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Role Playing (Games)

Best RPGs / MMORPGs of 2004 126

Posted by Zonk from the from-the-people-that-know-them-best dept.
The folks at RPGDot and MMORPGDot always run "game of the year" polls among their readers and staff members to determine the best interactive RPG experiences of the year. They've now run their course, and all the awards have been given out. For RPGs, they have the categories of Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game (mm...Torment 2), Best Console RPG, and Overall Best RPG of the Year. Vampire: Bloodlines, the dark RPG from the late, lamented Troika appears to have garnered many of the top honors. As for Massive Games, the categories included Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game, Best Expansion, and Best MMORPG Overall. World of Warcraft pretty much swept the categories for the genre.
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Best RPGs / MMORPGs of 2004

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  • Alas (Score:3)

    by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @06:48PM (#11808131) Journal
    Alas poor rpgdot we knew thee well.
    May refreshes of slashdotters crash you to your knees.

  • Slashdot vs RPGdot (Score:3)

    by interiot ( 50685 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @06:51PM (#11808147) Homepage
    Slashdot vs RPGdot: slashdot wins.
    • phpBB :
    • Critical Error

  • Biggest disappointment runner up (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Interesting how Vampire Bloodlines makes it as one of the top Biggest disappointments AND best RPG of the year.. interesting.

    Maybe since it's not an MMORRPG, Troika is forgiven for launching a game ridden with gamestopping bugs?
  • World of Warcraft was $13 a month. You'd think after 800,000 players just in the US [slashdot.org], they could drop the price a little. But then again...we've discussed this before [slashdot.org] ;)
    • I don't know, imagine how expensive it's been for them to keep up with demand? They've had to add emergency servers at the authentication, login, and even content levels. They probably needed to hire more staff, bill people for longer hours etc. But who knows I'm not their accountant or anything.

    • The monthly fee, again (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Psychochild ( 64124 ) <psychochildNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday February 28, 2005 @09:39PM (#11809243) Homepage
      Why is there a monthly fee? I already talked about this before. [slashdot.org] But, let's give it another go, shall we?

      I'm familiar with this topic because I run my own online RPG, Meridian 59 [meridian59.com]. It's not quite as large as WoW, but there's still a lot of basic costs that do scale up appropriately.

      A discussion on about the monthly fee for larger games can be found at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.htm l [legendmud.org] which was written by Raph Koster of UO and SWG fame.

      Essentially, these games take a lot of money to develop and then to maintain. The box fees help defray the costs of maintenance, and a large part of the subscription fees go towards maintaining the game world. Every time a gameworld in WoW goes down, there's a team of programmers and at least a few network center administrators working on the problem, most likely. These people don't come all that cheap, and a team of people working like this is fairly expensive. This is a necessary cost, because people expect unusually high uptime for these servers considering most people are only paying $15/month or so. I've had more broadband downtime over the past year than people would accept in M59.

      I won't go too much into how good a price even $15/month is. You'd expect to pay that much if you watch pay-per-view shows a couple times per month. An online games will provide you with more than a few nights of entertainment per month.

      There are alternatives out there, though. Meridian 59 [meridian59.com] doesn't require a box purchase and is only $10.95 per month. Sure you're not going to get the prettiest graphics and the slickest UI, but you will get a very balanced game that has superb uptime. You'll also get gameplay that's considerably deeper than most of the games out there. We don't have pre-defined classes and there's no levels.

      One of the biggest things about the monthly fee is that no business runs at no profit. Every business needs a little bit to keep growing and developing, otherwise the company stagnates and eventually dies. One of the problems our company is having is that we feel our lower monthly fee is a better deal for players, and we want people to be able to play our game, but it's hard to make significant profit to fund development of new games. We'd love to do something a bit more modern than M59, but it's tough to do when you're on fairly thin margins.

      Some information, as usual.
      • Ok, first...I made a mistake with my first post...they charge $15 a month, not $13 (that's only if you buy it in a 6 month chunk).

        Until you throw some numbers up, I can't just take your word for it. Bandwidth isn't cheap, but it ain't that expensive! I'm fine with them making some money, I'm all for it...but this is ridiculous.

        Here's some basic math based purely on the estimated 800,000 users in just the US. The game costs $50 ($80 for the collectors edition, but we won't even worry with that). Th
        • "So that's $159,000,000 of pure profit!"

