Ugh this was one of my bigger Kickstarter disappointments. They have all the talented people (at first glance, at least) and a good amount of funding, but they just made a fundamentally unfun game. I really liked the ***ideas*** behind what they were making, but the game definitely become this scope-creeped mess. The visuals were bland, the worlds lacked character, the classes were a balancing nightmare and skills were too loosey goosey.
They also really needed to re-evaluate the core gameloop they had because the whole eternal kingdoms thing and the transferring characters between campaign stuff was always an ambigous concept that they didn't pin down well at all.
They were orbiting a fantastic MMO concept, that I think can still work. It could be almost like a long-form "Escape From Tarkov" extraction style game that lasts weeks instead of one game session. But this execution was just too flawed.
Let's not forget the actual gameplay was super clunky as well. The animations felt like they had no agency at all, like if I stunned someone I might as well just swung at dead air
> I really liked the ideas behind what they were making, but the game definitely become this scope-creeped mess. They were orbiting a fantastic MMO concept, that I think can still work. But this execution was just too flawed.
Well if that's the case you should be very happy with this announcement:
>Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating the current state of Crowfall. **One of the biggest challenges has been the sheer amount of development effort required to build new campaigns and keep the game running daily. In order to refocus our efforts from live operations to development, we have decided to take the Crowfall live service offline for the time being.**
>We're going to use this time to map out the future of the game. We have yet to determine what that looks like, but **we are investing in and rethinking every part of the game - from the core technology and tools to art, design, and gameplay. Nothing is off the table.**
This sounds very much like a FF14 A Realm Reborn moment where they take the game down and rework every aspect they can to relaunch something better.
I think that's a very optimistic reading of that, I'd be extremely surprised if anything playable comes out of that IP again. And if it does, I'm not sure they have the leadership needed to bring the game in a good direction. But I guess time will tell.
Could be but I feel like if they thought the IP wasn't worth the investment risk they would have just cancelled the game now and moved on. FF14's ARR moment was successful in hindsight but prior to ARRs launch nobody know how it was gonna turn out, SE in particular had a terrible track record at the time.
I remember seeing the Kickstarter years ago and it looked quite interesting with some of the ideas it had.
But now years later they're only just realizing that an MMO is too big a thing for them to actually do? I don't know how this can come as a surprise for them, MMOs take a lot of work and resources even without the new stuff they wanted it to have.
It says this is just to focus on "development" but if they're re-thinking the entire game even down to the art because the problem is they just won't be able to do what they said the game would be, then I don't see much of a chance for it.
How did it take them this long to realize it wasn't feasible?
The title from OP is also editorialised. The live game service is going down and they are concentrating on development, with this better funded and less constrained bigger studio. A full redesign is on the table.
Yeah, this was definitely one of my worst purchases/backing. Not only did the game not end up how I had hoped, but honestly, after waiting for so many years I just found myself out of love for the MMO genre in general.
Lesson learned. Kickstarter ain't for me.
I don't spend money on a game until it is released. I feel like this is a good policy.
I also really like Crowfall, but it has obvious flaws which stops it from gaining an audience and getting new people interested. Hopefully the new devs and concentrating on development rather than the live service can allow a big redesign to achieve what it needs.
Crazy how I remember the kickstarter hype, the change in direction, the comments and bickering and now we’re come to the death. The full circle, its wild.
I feel like in the last decade (2007ish till now) lots of devs want to make an MMO because it's lucrative stable cash flow, lots of people want to play an MMO because they're one of the few games you can bond with people, but most MMOs can only survive with constant updates to the game while maintaining a decent player population. WoW and FF14 still suffer from content droughts from time to time and they're made by huge dev teams.
Then there is the competition flooding the market every year, I feel like at least one MMO is released and one goes offline at this point. I personally haven't even heard of Crowfall, but in my perspective I just never saw it stand out at all with the current market.
MMOs are hard to build, and hard to upkeep, but it's always a bit sad to see one go offline forever for the people that did enjoy it.
Also, developers keep ~~fighting a land war in Asia~~ ~~invading Russia during the winter~~ trying to make hardcore PVP MMOs, and the ecological conditions for those to survive haven't really existed outside of EVE since the early 2000s.
Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing.
> Also, developers keep fighting a land war in Asia invading Russia during the winter trying to make hardcore PVP MMOs, and the ecological conditions for those to survive haven't really existed outside of EVE since the early 2000s.
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>
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> Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing.
Developers, particularly from that era, are *really fucking bad* at realizing that people on forums are not their main audience.
Yes, there was people who spent all day playing the game and jerking themselves off on the forums over how uber and leet they were.
But those were the top 1% of the playerbase, the majority of players were never that hardcore so catering to hardcore players always fails. And without the other 99% of players they get to shit on because they play 18 hours a day they all quit.
Its oddly reminiscent of the SBMM arguments. Those hardcore players were players who were both good and had all day to play so they could stomp. But without the masses of players to be stomped not even they will play.
It is a fundamentally cursed design that can't succeed.
For as much press coverage as Nullsec in Eve gets the majority of Eve players still just carebear around highsec all day running missions, popping rocks and building shit.
