Wildstar has a fairly large breadth of content, but little depth to it. It's real easy to knock out all the adventures, and having the medal system hooked into them was an incredibly bad idea since the replayability aspect gets shot down since everyone wants to do efficient gold runs. Dungeons offer more meat to chew on, but there still aren't a lot and the off-kilter difficulty doesn't help. Daily hubs have no variety, and the grind is too long. PvP offers three battlegrounds and, what, one arena? I think that's not bad, but it's also nothing to write home about. Warplots were DOA, so let's not even go there.
The only thing you could sink a lot of time into was housing, but housing demanded you do other activities to obtain furniture be it via gold, renown, or just unlocking them.
And then there's raiding, whose problems I think we've go over quite a bit already.
Much as I want Wildstar to survive, I almost feel at this point that it would be better for it to die, to serve as a strong reminder to game developers and publishers of what not to do when making a modern MMO.
If you can't figure out a new way to do things or a better way to do the old things MMOs do, to compete with existing games in other genres and other MMOs, then you probably shouldn't spend millions of dollars and many years of development making a game that will flare up and then fade away in a month. It just makes absolutely no sense.
I think you don't even necessarily need to find a better or new way to do things honestly. I feel if you can bring an interesting story, good visuals, fun combat/mechanics, and a healthy economy, all you really need to make sure of is that there is something for EVERYONE to do. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, a lot of times people want a new game just because they are tired of the old game and want to see a new world. You just need to make sure the casual, the hardcore, the economist, the costumer, etc all have something fun they can do that will occupy their time long enough for the development team to release more content for them to chew through.
The mistake a lot of developers make is that they release content that can be too easily consumed by the masses (not the few, they'll chew through anything in record time), or are too prohibitive.
The challenge comes in making sure the content takes just long enough for the reward without discouraging the player too much that they won't even bother. That's where the real skill comes in, you need to hook the player, get them to spend hours and hours working towards something they want but not too long that they think it won't be worth the time. Sprinkle that with a decent amount of smaller goals and more casual activities, coat in a fairly difficult raiding endgame that eases into a more casual one over time add a sprinkle of constant content updates and simmer until done!
Never give the player anything right off the bat, always make them play the game to acquire the thing they want, even if it's only a few hours of effort for a small thing, that's a few hours they need to spend instead of just walking to a vendor and buying the thing.
New dance emote? Don't just add it to the game, make it a quest that take 30 mins
New cosmetic head piece? Make it a difficult high level craft
New mount? make it the reward of 30 days of reputation grinding, but make the reputation grind only take 30 mins a day.
Add dozens and dozens of those sorts of things to keep players occupied between the story and dungeons content updates that take longer to develop.
None of this is new stuff, it's all old hat but it's presented in a way specifically designed to keep the player playing, but not prohibitively so.
Delphinidaes on
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I mean, WoW had very little to do at 60 that didn't involve the game's two raids, but that was ten years ago. WoW was the only game in town, and expectations have jumped considerably.
You can't expect to recreate vanilla WoW in 2014 and succeed.
Basically, the only reason I'm still playing this game is because of the friends that are still in.
I like the combat, I find it fun. But if it weren't for them, I'd go play other games that are also fun but have things to do that aren't the same dalies over and over, intersperesed with sometimes-frustrating dungeons or boring/mindless adventures.
The spate of bugs and just generally old-school feel of the end-game are really doing a number on my excitement to keep playing.
I mean, WoW had very little to do at 60 that didn't involve the game's two raids, but that was ten years ago. WoW was the only game in town, and expectations have jumped considerably.
You can't expect to recreate vanilla WoW in 2014 and succeed.
I think it's a problem with MMOs as whole(though recently I think developers have started catching on; see the rise in Sandbox style MMOs). Both developers and vocal subsection of MMO players idealize Vanilla WoW/EQ/their first MMO and want new MMOs to copy those designs. Of course, that's a recipe for failure; it's not the 2004 or the 90s anymore. When WoW was released, the other big game was Halo 2. Online and Multiplayer games have gone a long ways since then(often stealing the parts of MMOs that people like in the progess, such as leveling and progression based mechanics), and MMOs no-longer compete against just MMOs, but the entire online space; which when compared nowadays to 2004? The online space is gigantic compared to the past. And it's time that the MMO genre comes to terms with that.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
IMO the MMO genre is a dieing thing. I really dont know how FF14 does it outside of basically being a Final Fantasy game (well, a GOOD FF game, something people have lacked for a long time). The actual gameplay in FF14 is boring even in comparison to something like vanilla WoW, but something about the games structure and story and just the IP itself keep people hooked.
