just say that if you were very, very lucky you might only have to sit through ten hours of mind numbing boredom. But then you would have to do it on a regular basis if you wanted to ever get anything for your trouble.
To this day it baffles me that the developers of EQ would take such a fun game and turn it into such a nightmare of boredom, frustration, and maddening bullshit. And I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was this, more than anything else, which drove people away and sent EQ into decline.
I'll take Scott's word that it hurt the game, as he was one of the lead developers for DAoC during the time of ToA.. And I'll agree with him - ToA threw what semblance of RvR balance there was out the window with the ML and artifact abilities.
Anway, great article! Bit of a tease, as I really wanna see the conclusion.
Great read. I remember when I was making one of the most important decision of a young man's life: what is to be your first MMO, it was a toss up between EQ2 and WoW. From the evidence produced here it looked like I make the right decision. Bunch of polygons? 72 hours? Uh, nah...
On a side note: the 'Meh Factor' should become an internationally recognised rating system.
He hit the nail on the head about DAOC.
Not so much on SWG. I played SWG for 2 months when it first released. I started playing again off and on about 2 years ago and enjoy it alot more now. I don't play a Jedi, I play a BH and Commando and they are both alot of fun. Next month I will be playing it again when SWG sends out the free 1 month invites for Feb.
The keys are expired because the game has been shut down. Hard to play a game with no servers, no matter what the lack of expiration date may otherwise imply!
Can't believe there are still people advocating EQ's style of PvE. Seriously? To those people: If this article didn't make you realize that you have no life, nothing ever will.
SEVENTY. TWO. HOURS.
Good article.
Awesome article. Felt like a journey back through time for me. I remember UO, Everquest, DAoC and SWG. You would think that most developers would have learned something from their initial designs; but, they seem to wing more towards that instant gratification group out there somewhere, meanwhile all the veteran gamers find themselves wondering between games like refugees.
The keys are expired because the game has been shut down. Hard to play a game with no servers, no matter what the lack of expiration date may otherwise imply!
well i was being sarcastic though if there is no expire key it wouldnt have been a bad idea to maybe give free time torwards another game or a free makeover in gw or something as the key was never used it cant be expired
/Agree. I played it because from 1999-2001 it was the best thing out .
Probably about 3 ;). I'd agree with you that the CU had the potential to make the game better, though, had they worked on fixing the bugs it created instead of scrapping it for the crappy NGE.
3 sounds about right. :-) I actually looked at the design document (diagram?) for the CU and it made a lot of sense. They were trying to more clearly define the roles of the different combat classes which needed doing and, as you pointed out Luxumaru, fixing and tuning that update would have made the game better but, lets face it, SOE was always more intersted in trying to add content that fix bugs.
To fix the end-game, I always thought they should have introduced a couple more uber classes that could take on the Jedi... Mandalorian Bounty Hunters & Dathomir Witches could have been good. Give them the same crazy Jedi grind and they could have made for interesting user creatable end-game content.
Before the NGE, I always saw WoW as a MMO trainer for SWG. I figured that when people got tired of WoW leading them around by the nose, the would migrate to the more free-form game that SWG offered. Clearly, I know nothing.
Here, as we see it, is the problem.
Next week: we attempt to establish we can do better!
WEll I have to agree SWG by far is the worst example of lets screw your player base, followed by tabula rasa.
Now putting eq2 in there, when we still got tons of folks who play it, and were releasing an xpac in just a few days I dont know how you clasify that as fail.
Great article. Guessing that first link in the UO section was supposed to go to a UO horror story, not the EQ 72-hour horror story?
But you have to keep in mind that there were two sides to EQ. The early part of the game, the first forty levels or so, were amazingly fun back in the first two or three years when there were still lots of people around at those levels to group with. The insanely un-fun parts were mostly confined to the high levels and that's why the game didn't go into decline untill the majority of the playerbase was reaching those levels and burning out on that crap.
Even then a lot of people, like myself, replayed the fun parts by starting alts untill the low/mid level population was too thin. But you can only do that so many times before you burn out on playing through the same stuff over and over and eventually there were no servers left with a good lower level population anyway.
Not to take away from your experience, but from my WoW experience with end-game (I haven't played end-game since before BC), I'm not sure WoW was (is?) better. Back with the 40-man raids, I burned out trying to keep up with the raiding schedule and my guild wasn't even hard-core. Not sure how much better it's become these days.
I point this out to ask why WoW hasn't suffered the same fate? Could it be different demographics?
EQ2 closed somewhere around half of its servers in its first year of production. It may not have been total failure, but it was a pretty big failure none the less.
Scott is spot on accurate about EQ2 having problems and flaming out. The overall mmo population was exploding in size while eq2 was dieing.
If you really look at the period Scott is talking about you will see just how much of the design concepts soe had to change with EQ2 in that 1st year. Combat revamp, quest revamp, tradeskill revamp, solo/group content revamp (several times), shared death, class archtype system revamped, failed faction war revamp, access quests, etc etc. EQ2 was a conceptual mess at release and even though it survived (as several games on the list have) the problems have held back the games potential, thus "flame out".
@OP
Excellent post and well played humor.
Thank you for mentioning the horrid epic weapon quest mechanics in everquest. There goes 10 grand in therapy.
Still have great times in those first few games though.
Probably about 3 ;). I'd agree with you that the CU had the potential to make the game better, though, had they worked on fixing the bugs it created instead of scrapping it for the crappy NGE.
I think the point for a lot of the people throwing fits over the SWG NGE (Yes, I was one.) was not the quality of the resulting game, but the fact that the game we'd tested, pre-ordered the CE for, purchased, and faithfully subscribed to no longer existed. It would be like telling everyone playing EQ, "Hey, guys, we're shutting you down, but we'll transfer your subscriptions to World of Warcraft." My "class" didn't even exist after the changes.
In other news... loved the article. I've played most of these and think the points are spot on. It was a nice bit of nostalgia, too.
3 sounds about right. :-) I actually looked at the design document (diagram?) for the CU and it made a lot of sense. They were trying to more clearly define the roles of the different combat classes which needed doing and, as you pointed out Luxumaru, fixing and tuning that update would have made the game better but, lets face it, SOE was always more intersted in trying to add content that fix bugs.
To fix the end-game, I always thought they should have introduced a couple more uber classes that could take on the Jedi... Mandalorian Bounty Hunters & Dathomir Witches could have been good. Give them the same crazy Jedi grind and they could have made for interesting user creatable end-game content.
Before the NGE, I always saw WoW as a MMO trainer for SWG. I figured that when people got tired of WoW leading them around by the nose, the would migrate to the more free-form game that SWG offered. Clearly, I know nothing.
3 that would admit it. Maybe 4. :p Actually, without SOE ever releasing hard numbers, most conservative extrapolations are around 2 to 10 times as many people hate it than like it. That's just going strictly by what kind of numbers there were guessed to be then vs. what kind there are guessed to be now.
gaidin6 - Unless you were privy to inside information, the design document you most likely saw (if it's the same one put up by GreenMarine the January before CU was released, please correct me if I'm wrong) was for something then and retroactively referred to as the CURB, or the Combat Update and Re-Balance. The CU (Combat "Upgrade") turned out to be something totally different that was in closed development while we were all gabbing on the forums about the CURB, and what was eventually released and promised to be made better. Seven months later, we had the NGE. And oh, how I WISH you would have been right in your WoW analysis.
Good article, Scott. In the MUDs I played in the before-times, there were typically 8 to 24 hour respawn times for boss MOBs that would just frustrate the piss out of everyone, especially since subsequent respawns after the MOB was first killed after server reset would often not produce any loot whatsoever, but I had no idea there was ever anything as heinous as what you describe in EQ and UO. As a final thought, I, for one, am proud of my angry spittle-flecked hatred of those who not only completely screwed up the game/world simulation known as Star Wars Galaxies, but refused to put it back, fix it, or give us any link to it. I continue to carry my angry spittle-flecked hatred for the company responsible, the parent company of the company responsible, those who played the old game and continue to play the new and somehow think it's better, and really anyone involved with the whole mess in any way that doesn't share my angry spittle-flecked hatred. In fact, the whole experience has just turned me into a bitter old cuss, unable to trust any MMO company and unwilling to settle for less than I had. So really, thanks to LucasArts and SOE, there's $15 less per month in this multi-billion-dollar industry than there otherwise would be. Oh plus the initial cost of the game(s) of course. Meh.
This article makes baby Jesus cry.
It also kills kittens each time anyone reads it.
I'm not making any of this up.
No really....part of the time reading it, I laughed, mostly because that's the best way to lick old wounds. Part of the time I WANTED to cry, but really just seethed with hostility and rage, because....you know....it's a defense mechanism for what really deep down....is immeasurable emotional hurt.
I'm just sayin'.....did you really have to be QUITE so spot on with the recounting of these tales of woe?
3 sounds about right. :-) I actually looked at the design document (diagram?) for the CU and it made a lot of sense. They were trying to more clearly define the roles of the different combat classes which needed doing and, as you pointed out Luxumaru, fixing and tuning that update would have made the game better but, lets face it, SOE was always more intersted in trying to add content that fix bugs.
To fix the end-game, I always thought they should have introduced a couple more uber classes that could take on the Jedi... Mandalorian Bounty Hunters & Dathomir Witches could have been good. Give them the same crazy Jedi grind and they could have made for interesting user creatable end-game content.
Before the NGE, I always saw WoW as a MMO trainer for SWG. I figured that when people got tired of WoW leading them around by the nose, the would migrate to the more free-form game that SWG offered. Clearly, I know nothing.
3 that would admit it. Maybe 4. :p Actually, without SOE ever releasing hard numbers, most conservative extrapolations are around 2 to 10 times as many people hate it than like it. That's just going strictly by what kind of numbers there were guessed to be then vs. what kind there are guessed to be now.
gaidin6 - Unless you were privy to inside information, the design document you most likely saw (if it's the same one put up by GreenMarine the January before CU was released, please correct me if I'm wrong) was for something then and retroactively referred to as the CURB, or the Combat Update and Re-Balance. The CU (Combat "Upgrade") turned out to be something totally different that was in closed development while we were all gabbing on the forums about the CURB, and what was eventually released and promised to be made better. Seven months later, we had the NGE. And oh, how I WISH you would have been right in your WoW analysis.
Good article, Scott. In the MUDs I played in the before-times, there were typically 8 to 24 hour respawn times for boss MOBs that would just frustrate the piss out of everyone, especially since subsequent respawns after the MOB was first killed after server reset would often not produce any loot whatsoever, but I had no idea there was ever anything as heinous as what you describe in EQ and UO. As a final thought, I, for one, am proud of my angry spittle-flecked hatred of those who not only completely screwed up the game/world simulation known as Star Wars Galaxies, but refused to put it back, fix it, or give us any link to it. I continue to carry my angry spittle-flecked hatred for the company responsible, the parent company of the company responsible, those who played the old game and continue to play the new and somehow think it's better, and really anyone involved with the whole mess in any way that doesn't share my angry spittle-flecked hatred. In fact, the whole experience has just turned me into a bitter old cuss, unable to trust any MMO company and unwilling to settle for less than I had. So really, thanks to LucasArts and SOE, there's $15 less per month in this multi-billion-dollar industry than there otherwise would be. Oh plus the initial cost of the game(s) of course. Meh.
YOur not the only one what SOE did to me and the wife, made me very untrusting of any MMO out there. I see the same mistakes happning with Turbine I try to warn folks as I already been there once, nobody wants to listen. I took a look at STO in no way would I even give them my cash. I still play one SOE game, I had to finally realize that it was not entire SOE's fault that the NGE happened they were marching to what Lucas arts wanted and that was to take the game to a console version. Otherwise why the need to compleetly nerf it down. So yes the entire experiance makes me very leary of any MMO and makes me very over grouchy when I see new stuff or changes that even remotely look like were going to get an NGE again.
this article will upset allot of ppl :)
Well to be perfectly fair...Asheron's Call 2 chat wasn't down for a straight two months. Just down for hours at a time on a near-daily basis for about two months. I remember, I was there....and I found TeamSpeak because of it.
The more honest answer as to why AC2 failed would be...Microsoft. Look up Eric Heimburg's blog. He was lead designer for AC2. He spelled out just how Microsoft completely screwed Turbine in terms of AC2.
Great article ... although at times painful to read for the obvious reason.
Eagerly awaiting the next instalment on " How To Fix All Of This Mess"
geez i don't think i would put EQ2 down as a failure. but i guess now if you don't have WoW-like Sub numbers ... you're a failure.
I really wanted to get into Tabula Rasa because I'm a longtime fan of the Ultima series; having played Ultima I-III on an old C-64 where I remember editing my characters stats with a hex editor... ahh, the good old days. :)
I just couldn't get into the game. Nothing about it grabbed me. I tried but... yich.
