Didn’t we see this with Everquest though? They did a character overhaul for Luclin I believe, but I don’t know that it was successful in bringing in more bodies.
It didn’t; the EQ1 character revamp changed their art direction and many players rejected them, preferring the old (ancient) low-poly models and textures. WoW recently did a player character revamp that was much more successful as they all look basically identical to the old models, just much sharper and clearer.
I thought the WoW revamp pissed off some people, but I can’t say how many. I think I remember @Balasarius being pretty miffed at what they did to his gnome? Could be misremembering or maybe they’ve had more than one revamp!
No, just the one. That shows you how carefully people watch this stuff, he’s no doubt played that gnome for nigh fifteen years now, and the slightest change is immediately noticeable to him. Most people are pretty happy with it though.
I didn’t really notice it until I loaded up Classic for an afternoon. Then I could not “un-notice” it. But yeah, I would call it a reskin more then a complete revamp. The EQ characters looked much different.
Yes, WoW wasn’t super well received initially but I think once it was there for a while people came around (unlike EQ). The dwarf overhaul was completely awesome though. Kudos to whoever at Blizzard that knows Dwarves are the one true race.
Right, WoW didn’t change art direction at all, every character was as identical as possible, just rendered at higher resolution and with more detailed textures. This was very smart, they learned from EQ’s mistake.
Of course it wasn’t perfect, but I believe they ironed out most of the bugs.
Let’s be real here. No amount of visual updates is going to make the feel of Everquest less dated. It’s not like someone is going to come in and play it for the first time in 2021.
Amusingly enough I just browsed around and Dark Age Of Camelot is still a thing with updates. I can’t imagine someone starting that game fresh anytime in the last decade either even with graphical updates (despite playing it to almost addiction levels back in the early 2000s and still having a lot of nostalgia for it).
That’s incredible. It’s surprising that enough people still play EQ for it to be worth updating, but DAoC? That wasn’t even particularly popular in its heyday.
DAoC is the only MMO I played extensively. And I agree, I looked up the fact that it was still going last month, and I couldn’t believe it. I wonder if any of the people I was in a guild with and used to hang out with back in 2002 or so are still around? Probably not, I’m guessing.
I’d guess they’re all in ESO, as it’s the clear design descendant of DAoC particularly in its RvR PvP and the lead designers are working on it.
There was a guy who used to release graphs showing subscription numbers for the various MMOs, and DAOC would run in the 200K-250K range. Not as high as EQ, but it was a successful MMO for its time.
SirBruce, yes, but he pulled those out of his ass.
This game changed dramatically during development, right? To focus less on pvp? What is it at this point?
Hush about ESO. Trying to so hard to not get consumed with it. Silly influencer!
Yeah, that was me. And I’m still sour about it all these years later. Female gnomes in WoW used to smile. They don’t do that anymore. All the faces are varying degrees of grumpy. I had change all my female gnomes to the “green-eyed face” as its the least grumpy. (With Shadowlands you can customize your eye color… truly revolutionary.)
And I’m also sour about the facial animations.
Is she opening a portal or taking a really big dump?
This is the face she makes while running. You know, that thing you do all the time. Why am I angry running? I don’t want to be angry running.
But I still play WoW, in part because those purple moths on her back are the coolest things ever.
I think almost all MMOs still live on in some form or other. Even ones that shut down like Earth and Beyond are still being played on 3rd party private servers. These things never die.
I haven’t spent any serious time in an MMO for several years now, but I’ll give New World a shot if it starts getting decent reviews.
I can answer yes to your first questions. To their credit, their beta testers were less than enthused at what they saw so they put another year or so into the game to add a lot more PVE content.
As for what it is at this point after that revamp, I’m not sure! I think we’ll have a pretty good idea by the time closed beta hits, if not before.
It looks interesting, at least. The setting is a plus compared to generic fantasy. Dungeons are 3-5 man. Pvp optional. All those things are positives in my eyes. Like you said, I guess we will know more soon.
Me and the wife pre-ordered last year after the open Beta and have been impatiently waiting ever since. Really liked what we played, and looking forward to a modern MMO to explore together. Sucks that it comes out midsummer though, when our gaming hours are at a low.