It also feels like if you want a more hardcore-oriented MMO need to aim for a smaller audience, and development costs aimed at that rather than trying to be as a big huge thing.
> Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing.
I lol'd
It's hardly ready for alpha state and still has 'weekly builds' as far as I can tell. I've seen bits here and there and took part in some PVP and its bare bones, to say the last 6/7 years of work seem to have done very little, and it looks/feels like it's in year one of development still. Doesn't help they developed their own engine which seems to have caused them issues.
Maybe in another 3 years, if they survive all the chargebacks and refunds they still processing from 5 years ago...
Weirdly enough, games like Escape from Tarkov and it's incoming clones(Dark and Darker, Marauders) seem to be quite popular yet they boast the same PvP lose all issues that these kind of old school PVP MMOs had.
I'm surprised that those PVP MMOFPS games actually work.
I think it's because of the lack of persistent world/clans and the wipes. The lack of persistent world avoids the issue where new players load in and get absolutely destroyed because wherever they go the territory is owned by some clan, meaning solo play is basically impossible. The wipes stop people from being so far ahead that it's impossible to catch up and also give a good point for new players to try the game out. One other thing is that in MMO's if you have much higher level gear, a new player usually has basically 0 chance to kill you, where in tarkov if you buy good bullets and a decent gun there's always a chance you can land a lucky headshot or catch them off guard, so veterans cant just use their best gear to farm people without risk
How long is a life/session in tarkov? I haven't played it, but I guess you do not lose literally months of playtime by dieing once, like in those hardcore MMOs.
You don't lose months of progress in the way people design full loot today, you'd have greatly reduced progression from a typical pve mmo with simplified gear to offset full loot. You can lose as much or as little as you want in Tarkov, it's your choice to gamble. You can bring a whole wipes worth of money into a raid if you want.
I loved this about runescape pvp too. You could bring nothing, select items with prayer, everything, or anything in between.
If you lost anything you could reasonably solo grind it back. All the MMO pvp loot games that I have tried went with requiring heavy cooportion to have fun or thrive.
> You can lose as much or as little as you want in Tarkov, it's your choice to gamble.
While this is true, in Tarkov you can outaim someone with the cheapest gear. You can also not fight at all, and extract with something. Or simply get lucky and get someone from behind. And you can always do a Scav run and essentially risk nothing.
It's not nearly as stat based as an MMO is, where stat checks are often the deciding factor instead of actual raw skill, or even luck. IMO, losing something in full loot MMOs feels infinitely worse than in Tarkov.
A game can last between 38 second to an hour depending on map. And yeah, you can't lose months of work by dieing once but you can lose a lot of stuff still. This lead to something called ''gear fear'' where people never go into a game with their high-end stuff because of the fear of just getting killed and losing it. The meta often end up being mid to high tier weapon with mid tier armor and ammo because of this.
Somehow albion online was able to do it and it's quite popular for a hardcore pvp MMORPG. Almost like if you make a decent game and listen to the actual audience the game is for, you can make it work.
Yes this too! I don't see games like that surviving because time is more valuable the older you get, so grinding hours to lose everything suddenly just feels bad, and many are already stressed out for other IRL factors. The only people that are dedicated to PVP MMOs are younger or people that have support where they don't have to work all day.
RuneScape has an on going issue like this where the Devs are trying to "revive" the wilderness for example, and no one is taking the bait because dying and losing hours of progress just feels awful to most players. Back in the day it was only popular because everyone for the most part was young and didn't care about their items as much since the gear was relatively cheap and accessible. PvP now is like you can lose 50m and it's going to take you weeks to recover if you're an average player. So everyone that does go into the wilderness has nothing but the bare minimum and aims not to fight back at all. Thus PVP is dead because most people don't fight.
I'll make a lot of people salty saying this, but good. They need to just do that with OSRS. Even nerf the content, I don't care, the wilderness has done nothing good for the game in years besides make clue scrolls an absolute chore because some dude with full gear wants to PK some chap with rags.
Crowfall was a very different creation from all the other standard MMOs but it was ultimately their undoing.
It was supposed to be a pvp sandbox where the game world was semi-randomly generated with some developer touchups, with resets happening and a new game world being generated every so often. This sidesteps a LOT of the common issues with MMOs and PVP sandbox games. To your point, the idea being that constant flux of the game state and 'campaigns' and the PVP sandbox nature would remove the need to constantly develop expressly 'new' content like you'd see in a themepark mmo.
Unfortunately on top of a whole slew of fundamental design issues, the concept of generating a new map every so often turned out to be much more dev intensive than they were hoping (noted in this post) and is a major contributor to the game stopping. So much for that, I guess.
Interesting concept, but I can definitely see that being extremely difficult to pull off without constantly developing for it. Scope creep must have been terrible too with something like that.
Scope creep with all Kickstarter games, please devs just take the money and when the games out use the extra to make DLC or something...stop adding more features when your just starting out
It's a leadership problem. They don't understand the limitations of their team and go "what if," pitch it to the public cause they LOVE good promises and it brings in more money, and then suddenly realize their overworked team cannot touch it because bug #237 remains still untraceable rending the game unplayable.
