Oghier
1621
TSW is not just more story-driven than other MMO’s, it’s as story-driven as the best single-player RPG’s. The writing, voice acting and cutscenes are absolutely superb.
Unless you want to run elite and nightmare dungeons it is a single player RPG with other people running around you as you play. The only drawback is that if you treat it as a single player RPG the monthly subscription becomes really annoying.
There was quite a vocal minority on the closed beta forums saying that this game was pretty buggy and missing a lot of basic features for an about to be launched MMO…sure you don’t want to push back the launch date a little and do a little more work? The response was, basically, shut up haters, it’ll be ready don’t worry. Guess that worked out well for them.
I doubt that was the major problem. By the time players find out about the bugs the initial sales surge is already a few days old. The game didn’t sell as much that first few days, first week, etc. Bugs and things like that explain why the retention rate fails but they don’t explain disappointing initial sales. Something held back sales. I suspect it was a lack of trust in Funcom due to AoC issues and the different kind of game SW was trying to be.
Miramon
1625
Yeah, I doubt it was bugs that accounted for the poor sales.
After all the majority of sales in the first quarter (if not the entire life of the game) occur before launch, and I doubt they achieved even a third of what they would hope for as a bare minimum. I think that’s a failure of marketing more than anything else, possibly combined with their poor record with previous games discouraging some people from even considering a purchase.
If the game had had a good launch (in terms of sales) we could look at subscription changes over time to see what word of mouth was doing, but they never got to that point.
I think GW2 gets more slack because for more people it’s more fun than TSW, simple as that. I loved TSW for the first two or three weeks, maybe a month or so. Then I hit a wall where it wasn’t fun any more–it wasn’t really giving me that MMO feel, nor was it a satisfying single-player type game. It had a lot of things going for it, and a lot of very cool innovations that I hope other games steal. But I simply wasn’t having fun.
One thing that I think TSW really screwed the pooch on was not exploiting the three-way faction thing for more elaborate world or at least large-zone PvP. It always felt very very odd to me that you were a member of this occult society that was in a “secret war” with the other societies (and against dark forces, of course) but when you were fighting mobs, you were side by side with those same competitors, and only got to fight them in the (quite wonky, clunky, and poorly thought out IMO) structured PvP zones. Admittedly, the way their quests worked it might have been hard to do more in this regard, but I think in the long run it hurt them, perhaps.
Bugs, though they were annoying (chat in particular for me) didn’t cause me to unsub. And with GW2, the glitches, bugs, and annoyances there are more bearable because at this point I’m still having fun, and I’m not paying fifteen clams a month for the privilege.
I didn’t encounter the bugs mentioned above in GW2, and the absence of features like the trading post haven’t mattered a whit to me - that isn’t something I have any real plan to use anyway. I hate player economies. (Though I really want them to get the cross-server PvE going.) Chat being out of commission and “is it a bug or just me being dense” really hurt TSW for me, by contrast. But I think even more so…TSW is relying on subscription fees for ongoing funding. GW2 isn’t. So if someone gets fed up with the state of TSW, they drop sub and there’s a psychological disincentive to ever come back. Someone gets fed up with GW2, welp, they already paid. Worse case scenario they put it down for a while. They can always come back without spending another dime.
And I say all this as someone who likes both games but pound for pound prefers TSW as it’s much better at delivering story and has a significantly more unique (in gaming, at least) setting.
Nesrie
1628
Word of mouth matters. It’s not bugs alone, but don’t discredit them. You have one MMO adding servers, and another begging people to come back. I don’t know why the industry thinks they should hit with a big bang and then run around plugging holes and see whose left when they are done. The game did not have a clean release, did not appeal to hardly any guilds, the word of mouth is still piss poor, and it looks pretty bad. To say that none of those things really matter, that ultimately gamers just aren’t used to change, and it was too different. Come on. You could blame a slow start with that, but a downward spiral… no.