As for UO and Everquest, the games that started it all, yeah they did make a few mistakes - but it was to be expected. Both games were nothing short of ground-breaking. When World of Warcraft eventually came out as "The One MMO to Rule them All" nearly every other game had to make changes to keep subscribers that simply enhanced the enjoyability of the game - for example, the "grind" people complain about in Aion. NCSoft seems to be scrambling with double-xp weekends and constant changes to the system to give Western players used to rapid advancement more of what they want. Why are they doing this? Simply put, they're catering to the mass market consumer which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Ticking off the minority to please the majority is usually good business sense unless you want to cater to a niche market and leave it at that.
EQ2 is one of the best mmo's to play right now. The game had a few ups and downs early on just like every single mmo ever released. However right now it's a great game full of players from all over the world. Putting it in this "article" shows the lack of knowledge Jennings has. You say EQ2 failed then failed compared to what? WOW? Then every game pre and post WOW is a failure. Nothing he said was new regarding any of the games he listed.
/yawn
This is exactly what I was going to post. You got some of the games correct, but you obviously let the WoW fanboyism get ahead of you in your article. Eq2/Sony Has NOT failed. Do they still have a large stake in MMO? Yep. Do they still have subs? yep Do they still have a huge fanbase? Umm Hello SOE Fanfare.
Keep up the good articles, but try to keep the fanboy and the trolling out of the articles from now on.
wow, a story by staff i can agree with all points on.
i will concede that it is much easier to write a story about the spectacular failures of mmos than it is to write about success [still waiting for one (success)]
cant wait for part 2. there are many others i would add to this list, but for once, all your choices would make my list as well. (never got suckered by auto assault so ill take your word for it) .......unlike that crap story about the 5 best games which was a joke.
but seriously, a previous poster said it best about opening up old wounds. i think i cried a little bit reading the swg part.
This is exactly what I was going to post. You got some of the games correct, but you obviously let the WoW fanboyism get ahead of you in your article. Eq2/Sony Has NOT failed. Do they still have a large stake in MMO? Yep. Do they still have subs? yep Do they still have a huge fanbase? Umm Hello SOE Fanfare.
Keep up the good articles, but try to keep the fanboy and the trolling out of the articles from now on.
Do you know what an opinion piece is?
lol didnt know about the everquest being on news thing -that was b4 i was into mmos-
cant wait 4 the next article
Great article and spot on. But you missed The Matrix Online, what a mess that turned out to be. I would like to be a fly on the wall is the meeting in someones office after one of these debacles. Namely the SWG:NGE one. Whooo hooo! LOL!
I never really got to play EQ all that much maybe a few months but what I read sounds awesome. These ultra rare items are what is missing in modern MMO's. Now days everyone and their mom has the same awesome gear and its like oh wow you have the same thing as me. It really doesn't make you stand out anymore, your just another average Joe in the crowd. I understand that some people don't have time for all that jazz but for the people that do and want to get that legendary item I say let them have a choice to get it.. And if people bitch that its to hard tell them to nut up or shut up.
I also liked how in FFXI you could unlock different classes, while it wasn't as rare as those items sound it was nice for someone to say, "Wow cool you have Summoner and all the Avatars, man that is a hell of an accomplishment." Unlike WoW oh cool your a Death Knight yeah I have one of those to and so does my sister.
DAoC held around 250k subs from launch until around 11 months after TOA came out. It wasn't until 2 months before catacombs that the populations began to fall, slowly at first, then once the expansion came out, very rapidly. People can claim TOA killed the game, but the fact remains that they had over 90% of the numbers they had at launch over a year after the that expansion came out. What killed that game, finally, was Mythic catering to the loud mouthed minority who demanded their own server. The classic server pulled around 15-20% of the subs from the main servers. While that number is high, the 80-85% of the population base that said no thanks is the real story. If this expansion was so horrible, why would 80+ % of the population continue to play it when another place without it existed? The real problem there was that 20% was definitely a problem for the others left behind. I played that game from launch until '07 and the people left behind felt like the ship was sinking and it was. Morale was the problem just before the Catacombs expansion. The game had almost as many subs when Catacombs came out as the did when they launched but people had a serious blow to their morale and when the over powered classes of catacombs came out it was the straw that broke the camel's backs.
In that game, the best population indicators I saw over time were the numbers of people in the battlegrounds and RVR. I didn't see a noticable drop until the first 50's from catacombs started roaming the lands. People were leaving the game in a trickle at that point but a few months after that it became very obvious that people were leaving in droves. Yes, I understand that the loudest mouthed people that left were those that hated TOA so from an outsider's point of view, that was THE reason. But the sub numbers betray every word that comes out of their mouths. The FACT that the classic servers were empty when the final merge happened is just one more indicator that the true fans of the game, the ones that played TOA servers, the ones that still to this day keep the game alive, always outnumbered the ones who didn't like TOA.
To anyone that claims that TOA killed the game, in a way I guess they are right in that the people that didn't have it in them to spend two weeks to get the same gear as anyone else yelled just loud enough that Mythic thought they were the majority and ruined the game because of it. Google DAoC;s sub numbers for yourself and see that more people quit when they caved to the TOA haters than actually left to play on the classic servers.
Not to take away from your experience, but from my WoW experience with end-game (I haven't played end-game since before BC), I'm not sure WoW was (is?) better. Back with the 40-man raids, I burned out trying to keep up with the raiding schedule and my guild wasn't even hard-core. Not sure how much better it's become these days.
I point this out to ask why WoW hasn't suffered the same fate? Could it be different demographics?
WoW was definetly there as well before the first expansion. The raid gear grind was an utter soul crusher and it burned out a lot of good players. Burning Crusade cut down on the raid sizes and Wrath of the Lich King flipped the gear equation where gearing up is not that hard and can be done very casually. Raids are much shorter and the gar distribution much smoother with emblems and armor tokens. Although raiding is still the primary activity for endgame progression, it is way more accessible and does not require a strict raiding schedule unless you going for the hardmodes and the big achievements.
Great article. One of the best I have ever read on this website. Brought back good memories and some sad ones..
star wars galaxies wasn't only doomed because they completely revamped the game or because the players complained about it everywhere after the NGE was implemented without prior warning - swg:nge also failed because it was plagued with game-breaking bugs, stability and performance issues, as well as conflicting game mechanics with the old system.
A link to this article should be the standard response to those people telling others they need to "get over" X game from the past. In specific SWG. Not everyone still rages (though yes, some do, most of us don't) at that colossal screwup of screwups (how exactly is Smed still employed again?) but we do have long, elephant like memories. Most of us are capable of seeing the message sent there by SOE in that they will do what they want to do and make you absolutly zero guarantees of anything other than they are going to do whatever it is they want to. Your opinion doesn't matter. Most of us don't and won't conduct business with them ever again and rightfully so. There is no "missing out" factor to any future game they make as there is no reasonable guarantee of some measure of reliable gameplay mechanics/features.
Like I and many others have pointed out time and again, and like Mr. Jennings has also illustrated (which I guess it took for some people to actually look at and digest the situation and see it's screwed up; the rest of our laymen words weren't good enough), a company that will sell you an expansion knowing full well that a week or two later it'll be obsolete in terms of gameplay does not care about doing the right thing by their customers. Why in the world anyone would give them a chance on any future project is beyond me. A fool and a masochist are parted with two things: money and dignity.
Great, great article.
Good read.
ahaha those where great. I loved how the old MMO's decided to follow each other with bad decisions (nowdays they just copy the good ideas and fail hard at it).
SWG was a good pick and tbh i think you will be right about the future game institutes telling people to never ever do something that stupid.
The pre-NGE SWG had a ton of issues and the game was bleeding customers because of it. Instead of fixing them straight up they opted for the NGE instead which still did not fix most of those problems and killed a lot of the good stuff that allowed peopel to put up with the bad stuff.
No mention of your own company killing the second most successful mmo series in the west? It's strange. The Lineage is still going strong in Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, but it is dead dead dead in the west. Not supporting your community to the point where your pr guy is swapped out every few months and whole offices are wiped off the map after killing the golden goose sure sounds like a legendary failure of legends to me.
But I guess that hits too close to home. After all, that failure is being repeated right now in aion. Looking forward to some juicy ncsoft gossip after you get fired again :)
As far as my memory currently goes, best read I've had here.
A truly excellent read
Ahh the old EQ days...The guy that made the news was NOTHING compared to how my guild got screwed over. So I had a guild member waiting on ragefire and when we got him to spawn we all were ready to take him down. But in the end my guild which was 44 members that logged in to help all died. But came back going for another try and failed again. And while everyone was waiting to get a rez to go for a third try, another guild showed up, and took him down. The sad part was....it only took ONE GROUP of the other guild to take down Ragefire while my guild had SEVEN groups. Talk about demoralizing. But of course in the end we were able to get him, and for the guild who showed up and took the kill. Well their cleric gotten his epic piece stripped away. But then again the guild never was the same again.
Coupla comments on the EQ thing.
1. I played EQ for years, but *never* did the epic quest or the endgame raid stuff. And I don't think I was alone. So I really believe there are some of us to whom this horror just doesn't apply.
2. On the other hand, those who did participate --- pretty much knew what they were getting into. And they still did it. In fact I was in more than one guild where several friends left because they wanted to do the endgame. It seems to me that there is that possibility that getting a truly rare item that takes a monumental amount of time and effort does appeal to some people. Not me, but to some. Otherwise why would they keep doing it?
You know this particular "fail" comment is one that particularly bothers me. Clearly the writer didn't like part of EQ. OK, so either (1) he didn't DO it, so no problem, right? OR (2) he DID do it nevertheless, realizing what it was, and suffered terribly because of it...which is a comment on the game....or on him?
Or does the MMORPG.com only care to discuss what the second kind of people (2) would do? Those people need some help, IMHO.
I very much liked the article. Very funny read, esp. the comments on Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa (But it looks like some of the links need to be fixed)
This article emphasizes that remembering the past is very important for the MMORPG community. The memories here are way too short.
On that subject, let's not forget Star Wars Galaxies was losing thousands of players a month *before* the NGE release as described in this blog from a SWG developer who worked on the game for 5 years.
rubenfield.com/
The OP's article neglects to point this out the loss of pre-NGE players, but the point that major changes should not be done to a MMORPG after release is still valid.
Being placed in a position to consider such a major change after launch in the first place, however, means your game already has horrendous, fundamental problems. What SWG shows is that there isn't any way to fix them at that point.
This is exactly what I was going to post. You got some of the games correct, but you obviously let the WoW fanboyism get ahead of you in your article. Eq2/Sony Has NOT failed. Do they still have a large stake in MMO? Yep. Do they still have subs? yep Do they still have a huge fanbase? Umm Hello SOE Fanfare.
Keep up the good articles, but try to keep the fanboy and the trolling out of the articles from now on.
EQ2 is starting to get better now that my character has finally started to get towards the end of the level curve... However, all the "old" early level content that has not been stripped or revamped really was grating on my nerves and ability to struggle through it.
To be fair to EQ1.
Not all class's epics were nearly as life ending to obtain, involved retarded mechanics obtain, or were even "required". Some were even detrimental to use. EQ1 death to me was when they decided that in order to be a grouping player ya needed to also be a raiding player.
Not to take away from your experience, but from my WoW experience with end-game (I haven't played end-game since before BC), I'm not sure WoW was (is?) better. Back with the 40-man raids, I burned out trying to keep up with the raiding schedule and my guild wasn't even hard-core. Not sure how much better it's become these days.
I point this out to ask why WoW hasn't suffered the same fate? Could it be different demographics?
I'd be lying if I claimed to have an answer to that. All I can do is speculate.
It might be simply because there was no new WoW to pull people away from WoW when things were at their worst. I haven't played WoW enough to really know what the endgame is like but I used to read their forums occassionly and I know there was a lot of raider / non-raider hatered flying around there once upon a time. I also know that you don't see that so much anymore and they have tried to make their raiding a little less horrible plus give people other things to do at end-game. Also, as I understand it, raiding in WoW was never as God awfull as it was in EQ. It was never more than 40 people, for example, whereas in EQ raids often consisted of upwards of 100 people. And in EQ you might start a raid at 7:00 A.M. Saturday morning and if you were lucky you might be done sometime Saturday afternoon but you could just as easily still be sitting there doing that same raid at 4:00 A.M. on Sunday morning. It happened that way sometimes and it was just unbearable. Whoever the devs were who thought that shit was fun for people should have been taken out in the street and beaten with a keyboard.
So, anyway, maybe it's just that the WoW devs had time to adjust and the common sense to do it. The EQ devs went raid crazy and refused to even acknowledge that there was a significant percentage of the playerbase who didn't like raiding (I would say the vast majority but I can't prove that). Then other popular games came along like DAOC, SWG, and finally WoW. The EQ devs still hadn't turned away from their raid-or-quit mentality so people started quiting when other options came along.
