Originally posted by zerokillz

    Seems to me that everything (well almost everything) was trucking along just fine and then WOW came out. All the sudden execs saw that 6 million subscriber number. The initial cost of the game plus $15 a month equals a huge amount money coming in. The subs alone are worth roughly 90 million dollars. So they all want those kind of numbers. Before that, a quarter million subs was a good number for a decent mmo. There are exceptions to that of course, mainly Lineage and Lineage 2.

    What needs to be accounted for is that WOW is a singular phenomenon. They stumbled into massive success that no one could have predicted. Think anyone at Blizzard saw that number coming? They took a shot and it worked.

    Now, the countless clones come. But you can make Pepsi taste like Coke, but people will still drink Coke, because it's Coke. It's called branding. These people should know it. It's a pretty basic concept in marketing and about the only thing that can break through it is cost. Sell me the same thing cheaper and I might switch but beyond that I'm stickin' with ma Coke.

    We just have to wait for enough of them to fail and lose massive amounts of money. The execs are guided by the almighty Dollar and when their clones don't get Him to visit they'll have to change tactics. Then we might get something worth the time, cost, and emotional investment we make in MMO's.

What saddenes me is that there are good Dev's with good idea's that get shot down and their forced to make these "Things" (trying to be polite) by bottom line watching little toads. Most poeple I've talked to don't want to remake someone else's work. These people have to spend years working on something they hate. They do their best and try to put something of themselves into it, but there's only so much you can do.

 That turned out long than I expected so I'll end it here.

Not all MMO's are out to equal WoW's subscription numbers.  Quite a few actually aim a lot lower knowing full well that they cannot go up against a subscription heavyweight such as WoW.

Nevertheless, MMO devs are mindful that the design scope of their game must draw in enough subscriptions to make the project viable, and be able to sustain those subscription numbers at least until all development costs have been recouped.  Otherwise, the project is dead in the water.  When all is said and done, nothing in this world is free.  Everything costs money.  And I'm sure that the cost of designing and running an MMO today is a lot more than what it was 8 years ago.

All those figures say to me is that there are a certain percentage of age groups like playing online games.  It doesn't say what their desires of MMO's are.

Not all +30 year olds want their favourite MMO to be nothing more than an extremely hard MUD with a graphics update.  Some do, I have no doubt, but they are a very small percentage, the amount of which can no longer necesarily provide enough income to justify the creation of a brand new MMO.  Unfortunately, this means that MMO devs must react accordingly.

Take a look at Vanguard as an example.....It originally tried to emulate the early MMO's to some degree, but the dev's realised that both the older and the younger age groups dont have the time to dedicate their lives completely to an MMO for different reasons. The older age group have real life concerns (families etc) which takes up a lot of their time.  The younger age group either do not have the time / do not want to dedicate extremely long periods of time to an MMO.  In both cases, both age groups want to attain a certain level of enjoyment or achievement from the game that they are playing.  After all, an MMO is a game, and a game is supposed to provide the player with a sense of enjoyment.  Does this mean that such people want a "carebear" environment.  Not necessarily, unless one is so blinkered that they must classify something as either black or white, and cannot distinguish between shades of grey. 

It just simply means that both age ranges have reasons for not wanting to have to spend extremely long periods of time in order to achieve even the simplest of goals e.g. going from level 1 to level 2.   If an MMO dev makes an MMO too difficult to play immediately after installing it, then that would potentially result in turning off a large percentage of their audience.

This is one of the reasons why Vanguard changed during beta and just after release. 

Personally I agree with an above post.  The closest one can get to a "happy medium" when desiring an MMO that is harder than Wow, but more user friendly than MUD's is Vanguard.  Its a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless, that the MMO market has changed.  And if the product's don't change with it, then there is a possibility that they will not make any money and thus will die quickly.

P.S. Before anyone calls me a Vanboy, or Vanguard lover please take note, I cancelled my VG account months ago.  The reason has nothing to do with the above.  But I still feel that the game has promise.  The devs are just taking too long getting there imo.

I'd say "Wow!" but people would get the wrong idea.....so....

WHOA!!!!!!! AWESOME!!!

Yep, I'd suggest all try the combat prototype.  If only to see how it runs.  I realise that the proto is not actually anything to do with the game but look at the detail on the ships even without textures.

And, it runs fine in Vista!

Such a shame they aint got the resources for planetside non-ship based stuff too.....oh well, we live in hope :)

Hiya Crayf1sh,

Im not sure what it is, but theres something about your game that is keeping me interested in its development.  Can't wait to hear more info.

By the way, I've tried the combat proto, plays nicely.  Even plays in Vista, which surprised me :)

Anyhow, cant wait to see how the game will turn out.  Hopefully will be a mix of land and space adventures :)

Keep up the good work.

I have fond memories of AO, the introductory 18 chapter storyline had me hooked.  I suppose the nearest you get with the most recently made MMO's is Tabula Rasa.  But TR is missing some of AO's finer touches, an intriguing and ongoing storyline, the social aspect, a more in depth "spell" system, and lets not forget......having to wear silly pink hats just to "twink" in an augmentation.  Incidentally, I did try to go back to AO after playing EQ2, Eve and Wow and the graphics engine and controls did make me whince a bit.

With that said, I seem to recall reading somewhere that AoC's engine is an evolution of the AO's engine.  How closely they resemble one another on a coding scale is probably like comparing Neanthethal man with present day man. lol.

Still, I hope that AoC will take off well, for that engine might then be considered for other uses, e.g. AO2.  :)

And the head dev for AO did say back in June that the game would be getting an upgrade of the rendering engine further down the line.

Who knows?  It aint gunna be anytime soon.  But we can all hope....and pray.