These 3 statements just got me to install the game. You better not be full of shit. I’ve played gemstone3 on and off for the past 15 years.
I liken it to buying extended warranties for your electronics where 99% of the time it’s a horrible investment. And in today’s MMO world it’s an even worse gamble than it would have been 5 years ago. Games don’t last as long, and they are as cheap as $10 a month even with just 3-6 month plans, so you are looking at 20 months to break even. Who really plays any MMO for 20 months these days? EQ and possibly WoW would have been the only games worth a lifetime fee for me.
Further, when a company tries to front load income like this it’s usually a sign that the game isn’t going to be P2P for long. And I’m not just talking about their lifetime stuff, I’m talking about their $15 and $60 packs, their $10 reservation fees and extra character slots, all things that AoC added when they knew they were headed F2P. Funcom is already set up for F2P and won’t hesitate to pull the trigger much quicker on this game than their last.
Further, when a company tries to front load income like this it’s usually a sign that the game isn’t going to be P2P for long. And I’m not just talking about their lifetime stuff, I’m talking about their $15 and $60 packs, their $10 reservation fees and extra character slots, all things that AoC added when they knew they were headed F2P. Funcom is already set up for F2P and won’t hesitate to pull the trigger much quicker on this game than their last.
Yeah what he said. Unless this game blows up with subscribers I can see it going F2P. I mean they already have it set up to sell clothes and guns and stuff so making the leap to F2P wouldn’t be difficult at all. That is kinda the one thing holding me back from buying it. Why blow the 50 bucks now if in 6 months I can play for “free”.
Most MMOs that have gone free to play still offer a monthly subscription, and the lifetime subscribers on MMOs that offered them get all the benefits of that subscription. Honestly, as long as they don’t do something to really cripple game balance or flow in service of driving people to pay, I actively anticipate the game going F2P. More people to play with, but no need to deal with the bullshit that comes with being a free player.
I’ll temper your expectations by saying I don’t think the game is hard, let alone Dark Souls hard. It’s just that there isn’t much hand holding and you need to figure it out yourself. It’s deep enough that your average gamer is going to be completely lost and not ‘get it’.
Add the fact that the investigation missions get progressively more difficult if you don’t cheat and you’ll blow the mind of an average gamer down to jelly.
The huge number of people I saw asking for the solutions to really, really basic puzzles (like the code to the keypad on the safe under the rock for a misc quest, and the password to Dr. Bannerman’s computer) on general chat was pretty indicative, I’d say.
You’re welcome?
And if you’d said it were, I’d have laughed myself silly, because I know better grins
I know some people have issues with Funcom, and there are plenty of things to gripe about, but their record of supporting MMO games long after launch is good. I believe AO is coming up on their eleventh anniversary? And yes, AoC is now free to play, but I’ve seen numerous people comment that the game has steadily improved.
To each their own. I completely understand if people think it is too much of a risk. This would make an interesting topic for another thread if anyone wants to. I’d prefer not to logjam this one.
It’s a fair enough discussion, but I do agree with Oghier’s earlier point that a lifetime sub wasn’t as much about the MMO as it was supporting this kind of game and approach.
There is going to be a fair bit of ragequitting when people hit the puzzle wall early in their main quest line. The game throws some very subtle but clear hints at the player for the answers to some of the puzzle questions but I suspect the average MMO players eyes will glaze over when they realise they can’t simply click the “I win” button to advance their questline.
A member of a certain well known TSW podcast has already been complaining bitterly about how hard the puzzle quests are in TSW. Which is really silly since if she simply slowed down and thought a bit about the questions the answers would be obvious.
There are some deliciously subtle puzzle and investigation missions in TSW and it would be a shame for Funcom to dumb it down because of the complainers.
I used to be very, very good at these types of puzzles. However after years of being spoonfed and having my hand held in games I’ve lost the touch. It’s quite sobering realizing how much I lost and I’m grateful for the chance to re-hone those skills.
I just feel bad because the game will likely fail in no small part because it actually asks people to figure stuff out for fun.
Very much my own thoughts on the matter. I feel like the grandpa equivalent of an MMO gamer. “well back in my day, they didn’t mark quest mobs on your radar, you had to wander out into Strangletorn Vale and find 'em on your own”. I realized a while back that I would get annoyed if I didn’t immediately know what I was supposed to do for a quest. It’s kind of disturbing when you realize that.
I don’t know that people will quit over it, they’ll simply spam chat with questions, just like “where’s Vekas” (Tera) or “where’s Mankirk’s wife” (WoW). To me, that’s ok! The people that don’t want to figure out the puzzles will just google the answers or get them on chat.
I don’t know what “fail” means for this game, though. No one is expecting WoW numbers and Funcom’s other MMO’s are still running. If AoC still has servers at this point, I don’t know what the “fail” state is for TSW.
I am fighting the urge to get a lifetime sub. It’s really more a gamble on my own gaming nature rather than the game itself, though. I didn’t get a year out of Rift before I checked out and that was a great game. I did spend 6 months playing in the beta before launch, though, and that might have taken some of the bloom off of the rose.
They already do this now at an ridiculous level. General is as close to old-school Barrens level chat I have seen in a while. They expect you to Google around for information, though. There is the best implementation of an in-game web browser I have seen (Chrome) and it is expected that you will need to look up information to solve puzzles.
This is going to be doubly compounded by every blogger/reviewer/designer echoing the statement that it is bad design if the game doesn’t spell every little thing out for them.
Just as long as i don’t have to spend hours wandering the country side looking for something the quest doesn’t tell me the location of, as it was in earlier mmorpgs, including wow early on.
I don’t mind if i don’t get real time satellite tracking of quest objectives, but too many games take this as an either or situation. You either tell the player exactly where the target is from the start or you tell them “kill Rory the Luminous” without giving the player any idea who or where that person is.
Mankirk’s wife is a pretty notorious example obviously, because i don’t think there was any indication to the wife’s general area short of wandering around searching a large area without a mount. It has been a long time since i’ve played wow though and even longer since i was low level horde, so it is remotely possible i am remembering wrong. I don’t want to spend an hour wandering around playing “search for the clickable.” If i did, i would play an adventure game.
The stuff I was exposed to was like “follow the blood trail/ravens flying away” or “find this couple’s grave” (in the graveyard), or “clues in nearby miscellaneous document”. But the investigation missions were locked, and I assume they get hairier.
This is offtopic, but they did eventually make the storyline in LotRO all soloable. I think duo-able, too, though I’m not precisely sure how it all worked.
The problem with googling for hints to puzzles is you often find the very first google response is a spoilered solution. Ideally they would have had a fake browser setup that you can manipulate to find the answers. It’s nice having the real browser, but again it forces people to use their own restraint and I think very, very few people will.
The latest word is that the devs will be removing server wide General Chat and replacing it with a faction chat for Dragon, Illuminati, etc. Their reasoning is that they have received a lot of complaints after BWE3 that players were spoiling the game for other people who wanted to work through the puzzles without help.
I would have thought it would be simpler for people to deselect the General Chat window.
You get automatically readded to it every time you reload a zone. I think there is a setting that turns that off, but then you don’t automatically get the group channel when joining groups, among other things.