21

I don’t like raspberries, but when people say that’s their favorite fruit, it doesn’t irk me. I just accept that they have different taste from me.

22

Wait, is that true?

Ugh. All the praise for CCP kills me. I can’t stand them as a maker of MMOs.

<snip>

I just don’t get how they can continue to ignore the solo player market. It’s huge.

You are saying they actually suck cause they don’t have what you want, and then that you think they are doing their job wrong.

So when you say

I’m not whining about Eve at all.

You actually are, and when you say

I don’t have a problem with that.

You actually do.

Or at least, that’s what your words say.

Anyway, CCP is the only MMO company I have faith in because everyone else is just making more of the same with different graphics and/or story. Meh. I’m not looking for a single player game out of an MMO, even if I can play with friends. I am looking for a massive world simulation. Who else is doing that on a successful scale? No one, that’s who.

23

I would say that perhaps, maybe Blizzard had it right. At this point they’ve made the game so god-awfully solo friendly that until you get to end game raiding, grouping with other people is actually a penalty. You have to split loot, some quests take longer, exp on the mobs is split… Grouping up with other players is like tying a weight to your leg. I suppose the people who prefer solo play enjoy that, but to me it makes the game not worth playing. I play multiplayer games to play with people, not to play also while other people play and we can chat.

24

Someone next is gonna show us that FF11 got it right because no one can solo pass lvl 11, and in order to get anywhere you need to have a perfectly sync group that kills at 110% Efficiency.

If EVE is the “Right” MMO, the future of MMO is bleak indeed.

If World of Darkness MMO’s skill accumulation works just like EVE, then this game is automatically gets a will-not-purchase.

25

I don’t see how it’s bleak, unless you consider endless dikuMUD clones to be A Good Thing.

26

Oh jesus. If you people truly think I was saying “Eve is the one true MMO” you need to stop posting and take some reading lessons.

27

I don’t like to be force to periodically resubscribe to a game just so that when I do want to play the game again, I’m not hopelessly behind.

wasn’t talking to you charles.

the quote I was refering to is

Expected, but still excellent news. CCP is the only company making MMOs that I have any faith in at this point.

28

You’re right. When Charles is king of the world, all MMOs will play just like EVE. You better play more WoW because your time is running out. Tick tock.

29

Hopelessly behind? Are you seriously of the opinion that only the front-runners in terms of skill points can play the game? Really? Because that just simply is not true. Ask the Goons.

As for having faith in CCP - yes. I’m bored to tears of endless variations of the same theme. WoW, EQ, EQ2, WAR, AION, etc etc etc - they’re functionally identical. CCP had the nerve to come up with something original and the ability to implement it and keep it going and growing.

30

I like the idea of EVE but haven’t tried the game because I do favor soloing most of the time (even though I enjoy grouping too). I just like the ability to pause when I want without worrying about other people’s time and such. That said, I think this is a great company for this particular game. WoD should be about political intrigue and cool social settings and interaction. EVE has shown a remarkable ability to do that. But was it by design? I think I’ve read some people who argue that the game went in directions that were not exactly intended by the devs. If so, we have to wonder whether they can intentionally pull off the same thing.

That said, I agree that the company is a great choice for this particular license. I’m excited.

31

Well, I agree with that statement.

32

It may be a case of different strokes for different folks, but I found the solo play in Eve to be mind-numbingly dull. And I love spaceship porn, and economic games, and all that sort of stuff, but solo play in Eve is simply not a fun experience.

33

I’ll toss my two cents in and agree. Eve solo was incredibly dull and made it into a non-game.

34

Depends when you guys started. If it was near launch, solo play was almost non-existant. If it was within the last year or so, yeah, it hasn’t improved that much since then. Although faction warfare gives solo players a lot easier of a time getting into PvP.

35

I think a Changeling MMO could be awesome, provided it had the right focus. 2E Changeling’s metaplot was a great backdrop, and The Lost has a fantastic world that I would murder to play around in. I agree about the rest, though, and would add that a Hunter MMO could be good, as well.

