I saw in one of the videos that the last Dominion race is the scientist type, but they're the ones dropping in shit for the draken to kill in that starting zone for "testing purposes." So they're apparently going to be more than a little cruel.
My hope for the 4th dominion race if they actually do turn out to be the fuzzballs is for them to be completely deadpan, amoral monsters with no concept of right or wrong when they do science. Like a sci-fi version of Droopy from the Tex Avery cartoons.
If this happens there is literally no reason to ever play Exiles ever for me.
Bard in EQ was interesting, but you could forget about communicating with anyone ever.
This, so much. I had re-mapped my skill keys to "qwerasdf" (i'm a lefty) so I could song-twist. I could just keep 4 songs up if lag was on my side, but I couldn't do ANYTHING else until the fight was over.
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984
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kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Lady Mechari for me because I want to be a sassy giant death robot. I enjoy playing humans too but my first characters always go towards non humans of varying stripes because I am a human and generally being a human is boring by default and more of a tabula rasa to make cool later with gear and customization, regardless of this or that blend of human lore in the IP. I want to be different.
More from the continuing Q&A thread saga:
Yep a boss out of your hair means a day work actually gets done. Jeremy free to stay here as long as he likes so Wildstar gets finished sooner LOL. (This was in reference to Jeremy being Executive Producer and therefore free to do this kind of Q&A thing and leave his devs to make the game in peace).
- Player inventory has been divided into three parts: Inventory, Supply Stash, and Quest Inventory.
- Supply Stash will keep track of all your various tradeskill and hobby ingredients so they no longer take up valuable bag space.
- Quest Inventory will only appear when you have received or collected required items for quests. Many quests which used to grant quest items have now relocated those items to the new Quest Inventory.
So my question is concerning inventory. I love the idea of separate bags to make management of items easier, however I am concerned that you may have made it to easy and bag management is not longer that much of a factor.
Are you concerned that inventory management may be to easy for the players and no not much of a factor with this type of system? What steps are being taken to ensure players still feel like they are in control of the bag space and that bag space management is important.
Actually, personally I worry about that - I think there is often a tendency in MMOs, especially as they age, to streamline away things that are actually fun or meaningful. Bag management can be tedious, but you have to be very careful streamlining it that you don't completely trivialize it, as it's part of the minigame that is go adventure, gather loot, get full, come back to town, and get rewards.
We endanger that very key cycle already with cell phones that (when we do content poorly in an area) keep you from coming back to towns full of completed quests and the ensuing "yatta!" feeling of a big xp/loot pinata and then the gold piece "stocking after Xmas" of selling off all your white/grey loot. (Diablo historically especially kinda nails this cycle).
In an earlier iteration, we thought that trash loot was boring - and withe the cell phone callbacks, you ended up on hours long questfests that usually never brought you back to the same quest hub, and your bags never got full, and you know what? It kinda sucked. It was too much of one thing with never an incentivized downtime. So we iterated away from that, and tried to find our natural cycles of proper engagement in an area (public quests to complete back in town, rep benefits, found quests that steer you back to base, settler thingees to use, etc.) and it feels better again today.
Not that there isn't more tuning to do of course - but that was a good example of streamlining the fun away.
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
In today's content we don't do a lot of continent-spanning quests - we're usally focused on telling local stories or introducing lore in an area; I've talked with the content guys about doing a pass later in beta specificially adding in more of these, because they are cool - but really we should gather feedback on the local stuff IMO before layering in the lengthy stuff (because as a dev it's hard to maintain that). So no promises in stone, but we (Mike D and I at least) agree it's cool.
Also to get into elder game content we're intending to have some pretty epic chain quests like this. If that's not leaking too much.
Any idea when the Wildstar Wednesday article will show up?
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
edited April 2013
They put out a tweet saying that it was still wednesday for 8 more hours where they were at. I'm guessing it'll be at the last minute which means it's a pretty big Wildstar Wed or a really small one.
BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
edited April 2013
Couple good nuggets of information today
My favorite was the anecdote of the confused taxi driver that kept giving money instead of taking it. So a beta tester spent 4 hours farming him for money.
The stats breakdown of who died to what the most was amusing but mostly I can't wait until the UK events are done so we can get our first looks at this dungeon they ran.
EDIT: Interesting, it seems they massively underestimated their own hype via word of mouth. Their goal was around 20k beta applicants but the last figure Gaffer had seen was about 200k more than that. They haven't spent any money on ads or their hype train yet. That's pretty telling.
Double Edit:
Surprisingly in-depth response from Mr. Gaffney as to why an mmo sub is 15 dollars.
In general, this .
Also believe it or not, air conditioning and electricity costs for server rooms have become very large relative costs in many territories, no joke. On Asheron's Call we optimized the crap out of bandwidth/hardware costs (I wrote a layer on top of UDP to minmax bandwidth and we did dynamic loadbalancing which in net we should have skipped to go zone based like EQ did...we coulda then shipped probably a year and a half earlier with slightly higher backend costs and beat EQ to market, but w/e). Nicely played EQ.
