SOE President: "Content-driven" MMOs have become unsustainable

[Xenich]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

SoE has no interest in gameplay, as has been shown by what they did with it. They are interested in creating time sinks, currency / token farming, and gear treadmills; all of which can be shortened with micro-transactions.

thats still 100% more than the competition offers, which is probably because the competition doesn't exist.

Which is sad. WoW and EQ 2, while missing the mark in many ways were a great experiment in response to the problems that existed with EQ. I had sincerely hoped at the time that this would be a competition to bring new ideas and hone old ones to a polish. Unfortunately WoWs mainstream success brought about the demise of the industry as all games became nothing more than an attempt to replicate WoWs model to an exactness. So much for innovation.

 

[Ranselknulf]

https://www.soe.com/girl

Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) is now accepting applications and submissions for its 2014 Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Game Design Competition. Through the G.I.R.L. scholarship program, SOE will award one winner with a $10,000 scholarship to be applied towards tuition, room and board, and other educational expenses at the winner’s college or university. In addition to the cash prize, the winner will also be given the opportunity to be hired as a paid intern for up to 10 weeks at SOE’s headquarters in San Diego for hands-on experience working on award-winning franchises, including PlanetSide® and EverQuest®.

Now in its seventh year, the scholarship has played a major role with helping aspiring game developers gain knowledge and skills in the video game design field, while providing them with valuable assistance for educational expenses. Past winners have gone on to make their own impact across the gaming and art industries.

“The G.I.R.L. Scholarship aims to be the first step towards empowering bright careers for young women in the video game industry,” said Laura Naviaux, Senior Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing, Sony Online Entertainment. “By helping to create more opportunities for women in game design, we are helping to shepherd fresh perspectives and new ideas into our industry.”

Submissions for the 2014 G.I.R.L. Game Design Competition will close on March 19, 2014. To apply, applicants must register with Scholarship America®, SOE's scholarship administrator, and submit their application for evaluation, as directed here: https://www.scholarsapply.org/gamersinreallife.

For more information, follow G.I.R.L. on Twitter, go to https://twitter.com/SOE_GIRL or to join G.I.R.L. on Facebook, go to http://tinyurl.com/SOE-GIRL.

I wonder if they accept self-identifying females that just haven't undergone the operation yet.

 

[Xenich]

https://www.soe.com/girl

Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) is now accepting applications and submissions for its 2014 Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Game Design Competition. Through the G.I.R.L. scholarship program, SOE will award one winner with a $10,000 scholarship to be applied towards tuition, room and board, and other educational expenses at the winner’s college or university. In addition to the cash prize, the winner will also be given the opportunity to be hired as a paid intern for up to 10 weeks at SOE’s headquarters in San Diego for hands-on experience working on award-winning franchises, including PlanetSide® and EverQuest®.

Now in its seventh year, the scholarship has played a major role with helping aspiring game developers gain knowledge and skills in the video game design field, while providing them with valuable assistance for educational expenses. Past winners have gone on to make their own impact across the gaming and art industries.

“The G.I.R.L. Scholarship aims to be the first step towards empowering bright careers for young women in the video game industry,” said Laura Naviaux, Senior Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing, Sony Online Entertainment. “By helping to create more opportunities for women in game design, we are helping to shepherd fresh perspectives and new ideas into our industry.”

Submissions for the 2014 G.I.R.L. Game Design Competition will close on March 19, 2014. To apply, applicants must register with Scholarship America®, SOE's scholarship administrator, and submit their application for evaluation, as directed here: https://www.scholarsapply.org/gamersinreallife.

For more information, follow G.I.R.L. on Twitter, go to https://twitter.com/SOE_GIRL or to join G.I.R.L. on Facebook, go to http://tinyurl.com/SOE-GIRL.

I wonder if they accept self-identifying females that just haven't undergone the operation yet.

Yeah... umm... seriously... What the fuck?

 

[set]

That is a parody right?

Right?

RIGHT?!

 

[Gregz]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

Bullshit.

Verant made them. SOE just bought them and subsequently drove them into the ground.

http://www.ign.com/companies/verant-interactive

You can give SOE credit for SWG if you want though.

 

[set]

Even if SOE were responsible for "the best sandbox MMOs", this is the year 2014, where Blizzard Entertainment and Square Enix haven't made a respectable game in almost over a decade now.

