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- FFXIV
- Raesvelg Helheim
It's a trilogy now, woohoo!
So. I won't belabor the points of "Why FFXIV has so far failed", since I think we're all pretty familiar with them. There are, on the other hand, lots of new MMOs coming out.
Rift, for example. I've not been involved in the beta at all, so I simply have my observations on various previews and videos, along with a general assessment of how I think the game is going to play. And I'll be honest, I have my doubts.
Less about the gameplay itself, and more about the fundamental concept of the game, the "Rifts". So. A rift opens up like some sort of dimensional pinata, everybody scrambles to go kill shit from said Rift, profit ensues. Warhammer Online tried this, incidentally, in the form of the "Public Quest". It didn't work out so well. Not because the concept itself was somehow terribly flawed, though the contribution balance was rather screwed up, as was the ability of different jobs to actually contribute, but because once the player base had reached a certain level of maturity (which happened very quickly in the lower tiers), nobody did them anymore. It's kinda like trying to get a sub-30 xp party in XI before Level Sync; it was difficult at best. Hell, it's difficult with Level Sync. Public Quests were ghost towns in the lower levels pretty early on in the game, and their difficulty was originally scaled for large groups to complete them. Which meant that once enough of the player base had moved on, level-wise, Public Quests were essentially unwinnable. Now, you could drag someone of higher level out to win it for you, but that's something that the designers shouldn't require. Ultimately, they scaled the difficulty across an array of public quests, making some of them into things that small groups could win, but by then (like with so much else in WAR) the damage was already done. While by all accounts the folks at Trion Worlds have done a slightly better job with the rifts, I still worry that it's going to be one of those mechanics that drops off rather quickly at lower levels, leading people who aren't part of the big first wave to be rather disillusioned with the game by the time they get through their trial period.
Now, on the other hand, we have SW: The Old Republic.
And I just don't know what to think about that.
On the one hand, it's from Bioware, and I do like the vast majority of what they've produced over the years. On the other hand... I have no idea if Bioware is going to be able to pull off an MMO, and a lot of what I've seen from the game has been of that slightly cartoony style that I just don't like. And knowing Bioware, they're going to shoehorn some sort of relationship mechanic into it as well... What's been described and shown so far is rather ambitious; fully-voiced, each player gets their own ship, NPCs to handle the scut work, etc etc. Again, though, on the downside it's a sci-fi setting, and so far that's been just about the kiss of death for an MMO (EVE being the obvious exception). They've got a lot of baggage to work around, of course, playing in someone else's universe, but that's hardly uncommon in games. The game has vast potential, but I can't help but think that unless they hit it completely out of the park at launch, they're going to fail to live up to the expectations of an increasingly fickle market. Smaller games can occasionally sneak through the back door, and survive a certain level of missing content or growing pains, but SWTOR is going to be under the magnifying glass from day one, and it doesn't take much to have people turn on you.
And now a token mention of the 1000lb gorilla in the room...
WoW has practically relaunched their game at this point, of course, with Cataclysm changing the majority of the early "WoW Experience". I can't help but think that that is going to have a certain chilling effect on the rest of the market; redesigning the early part of WoW could easily bring back of a lot of people who quit before they made it to endgame, after all. It would easily feed into that group that I mentioned last time, the people who can never quite find a game as "good" as the one they started with (largely because of the people they played with) and wind up bouncing around from game to game, looking to recapture that initial high. WoW was the first MMO for a lot of people, after all, so I imagine that they'll be able to rope at least a few of them back in for the long term.
And finally, Guild Wars 2.
To be honest, I'm not expecting much. Not that it will be bad, or anything like that, just that it's not going to set the world on fire. I fully expect another solid fantasy MMO entry into the market... that is largely glutted with solid fantasy MMOs, and utterly dominated by a single fantasy MMO. Guild Wars 2 would have to come with free oral sex for a year to have much of a chance at breaking into WoW's subscription numbers, no matter how good the game is.
Indeed, pretty much the only thing on the horizon that I see right that has a chance of slipping into a solid second place is SWTOR. Everything else, I fear, is going to be relegated to strictly niche markets, relative to what WoW has become.
And that's okay.
Particularly with subscription-based MMOs, it doesn't really take all that incredibly much to make a game successful. Not everything has to be earth-shatteringly profitable; so long as it makes money and fans are satisfied, what else really matters?