I know I would have gone to DAOC when it opened but at that point I was feeling too burned out in general and didn't want to start a new mmorpg.
Who knows what might have happened to WoW if a new, reasonably well polished and fun game had come out and if the WoW developers had been slower to adapt. Even now I think there are a heck of a lot of people who would leave WoW if any other game would come out that wasn't F-ed up in one way or another (or several ways). Look at AoC; a million + people rushed to try that game and it could have been huge..but..well, you know. And WAR, again there were hordes of people just itching for the "new thing" but WAR fell short.
So, I don't know, and I'm having trouble not drifting off into ranting just thinking about this.
I am going to go a little against the grain here:
The article reads a little like one of MMORPG.com's "Top 5 MMOs that ... whatevah..." lists?
I thought the content was good... but the "Top 5" list typw presentation is not something we need more of on this site.
Will be interested to see next week's article all the same.
EQ2 closed somewhere around half of its servers in its first year of production. It may not have been total failure, but it was a pretty big failure none the less.
Scott is spot on accurate about EQ2 having problems and flaming out. The overall mmo population was exploding in size while eq2 was dieing.
If you really look at the period Scott is talking about you will see just how much of the design concepts soe had to change with EQ2 in that 1st year. Combat revamp, quest revamp, tradeskill revamp, solo/group content revamp (several times), shared death, class archtype system revamped, failed faction war revamp, access quests, etc etc. EQ2 was a conceptual mess at release and even though it survived (as several games on the list have) the problems have held back the games potential, thus "flame out".
@OP
Excellent post and well played humor.
Thank you for mentioning the horrid epic weapon quest mechanics in everquest. There goes 10 grand in therapy.
Still have great times in those first few games though.
all those changes listed there is what I hate about WoW.....that games success making $OE change EQ2 gradually to WoWs layout. loved that you had to do alittle scenary to get access to the next unknown land ( they should have made it so alts got automatic access since became hard to find ppl for them).
the sub class change I have no understanding for.....who cared that you started up as a warrior or sorcerer then at lvl 20 got to choose....chooses being some of the most fun in an adventure game - something EQ2 no longer is at all....to me putting EQ2 on this list is because they stupify the game to extremes....the current game is nothing but instance grinding which is belonging to solo player games
yep very frustrated atm that "my MMO" is going down the water, went from a great adventure game at release to an gear focused crap game....and again, the bastards introduce BGs, even if there already is a PvP server
oh and yea they had been abit over confident every single eq1 player would come over to eq2...why they had an early server close down
I had heard of all these tragedies/disasters ... but never quite knew what they were about until i read this article o.0
quite an eye opener ...
Disagree about the Trammel being a bad idea. People shouldn't be forced to PvP and a lot of people didn't know that in UO you could pretty much be killed at any time. It was just a bad idea for the bullying types because then they'd only have each other to kill.
That said, awesome and very well-written article. Loved it.
Looking forward to the next part.
I think the point for a lot of the people throwing fits over the SWG NGE (Yes, I was one.) was not the quality of the resulting game, but the fact that the game we'd tested, pre-ordered the CE for, purchased, and faithfully subscribed to no longer existed. It would be like telling everyone playing EQ, "Hey, guys, we're shutting you down, but we'll transfer your subscriptions to World of Warcraft." My "class" didn't even exist after the changes.
Yeah I agree with both of you, and Charity, When you put it that way, I totally understand. Kinda makes me regret being a CU fanboi :(. /shame on SOE.
read it right what you talking about is EQ>1< not 2....no pictures of eq2 showed here...and never were 72 hour camps in eq2.....eq2 shouldnt even be on this list, they havent closed servers because of ppl leaving, but for the ppl that never came....if wanted to put up a fail on eq2 it should be SOE remaking it to WoW
Ahh Everquest. The cleric epic (Ragefire) was pretty bad, but there are also some other horror stories you can tell too. On our server we had a list of people needing Ragefire (based on order you completed the parts up to him). To get Ragefire you had to camp the spot, keeping it clear (which required at least one other person, but usually a full group) for the 72 hours hours. If you logged off and Ragefire spawned you'd forfeit your spot. I believe if you wiped on Ragefire you'd forfeit your spot too. The list had well over 30 people on it, which meant you had to wait 4+ months (optimally) to get Ragefire. The epic was almost a requirement too for end game raiders.
The other epics were bad (but not quite as bad) with plenty of 3 day+ spawns to camp.
Worse than cleric epics though were the attunements. Veeshan's Peak, Sleeper's Tomb, Vex Thal, etc. With Sleeper's Tomb for instance you'd have to kill 3-7 day spawn timers (I don't remember the exact number that spawned - about 4 or 5?) and you'd get about 3-4 members keyed each kill. It would take a very long time to key 40 members especially if you weren't a member of the top guild on your server. The top guilds would typically dominate the spawns not even allowing the other guilds a chance to even TRY them (and they weren't easy bosses - expect multiple wipes on your first attempts), so it could take months to gear your guild for Sleeper's Tomb. Vex Thal was bad also, requiring each member to spend about 2 weeks (sometimes much longer) worth of solo and small group questing ending in a battle with a raid boss that would also be dominated by the top guilds. There were special bosses in Akheva Ruins too that almost no guilds bothered with (even the end game guilds) because the attunement was so awful it could easily take a year to get a decent sized raid in there.
Oh, and everyone, not just your tanks, had to farm resist gear as well as items that gave you buffs instantly on click (to combat against buff dispelling bosses). This meant more camping of ridiculous rare spawns. If you wanted to raid in Everquest you had to be prepared to spend at least 12 hours a day playing or you'd be stuck in a guild that would always be behind the curve and almost bullied (competition for spawns on everything) even further behind the curve.
Kylrathin,
You are correct, it was the CURB document. And, your reminder explains wiy the CU (a) didn't reflect the document and (b) was so poorly recieved. As I recall, the CU was released to the test server and pushed to production in two weeks, too.
Thanks!
Your not the only one what SOE did to me and the wife, made me very untrusting of any MMO out there. I see the same mistakes happning with Turbine I try to warn folks as I already been there once, nobody wants to listen. I took a look at STO in no way would I even give them my cash. I still play one SOE game, I had to finally realize that it was not entire SOE's fault that the NGE happened they were marching to what Lucas arts wanted and that was to take the game to a console version. Otherwise why the need to compleetly nerf it down. So yes the entire experiance makes me very leary of any MMO and makes me very over grouchy when I see new stuff or changes that even remotely look like were going to get an NGE again.
And I should point out that I am also one of those who still expounds spittle-based hatred over the changes... to the point that I will not buy ANY product with a Sony logo... not just their gaming products.
Many, many people at SOE have conceeded that it was a mistake. I can't, for the life of me, understand why they wouldn't back rev ONE of the servers for the people who have been so vocal about wanting it.
Great article. I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed an article that much, on any site.
Also, am I the only one that wants
TABULA RASA: IN RETROSPECT, BLANK SLATES NOT THE GREATEST OF PLANS
...on a t-shirt? :D
I had a small chuckle over the Star Wars thing.
In part of the link provided the lady says something about all the hard work they put in and then the game/community being taken over by 10yo....so she went to WoW?*
I didn't play any of those games (UO I didnt play on the real server), but it did made me appreciate lotro that much more *smile*
*read quick, may have misread
Although I wasn't a MUDer myself, I had a lot of friends who were and I remember them shaking their heads at UO when it was first announced, annoyed that its developers were completely ignoring years of hard-earned experience out in the MUD world about what did or didn't work in open PvP. The fact that the game didn't entirely crash and burn was foreshadowing of just how large the potential market was.
Perhaps the most telling indication of the legendary nature of the failure is the number of people, who when looking over a new game, check what the PvP rules/restrictions are before even reading the rest of the review.
Wow!!! 6 stars out of 5. Prolly one of the best reads yet.
I LOLed at the comment about UO 'At which point, the quest mob spawns, and then you kill him. At which point - thanks to how Everquest's looting worked - anyone nearby could loot the corpse for the quest item. ANYONE.'
Many (most? of the early muds had this 'feature'. This included your corpse. We all put up with it because there was nothing better. I was in guild called Balance which dedicated itself to griefing griefers. When we were on in force the griefers stayed in Midgard in a safe room 2n of recall. Later a no pk helper guild was formed which entailed endless hunts for eq requested and 'help with ( read do) quests and high lev mobs for me. That got old real fast! I could run Underdark blindfolded ;P The mud was gone after about 3 years..not bad for a freebie.
I opted not to play UO.
The NEVER DO THIS was just hilarios!!! Hard to understand what they were thinking. Geez...Lucasarts is smarter than that...aren't they?.....guess not!
I totally agree with SWG's NGE being one of the WORST failures to this very day. Its a glaring demonstration of just how short sighted Dev's and suits can be. To this day, I still have an image of the conversation between Vir Cotto and the shadow emissary Mr Morden.
With good old Smed in the role of Mr. Morden...
"I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"
OMG I would so play a B5 MMO. and yes smedly as MR. Morden I totaly agree. But I also have hsi counterpart in lotro called Jeff stefell, he too is cut from the same block.
Ok first of all, this article really, really entertained me. I'm still smiling, and had a great laugh.
Second though, and perhaps more important, someone actually gets it. Why does this surprise me? Because from a lot of the press releases and marketting crap that clogs the internet, you'd think that players were making all this up just to piss themselves off, for fun.
Yes, this stuff really, really did happen, and players were peeved, and the games are in the toilet. It ain't rocket science. Someone's just got to have the guts to call it like it is. Then, and only then, can anything actually be "done about it." Some game companies seem so steeped in denial that they haven't even taken the first step.
P.S. Guerilla marketting ain't the answer.
Funny article. Great read. Looking forward to the next one.
And talk about great timing: On the same day of perhaps the confirmation of another spectacular MMO FAILURE - Cities XL's Planet Offer.
.
Interesting to see that he left out the greatest failure that isn't ten years old... Warhammer.
Careful about complaining about short memories with SWG. As I recall, a large part of the bleeding you refer to was because of the CU. As I was reminded of earlier, SOE played a shell game with it. They provided the CURB to the test servers (which I did not partake in) and after testing for an extensive period of time, receiving tons of feedback from the community on how to improve it, SOE chose to, as they had done time and again, ignore their player base, came up with the CU and pushed it out with very little testing time and against the player bases concerns.
Of course, it broke everything combat related and needed a few of patches to fix. This was the last straw for a number of the core testers and players who had stuck with the game despite receiving this treatment from SOE for years (in some cases). Many felt that they had put hours of testing in for the company and provided feedback the company REQUESTED for nothing. SOE continued to ignore requests to fix bugs that had plagued the game since release. You can only kick a dog so many times....
As for the link you quote, and the author's thoughts on 200K subs being nothing, I think he fails to recall that it was a top 5 game before the CU and that 250K subs was respectable for the time.
The CU should have been enough of a warning for anyone at SOE to understand that the NGE was a VERY BAD idea.
Personally, I think the reason SOE/LucasArts felt compelled to try the NGE wasn't so much that there were "horrendous, fundamental problems" (not saying there weren't issues, there were!) so much as the business guys were standing around looking at WoW kick the crap out of them in subs almost out of the gate.
Someone must have said "how the <<expletive deleted>> is this happening with an MMO based on such an insignificant IP (compared to Star Wars). That guy didn't understand there was a fundamental difference between sandbox worlds and theme parks (heck, no one really did back then!) and they panicked. This lead to the request to "re-imagine" the game and anyone asked to do that is going to look at the juggernaut that WoW was (and continues to be) for inspiration.
What everyone seems to have missed was the fact that if you break the faith with your community (and the NGE wasn't the first or even second time SOE did this in SWG), no one will trust you again, including the potential new players you hope to attract.
I also think that lack of trust is what ultimately killed The Matrix and crippled Vanguard. The Matrix was a dog's breakfast on release, no question but SOE customer support completely killed it with their brutal service levels. By the time Vanguard came out, the announcement that SOE would be involved made anyone with ANY connection to SWG/The Matrix ran screaming from it. I personally have a LE box for Vanguard that I've never played.
Again, I'm sure if my memory has failed me (again!), someone here will point it out. I'm up there with Lum in age!
I'd be lying if I claimed to have an answer to that. All I can do is speculate.