The only hope of getting a good MMORPG at this point is via indies. Eventually, I think we'll see a game engine (better than Hero lol) which can support indie MMORPG development. Certainly, I've played some amazing MUDs, so there exists creative talent for this sort of thing. It's just that MMOs are a big networking nightmare... but eventually the development burden will be smaller. If EVE can survive on 400k subs, five to ten years from now, we might see a few indie mmos making a profit at 50k-200k total users.

 

[Gregz]

The only hope of getting a good MMORPG at this point is via indies....It's just that MMOs are a big networking nightmare...

Yeah, there's just no structural support for something like that yet, large-scale bandwidth and low ping are too pricey for indie shops.

 

[set]

Well, Path of Exile "made it" though they're not technically an MMO, because instances can't hold more than six players at once and the game is entirely instanced.

And MUDs do fine with several hundred players concurrently playing at once on the same realm.

But yeah, if you're an independent developer, getting a base engine that can handle networking and graphics... that's tough. And of course, the cost of world building is frankly enormous. It's going to be a little while until an MMO project isn't such a huge financial investment.

 

[Froglok]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

LOL

 

[Xor]

And MUDs do fine with several hundred players concurrently playing at once on the same realm.

MUDs are very simple structure-wise - there are only a handful of commands a player can give at any given time, and the client only needs to communicate with the server whenever a command is entered or whenever something happens that the client needs to be made aware of. On the other hand, a modern MMO client is communicating with the server constantly so it can be up to date on the location of other players, NPCs, and enemies along with what they're doing, any AOE spell effects, etc. Networking code like that is a bitch to do even with only a handful of clients, and when the game needs to support 50 to 100 or possibly even more clients in any given location simultaneously, and thousands across the entire shard, it becomes a nightmare.

I'd love to see a decent MMO engine available for cheap so we might start to see some decent MMOs, but honestly the programming side of it is such a large barrier that I don't think it's very likely.

 

[Xenich]

I'd love to see a decent MMO engine available for cheap so we might start to see some decent MMOs, but honestly the programming side of it is such a large barrier that I don't think it's very likely.

It can be done, but it won't. There has to be a demand and honestly, there is no demand because idiots keep paying monthly fees or tons of money through micro transactions to keep them focused on this limited avenue.

 

[No Great Name]

It's interesting to note that most of the modern, popular MMOs are derived from WoW which in turn was derived from Everquest. How many modern, popular MMOs have been inspired by Ultima Online?

 

[zeitgeist]

This is the guy who killed Star Wars Galaxies. Just saying.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Central MMORPG developer doesn't remember Ultima Online. News at 6pm.

Actually I think this is so obviously correct in the long term that my only puzzelement is that it's taken so long for major players to say it. I think a lot of the support for the EQ model (which includes WoW) comes from the idea that most of the playerbase is there for the end-game content-driven model. Whilst it's true that these games massively outsold their sandbox predecessors, they also function as something of a gaming feudalism, where an elite aristocracy (based on time invested and gold purchased, not skill) is the focus of the game's content, and the majority of players play the raiding game only because there's nothing else to do, and they feel like they've invested too much to 'give their characters up' at the end-game. This leads to absurdities such as actively punishing players for using the environment or finding ways of doing things other than that specifically intended by the developers, going directly contrary to the aims of environmental interaction and emergent gameplay that games are usually judged by.

WoW has often struggled with how to provide a raid game that matches the expectations of gamers who grew to love the game during its initial levelling process - a very different experience, where PvP is organic and alliances are formed on the fly to clear opposition out of a zone so you can do the quests, and individual players get to feel like they're accomplishing something outside of being a mook working for a handful of guild leaders who get to play the 'real game' (very few players ever get to actively work out tactics for raid encounters or PvP maps - no matter how complex or sophisticated the tactics are, the end result for all but a handful of players is 'do what the raid leader tells you, to the extent where most classes won't even look at their screen because the game is, in practice, about following the chat instructions to press the keys when you're told to'). A lot of the 'rank and file' mmorpg players would leap at the chance to play a mmorpg where they can interact with the world and the other players as free agents instead of raid-mooks...IF such games presented a sufficiently easy learning curve and (most importantly) were free from the game-breaking exploits and anarchy that killed the early generation of sandbox mmorpgs, and simultaneously avoided the Eve model of being equally restrictive except with the impositions made by other players instead of the content.

