Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
No, but see, that's the thing. The figures I've quoted are the company's net revenue- their profits after their expenses. Shanda pulled in $450 million after it gave eyeDentity money to build Dragon's Nest. Nexon pulls in over $1 billion after it pays for maintenance costs and such.
Bethesda, meanwhile, pulled in $600 million from Skyrim (and DLC, IIRC) sales after accounting for the costs of making Skyrim- not counting the costs of patching the game, paying developers, etc. Which represents a significant amount of money down the drain after the fact.
After accounting for everything, Bethesda has a bit more money behind it- except, wait, they have to keep making single-player TES games on top of the MMO, too, because they don't have any additional revenue to fall back on like Shanda and Nexon does. They have roughly the same amount of employees, except they're working on two games.
Essentially, Bethesda has no other people to pay money to other than ZeniMax, but it also has no other streams of revenue. They have money from Skyrim sales, plus I think they get a bit of money from Dishonored sales, and that's roughly it; those funds then have to go in to paying 180+ employees who are working on producing two full games, and they have no additional streams of revenue until one or the other is full. And, they have to leave enough money in liquidation to keep shareholders from getting too nervous and themselves from running to the edge of bankruptcy, so strike a whole bunch of that money out, too. Then they have to give money to ZeniMax Media, who owns them.
If Bethesda can manage to both afford megaservers on that budget and manage to make an action MMORPG run smoothly on them, then Dragon's Nest, with its equally large budget to pull from and significantly less polished game (judging by what we've seen; I am talking purely about aesthetics and game world size here at the moment, as there is no TES MMO demo so we can't test its polish against Dragon's Nests', but there are videos of it out so we can test its art style) should have been able to do the same. The fact that they didn't in favour of instancing everything within linear paths is a significant strike against the game, to me at least.
Ah. My goof.
Anyway, you're still treating Shanda and Nexon as though they're only spending or receiving money in relation to Dragon Nest, though. Both companies license more than just that game, as you yourself pointed out. If you're talking about the value of an individual game, $600 million might not seem much next to $1.45 billion, but the former's just the income based on one single-player game.
If Shanda, Nexon and Eyedentity want to pull a TES Online with Dragon Nest, then they'd have to leech resources from other projects -- and get all the regional publishers and licensers on board with whatever extra server resources they have to provide.
And what's more, this is presuming that larger environments with more players are inherently better. There's a thousand and one ways to design a game, and not all MMOs have to be the same -- in fact, it's better if they're not. Dragon Den is wearying me with its quest design, which is nothing special, but using more linear dungeons opens up different options and closes off others. If nothing else, it's easier to balance for linearity and helps the dev team control the parameters of different encounters. In this respect, Dragon Den certainly runs counter to typical MMO design, but it's a trade of compromises that alters the experience towards some tastes more than others.
Basically, I'm bothered by the implication that MMOs have to be designed with one particular goal in mind. They absolutely don't, and there are various ways to have large playerbases interact that fall outside the purview of typical MMO design. The Souls games and Dragon's Dogma are great examples; the former because of the isolating nature of the game with largely random interjections by other players, and the latter for sharing in-game information through an NPC medium. All three of these games involve thousands of players potentially interacting with one-another, but on a smaller scale, with less focus on simulating the life of a fantasy adventurer in relation to others and more on a singular, heavy task where the interjections of other players are welcome respite.
No, I'm not. I am looking at the money being used, and- well, okay. Let's look at this.
Basically, what this page talks about it how a megaserver works. It doesn't rely upon buying one prohibitively expensive server; rather, it's taking several smaller servers- such as the ones Dragon's Nest already has- and merging them together.
This results in something much similar to what's already happening- you have 'phases', and X amount of people are in Phase A at any one time (I think the quoted cap is 500 at the moment), but when the population of a server drops, the phases are then individually, invisibly merged, to up the population of the world. This reduces the strain on the server, and thus the lag, while still allowing for much larger worlds with consistently high population.
The reason I have been complaining about this is that the cost is really not prohibitive at all. In fact, it's simple enough that between the time that Bethesda announced that that is what they were doing and now, DC Universe Online (owned by Sony, which has a huge number of other projects, similar to Shanda/Nexon) have already announced their decision to make their servers into a megaserver.
And what's annoying me is that Dragon's Nest is doing exactly what several other MMO's have done before it and not significantly improving on the formula. The game has basically copied Vindictus, except without Vindictus' awesome thing whereby you can actually interact with the game environment.
