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MMORPG's are losing AAA developers it seems..
knightofblackvalor
Member Posts: 25
With no AAA releases in sight (Besides some eastern releases, but korean games usually turn up with hardcore cash shops.) it seems like MMORPG's are just getting kickstarted and small indie developers are taking over. This may be a good thing or bad thing. What do you guys think? (Crossing fingers for Pantheon to be good.)
Comments
That you know of...
MMORPG's are losing AAA developers it seems..
Good.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
The pendulum always swings back the other way.
After a long stretch of big companies trying to duplicate WoW's success by duplicating WoW's mechanics, it seems they have given up this folly idea.
Whether that is good or bad overall is yet to be seen, but it'll be nice to see more diversity than we've gotten recently.
I just hope the indie devs don't follow suit in the payment models that seem to have taken over the genre during the reign of big-company development.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
Many of us have long been saying that MMORPGs won't return to their Golden Age quality until publishers back out of the genre.
WoW is a fluke that really can't be repeated. The most successful MMOs have always been niche titles with decent budgets that focus on serving their audience and steadily growing. Publishers and AAA MMOs really did nothing but hurt the genre outside a few rare decent games.
But the last 10 years have been full of soulless titles and wasted potential. Talented devs that understand the genre driven by passion, rather than publishers, is what made MMOs great at the start and what will make them great again.
Hopefully the well isn't too poisoned by WoW's design decisions. Sadly many people now working on MMOs cut their teeth on WoW and totally missed the design lessons that early MMOs and MUDs gave. I was at a panel at PAX talking about "What happened to socializing in MMOs", and almost all the devs there except ONE had started with WoW and didn't really understand why socializing went away.
Thankfully though, Crowfall and Camelot Unchained have people behind them that DID start with MUDs and DO understand what makes a solid long lived MMO.
Anyone who has ever made a game assumed that they knew how to make a solid long lived game. Trust me, if Blizzard had no idea that WoW was going turn into the giant that it has become when they first spoke of it, no other game developer can possibly understand what it takes to make a winner. If they did, we'd have a bunch of winners instead of duds.
Ultimately the people who make or break a game are the players... if we all chose to turn it into the next coming, it will be the next coming... if on the other hand, we want it to burn in hell, so shall it be. The developers only make the game... the players decide what they think is good and not good... and it usually has little to do with how well the game was designed.
Most of those duds came from game design forced upon studios by PUBLISHERS who absolutely DO NOT understand the market or the tricky subject of MMO design.
People like Mark Jacobs, who has been playing MMOs for... 35ish years? And has about 8 MMOs released under his belt, knows a bit more than Bobby Kotick and the investment board, which are the people who have been designing the MMOs of the past 10 years.
Hard to imagine a more souless game than eq1, grinding same monsters for hours in hope to find some epic to prove your epeen. You can dream all you want but those days are over and no quality mmo will use the eq1 recipe ever again, at best you will get some B class mmo with second class graphics,animations,repetitive music and lot of npcs to grind on - should make "old school" players happy.Mark Jacobs like other old school mmo creators was not capable of creating another successful mmo, Warhammer had awful animations, awful pve and awful pvp after tier 2.
All the upcoming mmos looks really bad.
People are happy to lose AAA developers? You do realize that the devs aren't the ones directing how the game pans out?
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
There are really only AAA budgets. While I guess you could call someone working on a AAA game a AAA developer many times those people move on different projects which are clearly not AAA.
There are no more big budget games being made because investors with deep pockets finally realized there was not going to be a WoW killer, and if you can't deliver WoW numbers they would rather spend their hundreds on million on things with a higher rate of return than a failed MMO.
I think people are generally expressing joy at this because a lot of those AAA MMOs wound up sucking and by in large were a naked attempt to steal away WoW's players with a game that was about as identical as possible only with a unique twist they hoped would somehow differentiate themselves as superior.
Oh, dont worry Im sure the recent independent PvP focused Kickstarter MMOs will save the MMO genre from ....
Im sorry I cant finish writing that because its so ridiculous.
Well, atleast when stuff like Crowfall fails Im sure WoW will still be blamed.