The learning curve doesn't require idiocy - there's nothing innately simpler about the EQ model, but WoW did a superb job of easing new players into the EQ model's core mechanics, to the point where the player base is so familiar with these mechanics that they can easily pick up and play new games in the same model. A return to sandbox mmorpgs would require a similarly easy introduction in its early interations, until the player-base has recovered basic competency with the central mechanics.

The 2nd part is a lot harder. No game has yet been able to balance the freedom required for a genuine sandbox to work, with enough restriction to avoid the game suffering the fate of Ultima Online and becoming simply too anarchic for new players to do anything but get mugged. But it shouldn't be an 'in principle' problem - MUDs had the same challenge, and it's the kind of thing which gets better with further iterations on the game-style. It's a balance issue - you can always place uber-powerful guards somewhere, and update them to maintain their relative power to the players, but you don't want total safety - you want there to be enough safety that new players can enjoy the game and you don't have to constantly look over your shoulder in your faction's home zones, but that well-organised incursions by bandits, usurpers and other factions are possible; just sufficiently difficult and costly to be occasional events rather than a source of constant anarchy. Tough balancing act, but it's the kind of challenge that game developers have repeatedly faced and overcome in numerous genres.

The 3rd part - avoiding the Eve scenario, where you're just trading content restrictions for equally restricting factors imposed by an unshiftable power structure within the playerbase. A large element of this is ensuring that there are plenty of things to do that aren't routed through the guild system. I think the massive focus on guilds in mmorpgs has been a mistake - it typically renders the game's factions inconsequential, actually locking out more players from 'massive multiplayer interaction' than those who it connects. A system that lets players be locked out of most of a game's content if they don't meet the play-times or don't want to subject themselves to the authority of a guild, is a bad system. I'm not saying we should get rid of guilds - part of having a free sandbox should be that players have the tools to implement their own alliances, including the imposition of guild-power over macro trade and certain key zones ala Eve. The problem is where there just isn't a satisfying game outside of the guild system - where guild control BOTH extends to all significant zones, AND there's no sustainable means of operating except through guilds.

The game needs to allow sole-merchants, explorers and adventurers to interact with and alongside the guild system. There should be resource-gathering, crafting and trade activities in which guilds give no advantage (limit guild functions in frontier mining zones, if necessary), encouraging a system where guilds purchase items/materials from the 'sole traders' who play the frontier mining game, trading the security of guild zones for the opportunity to advance economically outside the guild structure. When a guild controls an area, they shouldn't be able to lock off adventurers from dungeon-diving or farmers from herding and crafting, within that area. Their role should be as tax collectors and service providers - let them keep their power, but shift the balance a little closer to that of the real world, where authority has an incentive to appeal to the ordinary individuals (it needs to become a problem for the guild if they become demonstrably less efficient than other guilds, such that they're providing less value for their taxes - there needs to be mechanisms for local unrest that lets ordinary players influence which guild dominates a region).

That's just one set of thoughts on it - but the main issue on the Eve problem is just that you need sustainable ways of playing the game, including adequate advancement opportunities, outside the guild structure, so that guild play becomes a choice instead of a requirement beyond a certain point.

 

[Xenich]

Central MMORPG developer doesn't remember Ultima Online. News at 6pm. snip...

Thing is, in early EQ, it was difficult to get to max level before new content came out unless you didn't have a job or played a strong solo class and OCD'd to cap. Back then, we called those people the hardcore players and to be honest, first kill guilds tended to be hardcore players with ridiculous amounts of time on their hands (ie unemployed or limited employed). I am not being factitious either (I know casual/hardcore is entirely different in meaning these days), casual back then meant you played 2-5 hours a night and maybe had a 6-10 hour run on a weekend. My guild all had working professionals (I was pulling around 60+ hours a week) and we played when we could and did raids on the weekends as we could. Most of us weren't even at level cap when a new expansion came out each 6 months. We were pretty much the average player in EQ and those who were always at cap and complaining were the small percentage of the hardcore player base. Those were the ones that the devs tried to "cock block" with ridiculously difficult content. It worked well, but as you pointed out there was a lot of drama concerning methods and approaches to defeating the content. That said, you don't spend all your effort catering to a small percentage of play style and that is all Sony did after a while as the raid game became the only reason for EQ (specifically obvious with PoP).