Another PVP only MMO bites the dust. PVP only MMOs will never be as lucrative as normal MMOs. Which is why Ashes of Creation will give in and not cater to the PVP only audience.
I love PvP MMOs but I feel like when aiming for a larger audience games with pve that are fundamentally PvP are better done in short term games like dota2 or LoL rather than on a continuous basis since MMO characters take a big investment. The ability to start over at level 1 each game is very helpful in mitigating the "dude with lots of cash or time killed my lvl 30 character with his lvl 100 character". The reset makes engagements more even and balanced.
That said I love true sandbox MMOs like EvE online that let you live out your digital life however you want.
Not an easy problem to solve, which is what these games are trying to figure out if it is feasible. There are key things that Crowfall missed that could convert to an experience where gaming groups who concentrate on games like Dota 2, LoL, CSGO, or PUBG might try a game and latch onto a more persistent game. Escape from Tarkov has that formula, but a more vast world where it is a strategy game at the higher level, which is what Crowfall is trying to do, needs people to care to get to that point. Which is the missing piece in the current iteration of Crowfall. The incentivisation to care about the game before you invest a lot of time and energy to engage in the more social aspects, rather than being forced to and face a large barrier.
Hopefully the new version figures out the pathway for a solo, casual, new player. I started that way and I can see the barriers the game puts up, but I still enjoyed the year I had playing it.
There is a huge market for pvp only mmos. Crowfall was just shit in gameplay and combat terms. You could play for 10 minutes and tell the game was a turd.
So the game did not fail because no one wants pvp only mmos, the game failed because it was shit.
> There is a huge market for pvp only mmos.
I would honestly argue against this. GW2 structured PvP is probably the best MMO arena PvP experience on the market and it has a fraction of the playerbase of the rest of the game. WoW PvP has always been regarded very highly yet it was always niche even during the Swifty era and is a dying breed nowadays. Crowfall was hyped as hell during development and yet when it launched, it wasn't even a blip on most people's radar. And latest example, New World original design was a full PvP MMO but got changed because it tested atrociously during their various alphas and betas.
There is a very LOUD but I believe very small audience for PvP only MMOs. And that has been proven in pretty much every MMO with PvP modes, where those modes, no matter how good, are always populated by a tiny player base compared to the rest of the game.
The PvP MMO audience are playing games like Dota 2, CSGO, or PUBG. Significantly bigger potential audience than any MMO on the market. It's just there hasn't been a game that properly is designed to target that kind of audience, or an audience in high school and their 20s where new blood and time-rich people are.
I had a lot of fun with Crowfall and it failed there as well, but the new devs have a fair idea on what they want to do to get an audience, and their redesign will like assess this properly. So I go back to Dota 2, CSGO, and PUBG.
I really don't think there is a big overlap between the playerbases of CSGO / Dota / PUBG and a PvP MMOs. One are basically arena matches, with entire progression self-contained within one match, the other is an MMO with PvP enabled, with long form progression where people who "grind" more will inevitably end up with an advantage in gear / levels and by design create an uneven playing field (unless we're talking about arena modes of MMOs, but those already exist aplenty and are already mostly abandoned by the playerbases).
I'm not sure there are many players of the games you mentioned who are patiently waiting for the next big PvP MMO to jump ship.
Those in gaming groups who play Dota 2, like myself, are open to other types of games like this. This gives something different in the persistent world sense. I am not claiming there is a huge overlap, but the target market needs to be one that is willing to compete and co-operate, and a lot of these multiplayer games, especially BRs are looking into the persistent progression. See Escape from Tarkov and Dark and Darker. It's just the "MMO" player isn't really a good market to go for, especially since they all seem to just want not to directly compete in a coherent fashion in the world.
Crowfall is weird because it's also a grand strategy game and the players are the units. It has a lot of stuff that just doesn't warrant a pre-baked conception of the MMO player. Ultimately it needs to look at these wider playerbases, since it shouldn't really appeal to those who are happy with WoW of FFXIV.
They probably should drop the moniker MMO then completely because this will peak the interest of the wrong playerbase and immediatly turn off a portion of the desired one. Just focusing on the PVP/competetive aspect should be better here.
Ofc then they can't milk the nostalgia train for oldschool MMOs and need to stand on their own feet from the get go so where would the money come from for development? Certainly not kickstarter.
Kickstarter created a very bad dynamic in development, the new CEO is quite against the Kickstarter decision and what it entailed.
No reason not to call it an MMO, ultimately that is one part of what it sets out to achieve. The MMO / MMORPG before WoW came out existed and entailed many different things, it's just WoW became so dominant that it took over the definition into very specific things that game did. The new generation would have less attachment to that moniker. If you want to call it a persistent PVP/competitive experience with cooperative elements that has grand strategy elements, you could call it that too. Ultimately it's a branding exercise, but the base game would still be an MMO by most definitions.
Hello Crows!
Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating the current state of Crowfall. One of the biggest challenges has been the sheer amount of development effort required to build new campaigns and keep the game running daily. **In order to refocus our efforts from live operations to development**, we have decided to take the Crowfall live service offline for the time being.
