The only sure method of getting good sandbox games back is to stop paying for crappy themeparks.
As a customer base, we can't keep supporting these companies and their subpar games with our cash and expect changes. If developers can continue to spend a minimal amount of investment on developing for quick box sales, why would they bother with anything more?
Don't want crap? Stop paying for crap.
That's what I did and if more people would jump onboard instead of throwing cash around at the latest over-hyped half-a** project like crazed crack junkies, perhaps things will change.
Bethesda? Perhaps, but don't hold your breath. They'll most likely take the quick and easy way out too, fast box sales.
Unfortunately a fool and there money etc. same goes for things like drm.
In game terms it seems like companies now think that people are going to buy there game anyway so why bother making it good coughbiowarecough. Don't see it changing anytime soon.
The only sure method of getting good sandbox games back is to stop paying for crappy themeparks.
As a customer base, we can't keep supporting these companies and their subpar games with our cash and expect changes. If developers can continue to spend a minimal amount of investment on developing for quick box sales, why would they bother with anything more?
Don't want crap? Stop paying for crap.
That's what I did and if more people would jump onboard instead of throwing cash around at the latest over-hyped half-a** project like crazed crack junkies, perhaps things will change.
Bethesda? Perhaps, but don't hold your breath. They'll most likely take the quick and easy way out too, fast box sales.
companies now think that people are going to buy there game anyway
Bingo. Buncha game junkies twitchin' fer tha next fix. It's sad and pathetic and we're getting everything we deserve.
STOP THE MADNESS!
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Bingo. Buncha game junkies twitchin' fer tha next fix. It's sad and pathetic and we're getting everything we deserve.
STOP THE MADNESS!
What madness?
I am having fun with my gaming. Why should i stop just because you do not like it?
Good for you, but I wasn't speaking to you.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
So if say sometime in the near future bethseda comes out and say they will make a sandbox game?
What are your thoughts, would you be excited and hyped about it? Compare to say anoher indie developer that gamers have no clue on say they are making the next sandbox game???
Remember that beth has alot of capital from all those titles such as elder scroll series and a huge possibly sandbox players base. Beth+sandbox? are you hyped or not?
As mentioned before, about 20% of the player population are of the hardcore types that dedicate 3-4 nights a week to raiding. They put in 20+ hours a week, grind to make sure they have all the consumables and gear needed to raid. This group of WOWs overall playerbase consume content MUCH faster than the other 80% of the playerbase....and create a HUGE demand of the developers time & resources.
Where did you get the 20% number? It is well known that only 2% have done Sunwell back when it was the hardest raid dungeon. The completion of the normal newest DS raid is 4%.
The LFR raids .. which makes raid a lot easier .. has a completion raid of 35%. This is raid for the casual.
I highly doubt there are 20% of hardcore types. Do you actually have statistics? The statistics i have seen does NOT back up this 20% number.
After wotlk hit and players found themselves in a situation where basically anyone could do the heroics and the entry raid (naxx10/25 was severely undertuned), blizz argued that "only around 20% of guilds regularly raided in TBC" and that the new system is in place so that content is not released just for a few percent of players.
Now ofcourse "20% guilds raid regularly" is far from "20% players are hardcore", it is more something which has over time become something of a agreed approximate number of people who were "interested in raiding" those days, not how many are hardcore, not how many were actually succesful doing it.
I mean, the real number of "players interested in raiding" may be all over the place, even if we assume that blizz counted just guilds which have 25+ members, there were non-raiding social guilds with much much more players in existence.
From a current point of view we could argue that those 20% could be "people who are interested in raiding, if it is difficult, not just a loot pinata", compared to your 35% of "people who are interested and able to raid, if it is a loot pinata", but it is ofcourse a far stretch and open for discussion.
Flame on!
P.S. "interested in raiding" in this post means "interested in doing a raid more than once a week or 14 days" or "seeing raiding as the main ingame activity".
As mentioned before, about 20% of the player population are of the hardcore types that dedicate 3-4 nights a week to raiding. They put in 20+ hours a week, grind to make sure they have all the consumables and gear needed to raid. This group of WOWs overall playerbase consume content MUCH faster than the other 80% of the playerbase....and create a HUGE demand of the developers time & resources.
Where did you get the 20% number? It is well known that only 2% have done Sunwell back when it was the hardest raid dungeon. The completion of the normal newest DS raid is 4%.
The LFR raids .. which makes raid a lot easier .. has a completion raid of 35%. This is raid for the casual.
I highly doubt there are 20% of hardcore types. Do you actually have statistics? The statistics i have seen does NOT back up this 20% number.
After wotlk hit and players found themselves in a situation where basically anyone could do the heroics and the entry raid (naxx10/25 was severely undertuned), blizz argued that "only around 20% of guilds regularly raided in TBC" and that the new system is in place so that content is not released just for a few percent of players.