WoW certainly attempted to lessen this attention and balanced out a bit. Initially WoW was sold as providing the small group experience many of us knew from EQ and it was supposed to get away from the massive 70 main hardcore raiding focus of EQ. MC and Onyxia were originally supposed to be 25 main raids. WoW was supposed to rein in the ridiculous requirements of coordinating a massive amount of people. With instancing, it provided a means for players to experience content without having to get in line. Though that changed with Furor and Tigole pushing for large raids and pushing for yet another raid focused EQ. Remember all the promises of adding 5 man dungeon content? Remember early WoW and how dungeons were difficult, how multiple attempts at the zone were required to finally beat a boss? Well, when they started catering to the "occasional" player, they dumbed down the small group content, increased leveling speed, etc... and essentially forced the game to be a "rush to max level and raid" type of game. Of course, once they made that the focus, the "occasional" players complained about that division and so... what did they do? They dumbed down raiding as well. Now, new content comes out and people consume it in days, not the months it used to take.

The problem isn't content, raiding, etc... it is focusing on appealing to either a small hardcore crowd (like EQ did) or appealing to a extreme casual player. The result is a game that is ridiculously easy to play, to which content is consumed within weeks of release and players sit around complainign about the lack of anything to do or they are confined to retarded daily gimmicks.

What I think needs to be done is to go back to the extremely long leveling model. The average person should spend a few weeks or more in a given zone. That zone should have content of a range of levels. It should contain tons of secret dungeons, random events, mysteries, tough quests and puzzles, rare spawns and triggered rare events. The combat should be hard, extremely hard, not designed for easy consumption. With all that we have learned, classes should be designed to facilitate this type of play. There should be numerous types of non-combat skills and abilities that various classes and races have that are used to interact with the environments. Quests should be hidden and obtained through various means such as books found, a broken item found on the ground, an odd lamp in a shop, through a keyword conversation/comment with an NPC friendly or enemy, etc... Some things should only be seen or accessible at different times of the day. Dungeons should take many returns of quest solving and searching before it is finished.

Now I know... as Smed mentioned, that people will just "look it up on a site guide", but here is what I have to say to that... "SO WHAT?" The response to a locusts who consumes your content because they used a cheat site and then complains about there being nothing to do should be... "Umm, no fucking duh dumbass?". I mean, you don't cater to them or you end up with suicidal developer.

Now we all know there has to be some sort of a grind in the games. You can't develop enough content on a release to keep people from repeating things, but as I said... you do it by giving a worthy reason for repeating something, and more than just a rare drop. EQ2 was on the right track here with their dungeon designs. They made massive theme dungeons with hidden areas, quests, mobs, etc... and the dungeons were a range of mob levels. Many of them would require you to come back several times before you completed everything and some of them would change (new quests, mobs, etc...) based on the fact that you had completed certain quests.

The point is, people used to play the games for the content. This whole "rush off to max level to raid" wasn't the point in early gaming. Now I am not saying there shouldn't be all the things you mentioned. I think player communities and interactive features are great, but the idea that developer created content can't be sustained is not a legitimate point, rather it is an excuse for people like Smed to start catering to their next fad gimmick, just like they catered to the fad raid only focus games, just like they catered to the extreme causal crowd with easy content, and just like they catered to the "pay to win" crowds with their RMT schemes. The "sandbox" claim is another fad as the game won't be what you expect, it will be some idiotic sale point to entice the sheep into throwing away money.

 

[No Great Name]

Taking a very long time to level up is fine as long as it includes a wide variety of things that can be done across the level spectrum as you say. Otherwise you will end up as a few Asian MMOs do that take forever to level up and the only thing to do is grind, grind, grind.

I personally think that levels should not be the focus at all though but rather skill should, whether it be character skill, player skill, or a combination of both. Locking people out of content just because they don't have the required level has always seemed silly to me. People should be able to try content out and be able to fail in its completion and then be able to tell themselves that "I'll come back when my character is stronger or knows more" rather than "I'll come back once I hit this level."

 

[Xenich]

Taking a very long time to level up is fine as long as it includes a wide variety of things that can be done across the level spectrum as you say. Otherwise you will end up as a few Asian MMOs do that take forever to level up and the only thing to do is grind, grind, grind.

