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General: The List: Top 5 MMOs That Need Remakes
News Discussion « General Discussion 10/19/09 11:34:48 AM
I cant say I read this through entirely, simply because I am not conversant with all of the games covered. I do think its an excellent article with a very good and strong point. From my perspective, there are too many games out there vying for our time and attention and too many of those are either outright rubbish (rubbish beyond any influence of any objective personal opinion) or are merely a flashy graphics front end pasted on top of old, outworn, poorly implemented ideas and game engines that are so simplistic as to baffle their description as MMO. Strangely enough, one game that you would have to consider as being worth a remake would be Conquest Online. Pretty poor on the graphics front, with and extermely simple class and combat system, its nevertheless a great game for both group and solo play. As for those you mentioned AC was a game I never really liked and maybe a spruce up of the graphics and general game mechanics would result in a decent hack and slash. UO maybe once had some sort of glory, when people were actually there to play with, but I cant say I ever saw that, and, tbh, the hard to see graphics and eye frazzling colour contrasts put me off it almost immediately. Stick Baldur's Gate quality graphics on it and maybe it would be worth some attention. Perhaps, in some ways, Wurm Online is the remake of UO, having a 3D environment with gorgeous graphics and complete freedom to pursue whatever skills you are interested in right up to the point where the buildings and items you construct are repsresented as part of the landscape. This game is well worth a look if you like Ultima Online. As an original player of EQ, EQII and AO, I look back with sad nostalgia to the days when the servers were packed with eager, fun loving players in games where team work was an ultimate requirement to success. The same can be said of the revivified DDO. All of these games, in spite of looking slightly aged with respect to their graphics are games that have eternal appeal, simply because the games themselves are incredibly well written, well balanced and have that immersive quality that any good MMO must have to be recorded in the annals of the glorious.
However, it is not any datedness or inadequacy of these games that would suggest a remake, or necessarily that any of them need any sort of remake, since what makes a game great is not it graphics but its playability. What really needs a rethink, and all MMO's really have to consider this issue, is how they are marketed. With the advent of WoW we saw a type of self destructive, predatorial marketing that encourages people, especially younger players, to focus on uberism, soloing and deemphasis of what actually gives an MMO lasting appeal to all age groups, ie the social group play aspect that causes the game to be more than just a computer program but a leisure passtime that is as fun and fascinating as any other passtime that involves interaction with other people. Its the people that lend the dynamism, fun and excitement in the longterm. No people = no game. The younger players grow up. They want more from a game than an online solo FPS/RPG in a huge environment. When the game has become too focussed on solo play, the players are inhibited from creating the social environment that would keep those players as they begin to want more from the game than just personal achievement .. as they begin to want the achievement of working well with others. Those players then leave the game they played to try to find a game that offers that missing something but, all games suffering from that migrational inclination in a market where there are almost more games than players, the market as a whole actually starts to lose players, driving them away with its own cheap marketing policies, with the end result that every game currently, good or bad, is suffering from depopulation. The solution, perhaps, is not for the games that led the way and are still the best to be revamped, but for those games to be recognised by us for what they always were and still are .. the most playable games on the market. In return, the companies running those games need to do two things. They must ensure that their player population is not split destructively across multiple servers. Every game has an effective minimum population which seems to be about 75% of what the developers estimate as the maximum population which the servers at the time could handle. All the games mentioned are old and were developed for much less powerful hardware. Were each of the companies responsible to invest in more modern servers, capable of twice the population load, and then merge the populations of the current servers so that the new more powerful servers ended up with between 75% and 125% of that initial maximum estimate, then all their servers would be sufficiently highly populated to make the game attractive to new players looking for other players to play with. Assuming, our hope, that those games then attracted more players, their servers could then be split at around the 150-175% population mark to create new servers to handle incoming population. Remember that all those old games were written in times when the computer at home was much less powerful, when our internet connections were much less capable. Client side lag, which was a common cause of frustration in the past, should be nearly non-existent in those games now. Similarly, there is no reason for there to be server side lag in older games, given that today's server hardware and internet connections are also to the order of seven times more capable. Running servers that can cope with twice the initial estimated maximum population should be trivial. Thus consolidating existing populations to make games that much more attractive to new or returning players should be, more or less, simply a matter of investing in servers capable of doing so.
Anarchy Online, 156 Fixer <Famous Last Words>, RK1 |
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Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning: Compare and Contrast - Use of IP
News Discussion « General Discussion 10/06/08 8:17:37 PM
Originally posted by Thachsanh
No, no! Wait! I want to see pink rainbow giant goblin! You cannot deprive me of that pleasure or I will set a battalion of Turkish horsemen mounted in Ford Escorts on you! |
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About a week after leaving L2 I have started a trial on a game called Endless Ages. After only a couple of days I have to say that, although it is not as initially impressive graphically, that EA is a hell of a lot of fun. |
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I started L2 two weeks before the beta ended and I have to say that I bought the game immediately because I genuinely did like it. In that first two weeks I got to level 20 and found the gameplay to be exciting and diverse and set in a colourful atmospheric world. Since the retail came out I have reached 30 with that character and raised two others to 20 and 12. Some aspects of this game are marvelous ans I cant say technically that there is much wrong with it. But! After level 20 the game rapidly begins to become a boring, uninspiring level grind. At level 30 and after four weeks of play I am already experiencing the same disenchantment with the boredom of killing things for xp that caused me to leave EQ at 56 after two years of play. I am singularly unimpressed with the lack of any alternatives to killing to gain xp and with the complete absence of quests between level 20 and 30. Actually there is one quest and I have still not completed it after starting it at level 24. As far as I can make out the is unanimous agreement that the quest is long and boring and not worth the bother. My main compliant with this game is one that is common in many MMORPG's. Noob life is colourful, exciting and interesting to go through. After that there is nothing to do but kill vast numbers of the same type of monster until you level enough to move on to hordes of the next type of monster. L2 is a radically different game after level 20 and I am very disappointed to find myself so quickly bored with a game that I initially liked immensely. This is not a game that I would recommend spending $50 and subscription fees on in spite of its vast potential to be an excellent game. |
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