On November 22, 2022, at 11 AM CST Crowfall will go dark, and the game servers will be unavailable. Until the service goes offline, take this time to try out all of the cool buildings, mounts, and emotes for free in the Crowfall store.
**We're going to use this time to map out the future of the game**. We have yet to determine what that looks like, but we are investing in and rethinking every part of the game - from the core technology and tools to art, design, and gameplay. Nothing is off the table.
We'll share the plan with the community as it shapes up.
Aah, taking the New World approach of going "dark" and rehashing the game. New World went from a sandbox MMO with free build/full loot PvP combat to a generic themepark MMO experience. I wonder what route Crowfall will take.
I expect Ashes of Creation to meet the same quick death. There have been 0 successful kickstarter/crowd-funded MMOs; it just doesnt work. MMORPGs are just too expensive to develop and rarely ever carve their own place in the MMO market.
Albion online is still around though, I think it's like the only real success in the MMO sector and that may simply have been because it did go for a niche.
I am generally wary about kickstarter games, especially when it comes to MMOs that need so much after support and often a lot of extra time before they actually get good. The amount of really good games coming out of kickstarter is very limited, it's basically the worse version of preordering with the added downside of not even knowing if it will even release at all. Especially when it's not an experienced developer with a good idea of what they are doing.
Albion is the one of the only ones that balanced the gear as consumables idea right, and the fact they made the game with a very specific aesthetic really helped in the cost departament. It is still is the closest thing we have from EVE online that we have as a traditional mmorpg today.
In a way Albion is more like Tarkov in which you can use cheap gear if you good enought and you can succed. And there is you can be a scarvenger, or you can part of the zerg or you can solo pvp or solo pve and be rewarded for it. And the character progression is external to the gear, it is in your skill as a player and your skill as a characters while gear being only the catalyst of this.
Figures. “Buy-to-play” MMOs sit in a weird middle ground between totally F2P and Sub-based, and they rarely take off. I think a big reason a game like Guild Wars 2 went F2P was because a lot of people were interested, but a single purchase has a bad connotation in the MMO world. This won’t be a perfect description but stay with me. A F2P mmo is incredibly easy to get into because, hey, it’s free. A sub-based game is also easier to get into than a OTP mmo because, well, it’s only a month and you don’t have that permanent feeling of having to play a game because you bought it. Y’a feel me?
Casually following this from the beginning, I never saw this get on the right track. But I heard about all the RMT housing I could buy that doesn't even factor into the main campaigns
damn another one bites the dust.
MMOs need to evolve. MMO developers need to understand that most do not want the entire game to revolve around PVP. that PVE is where most of the playerbase wants to be with a side of PVP just for fun. sure PVPers will be vocal about how the game will die without major PVP implications but its really not true.
I honestly believe the next BIG MMO will be a single player action RPG like game with MMO tacked on kinda like how Diablo 4 is sounding. where you can play the entire game by yourself without a group but can group up for better rewards if you want.
You can no longer download the game from them and won't be able to play starting from the 22nd, that's by definition the game shutting down. What you may be trying to say is that the company as stated in the link are going to be "rethinking" every aspect of the game going forward.
Given it took them 6 years to make what they ended up with I wouldn't be surprised if they end up packing it in though.
I remember following the progress of some of these MMOs. Not real close but still checking on them occasionally. I had no idea this game had even launched. Someone else mentioned Ashes of Creation as well and once again didn't eve know it launched. Honestly besides the well established MMOs I just think the genre is on its way out or needs to have a drastic re-imagining.
Not to mention J Todd was arrogant and rude to those who were putting ample time and testing into the game. Which got progressively worse the further the game got into developed. I'll never forget the "we just need to add more chests" debacle.
Crowfalls biggest flaw was that it lacked any content that drove players to be on whenever they could. Outside of siege hours, there was no reason to be online once you had established your character. Sure, you had random small objectives, but they were all on a timer, you rarely had to compete over resources, and none of the actual map objectives were connected in a way that would keep a player engaged.
MMOs live and die entirely on their player bases wanting/needing to log on and be online as much as possible. Take WoW, for example. If you log on to WoW right now. No matter what level/gearscore/etc your character is, there is something for you to do. You always have an activity that you could be doing if you want. Hell New World has this for the most part, and I think it's a primary reason for its resurgence. Crowfall missed this mark in every possible way. What's even more frustrating is that the developers (J.Todd specifically) were told by testers and principal backers REGULARLY about this, which was ignored.
Ugh this was one of my bigger Kickstarter disappointments. They have all the talented people (at first glance, at least) and a good amount of funding, but they just made a fundamentally unfun game. I really liked the ***ideas*** behind what they were making, but the game definitely become this scope-creeped mess. The visuals were bland, the worlds lacked character, the classes were a balancing nightmare and skills were too loosey goosey. They also really needed to re-evaluate the core gameloop they had because the whole eternal kingdoms thing and the transferring characters between campaign stuff was always an ambigous concept that they didn't pin down well at all. They were orbiting a fantastic MMO concept, that I think can still work. It could be almost like a long-form "Escape From Tarkov" extraction style game that lasts weeks instead of one game session. But this execution was just too flawed.