SQL license costs per CPU can be a ton too, especially some of the top brands but really any commercial SQL (+ DB maintenance costs). Also rack space for servers.
Weird costs these days compared to The Old Days and quite a bit of variance territory to territory world wide (GM costs dominate here in many ways, and not in Asian territories where benefits are less of an issue).
Server costs do still matter though, they are nonzero. They used to be about the most dominating costs though back in the 90's. Note that most of the costs here except for hardware scaled with inflation, so more efficiency over time hasn't necessarily improved profit margins (for which check the public earnings reports of your favorite public MMO company I'd imagine). If you really care though server costs are capital expenditures and therefore depreciated over the life cycle of the game, so they're minimized as month over month costs. Finance geeks FTW.
Too much detail here, but busy and it takes too long to write a short note, heh.
Beezel on
PSN: Waybackkidd
"...only mights and maybes."
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Modest expectations may mean a better financial planning process meaning we might see the game become solvent with less and succeed more in coming up with more moneys for content generation/secret island studio surrounded by sharks/alcohol.
This!
I've occasionally checked in on the thread, and told friends about the game which then gets me excited about it all over again. Then I want to watch ALL of the videos....but I need to manage my hype level. NEED.
PSN: jfrofl
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
This question was asked on Reddit
This is a wonderful video, though WildStar is very much a theme park MMORPG. However, I am looking forward to what sort of sandbox-y type things might come with the Settler path and how Warplot PvP works. I doubt they'll be as sandbox-like as a game like EVE, but if Warplots were eventually expanded into even larger persistant battlezones... that would be interesting indeed!
Gaffer's reply:
Well, here's a little more on that. You are hinting near our intent with WildStar I think.
Here's a bit of a riff on what the vid has to say.
Sandboxes are really fun. But there's a huge barrier to entry, and it's not just e-peening by EVE players like MrBTounge implied. Why is this?
Let's us make a sandbox game right here: Your game world is: a simple canvas. Yeah, in the real world. Your toolbox is brushes and paints. Go nuts: Do whatever you want. The one who makes the most money by selling paintings wins.
Heck, you maybe get attracted to this game because you see these awesome paintings on the web. They're fricking awesome. You want to do that.
So you plop down at the easel.
Well you know what? It's actually hard. How can it be hard, you say? Any kid can fingerpaint. But you know what, most folks in their adult lives don't finger paint. It's not rewarding enough. You put in time without really knowing how to win and you don't see a lot of improvement. You go long stretches making little money. Most sane people start turning their attention to other areas of their lives that they can win, or where they can more easily see improvements. Many might even become art critics, or book readers. After all, it's easier to consume content than create it, and many people crave a linear direction saying what to do and how to win.
And there isn't really a clear direction on how to get better. Let's say there is a tutorial to tell you the first steps of painting. It doesn't help! You get done and you have the same skill level as every other person who finished the tutorial, and you don't feel better than average, and so you can't make much money at all! In fact if it's a competitive game, then maybe every other artist is actively trying to keep you from getting money, and at any time half the time you're sliding backwards and getting poorer.
Now, maybe it turns out you're an awesome artist. Maybe it turns out you have a drive that lets you put in the 10,000 hours of mastery to learn the skills. But if that drive is a common drive, then guess what? There's still even then a ton of competition. Money's still not easy. Only for the very best, the ones who have rare skills, rare drive. By definition.
Which means in this game, most people are average. There's almost no escape from that.
And it's no damn fun to be average.
So, it's true: there is room at the top. But there is ONLY room at the top, and so you either have to find a sweet spot for yourself down the hierarchy, or really have that drive to succeed that by definition above has to be rare.
So that limits who has fun in the long haul.
Now, that's not saying all games like this will fail: EVE for instance hit a sweet spot. Broad enough to attract folks, with niches down the hierarchy that are still satisfying (ore mining, etc). And cool enough stories of awesome fights and espionage to make it fascinating to listen to and attract folks in, some of who eventually claw into the hierarchy itself and make some of those stories themselves (and stick for a long time: "free" elder content, the benefit of the sandbox world - if you put in the work to make it right and maintain it well without breaking it)
Or Minecraft: For every awesome scale model of the Enterprise you see, how many people puttered around for a while and dropped out? Seeing some dude make King's Landing is so neat that it keeps you interested, and drags people in - and some do stay for a while. And hell, that made a ton of money and is cool.
But I'd conclude in a sandbox MMO, there's in general only really room at the top, which is inherently self-limiting. It's not an unsolvable problem, but it's damn hard - which is why there aren't a ton of successes.
Well what about themeparks? They can incent all the right behaviors. Everyone can win, too! 99% of people can win each fight, not 50% or much less as you compete with those more experienced than you. Solo PVE quests can guide you from fight to fight and make sure you have content you can beat, feeling hard enough that you get a glow of success. Every area can be different enough to keep you from dropping out through repetition.
But it's expensive - as BT said, the costs of making new content to keep that experience going are so high that you can only pay for the dev costs to do so if you're one of the bests of the bests in the genre, and barely then. By the elder game, the players are frenetically outpacing the amount you can add to the game, and they get bored, and leave.
