Glitch is closing. I’ve never played the game, nor looked into it enough to really have an opinion, but if this is true:
The game IMO is a 2D Eve without the PVP – instead of star systems you have streets, streetsigns instead of warp gates, real time training of skills, huge emphasis on crafting, etc.
what does that tell you about not including PvP?
Also Darkfall.
Former MMO blogger Tobold is having a rough year. First his EVE prediction is set to be confirmed as idiotic in just over a month, the industry has nothing for him to play and banished him back to the tabletop, and ‘soon’ the reality that Darkfall is coming back for round two is once again going to haunt everyone’s favorite thin-skinned, hyper-sensitive whipping boy.
Of course, a track record a mile long of simply being wrong does not stop him from posting. He is very tackle-titan-Gevlon in that regard, though with less blog-editing-after-the-fact. Today’s troll bait, which embarrassingly I’m going to bite on (in part because, as is most often the case over in dream land, the commenters that don’t get filter out beg for my opinion), revolves around keeping/losing subscribers.
Much like predicting EVE shutting down because “financial reports don’t lie”, it seems the old man’s memory has also lead him to forget which MMO he is talking about here. Because I’m pretty sure making a post about losing subscribers over the last three years, with examples such as WAR, AoC, Aion, LotRO, SW:TOR, and WoW itself around, picking the hardcore niche PvP MMO from an indie studio that remained a sub MMO all three years and with an increased staff is launching a sequel ‘soon’ is a poor choice.
But what do I know. I’m pretty terrible at this predictions thing, having been totally wrong about SW:TOR 4th pillar in 2009, GW2 lack of progression dooming it, WoW with WotLK, LotRO selling its soul, Aion being Aion, Rift 3.0, Tobold rage-quitting blogging yearly, etc etc.
So let’s keep his little post in mind 6 months after DF:UW releases (so 2035), so we can all link back to it and write glowing posts about how Tobold was right about something in the MMO genre. First time for everything right?
Or, after said 6 months, we can link back to it much the same way we link back to the EVE prediction, and have a little fun while DF:UW is down for the expansion patch. Assuming, of course, Tobold is not on a rage-quit cycle.
Also how is he still screwing up FBW, posting this on a Thursday?
Darkfall 1 closing in style. Well played AV, well played.
This new video about DF:UW is the best yet in terms of info and showing off the visuals. Pretty sure it made me hate the delay even more, but I think that’s working as intended.
There are some people who play the content they enjoy without thought of the rewards; they are mostly not MMO players. – Zubon
GW2 critical flaw stated well.
I think it’s also important to remind everyone that MMOs are typically poor at… well being decent at anything if you remove the social/massive aspect. Dungeons would be terrible single-player levels if placed into a game like Skyrim or The Witcher. Most MMO quests would be seen as trash filler in a proper RPG. In what other genre do you repeat content as tedious and simple as raiding? Better 5v5 PvP experience; themepark battlegrounds or LoL? Etc etc etc.
But the lackluster content CAN work in an MMO because with a few dozen/hundred/thousand people around you, DPS-rushing a big-bad feels epic rather than insultingly simple. Compare the experience of a dps player playing BWL’s Vael on a guild-first kill to the first time you defeat the final story boss in GW2. Both were/are essentially smashing one key over and over for a few minutes, but one was a major rush while the other might be the biggest joke in recent years.
If Riot added mining or herb gathering to LoL tomorrow, would anyone elect to wander around SR and just click nodes over playing a match, if all gathering did was level your champion to 18 only to be reset once you leave? Of course not. Yet some MMO players have spent hundreds if not THOUSANDS of hours watching EVE’s mining lasers hit rocks. Why? Because those rocks lead to something, and that something is deemed worth the grind. A thousand-man fleet does not grind SBU’s down because shooting a structure is fun and interesting gameplay, especially the hundredth such Op. But they show up because they want ownership of that space, and because maybe that day will be the day an epic super-cap battle breaks out. 99/100 times it won’t, but hey, 1/100 is more than zero. Zero is a cancelled sub.
The big picture matters. It always has in MMOs. And the better your big picture, the less the little stuff matters. Players in the thousands will literally watch paint dry if ultimately the house they are painting is grand. Don’t perfect the painting ‘mini-game’, make the house worth painting.
And it’s very important to remember that players lie about what they want, including to themselves. You say you want explorer content, yet your story always includes that awesome reward for exploring. You say you love crafting, but remove the profit or long-view, and you stop. You say you want accessible content, yet as soon as breeze through it, you ask what’s next or simply leave.
Smart devs ignore 99% of what players say they want, and instead give them what players have shown to actually want. MMO players will grind and grind and grind, so long as the carrot at the end of the infinitely long stick is deemed worthwhile. They’ll bitch on the forums and write angry blog posts about said grind, but they’ll do so while grinding. And more importantly, while continuing to pay to grind. In an industry where ‘keep people paying’ is the goal, that’s important, yet continually ignored in recent years. And we wonder why the AAA MMO space is in a funk.
MMOs are hard, yo.
Update: GW2 is adding Molten Core (fractals). Enjoy the fire resist (agony) grind. The MMO formula ‘fixed’ everyone!
I picked up Towns over the weekend off Steam (the wait for Darkfall continues), and got to play it a fair bit. Consider this a Super Eurogamer review (mmm, Darkfall…)
First things first, Towns is not a finished game. It’s not in an alpha state, and in this post I’ll go over some of the features, but if you can’t handle less-than-perfect games, this might not be the time to jump in. A solid comparison would be Minecraft in its earlier purchasable states, or something like Terraria before that got major updates. Again, very playable and fun, but not finished despite being on Steam for $15.
