WoW is a fundamentally different game, though. I don’t see Megaservers working here when you have core features like open world PvP, competition for resources, and territory ownership.
The underlying architecture is flexible. So in WoW, everybody has a “server” with a name like Sunnyside. Back in the day that was one of dozens of physical blades in a datacenter somewhere. Now everything is virtualized and each region has a megaserver, so everybody’s on the same server. But you’re still “Drizzzzzt-Sunnyside” in the game, and you (in theory) only see players from the same “server” when out in the world, even though that’s really just an illusion.
Then when each illusory server gets too depopulated, you simply cluster them together, so the Sunnyside and Baconwaffle servers share the same persistent world. This lets you effectively merge servers without the bad PR and without inconveniencing players, as you are likely to have one Drizzzzt per server. Additionally if you have over population issues in a concentrated area, for example everybody crowding around the Christmas tree to get presents or whatever, you can simply split up those illusory servers and the population problem goes away.
This is an elegant solution that was devised a hell of a long time ago. Guild Wars 2 does it, ESO does it, WoW does it, these are not new games.
I understand how it works and it works really well for those kinds of games. It’s not a technical issue, it’s a game design issue. It fundamentally doesn’t work with this kind of game where the focus is on competing for territory and resources in the open world and not instanced raids, arena fights, battlegrounds, etc.
In Guild Wars or Elder Scrolls or WoW it doesn’t really matter if you’re phased while out questing or doing your thing. If you want to run a dungeon, it’s fantastic you can queue up and get in with people that aren’t on your “server”, if you even have one. In New World that matters a lot because the territory is controlled by the guilds/players. Guilds fight hard over places like Everfall because of it’s central location. You can’t translate that to a megaserver where everyone owns their own copy of Everfall, nor is there an elegant way of merging those instances together. For GW2 they can just phase players in or shut down the instance when everyone leaves. In New World, a guild may have invested heavily into building up certain infrastructure in Everfall. Another guild may have invested a lot of resources into attacking and trying to conquer it. You can’t just phase that out and merge it into another where a completely different party owns and has invested in the territory.
Because you can’t do one of the main things the game offers, the PvP invasions stuff, until you hit the endgame, it makes the 1-60 journey sort of bland and cut off from the meat of the game. They desperately need Battlegrounds or the equivalent, gated by level tiers like DAOC or WHOL.
Apropos of nothing else, their Holiday event, Winter Convergence (I think it’s called), is pretty well done. As a bonus, it doesn’t seem to have any bugs. :)
I picked this up and fell off pretty quickly. More to do with other games distracting me, as I kind of enjoy the core concept and gameplay.
One big issue is that the game really chugs on my, admittedly, old machine. Which is a bit of a turn off.
Yeah, it seems like PvP is cut off for my low level character. I realize I can flip my flag but my guess is all that will do is place my character’s neck onto the chopping block. I’d like a battlegrounds option gated by levels.
Happy New Year, New World players and watchers.
I am arbitrarily calling this the “bottom”. Player counts have slowed their drop. Mechanics are in place and appear to be stable. There have been no major new bugs in a month. Servers are merged.
So, when is the right time to get back in? Now? Wait another patch or two? Give it six more months?
Now isn’t a bad time to return. Big patch drops tomorrow with quite a few changes that seem to be in the right direction.
Planning on hopping back on when I get my new PC this weekend.
Yikes.
What a shame.
Interesting video. Can’t argue too much with the conclusions, either. Many of us were saying exactly that it was made in a vacuum.
Shrug, that’s why you play in the first three months, vast majority of MMOs die out after that.
I suspect a lot of what’s in this video is pretty accurate, although some of the specifics of things he liked or wanted from earlier in development(dark souls combat or the total sandbox) would be things that would have attracted me to the game. As a person who enjoys the PvE and crafting aspects of MMOs primarily I was eventually turned off by the environments getting darker/gloomier and therefore places I wasn’t as interested in running around for hours. And the crafting system was very engaging for the first couple of tiers but eventually got grindier and pretty samey.
And I believe they made the pants-on-head decision to cap the effectiveness (gearscore) of crafted gear by whatever the highest item drop for that equipment slot you had found. Which… kind of undermined the idea of crafting to some extent. Sure, you could craft gear but it couldn’t be better than what you already found. You did have the advantage of having the right stats or traits or whatever, but it felt really dumb to me. I had spent all my time gathering and crafting and losing money in the process instead of farming mobs. And then they made it so the people farming mobs were the only ones who could really benefit from my gear, and that I wouldn’t be able to utilize my crafted gear until I went and ground my way up the gearscore chain. And after the ridiculous amount of grinding that crafting/gathering took… no thanks.
Honestly, I know I’ve said it before but I’m still floored about how the development team consistently made the game worse with every single game update for the couple months I played. I’ve never seen anything like it.
They committed a cardinal sin in trusting the client. It immediately exposed their lack of the most basic competence in MMO and even multiplayer game production. Amazon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this game and hired charlatans to do it.
It is really weird that a lot of their senior development staff did not have a lot of MMO experience, when making an MMO.
I mean, AGS basically bought a studio, and let them kinda go on their own.
Feels like they had some really neat ideas, and then decided to move back to a more traditional PVE mmo. Which removes a bunch of the reason of the game being unique from the other MMO games in the genre.
It kind of sucks too, because I was interested in the game’s setting a lot, but it didn’t run great on my older PC. Now that I have a new PC, the player count is gone!
Even if they made an astonishingly fun game, the next WoW of its time, it would be hacked to hell and back since they trust the client. They’d need to rebuild the game to be server authoritative at all times, and that would be a monstrously huge task while still building content and servicing the live game.
The game was d0med when they made that crucial mistake, years before release.
I am confused by your statement.
Games like WoW are also prone to client side hacks as well.
Speed/flight boosts.
Not all aspects of the game are prone to that type of hacking, but certainly it is not immune.