4226

Hell,

I’d buy some of those JPEGS as pictures I could hang on my wall, if they come with a quality print + decent frame/size I’m sure they’d be around 230$.

Nice summary linked up earlier by the way. I didn’t know my 265$ would get me an ARG back in 2012, but at least I got a metalic card with ‘Rear Admiral’ on it, and 5 years of internet content :)

4227

That’s for a 5 pack. Individual ones are $40. It’s steal. I’m getting 4.

4228

I saw some ads for his campaign on a gaming news website… I wonder how much they spent on marketing this KS. At this point they probably should cancel it: if they hit their target they’ll have to deliver on their promises with so little monetary resources.

4229

At this point the game is worth more in development than ever launching.

4230

They could just slowly fire development and just keep a team of artists to dream up new .jpgs to sell folks.

4231

Sounds about right. The money is in the fantasy of some amazing super-game. If it launches, the dream crystallises into a real product and if it isn’t immediately the be-all and end-all of space games, then no one is going to cough up money for jpgs of an imaginary spaceship to be put into a “meh” game.

4232

WoW for example also isn’t some amazing super-game and yet is (was) a money printing machine for Blizzard. I think people here grossly underestimate the financial potential even if Star Citizen ends up just being a “good” game (MMO).
Look at the kind of money shitty browser games can generate and even a “hardcore” MMO like EVE did well over the years.
All the money that is already coming in despite the fact that there is no game yet just goes to show what is actually possible if someone DOES deliver a good game.
I can’t even imagine what will happen if they really are able to create a great game. There is a reason why you have so many “sandbox” (MMO) games out there. There is a huge demand for these types of games and people do play them despite the fact that pretty much all of them are very flawed / incomplete.
Star Citizen is really the first AAA-attempt at such a game and while I can understand the usual internet cynicism I’m glad someone is trying this. It’s projects like this that have the rare opportunity to really shake things up.

4233

WoW wasn’t an amazing super-game? It was a total game-changer when it was released. Every developer wanted to get on the bandwagon, and how many of those panned out making the same amount of money?

From what I’ve seen of Star Citizen so far, it’s pretty much meh. There’s a lot of Molyneuxing going on, but until it launches, it’s vaporware. All you have are some tech demos.

Also, I wouldn’t say Star Citizen is the first AAA-attempt. I thought E:D did a great job and that continues to expand in a very credible fashion.

4234

It kinda wasn’t. What WoW did is take the EQ/DAoC (at least single player model) and make it mainstream and accessible. WoW was a pretty logical ending point for the way MMOs were trending. EQ2 and WoW actually had a lot in common when they launched.

That’s not to disparage what Blizzard did. They captured lightning in a bottle and rode the success for a very long time.

4235

I guess it depends what our individual definition of “super-game” is. I played EQ and totally bounced off it but I was sucked in WoW for years. I do feel that making something mainstream and accessible sounds easy but that formula is really tough to get right. We’ve seen so many WoW-clones try to achieve the same and fail.

Star Citizen doesn’t seem to fill me with any sort of excitement, partly due to the continuous feature creep that has led to a fatigue suggesting a game that will never launch, and also because a lot of the new features don’t really excite me at all. Space-farming? Er, sure, ok, whatevs.

4236

It is definitely a super-game. Even now, not really playing MMOs, I enjoy playing it at times.

4237

The atmosphere on /r/starcitizen is like a tide that rises and falls with the amount of time since the latest cool bit of (actual) progress was shown, usually from their weekly behind-the-scenes videos but also from the occasional update to the alpha or presentation at a convention. If they were to stop developing the game, the hype would die out and the funding would dry up.

4238

You know the difference between all those other games (MMO’s) and SC? They all had/have a business model that supported the game POST-launch. SC has a business model that supports the game pre-launch and nobody knows what that is going to look like if they ever get a product out the door, or whether that is likely to sustain continued development.

4239

they would be fools to actually release the game. The revenue stream from the whales would dry up in a hurry.

4240

So either…

  1. You didn’t play any of these three games (EQ, DAOC, WOW) when they existed contemporaneously together in the same marketplace, OR

  2. Your memory is failing you, OR

  3. You’re posting Bayless-level hot takes today.

In any event you’re wrong, of course, by any empirical measure.