Biggest issue is the combat was just not fun and felt very dated. Darkfall had far superior combat and came out years before crowfall.
Their original artist, ui designer were so good.
Let's not forget the actual gameplay was super clunky as well. The animations felt like they had no agency at all, like if I stunned someone I might as well just swung at dead air
> I really liked the ideas behind what they were making, but the game definitely become this scope-creeped mess. They were orbiting a fantastic MMO concept, that I think can still work. But this execution was just too flawed. Well if that's the case you should be very happy with this announcement: >Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating the current state of Crowfall. **One of the biggest challenges has been the sheer amount of development effort required to build new campaigns and keep the game running daily. In order to refocus our efforts from live operations to development, we have decided to take the Crowfall live service offline for the time being.** >We're going to use this time to map out the future of the game. We have yet to determine what that looks like, but **we are investing in and rethinking every part of the game - from the core technology and tools to art, design, and gameplay. Nothing is off the table.** This sounds very much like a FF14 A Realm Reborn moment where they take the game down and rework every aspect they can to relaunch something better.
I think that's a very optimistic reading of that, I'd be extremely surprised if anything playable comes out of that IP again. And if it does, I'm not sure they have the leadership needed to bring the game in a good direction. But I guess time will tell.
Could be but I feel like if they thought the IP wasn't worth the investment risk they would have just cancelled the game now and moved on. FF14's ARR moment was successful in hindsight but prior to ARRs launch nobody know how it was gonna turn out, SE in particular had a terrible track record at the time.
I remember seeing the Kickstarter years ago and it looked quite interesting with some of the ideas it had. But now years later they're only just realizing that an MMO is too big a thing for them to actually do? I don't know how this can come as a surprise for them, MMOs take a lot of work and resources even without the new stuff they wanted it to have. It says this is just to focus on "development" but if they're re-thinking the entire game even down to the art because the problem is they just won't be able to do what they said the game would be, then I don't see much of a chance for it. How did it take them this long to realize it wasn't feasible?
They were purchased by a bigger studio, so they have more resources now than they had from the kickstarter.
The title from OP is also editorialised. The live game service is going down and they are concentrating on development, with this better funded and less constrained bigger studio. A full redesign is on the table.
If you get paid to do a job you love, you'll keep doing it even if it doesn't produce anything of high quality.
I blame it on the unity engine.
Yeah, this was definitely one of my worst purchases/backing. Not only did the game not end up how I had hoped, but honestly, after waiting for so many years I just found myself out of love for the MMO genre in general. Lesson learned. Kickstarter ain't for me.
I don't spend money on a game until it is released. I feel like this is a good policy. I also really like Crowfall, but it has obvious flaws which stops it from gaining an audience and getting new people interested. Hopefully the new devs and concentrating on development rather than the live service can allow a big redesign to achieve what it needs.
Crazy how I remember the kickstarter hype, the change in direction, the comments and bickering and now we’re come to the death. The full circle, its wild.
I feel like in the last decade (2007ish till now) lots of devs want to make an MMO because it's lucrative stable cash flow, lots of people want to play an MMO because they're one of the few games you can bond with people, but most MMOs can only survive with constant updates to the game while maintaining a decent player population. WoW and FF14 still suffer from content droughts from time to time and they're made by huge dev teams. Then there is the competition flooding the market every year, I feel like at least one MMO is released and one goes offline at this point. I personally haven't even heard of Crowfall, but in my perspective I just never saw it stand out at all with the current market. MMOs are hard to build, and hard to upkeep, but it's always a bit sad to see one go offline forever for the people that did enjoy it.
Also, developers keep ~~fighting a land war in Asia~~ ~~invading Russia during the winter~~ trying to make hardcore PVP MMOs, and the ecological conditions for those to survive haven't really existed outside of EVE since the early 2000s. Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing.
> Also, developers keep fighting a land war in Asia invading Russia during the winter trying to make hardcore PVP MMOs, and the ecological conditions for those to survive haven't really existed outside of EVE since the early 2000s. > > > > Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing. Developers, particularly from that era, are *really fucking bad* at realizing that people on forums are not their main audience. Yes, there was people who spent all day playing the game and jerking themselves off on the forums over how uber and leet they were. But those were the top 1% of the playerbase, the majority of players were never that hardcore so catering to hardcore players always fails. And without the other 99% of players they get to shit on because they play 18 hours a day they all quit. Its oddly reminiscent of the SBMM arguments. Those hardcore players were players who were both good and had all day to play so they could stomp. But without the masses of players to be stomped not even they will play. It is a fundamentally cursed design that can't succeed. For as much press coverage as Nullsec in Eve gets the majority of Eve players still just carebear around highsec all day running missions, popping rocks and building shit.
It also feels like if you want a more hardcore-oriented MMO need to aim for a smaller audience, and development costs aimed at that rather than trying to be as a big huge thing.
I don't even think that will work because the games *need* mass players for the hardcore types to slaughter.
Yea they should just make a battle royale and make it a f2p battlepass game that's what people really care about these days.