          Err, is that a bad thing? I kinda thought the whole point of making the game was to rake in some money. It seems pretty clear that everyone is happy in the deal. Developers get a pile of cash, gamers get a game that they feel is worth a monthly fee (or else they wouldn't pay it), and interest is generated in the industry so that the next generation of MMORPGs will be bigger and more bad ass. Other then the 16 year old kid who can't get mom to give him a credit ca
          • You don't find $160 million a little excessive? Like I said before....I've got no problem with them making some bank, but that's ridiculous... If my figures are even remotely correct they could charge $10 a month (I'd gladly pay that) and still be making plenty of profit. Plus, don't forget that the majority of the cash goes to their publisher, not the developer... If they cut out the middle man and sold it directly from their website it could be even less...
            • Why is 160 million excessive? If you can make 160 million, why not? The whole idea behind making a pile of money is that you can never have too much. Forget making money just for the sake of making a profit. Just look at it from a business side. Sure, WoW is wildly successful right now, but guess what? Not everything Blizzard makes smells like roses and sells. They lose money all the time on other things. For all they know, the next MMORPG they might try will fail horribly and they will be down a fe
        • Alot of wrong numbers.
          Box wise the developing company is only going to get around $15 for your average $50 box(more for collectors box). The game cost close to $20 mil to develop, salaries are ok but add 40% for retiurement,medical,vacaton,etc; don't forget office space, also don't forget phone support staff(figure 4-5 people for each 24/7 slot), also the overhead of running a business (HR,etc). Your prices for hardware is cheap(probably closer to $10,000 each(and they have more physical servers then wor

        • Re:The monthly fee, again (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Psychochild ( 64124 ) <psychochildNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 01, 2005 @07:34AM (#11811417) Homepage
          The problem is that exact numbers aren't easy to get. If you want to see the nitty gritty, then I'd recommend Developing Online Games [amazon.com] as a good book to take a look at. I'd quote from it, but I don't have the book handy right this moment.

          But, let's talk about some holes in the numbers you came up with.

          First, box sales are a completely different issue from subscriptions. You're lucky to see a third of the money from the box sale; most of the rest is eaten up by retailer margins, "promotion fees" at the retail end, cost of making the boxes, etc. Remember, this is also a one-time income item. Yes, there are expansions, but not everyone will buy them. Also, expansions have a cheaper price point than $50.

          Second, not everyone that buys the box actually signs up, and very few of those people will actually play a full year. We have what's called a "conversion rate", which is the rate at which people will become paying subscribers after their free month. We also have what's called "churn", which is a comparison of the number of people that sign up compared to the number of people that cancel an account. This means that you're not going to have that full 800k paying. Dave Rickey, an experienced developer, estimates that out of those 800k, you'll probably have 442,800 to 543,152 [feetofclay.us] people per month, on average once you count conversion rates and churn.

          Third, as you point out, people aren't going to all pay the full $15/month. Some people will be paying less if they sign up for more accounts. Ignoring discussions on the future value of money (take Econ 101 if you have a burning desire to hear more about that), this reduces income by several percent.

          Already we see that the number is going to be considerably lower than your 800k x $15 equation.

          Next, your estimation on the cost of the game's development cost are off by a considerable sum. I've heard it said that Blizzard spent $30 million on the game. Unfortunately, I don't have a reliable source to link right now, so you'll have to take my word for it. This is 3-6 times what you estimated. Hell, traditional single-player games have budgets that approach $10M; I don't even think you could make a game for only $5M anymore and expect to get it published on a console. It costs a lot more to make an online RPG like this because not only do you have to create assets and the game, you have to create more art assets (for a wider variety of player avatar options), a server, and hire network coders. Yes, single-player games sometimes have servers as well, but it's the difference between an elementary school baseball field (a few dozen people simultaneous) and a baseball stadium (tens of thousands of people simultaneous). Even if Blizzard got to keep 33% from each box sale (which is a crazy high number), they would have only made $13.3M, less than development costs.

          Okay, now we come to bandwidth. Here's some numbers for you: Meridian 59 uses 1 kilobyte per player per second. Remember, this is for a game designed to be played on 14.4k modems on the client side; a game like WoW is going to require much higher rates. But, let's assume that players play an average of 10 hours per week (quite low, "hard core" players usually go 20-30 hours per week), there's 4 weeks per year, and use the numbers from Dave Rickey above, rounded to 500k to make my math easier.

