Bored Druid ThreadFollow

They have to hype themselves. Being an MMO nowadays is a quick death march. Gotta make that money quick and fast, because in three months you're statistically likely to be in the grave.

Okay, maybe not "dead" dead but definitely whatever Terry Schivo was.

On life support and waiting for someone to pull the plug is hardly alive.

I get WHY they introduced a class system. But that doesn't make it better, because the actual reasons aren't things I care about preserving in the first place.

The game looks like they took a standard MMO, put a Skyrim HUD on it, gave you first person view with weapons (and added crosshairs to make you think you're aiming, when in reality it just means that you target whatever is closest to the center - tab targeting where you can't look away).

I didn't really see anything that really backed the concept of solo play. You're forced to join one of the PVP factions at character creation, which is extremely stupid for an ESO game. They seemed to be really pushing the idea that combat is designed around fighting groups of enemies, and not the typical focus fire approach you see in other MMOs.

There is also way less value to the kinds of things you'd be doing solo. Exploration only nets you experience, so it's nothing but map clearing like current MMOs. Don't even have the jumping puzzles of GW2, or the promised Exploration game style of Wildstar. You can't just pick up 80% of the items in the world, like in Skyrim.

Crafting has the typical professions (plus Provisioner), and you choose 2. You can apparently combine various items to get a reward, which essentially gives every item various recipes (and "recipes" don't exist, which I presume means you don't need to buy a schematic). That doesn't sound bad, but I hate the limit in an ES game. And nothing from the gameplay demos have led me to belief crafting could be a major gameplay aspect. I can't imagine the economy being anything other than a hot mess. I just feel like this is going to lead to a massive number of depreciated materials, unless it's incredibly carefully balanced.

And then they've cut player housing, so none of that. You're forced into a class, so there's some answers about your guilds. Plus, the value of the guilds is already reduced. What fun is the Thieves Guild if you can't actually be a thief? Join the Dark Brotherhood? Too bad you can't just kill whoever you want. Etc.

Honestly, I said from the start that I wouldn't be happy with an ES MMO unless it was more or less an ES game essentially made multiplayer. This isn't. At all.

Well I guess the main story is solo-play and there's a number of group PvE "dungeons" and stuff (yes I know not solo...)? Hopefully that'll be enough even if PvE isn't their end-game focus.









Grindy with random procs and lost of AH scanning to get stuff from far-away areas?

SpoilerSeriously this writer for Elderscrollsonline.info...

Edited, Aug 6th 2013 3:28pm by someproteinguy

If it was fun the first time, it should be fun the next 578 times!

Hell yes. Really enjoyed it till they destroyed it. That and Ultima Online both allowed you to level whichever skills you wanted and also most of the gear you used was crafted by players. Also having your own house and decorating it with souvenirs of your travels was awesome. Their biggest pre-NGE mistake though was player towns. They spread the playerbase too much and the main cities became ghost towns. Prior to that there was always 20-30 people in the cantina chatting relaxing before heading out to kill stuff or do some mining - made the game very social.

Crafting in particular in SWG was fantastic. I set up a Droid Engineer shop and spent a lot of my time filling custom droid orders for regular customers. If only they had found their own end-game instead of totally changing the game to try and be WOW.

While the whole MMO scene is relatively new, companies with their heads up their asses isn't so I wouldn't hold my breath on any Cranial ****** Ablation in the near future.

They made a huge effort spending 100's of millions of dollars, and they got an MMO that feels like it was created by a giant corporation where one hand never knew what the other was doing.

Does still make my list for most improved MMO though.

This. SWG was one of the best sandbox experiences in the history of MMOs.

Rare, have you checked out The Repopulation? It appears to be heavily inspired by SWG. It's still in alpha, I think, but it looks promising.

Edited, Aug 7th 2013 5:24pm by Mazra

Yeah, that's fair. At least for a very large portion of the population.

But I also think there's a much higher potential to steal new players that hasn't been actualized. In order to get those new people more excited about your game, they need to be having an overall better experience with your game. But that means you're competing against the previous game's endgame content (in general) with your new game's early content (in general).

With every new MMO having the same focus on a vertical progression and endgame system, that's just not going to happen. In most MMOs, you have this "fake" progression until endgame (when everyone starts off roughly equal regardless), and then the real game begins.

If you're going to try and steal players with fun leveling, when they're used to endgame, it won't work. If you're going to try and steal players with a reskinned version of the game they've already put hundreds of hours of effort into, it won't work.

It needs to be something actually new, and actually enjoyable from the get-go. GW2 was sort of like this, before people realized the reality of their "dynamic" events' limited scope. TOR's struggle was always its combat which, while fun, grew dull (ultimately being like every other MMO). Leveling was fun enough, with you always needing to fight groups and actually use strategy. But PVP and PVE stuff was really just like WoW.

Storytelling was great, but if you needed really new combat to care, you were lost.

It's definitely about time the market introduced an actual sandbox game, with horizontal/vertical/diagonal progression, a deep crafting system, and all the other features of a sandbox world. The more dynamic they can make it, the better.

I'm confident that, if a polished game with those features was released, it would be successful.

But I'm also convinced that it would need to be F2P at this point, simply because the market is too saturated with games in general to get people trying it as quickly as you'd need them to. The point is to make your game accessible and then get them hooked.

There is such potential in a cash shop for customization options alone, that it could be super profitable. Things like extra dye slots and unique skins sell super well, in general. But in an actual sandbox world, that could go so much further.