It might be simply because there was no new WoW to pull people away from WoW when things were at their worst. I haven't played WoW enough to really know what the endgame is like but I used to read their forums occassionly and I know there was a lot of raider / non-raider hatered flying around there once upon a time. I also know that you don't see that so much anymore and they have tried to make their raiding a little less horrible plus give people other things to do at end-game. Also, as I understand it, raiding in WoW was never as God awfull as it was in EQ. It was never more than 40 people, for example, whereas in EQ raids often consisted of upwards of 100 people. And in EQ you might start a raid at 7:00 A.M. Saturday morning and if you were lucky you might be done sometime Saturday afternoon but you could just as easily still be sitting there doing that same raid at 4:00 A.M. on Sunday morning. It happened that way sometimes and it was just unbearable. Whoever the devs were who thought that shit was fun for people should have been taken out in the street and beaten with a keyboard.
So, anyway, maybe it's just that the WoW devs had time to adjust and the common sense to do it. The EQ devs went raid crazy and refused to even acknowledge that there was a significant percentage of the playerbase who didn't like raiding (I would say the vast majority but I can't prove that). Then other popular games came along like DAOC, SWG, and finally WoW. The EQ devs still hadn't turned away from their raid-or-quit mentality so people started quiting when other options came along.
I know I would have gone to DAOC when it opened but at that point I was feeling too burned out in general and didn't want to start a new mmorpg.
Who knows what might have happened to WoW if a new, reasonably well polished and fun game had come out and if the WoW developers had been slower to adapt. Even now I think there are a heck of a lot of people who would leave WoW if any other game would come out that wasn't F-ed up in one way or another (or several ways). Look at AoC; a million + people rushed to try that game and it could have been huge..but..well, you know. And WAR, again there were hordes of people just itching for the "new thing" but WAR fell short.
So, I don't know, and I'm having trouble not drifting off into ranting just thinking about this.
Sorry! Didn't mean to fuel a rant. From my other posts, you can see that I'm not immune to the concept!
Thanks for the perspective! Despite being the jaded old fart that I am, I'm ever hopeful that MMO devs & designers may stumble accross a thread like this and find a nugget of wisdom in it that will make some future game better. :-)
all those changes listed there is what I hate about WoW.....that games success making $OE change EQ2 gradually to WoWs layout. loved that you had to do alittle scenary to get access to the next unknown land ( they should have made it so alts got automatic access since became hard to find ppl for them).
the sub class change I have no understanding for.....who cared that you started up as a warrior or sorcerer then at lvl 20 got to choose....chooses being some of the most fun in an adventure game - something EQ2 no longer is at all....to me putting EQ2 on this list is because they stupify the game to extremes....the current game is nothing but instance grinding which is belonging to solo player games
yep very frustrated atm that "my MMO" is going down the water, went from a great adventure game at release to an gear focused crap game....and again, the bastards introduce BGs, even if there already is a PvP server
oh and yea they had been abit over confident every single eq1 player would come over to eq2...why they had an early server close down
The access quests I was referring to were the ones where a rare drop key would open access to some sub zone of a little dungeon. Some of the design flaws with it was that everyone in the group had to have their own key to get in. The keys would usually drop off mobs that were 5 levels higher than the area it opened and the gear that dropped off the mobs in the special zones was usually a few levels lower than the area.
Long story short it was a mess.
The subclass change happened, because people didn't enjoy grinding the same 20 levels to see if they would like a different variation of the class they already tried out.
That would be an awesome tee!
(1) This article talks about the release problems of eq2, not what it is doing today. A game can launch and have mechanics that are failures which needed to be removed or redesigned. It doesn't mean the game is closing down.
Keep in mind soe rushed eq2 to market unfinished just so they could compete with wow head to head. This isn't about having wow numbers, but at the same time closing servers within a year after release is a failure and the reason people were leaving was because of the condition of the game and its mechanics.
(2) The entire point of this article is about games the failures caused by certain aspects of a game. EQ2 at release was chock full of terrible designs. Soe really thought they hit a homerun with eq2 at release and were going to clobber wow.
(3) There are millions and millions of new players who have joined the mmo market over the last several years that have little to no exposure with soe. You are looking at the result of a companies actions on their playerbase and trying to make it the cause of their problems.
The only thing that is holding eq2 back is eq2.
"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."
FU Nancy Macintyre
FU Lucas Arts
FU SOE
Yes they deserve to die! and I hope they burn in hell!
The real problem with eq2 wasn't so much to do with its early gameplay but that fact that the average 2004 era computer couldn'd handle the graphics. A lot of people who signed up for eq2 couldn't really play it because of super low FPS so of course the Subscriptions dropped off after the initial months. FPS is not a problem anymore as PC hardware has had time to catch up. Other than that eq2 was and still is one of the best games out there.
I really enjoyed EQ2's class structure on release, and lost interest when it changed. Lineage2 had something similar, and I liked it then too. I still enjoy the defection and good/evil aspect of EQ2... or at least it was there last time I played.
EQ2's survival doesn't negate SOE's original failure - indeed SOE's capacity for driving off their own players appears to have weakened a little with EQ2 - the game is much better than it was, but that's only after persistent and dramatic redesign.
With EQ, I would have widened the 'failure' evidence to include:
OP your obvious looked that up about AC2 but dont know jack shit what happen and why AC2 failed it have btw runned for 3 years.
AC2 was a very good mmo and it surtenly not failed becouse of chat was disabled.
GET YOUR FACT'S straight dont spread false information around the net.
when players are given the tools to create, they can often come up with some spectacular results. SWG had it Pre-CU and Eve online has it now.... i really dont know why the figure of 200k was considered a failure, except of course, if your greedy.. Eve has currently around 350k active subs, its not successful on the WoW scale perhaps, but it is successful!
SWG for me was a great game, it was successful, if with its own faults that a little bit of tweaking/balancing would have taken care of.. that was destroyed by Envy.. SWG will never recover from the NGE, theres just not enough of the game left to work with.
Very informative post Evasia. Why are you holding backs with the facts that Scott Jennings apparently has to get straight.
Instead of bashing the excellent article with zero information trash and wasting our time, do us a favor and give us some information.
So why did AC2 fail? Maybe a list of points would be nice.
Thanks.
hmm, there are so many more examples... I hope the next article covers the failiers.. of mmo's of this decade, and the continued predictable failyers of MMO's currently being developed.
when players are given the tools to create, they can often come up with some spectacular results. SWG had it Pre-CU and Eve online has it now.... i really dont know why the figure of 200k was considered a failure, except of course, if your greedy.. Eve has currently around 350k active subs, its not successful on the WoW scale perhaps, but it is successful!
SWG for me was a great game, it was successful, if with its own faults that a little bit of tweaking/balancing would have taken care of.. that was destroyed by Envy.. SWG will never recover from the NGE, theres just not enough of the game left to work with.
And when SWKOTOR comes out they will finaly put a nail in SWG coffin. How this game even has subscribers to this day is a surpirse. When I am playing EQ2, I can have friends cross server/cross game even. I only see 1 or 2 folks logging in over there out of the 200 plus that I have in my friends list. Most moved to other games.
This article was spot on! I see SWG was saved as the 'Grand Finale' for this master piece and rightfully so.
$OE was never much interested in directing resources to fix SWG or to capitalize on the unique and innovative system already in place. Resources were continually directed to unwanted revamps (even the clandestinely created NGE) and cash grabbing expansions that ushered in these unwanted changes (the exception being JTL).
Even after four years, it doesn't matter what WoWesque content, gimmicks or card games scams are bolted onto the NGE, the game continues to decline. It also doesn't matter what watered down content from earlier versions of SWG is re-introduced - - the dumbed-down NGE core game is not what paying players want, and the closed and dying servers attest to that.
How $OE believed the catastrophic failure of losing 200k paying players practically overnight due to the unwanted NGE was going to lead to an even larger, more profitable playerbase is beyond all reason. How a company responds to massive failure tells another story - and not a very pretty one as far as $OE goes.
It's because guys like this makeing claims that these games are Failures that new games are so afraid to try anything new.
There were only 2 games in his list that were Failures AA and SB the rest made a very good showing and some are still alive and kicking in this day of WOW and WOW wannabes.
If you are so great and know everything about MMO's and what MMO fans want then why dont you make your own game??
OOO Right it would be a Failure in your own opinion.
Ehmm what? AC2 was shut down. Tabula Rasa was shut down. The rest in that list that is still running today, is struggling to stay afloat. With absolute minimum resources spend. Just to keep it running.
Plus, he didn't say that all the mentioned games shutted down. As Everquest 2 managed to recover with the Echoes of Faydwar expansion. Wich was one of the best and most expansive MMO expansions to date.
Cheers
Very informative post Evasia. Why are you holding backs with the facts that Scott Jennings apparently has to get straight.
Instead of bashing the excellent article with zero information trash and wasting our time, do us a favor and give us some information.
So why did AC2 fail? Maybe a list of points would be nice.
Thanks.
That list could go on and on... But the high points. One, it wasn't AC1(with an improved graphics engine), that turned off a lot of the existing player base, who expected it to be. Next, there was the *endless* series of "issues" major and minor. Some are only to be expected at the launch of a new game. But breaking the entire chat system, the combat system, the guild system, missing items from inventory(data base system), just to name a few was a bit much. Not only that, but those issues played musical chairs for months and months and months. All the while Microsoft and Turbine engaged in finger pointing at each other.
It was finally too much. Just to add the cherry on the top of the cake, Turbine closed the game down, not that long after selling many of us the expansion. That left a very bitter taste in many peoples mouths to this very day.
Oh how right you are; I will never forgive SOE for what they did to SWG. And I'm stopping now before I go off on a rabid rant...
The list isn't about total and complete failures, but rather things there were failures to various different degrees. Even a successful game can do things that are a failure or represent a bad aspect of mmos.
Scott Jennings You may want to read up a bit before you go telling people to go make mmos.
In my opinion AC2 failed because they took everything that was great about AC and threw it straight out the window, instead choosing to go with; a more 'EQ' style system with classes and skill trees, invisible walls, linear game play... etc
It was still an enjoyable game, but it just wasn't 'as' good as the original. Server populations were never very high.
What really pissed me off about that game was the fact that they released an expansion weeks before shutting down. The bastards had to know they were that close to the toilet, they knew the expansion sales wouldn't be enough to save them, but they just had to squeze every last dime out of those of us who supported the game.
To me this is right up there with the NGE in 'fail factor'.
The early problems of eq2 were varied and many and all had a hand in the decline of the game and it never reaching its potential.
The performance was just one more problem on top of a pile of problems and it was the result of a specific choice soe made. Soe decided to make a game with beyond start of the arts graphics and then cut the legs out from under any pc that had a decent chance of running it by coding the game engine to ignore the graphics card and push everything on the processor.
If the game was coded properly, then an average 2004 era pc could have run the game.
Who in their right mind purposefully rushes to release a game they know will perform like crap and their plan to fix it is hope, yes hope, technology catches up to the games needs in the future. That is an epic level failure on the part of management.
Ehmm what? AC2 was shut down. Tabula Rasa was shut down. The rest in that list that is still running today, is struggling to stay afloat. With absolute minimum resources spend. Just to keep it running.
Plus, he didn't say that all the mentioned games shutted down. As Everquest 2 managed to recover with the Echoes of Faydwar expansion. Wich was one of the best and most expansive MMO expansions to date.
Cheers
1st off I never said just 2 of the games shut down.
And were is it said that a game has to last forever to be a success??
Most of the games in his list were a success for what they were and filled a roll in the MMO world. Just because you or I do not like a game does not mean it was not a success. I hated Tabula Rasa but for its short lived life it had some die hard fans so for them the game was a success.
Now I am not saying just because a game had a few fans it is a success but lets look at a few of games in his list,
UO was a great success and even after Tram was released it still had alot of fans even in the age of 3D
SWG ( even tho I did not like it ) was a great success for scifi fans and yes NGE ( which was planed and approved by LA and was not all SOE's fault) did help kill alot of subs there were still a fair number of players that liked the game.
EQ still had a small following but was the BIG DOG til WoW came around.
Did things change in these games? YES
Were they for the best? well depends on who you ask
But change has to happen... and just because someone does not like a change does not mean the game is a Failure.
(1) This article talks about the release problems of eq2, not what it is doing today. A game can launch and have mechanics that are failures which needed to be removed or redesigned. It doesn't mean the game is closing down.
Keep in mind soe rushed eq2 to market unfinished just so they could compete with wow head to head. This isn't about having wow numbers, but at the same time closing servers within a year after release is a failure and the reason people were leaving was because of the condition of the game and its mechanics.
(2) The entire point of this article is about games the failures caused by certain aspects of a game. EQ2 at release was chock full of terrible designs. Soe really thought they hit a homerun with eq2 at release and were going to clobber wow.
(3) There are millions and millions of new players who have joined the mmo market over the last several years that have little to no exposure with soe. You are looking at the result of a companies actions on their playerbase and trying to make it the cause of their problems.