          1 kilobyte/s/player * 500k players * 40 hours/month * 60 minutes/hour * 60 s/minute = 67 Terabytes per month.

          M59 currently spends about $3/GB per month. That puts bandwidth costs closer to $200,000 per month, four times your number. Keep in mind that 1) WoW probably uses more bandwidth per player per second , and 2) this bandwidth usage is constant, not bursty like most network traffic is. This means you're going to be filling up fat pipes easier and longer than most other server types will. A
          • Considering, many business models, including MMORPG models, don't start to show a profit until at least the first or second year. What if the product fails meet the estimates of the business model or the sales lack? That's a pretty big risk to take by any would-be investor, especially on an MMORPG.
          • Thank you for replying and not being an asshole about it like most of these other guys. You run your own MMORPG...you do know much better the costs than I. It looks like I was way off in my Bandwidth estimates, but they were just that....estimates. However, you say that it cost around $30million to make the game...in my post I say it probably took about 10, and then at the end say that even if my figures are 3 times that (ie..30mill) then they're still over charging. I may have made some mistakes in my figu

          • Hi Brian,
            I always enjoy reading your posts, so I just signed up for M59 today.

            Say Hi if you see ElmerTheCat online on server 102 :)

            • Cool. :) Feel free to send me an in-game mail to "Psychochild". I'm goning to be at a conference next week, but I'll be glad to handle any questions you might have when I get a chance to read mail.

              Feel free to email help@neardeathstudios.com if you have any problems getting online.

              Have fun,
        • OK. Let's assume that your figures are dead-on accurte. That means that over HALF of the money that is paid each month is pure profit! Well, if this really IS the case, then other people will come out with BETTER games for CHEAPER, and cut into their business. But this has not happened yet. I am not a MMORPG player, but I have heard a lot of complaints about various issues. So clearly, nobody is doing a better job for cheaper.

          There is an old saying for those who want to start their own business: If
        • I don't know what fantasy world you come from, but in this world a "real" server costs $10,000 without much effort. And for World of Warcraft, you have 90+ worlds just in the USA. Each world is at least 4 servers if not 10. Then you have the rest of the world which just may be double the USA figures. Now tell me again how cheap this is?

        • The game costs $50 ($80 for the collectors edition, but we won't even worry with that).

          That means that when you go to your local store to buy it for $50, the upstream (Blizzard + wholesalers) are actually only getting $20, maybe (where I used to work, retail price was 250% of wholesale).

          Take out the cost of printing, pressing and all the freebees they had to give away and replacement disks they had to send out for defective pressing, and your profit per item drops way down.

          It is still up there, but n

        • Messed up on math for server/bandwidth....only gave rate for one month instead of one year...bump that up to about $700,000 or so...
        • I love such arguments. Unless I'd see their balance sheet, I'd refrain from estimating what their profit margin is, but everybody has the right to be naive. There are few businesses in this world with over 100% profit margin.

          If 800,000 people are willing to pay $15 a month, it means the price is good. It's the market which sets the price, supply and demand thing. Blizzard is not a monopoly in MMORPG business. If the price was unfair, people would not pay it.
          • First, thank you for making one of the few sane replies to my idea there. It was just a guess people...

            You are very right about the market dictating what an appropriate price is. I was simply trying to make my case on why I, personally, do not want to pay that much for an online RPG each month.

            How much would I pay? Well, I do like how Blizzard offers the game at a cheaper price if you pay for larger portions. I think $12 a month should be the limit though, and then they could have $11/month for 3 mont
      • Well, I hate to waste a mod point by replying a thread I've modded, but I have to say this...

        Your estimates are way off, staff-wise. I'm not sure how large their programming staff is, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't that NY Times article on them mention that their company has grown from under 200 to over 700 employees, most of which are doing customer support?

        That's a pretty big expense...
    • All I have to say - go WoW! I love this game :-) I should have never started playing it though because now I am addicted.
    • Similar to Miridian, there is The Realm Online http://www.realmserver.com/ [realmserver.com] for $5.00 a month. Some feel that monthly fees are a horrible idea, but you get far more entertainment than renting a movie or going to a theater, which is almost the same price.
    • Why is the monthly fee as high as it is? Because people will pay it. That, I think WoW tapped into "not living with my parents and have a job" market much better then any other MMORPG to date. When you are 15, $13 a month might be a big deal. When you have a real job it is less then an hours work. Would I pay less then one hour worth of wages to play a game all month long that I enjoy? Hell yeah and screw the kiddies.