Now it's almost like there's an answer hanging out there: Have predominantly theme park type content early in the game, and then hook more and more sandbox elements as you level up. Maybe culminating in things like pure sandbox persistent fortress vs. fortress megabattles, with enough player variation built that no two fights will be alike and enough hardcore persistence to make fights matter and maybe some cool epic stories come out of it. Or deep housing full of quests and goodies to unlock over time and design the way you want it. Maybe you take static raiding and instead move to raids with big dynamic elements to make them actually varied enough that there isn't much filler, and then add the competitive element by allowing guilds to compete with each other for server and world firsts on a weekly basis fighting in the new configurations to create a rush to try to be the best and the baddest every week, with legendary rewards. Maybe add huge dynamic zones of...unannounced stuff, dammit.
Now there's downsides maybe to that strategy. Can you get enough sandboxy elements in there that it feels like a sandbox overall by the top level and not individual sandboxes sitting in a theme park? Is a nuanced message hard to sell to people in a world that's been overhyped, and full of oversimplified USPs? Are people just too passionate about what they've seen before for a message that is more based on mucking with stuff to make it fun than predetermined answers? Hell, will people look at low level themepark-y content and declare the whole game a theme park and they hate theme parks because at the last one the mascot touched them inappropriately?
(that got dark, damn)
So here's some extra thoughts separate from the MrBt's video's ideas:
I did a system in Asheron's Call that a variant of might actually help with the issues - so maybe there's a parallel (we're not doing this in WS [well kinda with settlers, but really I'm just theorizing]). We, in AC, made new players a commodity - if you befriended one as an older player, you got a benefit the more fun your new player had.
How did we measure fun? Well, it's rough, but if we figured if we gave XP for fun things, then we should reward the older player if the new player gets XP - by giving the elder guy extra XP for every allegiance member they recruited and who stuck in the game (ie they kept earning XP). You know, a pyramid scheme. The elder player wins (woot, free xp!), the noobie wins (woot, a mentor!), and Turbine won (woot, subscribers!).
Put an element like that in a pure sandbox, and all the sudden Picasso is fighting to train you to be a better painter. EVE has elements like that. Maybe a well-sculpted for a game variant of that works to have player-created guidance happen as often as player-created obstacles.
Now there are other solutions beyond that, or BT's vid: Grand Theft Auto is an almost (IMO) perfect blend of the direction (quests/story) of a theme park and the open worldness of endless distractions of player-created subgoals. Skyrim got close too - tons of quests to steer you around, but a mass of content that felt sandboxy through sheer volume and density.
So how do you do that kind of thing in an new MMO? (spoiler: this bit is WildStar)
Well, you can let social players plop down sandbox elements to vary up the world for everyone else. You know, like a positive version of the PVP common to make things "sandbox"
Hell, You can bribe them to influence as many players as possible.
Mix in dynamic discoveries, the best of which change gameplay in the area where they spawn, to add emergent behavior.
Have a rich library of environmental hazards and effects that interact well with the monsters and other hazards nearby to give little puzzles to solve or emergent behavior (with the random discoveries mixed in) for those who want sandboxy elements, and more variance to the theme park crowd.
Bribe the anal-retentive player types keep scanning and unlocking even more of these interlocking bits of content (cough cough scientists).
Make the combat-focused guys start huge public events in an area with hordes of monsters. Bribe everyone to fight with each other to help friendships form.
Make combat be actually interesting in 1v1, 1vN, and NvN fights, and mix in with those earlier elements to keep boredom and repetition at bay...and make player fights be new and refreshing, and group fights be strategic battles where you're communicating with your allies by painting on the group in real time with your abilities - and you and your enemies are laying down persistent effects so the battlefield becomes a tapestry of combat over time.
And then culminate that with as much sandboxy goodness as you can cram into the elder games, without breaking too much of the feel you established during levelling.
Hopefully all that adds up into something pretty f'ing awesome.
Or if not, hell, it sounds like a damn good try and maybe if you make your world easily modifyable you keep adding elements until you find the right mix.
So maybe we mess it up and don't add quite the right mix. But given time, and sweat, I bet we can make it pretty damn cool.
So, yeah - that's my offhand thought on the subject.
Yeah, that's a pretty awesome response. These guys seem like they really have put a lot of thought into the issues that MMOs need to address. Very excited.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I like that they aren't saying "WS WILL be all these things" and instead are saying, "This is what we are trying very hard to attain, and if we fail you can't say we didn't try!"
I find it mildly disturbing that they talk about a MMO in terms of 'winning'. Saying people only play if they can win, and you can't win a sandbox! It makes me doubt if this will be the type of game that has any longevity. In my mind its like Star Wars Galaxies versus Star Wars The Old Republic. SWG was a large completely unwinnable sandbox that went on for 8 years until the liscence was pulled to make room for TOR. TOR is a completely winnable themepark that is bleeding subs and free to play in less than a year after launch. When you 'win' that normally means the game is over.