Apparently something must matter, because it seems like people just love to despise MMOs that don't defeat WoW.
Which is something else I just don't understand. Sometimes I wonder if a lot of those people don't quietly hate WoW themselves, but simply play it out of a lack of anything "better". It would make sense, and fit with a lot of the responses I've seen on the matter. Hell, it would fit with some of the ebb and flow of WoW's subscriber base.
And it leads back into how incredibly fickle the market has become. When a big new MMO launches, tens to hundreds of thousands of WoW players flock to it... and often desert it weeks later. Someday, we might actually see something that retains enough of the disaffected players to, as I said, move into that solid second place that most of the games are trying for. Because let's be realistic; nobody is going to dethrone WoW except WoW 2, at least for several more years. Blizzard can keep raising the level cap, keep making new content, and ultimately start reworking the graphics in a more substantial fashion in order to keep WoW alive just about as long as they want, really.
Though it does lead to another question, and one that I've always been somewhat puzzled over: Who cares about the intervening levels?
What do I mean? Well, I think most of us know exactly what I mean. Who cares about the levels before you get to endgame? It's something that became increasingly common in XI, for example, with the rise of Level Sync and SMN burns, and even more so in some ways with Abyssea. People blitz to endgame, wind up getting there with very little in the way of skills, and then... kinda suck. And I'm not just talking about skills in the sense of competency in playing your job, I'm talking about actual skills of the character itself, and people getting BLM to 90 with the Elemental Magic skill one would expect at level 45. And now, assuming someone were, in fact, deranged enough to either start up FFXI as a new player, or start up again as a returning one, functionally the entirety of what made up the old FFXI endgame is dead. Worthless.
I can't help but think that WoW has the same problem. During my brief stint there, I ran a few dungeons (to my immense frustration), but I can't help but imagine that an awful lot of people do what is essentially the logical thing, and simply blitz to endgame as fast as they can, using whatever gear is easily accessible off the auction house, and that means that WoW has an awful lot of what was once endgame that is now a ghost town.
Or did Blizzard figure out a way around that? I mean, given their model, it wouldn't be overly hard to have older content simply scaled to higher levels, with appropriate drops replacing the low-level gear. It wouldn't work so well for FFXI, but even there steps could be taken...
Ah well.
Time to go read a book.
So. I won't belabor the points of "Why FFXIV has so far failed", since I think we're all pretty familiar with them. There are, on the other hand, lots of new MMOs coming out.
Rift, for example. I've not been involved in the beta at all, so I simply have my observations on various previews and videos, along with a general assessment of how I think the game is going to play. And I'll be honest, I have my doubts.
Less about the gameplay itself, and more about the fundamental concept of the game, the "Rifts". So. A rift opens up like some sort of dimensional pinata, everybody scrambles to go kill shit from said Rift, profit ensues. Warhammer Online tried this, incidentally, in the form of the "Public Quest". It didn't work out so well. Not because the concept itself was somehow terribly flawed, though the contribution balance was rather screwed up, as was the ability of different jobs to actually contribute, but because once the player base had reached a certain level of maturity (which happened very quickly in the lower tiers), nobody did them anymore. It's kinda like trying to get a sub-30 xp party in XI before Level Sync; it was difficult at best. Hell, it's difficult with Level Sync. Public Quests were ghost towns in the lower levels pretty early on in the game, and their difficulty was originally scaled for large groups to complete them. Which meant that once enough of the player base had moved on, level-wise, Public Quests were essentially unwinnable. Now, you could drag someone of higher level out to win it for you, but that's something that the designers shouldn't require. Ultimately, they scaled the difficulty across an array of public quests, making some of them into things that small groups could win, but by then (like with so much else in WAR) the damage was already done. While by all accounts the folks at Trion Worlds have done a slightly better job with the rifts, I still worry that it's going to be one of those mechanics that drops off rather quickly at lower levels, leading people who aren't part of the big first wave to be rather disillusioned with the game by the time they get through their trial period.
Now, on the other hand, we have SW: The Old Republic.
And I just don't know what to think about that.