Now ofcourse "20% guilds raid regularly" is far from "20% players are hardcore", it is more something which has over time become something of a agreed approximate number of people who were "interested in raiding" those days, not how many are hardcore, not how many were actually succesful doing it.
I mean, the real number of "players interested in raiding" may be all over the place, even if we assume that blizz counted just guilds which have 25+ members, there were non-raiding social guilds with much much more players in existence.
From a current point of view we could argue that those 20% could be "people who are interested in raiding, if it is difficult, not just a loot pinata", compared to your 35% of "people who are interested and able to raid, if it is a loot pinata", but it is ofcourse a far stretch and open for discussion.
Flame on!
P.S. "interested in raiding" in this post means "interested in doing a raid more than once a week or 14 days" or "seeing raiding as the main ingame activity".
It is a huge stretch to go from 20% who have some interests in raids, to equate they want "if it is difficult". In fact, the best data is what i cited (from MMO-CHAMPION a while back and you can check it).
35% of the players completed LFR DS
4% of the players completed DS NORMAL mode
less than 1% of 1% completed DS HARD mode.
Obviously players have a choice of WHICH of these 3 mode of difficult they will do.
The data overwhelming supporst the conclusions that:
a) a significant portion of the players (although NOT a majority, only at 35%) want to raid for whatever reasons (loot, want to see the end of Deathwing, find the mechanics fun ...)
b) VERY few players want anything challenging (4% if you call normal mode challening, less than 1% of 1% if you only consider hard mode challenging).
It is obviously that most players who want to raid CHOOSE the easiest option by an overwhelming 9 to 1 ratio. In fact, many players won't even attempt normal mode raid until it is puggable because of the debuff to nerf the raid is in place.
99% of the players probably won't even attempt hard mode.
Do you think it is the fault of themepark or the fault of traditional gameplay?
Killing 10 rats might be more interesting, when you do it different. The race to elder game can be a different experience when the gameplay is shooter-like, or roundbased/realtime strategy.
It is a huge stretch to go from 20% who have some interests in raids, to equate they want "if it is difficult". In fact, the best data is what i cited (from MMO-CHAMPION a while back and you can check it).
35% of the players completed LFR DS
4% of the players completed DS NORMAL mode
less than 1% of 1% completed DS HARD mode.
Obviously players have a choice of WHICH of these 3 mode of difficult they will do.
The data overwhelming supporst the conclusions that:
a) a significant portion of the players (although NOT a majority, only at 35%) want to raid for whatever reasons (loot, want to see the end of Deathwing, find the mechanics fun ...)
b) VERY few players want anything challenging (4% if you call normal mode challening, less than 1% of 1% if you only consider hard mode challenging).
It is obviously that most players who want to raid CHOOSE the easiest option by an overwhelming 9 to 1 ratio. In fact, many players won't even attempt normal mode raid until it is puggable because of the debuff to nerf the raid is in place.
99% of the players probably won't even attempt hard mode.
Ok, it was bad choice of words on my part, "if it is difficult" should have been "despite of it being difficult".
Where you in my opinion make a mistake is reading something like "4% have completed it" and you see "4% have completed, AND are trying , planning or want to".
The rest of your post is flawed logic, just because something is the path of least resistance, inevitable, or most of us do it at least once, it does not mean it is popular in itself or desired or even good
By your logic 100% of humans WANTS to die (over and over again, all the time )
The problem with playing sandbox games is there isn't any quality ones IMO.. Well I guess EvE is pretty good quality wise but I'm just not into being a ship most of the time. I missed out on the sanbox games back in the day and played a little bit of EQ and FFXI as my first MMO's then played wow off and on for a year and countless other mmos.
I got bored of the themepark style of game, but the Quality and Polish of the themeparks like the music, sfx ,animations makes it kinda hard to play a sandbox with a fraction of the budget. Even though I like the ideas of Darkfall and Dawntide and Xsyon when I try to play I can't help to think how crap the animations and sound is compared to other Themepark games. I think thats why people won't play the sandbox games currently out, they are used to the quality of themparks.
So if Arche Age can bring in some sandboxyish gameplay but have all the graphics, sounds and animation that is the same quality of all these other themeparks we'll start seeing AAA devs start working on more Sandboxish type games.
So if say sometime in the near future bethseda comes out and say they will make a sandbox game?
What are your thoughts, would you be excited and hyped about it? Compare to say anoher indie developer that gamers have no clue on say they are making the next sandbox game???
Remember that beth has alot of capital from all those titles such as elder scroll series and a huge possibly sandbox players base. Beth+sandbox? are you hyped or not?
They don't exactly have a track record of making sandbox games, so I wouldn't be that hyped on it.