Not to mention that he linked taling about sandbox elements with PvP elements when the two are compeltely unrelated in most circumstances, unless his comments about persistant fortress magabattles means you can build an entire fortress from scratch. Sticking two opposing armies of players in persistant unmodifyable fortresses and having them duke it out is not sandbox in any way at all, and if that is what the dev thinks a sandbox is then there is a serious definition problem.
What if people don't want to win? What if they actually do enjoy the freedom of a sandbox because its the journey that matters, not the prize at the end? Is there any indication that this game would be appealing for them?
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I find it mildly disturbing that they talk about a MMO in terms of 'winning'. Saying people only play if they can win, and you can't win a sandbox! It makes me doubt if this will be the type of game that has any longevity. In my mind its like Star Wars Galaxies versus Star Wars The Old Republic. SWG was a large completely unwinnable sandbox that went on for 8 years until the liscence was pulled to make room for TOR. TOR is a completely winnable themepark that is bleeding subs and free to play in less than a year after launch. When you 'win' that normally means the game is over.
Not to mention that he linked taling about sandbox elements with PvP elements when the two are compeltely unrelated in most circumstances, unless his comments about persistant fortress magabattles means you can build an entire fortress from scratch. Sticking two opposing armies of players in persistant unmodifyable fortresses and having them duke it out is not sandbox in any way at all, and if that is what the dev thinks a sandbox is then there is a serious definition problem.
What if people don't want to win? What if they actually do enjoy the freedom of a sandbox because its the journey that matters, not the prize at the end? Is there any indication that this game would be appealing for them?
I feel you may have missed the messages! First this is an outline of goals. I'm not sure if you've been following the game much but it seems like you have missed a bunch!
The fortresses are indeed built and customized by players. Some parts can only be built in certain places but the things that are built in those places still need to be chosen and then built. There are also free-form pieces to build. This building fortresses aspect is very sandbox-ish.
As for the winning, their goal is to add constant content. What they mean is that there will be enough content added that you can get that feeling of accomplishment from month to month as more stuff is added and more stuff is switched up. Example: (this is just one example please don't take it as an absolute) One guild gets the first kill of a big baddy in a new raid. They appear at the top of the leaderboard, they feel like winners! Next week that raid gets shuffled around and content is changed, now a new guild finishes first and now they feel like winners! Rinse and repeat with various aspects of the game.
Winning DOES NOT equal ending with persistant content.
The question is can they do it? If they can then prepare your mindholes to be blown. If they cannot then I respect their efforts.
If he's still in the mindset of trying to justify a $15 sub fee he's miss reading the market and what it will bear for his product.
I'm not saying F2P is the panacea but I really think there are a lot more market factors on the demand side that he's simply refusing to see.
I can definitely agree that a B2P model is probably a much better idea right now and I really hope they realize that because I don't want to see this game fail for a silly reason like that.
Well...what's better? A 2 million people paying $60 and no monthly fee, or 200,000 people paying $60 + $15/month?
After three years, the two breakeven.
If you get three years or 200k. I'm saying that sticking their head in the sand to the market changes will do nothing but hurt the game.
People don't want to be tied to a sub, not because they're cheap, but because they feel that if their financial situation changes they'll lose what they have. People feel safer spending money for things that they get permanently (as long as the game is running at least) and that includes cash shop purchases and B2P type stuff. Consumer confidence is very low right now and that's why the sub model is having a hard time.
Seidkona on
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Well...what's better? A 2 million people paying $60 and no monthly fee, or 200,000 people paying $60 + $15/month?
After three years, the two breakeven.
Come on now, you now it's not that simple.
Cash shop = mad bank and no commitment.
Never underestimate people's need to look cool.
Hide the coolness in RNG chests and people will spend literally hundreds of dollars on keys every time you add new items.
Gambling. It's a hell of a sickness.
+2
BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
edited April 2013
More looks behind the curtain:
Here's how I'm looking at it. If the leveling content is enjoyable enough to capture my attention for over 100 hours then I'm stoked. I welcome the aspect of so much to do that it takes over 100 hours to get started on the end game. I recently just finished playing Tomb Raider, fantastic game, short as shit. 12 hours and I was done 100%, well now what? I've played WoW on and off for many years now, one thing that always happens to me is I hit max level in 35-40 and then I'm done. My schedule is weird and I love late night raiding but there is a lack of that right now, with 100+ hours of leveling I'm getting at least a month of a game for sure instead of 2 weeks. Giving a long leveling time to the players may be a brilliant decision, more people getting captured in the beauty and awesomeness of this game would be sick. Everyone is different however and I'm sure there are more people like you who want it shorter, likewise I'm sure there are people like me who want it to stay longer. We shall wait and see, let's just have fun!
Response: Actually you kinda hit our strategy here:
We're working on a ton of zones. Our theory basically is our hours to cap should be as many as feel right. If a zone or level range feels slow, we should probably speed up the xp there (or make the zone better). In general, though instead of adding filler, we should just make it take as long as it is fun to do.
If we have 10 fun hours across those zones, it oughta take 10 hours. If it's 250, that's fine too.
If you have good elder games, and a fun levelling game, it's really not that important in many ways...though the better the elder games are may be an argument for shortening the time to level as tissek implies.
