Guild Wars - Competitive MMO, No Subscription? 18
Thanks to IGN RPGVault for a new interview with the ArenaNet team, developers of Guild Wars. These ex-Blizzard developers, whose company was recently acquired by Korean RPG behemoth NCSoft, talk in-depth about Guild Wars, which they call "..a competitive online role-playing game, which we believe to be a new genre." According to the article, "..gameplay options will include cooperative group combat, single-player adventures and large-scale guild battles.. [with] persistent characters but a non-persistent game world", and there will be no monthly subscription fee for this intriguing PC title, which is due out later in 2004.
Didn't Blizzard do something like this.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That just means it'll be cake to boost yourself
Good thing it's free. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Good thing it's free. (Score:1)
Re:Good thing it's free. (Score:1)
Re:Good thing it's free. (Score:1)
Re:Good thing it's free. (Score:1)
Re:Good thing it's free. (Score:1, Insightful)
A year or two back I was playing EverQuest a good 50 hours a week, sometimes more sometimes less. For $9.99 then (and now $12.99) a month, you can't tell me that isn't one hell of a deal.
Think about it, people go out for a few hours and can easily spend $20 for dinner and movie, if not more. For $12.99 you can play as much as you want during a month. And this is comparable, because
no monthly fees? (Score:3, Interesting)
IANAMMORPGDE (I Am Not A MMORPG Design Expert) but I am an admin on a graphical MUD [cabochon.com]. It seems like there'd have to be some ongoing expenses to cover: bandwidth, server maintenance, game staff, designers, etc. I guess if they sell enough copies, that'll cover it...while they're selling copies.
From some of the things described in the interview (e.g., "But once you form a party and go on a quest, you and your friends get your own unique copy of the quest...") I'm wondering if they've got a completely different client-server model, with more stuff pushed onto the client side, and maybe direct client-to-client communication for some stuff to reduce the bandwidth requirements for the servers. But those both have some security implications, i.e., never put anything important on the client or it'll get abused.
Re:no monthly fees? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no monthly fees? (Score:2, Interesting)
Take EverQuest for example.
There are over 30 -game- servers, each one of those game servers taking up many many computer servers themselves. I've heard developers referring to the "farm of everquest servers". Not to mention the bandwidth. Blizzard can run Battle.net with a small amount of bandwidth because their games, once started, run directly (for the most part) between the clients playing. Everquest has every single action sent
Re:no monthly fees? (Score:2)
Though there will be persistent areas which look to be like chat rooms basically rather than an actual part of the game.
Re:no monthly fees? (Score:1)
Re:no monthly fees? (Score:1)
Reminds me a bit of Dungeon Siege (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me a bit of Dungeon Siege (Score:1)
Don't hold your breath... (Score:2, Interesting)
...with the current state of MMORPG's its going to take one hell of a revolution in that scene to make anything notably different.
I mean take a look at the huge amount of launched, cancled and announced games of this type we've seen ever since Sony hit pay dirt with EQ. I mean even with competivness brought in at different levels, or different playstyles (UO, DAoC or PlanetSide). All these games become the same in the end and they all suck... I shudder everytime I see the letters MMO.
And with this game
reality check (Score:1)
Oh. Right, their graphics look pretty weak too. Here's to hoping they get a new artistic vision (World of Warcraft is easily the nicest in design of all MMORPG's I've seen to date).