  • Only american games? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by incom ( 570967 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @07:16PM (#11808376)
    And the genre is RPG? How can that be. Also, by console, they mean xbox.
    • +1 insightful. How is it that not a single Japanese developed RPG managed to get into the top 10 of Best Console RPG?

      Of course, looking at the list of game reviews elsewhere on the site... the site clearly is almost myopically concerned with RPG releases from US developers. If you don't have reviews of Final Fantasy X or XI, Xenosaga, Shin Megami Tensai: Nocturne, etc, etc, up, then the awards list just reflects the site's previous... orientation. But that also means it's not a very complete reflection
      • No, because the Japanese RPG market has stagnated, so nobody cares about it. During the boom that followed FFVII, the Japanese RPGs were worth watching... but somewhere around 2001, it fell off. The nail in the coffin was the moment that players around the world came to the stunning realisation that the FF MMO didn't couldn't really compete directly with its American counterparts.

        Its sad - I've always preferred the inventive Japanese RPG art to the stark realism you see in most American MMOs... but now A
        • Man you nailed it right on. It took awhile for American companies to catch on. Japan is no longer the superior RPG factory.

          The ONLY RPG I am interested in 2005 from Japan is the Phantasy Star 1,2,4 remake on PS2. And that's sad.

          Square needs to create a chronotrigger type RPG with Final Fantasy where you go in and out of FF1 to FFX in a single game. You can only ride chocobos so many times before you get bored.

    • Spellforce and Gothic are German. I'm very disappointed that Spellfoce didn't fare better though, it's a *fantastic* game.
      • for that matter, some of the games in the list aren't in the US yet - The Fall: The Last Days of Gaia (see this forum [silver-style.com]), Kult: Heretic Kingdoms (info here [gotgameentertainment.com]), for instance. I think RPGdot's audience is more global than their UK base, so games released globally will rack up more votes from games released globally (thus the big difference in their votes vs the world votes).

  • Normally not one to complain about results... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 28, 2005 @07:28PM (#11808472)
    ...but in this case I have to. Mainly because I can't find anything to explain how the poll was conducted. Was it an email mailed out, asking you to vote on something? Was it a forum post? In either case was the user presented with a list of games, and told to choose one?

    (The reason I want to know this is because, if it's the latter, then may I say that, based on their top 10 lists, the poll choices were shitty. Two copies of both Dark Alliance 2 and Bard's Tale in the top 10? Why? Was console choice that important that they needed seperate spots?)

    Finally: who in their right mind would even consider voting for Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel? There were far better RPGs released in 2004 that aren't listed there (Sin Megami Tenshin: Nocturne, for instance) than that piece-of-shit disgrace to the previous Fallout games.
    • I should note that the above post was inspired by the best console RPGs results, which was the only page I could get to open due to the slashdotting.

      (And that should be Shin Megami Tenshei: Nocturne, not Tenshin. I've never been able to spell that damn title.)

  • WoW Report Card (Score:2, Insightful)

    by blunte ( 183182 )
    A - Appearance
    B - Story
    A - Quest system mechanics
    A - Number of quests
    C - Quest content
    C - Player classes
    D - PvP
    D - Incomplete
    D - Nerfs
    FFF - Availability and reliability of game world

    o Basically, it's got:
    o Blizzard Polish
    o Fisher Price difficulty
    o redundant and boilerplate quests
    o modestly evolutionary game mechanics
    o the worst online world management and availability I've ever experienced (out of UO, AC, EQ, DAoC, ATITD), bar none

    Blizzard has made so many poor decisions regarding capacity pla

    • Re:WoW Report Card (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NBarnes ( 586109 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @08:08PM (#11808734)
      Anybody that says that WoW's server availability and stability are worse than EQ's or AO's never actually played early EQ or AO.

      And, re: nerfs, please. Cry more. I know that most players would rather devs allow their games to accumulate broken game mechanics that they can leverage until they get bored, but devs have never been that dumb.

      • Re:WoW Report Card (Score:3, Informative)

        by blunte ( 183182 )
        I played EQ for five years, beginning with opening weekend on May? of 1999.

        I was there. It started with a bang, was slow, and then they suffered router trouble. They were having 8,000 connections dumped at a time, and then their login server would choke on the big simultaneous volume (that they never expected).