The only thing that is holding eq2 back is eq2.
so basically because eq2 chose to adapt and redesign based on its CUSTOMERS complaints its fail? give me a break. if anything that should show you the quality of SOE, that they aren't stubborn like some other game companies and will work with their community in order to make them happy.
as for hitting a homerun, they probably thought they were, they didn't realize how "casual" this market would become. lets face it when EQ2 came out, while it was not as "hardcore" as EQ1 .... it still had hardcore elements. forced interdependency, spirit shards, group exp loss and little to no solo content in most quest lines. they still thought that MMO players played this genre to work together ... until WoW came out and basically presented the Massive Single Player online RPG. then they had to restructure their game to adapt to the new MSPORPG genre.
as for 3, yet those millions and millions have the internet, know sites like this and others where SOE is proclaimed as the devil by the certified stupid and the SWG "vets" who can't get over what lucas arts forced SOE to do. so my point still stands if Blizzard or Bioware or even Verant had their named stamped on EQ2 it would be considered the best MMO out there.
because thats what it is, its the best MMO out there.
Nope, what ruined DAoC was definatly Trials of Atlantis combined with New Frontiers, while New Frontiers was a noble project, it was too drastic, coupled with ToA was the demise of DAoC.
By the time Catacombs released, the damage had already been done. Seriously, if you think warlocks had anything to do with it you have no clue.
Now the actual drop in subs came right before Catacombs, because people were actually playing ToA and getting all the goodies, then they had the honeymoon period with NF, but then the bubble bursted and WoW released, it was a triple hit :
TOA + NF + WoW, and DAoC never recovered. If DAoC never had released ToA nor NF but instead small incremental updates not disturbing the balance between PvE and RvR and only tweaking old frontiers instead of totally remaking it, it would have been much more hardened to sustain WoW, and would have grown slowly like EVE did.
To the OP, you make my heart bleed ...
DAoC and SWG, two of the biggest epic adventures, now ruined, and all what is left are the grand tales of times long gone.
/cry
(1) Seriously? Quality? That is like saying you bought a new car that didn't function well and most of the systems incomplete, but you are impressed by the quality of the company every time to take it to the repair shop.
Again you are looking at the effect and trying to make it the cause. People complained and left, because eq2 was loaded with failure at release. The redesigns were not something initiated by quality. They were in response to a lack of quality.
Also I think if you look at the history of changes in EQ2 you will find soe wasn't responding to what its players wanted, but what soe thought new potential players wanted. That is why you see so many soe customers complaining of the "wowification" of their game and similar claims. Again, this isn't a company known for listening to its players.
(2) This isn't about casual at all. EQ2 was a disjointed unfinished game that lacked direction and polish, because it was intentionally rushed to market to beat the competition by a few weeks. The result was that game crashed during a period when the mmo market was exploding. If 3 million people join the market and you have to close down servers, you are doing something wrong.
(3) Sites like this are just as full of people calling blizzard the devil and how horrible wow is, but that doesn't seem to stop wow from being successful.
Do you even understand why blizzard and bioware have great reputations? They make great games. If bioware or blizzard had their name on eq2 it wouldn't have released in the sad condition that it was and it would not have spent the next several years constantly changing design directions trying to find a market of players that would be interested in playing the game. Neither of those companies find it acceptable to push broken and unfinished products to the market. Soe has a long and ugly history of screwing things up and some of it intentionally.
Like I said already, great games sell themselves. Somehow I don't think such a masterpiece is being held back by a small handful of angry former customers.
Usually I stay out of all of this. I read the articles, reflect, and move on about my business. And as soon as I saw the title of the article, I knew the kind of responses that were going to be here. So from a business point of veiw, mad props to the author for opening up a can of worms that will boost the hell out of traffic here. Since I have finally opened my mouth for the first time in a gaming forum in many years, I will say a couple things I guess.
1) You forgot Matrix Online... Beautiful concept at first, everyone was really getting into it. But you couldn't run those live events forever. Used to have a blast in there, but once that decline started, it continued ever so rapidly. With something so promising, epically failing, so should have been on that list.
2) Auto Assault - imho the game was marketed very poorly. Myself and those who played, absolutley loved the game. A small known fact, but a group of players, after the game closed, got ahold of the source code, spent weeks going through and working out bugs, and then presented it back to NC Soft asking for nothing in return but they open it back up. They were handed a cease and desist order. It had players, dedicated ones, just not enough to suit the companies wallet I suppose. *shrugs*
3) EQ2 - Out of the gate, I agree it was an epic fail. They tried too hard and players got turned off because they missed the target on the "feel" of EQ1 that all the old players were trying to obtain. That feeling doesn't exist anymore, you burnt it up in EQ1 raids that you called in to work stating your grandmother was dead for the 5th time. But take a look at it from then to now. They've made the game fun to play again. I've been peeking in on it off and on for the past 6 years, and though I'm not thrilled about all of the changes, they have made a solid game, that can very well be enjoyed for a long period of time. It lacks the shallow and fisher price of WoW, there's alot of people who appreciate that. I just started plying it solidly again a couple months ago, and am very satisfied with the experience thus far.
4) Another one that we all got pumped up for and had our hearts broken on was Vanguard. How excited were we that a game that out of the gate was going to take 13 GB to install?!?! And that we knew we were going to have to throw the can on the workbench and upgrade the hell out of. And somehow, with all of that, they missed. Still haven't placed my finger on it, but they did... Still foolishly holding out hope for this one to do something...
5) Are you seriously EQ1's failure was mainly based on ninja-looters??? Pain in the ass, infuriating, etc... yes! But don't think it can really be considered a failure, much less an epic one, when it still has a decently strong player base. Those who still do play (I must admit, I personally haven't gone back in for more than an hour in years now though, but still talk to many who do play) love the game and still play it to everywhere from casual to hardcore levels. My issues with it are personal, but I wouldn't call it a failure.
6) I agree on many fronts regarding SWG. I was one of the few fans that liked the changes and saw the possibilities that it could have brought, including a lot of new players that could have made the game more enjoyable. But as stated, the fanbois lost their damn minds and made new players even afraid to try the game. Don't really think the companies messed the game up, they truthfully made it better. The bad apples destroyed this one.
Anyways...guess that's enough said after my few years of silence in the gaming world....flame on guys
Ehmm what? AC2 was shut down. Tabula Rasa was shut down. The rest in that list that is still running today, is struggling to stay afloat. With absolute minimum resources spend. Just to keep it running.
Plus, he didn't say that all the mentioned games shutted down. As Everquest 2 managed to recover with the Echoes of Faydwar expansion. Wich was one of the best and most expansive MMO expansions to date.
Cheers
The fact that some of those games were shutdown isn't the point, the point is that the autor is classifiyng all the games in the list as failures when in fact some of them weren't.
The major problem resides in the player comunity that, lets face it, likes to be lead by the nose , kind of a donkey following the carrot hanging from the pole straped around its back , people only adere to two types of games, WoW type games, grind-grind-grind or Korean type games, grind grind grind grind, oh God more grind and in some pay for epic items type games.
Tabula Rasa for instance was a nice aproach to a new type of games, the point was immersing you in a frontline war and basicly making you fullfil quests, it took the weight out of the grind because quests ran smoother than most, and lets face it, it had more variety from escorts to holding bases, not much, BUT , infinitely better than, we have an infestation kill 100 fluffy bunnies to win 1000gold and pink sleepers of magic ( rinse and repeat ) type of quests and games.
Another point is that, a game is also sucessfull based on the quality of its player base, and lets face it, in general the player base is very very poor, ganking, smacking and so forth, most of you have surely seen it all. A game is only as good as its comunity and that is the problem with most games, not that the games itself are bad, but its a matter of taste, and most players despite not liking a game stick to it just to cause the most grief as they can until they eventually move on to the next game / get tire or are simply kicked.
Diversity, or the lack of it, you got a basilion fantasy porno type fairy fireball launching orc shaman undead games and for instance games like EvE are underpopulated, like SB or TB are down , and the others well. live on the diehards. Lets face it, the diversity isn't much, and when presented with options, people just randomly discard them. ( prays that Startrek Online turns out great )
And last but not least, bugs, i personally hate bugs, i play EvE, have played WAR and alot other games and to be honest what makes me leave its the bugs, EvE online so help me God if i won't leave it as soon as Startrek Online comes( at least i will wait to see if its as near as good as its being sold by the devs ) , i meen, EvE has the potential to be a great game and its bugged to hell and over, the only thing keeping CCP afloat with it its the playerbase that stuck with it for lack of better options or simply love for the game ( not that the comunity is all that great mind you but its a notch better than most ofthers ) .
I left WAR because of them, WAR was one of the most unbalanced games i ever saw in terms of bugs from the famous soldiers falling out of the sky to the new classes with aoe uberness that wrecked the chances for everyone wanting to roll other classes, lack of forums, then with forums lack of content in them, then GOA itself...
Conan now that i think of it, i played it also for about 3months and thats it, Conan was the kind of you get a ranger or a shaman, blast people from distance and thats it, everyone wants to be a w(h)inner, and well coupled with an impressive array of bugs and monstruous patches, not to mention the initial 30GB of Harddrive required plus almost top of the line computer... ( wich fortunately i have , but i am a drop amongst an ocean of players ),
Eve well, the last patch for Dominion is... well the very example of a bug domination, and a poor example of a dev team after some time, while at first they comunicated , now they seem to be in the clutches of the terrible beast of marketing teams and advisors, a really nasty pest that once it takes hold within a corporation... oh God.
So all this to say that the list on that article is biased and its the kind of example why a person should write from an observing and detached perspective sometimes, there are an infinite list of games that are still running and are a poor example of what we play today, and yet, surprise surprise, people do play them for the most undisclosed reasons, be that they're grief candy material to the latest fashion ( AION , oh God the grind.. .OH GOD ! how i "dislike" korean mmos ), or just lack of options.
(1) Seriously? Quality? That is like saying you bought a new car that didn't function well and most of the systems incomplete, but you are impressed by the quality of the company every time to take it to the repair shop.
more like you bought a car and customers complain about various designs of the car, and that company recalls the cars they sold and changed them based on customer complaints =.
Again you are looking at the effect and trying to make it the cause. People complained and left, because eq2 was loaded with failure at release. The redesigns were not something initiated by quality. They were in response to a lack of quality.
yes they were initiated by quality, like i said SOE made the game too "hardcore" for the casual based gamer now a days so they changed it.
Also I think if you look at the history of changes in EQ2 you will find soe wasn't responding to what its players wanted, but what soe thought new potential players wanted. That is why you see so many soe customers complaining of the "wowification" of their game and similar claims. Again, this isn't a company known for listening to its players.
Now yeah they don't want easy mode, but if you were on the beta forums and early forums they were filled with complaints about ... shards, crafting, archtype system and all that crap that you mentioned.
(2) This isn't about casual at all. EQ2 was a disjointed unfinished game that lacked direction and polish, because it was intentionally rushed to market to beat the competition by a few weeks. The result was that game crashed during a period when the mmo market was exploding. If 3 million people join the market and you have to close down servers, you are doing something wrong.
its completely about casual, EQ2s overland zones were filled with group ONLY content, quests lines were mostly group only, dungeons were group only hell crafting had to nearly be done in a group since you needed parts from OTHER crafters in order to get a finished product in your own craft.
(3) Sites like this are just as full of people calling blizzard the devil and how horrible wow is, but that doesn't seem to stop wow from being successful.
also helps they advertise. thats one of the only things i blame on SOE.
Do you even understand why blizzard and bioware have great reputations? They make great games. If bioware or blizzard had their name on eq2 it wouldn't have released in the sad condition that it was and it would not have spent the next several years constantly changing design directions trying to find a market of players that would be interested in playing the game. Neither of those companies find it acceptable to push broken and unfinished products to the market. Soe has a long and ugly history of screwing things up and some of it intentionally.
Like I said already, great games sell themselves. Somehow I don't think such a masterpiece is being held back by a small handful of angry former customers.
BGs, arenas and what not, thats blizzard changing direction of the game as well. so according to you that means WoW = fail. since WoW was a PVE game when it was launched.
ne
Shadowbane was not and is not a fail game it had a bad bug yes but other then that it was and still ahead of its time. Tho the last few patch kind of killed some of it.
I must say I never missed not being part of the ancient MMO era. I recall vividly trying out UO and EQ in it's days on friend's accounts, and I knew in no way in hell I would play such games. Only with post Eq2 era MMOs became interesting for me. Why people enjoy blowing up others at a picknick or camp 72 hours a boss is beyond me.
This article might be better than the last one about all the Trek geeks getting ready to eat a big excrement sandwich.
ToA was DAoC's downfall, not Catacombs. Yes, Warlocks were stupidly OP'd, but Classic servers for people refusing to do the ToA grind should be a fairly solid acknowledgment that ToA was a legendary fail.
AoC and probably WAR should have been on this list.
