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331 Comments
- Faderprime, on 01/07/2009, -4/+186Those games did not fail because the industry is in trouble, they failed because they were trying to fill a niche that was already occupied.
- Vosem, on 01/07/2009, -3/+124It's not just 2008. EA has been a pioneering leader in MMO destruction for years.
- ThantiK, on 01/07/2009, -13/+70The reason these MMOs have fallen flat on their faces is the fact that World of Warcraft is amazingly successful. WoW brought a lot of the casual players into the scene and unfortunately it's really divided the MMO scene. There are those of us who want a more hardcore experience but we're stuck on WoW because lets face it, an mmo is only as good as the amount of people playing it. Everyone is focusing on easier and easier gameplay because that's where the money is. The side effect of that is that the casual players...are exactly that. They are the ones who DON'T want to switch games, they DON'T want to grind all over again.
If an MMO catered to the hardcore players a little more - you'd see big-name guilds come over from WoW, advertise and you could make a game big again. That top 5% of gamers are tired of the freebie-mode epics that warcraft has to offer and are honestly looking for something that's just as engaging but requires more time/effort. The other 95% of warcraft's gamers probably have their accounts active and play less than 10 hours a week. It's impossible to truly enjoy an MMO only playing 10 hours a week. - warrenterr, on 01/07/2009, -0/+50Hellgate was a disaster but it had potential. The gameplay was fun, and everything worked but there wasn't enough content. An hour into the game and you saw all the environments and most of its monsters it had to offer (which changed colors in later levels).
- Llanowar, on 01/08/2009, -0/+44They failed because they sucked.
AoC was viewed as the one possible candidate to dethrone WoW and had god knows how many sales in its first week.
However, with the crap it was I'm surprised they didn't cancel it yet.
Pirates of the burning sea just sucked. And even if you liked it, it's hardly mmo material.
Tabula Rasa, never tried it, but haven't heard a single positive thing about it.
And well, everyone knows about Hellgate I would think. - brandondatwyler, on 01/08/2009, -2/+38ULTIMA ONLINE FTW
- Schmidtopolis, on 01/08/2009, -0/+25What is this, *****' youtube?
- aramova, on 01/08/2009, -3/+26"...because lets face it, an mmo is only as good as the amount of people playing it."
You can't really say that in terms of WoW.
Each server is limited to around 5,000 players concurrent last I checked. An MMO just like anything else can be crushed by the weight of it's popularity unless you spread that weight out. And the number of people have nothing to do with the game at that point.
The only thing numbers help in WoW is Player Churn at this point.
If you want to make an example of where numbers are a true influence on game experience, look at Eve Online. A single shard universe where everyone plays on the same server. Last record was 45,000+ people online at once. Since the entire game is a PvP zone, that makes for interesting play.
WoW, not so much. - Matri, on 01/08/2009, -0/+22That ain't all that did it. Take a look at this:
http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t= ...
Priceless... - inactive, on 01/08/2009, -0/+21I expect with the climbing recession and high employment rate MMOs will get a lot more attention. When your life sucks and you have nothing else to do with your time, MMOs are a great way to waste your life
- Schmidtopolis, on 01/08/2009, -4/+25Don't forget SOE.
- inactive, on 01/08/2009, -1/+21I don't blame WoW for taking the top spot, I congratulate them.
They have set the bar, and other MMO's can't understand how to catch-up. Right now, no MMO is better than WoW as a whole. - warrenterr, on 01/08/2009, -1/+20I saw your mom online the other day.
- bustaballs, on 01/08/2009, -1/+19FFXI is still a great game and still consumes half a million people. That's no where near WoW level but it's still plenty enough to have well populated servers and enough income to keep it going. Success isn't determined by whether you can beat WoW or not.
- zombiedepot, on 01/08/2009, -0/+17I used to play Ultima Online a lot back in the day and there has yet to be an online RPG since that offers the same amount of freedom.
It's too bad EA completely screwed over the franchise and canned the sequel, otherwise these games might have a higher standard to live up to. The gameplay aspect of the genre seems to be devolving in favor of higher quality graphics. - wonderchemist, on 01/08/2009, -0/+17AoC has no one but their content development staff to blame.
- ThantiK, on 01/08/2009, -7/+23If you think WoW is too much, your definitely not "hardcore"...in any way, shape, fashon, or form. In fact your the casual of the casuals. It took less than 1 day for most of my guild to get the achievement of "Superior" (ilvl200 on all gear), less than 48 hours for most of us to hit 80, and less than a week for us to conquer all 25 man content that's been released. Since then we've been bored off our asses until Season 5 started. Since then we've been pvping our asses off since we're in full PvE epics, and now working on PvP epics.