But note that separate than that we intend to cheat: You can make casual players catch up to hardcore players using weekly quests (non repeatable) and rest XP. How?
Well picture a weekly quest at your house, it's different every week. But imagine (thought experiment here to prove the point) that it took very little time and gave a full level of XP. Wow!
Well you know what - hardcores would barely care. If they are playing 40 hours a week, they're at level cap (150 hours) in just 4 weeks - and so they only did the weekly quest 3 times.
But someone playing 1 hour a week - imagine they just did the quest. Well after only 50 hours of gameplay, they would hit cap. It'd take a year, but that's better than the 3 years it would otherwise have taken.
So that's an example of what I meant by "if you're dedicated".
Weeklies don't work quite like that, but it makes the point. Rest XP has a similar effect.
also
I have always found it pretty absurd that I have to purchase a game for $60, then pay a monthly fee on top of it. It wouldn't be so shitty if it was like XBOX Live where my sub counts towards access to ALL my games, but that's not possible in this scenario. Is there any games that instead of going FTP, have tried a free digital download and a $15 month sub fee?. At least that way you can experience the full game for only $15 and see if you think it's crap or not. It's not bad paying .50 a day when you have no life and can milk the programs fat ass utters all day, but I work 6 days a week and get limited time.
60 down payment, monthly fee and option to drop cash in game is just ridiculous. That's one thing WoW did that really turned me away. It feels way better to earn some bad ass flying mount than to purchase one! Oh yay this transaction was awesome... hey dude where you get the mount!? oh I BOUGHT IT ON THE BLIZZSTORE :DDDDD... hell no
Problem with digital downloads and then a sub is that around 3/4 of sales for most games in recent times by the numbers I've seen come from 3rd party retail and 3rd party digital.
You'd lose all those sales with no box price (3rd party won't sell you if you don't have a box) and on top risk being branded as a non-AAA game.
Not saying it can't be done (with great buzz for instance, or growing from a small initial playerbase like LoL) - but it'd be a ballsy move for a 10s of millions of dollar budget MMO to take (and many reportedly cost 100's of millions).
Now maybe the market changes. Or, you're Valve. Otherwise though it's a big risk for the beancounters (and beancounters just loooove risk)
So the Battlekeeps are limtied to predesignated areas like the Age of Cona ones were?
And EVERY MMO ever has said they wanted to constasntly add content. And they usually manage to for the first month or two before slowly dropping off for numerous reasons. The question is will there be enough basic framwork for the players themselves to create or engage in their own self-determined content once the themeparks and dev-designed quests dry up, or will the games design be to inflexable to do so?
fyi, you are right, I haven't been following this game closely, that's why I'm asking, I want to know these things, and work filters prevent me from looking up the information directly!
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
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Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Still waiting on Dan "Man of his Word" Ryckert to eat a hat
imo
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If this happens there is literally no reason to ever play Exiles ever for me.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
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I ultimately end up playing the human as well. All my pre-game bluster is for fancy races this, and neat fuzzy dude that.
But, when the creation screen comes around... Inveriably I roll a human. Why?
Because I am a human. I can identify with the character, and it enhances my experience.
I belive there are rumors of a staff-wielding monk-ish class that will be just that.
This, so much. I had re-mapped my skill keys to "qwerasdf" (i'm a lefty) so I could song-twist. I could just keep 4 songs up if lag was on my side, but I couldn't do ANYTHING else until the fight was over.
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984
That's why, as an Otherkin, I always go gnome.
More from the continuing Q&A thread saga:
Any idea when the Wildstar Wednesday article will show up?
Edit: It's up. My body is ready. http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/black_ops_missive_from_the_field.php
"...only mights and maybes."
My favorite was the anecdote of the confused taxi driver that kept giving money instead of taking it. So a beta tester spent 4 hours farming him for money.
The stats breakdown of who died to what the most was amusing but mostly I can't wait until the UK events are done so we can get our first looks at this dungeon they ran.
EDIT: Interesting, it seems they massively underestimated their own hype via word of mouth. Their goal was around 20k beta applicants but the last figure Gaffer had seen was about 200k more than that. They haven't spent any money on ads or their hype train yet. That's pretty telling.
Double Edit:
Surprisingly in-depth response from Mr. Gaffney as to why an mmo sub is 15 dollars.
In general, this .
Also believe it or not, air conditioning and electricity costs for server rooms have become very large relative costs in many territories, no joke. On Asheron's Call we optimized the crap out of bandwidth/hardware costs (I wrote a layer on top of UDP to minmax bandwidth and we did dynamic loadbalancing which in net we should have skipped to go zone based like EQ did...we coulda then shipped probably a year and a half earlier with slightly higher backend costs and beat EQ to market, but w/e). Nicely played EQ.
SQL license costs per CPU can be a ton too, especially some of the top brands but really any commercial SQL (+ DB maintenance costs). Also rack space for servers.
Weird costs these days compared to The Old Days and quite a bit of variance territory to territory world wide (GM costs dominate here in many ways, and not in Asian territories where benefits are less of an issue).