Also, WoW’s staying power–which you note–sort of tells me you’re not real tapped into that whole meaning and context of the phrase “lightning in a bottle”.

4241

Have to agree with triggercut, I had been playing MMOs since 1999 (and MUDs and browser based massively multiplayer games too).

WoW in terms of polish, cohesiveness, strong narrative and positive incentivisation for socialising was a gamechanger.

It isn’t my favourite MMO, but vanilla remains in my mind the overall best MMO that I have ever played and that goes from solo play, to levelling up characters with friends, to 5mans where you would physically run to a dungeon and ad hoc a group, to battlegrounds with 45minute queues, and 40man raids. It simply was the best blend of accessability and difficulty, with the right kind of punishment for getting it wrong.

4242

I did. I was the freelancer who did PC Gamer’s MMO reviews for a few years. Up until 2008 or so from 2004. I did the WoW TBC review for them. I played the hell out of all of those games.

There to me is a big difference between an amazing game that does a lot right, and being game-changing. Game changing for me means it changed the industry after it, but WoW was kinda the last of the big MMOs that were successful. Everything that came after it – with the possible exception of LoTRO – kinda failed on liftoff: Matrix Online, COH, Vanguard).

WoW’s success is learned from the mistakes of DAoC, which learned from the mistakes of EQ. The reason I don’t consider them to be a game changer is a lot of what WoW did came before it. It was in different games, and yes, it took an amazing level of talent, dedication, and money to bring it around. But for me, it is a very clear linear path from EQ, to DAOC, to WoW. I’d consider a game-changing game to be one that took a lot of concepts that hadn’t been done before, and changed them so every game had to have them.

Personally, I consider WoW to the be the ultimate final progression for the DIKU-style MMO. At the core, it’s the same basic premise of EQ: kill things to level, game begins at max level, raid to get more loot.

WoW eliminated a lot of things that drove people nuts: corpse runs, etc. But EQ2 had a lot in common with WoW at launch, and they launched very close to each other. I think the one thing WoW had that not many games had was instanced dungeons. The LFG tool and all came later. But EQ2 also had an ok story.

Early WoW was also a mess. Outside of launch issues, the quest hubs were a mess, and they hadn’t really nailed down zone progression.

I actually consider EQ to be more of a game changer than WoW.

4243

When @Mark_Crump said WoW wasn’t a total game-changer, I presume he was referring to the actual game mechanics rather than the financial landscape. A very literal interpretation of the phrase, if you will. Rob Pardo himself has said that his team’s goal was to take the gameplay of previous MMO’s (which mainly meant EverQuest, which he used to play competitively) and find a way to make it accessible.

It’s just kind of the achievement of WoW itself, of having this goal - our goal was to look at the genre, and we saw what was super fun about it, but unfortunately in the previous MMOs you always had to be hardcore to get to that really “sticky” fun. But for the people that did it, we all saw how much fun there was in that genre that so many people couldn’t ever get to. Our No.1 goal with WoW was, “Lets make a game where people can get to that fun, see it, and get invested in this wonderful genre instead of scoffing, and passing over it because it was an MMO.”

http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/interviews/6773-Five-Years-of-Warcraft-Speaking-With-Blizzard-s-Rob-Pardo.2

Edit: I spent so long looking for the quote I didn’t realize Mark had already explained himself X(

4244

That’s what Blizzard does with nearly everything they release, I feel. Take (good) ideas from other games, apply a ridiculous amount of polish, make them accessible, and sell millions. And they’re really good at doing that.

4245

See overwatch as an example.

I agree with Mark, WoW wasn’t really anything new. It was just a polished version of stuff we had already seen.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Polished games are fun to play.

I think that the reason we saw so many MMOs that followed fail so miserably, was that they also didn’t offer anything new. They just tried to do the same thing, but we’re less polished.

If you want to compete with that kind of game, you need to actually do something new, offer something different. LOTRO did this to some degree, by being able to offer the Tolkien universe and capitalize on it well. I can’t really think of any other MMOs which really impressed me since.