WoW uses the EQ recipe.. that's its entire recipe.
There were dozens and dozens of MMOs before why, why do people bounce to one of the earliest and most flawed when they try to defend their argument about themeparks? Oh wait, because their arguments are so flimsy they need a straw man...
AAA devs are only AAA devs when backed by publishers, and publishers ruined the genre, so...
One of the most accurate posts I've seen in a long time.
I think it's good. Let the suits chase the money in MOBAs now and stop trashing and pillaging MMORPGs and reducing living worlds into lobby-based cash cows.
MMORPGs are a PIA to make and only those who are dedicated to the genre can revitalize it now that the slick corporate vultures are moving on to greener pastures.
But while all those AAA soulless MMOs we love to hate have been coming out, plenty of small-label independant MMOs have been coming out, and they are pretty much all just as bad. Or is this thread full of Fallen Earth, Darkfall, and Mortal Online fans? I see zero evidence that smaller companies are gonna do it any better.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
LOL EQ a more soul less game?
Show me a game that has released since EQ that actually made you afraid? Every game has its own faults, camping was both bad and great at the same time. Sure you fought the same mobs over and over again but you had time to actually talk to the people you were grouped with and actually make some lasting online friendships outside of being in some guild that just wants to dominate the server.
With EQs faults, it has many more positives. No other game has truely matched the distinctiveness in zones that EQ had. Its world was massive compared to todays worlds. You actually had to learn your class and play well instead of just mashing buttons like people do in todays games. You were forced to make actual choices and suffer the wrath or victory of those choices. The game was not on easy mode like todays games are. There were always creatures in every zone that were higher level then the rest and they roamed around to keep you on your toes. Yes EQ had faults, but I made more random non guild friends in that game than I have in EVERY single game made since then. Show me another game were death actually means anything at all (outside of full loot pvp). The death system in EQ was harsh but it served multiple purposes. It kept you on your toes, it made you think before just running into a fight. It made you fear not only death but actually being able to find your body again. I look at todays mmos and if I had to compare them to anything, I would compare them to todays mindless smart phone games. Fun for short bursts but ultimately useless.
I see what you did there. There are more games than ever, you changed it to variety. You know you did that so don't try to BS about it.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
AAA MMOs are very risky ventures.
From a publishing perspective you can spend what 100+ million on an MMORPG. So when you pay people to make something that COSTS YOU ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS you make damn sure that it can make money. However the market of MMO consumers is weird and finicky.
Action combat? Tab targetting? Forced partying? Super hard bosses? Long or short raids? Open world crafting? Dynamic events of regular quest system?
Any decision that needs changing costs money. Any complex decision will cost more money.
This is why mobile gaming is a much more risk free venture. I honestly have no idea how much it takes to make a mobile game but I will wager that it is far far less than it costs to make an MMO.
The cash return on the mobile game wins out every time (financially) because there is simply less risk involved for returns.
Hearthstone is a good example of not spending millions of dollars to make a game nobody will play in 6 months. The risk for them was minimal, the reward however speaks for itself.
Play for fun. Play to win. Play for perfection. Play with friends. Play in another world. Why do you play?
Fallen Earth and Darkfall were miles more fun than just about any WoW clone I played.
And no, there's a difference between an indie team with 20 people and no funding and no experience, vs what we had before WoW: veteran MUD and MMO developers crafting modest budget niche MMOs.
During the WoW days, those experienced developers like Jacobs were put in charge of massive studios under the thumb of publishers, so the only people making indie MMOs were really inexperienced nothing companies.
But seriously, I've had more fun in Darkfall and Fallen Earth than anything I ever did in AoC or WoW.
I think its more imperative that mmo engines are available for good deals for developers.
That way you can have smaller teams with less down time on technical difficulties, and mostly focus on developing content.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
I'm not aware of a mass exodus of MMO developers from the industry. So where are these people working now ?
I think what the OP means is that there's a severe shortage of MMO's with AAA budgets in development in the west.
However, I'm convinced that KS MMO projects are just a passing phase. Sooner or later, players will realise that it all boils down to making sacrifices at the gaming temple. You burn some money at the altar and hope that your MMO prayers will be answered by the indie gods...