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View Full Version : Online World Roundtable #10


Scarne
03-21-2004, 10:45 AM
Vault continues their online roundtables (http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/500/500093p1.html). 1. After any recess, there will be a growth. You just wait and see, in three years, the topic will be where the growth has come from.
2. We need to offer more social reasons to play than just status.
3. We need to be less hardcore, as in offering players a feeling of being useful without investing several hundred hours (or days) of their lives!
4. Our efforts at being more casual should not end up being shallow, as we have seen some recent efforts tend to think. Depth and ease of gaming will coexist.
5. Players who are social must be rewarded by the game system.

Exactly how these five points are to be implemented by my esteemed colleagues, I cannot say. Good luck to us all. ;p
Several devs talk about when the MMO userbase hasn't grown as much as predicited. One theory presented is that essentially, casual players don't buy RPGs that much and most MMOs are RPGs.

JonnyG
03-21-2004, 11:27 AM
Some great stuff in there, these are always an interesting read.

Vali
03-21-2004, 12:55 PM
Toby Ragaini Lead Designer, The Matrix Online
That said, I think you can make some reasonable speculations as to why the North American market hasn't reached comparable levels.

Personally, I think the single biggest reason is the lack of innovative titles. The vast majority of persistent state world games released in the last couple of years have essentially been variations of EverQuest. As an industry, we need to stop chasing the leader and concentrate on where the market is lacking.



Claus Grovdal Producer and Lead Designer, Darkfall
I think the main reason why the persistent state world games market has failed to achieve the numbers of players the hype predicted a few years ago is lack of quality in the titles released.


Gaute Godager, Game Director, unannounced project
The reason why new titles have not led the predicted explosion in the western market (but read up on Korea and China) is because all new titles have all tried to do the exact same thing - long character development in competition with EverQuest. I don't care about the hype. Unless you actually do something new, people will not invest their lives in a new MMO.


I agree with these guys completely- and again am reminded how well Mythica would have done.



-V

JonnyG
03-21-2004, 01:25 PM
I agree 100%, Mythica was the one not trying to be an EQ clone. That's why I've latched onto Guild Wars as it isn't either. Think outside the box devs please.