The best article I have read in a looong while. I have played almost all of the games mentioned and all I can say is: Spot on! Keep up the good writing. Thank you. :)
Ah, the Trammel Facet...Birthplace of the term "Trammy n00b"
The fun I used to have sitting at Brit bank (tram) and watching two macho "pk's" trading your-mom jokes until one of them gets soo mad he opens (gasp) the RED GATE!! and says just bring it!
People should really keep arguing with someone who was actually on the DAoC staff. Really, keep going, because Im sure you know better than he does.
Anyone who played DAoC knows that ToA killed the game. Some long term subscriptions may have ran past the first month of its release, but the fact is that in-game, thats when the exodus began and when the bulk of people actually stopped logging on. Yes, NF and the catering to 8mans put the nail in the coffin later on, but ToA is unquestionably what killed DAoC and changed what most people loved about it.
And Scott, another great article. You should be careful though, having well-written articles that are also entertaining are taboo on this site and some of the other "writers" wont like it.
Good article, but you cannot speak of fail without including Vanguard.
Another great read and I know I'm biased by not having much involvment with any of the others but I think you got it right with number one. Another interesting thing that reading this brought me to about SWG was that I recall being at the local game store here getting whatever console game I was into at the time since I had never played an mmo before and I overheard one of the workers there talking about SOE making a Star Wars game with a complex skill system that was going to break alot of mmo conventions. The way he spoke gave me a sense that this would truly be a unique game that was not for everyone and somehow hearing that got me hooked and made me decide for the first time to play an mmo which again I knew they existed but had never had the desire to play one.
Well when they launched I think the game was very much what the guy in the store described it as being though certainly not without it's problems. It just leads me to wonder how exactly this happened, if the guy in the store did have credible info on how this game was being made why the surprise when it turns out as you expected and then why the turn around. I think personally it was alot of what I heard at the time and that was the fact that WOWs success changed perspectives about the industry all around.
But I also loved reading about the pre SWG era games too as I stated I didn't play any of them but have been a student of sorts of the industry since so knew they all had there problems but I think this article more than most others I read did a good job of summing up what they were good job.
Oh hey, I bought that too. For $4.99. The el cheapo headset made the purchase worth it. I used it on vent and to talk with people online long after the game crumbled.
But yeah, that game really sucked.
This article sounds like it was written by someone who got bored of WoW and decided to try out some games that are 7+ years old and just don't work anymore.
Sorry.
lol great stuff cant wait for the next part. I never was involved in EQ1s endgame but boy did I hear alot of horror stories. And as far as DAoC I remember it declining quite a bit even before ToA... dying, no, but I do remember seeing the number of players on merlin drop quite a bit even before ToA. I also am kind of surprised Vanguard didnt make the list. anyway, great read.
As other have pointed out not mentioning or having Warhammer listed the current holder of the title "epic failure" how is it possible you did not list it.
My blood pressure went up thirty points reading this article... If memory serves me right... Anarchy Online was the first pioneer into the sci-fi genre for MMO's and failed "Challenger-style", and then there was Neocron that I can say was very... "meh" as well. I can say that playing Shadowbane with it's sb.exe had prepared me for playing "Killing Floor", however.
I've posted it a few times before, but last latest MMO's I pre-purchased were Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London in major hopes of escaping "cookie cutter" MMO's. It turns out I was right, but yet so wrong.
Major changes, overhauls and removal of systems are not initiated by quality as you keep trying to make it sound. They are initiated by lack of quality. A company that intentionally rushes an unfinished product to market, especially when the beta testers are telling them not to, doesn't really stand as a pillar of quality.
There is a reason people chose to sit in a log in que for hours instead of playing eq2 where there was no waiting. Soe even had an ad campaign about "no waiting lines" and smed was rather smug about it.
Also, battlegrounds and arenas are additions to a game. That is called new content, which is drastically different than revamping major systems that your playerbase doesn't enjoy. Nice strawman attack though.
In the end, you can try to put lipstick on the pig all you want, but in the end it is still just a pig and there are reasons eq2 made the list.
Yes 72 hours to kill a Dragon was too long, but what would be too short a length of time? It all has to get easier and easier. Is 72 minutes too long? I don’t think so, but I am sure some of the “I don’t get to play more than an hour a day because <insert RL demand here>” players would think so. Oh and I have no time to group, so make it solo thanks! MMO’s are looking to expand their playerbase by making the games easier, particularly as new MMO’s are failing and a recession hits us. So they want to cater to every sort of player, even when those players don't want the same type of gameplay.
Which leads us to the question, is 72 seconds to kill a dragon too long? For some people it is and we need their sub, so let’s make the game even dumber! This is the end of the time equation we are being driven to, where two seconds is one second too many to do anything.
In a solo game the players who only have an hour a day just take longer to complete the game, no big deal. In a MMO, when companies try to pander to those with hardly any time to put into the game, we get ridiculously easy game design.
Nice article, look forward to the next one.
While on the subject spotlighted for it's fail for the game Star Wars Galaxies, I have to say the article failed to mention that before the legendary failure of NGE and the mistake of changing the core game with current subscribers, there was this thing called the "Combat Upgrade", or "CU". The game (community) was never the same since the CU, which turned out ok after a while. But you'd think they would've learned about changing people's game after the significant loss of subscribers resulting from the CU.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Third: This is PART ONE of a TWO PART article series, so we'll see more fail decisions in PART TWO.
Everything well put! ...
Good Read.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Third: This is PART ONE of a TWO PART article series, so we'll see more fail decisions in PART TWO.
1. They lost 75% of the sub base in less than 6 months. No game ever released has screwed up that badly close to a million people tried it and at best they have 10% of that left in a little over a year.
2. WAR's game engine could not even support its own game design this is the first of the many fails. I would put that above SWG as the worst in history. This SINGLE decision was at the core of many of its problems and should be game design 101. They released a game with an engine that did not support is own game design.....think about that.
3. With the title of the article it should have been in the part one as no game has failed like WAR you could use any number of epically bad game design decisions and worse they completely misread their own gaming market and made a game that its fan based hated and opted to try to get some of the golden cows subs and by doing that both groups hated that game.
I know.... makes the fact that this genre, for the most part, has gone to shit really come back into the forefront of my mind.
First: Because there are worse games than WAR.
Second: Because this article focused mainly on single design decisions, saying those decisions were fail, not necessarily the entire games themselves.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
While I do agree with some of the posts on this topic. There are alot of half truths and fabrications also. The orignal article writer I beleive should never have posted this article in first place. It shows an obvious b ias slant on things. Lets look at EQ for example. It did not start seeing a serious depletion of accounts until WoW appeared. That highly amounts to a failure game. Not to mention until WoW game along it pretty much was in the top 3 for subs and revenue for a MMO. Then there is EQ2. While I do agree quality was some what of a problem. The biggest issue that tanked the game at release was SOE decision to future proof the game.. The game was unplayable by the standard pc spec at the time and extreme gamer platforms that were 5k + at the time of release could barely handle the game. That cut off 90% of your customer base and made alot of people unhappy. So that along with the plot change hosed up there launch.
Problem is EQ2 is not a bleek wasteland like people are making it out to be . If you really wanted to give an award to a game most improved it would go to EQ2 over aoc anyday. They brought back the Gods and class epics not to mention revamped the whole game to be more eq1 like. the game took off after that. The comments about servers closing. That only applies to station exchange and pvp. Both were pretty poor concepts. I guess they are chanigng pvp again and infact are putting in barttlegrounds scenerios along with armor. Another WoW pvp clone I am afraid to say. Overall EQ2 is not on life support right now.
As for all the comments about how well blizzard and bioware producrts are. Lets get rid of the fan boy attitude already. Bioware has had issues but overall they deserve the praise. Blizzard on the other hand, I do not know how or even care maybe the men in black used there mind wipe thing on everyone lol but there were issues at release to WoW that were not minor. They did even give out free time. There are still bugs in the game also that cause you to become a geeksquad tech to get your pc running right in the game. So while they maybe had a less flawed launch they are not some uber mythilogical never make a mistake company like some want us to believe. I will note that I am not playing any of these games at the momment. But I did beta test all of them and played them all within the last 5 yrs in final. Ever MMO out there has its issues. Burt I will say this there are far better examples then what is posted in this article. Its seems to me we have another disgruntled SWG player of past that cannot let the SOE hate go away already. I expected to see more games like Horizons Shadowbane. I think for the most part the major players of the MMO industry have there + and - no one company is better then the other.
Note that SWGEmu boasts "Pre-CU" gameplay, not "Pre-NGE". SWG failed with CU. NGE was just an additional failure on top, for a total of failure2.
Off-topic, the post editor on this forum sucks.
EQ had some bad game concepts that were are not considered successes in terms of how well players enjoyed them. Please don't confuse that with total failure that killed populations. The point was that designs in a game can be bad and have a negative impact on a game. It doesn't automatically mean failure to the point of closing servers or massive subscriber drops.
EQ2 closed 10 pve servers before they even had pvp servers. There were 36 game servers at release (not counting the 5 pvp servers that were added post release) and now there are 20. It isn't just pvp and station exchange.
AOC improved more this year than EQ2, which is why it won the award.
No one was saying that other mmo releases were perfect and yes most had major problems at release. If people chose to sit in line for hours to play a game that had massive server stability issues over a game that they could instantly log into and play, what does that say? That is why EQ2s mechanics were pointed at on the list.
Shadowbane did make the list, but horizons would have been an interesting entry.
It is just silly to think that all companies are equal to each other. There is a reason some companies has long track records of top 10 selling and rated games and other companies go bankrupt or are forced to close games/merge servers shortly after a games release.
Great read!
I played some of those games myself.
UO was indeed the way you describe it. Took a lot of the fun out of the game at first. I still think the original concept wasn't that bad, it's just that they could've done better.
DAoC was my first true love in MMO. But yes, not only did the expansion kill the game, the numerous buff-bots in the game were really killer for lots of us that left the game. Such a shame, since the RvR was more than good PvP. Not to forget exploits like Radar and such, completely killed the game.
SWG was a tragedy in itself really. Not only did they launch an unfinished game at the start, they didn't fix it, and then in the end they kill what made it stand apart from other games. There you go, left over a poor type of WoW with a Star Wars shell slapped on top of it. I tried it again a few months ago out of curiosity, but it really is awefully poor and shallow compared to what it once was. I'd do a SWG2 based upon its original concept, but I guess no one wants to take that risk.
Can't wait for the next part.
Hmmm..... both AoC and AO had terrible launches. Yet, funcom does a good job at fixing them (admittedly, after crappy pre-release development).
Funcom surely wins the "Legendary failure Releases" award, but both AO and AoC developed into good games.
Both games maintain more then steady populations. I must admit, AoC has many other issues *coughimmersioncough* and it tries to make up with good graphics, but it is one of the better MMO's out right now.
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Uhm.... noone said EQ2 is a terrible game. It's a game which had some pretty terrible features though, which is the point of this article.
I think you forgot "no crying in the red circle" by the POTBS devs.
I would have deffo had that on my top ten legendary failures
Hello,
It was a good read and he did point out everything frustrating about every MMO he listed. I personally liked Ultima Online, I wasn't a PVP person but I just accepted the fact that hey people can kill you in this cool, I also saw Ultima Online as a life in fantasy world simulator. One thing I did not like was how over crowded the servers on Ultima Online were. It was like very few feet someone had a house. I enjoyed the house feature and really loved how guilds could make their own towns etc. I would think it would of somewhat did better if they could of done two things. Make more servers, one that would only support a certain population, and then make a gate system similar to the moongates, maybe red ones ala Ultima VI, and allow cross server travel some how. Then if you played on a server, and your friend may play on another one that isn't crowded you could just pop on over via red moon gate.
I also played EQ1, personally I got bored with it rather quickly. Even at lower levels I got bored, go kill rats, bats, the orcs across the zone... etc, it was some what fun when you had people to play with but it was hard for me to get a party a lot of times to get an item that would only be good for a few more levels (shinny brass shield-or something) from the orcs near the elf zone.
My old man still plays EQ... he says the game is finally starting to die though. I never got into Star Wars Galaxies because I knew it wouldn't meet my expectations or be worth the subscription fee. It looked like a UO/EQ hybrid in space to me when it first came out...I did try to play Shadowbane and yea that really sucked kept getting disconnects and errors. Game makers need to know what they are doing before they release a game and make sure it doesn't shut down at random...
As for the other games I really had time to play because by the time some of them came out I was playing FFXI which didn't disappoint me one bit. I do think that maybe we as players are all too hard on MMOs though because we sometimes forget how hard it is to make one, how hard it is to sell one (advertising etc etc) and how hard it is to keep coming up with new ideas for players to enjoy. It would be like trying to plan a pen and paper D&D campaign that would last for years but instead of just you and your friends it has to appeal to the masses of people that play. Ultimately failing in one aspect or another in the eyes of someone else.
just some thoughts no one will read or pay attention to,
Dustin
Good article, but a couple of things I disagree about.