Server costs do still matter though, they are nonzero. They used to be about the most dominating costs though back in the 90's. Note that most of the costs here except for hardware scaled with inflation, so more efficiency over time hasn't necessarily improved profit margins (for which check the public earnings reports of your favorite public MMO company I'd imagine). If you really care though server costs are capital expenditures and therefore depreciated over the life cycle of the game, so they're minimized as month over month costs. Finance geeks FTW.
Too much detail here, but busy and it takes too long to write a short note, heh.
"...only mights and maybes."
Gotta get me in on this beta damnit!
I'm reaching TOR levels of hype over here.
This!
I've occasionally checked in on the thread, and told friends about the game which then gets me excited about it all over again. Then I want to watch ALL of the videos....but I need to manage my hype level. NEED.
This is a wonderful video, though WildStar is very much a theme park MMORPG. However, I am looking forward to what sort of sandbox-y type things might come with the Settler path and how Warplot PvP works. I doubt they'll be as sandbox-like as a game like EVE, but if Warplots were eventually expanded into even larger persistant battlezones... that would be interesting indeed!
Gaffer's reply:
Here's a bit of a riff on what the vid has to say.
Sandboxes are really fun. But there's a huge barrier to entry, and it's not just e-peening by EVE players like MrBTounge implied. Why is this?
Let's us make a sandbox game right here: Your game world is: a simple canvas. Yeah, in the real world. Your toolbox is brushes and paints. Go nuts: Do whatever you want. The one who makes the most money by selling paintings wins.
Heck, you maybe get attracted to this game because you see these awesome paintings on the web. They're fricking awesome. You want to do that.
So you plop down at the easel.
Well you know what? It's actually hard. How can it be hard, you say? Any kid can fingerpaint. But you know what, most folks in their adult lives don't finger paint. It's not rewarding enough. You put in time without really knowing how to win and you don't see a lot of improvement. You go long stretches making little money. Most sane people start turning their attention to other areas of their lives that they can win, or where they can more easily see improvements. Many might even become art critics, or book readers. After all, it's easier to consume content than create it, and many people crave a linear direction saying what to do and how to win.
And there isn't really a clear direction on how to get better. Let's say there is a tutorial to tell you the first steps of painting. It doesn't help! You get done and you have the same skill level as every other person who finished the tutorial, and you don't feel better than average, and so you can't make much money at all! In fact if it's a competitive game, then maybe every other artist is actively trying to keep you from getting money, and at any time half the time you're sliding backwards and getting poorer.
Now, maybe it turns out you're an awesome artist. Maybe it turns out you have a drive that lets you put in the 10,000 hours of mastery to learn the skills. But if that drive is a common drive, then guess what? There's still even then a ton of competition. Money's still not easy. Only for the very best, the ones who have rare skills, rare drive. By definition.
Which means in this game, most people are average. There's almost no escape from that.
And it's no damn fun to be average.
So, it's true: there is room at the top. But there is ONLY room at the top, and so you either have to find a sweet spot for yourself down the hierarchy, or really have that drive to succeed that by definition above has to be rare.
So that limits who has fun in the long haul.
Now, that's not saying all games like this will fail: EVE for instance hit a sweet spot. Broad enough to attract folks, with niches down the hierarchy that are still satisfying (ore mining, etc). And cool enough stories of awesome fights and espionage to make it fascinating to listen to and attract folks in, some of who eventually claw into the hierarchy itself and make some of those stories themselves (and stick for a long time: "free" elder content, the benefit of the sandbox world - if you put in the work to make it right and maintain it well without breaking it)
Or Minecraft: For every awesome scale model of the Enterprise you see, how many people puttered around for a while and dropped out? Seeing some dude make King's Landing is so neat that it keeps you interested, and drags people in - and some do stay for a while. And hell, that made a ton of money and is cool.
But I'd conclude in a sandbox MMO, there's in general only really room at the top, which is inherently self-limiting. It's not an unsolvable problem, but it's damn hard - which is why there aren't a ton of successes.
Well what about themeparks? They can incent all the right behaviors. Everyone can win, too! 99% of people can win each fight, not 50% or much less as you compete with those more experienced than you. Solo PVE quests can guide you from fight to fight and make sure you have content you can beat, feeling hard enough that you get a glow of success. Every area can be different enough to keep you from dropping out through repetition.
But it's expensive - as BT said, the costs of making new content to keep that experience going are so high that you can only pay for the dev costs to do so if you're one of the bests of the bests in the genre, and barely then. By the elder game, the players are frenetically outpacing the amount you can add to the game, and they get bored, and leave.
Now it's almost like there's an answer hanging out there: Have predominantly theme park type content early in the game, and then hook more and more sandbox elements as you level up. Maybe culminating in things like pure sandbox persistent fortress vs. fortress megabattles, with enough player variation built that no two fights will be alike and enough hardcore persistence to make fights matter and maybe some cool epic stories come out of it. Or deep housing full of quests and goodies to unlock over time and design the way you want it. Maybe you take static raiding and instead move to raids with big dynamic elements to make them actually varied enough that there isn't much filler, and then add the competitive element by allowing guilds to compete with each other for server and world firsts on a weekly basis fighting in the new configurations to create a rush to try to be the best and the baddest every week, with legendary rewards. Maybe add huge dynamic zones of...unannounced stuff, dammit.