The only sandboxes I'm interested in are those which take a strong gameplay angle like Terraria, or those made by the only people who made a sandbox MMORPG I enjoyed (the H&H guys working on Salem.) I wouldn't call it "hyped", but I don't really get hyped over any game until I try it (except Planetside 2. I'm a giddy schoolboy for that.)
A Skyrim MMORPG definitely wouldn't be as amusing as Skyrim, and definitely wouldn't be a sandbox (there's no "sand"; you don't manipulate the world, you ride the themepark rides the developers set up for you, in any order you want.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ok, it was bad choice of words on my part, "if it is difficult" should have been "despite of it being difficult".
Where you in my opinion make a mistake is reading something like "4% have completed it" and you see "4% have completed, AND are trying , planning or want to".
The rest of your post is flawed logic, just because something is the path of least resistance, inevitable, or most of us do it at least once, it does not mean it is popular in itself or desired or even good
By your logic 100% of humans WANTS to die (over and over again, all the time )
Flame on!
You erroneously miss the key flaw of your logic. A person canNOT choose whether to die. But a player certainly CHOOSE to play a LFR or a normal raid.
In fact, you said it .. ."path of least resistance" .. if people CHOOSE the path of least resistance .. by definition it is popular. And by definition they are CHOOSING the easier way.
Note the word CHOOSE. You cannot choose not to die, can you?
Ok, it was bad choice of words on my part, "if it is difficult" should have been "despite of it being difficult".
Where you in my opinion make a mistake is reading something like "4% have completed it" and you see "4% have completed, AND are trying , planning or want to".
The rest of your post is flawed logic, just because something is the path of least resistance, inevitable, or most of us do it at least once, it does not mean it is popular in itself or desired or even good
By your logic 100% of humans WANTS to die (over and over again, all the time )
Flame on!
You erroneously miss the key flaw of your logic. A person canNOT choose whether to die. But a player certainly CHOOSE to play a LFR or a normal raid.
In fact, you said it .. ."path of least resistance" .. if people CHOOSE the path of least resistance .. by definition it is popular. And by definition they are CHOOSING the easier way.
Note the word CHOOSE. You cannot choose not to die, can you?
Bu you do not know how many people have chosen to PLAY only via the lfr, you just know how many people have completed the lfr ONCE.
That is the point, you see the total number of people who have completed it and you miraculously assume all those people were not playing normal, were not playing hardmode, were not enjoying either, and will continue to play via lfr, even if they have now "beaten the game".
That is exactly like seeing 100% humans die (with a margin of error), and assume people like dying, and would do it over and over again, if given the choice.
And, for the record, given the nearly non-existent growth of raid-centric mmos, we could possibly say, that millions of people have chosen not to die
Because the main argument is not "how many people have ever raided", but "how many people like to raid, play to raid, and enjoy to raid", that is how we got into this, with that 20%, think about it, probably everyone has visited toilets in disneyland, does it mean it is the most exciting attraction?
You gotta be crazy or a masochist to make mmos these days. You have to raise tens of millions of dollars, then spend upwards of 6 years creating it. Then after launch you have to invest all of your time and money for the next 5 years minimum catering to the most fickle customers in existence.
Its like a prison sentence when you think about it.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Comments
Unfortunately a fool and there money etc. same goes for things like drm.
In game terms it seems like companies now think that people are going to buy there game anyway so why bother making it good coughbiowarecough. Don't see it changing anytime soon.
Bingo. Buncha game junkies twitchin' fer tha next fix. It's sad and pathetic and we're getting everything we deserve.
STOP THE MADNESS!
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
What madness?
I am having fun with my gaming. Why should i stop just because you do not like it?
Good for you, but I wasn't speaking to you.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
So if say sometime in the near future bethseda comes out and say they will make a sandbox game?
What are your thoughts, would you be excited and hyped about it? Compare to say anoher indie developer that gamers have no clue on say they are making the next sandbox game???
Remember that beth has alot of capital from all those titles such as elder scroll series and a huge possibly sandbox players base. Beth+sandbox? are you hyped or not?
After wotlk hit and players found themselves in a situation where basically anyone could do the heroics and the entry raid (naxx10/25 was severely undertuned), blizz argued that "only around 20% of guilds regularly raided in TBC" and that the new system is in place so that content is not released just for a few percent of players.
Now ofcourse "20% guilds raid regularly" is far from "20% players are hardcore", it is more something which has over time become something of a agreed approximate number of people who were "interested in raiding" those days, not how many are hardcore, not how many were actually succesful doing it.
I mean, the real number of "players interested in raiding" may be all over the place, even if we assume that blizz counted just guilds which have 25+ members, there were non-raiding social guilds with much much more players in existence.
From a current point of view we could argue that those 20% could be "people who are interested in raiding, if it is difficult, not just a loot pinata", compared to your 35% of "people who are interested and able to raid, if it is a loot pinata", but it is ofcourse a far stretch and open for discussion.
Flame on!
