The reviews for Kingdoms of Amalur that I've read have basically been "It's a straightforward RPG done very, very well.", and the demo confirmed that for me. It did not strike me as groundbreaking, but there's room on my shelf for well-executed, evolutionary work.

Color me impressed that Schilling sank $30M of his own money into this. It says a lot about him that he is taking that kind of risk instead of just sitting at home, signing baseballs and socks between rolls in his money pile.

chimp_ninja: Color me impressed that Schilling sank $30M of his own money into this. It says a lot about him that he is taking that kind of risk instead of just sitting at home, signing baseballs and socks between rolls in his money pile.

Hopefully, the demo wasn't indicative of the finished product, which was "single player World of Warcraft tethered into all the linear level design that drives me nuts in nearly all of today's games", but given his noted junkie-ism for Everquest, it's very possible.

Mike_LowELL: chimp_ninja: Color me impressed that Schilling sank $30M of his own money into this. It says a lot about him that he is taking that kind of risk instead of just sitting at home, signing baseballs and socks between rolls in his money pile.

Hopefully, the demo wasn't indicative of the finished product, which was "single player World of Warcraft tethered into all the linear level design that drives me nuts in nearly all of today's games", but given his noted junkie-ism for Everquest, it's very possible.

The demo disappointed me with a lack of first person voice work, and it does sort of feel like a WoW-esque RPG, without the LOLspeak teenagers spitting as they type. After watching the roomie play through chunks of Skyrim, it was nice to see a fantasy RPG that wasn't just beige, tope, and black and grays...

Isn't this because Reckoning was originally designed to be an MMO? Anyways, if Reckoning is successful, they might pitch the MMO version around to EA.

And its quite refreshing that Reckoning is in the most anticipated games of this year that its an original IP and not a sequel/prequel/triquel/whatever of an already existing franchise

Dinobot: I thought they were already planning the MMO. I thought the whole project was to introduce the world as a single player game, then drop three or four DLC expansions, and then drop the MMO next year or so.

To be fair, I'm looking more foreward to the final Mass Effect game dropping next month. I'm happy to see more new goodies drop in the market though.

hubiestubert: The demo disappointed me with a lack of first person voice work, and it does sort of feel like a WoW-esque RPG, without the LOLspeak teenagers spitting as they type. After watching the roomie play through chunks of Skyrim, it was nice to see a fantasy RPG that wasn't just beige, tope, and black and grays...

Honestly, I just see the same mistake being made in the name of safe profit. In the article, it notes that Curt Schilling "was a huge World of Warcraft fan towards the end of his baseball career, and like a lot of us, thought he had ideas for how to make his own MMORPG to take the experience to the next level." Which is fine with me. It's his money and his ideas, nice to see him give it a shot. I'd almost feel bad if the game ended up being a dud. The problem for me with these games is (and I know I mentioned this in one of the previous threads on the topic), it seems like all these companies are taking the MMO model and seeing what they can do to improve combat. They want to retain the familiarity while pushing the couple of extra steps necessary to separate the game from Fable or World of Warcraft. I'd rather these developers take the God of War model or the Bayonetta model and see what they can do to add exploration elements to it. I've played very, very few games with exploration elements (Link to the Past and Link's Awakening immediately come to mind) where sub-par combat could elsewise be rescued by good level and dungeon design, so they might as well get the combat right, first things first. Unfortunately, that means alienating a percentage of your player base with a complex combat system that may not even be worth integrating into any sort of system that is going to promote grind. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is one of the few games I've seen use an experience system while remaining challenging (or providing the tools to remain challenging) for most of its relevant life cycle.

What...is he remaking Duke Nukem Forever?

too bad it has ea attached to the project otherwise i'd support it

JonQDoe: Does Dark Souls fit your criteria? I would love a giant, Skyrim-sized game with a Dark Souls level of difficulty and sense of consequence.

Absolutely. I want more games like that. In general, I'd like many more challenging games across all genres, but that's a personal preference.

swaxhog: Actually he was a huge fan of Everquest during his baseball career. Played it more than he should have type addiction especially when you're supposed to be up in 2 hours for a game. Then he got hooked on EQ 2 and then WoW.