On the one hand, it's from Bioware, and I do like the vast majority of what they've produced over the years. On the other hand... I have no idea if Bioware is going to be able to pull off an MMO, and a lot of what I've seen from the game has been of that slightly cartoony style that I just don't like. And knowing Bioware, they're going to shoehorn some sort of relationship mechanic into it as well... What's been described and shown so far is rather ambitious; fully-voiced, each player gets their own ship, NPCs to handle the scut work, etc etc. Again, though, on the downside it's a sci-fi setting, and so far that's been just about the kiss of death for an MMO (EVE being the obvious exception). They've got a lot of baggage to work around, of course, playing in someone else's universe, but that's hardly uncommon in games. The game has vast potential, but I can't help but think that unless they hit it completely out of the park at launch, they're going to fail to live up to the expectations of an increasingly fickle market. Smaller games can occasionally sneak through the back door, and survive a certain level of missing content or growing pains, but SWTOR is going to be under the magnifying glass from day one, and it doesn't take much to have people turn on you.
And now a token mention of the 1000lb gorilla in the room...
WoW has practically relaunched their game at this point, of course, with Cataclysm changing the majority of the early "WoW Experience". I can't help but think that that is going to have a certain chilling effect on the rest of the market; redesigning the early part of WoW could easily bring back of a lot of people who quit before they made it to endgame, after all. It would easily feed into that group that I mentioned last time, the people who can never quite find a game as "good" as the one they started with (largely because of the people they played with) and wind up bouncing around from game to game, looking to recapture that initial high. WoW was the first MMO for a lot of people, after all, so I imagine that they'll be able to rope at least a few of them back in for the long term.
And finally, Guild Wars 2.
To be honest, I'm not expecting much. Not that it will be bad, or anything like that, just that it's not going to set the world on fire. I fully expect another solid fantasy MMO entry into the market... that is largely glutted with solid fantasy MMOs, and utterly dominated by a single fantasy MMO. Guild Wars 2 would have to come with free oral sex for a year to have much of a chance at breaking into WoW's subscription numbers, no matter how good the game is.
Indeed, pretty much the only thing on the horizon that I see right that has a chance of slipping into a solid second place is SWTOR. Everything else, I fear, is going to be relegated to strictly niche markets, relative to what WoW has become.
And that's okay.
Particularly with subscription-based MMOs, it doesn't really take all that incredibly much to make a game successful. Not everything has to be earth-shatteringly profitable; so long as it makes money and fans are satisfied, what else really matters?
Apparently something must matter, because it seems like people just love to despise MMOs that don't defeat WoW.
Which is something else I just don't understand. Sometimes I wonder if a lot of those people don't quietly hate WoW themselves, but simply play it out of a lack of anything "better". It would make sense, and fit with a lot of the responses I've seen on the matter. Hell, it would fit with some of the ebb and flow of WoW's subscriber base.
And it leads back into how incredibly fickle the market has become. When a big new MMO launches, tens to hundreds of thousands of WoW players flock to it... and often desert it weeks later. Someday, we might actually see something that retains enough of the disaffected players to, as I said, move into that solid second place that most of the games are trying for. Because let's be realistic; nobody is going to dethrone WoW except WoW 2, at least for several more years. Blizzard can keep raising the level cap, keep making new content, and ultimately start reworking the graphics in a more substantial fashion in order to keep WoW alive just about as long as they want, really.
Though it does lead to another question, and one that I've always been somewhat puzzled over: Who cares about the intervening levels?
What do I mean? Well, I think most of us know exactly what I mean. Who cares about the levels before you get to endgame? It's something that became increasingly common in XI, for example, with the rise of Level Sync and SMN burns, and even more so in some ways with Abyssea. People blitz to endgame, wind up getting there with very little in the way of skills, and then... kinda suck. And I'm not just talking about skills in the sense of competency in playing your job, I'm talking about actual skills of the character itself, and people getting BLM to 90 with the Elemental Magic skill one would expect at level 45. And now, assuming someone were, in fact, deranged enough to either start up FFXI as a new player, or start up again as a returning one, functionally the entirety of what made up the old FFXI endgame is dead. Worthless.
I can't help but think that WoW has the same problem. During my brief stint there, I ran a few dungeons (to my immense frustration), but I can't help but imagine that an awful lot of people do what is essentially the logical thing, and simply blitz to endgame as fast as they can, using whatever gear is easily accessible off the auction house, and that means that WoW has an awful lot of what was once endgame that is now a ghost town.
Or did Blizzard figure out a way around that? I mean, given their model, it wouldn't be overly hard to have older content simply scaled to higher levels, with appropriate drops replacing the low-level gear. It wouldn't work so well for FFXI, but even there steps could be taken...
Ah well.
Time to go read a book.
