I think clearly SWG leads the pack. If you were there when it started it had a huge pack of fanatics just waiting at the gates to get an MMO based on Star Wars. There were thousands of nerds dressed up like princess Leia and Chewbacca and all they had to do was have a decent game to play.
I know there are a lot of people that will say it was great, and I didn't hate it as much as most, but it was lacking a lot in fun PvE combat. I didn't feel like there was any effort put into making the player feel like they were a part of the Star Wars universe.
Whatever the reason it failed fast. I don't think there's been a game since that I thought would succeed and challenge WoW.
I would say SWtOR, but they seem to be moving in a better direction.
WAR after that, and TERA disappointed me but is still contributed to the genre imo.
"As you read these words, a release is seven days or less away or has just happened within the last seven days those are now the only two states youll find the world of Tyria."...Guild Wars 2
Originally posted by Rthuth434 besides WAR, every single Funcom MMO. i can understand GW2 for its potential, but the execution is head and shoulers above TSW, AoC and AO. It's worse than it should be, but not close to a failure of those proportions. It actually has great execution on many of its ideas and when you look at the fact that despite the attitude of most of this forum(which is identical for every MMO that's well liked, yes even SWG and DAoC and EQ a decade ago, i was here) it's not a failure at all.
None of the games you mention even come close to D&L, if you were really here you would know this.
dark and light didn't even qualify as a game with executed features.
Fact is it launched with features but all were executed badly, the game failed. None of the games you mentioned even come close.
As for GW2, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it a failure, nope but it's a poor game imo.
Shadowbane... hands down, no contest - Shadowbane.
second place = Tabula Rasa
third place = Warhammer Online
fourth place = Vanguard Saga of Mediocrity
honorable mention failure = EQ2.. yep the successor to what i think is the greatest MMO... sucks monkey balls. plays more like Diablo 2 than Everquest.
I didnt vote Dark and Light because i smelled that vaporware shit a year away and never considered it a game IN THE LEAST. hah
I agree WAR. I played it for a couple years but it could have been so much more. It could have been a lot better with just a little more, but EA or whoever didn't put sh*t into it after release.
The core concepts behind Horizons before release were as follows: to create a zoneless,[7] constantly changing environment in which players would cooperate to hold back a seemingly unstoppable enemy: the Withered Aegis.[8][9] This enemy would consist of a few individuals from the Living Races (races that the Players belong to) in an unholy alliance with groups of Devils and Demons from another existence called the Realm of Blight. The twisted Blighted magic would include necromancy, the ability to create zombies from corpses and even reanimate skeletal remains into fierce warriors. Due to the co-op nature of the game The Aegis would be entirely AI controlled.[10] According to David Bowman in 2002, "Horizons will not ship with player versus player conflict. Rather Artifact has chosen to put its full attention to making the player versus environment gameplay the best it can be."[11]
This enemy was originally supposed to be dynamic in nature,[12] launching automatic attacks on player held positions and blighting (capturing) the ground with its evil magic. This proved to be difficult to implement properly in practice, and the battlefront was eventually scaled back into static regions of Player and Blight held areas. However, in the years after Horizons launched "World Events" would be held that would allow players to make a permanent mark on the world. While not as cost effective to maintain as an automated system, this allowed Artifact, and Tulga, to keep their promise of a changing, interactive world.[13]
Warhammer Online had such HUGE potential and squandered it away terribly. It should/could have been DAoC 2 in the Warhammer Universe...can you imagine how incredibly friggin awesome that would have been? I am still upset about how it turned out. I think there were two major factors that were responsible for how WAR turned out; first was the state of mind when it was in developement, specifically the industry was still reeling in shock from the kinds of numbers WoW was putting up and everyone thought that Blizz had hit on what everyone wanted in an MMO and thus everyone thought they needed to try and duplicate WoW's feature set, which lead to a focus on instanced Battlegrounds for PvP instead of the RvR and open-world PvP which Mythic fans really wanted; second was EA's acquisition of Mythic, this exasperated the first factor to an umpteenth degree as EA is a "mega-publisher" which are famous for stifling creativity and focusing on the bottom line, they wanted a bottom line as close to WoW's bottom line as possible, which meant trying to turn WAR into as close to WoW-form as possible, which lead to near total focus on instanced battlegrounds.
Auto Assault
This was actually a really fun MMO, but it's execution was lacking. There wasn't really much that made it an MMO, it felt almost totally single-player b/c pretty much the whole game was PvE up until near end-game. I think it would have been a much stronger game if there was a heavier focus on PvP. There was some PvP, but they could have done such cool stuff and they just didn't. We should have had demolition derbies, thunderdome type events with cars in a space the size of a football arena, and straight-up large-scale vehicular assaults in the open-world on the other factions strongholds (and no, Ground Zero didn't cut it).
