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Targeting a Demographic & Making the Best Damn Game for Them - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Targeting a Demographic & Making the Best Damn Game for Them - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - MMORPG.com
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen News - Brad McQuaid has posted a lengthy article on the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen site that provides insight into the type of game that he is making. Called "Want went wrong? WoW? 'WoW-Killers' or a general lack of guts?", the article delves into whether or not MMO developers should continue down the same road using the same ideas or if they should "choose a target audience, a demographic within the greater online gaming space, and make the best damn game we can for that group".
Post edited by SBFord on
Comments
EQ was huge because it had no real competition. Now the market is flooded. Competition is great for the consumer. Great time to be a gamer.
Keeping their same "Vision" will not/has not worked in recreating their one time success.
I wish them both the best in life I just wish they would leave mmorpgs alone. It's not working guys. Take the hint.
Did you read the article? Yes the market is flooded, with MMOs designed to keep you entertained for about as long as a multiplayer FPS. They want to change that.
Imo, the only way to change this is to foster community in the game. That is the key ingredient missing in MMOs today. Modern MMOs are a "wham-bam-thank you ma'am" experience these days. Play for a month, get bored, go to the next one and maybe come back later for another month or two. Basically these are just solo games other people are running around in with you, no sense of community outside your guild, very little reason to interact at all. It will be nice to have an MMO that is designed to foster community again.
And the best part with this type of community is that they will stick to this game for years giving it a healthy income.
Still padding your post count I see.
Look up the logical fallacy "begging the question".
I'm more a believer in seeing the finished product and then making my decision.
Being in a creative field I know too well that sometimes one has failures that then lead to success.
Heck, that can be applied to science as well!
So I'm ok with people failing and then making additional attempts to get it right. What I'm not ok with is that group of people who will jump in without thinking and then endlessly complain because the game did not come up to the expectations in their head.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Yes we read the article the problem is those are just empty marketing non sense. All you have to do is look at the insanely low visual fidelity of pantheon to know it will be a bust. Its garbage and only a few stubborn fanbois will support it. Look graphics are not everything but they are a HUGE PART of it. Its a VIDEO GAME meaning a visual product. The art/animations/effects/combat are all even worse than the original eq. This games is beond dead on arrive they are just bleeding the same old suckers dry, you know those people who pretend EQ was an amazing game and who want to "recapture" the experience.
Eq1 can still be played if you think it was so amazing go try it and report back. Eq1 was amazing because it was a brand new experience that never existed. Now we are all very familiar with the MMORPG genre and that is a big part why these games tend to feel stale and boring.
look up delusional, the game is and will always be garbage it wont even reach the quality of vangaurd which was a pretty big flop itself this will be worse. Stay in denial though...that recent trailer was beyond abysmal it was embarrassing.
It does not matter how many attempts will be made, false thinking and nostalgia will keep the wheel going, just like this sad diatribe by McQuaid...
There is no successfull old-school MMO remake because it wasn't done right yet!
Power of circular reasoning....
hate to break it to you, but you can still play eq1 if you want that. Also While I agree I too am tired of the bad single player experience that mmo's have become, there is far more to making a great game than forcing people to group. Not sure how long you can be entertained by watching 5 ugly characters stiffly standing around an ugly stiff monster bobbing around for 5 minutes until it falls over, but i can assure you it wont entertain you for near as long as you think.
If you cant even manage to produce D-tier visuals at this point how could you believe anything in in he game will be done well? I mean this game visually IS REALLY REALLY BAD. This is a cash grab and the usual pack of suckers dreaming about their old EQ days will get taken for their money yet again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lol no competion, hmmm lets see, Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, Meridian 59, more MUDS/MUSH than I can safely mention.
As to taking the hint and quitting, thats so fucking stupid as to be unbelievable, one failure and quit yeah right, if thats your life attitude you'll never accomplish anything.
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Daybreak will!
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Are you talking about Pantheon, as from what I've seen the visuals look pretty good?
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
A game that has low population because it is 'niche', certainly has nothing to do with being bad/unsuccessfull!
C'mon....
But, honestly. How many people kvetch about "watered down and dumbed down" games in the MMO genre? Groups of players have very specific wants and needs and that's where niche games fit in and can be very, very successful servicing that niche.
The issue is that there never will be a WoW killer -- it's doing that just fine on its own. MMOs needs to evolve past 2000 -- it's nearly 2 decades ago, after all. Regardless, niche titles seem to be a decent evolution to the genre. Does that mean there never will be another WoW that captivates the masses? No, but it's going to have to be something so wildly outside the current box as to pull players from other genres.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They did evolve.Again, just a preference whether you like what they evolved into.
Somewhere in there Brad talked about picking a "healthy demographic" to target. It's ironic that he should say that because that is the part he himself is most blind to. He just can't seem to accept the reality that the ultra-hardcore, no-life, raider demographic is, in fact, NOT a healthy demographic to target.
He has this weird idea that people who don't fit in that demographic will still be happy to play his game forever because, hey, they can just keep creating new characters to level up. Yeah....ok.
You know, when people talk about how MMOs changed and became easier and more convenient, well, there was a reason for that. I, myself, am not happy with the current state of MMOs but bouncing from one extreme to the other isn't going to work.
EQ was fun. It was addictive. Not for everyone who tried it but for a lot of people it was. But oddly, Brad has never understood that it wasn't the endgame raiding that got people hooked on EQ. It was the casual grouping and free-wheeling fun of the early game that got people hooked. Focus on THAT demographic of people who liked that and I think you could have a sustainable population. Probably not a smash hit but a decent, healthy population.
That is what Brad just doesn't get. He thinks if he gives those people something in the early game and then completely changes the focus to the no-life crowd in the late game it'll be ok because the not-so-hardcore crowd will just keep playing the early game over and over and over forever. Unfortunately it just ain't going to work that way.
That doesn't make any sense if I'm following your logic.
There are a LOT of things out there that have very small audiences. How about Early music or the 12 tone crowd?
How about small art house films? Football certainly draws a larger crowd than fencing.
I don't see a lot of people going out every weekend to Tango!
You have to evaluate something on how well it achieves its goals, how good it is compared to other similar examples.
The idea that the greater the audience the better it is completely wrong. You can have a large audience for a property only to find out it's a bad example of that property and that large audience moves on.
Of course, the opposite is also true, just because something has a large audience doesn't mean it's "bad".
Whether or not something has larger appeal or not doesn't speak to its quality just its appeal.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
The issue here is that ANYONE can make a good speech. There are far more people out there telling you how things should be than those who are actually doing the things they say.
Proof is in the product. No product. Hot air. Or as Judge Judy likes to say, a whole lot of "puffing".
Until there is concrete evidence of the thesis... it's still only a thesis. And when you are claiming to be the one bringing the next big thing, your evidence CANNOT be in the form of what others have done, but in what YOU have done... today... not x number of years ago.
Problem is, most of these games are never done, always being fixed, and an example of an idea never realized. A far cry from the promises made. And we can EVEN use Blizzard in this example because they continually guild the lily all in the name of selling their product.
I am all for this and like this.