Most of us are working on our 3rd or 4th lvl 80 at the moment because we literally have nothing else to do. We're all in the 2030+ pvp brackets, Clear all 25 man content within 2 days and basically have nothing else to do other than grind for the rest of the week. - solmakou, on 01/08/2009, -1/+17Warhammer Online has so much potential but they stopped listening to their beta testers about 9 months before launch hopefully they start paying attention to their "hardcore" guilds/players because we are dropping like flies, I haven't played in 2 months and I was the second Archmage to 40 in the US (perhaps world) only next to a guild mate. Darkfall is fast approaching and many of us are salivating for it rather then grinding renown to get ready for the first major content patch.
- GoKings, on 01/08/2009, -0/+14Hellgate could have been so much fun. But they released the game waaaay too early. Glitches, laggy servers, numerous bugs, and mismanaged accounts all but destroyed the community that bought the game with such anticipation.
- Mossman85, on 01/08/2009, -0/+14There is only one solution to stop the beast that is World of Warcraft....Blizzard's next MMO.
- Equinox1, on 01/08/2009, -0/+14Fire Isiah Cartwright, the ***** worst skill balancer in any game ever, and Guild Wars would be awesome again.
While it's not an "MMO", it usually tends to fall under that category. - Akairenn, on 01/08/2009, -0/+13Darkfall *isn't* vaporware?
I'll believe it when I see it. :P
WAR is a very solid game; but Mythic can't help but be Mythic. The game had a history of facepalm inducing moves in Beta; it had the biggest facepalm inducing move I've ever seen on launch (nine *trillion* servers? Really, Mythic?), and it'll continue to have them. At least Mythic's changed somewhat - using my example, it didn't take them *too* long to realize they did not have the fifty million players or so to populate the massive assload of servers they launched with.
In the old days, if they had pulled something that stupid with DAoC, they would've waited til 90% of the playerbase left to fix it :p - Madcow17, on 01/08/2009, -2/+15They failed because WoW just simply blows them out of the water. I've played MMOs since 1997 when Ultima Online came out. Since WoW came out, every time i try a new game it feels so broken or poorly designed compared to WoW. WoW is so polished it's not even funny. It's like watching a bunch of homeless people try to fight a mech. When you have a good budget and put effort into something, you tend to blow away competition. Every game relesed to CRUSH it has faield so miserably. I want my money back for age of conan. Warhammer online actually isn't BAD. It had a sloppy release and the PvP is a little nuts, but it plays well and I think it's WoWs closest competitor, but still not close.
- KMartSheriff, on 01/08/2009, -0/+12Dude UO got ***** over long ago. But before it did, it was the most bad-ass MMO out there. *weeps* I miss the old UO days. God I miss that awful looking (yet awesome) 2-D user interface.
- Gonasadude, on 01/08/2009, -0/+12@Thanktik: The reason you're bored is because you rushed through everything. I honestly don't understand why you would want to rush through something, and then just wait.
- VSKBadCRC, on 01/08/2009, -2/+14Yeah, SOE takes the cake in this department. They've got the market cornered on taking the worlds most successful MMO's and turning them into complete garbage.
- sirbeta, on 01/08/2009, -0/+10I really doubt Darkfall will amount to anything significant. The fact that it had been accused of being Vaporware for so long, is run by a microscopic staff, had been bait and switching supposed closed betas forever (saying they were going into beta, and then changing their mind. Over and over and over again) along with other strange anomalies really does say a lot about its potential to succeed, or even blip on the radar.
- Nlewis4, on 01/08/2009, -0/+10the other games failed because they were awful
- Gonasadude, on 01/08/2009, -1/+11Diablo III is coming... *DUN DUN DUNNNNNN*
- paradigmx, on 01/08/2009, -1/+11WoW doesn't support Linux, it's just not hard to get it to run on Linux
and Mac does not have enough of an installed base to really cause any kind of swing in an MMOs popularity, at all.
in fact, i would almost say there are more people playing WoW at this moment, then there are people on a mac at this moment. - Gizza, on 01/08/2009, -0/+10I played it for about 3 months and it certainly seemed that way as every patch they released (sometimes several a week) broke more than it fixed and caused the servers to be down for several hours while they rolled them back.
This wasn't an odd incident or every so often, this was pretty much every single patch for about 2 months being released and then rolled back a day or so later. The game was a mess. - Cerialthriller, on 01/08/2009, -0/+10the problem is most of the people came to WoW after they worked out the horrible game breaking bugs and dont realize that the game was broken at one time. People pick up things like Age of Conan or Warhammer on launch day and think its going to be 100% polished like WoW, but don't realize WoW was actually worse then most recent MMO launches. After the free 30 days are up people arent renewing and the games dont have enough money coming in to finish off the polishing.
- MrJagil, on 01/08/2009, -0/+9EA has been pioneering in destroying all types of games..
it's their fault we don't see Dungeon Keeper 3, and it's their fault Spore turned out like it did... just glad Mythic didn't get sucked in... - Gizza, on 01/08/2009, -0/+9WoW has changed people's perceptions of what a successful MMO is. Before WoW half a million subs was about as successful as you could get in an MMO. In fact it was really only the huge asian MMOs that had more than that. EQ for ages was considered one of the most popular MMOs ever, yet that only ever had about half a million subs.
