The first game was pretty good, but the developers decided to market it as a 'Diablo killer' (when it had no skill system and very little treasure hunting) and it predictably disappeared. The second one was just heinous and this appears to be more of the same.

If a game doesn't sell enough to be profitable then the developers made mistakes. The wrong budget, market saturation, wrong target audience, etc, but bad marketing still isn't the consumers fault. The major WoWclones were marketed relentlessly and were still disasters. People didn't want to play them, but the developers were too aroused by the thought of $100 million a month in subscriptions to care.

Profit obviously doesn't mean good or bad - No One Lives Forever is highly regarded and probably my favorite FPS, but it wasn't very successful financially. Call of Duty is awful, but it certainly is lucrative. I don't think NOLF would've become a huge franchise if marketed differently either. It was just a niche game that they spent a lot on. Lucky for me, unlucky for Monolith.

I took the opportunity to unload a barrage of questions, but try as I might, I couldn’t extract more details about what makes JAO an online game. “Much is yet to be determined,” Anthony explained.

Ha. I'm not sure whether that is reassuring or very worrying. Maybe they pitched it as an MMO to get funding but will only have some multiplay options? Or it really will be some horrid console shooter MMO permanently destroying the series? Please be the former!

It was fun to play once but lacked the endless replay value of the Diablo games. Hopefully multiplayer will change that - Diablo on a LAN is still some of best fun I've had with gaming.

Torchlight 2 absolutely, positively, must be released in a playable state before Diablo 3.

Jerykk wrote on Jul 7, 2011, 01:52:
Really wish they had just made this into a single-player RPG instead of an MMO.

Also agreed. Developers are desperately chasing after WoW income even when a MMORPG would be much cheaper to develop and more likely not to be an embarrassing flop.

PropheT wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 17:42:
It just plain would not work with most of these games, especially Rift where zone events wouldn't really work if there weren't zones in the first place.

Expanding the game world would also require having something for them to do in the expanded areas. It's not just a matter of space that warrants the limit of players per area.

And besides, I like leveling.

A game does not need multiple servers to have zones. My idea is for all zones & players to be on one server like EVE and Guild Wars.

Yes, the new areas would obviously have content.

Liking leveling means enjoying it when your numbers get bigger. This can be achieved with faction grinding, achievements, titles or anything that doesn't create a dysfunctional gameworld. There's no need for developers to keep creating vast MMO worlds where most of the zones will be ghost towns not long after launch.

A mod remaking Morrowind with modern graphics wouldn't be a bad thing, but I'd love to see Daggerfall redone. That game was never stable and looked appallingly dated many years ago.

Losses aren't caused by consumers. It's the result of producers making things that consumers don't want. For computer games, think WoWclones. I read that Bioware has allegedly spent $300 million on theirs. If it fails like all the others have, then it will be entirely their own fault.

Designing a MMO to use dozens of realms needs to stop. Instead they can abandon the archaic leveling concept and expand the game world horizontally as the population increases. It would also save developers from having the very embarrassing mass server merges a few months after launch.

Siward wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 10:30:

Zadig wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 06:05:
Lots of good stuff today. Alpha Protocol, Bully, and Trine were all fun. Fire and Sword is something I've been waiting for and Singularity looks really good and got positive comments earlier. I'd probably be interested in New Vegas if I had Fallout 3. Hopefully there'll be a $10 sale for the 'ultimate edition'.

Honestly, New Vegas has nothing to do with 3. I actually disliked Fallout 3, and loved New Vegas. It's a lot closer in tone to the older Interplay-released Fallout games than Fallout 3 was.

I just have some strange fascination with trying it first. Since I never finished Oblivion and Fallout 3 uses some of the same game mechanics, I'm worried I won't like it either. If there's no Fallout 3 sale, and New Vegas gets a repeat on the final day, maybe I'll pick it up.

Guild Wars was effectively a card game based around tactical PVP. There was no treasure hunting, basically no leveling, everyone is on one server in a fully instanced world where everything could be soloed. There were no other fantasy games like that, and it had sold over 6 million copies as of 2009. That's why it was successful (unlike Conan, Lotro, Warhammer, etc) but they're apparently changing all of that. I obviously see no reason for it and doubt it will be successful because there are so many games offering very similar things.