Horizons: Empire of Istaria (forgot about this one til I saw it in this thread, and this one is more disappointing then what I originally had here)
The original concept for this game was absolutely amazing, but I don't think it was technologically impossible at the time. Not only that, but David Allen, the man who had the original idea for Horizons and started the company to make it, choose VERY poorly who to surround himself with and to hire into major roles in his company. In the end, the people he brought on board ripped the rug out from under him, taking away the company he created, and the vision for the game ended up changing drastically from it's original vision. It turned out that the game isn't so bad, after many, many years of development, but who knows what it could have been had the original vision been adhered to.
Dark and Light (SoG) - so much potential, so much fun even w/ the GMs cheating and such. Free form keep building on sides of mountains, on islands in the middle of lakes, flying on dragons etc...
Shadowbane. It had everything it needed to be a great game (and it was for me anyway even with its flaws) but it needed better hardware and more development to deal with lag and memory leaks before it released.
FFXI, it wasn't a failure, but proceeding WoW with a more popular IP, better graphics, setting and global community with pc and console support out the gate; it had all that but failed to acknowledge fundamental usability which would have made it the break out success WoW took right out from under them.
Aion, they talked a good game but delivered a glorified WoW clone. I still remember their hook, "interactive and reactive combat", except it wasn't in the combat, it was in the world impact.
Guild Wars 1, could have been more strategic and tactical. Could have continued to release content and interesting installments for years, but was dropped for their next project, for those who played since it originally release, that's a decade of waiting. I'd still be playing the first GW if they didn't get cheap with the balance and gameplay and filled it out to be more fun.
Horizons... Man. So much character diversity and ambitious features, just failed so hard on delivery and presentation...
Atlantica, too focused on grind and pirating money from players instead of tactics and strategy.
Good content, good work, failed or didn't ascend because they just did the wrong things and messed it up.
The sad thing is so much of the work is already done, and all they need to do is rearrange things in many cases... But their design objectives are just flawed.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Comments
I think clearly SWG leads the pack. If you were there when it started it had a huge pack of fanatics just waiting at the gates to get an MMO based on Star Wars. There were thousands of nerds dressed up like princess Leia and Chewbacca and all they had to do was have a decent game to play.
I know there are a lot of people that will say it was great, and I didn't hate it as much as most, but it was lacking a lot in fun PvE combat. I didn't feel like there was any effort put into making the player feel like they were a part of the Star Wars universe.
Whatever the reason it failed fast. I don't think there's been a game since that I thought would succeed and challenge WoW.
Asdar
I would say SWtOR, but they seem to be moving in a better direction.
WAR after that, and TERA disappointed me but is still contributed to the genre imo.
"As you read these words, a release is seven days or less away or has just happened within the last seven days those are now the only two states youll find the world of Tyria."...Guild Wars 2
Fact is it launched with features but all were executed badly, the game failed. None of the games you mentioned even come close.
As for GW2, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it a failure, nope but it's a poor game imo.
Shadowbane... hands down, no contest - Shadowbane.
second place = Tabula Rasa
third place = Warhammer Online
fourth place = Vanguard Saga of Mediocrity
honorable mention failure = EQ2.. yep the successor to what i think is the greatest MMO... sucks monkey balls. plays more like Diablo 2 than Everquest.
I didnt vote Dark and Light because i smelled that vaporware shit a year away and never considered it a game IN THE LEAST. hah
Some day I'm going to put a sword through your eye and out the back of your skull!
Arya Stark
I agree WAR. I played it for a couple years but it could have been so much more. It could have been a lot better with just a little more, but EA or whoever didn't put sh*t into it after release.
Vanguard
Horizons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istaria:_Chronicles_of_the_Gifted
The core concepts behind Horizons before release were as follows: to create a zoneless,[7] constantly changing environment in which players would cooperate to hold back a seemingly unstoppable enemy: the Withered Aegis.[8][9] This enemy would consist of a few individuals from the Living Races (races that the Players belong to) in an unholy alliance with groups of Devils and Demons from another existence called the Realm of Blight. The twisted Blighted magic would include necromancy, the ability to create zombies from corpses and even reanimate skeletal remains into fierce warriors. Due to the co-op nature of the game The Aegis would be entirely AI controlled.[10] According to David Bowman in 2002, "Horizons will not ship with player versus player conflict. Rather Artifact has chosen to put its full attention to making the player versus environment gameplay the best it can be."[11]
This enemy was originally supposed to be dynamic in nature,[12] launching automatic attacks on player held positions and blighting (capturing) the ground with its evil magic. This proved to be difficult to implement properly in practice, and the battlefront was eventually scaled back into static regions of Player and Blight held areas. However, in the years after Horizons launched "World Events" would be held that would allow players to make a permanent mark on the world. While not as cost effective to maintain as an automated system, this allowed Artifact, and Tulga, to keep their promise of a changing, interactive world.[13]
EQ2 fan sites
GW2. WAR being a close second. I only say this because I actually spent more time playing WAR than I did playing GW2.
