All Posts by bobfish

For me it's not a game because I've never met anyone in it who played it, they were either there to make money or to talk to like minded people.

Not saying people don't "play" around in SL, but I think that's the big issue with it. It's like reading the wallstreet journal for fun, you could, but it's not really what most people do with it.

SL to me isn't a game, it's just a virtual world, but for lack of anything better to call it, I concede the point at this time and call it a game. Though most of people who are active in it aren't playing.. they're either having virtual sex or getting rich from making stuff, it's very serious business to them.

Of note, Linden had to ban all peodophilla content from SL due a lawsuit in Germany. In fact, I believe SL is the only game that has had multiple lawsuits in multiple countries for it's sexual content. GTA got a slap for the nude scene, others have had rating issues, but I don't recall any actually having a government take them to court over the content.

Cyber sex and perversion happens in all MMOs, though it is a minority. In SL you can simulate anything though and there is very little censorship (though that is improving).

It's by no means everyone in SL, and there is an awful lot of non-sex driven content. It's just that most of the non-sex driven content isn't profitable and is rarely used. The community was spreading itself too thin last time I checked too, with a lot of people doing their own thing in small groups or the odd event which attracted a lot of people, but on the whole the populated places were always something to do with sex.

Well, sex does sell, but virtual sex is just weird imo.

SL's user figures are iffy, but the amount of money going through the game is accurate. Also I think it's pretty fair to say the majority of the users in SL are into the virtual sex, otherwise we wouldn't have a dozen or so online virtual sex MMOs come out in the last year or so. They clearly just copied SL and figured they could make more money offering a pure service.

Sad all the people who think there is more to SL than this though.

Okay, I just checked the latest figures from NCSoft, admittedly the 25k was from 2005, I assumed it hadn't increased since then cause it's an old game. But, these are the figures from Q3 2007, the latest numbers published, note it combines NA and EU and I was just referencing NA previously, still it's suprising that their number has increased so much in two years.

Lineage II
[World-Wide]: 931,263 subscriptions
[North America + Europe]: 78,953 subscriptions

Hard to tell how popular it is in the west, no figures. People thought Lineage 2 was popular in the west too, but according to NCSoft their subscriber numbers never broke 25k for westerners.

Though to be fair that "Worst game" award is a little biased. According to what is written there, it's worst game because the company did not listen to the players and meet their expectations of the game, they've taken a different approach to RO2 than they did with RO, so it's not a true sequel, in that it isn't more of the same.

They also slate it for being buggy and unfinished, with systems and interfaces not being complete. Though the game is in open beta at the moment and they are patching nearly weekly, so not really sure that's justified either.

From what I know of RO2, if it plays alright, it's been designed to appeal to different types of gamers all over the world, three races in it have different approaches, one is class based, one is skill tree based and the third you equip a stone and that unlocks skills associated with the stone, no stone, no skills. So it's a little weird, but should be okay.

They are working on the English client at the moment, so expect more information to come out in the new couple of months, as far as I know release is Q2 in Korea and Phillipines.

Accurate for who? His figures for all Western MMOs except WoW are just made up, as none of them publish numbers to anyone other than shareholders at the AGM. Korean companies are a little more honest, in that they provide actual numbers to the public, but even then it's only a yearly production of figures at the end of their financial year and then you have to make a guess as to whether their number is currently active or all actives since release.

Player opinions of subscription numbers to server population are generally wrong too. In the last MMOs I worked on, one had a larger number of subscriptions that didn't play to those that did play, and the other had no subscriptions that didn't play regularly. So whilst latter appeared to have more subscribers, the former in reality did, they just didn't all play.

Really pisses me off these speculative sites, they basically say "I like this game so I think it has more players than this other game that I don't actually like".

I've said it before, the industry is run by a bunch of pirates and cowboys, professionalism doesn't exist in most game development companies and most publishers only think of the money.

Someone was saying recently that more games get cancelled before release than are actually released, so makes you wonder just how crap those games must've been and how insane people were to back them. The issue is though, those with money don't really know anything about games, so they trust the developers, and the developers don't know anything about business and just piss around for a few years.

Glad I work for a publisher, least my company won't go bankrupt, even if they don't actually care about the players.

Vista is a very nice operating system, but atm, it just doesn't have the support it needs, it's still too new. Use a dual boot system if you must have Vista :D

I was a beta tester for VG, played at launch, got to 50, quit, came back, did everything new, quit again.

The game has improved a lot under SOE, but it's nowhere near the standard it should be at. Too big, too much empty space, to much wasted space, too much content at the wrong levels, badly thought out time sinks, badly thought out loot distribution, very badly balanced classes.