GW2 is the only other thing close to successful now. And even though it really is an MMO is so loosely defined as such it pretty much survives on being unique, and being free after bought (which is HUGE, I haven't played in forever but I could easilly just pop in for a bit and not spend a dime).
I really do not think any MMO is going to be the next big thing ever again. EQ Next is going to be like GW2 and be so different its surviving off of being a different game. But that might be the last gasp for MMOs there is and I think WoW is going to drop off big time past this expansion.
EDIT: Although I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually made a decent MMO for consoles sometime.
But that's a bit of a special case as well as a hallmark of the older FF11, which I believe is perhaps the only MMO that was on consoles prior to recent times.
*looks at his PS2 across the room that has a hard drive from FF11 in it*
Well, there was that and PSO on the Dreamcast. Hey, maybe SEGA will stop jerking us around someday and actually put out a modern one with a actual worldwide release.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
as far as I know FF14 is the only mmo in like 7 years people have actually stuck with and has been consistently growing in sub numbers
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
as far as I know FF14 is the only mmo in like 7 years people have actually stuck with and has been consistently growing in sub numbers
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
I think the most important thing about the whole thing though, was what they learned in the process. They took that failure to heart and turned around and created one of the best MMOS in years.
Delphinidaes on
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as far as I know FF14 is the only mmo in like 7 years people have actually stuck with and has been consistently growing in sub numbers
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
and now SE is having the best fiscal reports in a long time. YMMV
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
Indeed, which is proof that the WoW-copycat model can work, you just need to copy the current WoW and not the one whose mechanics and conventions have been in the dumpster for years.
But that just wasn't the game Carbine wanted to make, for better or worse - they wanted a return to the Vanilla WoW era. Unfortunately for them, no one else did.
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
as far as I know FF14 is the only mmo in like 7 years people have actually stuck with and has been consistently growing in sub numbers
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
and now SE is having the best fiscal reports in a long time. YMMV
Are we sure about that ? Isn't Square Enix still paying off the burning, crashing disaster that was the FINAL FANTASY movie ?
as far as I know FF14 is the only mmo in like 7 years people have actually stuck with and has been consistently growing in sub numbers
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
and now SE is having the best fiscal reports in a long time. YMMV
Are we sure about that ? Isn't Square Enix still paying off the burning, crashing disaster that was the FINAL FANTASY movie ?
From what we know the reports have said that SE went from the red to the black due almost entirely because of FFXIV:ARR. The game is also launching soon in China and they just struck a deal in Korea to bring it there as well. Subscription numbers have done nothing but climb over a year of the game being out (pretty much unheard of in an MMO these days), they stuck with HUGE content updates every 3 months with smaller QoL and content updates in between and have the first major expansion slated for next year which is said to contain as much content as the release of 2.0 had.
If you want a study in how to make a successful MMORPG these days, you look at FFXIV:ARR, and specifically at the Director Naoki Yoshida (who is on a committee now overseeing the entire FF brand so look forward to hopefully seeing all future FF games getting a similar treatment).
Delphinidaes on
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Does this mean that Square-Enix can finally start acting like a proper game company again instead of a bunch of shifty county fair carnies?
Does this mean that Square-Enix can finally start acting like a proper game company again instead of a bunch of shifty county fair carnies?
We can only hope.
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
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firewaterwordSatchitanandaPais Vasco to San FranciscoRegistered Userregular
Yeah, it's probably obvious, but I've completely dropped this game.
Loved the first month of the game, had a really good time playing with BDH dudes. Had to take about 6 weeks off for work and stuff; I came back late August, popped a credd, and realized about 5 minutes after logging on that I had zero interest in doing anything at all in the game. It was nice to get to say goodbye to my bar and house though.
Costumes remained broken as hell even two months after launch. Cannot say how often I would fight trying to swap out stuff, and then the thing would cycle between the two pieces of gear. It was like a roulette minigame just to change up a costume.
