Four Years (or, Why free passes re: development have to stop)

I agree that the quests could/should be considerably more developed at this point. However, I also think that Lum has been doing his best, and I was quite impressed with his grasp of the task at hand, based upon posts and comment during telethons. I get the sense he needs more help.

I also feel that aiming for everybody to be equally displeased is just as risky as trying to please everyone.

I sense that there is either a lack of clarity regarding who the core audience of this game is. Or worse, an unacknowledged realization that the core audience is simply too small to make the game commercially feasible.

 

Well, the way they have deleted my posts today sure does not make me want me to spend more, my internal employee needs to be fired (Im joking... well half joking).

 

I see SotA as open world in the same as Ultima V was. Open world has come to mean one seamless first-person experience, but to me it just means you can travel anywhere, go anywhere, do anything, and are not prevented from going places because of arbitrary story or level mechanics.

It also has sandbox aspects in the sense that housing isn't segregated into private instances -- though nested POTs were a step in that direction -- and a lot of the economy is player run. Those are good aspects of SotA. I don't think any game can be 100% sandbox though unless you want to sacrifice immersion (which was my joke), though I don't think most players would like that. Despite some hostility to arguments about immersion on the forums sometimes, immersion is what draws players into role-playing. People want to travel to another world, one that feels real to them.

I don't think the real dichotomy is 'theme park vs sandbox'. There's obviously a distinction to be drawn between a game where you create your own content and where content is created for you. But you can have a sandbox game that is theme-parky if there are no consequences to anything and everything is done easily. The thing I hate about theme park MMOs is that everything is shallow and meaningless.

Anyway, I'd still like to see more survival-like elements in SotA, because I'd like that not to be the case.

 

I disagree, they are still uncloning major cities. Many HUGE cities (like Adoris) have been worked on in the past few months. Hard to create quests if the entire zone isnt built for it yet.

 

Fair enough. And for the time being... I'm still in.

 

I figured so, I've read your posts and you are generally level headed about all of it, you do a perfect job of constructive criticism.

 

Why thank you. I appreciate your noticing!

 

How many players is that, really? So much of the discussion has been how SotA can't be compared to AAA games, how Portalarium is operating on a fraction of both budget and team size. Why would it then need a player base comparable to a AAA to survive?

 

Despite it's instancing I do not consider ESO a theme park, the instances are very well disguised, you rarely feel the boundaries are there. It feels as open as Skyrim, which also had natural boundary and dungeon instances. I am not led thru a quest chain on rails, I can go where I want and make the consequential quest choices I want, when I want. It very much plays like a single player Elder Scrolls game on the entire continent, with multiplayer help in dungeons and bosses.

So I don't get why people say it is theme park, to me a theme park MMO is WoW or Final Fanasy XIV . I think the theme park maybe comes from launch when people grinded thru the content in a month then left, it is a very different game now with One Tramiel removing all levelling gatekeeper funneling restrictions. They made that change because they realized they was not attracting the Skyrim players like they had planned.

While it may not be fair to compare to SOTA from the development point of view, it attracts the same type of player that could be playing SOTA, be it RP/PVE or RP type that maybe not normally play MMO.

Releasing against ESO Morrowind in summer/fall is probably a bad idea, consider how many people say SOTA feels a lot like (or will when complete) a lot like Morrowind.

 

SOTA does not don't need millions of players but they do need tens or even hundred thousand players. That is just basic money spent vs players playing ratio. $2m/$180 yearly expected dev/player budget is over 10k active players. NO matter how much you think the steam login under counts active players, there is no way 10,800 players are using the Portalarium login. This makes it clear that even $2M is not enough because the big donors cannot last forever, yet to keep to monthly updates requires even more money when it takes two months to release a new scene , and even more months to polish a questline

Same math as to why an Indy movie can be a hit, despite making less than a Hollywood studio.

Only a fraction will support the game on the store, b2p is not enough to support the game (it is just a qualifier that people are willing to pay some money and not be freeloaders , the goal is that the average store purchases balances out to a years WoW subscription.