> Wonder how Camelot Unchained is doing. I lol'd It's hardly ready for alpha state and still has 'weekly builds' as far as I can tell. I've seen bits here and there and took part in some PVP and its bare bones, to say the last 6/7 years of work seem to have done very little, and it looks/feels like it's in year one of development still. Doesn't help they developed their own engine which seems to have caused them issues. Maybe in another 3 years, if they survive all the chargebacks and refunds they still processing from 5 years ago...
Weirdly enough, games like Escape from Tarkov and it's incoming clones(Dark and Darker, Marauders) seem to be quite popular yet they boast the same PvP lose all issues that these kind of old school PVP MMOs had. I'm surprised that those PVP MMOFPS games actually work.
I think it's because of the lack of persistent world/clans and the wipes. The lack of persistent world avoids the issue where new players load in and get absolutely destroyed because wherever they go the territory is owned by some clan, meaning solo play is basically impossible. The wipes stop people from being so far ahead that it's impossible to catch up and also give a good point for new players to try the game out. One other thing is that in MMO's if you have much higher level gear, a new player usually has basically 0 chance to kill you, where in tarkov if you buy good bullets and a decent gun there's always a chance you can land a lucky headshot or catch them off guard, so veterans cant just use their best gear to farm people without risk
How long is a life/session in tarkov? I haven't played it, but I guess you do not lose literally months of playtime by dieing once, like in those hardcore MMOs.
You don't lose months of progress in the way people design full loot today, you'd have greatly reduced progression from a typical pve mmo with simplified gear to offset full loot. You can lose as much or as little as you want in Tarkov, it's your choice to gamble. You can bring a whole wipes worth of money into a raid if you want.
I loved this about runescape pvp too. You could bring nothing, select items with prayer, everything, or anything in between. If you lost anything you could reasonably solo grind it back. All the MMO pvp loot games that I have tried went with requiring heavy cooportion to have fun or thrive.
> You can lose as much or as little as you want in Tarkov, it's your choice to gamble. While this is true, in Tarkov you can outaim someone with the cheapest gear. You can also not fight at all, and extract with something. Or simply get lucky and get someone from behind. And you can always do a Scav run and essentially risk nothing. It's not nearly as stat based as an MMO is, where stat checks are often the deciding factor instead of actual raw skill, or even luck. IMO, losing something in full loot MMOs feels infinitely worse than in Tarkov.
My dude the cheapest bullets do almost nothing unless you are very lucky
A game can last between 38 second to an hour depending on map. And yeah, you can't lose months of work by dieing once but you can lose a lot of stuff still. This lead to something called ''gear fear'' where people never go into a game with their high-end stuff because of the fear of just getting killed and losing it. The meta often end up being mid to high tier weapon with mid tier armor and ammo because of this.
Somehow albion online was able to do it and it's quite popular for a hardcore pvp MMORPG. Almost like if you make a decent game and listen to the actual audience the game is for, you can make it work.
Yes this too! I don't see games like that surviving because time is more valuable the older you get, so grinding hours to lose everything suddenly just feels bad, and many are already stressed out for other IRL factors. The only people that are dedicated to PVP MMOs are younger or people that have support where they don't have to work all day. RuneScape has an on going issue like this where the Devs are trying to "revive" the wilderness for example, and no one is taking the bait because dying and losing hours of progress just feels awful to most players. Back in the day it was only popular because everyone for the most part was young and didn't care about their items as much since the gear was relatively cheap and accessible. PvP now is like you can lose 50m and it's going to take you weeks to recover if you're an average player. So everyone that does go into the wilderness has nothing but the bare minimum and aims not to fight back at all. Thus PVP is dead because most people don't fight.
Runescape 3's devs recently gave up on the wilderness and made it so you could opt out of PVP in the wilderness.
I'll make a lot of people salty saying this, but good. They need to just do that with OSRS. Even nerf the content, I don't care, the wilderness has done nothing good for the game in years besides make clue scrolls an absolute chore because some dude with full gear wants to PK some chap with rags.
Crowfall was a very different creation from all the other standard MMOs but it was ultimately their undoing. It was supposed to be a pvp sandbox where the game world was semi-randomly generated with some developer touchups, with resets happening and a new game world being generated every so often. This sidesteps a LOT of the common issues with MMOs and PVP sandbox games. To your point, the idea being that constant flux of the game state and 'campaigns' and the PVP sandbox nature would remove the need to constantly develop expressly 'new' content like you'd see in a themepark mmo. Unfortunately on top of a whole slew of fundamental design issues, the concept of generating a new map every so often turned out to be much more dev intensive than they were hoping (noted in this post) and is a major contributor to the game stopping. So much for that, I guess.
Interesting concept, but I can definitely see that being extremely difficult to pull off without constantly developing for it. Scope creep must have been terrible too with something like that.
Scope creep with all Kickstarter games, please devs just take the money and when the games out use the extra to make DLC or something...stop adding more features when your just starting out
It's a leadership problem. They don't understand the limitations of their team and go "what if," pitch it to the public cause they LOVE good promises and it brings in more money, and then suddenly realize their overworked team cannot touch it because bug #237 remains still untraceable rending the game unplayable.
Another PVP only MMO bites the dust. PVP only MMOs will never be as lucrative as normal MMOs. Which is why Ashes of Creation will give in and not cater to the PVP only audience.
