Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[GalkaBikini]

You guys have SO obviously not used an Oculus Rift yet, heh. It is the future, period.

[Akiza]

Every game coming out has a mutiplayer online component with rp elements. The problem is MMO's have forgotten about the rp element and focused on social aspects. MMO's will become shared virtual worlds with single player experience and focus on character progression.

[justinjarjar]

Yes and I have heard reviews also it is a gimmick. If you want to use it good for you, but in way is it going to be a thing for many many years to come. Even then what do you mean by 3d? Since right now 3d is a gimmick or it is only used to enhance an image (which is cute but not needed in anyway).

[Dawnblade]

I never played SWG but wasn't the "failure" due to Sony trying to make Jedi more accessible to casuals, and make "The New Experience" patch? Any old SWG players want to explain what happened there? Most people I heard who played it said the game died cause of that patch.

Yes, the game was it was before said patch had out of the best character development systems I've seen in any mmo since. There were balance problems of course but those always exist. I was one of those who left at the time. And I've been looking for a similar product since.

[Delily]

It's an industry where most development focuses on innovating slightly while ripping off your predecessors. To the point where if someone truly does have an innovative idea for an mmo it sounds like they've gone off their medication.This has created a pretty large bubble that is eventually gonna burst.

I've seen this statement before, and it's usually lobbied at Apple when they announce a feature that's new to iOS that has been in Android for years, and it represents that same level of misunderstanding about innovation. Innovation is not creating some completely new idea, that's invention. The reason people are wary about invention is because it's extremely risky; plenty of people have great ideas, yet very few actually test them out. In a sense, each idea a person has is a hypothesis about what customers will like enough to pay for. The usual way to do this is to create an MVP that can be used to test your ideas against your target audience, but that's not common (or easy) in the MMO market. The other way to "test" your idea is to look at similar products and see how well they're faring. For MMOs, that's basically WoW, which moved MMOs from niche markets to the mainstream. This creates the problem you mentioned, lots of poorly done clones that are rushed to market.

FFXIV stands alone in the MMO as the other successful subscription game for several reasons. They did use a successful model (WoW) as their basis, and they did add their own twist to it. The ability to switch your job, the heavy emphasis on story, the intricate crafting are the ones that come to mind. For SE, these ideas had already been validated in FFXI as features customers liked. It also helps they stated they're not aiming for WoW level subscriptions. I think I read that 100,000 was all the game needed.

A few more comments. Truly sandbox MMOs are hard to do right for several reasons. The first is the sheer time investment. A big part of Eve is the metagame, and a lot of the game is "played" in Excel. There's also the "king" premise. People like sandbox games like the ES series because it lets them play king, construct their own kingdoms, and then burn them down. In a sandbox MMO, someone else can burn down your castle. That doesn't appeal to the majority of gamers, especially when people will kick your castle down when you can't retaliate.

[TheUltimate3]

Yes, the game was it was before said patch had out of the best character development systems I've seen in any mmo since. There were balance problems of course but those always exist. I was one of those who left at the time. And I've been looking for a similar product since.

I hung on for about 3 months after the NGE. Yeah you'll never find another.

[Delily]

Imagine this:
If you started a "new" game, and were just "dropped" into the world. All the Players and NPC's have the same color names so you can't tell them apart. There's no global chat, only /say and link-shell. The entire game requires you to have an 8-player party for all content. To dynamically create an 8-person party all you do is flip a switch and the 7 closest people/npc not in a party with a "auto-join" switch on will join and the content will commence. Your only ability to tell if a player is a computer controlled or not is by asking questions about the world outside the game. eg "How old are you? Where do you live?"

It is a great over-simplification, but this is part of the entire "dating game" genre, where you try to "win over" certain npc's by either being nice, or helping them, and in turn they will willingly help you. In this theoretical game, autonomous computer controlled characters keep schedules like real people, and are actually in demand. Most content could be cleared with an all NPC party, though coordination would be made easier with real people. There are entire games out there already that are basically "dating RPG"'s which western'ers tend to think are a joke. The entire point of that aspect is you don't get to be a jerk to -everyone- , you can completely ignore every npc character and play only with other real people that you met outside the game and likely get through the content much faster.

Think through the implications of this applied to an MMO. If the NPCs keep a schedule, how would you prevent lockout? Meaning, how would you ensure that if a person (with limited time) wants to clear content, how would you ensure there's always at least 7 NPCs around that can help him? Also, how much time would a person need to spend managing relationships with NPCs. Dating sims work well in a single player setting, I've yet to see one scale out to multiplayer.

I'm not trying to shoot down the idea, more just interested in seeing some of the downsides to it.

[AsakuraVN]

I think ArcheAge is one of the recent bigger Sandbox MMOs that was ported over into our market. But apparently the company behind it screwed up massively.

Archage is a "Sandpark" MMO, meaning it stands somewhere between sandbox & themepark, because it has tons of limitations & rules enforced by the system to keep a balance (but ended up being exploited everywhere). It only gives you an illusion of freedom.

[Aeyis]

I've seen this statement before, and it's usually lobbied at Apple when they announce a feature that's new to iOS that has been in Android for years, and it represents that same level of misunderstanding about innovation.

No. That's exactly what innovation means: a never before thought of idea or use for something that already exists. Invention is simple making something new, regardless of whether or not its like has been seen before.

Think through the implications of this applied to an MMO. If the NPCs keep a schedule, how would you prevent lockout? Meaning, how would you ensure that if a person (with limited time) wants to clear content, how would you ensure there's always at least 7 NPCs around that can help him?

This seems to be the main line of thought at the core of current days MMOs.


Consider the implications that those with limited time available are now considered the targetted audience of MMOs.

[Delily]

No. That's exactly what innovation means: a never before thought of idea or use for something that already exists. Invention is simple making something new, regardless of whether or not its like has been seen before.

People misunderstand the application of innovation. It's not going to be a game that has completely different game play from existing titles. In fact, I'd wager such a game would fail. It's going to look like similar successful titles but have it's own features. The armory system, for example, would be considered an innovation. Innovation is done with small ideas that undergo rapid iterations of testing and refinement.

This seems to be the main line of thought at the core of current days MMOs.


Consider the implications that those with limited time available are now considered the targeted audience of MMOs.

So? It's a profitable market. Heaven forbid a game company try to make money.