 

Here's the thing. I really like ESO. I'm happy to defend it all day long, across many different aspects because it's a cracking game that doesn't get as much respect as it should. Especially as a simple B2P proposition, it's astonishingly good value. I find many of the worst criticisms are from people who only played at launch (and it's a better game now), or worse -- haven't played it at all, but have a "feeling" for what it's like and base all their nasty comments about the game on that feeling.

With that out of the way, I think the reason people think ESO is a theme park game -- and are probably right -- is because it's more along the lines of traditional theme park MMOs like WoW, LotRO, SWTOR, etc, than it is along the lines of sandboxes like SWG, Wurm Online, Mortal Online and so on.

That doesn't mean it's exactly like WoW or whatever, but it's more in that direction where you're questing or PvP-ing and the sense that you're really "living" in the game world is far, far less than games where you're building houses in the middle of nowhere or whatever the case might be in some sandboxes.

That doesn't mean you can't feel that you're living in the game world and/or can't role-play in a game like ESO -- of course you can -- but it keeps coming back to this idea that if you had sandbox games on one side and theme park games on another, where would ESOs compass point? It's always going to be (more) towards the theme park games.

Yeah, I look at it like this... summer/fall is when a lot of cool games will come out. A game can't *not* release around then because something else might be releasing. What I can say, however, is many people who are interested in the MMO genre are going to be up to their neck in Morrowind around that time, with little time for anything else. So the timing certainly won't help SoTA, or a lot of other games around then, frankly.

 

You're assuming that money is the limiting factor here. It may be, but it could also be other things, for example having no dedicated HR staff to recruit and retain new employees.

With some quick maths... An average salary of $50K yields $65K of expenses per employee. Plus overhead. That means $2M annually would support a full-time dev team of approximately 25 or so.

 

I just think it is an odd label as ESO was intended to play like Skyrim, which has always been referred as an open-world do what you want RPG. So I think the confusion comes from considering open world as interchangeable word with sandbox, even though Mortal and Wurm are very different games that are pure sandbox. - I consider them as open as Skyrim. I consider openess the opposite of theme park, and I consider sandbox a type of open game. When I think of a themepark I think of Dragon Age or Witcher, becaue you can only play the story or character the devs laid out for you, no matter how detailed or open world those games maybe, they have zero replayability.

 

Sure, but consider each and every character in ESO is "the" vestige and you need to reclaim your soul. Sure, you don't have to do that quest line, but at ESOs core, that's always there and a drag to replay.

 

And I understand they make a bit more and have hired a bit more staff. Presumably on the low end of salary since some of the new guys are art school or ex-modders with little work experience. The main thing saving them money is the use of Unity, flapping cloaks came from a unity asset, without that someone would have had to write that physics package and that is not junior work. Even if they go back and polish something better than using a Unity asset, Unity still bought them time. So they don't need the same dev/player budget ratio as a AAA as they are more efficient, but it should be clear they need much much more players and more money than they have now to survive as an MMO.

 

It doesn't. It needs enough players to support the game they've built. ESO has something like 8.5 MILLION players. SotA would be able to survive on a fraction of that, I'm sure... but a fraction of 8.5 million is still... a large number.

 

I am not doing that questline on my alts, just like my Skyrim alts are not the Dragonborn. But just like Skyrim you do get exposed to it. I do wonder if ESO will flip the game and drop that plot, once they fill out the continent and need to revamp old stories to keep people playing. So yes it is always there and you are not a blank slate, it is not a pure RP game.

Likewise in SOTA I am not supposed to be anymore than myself in a virtual world , if one is to stick to the games fiction, though it seems to be you with a title...and it seems some have less virtuous alts but maybe they have multiple personalities.

Most RP know if they really want a blank slate RP, there is always D&D tabletop, but even then you have to agree on the campaign setting and if you are doing a dungeon crawler or a steampunk thriller. and go along for the ride.

 

Since this is primarily a player-funded game, perhaps it would be helpful for us to actually know their monetary needs, rather than leaving us to endlessly speculate in the forums.

 

A good tie into... https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...siness-model-for-when-sota-is-released.82877/

 

Fan...girl would be the correct term

as despite how my many negative sounding posts sound am I... a fanman!