I probably won't be able to play another mmo once my guild eventually implodes, as buggy as wildstar is it has some amazing combat and pve design. Will probably poke datascape this week since we have 40+ attuned people.
Straight up. Ten years from now, if I remember ANYTHING about Wildstar, it will be Firewater's house.
Thanks guys! Housing was easily my favorite part of the game (both building and exploring other people's stuff), followed very closely by dungeons/adventures with PA folks.
I do hope this game gets its shit together down the road, but we'll see I guess.
Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
edited September 2014
Personally I don't take Hugh's leaving as a good sign. When some of your more prominent team members up and leave for whatever reason that usually means something is up. As far as I know they still haven't replaced gaffney so the company is more or less headless unless Donatelli is managing things in some capacity.
Whenever anything good happened with wildstar's classes it was usually the result of Hugh Shelton's direct involvement. Engineers and Spellslingers were fucked for a really long time until Shelton had to guide Meerkat's hand to not implement stupid things. To hear he is now the lead class dev is hilarious after the fact.
Beezel on
PSN: Waybackkidd
"...only mights and maybes."
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GrathI'm a much happier person these daysRegistered User, ClubPAregular
man this thread depressed me into not wanting to play anymore.. Then I joined some random guild.. and it depressed me further when all they did was ask me to put up a mining plot on my land and neighbor all them...
man this thread depressed me into not wanting to play anymore.. Then I joined some random guild.. and it depressed me further when all they did was ask me to put up a mining plot on my land and neighbor all them...
I'm quickly running out of stuff to do. Last night I got Beloved with my last faction and have nearly capped out my blue pvp gear. With a looming ratings reset I don't want to start my final goal of pushing for an 1800 pvp set. The guild we went to has more or less folded due to a group of friends not enjoying the raid times and leaving while we were working on Kuralak. With my move coming up next month, I'm holding back on finding a new Dom guild to run with.
Posts
The only thing you could sink a lot of time into was housing, but housing demanded you do other activities to obtain furniture be it via gold, renown, or just unlocking them.
And then there's raiding, whose problems I think we've go over quite a bit already.
I think you don't even necessarily need to find a better or new way to do things honestly. I feel if you can bring an interesting story, good visuals, fun combat/mechanics, and a healthy economy, all you really need to make sure of is that there is something for EVERYONE to do. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, a lot of times people want a new game just because they are tired of the old game and want to see a new world. You just need to make sure the casual, the hardcore, the economist, the costumer, etc all have something fun they can do that will occupy their time long enough for the development team to release more content for them to chew through.
The mistake a lot of developers make is that they release content that can be too easily consumed by the masses (not the few, they'll chew through anything in record time), or are too prohibitive.
The challenge comes in making sure the content takes just long enough for the reward without discouraging the player too much that they won't even bother. That's where the real skill comes in, you need to hook the player, get them to spend hours and hours working towards something they want but not too long that they think it won't be worth the time. Sprinkle that with a decent amount of smaller goals and more casual activities, coat in a fairly difficult raiding endgame that eases into a more casual one over time add a sprinkle of constant content updates and simmer until done!
Never give the player anything right off the bat, always make them play the game to acquire the thing they want, even if it's only a few hours of effort for a small thing, that's a few hours they need to spend instead of just walking to a vendor and buying the thing.
New dance emote? Don't just add it to the game, make it a quest that take 30 mins
New cosmetic head piece? Make it a difficult high level craft
New mount? make it the reward of 30 days of reputation grinding, but make the reputation grind only take 30 mins a day.
Add dozens and dozens of those sorts of things to keep players occupied between the story and dungeons content updates that take longer to develop.
None of this is new stuff, it's all old hat but it's presented in a way specifically designed to keep the player playing, but not prohibitively so.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
You can't expect to recreate vanilla WoW in 2014 and succeed.
I like the combat, I find it fun. But if it weren't for them, I'd go play other games that are also fun but have things to do that aren't the same dalies over and over, intersperesed with sometimes-frustrating dungeons or boring/mindless adventures.
The spate of bugs and just generally old-school feel of the end-game are really doing a number on my excitement to keep playing.
But it has awful design and no QA department except poor Mr. Potassium.