Dark and light never launched. Settlers of ganareth was the only "game" they ever got online and it was a prelude to D&L
But same ppl and it was the worst "mmo" ever launched. Nothing has ever come close to it's level of fail.
WAR
Warhammer Online had such HUGE potential and squandered it away terribly. It should/could have been DAoC 2 in the Warhammer Universe...can you imagine how incredibly friggin awesome that would have been? I am still upset about how it turned out. I think there were two major factors that were responsible for how WAR turned out; first was the state of mind when it was in developement, specifically the industry was still reeling in shock from the kinds of numbers WoW was putting up and everyone thought that Blizz had hit on what everyone wanted in an MMO and thus everyone thought they needed to try and duplicate WoW's feature set, which lead to a focus on instanced Battlegrounds for PvP instead of the RvR and open-world PvP which Mythic fans really wanted; second was EA's acquisition of Mythic, this exasperated the first factor to an umpteenth degree as EA is a "mega-publisher" which are famous for stifling creativity and focusing on the bottom line, they wanted a bottom line as close to WoW's bottom line as possible, which meant trying to turn WAR into as close to WoW-form as possible, which lead to near total focus on instanced battlegrounds.
Auto Assault
This was actually a really fun MMO, but it's execution was lacking. There wasn't really much that made it an MMO, it felt almost totally single-player b/c pretty much the whole game was PvE up until near end-game. I think it would have been a much stronger game if there was a heavier focus on PvP. There was some PvP, but they could have done such cool stuff and they just didn't. We should have had demolition derbies, thunderdome type events with cars in a space the size of a football arena, and straight-up large-scale vehicular assaults in the open-world on the other factions strongholds (and no, Ground Zero didn't cut it).
Horizons: Empire of Istaria (forgot about this one til I saw it in this thread, and this one is more disappointing then what I originally had here)
The original concept for this game was absolutely amazing, but I don't think it was technologically impossible at the time. Not only that, but David Allen, the man who had the original idea for Horizons and started the company to make it, choose VERY poorly who to surround himself with and to hire into major roles in his company. In the end, the people he brought on board ripped the rug out from under him, taking away the company he created, and the vision for the game ended up changing drastically from it's original vision. It turned out that the game isn't so bad, after many, many years of development, but who knows what it could have been had the original vision been adhered to.
Dark and Light (SoG) - so much potential, so much fun even w/ the GMs cheating and such. Free form keep building on sides of mountains, on islands in the middle of lakes, flying on dragons etc...
WAR
SWTOR
WAR , no doubt.
That time I was sure as hell to play this game for years like I did with daoc, it lastet 1 month with maybe 2 month later or.
And everyone here that say "WOW" , please go back to your darkfail, gank some noobs and be quiet.
Step in the arena and break the wall down
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
1. GW2
2. FFXIV
3. WAR
MxO?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
1. vanguard
2.War
3.tabula rasa
Aion, they talked a good game but delivered a glorified WoW clone. I still remember their hook, "interactive and reactive combat", except it wasn't in the combat, it was in the world impact.
Guild Wars 1, could have been more strategic and tactical. Could have continued to release content and interesting installments for years, but was dropped for their next project, for those who played since it originally release, that's a decade of waiting. I'd still be playing the first GW if they didn't get cheap with the balance and gameplay and filled it out to be more fun.
Horizons... Man. So much character diversity and ambitious features, just failed so hard on delivery and presentation...
Atlantica, too focused on grind and pirating money from players instead of tactics and strategy.
Good content, good work, failed or didn't ascend because they just did the wrong things and messed it up.
The sad thing is so much of the work is already done, and all they need to do is rearrange things in many cases... But their design objectives are just flawed.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Final Fantasy XIV (Upon Release)
Guild Wars 2 (Upon Release)
Warhammer Online
...and even though it isn't an MMORPG, I feel as though the biggest disappointment was Diablo III.