When I look at VG now, I see a game that has solid foundations, but the people who built on the foundations didn't talk to each other, didn't work to a plan, and didn't know how they were going to add to it once it was built.

Before VG gets to a level where I would return again, they will need to gut and rebuild at least half of the content in the game to suit the top heavy population and to stream line the leveling experience so people aren't spread so far apart they can't even form groups.

I'm curious how people get themselves into situations where their computers are attack by malicious software.

Running standard anti-virus and anti-spyware software I've never been attacked by malicious programs, so why would I even consider adding in more security to a system that isn't threatened. Surely the reason you need all that extra security is because you, the user, is doing things that are putting your computer at risk in the first place.

You could always look at the flip side...

It's not bad for 1 years work by amateurs.

Obviously that's no excuse for what happened and the money that was wasted, but I think perhaps a few of the people who did actually put some work in, showed some potential talent.

Fury's original developers went bankrupt a few weeks ago, and three months ago they shifted development of the game to the Chinese company that was funding it last year.

So, delays in bug fixing, support and all sorts isn't really suprising.

You're all missing one simple but vital point.

EVE is only popular in the western markets.

All developers are looking to produce global products now, even if they seperate server groups to each continent they are still looking to produce MMOs that will sell in every market.

And unfortunately for all you sandbox fans, those games just don't sell in Asia. The top ten MMOs in Asia, all of which have over a million subscribers each, are linear based.

Also last reported accurate subscriber figures for EVE were just over 100k, that put it's behind, WoW, Lotro, EQ2 and probably a few others. I mean Vanguard sold 200k copies at release, even if none of them stuck with it, the fact that it sold more than EVE means people are desperate for linear games.

They had play test for Fury last summer, but decided it wasn't good enough to take on fully, so they only provided disk distribution in Europe for it not full publishing support.

I don't really care what some ex-Sigil developer says now. All but two of them have been fired, the rest of the Vanguard team is SOE people now, which means all the crap people are definitely gone now.

So whoever was to blame for Vanguard's failings, they haven't got anything to do with it now and likely are sitting around wondering how they can get another job after being fired for being incompetent.

Vanguard's future is bright now, it will never be a big game, but it does have a chance of getting better now.

Interesting bit of news for those who play on Codemasters MMOs, they are having an event, a fanfaire essentially, called Connect 2008 in March.

But the interesting point of it was this little snippet in the announcement..

Lucky visitors will also get a chance to experience Codemasters Online’s yet to be announced persistent games

Does this mean they have one or more new MMOs in the works? At the moment they have licenses to publish and host Archlord & RF Online in NA/EU and Lotro & DDO in EU.

Full announcement here http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?p=3517112

Doesn't it make more sense that BioWare take their single player experience and turn it into an MMO rather than take someone elses experience and turn it into an MMO?

They've said they want to make an MMO with a focus on the character's story line, not a global story line. They've ruled out player cities and player driven economy, they won't commit to even having crafting in the game, to me that just takes out the vast majority of what people expect from a sandbox.

The MMO team's producer is the former lead of Kotor1, the MMO team, whilst having many SWG devs, has just as many Kotor1 and other game devs. The most vocal and lead designer, Walton, an ex-SWG dev, doesn't seem to like the sandbox approach.

There is nothing here, or anywhere, that points to BioWare's MMO being a sandbox MMO, those of us who have been following it for over a year now, long before the Star Wars rumor, have never been led to believe that it will be anything but linear.

Originally posted by hubertgrove

 

Originally posted by damicatz

Bioware is the anti-thesis to open-ended non-linear gameplay.  If you are expecting Bioware to make a sandbox style MMO or anything resembling Pre-NGE or Pre-CU, you WILL be disappointed.  Bioware places emphasis on modularity, level design and narrative over open-endedness.

 

 

I am afraid you are probably right. However, it is true that a lot of ex-SWGers are now working for the Bioware studio is Austen, like Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton.  We can hope that perhaps they are lobbying for the addition of some sandbox elements to the Bioware model but we should not be too optimistic.

Walton has been the most vocal of the team so far, and everything he says and seems to believe about MMO design, points towards a more linear restricted game. I don't think he was a fan of SWG's sandbox approach.

Turbine own nothing. All Dungeons and Dragons material whether digital or not is owned solely by Wizards of the Coast. Atari are, and for the forseeable future also the only company anywhere in the world that is allowed to distribute and publish Dungeons and Dragons computer games.

What this means for DDO is that Atari are unlikely to relaunch or readvertise the game out of their own budget, but otherwise nothing at all. The game is already out, it's funded by Turbine and Wizards and neither of those companies are having any financial problems. And if there was a paid for expansion, Atari would still publish it as per their contract with Wizards.

Their financial problem is not impacting their ability to print disks or publish games, only internal development.