Miramon
1629
Their total sales over the life of the game so far is much lower than their total preorders should have been even to project a break even down the road. I believe a preponderance of users preorder in a typical subscription MMO, at least over the first year or so. Word of mouth may hurt subsequent sales, but that wasn’t their problem. Hence, marketing was their problem – and by marketing I don’t mean merely advertising, but the larger scale problem of orienting and presenting a product or a service that the market will want to pay for.
Nesrie
1630
Their open beta was pretty bad. I am guessing that affected pre-orders pretty heavily. FFXIV had a similar problem I thought. The open beta was horrific there too and very few not already die-hard fans bought that game. TSW didn’t have die-hard fans it could count on to buy it no matter how bad of a showing they gave.
Someone mentioned above that TSW didn’t make as much of the 3 secret societies as it potentially could have. I agree with this.
It started off well, you felt quite a part of whichever society you chose, but eventually, by about half way through the game, it was just wallpaper. Which is a shame, because while you “felt it”, it was really immersive, and quite unique (because of feeling like you’re in a faction in a modern-day setting).
Lack of resources again, I guess.
Yeah, the 3 faction system mostly was just an annoyance, in terms of forming guilds, than a feature that really drove anything positive in the game. They didn’t do much of anything with it beyond the deck outfits and using it to divide up folks for the PVP zone.
The idea of handing out HUGE PVE bonuses based on what other folks in your faction were doing in the PVP zone was pretty terrible too, especially with how much of a difference it made in Nightmares. It lead to a major feedback loop in faction imbalance.
Yeah, but you have to see what Funcom was seeing – AoC sold a ton right out of the gate. Warhammer did too. So did Old Republic. And I think Rift and Aion and even Star Trek Online sold really well day one. Secret World didn’t sell well day one. I don’t think it was the beta or subsequent report of bugs (and remember, there was a lot of praise for the game too). I think it was due to a lack of trust in Funcom and due to the different kind of game Secret World was. The latter probably points at what Miramon was getting at – marketing.
I agree about the psychological impact of the monthly sub. If I’m subbed I feel like it should be my game of choice to play, so if I don’t feel like playing it for any reason, I tend to unsub. And I won’t come back unless I feel like I have time to enjoy it for the monthly fee.
GW2 is nice because there’s no fee, but I do think there will be a barrier erected once the first expansion is out. For me I’ll feel like I need it to be competitive in WvW so I’ll associate a cost with returning to GW2 in my mind.
Depends on how they handle it, I suppose. I can’t imagine the GW1 release model would work for GW2, which is such a different game, but the traditional MMO expansion model seems a little underwhelming.
Nesrie
1636
I am not saying you are wrong. We really don’t know for sure, and it could very well be that… but Star Trek and Old Republic have a fan base. Those fan bases were going to try the game no matter what because of the universe they were in. Rift had a pretty clean release and a relatively clean beta. Aion already existed as a game in some form… so none of those are comparable to TSW’s release. A new world, piss poor beta, not a good release, and who cares what praise they were getting from the critics when the bulk of the gaming population is on the forums and in chat saying otherwise.
I think monthly subs will become a non-issue moving forward. With the failures of SWTOR and TSW these will be the last traditional subscription model MMO’s we will see. There are only two successful sub-based MMO’s left - WoW and EvE Online. EvE Online is the only MMO with a healthy increasing stable player population. A bigger question is will the F2P model sustain the market for high quality MMO’s.
Oghier
1638
The Halloween content was pretty good. It included a medium-length investigation quest, a very short dungeon and (this is the worst bit) a bit of farming for drops and a rare spawn. The quest was fun, though, and the dungeon reward is a very cool pet:
I rarely play this anymore, but it’s nice to drop in when they add new content.
This halloween content reminds me of early LOTRO mistakes- they make a quest chain that eventually requires you to finish a five man dungeon. I spent a long time begging for a group and then gave up in disgust.
For a game that had such promise it’s turning into a bad joke.
Razgon
1640
And its semi-official - The Secret world is going to be without a subscription.
They twittered an end of days videotoday, with Joel Bylos having a video report of his last days before 21-12-2012 and it ended with him storming the execs at Funcom saying that to make sure everyone could play their game before the end of days, they should make it “Subscription no longer required”…