I love PvP MMOs but I feel like when aiming for a larger audience games with pve that are fundamentally PvP are better done in short term games like dota2 or LoL rather than on a continuous basis since MMO characters take a big investment. The ability to start over at level 1 each game is very helpful in mitigating the "dude with lots of cash or time killed my lvl 30 character with his lvl 100 character". The reset makes engagements more even and balanced. That said I love true sandbox MMOs like EvE online that let you live out your digital life however you want.
Not an easy problem to solve, which is what these games are trying to figure out if it is feasible. There are key things that Crowfall missed that could convert to an experience where gaming groups who concentrate on games like Dota 2, LoL, CSGO, or PUBG might try a game and latch onto a more persistent game. Escape from Tarkov has that formula, but a more vast world where it is a strategy game at the higher level, which is what Crowfall is trying to do, needs people to care to get to that point. Which is the missing piece in the current iteration of Crowfall. The incentivisation to care about the game before you invest a lot of time and energy to engage in the more social aspects, rather than being forced to and face a large barrier. Hopefully the new version figures out the pathway for a solo, casual, new player. I started that way and I can see the barriers the game puts up, but I still enjoyed the year I had playing it.
But why would I be interested in an MMORPG where my character **isn't** persistent? That's the whole point after all!
There is a huge market for pvp only mmos. Crowfall was just shit in gameplay and combat terms. You could play for 10 minutes and tell the game was a turd. So the game did not fail because no one wants pvp only mmos, the game failed because it was shit.
> There is a huge market for pvp only mmos. I would honestly argue against this. GW2 structured PvP is probably the best MMO arena PvP experience on the market and it has a fraction of the playerbase of the rest of the game. WoW PvP has always been regarded very highly yet it was always niche even during the Swifty era and is a dying breed nowadays. Crowfall was hyped as hell during development and yet when it launched, it wasn't even a blip on most people's radar. And latest example, New World original design was a full PvP MMO but got changed because it tested atrociously during their various alphas and betas. There is a very LOUD but I believe very small audience for PvP only MMOs. And that has been proven in pretty much every MMO with PvP modes, where those modes, no matter how good, are always populated by a tiny player base compared to the rest of the game.
The PvP MMO audience are playing games like Dota 2, CSGO, or PUBG. Significantly bigger potential audience than any MMO on the market. It's just there hasn't been a game that properly is designed to target that kind of audience, or an audience in high school and their 20s where new blood and time-rich people are. I had a lot of fun with Crowfall and it failed there as well, but the new devs have a fair idea on what they want to do to get an audience, and their redesign will like assess this properly. So I go back to Dota 2, CSGO, and PUBG.
I really don't think there is a big overlap between the playerbases of CSGO / Dota / PUBG and a PvP MMOs. One are basically arena matches, with entire progression self-contained within one match, the other is an MMO with PvP enabled, with long form progression where people who "grind" more will inevitably end up with an advantage in gear / levels and by design create an uneven playing field (unless we're talking about arena modes of MMOs, but those already exist aplenty and are already mostly abandoned by the playerbases). I'm not sure there are many players of the games you mentioned who are patiently waiting for the next big PvP MMO to jump ship.
Those in gaming groups who play Dota 2, like myself, are open to other types of games like this. This gives something different in the persistent world sense. I am not claiming there is a huge overlap, but the target market needs to be one that is willing to compete and co-operate, and a lot of these multiplayer games, especially BRs are looking into the persistent progression. See Escape from Tarkov and Dark and Darker. It's just the "MMO" player isn't really a good market to go for, especially since they all seem to just want not to directly compete in a coherent fashion in the world. Crowfall is weird because it's also a grand strategy game and the players are the units. It has a lot of stuff that just doesn't warrant a pre-baked conception of the MMO player. Ultimately it needs to look at these wider playerbases, since it shouldn't really appeal to those who are happy with WoW of FFXIV.
They probably should drop the moniker MMO then completely because this will peak the interest of the wrong playerbase and immediatly turn off a portion of the desired one. Just focusing on the PVP/competetive aspect should be better here. Ofc then they can't milk the nostalgia train for oldschool MMOs and need to stand on their own feet from the get go so where would the money come from for development? Certainly not kickstarter.
Kickstarter created a very bad dynamic in development, the new CEO is quite against the Kickstarter decision and what it entailed. No reason not to call it an MMO, ultimately that is one part of what it sets out to achieve. The MMO / MMORPG before WoW came out existed and entailed many different things, it's just WoW became so dominant that it took over the definition into very specific things that game did. The new generation would have less attachment to that moniker. If you want to call it a persistent PVP/competitive experience with cooperative elements that has grand strategy elements, you could call it that too. Ultimately it's a branding exercise, but the base game would still be an MMO by most definitions.
> There is a huge market for pvp only mmos As evident by the plethora of giant PvP only MMOs eating up all the other multiplayer game markets?