P.S. "interested in raiding" in this post means "interested in doing a raid more than once a week or 14 days" or "seeing raiding as the main ingame activity".
It is a huge stretch to go from 20% who have some interests in raids, to equate they want "if it is difficult". In fact, the best data is what i cited (from MMO-CHAMPION a while back and you can check it).
35% of the players completed LFR DS
4% of the players completed DS NORMAL mode
less than 1% of 1% completed DS HARD mode.
Obviously players have a choice of WHICH of these 3 mode of difficult they will do.
The data overwhelming supporst the conclusions that:
a) a significant portion of the players (although NOT a majority, only at 35%) want to raid for whatever reasons (loot, want to see the end of Deathwing, find the mechanics fun ...)
b) VERY few players want anything challenging (4% if you call normal mode challening, less than 1% of 1% if you only consider hard mode challenging).
It is obviously that most players who want to raid CHOOSE the easiest option by an overwhelming 9 to 1 ratio. In fact, many players won't even attempt normal mode raid until it is puggable because of the debuff to nerf the raid is in place.
99% of the players probably won't even attempt hard mode.
Do you think it is the fault of themepark or the fault of traditional gameplay?
Killing 10 rats might be more interesting, when you do it different. The race to elder game can be a different experience when the gameplay is shooter-like, or roundbased/realtime strategy.
Ok, it was bad choice of words on my part, "if it is difficult" should have been "despite of it being difficult".
Where you in my opinion make a mistake is reading something like "4% have completed it" and you see "4% have completed, AND are trying , planning or want to".
The rest of your post is flawed logic, just because something is the path of least resistance, inevitable, or most of us do it at least once, it does not mean it is popular in itself or desired or even good
By your logic 100% of humans WANTS to die (over and over again, all the time
)
Flame on!
Misclicked...
Sandbox is dead. The hybrid is the future.
Of course, one person's idea of sandbox likely varies from that of another.
The problem with playing sandbox games is there isn't any quality ones IMO.. Well I guess EvE is pretty good quality wise but I'm just not into being a ship most of the time. I missed out on the sanbox games back in the day and played a little bit of EQ and FFXI as my first MMO's then played wow off and on for a year and countless other mmos.
I got bored of the themepark style of game, but the Quality and Polish of the themeparks like the music, sfx ,animations makes it kinda hard to play a sandbox with a fraction of the budget. Even though I like the ideas of Darkfall and Dawntide and Xsyon when I try to play I can't help to think how crap the animations and sound is compared to other Themepark games. I think thats why people won't play the sandbox games currently out, they are used to the quality of themparks.
So if Arche Age can bring in some sandboxyish gameplay but have all the graphics, sounds and animation that is the same quality of all these other themeparks we'll start seeing AAA devs start working on more Sandboxish type games.
They don't exactly have a track record of making sandbox games, so I wouldn't be that hyped on it.
The only sandboxes I'm interested in are those which take a strong gameplay angle like Terraria, or those made by the only people who made a sandbox MMORPG I enjoyed (the H&H guys working on Salem.) I wouldn't call it "hyped", but I don't really get hyped over any game until I try it (except Planetside 2. I'm a giddy schoolboy for that.)
A Skyrim MMORPG definitely wouldn't be as amusing as Skyrim, and definitely wouldn't be a sandbox (there's no "sand"; you don't manipulate the world, you ride the themepark rides the developers set up for you, in any order you want.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You erroneously miss the key flaw of your logic. A person canNOT choose whether to die. But a player certainly CHOOSE to play a LFR or a normal raid.
In fact, you said it .. ."path of least resistance" .. if people CHOOSE the path of least resistance .. by definition it is popular. And by definition they are CHOOSING the easier way.
Note the word CHOOSE. You cannot choose not to die, can you?
Bu you do not know how many people have chosen to PLAY only via the lfr, you just know how many people have completed the lfr ONCE.
That is the point, you see the total number of people who have completed it and you miraculously assume all those people were not playing normal, were not playing hardmode, were not enjoying either, and will continue to play via lfr, even if they have now "beaten the game".
That is exactly like seeing 100% humans die (with a margin of error), and assume people like dying, and would do it over and over again, if given the choice.
And, for the record, given the nearly non-existent growth of raid-centric mmos, we could possibly say, that millions of people have chosen not to die
Because the main argument is not "how many people have ever raided", but "how many people like to raid, play to raid, and enjoy to raid", that is how we got into this, with that 20%, think about it, probably everyone has visited toilets in disneyland, does it mean it is the most exciting attraction?
Flame on!
You gotta be crazy or a masochist to make mmos these days. You have to raise tens of millions of dollars, then spend upwards of 6 years creating it. Then after launch you have to invest all of your time and money for the next 5 years minimum catering to the most fickle customers in existence.
Its like a prison sentence when you think about it.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.