A recipe for greatness?

• Take the Combat, Animation and Immersion of Age of Conan.
• The Team controls and features (Sidekick!) of City of Heroes
• The in-and-out-as-you-wish optional PvP expected from Warhammer Online.
• The seamless World plus original small team Dungeons of World of Warcraft.
• The ship-to-ship combat of Pirates of the Burning Sea.
• The Crafting of Star Wars Galaxies.
• The Exploring and mystery of Earth & Beyond.

Oh I could go on, but you get the point. Put all the best features of these games and more together and you'd have-- well not the greatest MMORPG possible, but a pretty good one. Assuming it had a truckload of content, because that's what's needed most, just tons of content.

I don't know, nothing seems to match my imagination of what would truly be great. Too bad I want to experience the epiphany as a player, creating it could spoil it.

Maybe one day I'll take the advice I give to other armchair designers and write a whitepaper (or three) of my own.

*gets back to playing*

I've had an "EA is the Devil" category on this blog for years, it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek but there's a real reason it's there too.

Keen just opened up a bucket of worms by making the issue of 'incomplete' MMORPG launches an ethical issue of inflated customer expectations. The problem is, he's pumping EA-Mythic as his example of a company he trusts to deliver on what he'd hold others accountable for.

I probably would have discussed more of the premise, but as it was, I choked on my drink and sprayed my desk in the process.

Needless to say, I don't think EA is the bastion example of ethical behaviour when it comes to customer expectations in the MMORPG market. I also don't think Mythic is a good example of responsible budgets and deadlines for the health of their products, although that perspective is interwoven with their arrival to their EA-Mythic roost.

I'm surprised to hear this from a fellow Peter Molyneux fan, the king of raised expectations. Developers do get excited and hype stuff that they want to get into the game, and much of that stuff doesn't make it in time, or doesn't work as planned. Passion for your game just comes out that way. This is especially true with the complexities involved in MMORPGs.

I think the implication that there's an intentional bait-and-switch is absurd. There's no sinister attempt to hijack expectations. Wishful thinking perhaps. From evidence Funcom seems almost too honest about their shortcomings.

I still see this as more of a Craft than purely a business. I'm more often disappointed when it's treated as the later.

Found a link to Blizzard's forums which led to this:

Sure to be removed quickly, because I don't recall a Blizzard employee that has ever referenced another MMORPG on their forums before. They corporately maintain some kind of fog-of-war over that stuff.

It's perfectly sane and reasonable of course, you can't expect people to play their own game much, if at all, but they've got an interest in these kind of games so there has to be an outlet in competing products. There's a bunch of other normal reasons, too many to list really.

Much of the fanboi trash talk seems so silly when (during the trade-shows especially) it's probably usual for the devs, CMs and employeees of these companies to sit down together over coffee to discuss what they have in common. Many of them have worked together in the past, the talent is related and interwoven this way. You can catch competing devs smiling at each other on discussion panels and they're honest smiles at that.

I've always liked Eyonix, even back when Warlocks saw no love and as the Warlock CM rep he was too busy enjoying his Mage. =P

I found the link for this on the AoC forums in a thread with the sensationalist topic "Even Blizzard employees play AOC", right underneath "AoC is the Ralph Nader of MMOs" and right above "Is Funcom Gutlessly Caving In To The Prudes..?" which just goes to prove that regardless of any differences in the games themselves, the general forums are exactly the same.

You hear this term a lot, I use it myself plenty, but what is Endgame exactly?

It comes from standard RPG gameplay, where the player "levels up" to progress. But an online world needs persistence, you can't trap players into leveling up forever. It has to plateau, it needs an End. At which point players begin a sort of new game, where some of the rules change and new activities are repeated or take a much longer length of time to complete.

Anyone who doesn't play these games could look at that description and shake their heads. We don't repeat the leveling grind into infinity, because the repetition without end would frustrate players-- So we give them an End, but then redirect them into other activities that repeat anyway. Or make them progress very slowly.

That about sum it up?

I think it's perfectly possible to have activities that aren't a grind, the plain and simple of it is: gameplay and content.

It's easier to repeat gameplay and stretch content than to provide more of it.

Clearly it's impossible to create infinite quality content, but I also think there's this situation in MMORPG development when they stop making a game for the players and start cashing in. Further development slows, they accept the monthly fees but the content trickles out, reducing cost and turning the whole thing into one big cash cow.

I'm generally not this sort of cynic when it comes to game developers, the ones I know are passionate about their games, but I can't explain the trend for MMORPGs any other way.

I think this market is wide open for the first game that keeps up a better pace with quality content and a greater variety of gameplay.

Following much criticism over their twice-weekly patching schedule and quality assurance issues, Funcom has moved to a weekly patching schedule and is now providing a test server hosting the next upcoming patch.

Details for downloading and installing the Testlive client are listed in this AoC Forums thread. An existing and current Age of Conan account is required.

Hopefully this helps them hit that threshold where a significant amount of bugs get squashed and the new content begins to outweigh the issues.

I've also noticed that today's patch contains mostly bugfixes.

**Post & comments deleted because fanboi ire is pointless over a game I won't be playing anyway**

In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.