I think it's a problem with MMOs as whole(though recently I think developers have started catching on; see the rise in Sandbox style MMOs). Both developers and vocal subsection of MMO players idealize Vanilla WoW/EQ/their first MMO and want new MMOs to copy those designs. Of course, that's a recipe for failure; it's not the 2004 or the 90s anymore. When WoW was released, the other big game was Halo 2. Online and Multiplayer games have gone a long ways since then(often stealing the parts of MMOs that people like in the progess, such as leveling and progression based mechanics), and MMOs no-longer compete against just MMOs, but the entire online space; which when compared nowadays to 2004? The online space is gigantic compared to the past. And it's time that the MMO genre comes to terms with that.
GW2 is the only other thing close to successful now. And even though it really is an MMO is so loosely defined as such it pretty much survives on being unique, and being free after bought (which is HUGE, I haven't played in forever but I could easilly just pop in for a bit and not spend a dime).
I really do not think any MMO is going to be the next big thing ever again. EQ Next is going to be like GW2 and be so different its surviving off of being a different game. But that might be the last gasp for MMOs there is and I think WoW is going to drop off big time past this expansion.
EDIT: Although I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually made a decent MMO for consoles sometime.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
But that's a bit of a special case as well as a hallmark of the older FF11, which I believe is perhaps the only MMO that was on consoles prior to recent times.
Well, there was that and PSO on the Dreamcast. Hey, maybe SEGA will stop jerking us around someday and actually put out a modern one with a actual worldwide release.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
and all they had to do to get there was have one of the most disastrous launches in those 7 years then shut it down and dump tens of millions of dollars into redoing most of it
I think the most important thing about the whole thing though, was what they learned in the process. They took that failure to heart and turned around and created one of the best MMOS in years.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
and now SE is having the best fiscal reports in a long time. YMMV
But that just wasn't the game Carbine wanted to make, for better or worse - they wanted a return to the Vanilla WoW era. Unfortunately for them, no one else did.
Are we sure about that ? Isn't Square Enix still paying off the burning, crashing disaster that was the FINAL FANTASY movie ?
From what we know the reports have said that SE went from the red to the black due almost entirely because of FFXIV:ARR. The game is also launching soon in China and they just struck a deal in Korea to bring it there as well. Subscription numbers have done nothing but climb over a year of the game being out (pretty much unheard of in an MMO these days), they stuck with HUGE content updates every 3 months with smaller QoL and content updates in between and have the first major expansion slated for next year which is said to contain as much content as the release of 2.0 had.
If you want a study in how to make a successful MMORPG these days, you look at FFXIV:ARR, and specifically at the Director Naoki Yoshida (who is on a committee now overseeing the entire FF brand so look forward to hopefully seeing all future FF games getting a similar treatment).
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
"...only mights and maybes."
We can only hope.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Loved the first month of the game, had a really good time playing with BDH dudes. Had to take about 6 weeks off for work and stuff; I came back late August, popped a credd, and realized about 5 minutes after logging on that I had zero interest in doing anything at all in the game. It was nice to get to say goodbye to my bar and house though.
Thanks for the good times dudes.
Psn: Khezaf
Wildstar: MeHealU
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
Straight up. Ten years from now, if I remember ANYTHING about Wildstar, it will be Firewater's house.
Gave me lots of the sads, because of what really seems to be going down.
What was the post?
This is less than ideal.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
He left by his own choice(He wasn't fired, as he states in the reddit link).
http://www.reddit.com/r/WildStar/comments/2h9794/lead_class_designer_left_carbine_studios/
Nobody is technically in charge of Carbine right now, IIRC. No successor to Gaffney has been announced, which also doesn't bode well.
Nope.avi
"...only mights and maybes."
Thanks guys! Housing was easily my favorite part of the game (both building and exploring other people's stuff), followed very closely by dungeons/adventures with PA folks.
I do hope this game gets its shit together down the road, but we'll see I guess.
Whenever anything good happened with wildstar's classes it was usually the result of Hugh Shelton's direct involvement. Engineers and Spellslingers were fucked for a really long time until Shelton had to guide Meerkat's hand to not implement stupid things. To hear he is now the lead class dev is hilarious after the fact.
"...only mights and maybes."
What server/side?
Hopefully we get some news soon on Drop 3.