Sanya and Lum on Mythic Endeavors

heartless_ writes "Gamergod.com has part one of an interview with Scott Jennings and Sanya Weathers of Mythic Entertainment. The interview covers Darkness Rising, Dark Ages of Camelots' Realm vs Realm system, and the Korean gaming culture. Scott Jennings elaborated on the Korean gaming culture a bit: 'It is more of a technological thing. It is also kind of a cultural thing that in Korea, the cyber cafes are really seen as kind of skuzzy, not to put to fine a point on it, but they're very much like the back alley skid row bars we would go to here in the States. They are very much smoky elements that you do not want your kids to go to, that kind of thing.'"

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Depris]

no pun intended on comparing Scott Jennings (relation to Kenneth? the jeopardy wiz mormon?) to a building. *laughs evily*

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Quarters]

Scott: So we gave our most loyal customers the ability to destroy everyone else in the game.

Before stopping and analyzing how about reading and comprehending? He was making a facitious comment about how the only bug encountered during the launch of the latest expansion pack had to do with veteran titles shown above long-time players causing new players' (e.g. no veteran title) clients to crash. A bug they fixed the first evening the expansion pack was available.

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Jeff(GamerGod.com)]

As a point of clarification from the guy that gave the interview, I have to say Quarters got it mostly right. He was just commenting on the bug and the irony of giving their loyal customers a "god weapon" by mistake.

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Scott_Jennings]

Wow. I was at an E3 vice bust? Was I conscious? I miss all the fun.

DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Yst]

Unfortunately, DAOC faces a serious problem in retaining and gaining new users at present. And I'm not sure that's it's a curable problem. I use the word "unfortunately", because I genuinely believe it's a good game in its own way. It has a niche (realm and siege warfare) which there has been little attempt to fill otherwise (Shadowbane was generally regarded as a failure). And I don't want to see it die. But I'm not sure what can be done with it to keep it at stable subscription levels as it stands.

The problem with DAOC is that its triumph is its endgame. Its problem is precisely the opposite of WoW's. DAOC's RvR really has yet to be beaten by any competitor at what it does: large scale, cooperative, faction-based warfare that people can actually care about (or used to).

But there's a big problem with DAOC's focus from a new player perspective, and that is that playing DAOC today does not mean getting to see the best parts of the game in the short term. The battlegrounds mean access to a miniaturised version of RvR at fairly early levels, but the game's genuine strength is not something available to anyone who hasn't invested hundreds of hours in the game already.

And increasingly, as is probably inevitable, the path to RvR is a very, very long one for new players, as the game ages, as new content is added and as the level of experience presumed of participants grows. And while DAOC PvE isn't bad (it was certainly fine for its time, when it came out, and Darkness Falls was a high point), it can't really claim to compete with WoW in the present in that department, even by the accounts of DAOC's greatest supporters. DAOC's angle is a serious difficulty for it in the marketplace right now. "Play DAOC, and maybe a year from now you'll get to see the aspects of the game that really make it worth playing, once you've played all the lousy parts" is a hard sell. I wish DAOC the best, but I don't know what can be done for it to remedy its peculiar problem.

Re:DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Reapy]

That is exactly why I finally quit daoc. I played very heavily around release time. I unfortunatly ended up trying all the realms, and sometimes starting new characters when a friend would start playing.

The result is I ended up with a bunch of mid to high level characters scattered throughout, and I couldn't participate in any rvr (and actually enjoy it).

On release, I was like 10 levels off the upper curve of the players. So at the start you really could go out and rvr around level 20. But by the time I got

Re:DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Somatic]

I have a list of things I hate about DAoC (literally... I made it earlier this week), but those things you mention are actually very low on it. That sounded worse than I meant it: I meant, those areas have been improved a lot, I think-- improved to the point where they don't bug me as much anymore. They've done a lot of things in the past couple years that have made it easier to start playing DAoC.

• Classic Servers: In the Trials of Atlantis expansion, they introduced items that had to be levelled themselve