The guy just loves mmorpg's and had the money to try and make one himself. Except he's rather late to the party. This will be free to play within months if it doesn't already start that way. The market is too glutted for another.

I mean, I don't have much love for the guy as a human being, but it would suck for someone to throw thirty million dollars into a video game as little more than personal philanthropy and have it get pissed away. Not something I could really wish on someone. Agreed with you, though. His game is catching the tail end of a market that's mostly disappearing.

sprawl15: There are a few problems with exploration elements in MMO games. Not that I don't like them, or that they're bad from a gameplay perspective, but from a metagaming perspective. If there's a tangible reward for exploring (like in Rift, there were hidden caches on places that you really had to bust your ass to find, or the holocrons in SWTOR), it becomes either mandatory if the reward is good or disappointing if it sucks. If there's no tangible reward, most people simply won't be driven to do it because they're busy following breadcrumbs and those who do feel like doing them will just google the locations of everything interesting.

Metagaming could be mitigated significantly with a truly interesting random encounter system, but that would be very frustrating for completionists.

Basically. Everybody here knows all the awesome things that I have to say about Asheron's Call, so I'll start doing it. That game tried to avert what you're speaking of with numbers of smaller dungeons scattered across its massive game world, but players moved towards the more lucrative dungeons with much easier points for trapping spawns and killing them behind walls and on ledges and all that nonsense. Which sucked, because the idea of stumbling across a random dungeon you've never seen before was pretty cool, regardless of how primitive some of these dungeons were.

However, Asheron's Call had a server that was a free-for-all player-versus-player environment, meaning anyone could kill anyone. The only way to avert it was to find a level with a dungeon cap more palatable to your skills and abilities...which often led to lower-level players getting high-level enchantments from their main character or a member of their alliance and trashing out a lower-level dungeon, something that was always hilarious to see. So, with those high-yield dungeons, you either ended up with one of two situations: You find a safer place to level (the open world, where people aren't going to stumble upon you) or you fight for the high-yield dungeon with your guild members and hold it around the clock. And the defenders always had the advantage, since the majority of dungeons functioned as instances that had to be portaled into, and it took a couple of seconds before your "portaling" animation put you into the dungeon.

So to answer your question, I'm not sure it's as much about creating a set of game mechanics that can incentivize exploration, but giving players enough input and control where their actions incentivize it. As far as my original post goes, concerning exploration elements in MMOs, I was actually thinking more of the single-player Action RPG. I'd love to see someone put a battle system as complex as what you see in Ninja Gaiden or Bayonetta and jam it into something like Skyrim. I can't imagine how much money that would cost these days, and it's probably easier to appeal to the WoW audience these days. Oh well.

Mike Chewbacca: Wow. That kind of behavior right there is why I've never really enjoyed MMOs, aside from Guild Wars and Warhammer Online. Essentially, the game was set up so the other players really couldn't fark you.

They're not for everybody (and their time commitment scares off a lot of people), but games like EVE Online and Asheron's Call are probably the class of the MMORPG; their systems were designed to create interesting forms of collaboration, whether players were engaging with the monthly updates and storytelling in AC or just trying to out-douche each other in EVE. The rest of the genre (the World of Warcraft that was inspired by Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, which was then followed by all the copycats) is just a bunch of theme parks where you get on the ride, don't ask questions, and don't try to drink the water. The big problem for Asheron's Call was that guilds could be as large you wanted, and without any server resets, this naturally created a problem as the guilds and alliances attempted to consolidate their power on the Darktide PvP server. Here's an article on the topic. In short, after months of guilds forming alliances in a power struggle, it culminated in the guild leader Blood assuming control of over 3,300 members. As the author describes: "Game Over - It was over, all our goals were reached there was no real opposing force left so lots of our guys started to stop playing / selling by the end of January." People started cancelling their subscriptions because the war was over. These large publishers will never, ever, ever create a risk like that for themselves by letting players assume that much control over a game world, no matter how awesome the results are.

Barry McCackiner: I played all of the old-school MMOs and Asheron's Call was one of the worst. It had some decent ideas, but it was very poorly executed.