Well, it requires not only that leveling take a while, but also the tasks that people would do. I am not talking about bland pointless repetitious tasks, but time sinks varied over many things (timing, location, etc...). I went back with a friend to try EQ2 since they "changed" (ie FTP.. I mean.. PTW) a lot of things. One thing I noticed is that they got rid of many rare spawns. That is, they no longer had placeholders. One quest in particular was the "Stein of Maggok" heritage quest. At one point in the quest, much like the original EQ quest you go out and look for the ogre bouncers. Before the "changes", these 4 mobs were rare spawns with place holders and had a very wide pathing. I remember it taking me over a week to complete the quest in the past due to not catching them up. I would work on it off and on catching one up, then eventually another, etc... Once I completed the quest, I was pretty excited. It was a bit of effort and luck to obtain a very cool reward. Well, I did it again this time on another character. Without all the rare spawns, place holders, etc... well.. I finished the quest in 10 mins. Didn't even feel worthy of the effort.

Point is, everything has to be an effort to make it worth playing. If your levels take a while to complete and your quests take a while to complete and the special items and mobs that appear take a while to obtain/find, well... the game play means something. What is the old saying? Something like "nothing worth having ever came easy"?

edit:

Another thing I wanted to add that destroyed the experience was the exp gain in EQ2. They made it so fast that there was no point in doing any of the content. We just did a dungeon run and we leveled super fast. We didn't bother with zone quests and only picked up group quests in the dungeon because they were there. Not only that, but we ended up capping our levels just so we wouldn't grey out dungeons in our level range before we were done. Note we didn't repeat a single dungeon either, single run, no farming, quick run through. Not only were we leveling too fast, but our AA's are so high that it is insulting. I mean, a level 40 with 110 AA? Really? All of this and we did it in less than 5-10 hours of play. Sony just killed every bit of its content which is why Smed wins the Darwin Award for game design. He is complaining about people plowing through his content when he was the one that caused it to happen. /facepalm

I personally think that levels should not be the focus at all though but rather skill should, whether it be character skill, player skill, or a combination of both. Locking people out of content just because they don't have the required level has always seemed silly to me. People should be able to try content out and be able to fail in its completion and then be able to tell themselves that "I'll come back when my character is stronger or knows more" rather than "I'll come back once I hit this level."

Doesn't matter, its all subjective. Levels, skills, they are all development objectives. You can achieve the same result of "out of your level range" with skills as well (ie skill not high enough, or skill is too low). I disagree with you on the aspect that someone should be able to go anywhere and everywhere and have a chance of beating the content. That sounds very close to level scaling and in such type of content, there is no point in character development. If I can beat every encounter in the game with my starting skills, then there is no point in gaining skills and the result will likely be that content gets easier as I obtain more skills.

The point of having content that is beyond you is so you can test yourself to it as you do get better (as well as making the world dangerous for the unskilled and young). For some, because they are horrible at games, they will have to wait til the content is equal to them (or maybe even a tad below them). For others, they can test themselves to the farthest limits of possibility. Granted there is always a point where no matter how good of a "player" you are, no matter how well you can plan and execute a strategy, you will fail because you are not powerful enough for the content. Welcome to RPGs as character development, it is the entire point of the game. If your development has no bearing, then it has no meaning and if it has no meaning, what is the point?

 

[No Great Name]

I personally think that levels should not be the focus at all though but rather skill should, whether it be character skill, player skill, or a combination of both. Locking people out of content just because they don't have the required level has always seemed silly to me. People should be able to try content out and be able to fail in its completion and then be able to tell themselves that "I'll come back when my character is stronger or knows more" rather than "I'll come back once I hit this level."

Doesn't matter, its all subjective. Levels, skills, they are all development objectives. You can achieve the same result of "out of your level range" with skills as well (ie skill not high enough, or skill is too low). I disagree with you on the aspect that someone should be able to go anywhere and everywhere and have a chance of beating the content. That sounds very close to level scaling and in such type of content, there is no point in character development. If I can beat every encounter in the game with my starting skills, then there is no point in gaining skills and the result will likely be that content gets easier as I obtain more skills.

The point of having content that is beyond you is so you can test yourself to it as you do get better (as well as making the world dangerous for the unskilled and young). For some, because they are horrible at games, they will have to wait til the content is equal to them (or maybe even a tad below them). For others, they can test themselves to the farthest limits of possibility. Granted there is always a point where no matter how good of a "player" you are, no matter how well you can plan and execute a strategy, you will fail because you are not powerful enough for the content. Welcome to RPGs as character development, it is the entire point of the game. If your development has no bearing, then it has no meaning and if it has no meaning, what is the point?

What I meant by this is not level scaling at all but rather allowing the player to get his ass kicked in area that he is too weak to be in. It's like in a single-player game. You see that powerful ogre guarding the path to something and you know that you get ripped apart right now if you try to engage it but you know that you'll come back later when you're more powerful and defeat the ogre. But there is no sign that says "You must be this powerful to take on the ogre." That is what I mean.