        However, it took them only two days to get that issue completely worked out. Then they began a process of increasing bandwidth, server count, and most importantly, backbone connections (adding AT
        • WOW is still having major problems in terms of lagging out. I'm a regular player and am very disappointed so far. I still experience disconnects during every gameing session. I lag out and die frequently during encounters with either mobs or other players. Nothing like talking a whack at a player and then suddenly having no response from any key pressed. 1 minute later the game catches up and you find yourself dead and the only evidence of an encounter was the /spit left by your enemy. This scenario happens
    • Did you play EQ when it first started? Patches every other day it seemed like, down servers, lots of things were broken. SWG was even worse, completely unbalanced, extremely buggy, multiple server crashes per day (not load related), and a completely unfulfilling grind. WoW may not be perfect, but it is fun which is the most important thing.
    • And how would you make the game more difficult?

    • Re:WoW Report Card (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Dues ( 786223 )
      It seems strange to me that you complain about nerfs, then turn around and whine about "Fisher price difficulty"

  • Meaningless Results (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wan-fu ( 746576 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @08:13PM (#11808774)
    If you look at the results, the voting percentages were very similar in each poll. And this is no mistake. Most people will not invest in more than one MMORPG and few will play two at any given time. Even fewer will choose to play three simultaneously and once someone starts one, they are unlikely to switch to another. Thus, it seems like a lot of the voting was simply based on what people were familiar with via word-of-mouth, their experience with their game of choice, etc. With limited knowledge, it obviously makes it hard to vote properly on the various categories and people will be apt to simply vote for their own game as they haven't seen many of the others in action. The results probably reflect the MMORPG split-up of RPGdot's voting base and nothing more.

  • Worst...Poll...Ever... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pinkoir ( 666130 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @08:36PM (#11808933)
    And you thought the Oscars were bad...

    What a popularity contest. I do not see any signs that this was anything other than an exercise in people voting for the game they were playing at the time they took the poll. The clincher for me was the comparison between the results for "Best Overall MMORPG" and "Biggest Dissapointment". It would seem that while EQ2 is the second best MMORPG of the year it is also the biggest dissapointment and WoW while being the best was the runner-up for biggest dissapointment...hmmm.

    Possibilities:
    -Voters have absurdly high expectations and even awesomeness is not good enough for them.
    -Voters are die-hard partisans and vote against the enemy for the negative award.
    -Voters have never heard of any MMORPG other than EQ2, WoW or CoH

    I think it's the last option. The hype machines for those three games pwn all and in a popularity competition it isn't even about popularity anymore, just hype.

    Anywho, there are other MMORPGs out there. If you are interested in a well developed, balanced, mostly bug-free game with a superb market-driven economy and the kind of meaningful PvP that WoW and EQ2 only dream about then I suggest you give EVE [eve-online.com] a look-see.

    -Pinkoir
    • Spent all my mod points earlier today, but another vote for Eve-Online as best MMO.

      The other MMOs can't even hold a candle to the complexity of Eve. In terms of economy and PVP they are well ahead the others in their genre. They've come the closest to emulating real life, and still having it be rewarding and fun without the traditional level grind.

      • Re:Worst...Poll...Ever... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by C0rinthian ( 770164 ) on Tuesday March 01, 2005 @09:47AM (#11812173)
        I agree that Eve is much more complex than any other MMO. However that is both good and bad.

        Running a production corp of about 50-75 active members from both the US and Europe for the better part of a year, as well with dealing with alliance politics/BS ended up being more work than I did at WORK getting paid. Eve forced me to learn a LOT of stuff in Excel I never thought I'd know. Problem was it became all management. I'd never actually play the game. I'd log in, do corp maintenance and paperwork for an hour or two, and log out. It stopped being a game and started becoming a job and I simply burned out on it. The simplicity of WoW is a friggin relief after Eve. I get ehough of real life in real life. I don't want it in my games too.

        However, my 3 accounts are still active and training, in case the fire sparks back up. :)

  • Bad year for RPG's, I guess... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chromaphobic ( 764362 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @09:00PM (#11809074)

    The fact that Bloodlines won so many awards gives me a pretty good idea of how bad a year 2004 was for RPG's.

    It was a buggy, sloppy mess. They took all the power of the Source engine, smeared it in poo and slowed it to a slideshow. The base gameplay and storyline were good, but not great, and overshawed by the general piss-poor construction of the game itself.

    And that's the best we could do last year? Meh.

