I appreciated the art direction and style. That’s all. It was something new, and the backstory as it was originally was different and engaging. Gameplay is another story and easier to play with than changing direction. I think with the right team they could have kept the unique style and crafted a game that was fun.
But instead they went with cliches. That makes me sad, and in my opinion, hurt player retention. TR as it is now just isn’t different enough.
So who here believes cryptic can pull off STO as a unique platform and not another mill grinder?
Give me chances.
Leeroy percentiles.
I had such love for Origin in 1992 - with Ultima VII, the Wing Commander series, System Shock, creative products like Crusader No Remorse in the wings…hell, even Cybermage was trying something new and had David Bradley coming off his Wizardry trilogy when he wasn’t a joke
…it’s hard to believe that Garriott would never create another good game, and that the entire company would be finished producing games by 1997, just 5 years from that peak. May Pyros punish Garriott for his godawful decision to only produce MMOs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT5ZqhkB4dE&feature=related
Our only hope is for EA to compel the BioWare development team to produce a new Ultima.
0%
Read Cryptic’s design vision. The focus is on away team combat and space combat. There’s no mention of exploration, diplomacy, science, or pretty much anything besides away teams and run-and-gun.
I expect it to be an unmitigated failure within 6 months of release. Cryptic didn’t do that well with CoH/V, and it survived only because they got in on the market relatively early. CoH/V is plagued by player retention problems and based on the support of the game by developers, there haven’t been many ‘lessons learned’. I don’t see them being able to bring anything to the table when it comes to launching a competitive MMO, based on their design goals.
The market needs ambitious designs with low production values to build an audience (see EVE), not mega-launches with big budget support and spectacular failure months later.
Lineage 2 has posted subscription numbers comparable to CoH/V in NA/Europe - not nearly as successful as in Asia, but not a flop, either. Pretty sure NC Korea posts those numbers in their quarterly reports.
Lum may be talking about an even earlier version, which was never screened. In any event, I completely agree with Mark here - it may have been the worst game I’ve ever seen demonstrated. It would have saved NCSoft a lot of development costs to put it out, but it certainly would have been a commercial disaster - perhaps a legendary one. It was so bad it seemed like a practical joke.
Nope, I was with Mythic at the time, and was at the E3 where Imperator and TR “remix” were shown, that’s how I remember.
I do remember seeing the early version at a prior E3 and one of the designers stood by while I did a brief gameplay session on the show floor. He somewhat nervously asked what I thought. Hm, I’m running around with an androgynous avatar attacking slug-like things with musical notes. What can I say?
“Uh… it plays kind of like Diablo.”
“Wow. No one’s ever said that before.”
Friggin’ awesome. Love it.
What I wanted was Planetside with PvE. There are certainly flashes of that in the game: in particular the base assaults / defenses were fun, especially if you got an impromptu group of players involved. But too often it played like WoW with guns, only with much less variety in environments, monsters, classes, skills, equipment, weapons, powers, and…uhhh…pretty much everything else. That plus the progressive cost of leveling skills made for an extra-tedious grind - which, as near as I can tell, the patches made even worse to appease the idiots who thought it was “too easy” to level up.
And I also miss the original art direction of TR. It was like Moebius crossed with Phantasy Star. Maybe only 3 other people would’ve wanted to play “PSO the MMORPG” with me, though.
I don’t understand business, but why Mythic decided to go in that gut?
DAoC was doing okay, the company was growing, what is that makes things suddenly so risky that either it works or it’s all fucked up? Isn’t it possible to run a business and stay afloat without aiming for the sky?
There’s probably too much uncertainty in the ‘low’ end of the successful range, nowadays. You’re going to need a certain number of subscribers to at least be profitable (say, 100k), but it’s difficult to predict if you’re going to get 75k or 150k, both of which could be considered successful, but aren’t equally sustainable. It’s far less risky to shoot for that potential million+ crowd, where you could fall below expectations with a mere 700k subscribers but still be profitable.
Come with me, my brother. Together we will forge a world where not all games have to be derivative of each other.
NCSoft’s refusal to host forums for the game was inexcusable to me; it was just too difficult to figure out where the developers were headed.
No offical forums = no sale.
Count me as #3.
No forum would do it for me as well. That’s a bad sign.
Word.
I hate the trend towards not hosting official forums.
And you know who’s doing it next - Warhammer.
Not to turn this into an STO thread, but if you watched the thing in Vegas they talked about the 3 primary focal points of the game: combat, exploration, and economy. They’ve also stated in several interviews/Q&As that exploration is going to be a big part of the game. I thought it was in the FAQ on their website as well, but apparently not.
That said, I’m not sure if Cryptic is going to be able to pull off a Star Trek MMO that feels like Star Trek, primarily because they’re shoehorning the game into the Champions engine. I’m sure they’ll be able to change it around some, but in the end it appears that getting the game into the market as soon as possible and re-using the engine has taken precedence over designing something from the ground up. Can’t say I necessarily disagree with the idea from a business standpoint, but not so sure I think it’ll make the STO that I was hoping for.
As for Tabula Rasa, my wife and I were extremely turned off by the game in beta. I don’t necessarily think it’s fair to base a decision to play the game at release strictly on beta experiences, but the game just didn’t appeal to us in the least. It’s a shame as the genre could really really use a new release with a non-fantasy setting.
Robo, I was a disgruntled ex-CoH player at one point too :) Remember that CoH was designed by first time MMO developers and came out before WoW, on a shoestring budget. I’m also not sure why you think STO will be a “mega-launch with big budget support”. From what I’ve seen so far (yeah, I work there now, but not on that project) exploration is a huge focus of the game.
As for “lessons learned”, a lot of the lessons learned early in CoH post-launch (it turns out people really do like doing non-instanced quests) were extremely difficult to retrofit into CoH given the tech and design already in the game.
BTW what I am hearing is that TR is NOT cancelled (at least for now!), but NCsoft Austin has had significant layoffs.
Wait, what? No one seemed to like doing “street” missions, and is perhaps the primary reason the “hazard” zones were so despised.
Today, all anyone ever seems to do is police scanner instanced missions.
With all this bad news surrounding NCSoft, what is the effect (if any) on the production of Guild Wars 2?
I know they wanted to take GW2 in a different direction, go monthly MMO instead of the pay once and play forever model of the current Guild Wars. Considering how poorly NCSoft’s monthly offerings are faring these days (Lineage in Asia excepted) that seems like a pretty poor decision. I know they’re smart enough to NOT be looking at current Guild Wars sales and player numbers and think they’re going to get those numbers on a game that charges monthly right? Right?
So, no one likes to do REALLY BORING outdoor missions, like kill 50 skulls. People do like to do interesting outdoor missions, like escorts, giant monster takedowns, the kind of stuff in public quests in WAR. CoH only has the boring outdoor missions, so of course no one does them.
As a professional dev with an interest in community development, this absolutely baffles me. One of the HUGE reasons that people actually pay a subscription fee is to be part of an interesting, dynamic community. It’s kind of like a club membership in my view. Official forums are the clear out-of-game center of this community (WoW is so big it kind of outgrew them), and instead of being in the official forums, the WAR community hangs out at various fragmented sites, where the only people talking seem to be ultra-cynical disgruntled players.