When I wrote my post yesterday I was expecting it to generate some attention but I wasn’t expecting that Tobold would pick it up and call me flat-out wrong. For those of you who are not blogging getting linked to on Tobold’s blog usually means a lot of traffic along with a healthy dose of trolls so it’s an experience I try to avoid. And for the record, I am not a fan of Tobold’s writing.
So a short recap for those of you who are joining us. I was saying yesterday that the current MMO market favors heavily fantasy themed MMOs based around WoW model (Rift and GW2 for example) and that by not supporting innovative games like The Secret World, we are sending the message to the industry that we as customers are not interested in innovation and want WoW clones.
Tobold said that I was wrong, that what happened with TSW was that is was a bad game and that it failed because it lacked in execution and that the message we are really sending is that we want well executed game.
Really? Players want well made games? Who would have thought? It’s like a revelation!
So now it’s my turn to tell Tobold that I think he missed the point of my post entirely which was that if you are a player wanting innovation in your games, you have to support games that do innovate even if they are not the best. You have to show the industry that if they innovate they will have support and get their money back.
I’m not debating the importance of a well executed game. Everyone knows that it’s important. It’s like saying that breathing air is important. I used TSW in my post as an example of a game who tried to innovate but it could have been another game. Again, the point is supporting innovation if that is something you actually care about.
I’ll conclude with a little exercise. You have a 100 millions dollar to invest in making a MMO. It was hard work to get that money together and if you fail, you will lose your job and you could even bankrupt the company you are working for, making a lot of other people lose their jobs. If you were to look at the current MMO market right now, what kind of game would you make? Would you look at WoW and GW2 and make a game similar to them where you have the best chance of making money?
Or would you take a chance with doing something innovative or sci-fi based despite the recent troubles of games like Swtor and TSW? Your name, career and other people jobs are riding on this. Think carefully.
“if you are a player wanting innovation in your games, you have to support games that do innovate”
I totally agree. Of course consumers can’t be expected to give money to an innovative game that they hate or whatever (which you’re not saying!), but in general where we put our money will influence the genre over the next 5 years so it’s nice if you can make it count.
At the end of the day, I’d rather play ‘mow the lawn’, or ‘clean the house’ than another broken game. The burdon of solid development is solely the responsibility of the developer.
Ah, you gotta love Trollbold. He seems to pick out the exact wrong point of almost any post.
Well, I am problably one of the trolls taht Tobold’s post brought here, but GW2 is not a WoW clone. It is fantasy setting, but a lot of MMO too are.
And problably Syncaine is right about what happened to TSW: they created a niched game and hoped sell it as mainstream.
[...] pay for games just to support their innovation? Lonomonkey over Screaming Monkey seems to think so. He claims that “if you are a player wanting innovation in your games, you have to [...]
You’re confusing genre with a model. Fantasy and sci-fi are genres, not models. The business model of WoW is a sub fee. TSW and SW share(d) that model. It’s not innovative, and excepting WoW’s slow decline, players are showing how they feel about it. The game play model of WoW is based on grind, gear treadmills, static content, instanced raiding, etc. GW2 shares neither the business nor gameplay model of WoW. When players say they want innovation, that doesn’t necessarily mean they want a different genre of game. It may be the business model or game play that turns them off, or both. Of all the complaints about TSW and SW, none of them related to their genre.
I can understand why you’d call for players to reward a company for innovating, but here’s my issue: sure I’d like to encourage other companies to follow some of the design/genre decisions that Funcom took but, equally, I don’t want to reward either Funcom or encourage others to implement several of the other decisions they made which I think were just as much of a step backwards in MMO design as their good decisions were a step forwards.
How do I handle that? Send them the money with a letter saying “this is for these bits but not the bits I really don’t like?” Send them as much money as I think the game is worth? Or give feedback in beta and when they sent around the “why didn’t you buy our game?” survey recently?
The thing is, Funcom proudly announced back in June that they had 1.3 million sign-ups for their beta which doesn’t suggest to me that there was a lack of interest in the setting or the innovations in classless, skill-based character progression. But it didn’t even manage to get 30% of those players to buy the game at launch and, unlike GW2, failed to generate subsquent good word of mouth.
Not only that, but they were asking nearly 50% more of a subscription fee in the UK than either WoW, SWTOR or others and if you’re going to ask that much then you’ve really, really got to deliver.
I’m with Aly and the DraconianOne here: if you want a different genre/ theme, then clarify that (I would also cite Eve OnLine as non Fantasy that’s doing rather well).
I’ve just started GW2 and it is highly innovative in the way it approaches the MMORPG system of playing (and also billing!), but it is still in the medieval fantasy genre. I would say that I’m not sure it will hold me as long as EQ/ Lotro/ Eve have done- the mechanics are almost too different (read grindless) but it is more approachable and more fun.
Part of the challenge is that medieval fantasy has traditionally allowed/ called for the holy trinity of Tank/ healer/ DPS and is easy to set up in the genre; in most other genres, this is harder to set up- principally because most other combat has far more range options imho. The holy trinity is one of the things that draws people into MMORPGs, one of my friends has already left GW2 because this mechanic is perceived to be missing (and probably is).
And to answer SM’s question of what MMORPG game I would get set up for the best return; I would propose to go for an ‘innovative-in-some-way’ fantasy (like GW2) or perhaps a sci-fi that’s non innovative, though I have no idea how to set that up with the holy trinity mechanic.
I came late to TSW, I really like the idea of the setting, but poor gameplay is unfortunately enough to put me off, my time is too limited to get through flawed execution in my funtime.