I’m a huge WoD fan, and have been since I was a teenager. I can’t imagine how this game will work yet, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the concept since the news first started to leak out. I’m very, very interested to see more.

36

This thing is going to blow up when they announce the Twilight tie-in.

37

The Tabletop RPG game ran in the opposite direction than, for example, D&D. There were systemic political dynamics which could pit player against player within the same group, while the environment provided a constant backdrop of tension that the storyteller could ramp up or down…

Which is all fine for five people sitting around a bowlful of chips, some salsa, a decorative dice-holder and Type O Negative in the stereo.

There were few successful WoD MUDs that didn’t devolve into Twilightesque fanfics of the player’s characters themselves, while including a megadose of house rules that tried to gerrymander all the “species” into the same world. In the end, it became a soap opera + vampires and/or werewolves, fairies… I never saw Wraith deployed in a text world; the cross-over from it must’ve been a massive pain.

Now, if they’re doing away with the WoD system and just shoe-horning everything into something more numerically intelligible, there can be a world where vampires and werewolves can meaningfully coexist and eviscerate one another without it being massively one-sided.

This certainly won’t be the WoD that led to the LARPers of the night, and thank God for that, but the last round of material I read from them had lost a lot of its flaire.

I am cautious about this.

38

Honestly, I’d be a lot more interested in this if it weren’t for the bland WoD reboot that they did a couple years ago. I thought the older version of the setting had much more personality. For example, trimming down the number of factions for each game was a mistake*.

Of course, I haven’t kept up with it too much because it didn’t grab me (or anyone in my RPG circle), so maybe it’s better than it initially seemed. Definitely going to check this out, but there are several ways I can see this disappointing.

*With the possible exception of Werewolf, which I thought had far more tribes than it needed for its archetypes. Several of the tribes seemed to boil down to very close variations:
“Rarr, we are big strong men who are Norse!”
“Rarr, we are big strong men who are Native American!”
“Rarr, we are big strong men who are women!”

But for Mage, specifically, the different traditions all had completely unique philosophies and paradigms, and I can’t understand why they’d trim some of them to reduce setting complexity.

39

To simplify book-keeping, I expect, and to make the stories more about the characters themselves rather than the factions they were adhered to. Besides, Mages were code for Munchkins back then.

40

RPS had an interview with one of the CCP guys working on this a good while ago:

Most relevant parts:

RPS: You and I have discussed, on many occasions, the difference between Eve and more, shall we say “classical” MMOs… Are you going to apply the principles of Eve in your new game design?
Yes, the key, we still believe, is human interaction. The World of Darkness game shares that vision. We wouldn’t really be in this business if it wasn’t for those principles…. I want to say so much, but I really can’t at this stage. But it’s about being real in the way that Eve feels real. People should really feel it: they’re not just playing a game… you know what I mean by that.
RPS: I do. Eve is real because it’s processes might be abstract but they’re still analogous to the gains and losses of real life. It’s a far more natural system than most games, which you see in the economy and the combat. And it makes me wonder why people haven’t copied Eve’s model. Why haven’t people tried to steal your ideas?
Well you say that but I think the zeitgeist is moving this way… human interaction. If you think about the websites like Facebook, YouTube, they have similar human input, and they’re much bigger than the MMOs. People are paying more attention now and realising that the point about MMOs is that they are about human interaction. The first couple of generations of MMOs have been single player games with lots of people in them, and there’s not much of a fundamental difference in the game design philosophy. There needs to be, and we can learn to do that.
RPS: And you think MMOs need to consider themselves to be more like Facebook?
They are more like Facebook, or should be. They share the same technology, and they have to be considered as a social technology if the genuinely massively multiplayer gameplay is going to emerge. People interacting is all that matters here. We are going to stick to this vision with our games. It was what we believe in some form back in 1997 when we formed the company, and I think we demonstrated it with Eve.

Interestingly, CCP recently also announced a new community site with social networking-type stuff for EVE. Details are not plentiful yet, but this is likely a test of technology they will be using for the WoD MMO in some form.