DAoC was killed by Trials of Atlanits, simply put, noone that was used to DAoC before ToA came out was going to spend months leveling up equipment through long drawn out quests. People were used to maybe 2-3 hours max to get the best gear, then running around in the frontiers in a fairly balanced Frontiers. ToA just took way too long to get the items leveled, it's not EQ hehe.
The major problem with SWG wasn't that the new system wasn't good, infact it's not that bad. The problem is that SOE changed the entire game right after people bought the expansion, making that $50 you spent a waste. I've seen it in several different ways. SOE is greedy, they will do anything at all just to make a buck (points at subscription games with item malls...). That more than what happened with SWG is why I will never play anything that SOE has touched.
LOLOL in red, are you serious? I loved pre-cu, I enjoyed post cu, but to say that they "made it better" with the NGE is beyond hilarious. They made a different game and then wondered what happened when the player base didn't want a "new" game. Its that simple, no amount of negative players kills a game. A company that spit in the face of what their customers wanted and released a half baked revamp of core mechanics killed the game. Sorry to break it to you but you are in the ultra minority considering that basicially none of the players that played at that time much liked it and it didn't draw any new customers for the most part I guess that's all the proof I really need now isn't it.
Well, IMHO, I think Horizons (now Istaria) deserves a mention of a great concept game (think about it, no MMO has yet to allow you to be a Dragon like Horizons did) that failed big time in the end.. Ryzom could also end up as honorable mention after the major change that was done to the magic system..
LOLOL in red, are you serious? I loved pre-cu, I enjoyed post cu, but to say that they "made it better" with the NGE is beyond hilarious. They made a different game and then wondered what happened when the player base didn't want a "new" game. Its that simple, no amount of negative players kills a game. A company that spit in the face of what their customers wanted and released a half baked revamp of core mechanics killed the game. Sorry to break it to you but you are in the ultra minority considering that basicially none of the players that played at that time much liked it and it didn't draw any new customers for the most part I guess that's all the proof I really need now isn't it.
Yeah to funny how it is the players fault for what happened to an mmo.
Lets see, people didn't flock to the original game, because it was broken, buggy and unfinished.
People didn't flock to the nge, because it was ridiculously broken, buggy and unfinished to the point it made the original game look like it was a polished masterpiece. The conclusion is that somehow it is the players fault for not retaining or attract new players? Somehow new and old players are supposed to be excited about 2 years of player and developer work being thrown out the window without any notice and jump on the "it has potential" bandwagon? New players are supposed to be excited to give money to a company that just told their current players to piss off?
So soe completely tries to revamp an entire mmo in 2-3 months, delivers one of the worst releases in mmo history, intentionally alienates their customerbase in the process by lying about the changes and you wonder why swg had problems rebuilding a player base?
I wonder just how bad a game has to be or what massive blunders a company has to inflict on a game in order to be responsible for its own outcome and not some angry players.
Yeah to funny how it is the players fault for what happened to an mmo.
Lets see, people didn't flock to the original game, because it was broken, buggy and unfinished.
People didn't flock to the nge, because it was ridiculously broken, buggy and unfinished to the point it made the original game look like it was a polished masterpiece. The conclusion is that somehow it is the players fault for not retaining or attract new players? Somehow new and old players are supposed to be excited about 2 years of player and developer work being thrown out the window without any notice and jump on the "it has potential" bandwagon? New players are supposed to be excited to give money to a company that just told their current players to piss off?
So soe completely tries to revamp an entire mmo in 2-3 months, delivers one of the worst releases in mmo history, intentionally alienates their customerbase in the process by lying about the changes and you wonder why swg had problems rebuilding a player base?
I wonder just how bad a game has to be or what massive blunders a company has to inflict on a game in order to be responsible for its own outcome and not some angry players.
The lies, thats exactly it. If you all would remember we got mustifar about a month before the NGE. One day somebody that would be me was cruizing around Amazon and found the Guide to Star Wars Galaxies NGE for the Console. it was posted on the SWG forums, and i got a 3 day ban for that after the firestorm erupted. SOE was like there is not going to be a console version. Lots of finger pointing went on, and we even had one Dev if anybody would care to remember who stood up for us. Care to take a guess. Tiggs. Long storry short for 2 months SOE lied and told us nothing was happening then all the sudden about month from the NGE they told us it was comming. NGE was what it was; as nothing existed from the old game except your characters. 80% of the player base quit, folks were so mad that had just got mustifar expansion now to have it all nerfed down folks actually got their money back. And then somebody says it made the game better, rofl at that. IF the NGE was so great then why have they had to merge servers, and why is it a ghost town. I know it is I play eq2 and I can send cross server tells across games even. So all my friends are on my list and guess what, nobody is playing with the exception of 2 of them.
Rofl NGE made the game better, I laughed so hard i had to clean my keyboard.
ahh the original EverCrack... so many painful memories, yet so many memorable moments too:D
what the OP didn't realize is just how much WORSE ragefire camp was, on the zek servers:D I was in one of those 72 hr camps and the difference between a blue server and a red server is that on a blue server, the camp is done by 1 person or 1 group of people. on the red servers, the camp is done by the ENTIRE guild + allies:D On tallon zek. I did the camp for one of the most beloved "light"(TZ was a light vs dark type server) clerics on the server. the ENTIRE 72 hr camp our guild + allies had no less then 50 people camping it:D when it spawned at around 4AM EST. we had maybe 80 people in zone. roughly half engaged in ragefire, the other half watching/defending against any PKers/KSers that comes our way:D but we did get our 1st "light side" cleric epic that night and everyone was tired:D
As EQ evolved, it became a raiding game. the gap between the casuals and raiders became about as wide as the grand canyon and there was really no motivation for casuals to continue. while it takes a full group of casual to kill a mob, a raider can easily solo the same mob and sometimes at a faster pace. at 1 point, the difference between casual and raider was the difference between 10k hp vs 20k hp... as the pool of recruits dwindled(from the lack of casuals) for the raiding guilds, attrition took its toll on the raiders. from the ever more complicated(long) flaggin/keying to the lack of qualified applicants, the raiders soon found greener pastures to feed on in other games.
HOWEVER, credit must be given where it's due. to date, EQ remain the most enjoyable "raiding game" on the market. no other game come close in complexity and technical difficulty of EQ raiding script. For masochists who enjoy large scale raids where 1 mistake can cost you the entire raid, it's a rush to see everything fall into place. The sense of accomplishment in a well executed raid is worth the 3 months of trail and error learning the script and the hours wait getting the raid started:D
EQ has trained more advanced raiders then any other games. and, WoW's raid game benefited greatly from the "already trained" raiders that fled from EQ:D its unfortunate that the blind mofo's steering the boat at SoE fail to understand that EQ is more of a niche game and do not refocus the game as a raiders paradise. instead of getting players closer to the meat of the game(raids) they still focus on putting more and more flags/keys between where the grind is and where the game is enjoyable. In the end, EQ killed itself with its AA system. it was a great idea when it came out, but after years and years of AA inflation, no new players have any chance of reaching "raid" level game because they are 2000AA's behind:D
anyway RIP EQ. your accomplishments will forever be remembered in the MMO era as the game that proliferated the genera of MMO and the game that WoW possible.
Might have been brought up already but next years this is a new one on this list, Cities XL. I am sure will be interesting to see a complete take on that disaster.
At least he said the correct thing this time - SB.EXE killed Shadowbane, not the PVP or concept. I think Lum has found a new home.
People that are saying that catacombs killed DAoC are just plain wrong in every aspect, TOA was a big failure, and there are many that will tell you they left because of it. Now im not saying that ToA killed DAoC, what I am going to tell you is that WoW killed DAoC, it came out just before the release of catacombs, and when it hit, pretty much everyone I knew went to WoW that was playing. I was in the beta of catacombs and WoW, catacombs was actually pretty good, some of the zones were not done well at all, but the new classes were fun to play. Don't say catacombs killed it, WoW killed it, and many left it after ToA and Frontiers as well ( I liked it but many didn't) it wasn't the same RvR it used to be for the long timers after that.. Classic servers were a great thing for people that liked the old not-so-OP artifact killers in frontiers that it became. But by that time people were into WoW and they weren't coming back with the other problems Mythic created. That and finally allowing buff bot's made the game unplayable for many, if you didn't or couldn't afford a 2nd account, you had no chance! Mythic did many things wrong with DAoC, making the game unplayable after an expac came out and upgading graphics and the engine to where you had to also upgrade your computer if you wanted to play the new content, many people played it through the older client, even with top of the line comp's, to combat the lag fest that the new clients created, and then they did away with that ability.
Should be a note to all future MMO developers, don't bring out an expac with upgraded tech if you want people to still stay and play your game, many will leave and play a game they can play on their computer rather than upgrading their computer too, and in today's economy, that is even more of a reason.
STAR TREK ONLINE is star wars galaxies 2.0 there just screwing over the player base before release.
it should be (for the most part) that star trek, taken as a whole is a rather deep thoughtful univers full of exploration discovery and learning with some combat thrown in.... well.. STO got 1 out of 4 right.
STO with its new owners cryptic basicly cut everything out of the star trek univers except for the pew pew 10 year old level combat shoot first and middle and last then do it all over again and again.
what REALLY gets my goat is that the star trek franchise had THE potential of them all !
I went to SOL system specificly to explore it figured that would take me a couple of hours NOT! first off they have 1 space station similar to earth & beyond size with the barest of features. then there is earth just a globe to look at, no major capitals to beem down to not even star fleet acadamy which to me was a must! there was also the moon but again just prety to look at and other than a sun that was farther than the space would let you fly to THERE WERE NO OTHER PLANETS no mercury venus mars jupiter saturn jupiter neptune pluto uranus I would have even for your big 3 jupiter saturn and mars and a couple of moons but NOTHING.
wnd where STO really missed the boat was one of THE best platforms for imbeded learning ever constructed and cryptic just let it pass by them in favor of more vidrogame violence parents should ban these type of games especially ones like this one that could have been powerful learning tools. players could have learned about moons and planets visited the memorials on the moon and the rovers on mars and even completed quests basted on planetary surveys but nope cryptic nah lets just shoot stuff over and over! it sounds friteningly like star wars galaxies reason for the "new gamer expirence"
Why is it that games SUCK? there shallow simplistic shooting galleries sure they might have pretty pictures and take a mean screenshot but the story lines and gameplay is thinner than the paper they are printed on.
why is the game bar so darn low? I know im an older player but games just havent gotten any better in the last 15 years they got bigger sure but not better id even swear the mobs have the same AI brain they used back when i played everquest.
I look for a game that is realistic yet fun where there are quests but i can still do my own thing where my participation in the game universe makes a difference where i feel like ive stepped into an alternate universe that you can do prety much everything you expect to be able to do where things and animals act like their supose to, where the economy isnt combat based. "! have a dream"
dungeons and dragons should be on this list also.
they also had large potential but seemed to forget that D&D was about freedom and socialization not just a zone stuffed with instances, and thats not even mentoning the cut rate hack mape they selected for their "world" instead of something like dragonlance or other popular map worlds yet another game with all the life cut out of it.
Reading all these replies and the original subject, makes me kinda nostalgic. I remember all these games as if it was only yesterday.
I do have to admit that Scott has it pretty much on the dot... Can't wait for the second part.
Great work.
I take exception to the “SWG 2.0” comment. ST0, while lacking depth and in imagination works considerably better than SWG did on release. With the exception of new game issues that plague any new release, the game functions. I have found bugs but I have also found work-arounds. There doesn’t seem to be balance issues as yet but I haven't played PvP excessively yet either.
I understand your disappointment with a game that doesn’t meet your expectations, especially with an IP you love, but you can hardly compare a lack of content and features in a functional game with the game breaking bugs that were never fixed and directional changes to the game that SOE chose to make with SWG 4 years after release.
Even f you ignore the NGE which, I remind you, is why SWG was given the number one spot on Scott's list, STO is no where near the epic fail that SWG was on release.
Now, if we're still having 3+ hour outages, multiple times per day in 3 months, THEN you can make the argument that STO should have a place on this list. :-)
It's not really a news article if your telling everyone things that everyone already knew. All this did was embelish the flaws to sound much more grandiose than they in fact were.
Again, I think you're mis-representing your dissappointment with the way a company has chosen to present your favourite IP with broken game mechanics. The games on the list had issues that were either broken or made gameplay/progression impossible.
I'm not trying to take away your argument that the games are shallow or do not represent the spirit of the IP but these games function.
This article was a fantastic read. Got a few good laughs out of this, not to mention a whole mind load of nostalgia. Can't wait for number 2.