WoW, despite the scorn that you have for it, had some of the best PvP action in any game I have ever played. The battlegrounds were a fun diversion and the Arena was PvP perfection in my opinion. It had good incentives, PvP gear gained from farming Battlegrounds was then used in the Arena where you get the top tear gear from fighting in the arena. Matches were highly competitive and people used many different combinations of classes and specs. If you are really a fan of game play, then either you missed this portion of Wow, or you dismissed it because it was mainstream.

UO was actually one of the most perfect games before they made it a class game with kiddy pool rules. The old school rules combined with a decent skill system made it like the wild west. I have more fond memories and exciting player vs player interactions in UO than in all other games combined. Combat was the weakest part, and that is also what made Asheron's Call terrible.

I'm mostly of the impression that any role-playing game with combat dictated by server latency is going to be terrible, and yes, Asheron's Call had some pretty awful combat, with the added bonus that it was a much easier game to solo than most of what's been in the genre. (I can't speak for Ultima Online, but pretty much everything adopted Everquest's model, and I hate any game that says "If you're not within seven levels of this monster, you will not kill it, ever", which is why I'm going to partially assume that Everquest player-versus-player required a seven-level-or-less difference). The most interesting things to come out of the MMORPGs are the player-driven decisions, where players start spreading the Corrupted Blood, try to take down a god-character on their own accord (and score a personal victory by watching as the developer shuts down the server, for fear that they'll win) and those genres should be appealing to those feats of skill, whether the players are being douchebags, overly courageous, simply tinkering with the game mechanics, being stupidly curious, or contributing to the lore of the game world. That's what I want to see more of. I'd play give up Bayonetta: The MMORPG if it meant getting more games where player input is meaningful.

To note,I played World of Warcraft on three separate subscriptions: The first time, I rolled a character to twenty, got bored with it, quit. Then I rolled a priest to thirty, got bored, quit. Then I made an account for the sole purpose of writing random lulz on my web site, and somehow, it was the one time I did not receive a warning from Blizzard. Think I got to level seven or eight on that run.

Trust me that I would probably not play Asheron's Call as much as I did back in 1999 and 2000, even if it was free-to-play. Should they ever find a way to go free-to-play with the game (the programming apparently makes it impossible), I'd probably play a couple weeks for nostalgia's sake. But Asheron's Call did the things that the genre should be doing, rather than the genre we have now, which is mostly a group of wannabe Dynasty Warriors clones with fewer enemies on the screen. I know you think much higher of World of Warcraft than I do, but until they fix the issues that come with combat and server latency (and the general linearity of the genre), it's tough for me to get interested in it right now. (I wanted to pull out my farking hair after playing Rusty Hearts. Good god, if that's the direction the genre is going, forget it.)

sprawl15: I never played it, but I heard the Shadowbane PvP system was like this from a friend who used to do a lot of crafting and guild v guild wars. But like you said above, the danger in letting players control the world is that some players will win; I think EVE Online avoids this by catering towards a very competitive type of player for nullsec shenanigans. Any alliance big enough to start to take control will shatter because of people out-douching eachother.

Precisely. Asheron's Call never had that, and there wasn't much reason to piss off your chain of command, because the entire guild system was designed on the idea of a patron-vassal relationship, where the vassal gives the patron a cut of his experience points, preferably in exchange for loot and support. It was the kind of system where someone would go out of their way to absolutely destroy you if you pissed them off, and rightly so. I can't quite speak on the other MMORPGs that did these things, games like Shadowbane, games like Darkfall, unfortunately, so maybe I have a bit of a high impression for what AC beyond all the rest of the filth in the genre.

sprawl15: The Skyrim mod tools coming out soon will be pretty interesting. Considering there are already people working on making it multiplayer (with some basic successes) before the tools are out, it'll be fascinating to see where they can go with official support. I'm planning on fixing a few things myself.

Cool. Get it going. Fix the combat for me. ^^

Hopefully, they do something more interesting than Macho Dragon or My Little Pony Dragon or whatever it was they were doing. Because those were pretty cool, too. Top that and it should be fun.