- Drahkar, on 01/08/2009, -0/+8AoC had potential, but all of the things they used as selling points ended up being minor parts of the actual game. So everyone bought it, logged in and stopped short going 'wtf?'.
Tabula Rasa was actually a fairly decent game. It just suffered what is common to games being developed by PlayNC. A complete lack of added content and endgame. The crafting system was weak, offering little to the users and really wasn't more than a novelty. The rest of the game was fun, but once you hit the end, that was it. The game was over and they weren't adding anymore materials.
In the end they all died or are dying from obvious reasons. They chose to not implement the content and functionality that would draw people in. People like being able to flex their own creativity into a game. With EVE that manifests in sprawling corporations that have vast impact int he game world. In WoW it manifests in Guilds and custom built Add-Ons, in Warhammer they use the Add-Ons, Guilds and have the added benefit of the RvR system that allows zones to completely change allegiances depending on who controls the combat points.
Having that ability to customize or have an impact in the game world is what will really be the future of MMOs. - nofreee, on 01/08/2009, -0/+8I'll never forgive them for killing Earth and Beyond.
- E11iphunt, on 01/08/2009, -6/+14This 19 year old kid with no software development experience has no idea why these games actually failed so please don't listen to him.
Pretty much any time he is casting stones he is casting them in the wrong directions. - Lunarbunny, on 01/08/2009, -0/+8Really, I'd say it depends on launch. Every successful MMO, while not all having perfect launches, actually seemed like a relatively finished product at launch. Developer response is important as well, which I assume BioWare can pull off.
- mugicha, on 01/08/2009, -1/+9You lost me at stfu.
- TheDrinkNinja, on 01/08/2009, -0/+8Gilded Age jokes FTW.
- mugicha, on 01/08/2009, -0/+8I went to E3 in 2005 and talked to one of the Hellgate developers. He was so excited and enthusiastic that I came away thinking for sure that game would be awesome. I also saw demos of Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and Vanguard. None of them did well. Of course, one of the other demos we saw there was of WoW battlegrounds, and Blizzard always had huge crowds of people checking out their stuff. Not much has changed in 3.5 years.
- andrew97068, on 01/08/2009, -1/+8WoW is basically the modern Carnegie Steel of MMOs. They control just about the entire online RPG population. 10+ million players paying 15 a month.
- Equinox1, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7The proper term for it would be "CO-RPG" Cooperative RPG, you only experience the MMO portion when you're in a town or outpost. All the other instances and missions are done with 4-8 people on your own copy of the map.
The concept hardly detracts from the game, It's still awesome. - laserdog, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7One of Blizzard's game designers had a great quote:
"Polish one thing and nobody will notice. Polish 1000 things, and people notice."
People stop playing MMOs when things grate on them or annoy them. When something jars you out of the reality and makes you look around and go "WTF, I have better things to do?"
WoW has been polished to a point of being a silky sweet poison. Like drowning in a bottle of ether. Sure yer dying, but who cares?
It's also openly embraced the community enhancements to it, has a regular dialog with players, and is a continually moving target.
The MMOs listed all were shooting to copy WoW as it was at release. Which is a terrible game compared to WoW as it is now.
I'd personally hate to be a rival MMO developer... "WoW just added integrated voice chat?? Dammit, now the brass is going to want that too...." - xixphz, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7I view it as a fresh new start personaly. I would loved to have gotten into Eve Online when it launched but I was too busy standing in a buff line in Coronet. In hindsight I should have stuck with eve but I still had a hell of a time with swg. Im lookin forewards to Stargate Worlds but who knows. Perhaps one of the SWG emulator projects will get it right or mabye blizzard will make a scifi mmo and put everyone out of business. Only his noodly greatness knows for sure.
- Murdats, on 01/08/2009, -2/+9not really, no.
- roxya, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7I hate thinking about how UO was. Makes me realise just how awful MMORPGs are now.
- Yazilliclick, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7WoW is the best out there, especially now with years of additional patches and expansions after release. WoW got to where it was because it was good at launch, was easy to get in to, had depth and always kept things to do for the player base. You can say you don't like it and it's not your favorite, that's fine, but don't try and pretend it just magically got to be top dog for no reason other than that it was WoW.
- brundlefly76, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7solmakou - if you haven't played in 2 months you may have missed the most important change which has been a total game changer - RvR influence rewards.
Prior to this patch, open RvR was somewhat dead, but now it is the source of the best gear, so overnight warbands sprung up and the action has been on fire ever since. Esp once you get to T3.
Just prior to that patch myself and many other players were getting ready to call it quits because grinding PvE, waiting all day for a scenario pop, and joining/forming parties of 4 players max so you could get rolled by a Keep Lord did indeed start to suck. - Bravedude, on 01/08/2009, -0/+7Can any experienced MMO players here tell me the outlook on how good the new Star Wars MMO "The Old Republic" will be?
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