Very nice article with some very memorable moments for me !!
Probably the best article I've ever read on this site that wasn't a review/preview.
Yep, it was almost as it was written by itself! You read and think "how stupid can people be?"
If not for ther NGE in SWG......i would still be playing it. Eager to read the next.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
Another blazing article by one of the best mmorpg.writers - Lumm the Mad.
I must admit to a sense of quiet pride in this article because it was me who suggested, via a PM to LUM himself, that he might write an article on 'The Great Self-Inflicted MMO Disasters' featuring that Tiatnic of gaming decision, the coming of the NGE.
Funnily enough, I received a lifetime ban from Michael Bitton, the new community manager of mmorpg.com for starting a thread that covered this actual subject. I wish he would stop closing down discussions he doesn't like or understand and posting mad threads like this one:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/265162/READ-FIRST-Notice-of-Increased-Moderation.html
Then these forums could go back to the free back-and-forth discussions they used to be when Laura Genender was coimmunity manager. Yes, yes, I am bitter, peevish etc, etc.
Don't bother banning me, Mike, I'll see myself out.
Spot on... memories flooding back.
The intricacies of the raid scripts... the sheer exertion of the whole guild on first trips to places like Fear, or first Rathe Council attempts!!
Yes, it was very demanding, perhaps madly so with hindsight... but still my strongest and best MMO memories!!
I'll be more than happy to do just that. First off, a lot of what Scott says was spot on. I know because I beta tested this game and played it for about 3 months before I left.
1) The game was universally panned because the subscription base was to be made up of Asheron's Call subscribers except one thing was wrong.
2) That one thing was that even though AC lagged behind games like EQ and UO, the player base was FIERCELY loyal. After having played a dozen or so mmorpg's, it still ranks as the most fun game of the genre I've ever played. Many felt AC 2 was a rip off.
3) Spellcraft : In AC , for the first six months to one year, you actually had to "learn" spells by mixing different ingredients together. It was a completely unique approach.
4) There was not one single structure in AC that you could not enter. For Asheron's 2 , there wasn't one single structure you could walk in to. It just seemed rather idiotic to have a town with buildings that had doors but yet you couldn't open them.
5) The developers basically LIED about the game. The way they marketed it was to tell players that as they used the crafting system, the towns would start to heal, having been destroyed by a huge cataclysm. This was a blatant lie. All that occurred at the end of each month is all the servers just received the same patch that fixed up the towns a bit.
6} The Tyrant creatures, the most powerful creature in the game was bugged so in effect if you were a ranged character like mage or archer, you could trap the tyrant on the landscape and kill him without taking one bit of damage. I exploited this bug for days and not only topped out my character's level but walked away with crazy amounts of loot and cash. In effect, the majority of the population had max leveled two weeks after release.
7) Once they fixed the tyrants, it was quite impossible to level on one's own without getting mowed down by creatures that were unkillable for most solo players.
8) MOUNTS. When these were introduced, you couldn't just buy a mount and be done with it, it was more like you leased them and they were only for a pretty short amount of time.
Don't get me wrong, I thought AC 2's graphics were by far the most beautiful I'd ever seen in many respects but there were just too many annoying factors about it.
"Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go"
Another clueless poster. No developer is perfect, but Turbine has had a lot more success than any other besides Blizzard and CCP. If you ask me, Turbine has done some of the best graphic designs in the business and you can play their games on a far greater range of systems than most.
Scenarios - single design decision that killed the open-world pvp in WHO.
Open PvP in WAR wasnt going to be good anyway. They added the keeps and the small PvP areas so late that it wasnt going to work even without scenarios. Not to mention the on rails world design they used. Its like they hired a bunch of guys that never designed a world before. Guess thats what happens when the talent leaves ( Matt Firor as an example ).
On other games...
EQ2 still is a pretty average game ( bad IMO ). I have played it again the last 2 months and found it to be quite boring. The game engine is good for screenshots but its still hideous in motion even with a top end PC.Even on AB ( which I play ) the population is so sparse that you wonder how in the world the server is listed a " heavy " ( only 2 servers ever reach that ). I recently leveled a Templar and a Warden to level 50.. I saw less than 10 people during that time span. EQ2 has been dead for years but SoE and its players refuse to realize it.
Tabula Rasa.. I beta tested it and it seem pretty cool but content later in the game was lacking.
AC2.. The game could have been kept open but for whatever reason it was decided to close it instead. I guess it had less subs than AC1.. If it had more my guess is that AC1 would have got the axe. Turbine is on my short list of " no talent hacks " as far as studios go.
DAoC.. Distaste for the devs started long before the first expansion released. It was clear when RAs released that Mythic had no clue what they were doing as far as game balance or adding content that didnt break RvR. Should of stuck with Magestorm type games and left the MMOs to the talent. ( Mythic is also on my list of no talent hacks )
your silly talk about up to lvl 50 in eq2....lvl 50 were 5 years ago. why stop on 50 and then lvl a new.....eq2 is top lvl heavy and you should be happy they made it easier to get to lvl80 as a new player. it is a problem in ANY lvl based game that some content get obsolote or got to be lucky to get a group for the good things.
Major changes, overhauls and removal of systems are not initiated by quality as you keep trying to make it sound. They are initiated by lack of quality. A company that intentionally rushes an unfinished product to market, especially when the beta testers are telling them not to, doesn't really stand as a pillar of quality.
There is a reason people chose to sit in a log in que for hours instead of playing eq2 where there was no waiting. Soe even had an ad campaign about "no waiting lines" and smed was rather smug about it.
Also, battlegrounds and arenas are additions to a game. That is called new content, which is drastically different than revamping major systems that your playerbase doesn't enjoy. Nice strawman attack though.
In the end, you can try to put lipstick on the pig all you want, but in the end it is still just a pig and there are reasons eq2 made the list.
infact ALOT of ppl dont like the changes, but is in minority....SOE is a very proffesional company that listens to what ppl want. MOST wanted crafting to change where I personally found it AWESOME you needed other crafters to do rare crafts.
I loved spirit runs but because ALOT complained about it were changed.
I loved access quests, since made it an achievement to reach new lands. but ppl on their 3rd alt spending ages on get groups for it didnt - and do still think they just should have made it account wide when you got flagged.
Class changes. its silly to say you were half through the game before "becoming" your class. first off lvl 20 always were easy to reach it were the lvl 45-50 that took time since hardly were any solo content in the endgame. 2nd there is no real diffrence now from then other than you called by your class name from start.....personally I liked subclasses, find it cool you start out as a more or less undefined class but by your chars experiences in the world find your path,
over all SOE changed the product for the consumers and stil does. its not always for what I WANT, but for the MAJORITY. Id wish they had sticked to their original gameplay......but money talks.....and MOST is happy about it.
talking about PCs had to be top of the league I find trash too....a guy in my guild playing it on a 8 yo PC, ONLY thing required is 2gb RAM rest can be scaled down even if looks disgustion in lowest settings doesnt take much of a PC to bring the looks up to something acceptable....really think some ppl here didnt look in the options and know to turn off the fluff that their PC cant handle.
over all still find it incredible silly EQ2 is on this list and the only reason it and EQ1 is, is to bring up a couple of names everyone know....too few care if some little company made more of an MMO than they could handle....now bring up SOE...THEN you are sure ppl will react
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
AC2 - Gone
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
4 tries and only 1 decent outing.
3 of the first 4 games are all time great PvP games.
UO
SB
DAOC
Flaws and all.
For UO, I love it how that jpeg chart leaves out 2003 and it says : DID NOT HAPPEN.
This is especially funny, because in 2003 Ultima Online had the highest number of subscriptions ever, three years after Trammel..
Says the person who thinks graphics makes a developer competent..
AC1 - Very small game only enjoyable by those who played it first before playing anything else. Me on the other hand do not like be attacked by something that saw me through walls 4 rooms over.
That is utterly untrue. There's not one time in years of playing that this ever happened. There was clipping on adjoining walls that were near doors but that's about it. If you're going to comment on games, it's only respectful to get things right. I'm still waiting for ONE developer to create a game this good. It hasn't happened yet. Still the champion of event update quest lines. No mmorpg has had the guts or the ingenuity to pull off anything like "Defense of the Shard" that occurred on Thistledown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnj9afinaYI&feature=related
It would take me a 1000 words or more to describe what happened there.
AC2 - Gone
COULD have been a great game but too many early problems killed it.
DDO - F2P with clunky everything.
Never played it so no comment.
LoTRO - How can you not at least get 200k players with that license? Oh yea. No talent with many shallow concepts , bad combat and mobs drizzled about with no reason what so ever. Moria? Hey dudes lets put down 5000 mobs between this camp and that camp.. Awesome! Stinks of lazy developers.
4 tries and only 1 decent outing.
Well that might be true if that was all there was to the game but sorry, this analysis is so flawed, it's hard to know where to begin. First, LOTRO is a well-rounded game that taken as a whole is well executed. Oh I could say, crafting and you'd say "yeah we want to sit around all day sewing" or if I said the instances are incredibly well done you'd say "yeah, I need 4 other players to do them".
It wouldn't really matter what I brought up, you don't like the game so of course it has no redeeming qualities. Yes, I am definately a fanboy of LOTRO because I can appreciate a team that goes out of their way to provide an environment that isn't concentrated solely on dragging players into a loot race such as WOW.
LOTRO is a role players wet dream, the only true mmorpg that is out there. The story lines are engaging, the combat--well we must play a different game because it's a lot more interesting then WOW or any of the other current games around. I don't know what rpgs you play but all the ones I've ever played have random mobs dotted throughout the world.
Good read, but where’s Age of Conan on the list?
I’d figure losing 90% of your user base (over 700,000 subscribers) in less then 3 months after launch would warrant an honorable mention at least.
Especially since AOC holds the record for the largest mass exit in MMO history, and would be a perfect example of what "not to do" for some of these future (large budget) MMOs on the horizon.
Excellent read.
You could add a lot more examples in all games, but you do need to have a natural selection.
It is also interesting that afterwards everyone can see where it went wrong. Probably AoC and War are too recently published to be included in the list (publicity wise it wouldn't be smart to list them as legendary failures now on this website).
When looking back, ... the mmorpg industry didn't make it too difficult for Blizzard either.
72 hours without sleep. It shows the old games were all about having no life and time sinks as a replacement for skill/challenge.
Logical.
EQ2 was intentionally released early to directly compete with blizzard. Soe delivered what they thought the gaming market wanted and what would define a more casual game, but it was so far off base that they spent the first few years constantly rebuilding their game to stop the bleeding of subscribers. When the entire mmo market was exploding with new players at never before seen rates, EQ2 was closing servers and revamping major design concepts in EQ2. There is no way to spin what happened in EQ2 as a company listening to players or something that was quality.
Yes EQ2 deserves to be on the list, because it was filled with poor choices from top to bottom and is run by a company that historically doesn't listen to their players. It is funny to hear claims that soe listens, when one of the major complaints form current players is that soe is constantly trying to make changes to the game to appeal to players of other games.
I'm sure the majority of people wanted station cash, station exchange and station loot card mania too?
How many times do the leadership of soe have to make apologies and promise to start listening to their players?
Lum the Mad...
I think Cryptic has Two Colossal failures right now. Star Trek well it's just bad.. its really bad.. They might as well have not released it. or just made it single player no one would have noticed.
But let's get on Champions online, a game that COULD have had potential. BUT Cryptic being greedy decided that the Free trial would consist of an area thats maybe half the size of Orgrimmar, you are level capped at 15. .. but the exp drops off at about level 7, oh and you are not allowed to spend ANY talent points to you know see what the game is like and stuff, or use any travel powers.. like Flight.. god knows superheroes dont want to fly anyway right?
And here is the biggest slap in the face from this game, this game is PAY TO PLAY and ALSO has a CASH SHOP.
Pretty much its a P2P game that offers nothing unless you pay EVEN MORE because god knows 15$ a month is just not enough, no they also want to you to spend 60$ for different looking arms and stuff, the kind of thing you would normally figure to be INCLUDED with your paid SUBSCRIPTION.
I know Cryptics problem, they are trying to sell people frying pans for $500.00
Gotta love it when columists don't know what they are talking about, it is really surprising that THE BEST games up there are total failures to him. He doesn't even seem to know why AC2 failed what so ever...
You know i wonder if the guy that posted this has even played HALF the games he is writing about seems like he doesn't know full storys or what really happened........Whatever..
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UO just wasn't that planned an became PKers paradise, as soon as better mmo came along it's sub plummeted and now it is just a retro game for players curiosity. Richard Garriott was by 2003/4 into professional boxing support and by 2007 was headed into space...says a lot really, UO was really more or less given up on as an mmo franchise by 2001. it is a worthy fail.