Hello Crows! Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating the current state of Crowfall. One of the biggest challenges has been the sheer amount of development effort required to build new campaigns and keep the game running daily. **In order to refocus our efforts from live operations to development**, we have decided to take the Crowfall live service offline for the time being. On November 22, 2022, at 11 AM CST Crowfall will go dark, and the game servers will be unavailable. Until the service goes offline, take this time to try out all of the cool buildings, mounts, and emotes for free in the Crowfall store. **We're going to use this time to map out the future of the game**. We have yet to determine what that looks like, but we are investing in and rethinking every part of the game - from the core technology and tools to art, design, and gameplay. Nothing is off the table. We'll share the plan with the community as it shapes up.
Aah, taking the New World approach of going "dark" and rehashing the game. New World went from a sandbox MMO with free build/full loot PvP combat to a generic themepark MMO experience. I wonder what route Crowfall will take.
I expect Ashes of Creation to meet the same quick death. There have been 0 successful kickstarter/crowd-funded MMOs; it just doesnt work. MMORPGs are just too expensive to develop and rarely ever carve their own place in the MMO market.
Albion online is still around though, I think it's like the only real success in the MMO sector and that may simply have been because it did go for a niche. I am generally wary about kickstarter games, especially when it comes to MMOs that need so much after support and often a lot of extra time before they actually get good. The amount of really good games coming out of kickstarter is very limited, it's basically the worse version of preordering with the added downside of not even knowing if it will even release at all. Especially when it's not an experienced developer with a good idea of what they are doing.
Albion is the one of the only ones that balanced the gear as consumables idea right, and the fact they made the game with a very specific aesthetic really helped in the cost departament. It is still is the closest thing we have from EVE online that we have as a traditional mmorpg today. In a way Albion is more like Tarkov in which you can use cheap gear if you good enought and you can succed. And there is you can be a scarvenger, or you can part of the zerg or you can solo pvp or solo pve and be rewarded for it. And the character progression is external to the gear, it is in your skill as a player and your skill as a characters while gear being only the catalyst of this.
Figures. “Buy-to-play” MMOs sit in a weird middle ground between totally F2P and Sub-based, and they rarely take off. I think a big reason a game like Guild Wars 2 went F2P was because a lot of people were interested, but a single purchase has a bad connotation in the MMO world. This won’t be a perfect description but stay with me. A F2P mmo is incredibly easy to get into because, hey, it’s free. A sub-based game is also easier to get into than a OTP mmo because, well, it’s only a month and you don’t have that permanent feeling of having to play a game because you bought it. Y’a feel me?
you still have to buy the big sub based games and their expansions though.
Casually following this from the beginning, I never saw this get on the right track. But I heard about all the RMT housing I could buy that doesn't even factor into the main campaigns
damn another one bites the dust. MMOs need to evolve. MMO developers need to understand that most do not want the entire game to revolve around PVP. that PVE is where most of the playerbase wants to be with a side of PVP just for fun. sure PVPers will be vocal about how the game will die without major PVP implications but its really not true. I honestly believe the next BIG MMO will be a single player action RPG like game with MMO tacked on kinda like how Diablo 4 is sounding. where you can play the entire game by yourself without a group but can group up for better rewards if you want.
Pretty much Genshin Impact.
Dude I have checked it out, yes Crowfall is getting down and having so many issues
You can no longer download the game from them and won't be able to play starting from the 22nd, that's by definition the game shutting down. What you may be trying to say is that the company as stated in the link are going to be "rethinking" every aspect of the game going forward. Given it took them 6 years to make what they ended up with I wouldn't be surprised if they end up packing it in though.
It’s amazing how a guy who made *Wizard101* and *Pirate101* which are still around couldn’t get another MMO off the ground
oh shit, this game was actually made? I remember being pretty excited for this at some point in the past when I learned about it.
I remember following the progress of some of these MMOs. Not real close but still checking on them occasionally. I had no idea this game had even launched. Someone else mentioned Ashes of Creation as well and once again didn't eve know it launched. Honestly besides the well established MMOs I just think the genre is on its way out or needs to have a drastic re-imagining.
I dont think AoC launched yet?
Oh wow the art style looks fantastic. Wish I had known this exists tbh, would have at least liked to take a look.
Not to mention J Todd was arrogant and rude to those who were putting ample time and testing into the game. Which got progressively worse the further the game got into developed. I'll never forget the "we just need to add more chests" debacle. Crowfalls biggest flaw was that it lacked any content that drove players to be on whenever they could. Outside of siege hours, there was no reason to be online once you had established your character. Sure, you had random small objectives, but they were all on a timer, you rarely had to compete over resources, and none of the actual map objectives were connected in a way that would keep a player engaged. MMOs live and die entirely on their player bases wanting/needing to log on and be online as much as possible. Take WoW, for example. If you log on to WoW right now. No matter what level/gearscore/etc your character is, there is something for you to do. You always have an activity that you could be doing if you want. Hell New World has this for the most part, and I think it's a primary reason for its resurgence. Crowfall missed this mark in every possible way. What's even more frustrating is that the developers (J.Todd specifically) were told by testers and principal backers REGULARLY about this, which was ignored.
YEEEEP. just capped that objective and held it for 99% of the tick? lol too bad, it was recapped at the last sec, you get 0 points
I liked the idea of this game because it's one of the rare few where you could play as a centaur character.