It restricts itself to a bunch of linear dungeon designs... because. It's simpler for the dev team, I guess, but at the same time, it restricts the choices of the player more than is actually necessary for the game. Crowd control is a huge factor in the game- in fact, being overwhelmed by enemies due to poor level design and limited maneuvering space was one of the biggest complaints during the game's beta, and it wasn't significantly addressed at all.
Actually, I guess what is pissing me off is that this game basically sounds suckier in many ways than Bethesda's Elder Scrolls MMO, and that's a terrible thing, because the TES MMO has a high chance that it's going to suck ass.
I'm certainly enjoying Dragon Nest though.
You only have to wait for- wait, I actually misread the timestamps there, DC Universe Online has already switched to megaservers.
I'm not sure if it's honestly a simple process if only Sony has come to the same or a similar discovery. If anyone was going to get on this, you'd think that Blizzard might, given the incentive they have and the resources at their disposal. So there's two options here concerning the developers of the world's biggest MMO -- either they haven't worked it out, or they have and don't want to implement it. Unless I'm completely wrong and they're already on this megaserver thing. That said, I'm not sure how DCUO is doing or has been doing since the megaserver change, and how it works with TES Online remains to be seen.
Mind you, it's not that I doubt megaservers on a matter of principle, since this kind of game merger-departure looks like what the Souls games did on a much larger scale, so there's at least some proof of concept. At the same time, though, there's no significant body of evidence to draw performance data from (especially given the low population density of DCUO compared to many other MMOs). And given that Dragon Den began development in 2007, I can hardly blame it for keeping to a more traditional infrastructure. Although if megaservers did work and became the new standard, that would rock pretty hard.
But here's the same thing again; you use "linear" like a dirty word when it's just as useful a tool as a more open design. That simplicity for the dev team is certainly a point, but as I said, that also makes balance and encounter design easier. Plus, so far, I've never been overwhelmed by enemies. I'm level 10 at the moment, so not far in at all, I suppose, but mobility is fluid and it's not difficult to control combats with deliberate use of one's abilities while allowing the regular and secondary attacks to do the legwork.
The biggest strike against Dragon Den is that it's an MMO and, as such, is subject to a variety of game design and implementation standards that are far too broadly applied, or broadly accepted to be "common wisdom". In general, I think MMOs would be better served with less quests and more incentive for organic exploration and discovery. Collect five shards of wraithglass? Nah, fuck it -- but that crumbly old tower in the forest looks interesting, might go have a look at that.
I think a lot of RPG's have that problem, in general, Alex.
We are at the same level though
It's mostly the latter. It's good for games with a significant amount of instancing in them (games such as this one) or games with a low population count, such as DC Universe Online. TOR also considered going the megaserver route, but ended up just going with a server merge.
No; I'm treating it as a bad thing here.
Linearity has its place; most dungeons and raids in TOR and WoW are very linear, for example. This allows them places to have specific level and monster group designs, allowing them an unchanging set to work with.
However, it mixes these up; it has both linearity and open worlds.
The open worlds allow for two things in particular that I can think up at the moment; it allows for a coherent, organic world design, and it allows for exploration.
Those are only examples; large, open areas allow players additional options (which is nearly always a good thing), it affords developers extra space to work with when considering level designs, and so on, and so forth.
A game can work without that, and many games do, but Dragon's Nest does so badly, and that's why it annoys me. It uses one of the benefits (allowing for predefined monster creation, without considering environmental factors in many cases), and many of the downsides.
Fun story? Call of Duty is actually nearly as close to an MMO as Dragon's Nest is.
It's only the persistent hub that makes it technically an MMO, and if I recall correctly, Monster Hunter also actually has one of those in its town. So you could make a fair case for either Dragon's Nest not being an MMO or Monster Hunter being an MMO.
It doesn't. You have to join a town (or whatever grouping it uses) before you can see and interact with anybody, and each town only has 4 people in it.
Still, that's only a minor difference.
I think that's technically the same thing, although you could make a case that that stops it from being 'massive'.
I hate to pull out the subjectivity argument, but I'm not seeing how Dragon Nest does this badly. At least so far. You're using a lot of second-hand information, too, so I'm not sure whether you're arguing from specific information or general principle.
I personally didn't find either game to have very organic map design, or ones that rewarded a great deal of exploration. As long as things are locked by level and class, there's hard limitations of how organic an experience can be. Mind you, Dragon Den suffers from this as well. But at least I don't have to wait for my character to remember what they're doing before they attack an enemy, and I consider that to make all the difference. And the major difference here is that I feel that the game is reacting to me immediately, which makes it fun to play moment-to-moment.
