Too much Fantasy?
Moorgard adds his take to the Tabula Rasa reflections. It's a good read and I'll pull out a specific part that caught my eye:
All this talk of “too many fantasy games” or “too many upcoming sci fi games” is bullshit. Good games will get played regardless of genre, and bad ones won’t.
Pretty much sums up my opinion whenever someone says the Fantasy genre has already been cooked in the MMO space. In particular, saying we've got WoW so we don't need more is like saying more Vampire movies are pointless because Near Dark did it so well.
Aggregating the State of the Game
Rather than listing and commenting directly on Mark Jacobs' State of the Game address, I'll one-up all the other blogs and comment on their commentary-- Okay, to be honest, I slept in this morning and I'm behind, so this is where I catch up. =P
First up, Mythic is adding two new classes in December. The Black Guard and Knight of the Blazing Sun. Class injections are always great, but Syp over at Waaagh! is slightly jaded and this perspective should be acknowledged:
I know this is a major content addition, but most players won’t see it as an “addition” so much as putting back in that which was cut out.
Meanwhile, Lum the Mad had the best summary on the server balancing Mythic has planned, he called it "Consolidation" and threw previous comments from Mythic designers back at them that were originally jabs at other games. I'm gonna lift both quotes here shamelessly:
We will also be offering the first server transfers to our players to continue to help even out the server populations. These transfers will be free of charge but they will be limited to moves off high-population servers to select mid-population servers or off of low-population servers to a selection of mid-population servers
What happens to low-population servers once you've moved people off them? That's right, this amounts to merging servers. Here's that previous quote now:
Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.
For the record, I think they're doing just fine. This is just a jab at Mark Jacobs' tendency towards foot-in-mouth, especially when he trash talks other games.
Next up, the state of RvR. I would have preferred if Mark Jacobs was a bit more frank about it and unfortunately my concerns were true: all he's offering are incentives. JoBildo thinks this will work. Myself on the otherhand, I think it'll give a small boost at most but won't make a dent in the long term decline of RvR in WAR:
Open-RvR Incentives Out the Whazoo. Can I call it or what? Best part of the letter for sure, in my eyes.
It's all good news really, I just wish it were more. One needed addition thankfully are some default UI controls for main assist and target-of-target. Keen shows his glee on this and the item-linking as well:
YES… seriously this needed to be in the game a month ago! Very happy to see that it’s not something being ignored. Target of target, main assist and item linking = me happy.
And finally, I really appreciated Mark Jacobs' theories of class balancing, with an ever-upwards positive approach rather than nerfing classes. For this one, I'll quote him directly:
Almost every career is going to see some changes and love coming their way and there are very, very few changes that will be seen as reductions to a career’s abilities. The Combat and Careers team has spent the last month looking at the changes that they want to make with an eye towards making improvements and buffs, not removing or weakening abilities. I won’t go into details here but the vast majority of careers all have nothing but love coming their way.
One thing missing was the current state of Public Quests, which are virtually abandoned in many zones. I'm curious to see what Mythic plans for rebalancing and incentivizing PQs, if anything.
All in all, I'd say the game is progressing well, but not quite as well as expected. I thought WAR would top 1 million subscribers in the first month, but now with my expectations adjusted I think that's more likely to happen over the entire Christmas season. I really hope they can push it over the top. I'm not saying they need to have 5+ million subscribers to compete with World of Warcraft, I'm saying I'd like to see them have 5+ million subscribers regardless of any competition.
Sensationalist Proof of Sanity
Found a link to Blizzard's forums which led to this:
Sure to be removed quickly, because I don't recall a Blizzard employee that has ever referenced another MMORPG on their forums before. They corporately maintain some kind of fog-of-war over that stuff.
It's perfectly sane and reasonable of course, you can't expect people to play their own game much, if at all, but they've got an interest in these kind of games so there has to be an outlet in competing products. There's a bunch of other normal reasons, too many to list really.
Much of the fanboi trash talk seems so silly when (during the trade-shows especially) it's probably usual for the devs, CMs and employeees of these companies to sit down together over coffee to discuss what they have in common. Many of them have worked together in the past, the talent is related and interwoven this way. You can catch competing devs smiling at each other on discussion panels and they're honest smiles at that.
I've always liked Eyonix, even back when Warlocks saw no love and as the Warlock CM rep he was too busy enjoying his Mage. =P
I found the link for this on the AoC forums in a thread with the sensationalist topic "Even Blizzard employees play AOC", right underneath "AoC is the Ralph Nader of MMOs" and right above "Is Funcom Gutlessly Caving In To The Prudes..?" which just goes to prove that regardless of any differences in the games themselves, the general forums are exactly the same.
