Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by DavisFlight
 But here's the thing, they already have dozens of big games for casual gamers, why not try catering to the millions in the untapped MMORPG market, instead of making more small scale stripped down, feature lite CORPGs?

Millions of untapped MMORPG players in the market?

Where?

The several million players that existed in the market BEFORE WoW and who have not had a game catering to their interests since Vanguard?

Its a much smaller niche to be sure, and no one would believe you'd net all of them. But currently, there's no competition, and we're DESPERATE.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Icewhite

Seriously, why can't you spend an extra eight years in development?  13 years should be about right.

Of course the very first player to review it says "omg I can't believe you wasted more than a decade on this!!one1!!!"

Your usual biased nonconstructive posts I see.

If more features = longer dev time... then how come games with teams of 30 people, with under a million dollars in budget, release MMOs with more features and gameplay systems, and variety, than MMOs that were made with 300 million and a 200 man dev team? And how is it that those older MMOs, despite technology being MUCH worse, having to build the engine themselves, managed to do it FASTER?

(hint, it's not because modern MMOs are more complex, its that old MMOs were made by passionate geniuses whereas modern MMOs are made by average programmers who have to jump through hoops for publishers)

How do you hire 30 people with qualifications relevant to game development to work on a game for years with a budget under $1 million?

Having to build your own game engine doesn't necessarily add much cost.  Indeed, having one built to do exactly what you want your game to do may be simpler than trying to repurpose some off-the-shelf game engine that isn't meant to do what you want your game to do.

Building your own engine takes people with extreme skill, and adds development time, which adds to cost.

And how do you hire 30 people under 1 million? Ask Mythic, that's how DAoC was made.

I think people forget that systems generate tons of content. UO dungeons have been an example here. Let's face it. Nobody thought their dungeons were anything epic. They were pretty dull. The exciting part was how to balance how much loot to grab before you bounced back to bank to deposit it (or risk getting player killed). Or how you could find a treasure map on a creature that took you on a whole other adventure. Or how you could be mining for 2 hours, and then get ganked because you were too slow hitting your recall rune. Heart pumping times man!

Hell even EQ's death system produced more heart pounding action than all of today's MMOs put together, cause the cost of death was so high! A system that made the game more fun.

Game mechanics and systems the players can manipulate make a game have longevity in it's content. 'Story line' content has a very short lifespan in comparison.

In fact with the right systems, players can create unique, new content until you shut the servers down.

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by Lucioon

 

An good example would be WOW have years of contents added, could I make WOW2 with everything WOW1 has and more

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So let's say:

WOW takes 4 years to make
4 years to make expansions

You say that you can make WOW 2 that consists of WOW+expansions and yet take only 4 years to make, costing same money as WOW without expansions?

Would you share with me your magic formula how to shrink 8 years of development into 4?

I believe the point wasn't about pure content so much as options. For example, its not about having 12 dungeons instead of 6, its about the refinement and options. Its really not hard to carry over many things at all. An example being as silly as a sitting emote. MMO's now feel as though they concentrate on small moments rather than the grand scale of the game. This is where the older games got it right.

I love that people are finally starting to notice the lame trend MMOs have been following.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Icewhite

Seriously, why can't you spend an extra eight years in development?  13 years should be about right.

Of course the very first player to review it says "omg I can't believe you wasted more than a decade on this!!one1!!!"

Your usual biased nonconstructive posts I see.

If more features = longer dev time... then how come games with teams of 30 people, with under a million dollars in budget, release MMOs with more features and gameplay systems, and variety, than MMOs that were made with 300 million and a 200 man dev team? And how is it that those older MMOs, despite technology being MUCH worse, having to build the engine themselves, managed to do it FASTER?

(hint, it's not because modern MMOs are more complex, its that old MMOs were made by passionate geniuses whereas modern MMOs are made by average programmers who have to jump through hoops for publishers)

How do you hire 30 people with qualifications relevant to game development to work on a game for years with a budget under $1 million?

Having to build your own game engine doesn't necessarily add much cost.  Indeed, having one built to do exactly what you want your game to do may be simpler than trying to repurpose some off-the-shelf game engine that isn't meant to do what you want your game to do.

Building your own engine takes people with extreme skill, and adds development time, which adds to cost.

And how do you hire 30 people under 1 million? Ask Mythic, that's how DAoC was made.

Ever try it?  It's not as hard as you might think.  If you want AAA graphics, then maybe that would be hard--though even there, I think the barrier is more in making textures and models than the engine itself.  But if you just want something simple that will let you make the game do whatever you want and run smoothly at low settings on basically any recent hardware, that's not so hard.

Yeah. Stick this please.

Make an article about it as well.