The game itself plays a lot like Dwarf Fortress. If that means nothing to you, enjoy the learning curve, it’s a doozy, and the included tutorials should be called Trolltorials for all the help they are. Indie gaming baby! But don’t be scared if you enjoy a sim/sandbox title, Towns is worth the initial WTF headaches.
Basically your goal is to build up a town for your AI-controlled villagers, doing the usual stuff like giving them housing, setting up food production, and making it all look pretty so they stay happy. As sims of this type go, I’ve found Towns to be pretty good. Not the deepest or most feature-packed, but what is there now is solid and making a functional town is fun. The graphics, which are only about on par with Tortanic (performance is much better, don’t worry), are charming and represent what it happening well-enough in most cases (melee-humping ‘combat’ could be improved).
Where Towns shines however is in the inclusion of its RPG elements. As stupid as “RPG elements” usually is on a box, here it’s actually true. Below the randomly generated world (again, think Minecraft random) lies a huge, multi-level dungeon filled with a good selection of monsters. Once you dig down to access a floor, NPC heroes that come around your town (assuming you have a tavern and rooms for them to hang out/live in) will venture down to do what heroes do; kill stuff, level up, and get loot. I like to imagine the NPC heroes are WoW players, and I play the role of Blizzard and hand out welfare epics to always allow them to clear a dungeon without too much trouble. I’m meta like that (whatever that means).
I like games like Towns in large part because I enjoy watching AI NPCs live their lives, and here Towns is great. Not only can you watch them do basic stuff (eat, sleep, bake, chop wood), but you can also equip them and see them fight off monsters, venture down into a dungeon, and basically live a virtual life in a fantasy RPG-ish world that you help build/shape.
I also think the game has a lot of promise, and assuming the devs stick with it (I’d imagine just getting on Steam and the cash that will bring will only help to accelerate this), things will only get better and deeper. Just watching some of the older videos of the game shows me that many things have improved or been added already.
For $15 you could do a lot worse (like subbing to SW:To… oh never mind), so if you enjoyed Minecraft or something like it, I’m guessing you will enjoy Towns. If not buy a hotbar!
“Star Wars: The Old Republic excels in it’s PvP combat system above all else” – Said by no one, ever.
Just kidding, Complex.com said it. Awesome troll job is awesome right? (everyone is going to link to this, so yes, working as intended) Also nice to see what 300m+ gets you for visual effects. No wonder SW:TOR is a resource hog; Crysis-level stuff right there everyone, giving EQ2 a real run for its money! (EQ2 is atrocious looking; fact not opinion).
At least they got #1 correct, though at this point that’s kinda like stating one is the first whole digit positive number. It’s not so much a discussion as just stating the obvious.
Anyway, I’d highly recommend checking the entire list out, if only for the lulz. Not only is the 2-50 order odd, but my guess is you have never heard of at least a few titles included.
I did a Darkfall best-case here. Today it’s worst-case time.
Of course the first thing that could go wrong is the game not launching on Nov 20th.
Assuming the game does launch on the 20th, the next issue would be a typically poor MMO launch in terms of queues (over an hour) or outright downtime/crashing. Other problematic issues would be syncing or mobs not spawning ala early DF1.
Moving on, if we have a game on the 20th and we can actually play it, other items of concern are the lack of the first person view (yet to be seen in videos), whether the new role/skill system will move DF too far away from a player-skill based game and closer to a WoW/GW2 skillsmash, and whether the grind to a master-of-all-trades is really gone.
Other concerns include the revamped world (how much smaller? How specialized), the removal of some cities and hamlets (too many for midsized clans to have one?), and whether the economy will be anything but the mess that it was in DF1.
Finally, and most importantly, will DF:UW feel like DF1? Will it really be a better version, or some dumbed-down or bastardized version that is still too hard for ‘casuals’, but not meaty enough for DF1 vets? What if it goes F2P, or sub+cash shop? While it was taken for granted, DF1 remained true to its original version for it’s three year run; will the same happen with DF:UW, or will AV do to it what Blizzard did to WoW with WotLK, or Turbine did to LotRO with F2P? How much would you pay for a hotbar in DF?
(Just kidding about that last one, the game would need to fall really, really far before doing something THAT silly.)
Better PvP experience: WAR’s RvR near release, or GW2’s WvW?
Instinctively I wanted to say GW2, because lulz WAR, but I spent a hell of a lot more time in WAR’s RvR than I did in GW2’s WvW. The same goes for the guilds I played with. That’s hard to ignore.
Then it comes down to which is more flawed. I think GW2 gets more of the little things right, like siege equipment and zone layout, but WAR gets more of the big picture stuff right, like PvP actually going somewhere, and you actually going someplace with it. I’d say which has the better combat system is a tossup. GW2 has better skill balance, but has the silly invuln-dodge mechanic and basically no itemization (far too easy to get BiS everything just by visiting the AH), while WAR had massive CC issues but felt like you could do more with a well-balanced group, and not all skills in that game blended into one giant blah of AoE.
I bring this up because Keen mentioned the two in his post about TESO, where he too makes the assumption that GW2 WvW was better than WAR’s RvR, and I’m just not sure it’s that cut and dry.
Either way, both models ultimately pale in comparison to MMOs that get/got PvP right (EVE/DF/DAoC/SB/AC-DT/UO), and to Keen’s point, I don’t expect TESO to rise much higher (if at all) above that lowly set bar of GW2/WAR ‘PvP’. :queue “lowered expectations” theme song:
Hardcore Casual 