Now there's downsides maybe to that strategy. Can you get enough sandboxy elements in there that it feels like a sandbox overall by the top level and not individual sandboxes sitting in a theme park? Is a nuanced message hard to sell to people in a world that's been overhyped, and full of oversimplified USPs? Are people just too passionate about what they've seen before for a message that is more based on mucking with stuff to make it fun than predetermined answers? Hell, will people look at low level themepark-y content and declare the whole game a theme park and they hate theme parks because at the last one the mascot touched them inappropriately?
(that got dark, damn)
So here's some extra thoughts separate from the MrBt's video's ideas:
I did a system in Asheron's Call that a variant of might actually help with the issues - so maybe there's a parallel (we're not doing this in WS [well kinda with settlers, but really I'm just theorizing]). We, in AC, made new players a commodity - if you befriended one as an older player, you got a benefit the more fun your new player had.
How did we measure fun? Well, it's rough, but if we figured if we gave XP for fun things, then we should reward the older player if the new player gets XP - by giving the elder guy extra XP for every allegiance member they recruited and who stuck in the game (ie they kept earning XP). You know, a pyramid scheme. The elder player wins (woot, free xp!), the noobie wins (woot, a mentor!), and Turbine won (woot, subscribers!).
Put an element like that in a pure sandbox, and all the sudden Picasso is fighting to train you to be a better painter. EVE has elements like that. Maybe a well-sculpted for a game variant of that works to have player-created guidance happen as often as player-created obstacles.
Now there are other solutions beyond that, or BT's vid: Grand Theft Auto is an almost (IMO) perfect blend of the direction (quests/story) of a theme park and the open worldness of endless distractions of player-created subgoals. Skyrim got close too - tons of quests to steer you around, but a mass of content that felt sandboxy through sheer volume and density.
So how do you do that kind of thing in an new MMO? (spoiler: this bit is WildStar)
Well, you can let social players plop down sandbox elements to vary up the world for everyone else. You know, like a positive version of the PVP common to make things "sandbox"
Hell, You can bribe them to influence as many players as possible.
Mix in dynamic discoveries, the best of which change gameplay in the area where they spawn, to add emergent behavior.
Have a rich library of environmental hazards and effects that interact well with the monsters and other hazards nearby to give little puzzles to solve or emergent behavior (with the random discoveries mixed in) for those who want sandboxy elements, and more variance to the theme park crowd.
Bribe the anal-retentive player types keep scanning and unlocking even more of these interlocking bits of content (cough cough scientists).
Make the combat-focused guys start huge public events in an area with hordes of monsters. Bribe everyone to fight with each other to help friendships form.
Make combat be actually interesting in 1v1, 1vN, and NvN fights, and mix in with those earlier elements to keep boredom and repetition at bay...and make player fights be new and refreshing, and group fights be strategic battles where you're communicating with your allies by painting on the group in real time with your abilities - and you and your enemies are laying down persistent effects so the battlefield becomes a tapestry of combat over time.
And then culminate that with as much sandboxy goodness as you can cram into the elder games, without breaking too much of the feel you established during levelling.
Hopefully all that adds up into something pretty f'ing awesome.
Or if not, hell, it sounds like a damn good try and maybe if you make your world easily modifyable you keep adding elements until you find the right mix.
So maybe we mess it up and don't add quite the right mix. But given time, and sweat, I bet we can make it pretty damn cool.
So, yeah - that's my offhand thought on the subject.
"...only mights and maybes."
It is done.
Wildstar has my monies.
It's refreshing.
Not to mention that he linked taling about sandbox elements with PvP elements when the two are compeltely unrelated in most circumstances, unless his comments about persistant fortress magabattles means you can build an entire fortress from scratch. Sticking two opposing armies of players in persistant unmodifyable fortresses and having them duke it out is not sandbox in any way at all, and if that is what the dev thinks a sandbox is then there is a serious definition problem.
What if people don't want to win? What if they actually do enjoy the freedom of a sandbox because its the journey that matters, not the prize at the end? Is there any indication that this game would be appealing for them?
I feel you may have missed the messages! First this is an outline of goals. I'm not sure if you've been following the game much but it seems like you have missed a bunch!
The fortresses are indeed built and customized by players. Some parts can only be built in certain places but the things that are built in those places still need to be chosen and then built. There are also free-form pieces to build. This building fortresses aspect is very sandbox-ish.
As for the winning, their goal is to add constant content. What they mean is that there will be enough content added that you can get that feeling of accomplishment from month to month as more stuff is added and more stuff is switched up. Example: (this is just one example please don't take it as an absolute) One guild gets the first kill of a big baddy in a new raid. They appear at the top of the leaderboard, they feel like winners! Next week that raid gets shuffled around and content is changed, now a new guild finishes first and now they feel like winners! Rinse and repeat with various aspects of the game.
Winning DOES NOT equal ending with persistant content.
The question is can they do it? If they can then prepare your mindholes to be blown. If they cannot then I respect their efforts.