I guess it would mess with the social structure of WoW, too, given all the player-imposed stuff in there as well. Still, I'm going to wait and see how this megaserver thing pans out before throwing in my lot for or against it.
Arguably, but I'm referring to design decisions to do with gear, statistical character development, skills and so on and so forth. All that MMO prefab-style stuff that's just kinda eh.
I got a fair bit further into the game than you have, so I'm not sure what you mean here. I got up to Level 16 as a Mage and Level 11 as an Archer over the course of two days. The game hadn't gripped me by then, so... fuck that. As I said when I originally responded.
I don't know which games you're talking about, but I'm guessing WoW and Runescape, as they're the examples I brought up about instancing before.
If so... WoW has a terrible map design, but Runescape's follows a very simple design decision; they created a world, then they created a sequence of events, then followed the changing world. The result is a world that flows very organically in terms of how it meshes with the game's lore and its surroundings; it just kind of sucks in the actual 'why the hell is there a desert right next to a flourishing trading castle outpost' way. It's an okay example of map design, although it's not brilliant. The game's very design also means that it's not locked by level or class; as long as you can survive the monsters around the area, either by toughing them out or running past, you can get to any area in the game that doesn't have a quest requirement.
Here's an instance of where I'm talking from secondhand information; Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a very great map design and exploration rewards.
Yeah, probably. Although not as much as it seems like it's going to mess with TESO's structure (apparently, the world's going to change depending on the player's actions, so two players standing right next to each other might see very different scenery), so I guess this one's kind of up in the air.
That stuff is more the 'RPG' in MMORPG than the 'MMO'. You have MMOFPS, for example, which don't follow that trend at all.
Never played Runescape; I was referring to TOR. Which had kind of nice-looking map design, but was a massive case of "go here, do this, come back" rather than an organic process of play.
It's a very MMO-unique set of RPG elements, though. Different RPGs use a bunch of different systems, but most (if not all) MMORPGs are using similar, perhaps occasionally identical systems, to resolve conflicts of all kinds. If I play Mount & Blade, Dark Souls, even games based on D&D, I get a much more freeform system within which to design my character both in terms of appearance and fine detail stats and so on. There's stuff I can do independent of class and gear that has a significant impact on how my character works.
MMOs do this one-size-fits-all approach with almost always a Diablo-style approach to gear. It's like all my least favourite elements of some RPGSs crammed into the same game, which is then copypasta'd a million times.
Oh. Yeah, TOR has fucking terrible level design like that. You won't hear me argue that.
I think this is another case where I'll use my secondhand knowledge to recommend Guild Wars 2, where gear is used to determine your skills rather than your stats.
Or the TES MMO, when it comes out, which restricts your gear options to one type of armour and weapon.
I think Alex and I have the similar main opinion: Your character, their weapon, the enemy, and the damage on both sides happen immediately (barring lag) and that is what makes all the difference.
It's hardly the only MMO to do that, Saturn.
It's not even the first of its kind to go there; Vindictus and Divine Souls got there first.
You say that like it's a measure of quality.
No, I say that the existence of those things does not indicate quality.
No, but I like Dragon Nest because it has it.
Dragon Den is free to play and on Steam. I might've tried those other ones, but I'm not sure if they're free to play and I doubt they are on Steam.
The fact that I haven't heard of them might be a bit telling.
Also yeah, not on Steam.
Divine Souls is not on Steam, but Vindictus is.
Okay, I know when to admit that Vindictus looks better than Dragon Den.
I'll give it a shot.
Agreed.
Although, I still don't play Vindictus. If anyone wants to play an MMO with me, Runescape's your best shot. Or TOR, if I can work up the motivation to put up with its damned combat, but Runescape's a better shot.
Vindictus has a giant polar bear boss. That's enough for me.
The first conversation I ever had with a good online friend was about Runescape.
He was being chased by a camel.
I was attacked by an evil chicken once.
One of the quests I did involved walking into a shack in the middle of a swamp with a staff cut from a specific tree.
Man, I actually loved that quest.
You have to go to the Dramen Tree and cut a staff off it (and kill a tree spirit while you're at it), then travel to a specific shack in the middle of a swamp. Then, you get teleported to the Faerie land.
Why? Because fuck you im a faerie, that's why.
Also, it seems like the person in charge of combat design in Vindictus really liked dual-wielding.
yeah
because dual wielding is awesome
eight times better than single wielding