Basically the second paragraph of the quoted post is what I was saying.

 

[Xenich]

What I meant by this is not level scaling at all but rather allowing the player to get his ass kicked in area that he is too weak to be in. It's like in a single-player game. You see that powerful ogre guarding the path to something and you know that you get ripped apart right now if you try to engage it but you know that you'll come back later when you're more powerful and defeat the ogre. But there is no sign that says "You must be this powerful to take on the ogre." That is what I mean.

Basically the second paragraph of the quoted post is what I was saying.

Oh, I guess I misunderstood you. Yes, I completely agree with you then. There should be danger, risk and the fact of facing encounters that you are guaranteed to fail. That is one of the things I loved about early EQ. The dungeons were multi-leveled dungeons where you could start doing them at lets say 10, but in order to be able to finish the entire dungeon, you would be around 25-30 by the end. Runnyeye was a perfect example of a wide range of leveled mobs where you had to be careful as a single group, but the really cool thing was that we used to raid Runnyeye as a guild when we were in the early levels. It was a gas taking 30+ people in there in our 8-12 range and taking on level 20+ mobs. Though when you were a single group of 6, you had to be extremely careful or you would pull the Eye on you (level 30) who would instant wipe a group trying to do the level 10-15 sewers portion. EQ had that sort of mob mix all over the place and it made for a really interesting and dangerous experience. These days, everything is your level, everything is designed so you or your group can kill it easy. No risk, no danger... here is your trophy, move along... It really is a shame.

 

[Kane]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

LOL

where's the list of decent sandbox MMO that are not made by SOE, that should go along with this kind of post unless you're some kind of faggot?

 

[Kane]

WoW has often struggled with how to provide a raid game that matches the expectations of gamers who grew to love the game during its initial levelling process - a very different experience, where PvP is organic and alliances are formed on the fly to clear opposition out of a zone so you can do the quests,[...]

yes that is how we all wanted it to happen, but it was very obvious from the start that blizzard hat their collective head up their asses. that's why i gave my closed beta account away and have never touched that piece of shit game ever since. it should have crashed and burned for that disgrace but instead it massacred a whole genre.

 

[No Great Name]

This problem of burning through content too quickly also reminds me of one of the reasons why Myst Online ended up failing (before coming back in its present open-source version). I remember reading an interview with one of the devs during the early years of Myst Online who talked about this very problem as well.

Also, I've never really played EQ or WoW and all the knowledge I have of them are from what I've heard and read and the odd video here and there so I can't point to any specifics regarding those games.

 

[Angthoron]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

LOL

where's the list of decent sandbox MMO that are not made by SOE, that should go along with this kind of post unless you're some kind of faggot?

http://sandboxfreak.blogspot.com/p/testing.html

Why, which sandbox MMOs did you have in mind that SOE had made?

 

[Kane]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

LOL

where's the list of decent sandbox MMO that are not made by SOE, that should go along with this kind of post unless you're some kind of faggot?

http://sandboxfreak.blogspot.com/p/testing.html

Why, which sandbox MMOs did you have in mind that SOE had made?

Half of the games on that list aren't even Sandbox, and the other half doesn't exist, is shit quality or both.

And the answer to your question is
- Planetside
- Star Wars Galaxies
- EverQuest Next?

That's about 100% more SB titles under the belt than any competitor.

 

[Angthoron]

I'd love to see more sandbox MMOs. But not if SoE is making them.

except that SOE made the best sandbox MMOs to date.

LOL

where's the list of decent sandbox MMO that are not made by SOE, that should go along with this kind of post unless you're some kind of faggot?

http://sandboxfreak.blogspot.com/p/testing.html

Why, which sandbox MMOs did you have in mind that SOE had made?

Half of the games on that list aren't even Sandbox, and the other half doesn't exist, is shit quality or both.

And the answer to your question is
- Planetside
- Star Wars Galaxies
- EverQuest Next?

That's about 100% more SB titles under the belt than any competitor.

EQN isn't even in alpha, so judging the quality of that is slightly more than premature.

SWG, SOE first made great, then fucked up the ass, which speaks tons about their designers. If they learned from that, good on them. If not, they'll fuck up EQN as well. However, yeah, I'll give it that, they have two good sandbox MMOs under their belt.

Best, though? Many will argue that "best to date" is reserved for UO.