    • You must have a pretty crappy machine. My Athlon XP 2500+ with Radeon 9500 (non-pro) ran it just fine once I'd upped the RAM to 1GB. Yes it was better when I eventually upgraded to a 9700 Pro, but the main difference was that I could run at 6xFSAA and 16xAF with no slowdown. Absolutely gorgeous - you've got to play the Ocean House Hotel with maximum graphics settings and good headphones.

      The only real performance problem with Bloodlines was the amount of RAM. If you had 512MB or less it was dog-slow at load

      • I've got an Athlon XP 3000, GeForce 6800 & 512MB, my system isn't the problem. My system isn't crappy, Bloodlines is crappy. I can run Half-Life 2 with the settings almost all the way up with good framerates, Bloodlines exhibited the Soure engine's stuttering problem to a degree MUCH worse than HL2 and I got significantly slower frame rates.

        And, from what I've read, Valve has made ALL updates to the engine available to licensees, so apparantly Troika/Activision simply chose not to update Bloodlines.

  • Stupid poll (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let me preface by saying that I played both EQ2 and WoW for ~2 months each. While I believe that WoW is most regards is a much better game, EQ2 definitely has better graphics and sound/music. The results of the poll simply reflect what people are playing. I think the most interesting results are the votes based on the sites editorial boards. At least they seem to have played all the games.

  • Crappy results (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@gmail. c o m> on Monday February 28, 2005 @09:41PM (#11809248) Journal
    In addition to a "just vote for your favorite" methodology they seemed to use (and is terribly flawed), their list of single player games is just laughable. Deus Ex 2 wasn't an RPG, while it did have elements; nor was Pirates. Despite these additions, notable games were simply ommited from polling, like Tales of Symphonia and Knights of the Old Republic 2.

  • WoW = wow? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theclam159 ( 833616 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @10:14PM (#11809440)
    Did anyone else think that World of Warcraft wasn't that great? Maybe I'm not the MMORPG type, but once you got to the mid-game (about lvl20-25+), you've got most of your abilities, so the gameplay mechanics won't change at all for the next several hundred hours that it will take until you reach lvl60 and can do raid instances. This wouldn't be a big deal (it isn't a big deal in many other games), but the combat system isn't that hard and doesn't have that much depth (compared to the non-multiplayer RPGs that I play). PvP is based upon your class (and race too, with WotF against Warlocks/Priests). If you face a certain class with a certain class, then you'll get schooled every time, unless there is a massive skill/level disparity (paladins > warriors, druids > warriors, rogues > warlocks, etc). Some items are so cheap (spider belt, the blacksmith trinket that stops fear) that they destroy another class' only way to stop certain classes. Character development is sparse, even compared to final fantasy games. Here are the only ways to customize your characters: 1.Race 2.Class 3.Items 4.Talents 5.Skills 1. This has little effect, unless you're an undead PvPer. 2. This makes a huge difference, but this is in almost every other RPG. 3. Your items depend almost entirely on the amount of time you spend playing the game, not on how you want to customize your character (unless you go for looks). Most characters have standard choices based upon talents and class. Warlocks go for stamina/intellect, almost always. Warriors go for stamina/strength/armor/DPS. Rogues go for agility/stamina/DPS. Druids go for stamina/intellect/spirit if you're restoration/balance, stamina/agility/strength if you're feral combat. You don't seem to have to make any choices for your equipment. One piece of equipment will always be better than another piece for a certain class/talent combination. 4. Here is the only way to customize your character other than class. It's well done, for the most part, although certain trees/skills are weak (druid feral, warlock demonology). 5. Your choice in skills only seems to determine your cash flow. A miner/skinner will always be richer than a miner/blacksmith, although their equipment will be similiar. The only exception seems to be a PvP engineer. Everything besides engineering stuff can be bought from another character at the AH (yes, there are some soulbound pieces of crafted equipment, but you can get comparable stuff at the AH), so there's no reason to pick anything other than moneymaking professions (except for engineering). One major thing (that may be endemic of MMORPGs) is that it takes 8 hours for you to level at about lvl30. 8 hours and you get 1 talent point and 1-2 pieces of new equipment. 16 hours gets you 2 talent points, 3-4 pieces of equipment, and upgraded skills. There's very little reward per hour spent playing. Other genres can get away with this (FPS games often have very little character advancement), but they have enough gameplay depth to keep you playing for long periods of time. The one thing that makes an RPG an RPG is character building. If it takes 8 hours to build your character up just slightly, then I'm not playing. It's got great sound and graphics, a good story line, an excellent UI customization system, tons of Blizzard polish, and high production values. The gameplay just isn't good enough, in my opinion (I have to say that Halo seems to suffer from the exact same problems, high production values, but mediocre gameplay, but that's OT). It's good for hardcore MMORPG gamers and casual players, but for a more general hardcore player, there are so many better games to play.
    • The big change in WoW from lvl 20 to lvl 60 is that you spend increasing amounts of your time in instances, which is an entirely different ballgame than solo grinding or grouped with one buddy hunting +2s (an enemy two levels tougher than you). Instances, especially the first time or three you go in, are just a 2-4 hour long session of pure gaming goodness and the tactics you use are completely different than what you do in small-group situations. They're also good loot and fairly decent XP, although I th
    • Did anyone else think that World of Warcraft wasn't that great?