The killer issue is the greatly increased level cap. Spending tens of millions of dollars to design a beautiful world with ample quests & compelling lore when 90% of it will be useless to 90% of the players in a few months is an absolutely horrible idea. It's just an ancient MMO design flaw. Everquest did it, WoW copied it, and the clones have copied them. This leads to ghost towns and simplified gameplay for all the people who rushed to the 'good stuff'. Guild Wars and EVE were the only games I know of that avoided these problems and it looks like Arenanet did it by accident.

Slashman wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 11:12:
Dragon Age: Origins is actually a great game with meaningful choices and consequences and combat that doesn't require the use of an awesome button. The DLC and expansion seem not to be that great. I didn't buy any of them. But the base game is worth it IMO.

It's usually their writing that annoys me. The same characters, played by the same actors, in the same stories, again and again and again. I repeatedly heard this had 'old school' (i.e. hard) rpg combat, and choices are always nice, so I clicked the buy button and hope to finish downloading before 2013.

Lots of good stuff today. Alpha Protocol, Bully, and Trine were all fun. Fire and Sword is something I've been waiting for and Singularity looks really good and got positive comments earlier. I'd probably be interested in New Vegas if I had Fallout 3. Hopefully there'll be a $10 sale for the 'ultimate edition'.

Everything I've read about GW2 has been very worrying and this continues the trend.

"xp and loot sharing" Guild Wars had a nominal level cap that you'd hit in a few hours and most 'end game' equipment could be bought from vendors in town. This shouldn't even be mentioned unless they're changing that, which they clearly are.

"co-op" You don’t have to party with people but you’re still having a co-op experience with them, we feel that’s something that has been missing from most MMOs until now.

What on earth does this mean? No more instancing? You're forced to group once you leave town? GW was fine as it was. You could beat any campaign with bots or group with people you actually liked. No being forced to drag kids with fetal alcohol syndrome through a quest.

"leveling" So, to get from 30 to 31 is about an hour and a half, to get from 68 to 69 is about an hour and a half. We think that any longer and things start to feel a little ‘grindy’.

If these levels are trivial road blocks to keep people away from the 'good stuff' (which I bet is at level 85 like some other game!), then why even have them? Why waste thousands of developer hours designing areas and content for huge swathes of gameworld that will be obsolete and abandoned within a few months of launch? GW doesn't have ghost towns. Neither does EVE. It's because they weren't designed to be WoWclones. Unfortunately GW2 is.

Tropico 3, Torchlight, and Defense Grid are all very nice games for their genre.

Dragon Age Ultimate Edition is a 1 day sale for $10.20 that isn't visible on the front page. The Steam trailer does nothing for me and Shovelware isn't my favorite developer, but I'm still curious to see what all the fuss is about.

It isn't a generic fantasy MMO or 3rd person shooter with chest high walls and regenerating health. That unfortunately qualifies as innovative now. It isn't even a "cute platformer" which is what most successful indie games seem to be.

EA would've laughed them out of the office if someone tried pitching this to them, but it has sold a lot more copies than most (all? FIFA probably outsells it) of the garbage they release.

The gameplay has looked terrible in every single one of the trailers I've bothered to watch. No wonder it keeps getting pushed back.

For a game I have no interest in playing, I'm always happy to hear how incredibly well it is doing.

Partially because unique innovative games should be celebrated even if they aren't your cup of tea, but mainly due to the conniptions the success causes to Ubisoft/EA/Bioware as it destroys their latest 'aaa' shovelware.

What a disaster this game turned out to be. Tremendous amounts of time and money thrown away making another awful WoW-clone that was guaranteed to fail.

Those resources could've been spent refurbishing Anarchy Online, or releasing Secret World, or just throwing all the hardware, money, and developers into the ocean. It couldn't possibly have been a worse decision than Conan.

Steam already has competition that will never go away - Amazon. They've been mimicking most of the Steam sales but at an even lower price for a few months now. Accordingly, in the last 6 months I've spent more on Amazon game downloads than on Steam.

As for EA, they can't compete with Amazon either and are too thick to realize that having their products in more venues will lead to more sales.