I'm not saying F2P is the panacea but I really think there are a lot more market factors on the demand side that he's simply refusing to see.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I can definitely agree that a B2P model is probably a much better idea right now and I really hope they realize that because I don't want to see this game fail for a silly reason like that.
After three years, the two breakeven.
If you get three years or 200k. I'm saying that sticking their head in the sand to the market changes will do nothing but hurt the game.
People don't want to be tied to a sub, not because they're cheap, but because they feel that if their financial situation changes they'll lose what they have. People feel safer spending money for things that they get permanently (as long as the game is running at least) and that includes cash shop purchases and B2P type stuff. Consumer confidence is very low right now and that's why the sub model is having a hard time.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
The settler path looks really cool, the way you can trick out questing hubs and stuff.
Come on now, you now it's not that simple.
Cash shop = mad bank and no commitment.
Never underestimate people's need to look cool.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Hide the coolness in RNG chests and people will spend literally hundreds of dollars on keys every time you add new items.
Gambling. It's a hell of a sickness.
Here's how I'm looking at it. If the leveling content is enjoyable enough to capture my attention for over 100 hours then I'm stoked. I welcome the aspect of so much to do that it takes over 100 hours to get started on the end game. I recently just finished playing Tomb Raider, fantastic game, short as shit. 12 hours and I was done 100%, well now what? I've played WoW on and off for many years now, one thing that always happens to me is I hit max level in 35-40 and then I'm done. My schedule is weird and I love late night raiding but there is a lack of that right now, with 100+ hours of leveling I'm getting at least a month of a game for sure instead of 2 weeks. Giving a long leveling time to the players may be a brilliant decision, more people getting captured in the beauty and awesomeness of this game would be sick. Everyone is different however and I'm sure there are more people like you who want it shorter, likewise I'm sure there are people like me who want it to stay longer. We shall wait and see, let's just have fun!
Response:
Actually you kinda hit our strategy here:
We're working on a ton of zones. Our theory basically is our hours to cap should be as many as feel right. If a zone or level range feels slow, we should probably speed up the xp there (or make the zone better). In general, though instead of adding filler, we should just make it take as long as it is fun to do.
If we have 10 fun hours across those zones, it oughta take 10 hours. If it's 250, that's fine too.
If you have good elder games, and a fun levelling game, it's really not that important in many ways...though the better the elder games are may be an argument for shortening the time to level as tissek implies.
But note that separate than that we intend to cheat: You can make casual players catch up to hardcore players using weekly quests (non repeatable) and rest XP. How?
Well picture a weekly quest at your house, it's different every week. But imagine (thought experiment here to prove the point) that it took very little time and gave a full level of XP. Wow!
Well you know what - hardcores would barely care. If they are playing 40 hours a week, they're at level cap (150 hours) in just 4 weeks - and so they only did the weekly quest 3 times.
But someone playing 1 hour a week - imagine they just did the quest. Well after only 50 hours of gameplay, they would hit cap. It'd take a year, but that's better than the 3 years it would otherwise have taken.
So that's an example of what I meant by "if you're dedicated".
Weeklies don't work quite like that, but it makes the point. Rest XP has a similar effect.
also
I have always found it pretty absurd that I have to purchase a game for $60, then pay a monthly fee on top of it. It wouldn't be so shitty if it was like XBOX Live where my sub counts towards access to ALL my games, but that's not possible in this scenario. Is there any games that instead of going FTP, have tried a free digital download and a $15 month sub fee?. At least that way you can experience the full game for only $15 and see if you think it's crap or not. It's not bad paying .50 a day when you have no life and can milk the programs fat ass utters all day, but I work 6 days a week and get limited time.
60 down payment, monthly fee and option to drop cash in game is just ridiculous. That's one thing WoW did that really turned me away. It feels way better to earn some bad ass flying mount than to purchase one! Oh yay this transaction was awesome... hey dude where you get the mount!? oh I BOUGHT IT ON THE BLIZZSTORE :DDDDD... hell no
Problem with digital downloads and then a sub is that around 3/4 of sales for most games in recent times by the numbers I've seen come from 3rd party retail and 3rd party digital.
You'd lose all those sales with no box price (3rd party won't sell you if you don't have a box) and on top risk being branded as a non-AAA game.
Not saying it can't be done (with great buzz for instance, or growing from a small initial playerbase like LoL) - but it'd be a ballsy move for a 10s of millions of dollar budget MMO to take (and many reportedly cost 100's of millions).
Now maybe the market changes. Or, you're Valve. Otherwise though it's a big risk for the beancounters (and beancounters just loooove risk)
"...only mights and maybes."
And EVERY MMO ever has said they wanted to constasntly add content. And they usually manage to for the first month or two before slowly dropping off for numerous reasons. The question is will there be enough basic framwork for the players themselves to create or engage in their own self-determined content once the themeparks and dev-designed quests dry up, or will the games design be to inflexable to do so?
fyi, you are right, I haven't been following this game closely, that's why I'm asking, I want to know these things, and work filters prevent me from looking up the information directly!
Why not have both?
Because that's evil.
Why?