      Partially yes. I miss the 'realistic' atmosphere of Everquest. WoW feels more like living in a comic-book world than a 'dungeons and dragons' world. Some of the artistic styles are a bit cheesy, but the low polygon count, like so many other things in that game, are very thoughfully designed.

      Most people who've played previous generation MMORPGs appreciate WoW for its gameplay design. Twinking is almost non-existant, the interface is pure
    • Yep, and the numbers are increasing.
      I was one of thoses who initally got WoW, played it got bored, though the consistance instance gratification was nice.
      Switched over to EQ2 and am having a ball, a little slower in leveling and some stuff you have to plan on what you are going to do, but over all a lot more fun experience.
    • It sounds like you're not enjoying WoW.

      If that is the case, I'd recommend quitting the service and, in two months, taking the $30 you've saved to get yourself a keyboard with a functional "Enter" key.
  • I've looked at Best Surprise, Best Game, Biggest Disappointment and the top three for each were World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and City of Heroes.

    I would expect there to be different results at least between the disappointment, surprise and best game. Maybe there's some favortism in some of the more recent games.
  • When you have how many hundreds of thousands of people signing onto a new MMORPG, let alone one that produced record breaking sales, do you expect the votes to skew to something else?

    Personally I like Final Fantasy XI better and would vote that higher, but when there are a higher number of players in World of Warcraft for each FFXI player now... again, not surprising.

  • Well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Master_T ( 836808 ) on Tuesday March 01, 2005 @03:43PM (#11816018)
    I usually hate whining like I am about to do... but this is rather justified. They are mostly concerned with PC RPGS here. Which is fine if MMOGs are your concern. but in terms regular rpg's the fact of the matter is that most of the meat of the subject is found on consoles. this polling totally ignored the RPG's (non mmog) that people were interested in. Fable was great and all.. I guess but it doesn't constitute the end all be all. and KOTOR II is also good but look at all the games they ignored here as though they were non-existant.

    -Tales of Symphonia

    -Star Ocean

    -Shin Megamin Tensei Nocturne

    -Shadow Hearts: Covenant (a flippin masterpiece imo

    -Baten Kaitos

    -Phantom Brave

    That isn't even close to all the offerrings we saw last year. Gamerankings lists approx. 90 rpgs released this year and we are considering fable and Kotor II is all? Whether or not they (the few I listed) are universally loved doesn't matter, as some of the premier titles added to the genre this year they require consideration. How can they look only at console rpgs on the XBOX, the only console that is nearly completely lacking an RPG library. This is a pathertic poll. What a waste of a /. link.

    • The site began its roots as one dedicated to PC RPG games, such as the beloved Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, Baldur's Gate, and etc. franchises. Then that field just kind of slowed to such a crawl, that in order to get more content they needed to branch out into other areas.

      They have slowly started adding content for console systems over the last year or so, and they also add RPG-flavored PC games that aren't really RPGs, like the Heroes of Might & Magic strategy games, or Thief, a first perso
  • Does anyone know how well Deus Ex: Invisible War sold? I really loved the first game but I felt complete disappointment when I played the PC demo. They definitely got rid of what made the first game great so they could try and make an XBox hit. I'd like to think that the market responded to their crappy juxtaposition by not buying the game, but I haven't been able to find out one way or the other.

    Is there any official method of checking how well the game sold and what it cost to develop? I seem to reca
  • Someone please tell them that Deus Ex 2 came out in 2003.

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