Posted on April 10, 2014, in Episodes, Sidequest. Bookmark the permalink. 30 Comments.
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Posted on April 10, 2014, in Episodes, Sidequest. Bookmark the permalink. 30 Comments.
MMO Grinder 
Man, it’s only been a couple of years. I was surprised to hear the studio that made this is closing down.
I’ve been playing Wildstar beta a bit. I’m pretty much in same boat with others, no problems buying copy but subscription makes it tough sell.
I’m actually surprised so few folks have heard of it. But then again, I really haven’t seen that much advertisement for it, despite how stellar the trailers for the game have been. Guess they popped for high-class ads, but not a widespread ad campaign. This is sad, because the game looks so good, and has a very unique aesthetic. And it’s slated to be a P2P? Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. I hope they’re not gearing up to shoot themselves in the foot, especially with how much potential I see in the game.
You make a good point about the subscription being a big barrier.
I’m excited about Wildstar, ESO, FF 14 and WoW but there’s no way it’s even remotely feasible to pay $30-$60~ a month to play them. I might give Wildstar a shot but it’s got steep competition.
It doesn’t help that, at this point, most people are just going to say “meh, I’ll wait till it goes F2P” That mindset definitely doesn’t help Sub MMOs make it. (Other than WoW and possibly FF 14- due to FF 11’s history)
Oh wow I remember playing this game 3 year a go at Gamescom. Looks like it still looks the same, guess that they really wanted to stick to the borderlands feel. But wow a sub game and like you say in the preview almost nobody knows about it heck I myself thought the game was canned.
It looks interesting but the monthly fee is something I can’t really accept.
It cost’s 45€ (preorder), you get 1 free month & after that 1 month costs 13€.
I could play this game for half a year & that cost me 110€. That is way too much considering that I don’t even wanna pay 60€ for brand new games, I usually wait till they get cheaper.
If I play 2 months, then it is 58€, that sounds more reasonable & everything over that is not justified in my eyes. (even if I like the game)
Then there is this 1 game on steam where I have 1800+ hour’s played & that game only cost me like 10€ if I remember correctly. Even if you play wildstar 2 months straight without ever looking away from the screen (impossible obviously, you will die), you will only reach 1460+ hour’s in 2 months.
I know I shouldn’t be min-maxing but if you actually only had to pay for the hour’s you actually play the game, would be much much cheaper than 13€. To me, the monthly flatrate subscription model looks more like a ripoff, because no human being can get one month money worth it & play out all of the hour’s.
I actually calculated how much money you would lose with ESO & people weren’t very pleased with me when I wrote it down.
Not much else to say, but look what funny thing I found on ESO forums lol xD
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/606444
“I got banned for mailing my guild members. I AM THE GUILD LEADER!!!!!”
Sorry to say that literally nothing about this game makes me want to play it. It’s a shame, because it’s clear that the developers worked really hard on the game to give it a unique and polished look and feel, and lord knows the MMO market could use more innovation, but none of the character models, enemy designs or environments look interesting to me at all (the art style just doesn’t do it for me), and all of the gameplay videos I’ve seen of it make me feel like I would get bored out of my mind within the first couple hours of playing it… Even if the game was totally free to play, I couldn’t see myself having the motivation to even bother trying it out.
I was actually getting interested to check it out until you mentioned that it’s going to be a sub game. I am one of the few that actually sub to SWTOR, but I only subbed once I’d leveled my character to the point where the XP penalty kicked in, giving me more than enough time to figure out if I wanted to pay for it. I’m not in the mood to sub to more than one game at a time, and I’m certainly not going to sub for a game that I don’t even get the chance to try first. I’m picky and I must have tried half-dozen games before settling on SWTOR (I do majority solo because I often only have an hour or so to play a day if that). That said, if it were buy to play and the buy price was $30 or less, I’d be more open to giving it a shot.
Oh well. I’ll check it out when it inevitably goes F2P. If it lasts six months as sub only, I’ll be shocked.
So…
Auto Assault
Tabula Rasa
Wildstar
Something seem familiar? All had long development, no publicity, were sub, and all were NCSoft; and soon Wildstar will get shut down like the first two because NCSoft hates you if you aren’t in Korea. They have to kill these games so Lineage 2 can stay up, right? Must be a plot to make their crap games look good by killing all new games out the gate.
City of Heroes was an exception in not being shuttered right away’ and NCSoft is hands off for GW as far as I can tell, not sure what voodoo happened there.
Anyway you watch, NCSoft will move to shutter Wildstar soon enough and then hunt down fans who try to create servers after the shut down. NCSoft is where games go to die.
“Dungeon Runners” was a decent’ish game too,
But yeah, the track record of NCSoft simply horrendous. Not to mentioned that there has been rumors too that the developers of the IPs you mentioned more than likely would have even wanted to buy-back the IPs for themselves to continue development. But NCSoft decided to be one of those “horde”-companies who just pile up IPs to sit on and do nothing else with them (such is the case of “Metal Arms: Glitch in the System”, at several years ago).
But yeah, it’s more than likely the scenario you mentioned is going to happen yet once again…
Wow I completely forgot about Dungeon Runners. Again you’ll note it wasn’t from the Korean studio. And yeah NCSoft is definitely all about hoarding IP and sitting on it. Oh well, I’m going to give it a try this beta weekend and take a look at it before NCSoft strangles it to death. Man, I had been following this one for a long time, like when they first announced it, back when CoH was still around, and now.. yeah I just can’t get attached now that I’ve realized how likely it’s probably going to be put into the ground.
Despite not being interested in the title at all, I already fell bad for the developers putting so much effort into fleshing out a setting that will probably end up in NCSoft’s IP graveyard.
Yeah, with all the different MMOs you play to do this show, you probably spend about as much time on one, possibly less, than I do.
I wish MMOs would do Weekly Premiums, where you just pay for the week or 2 you’re actually going to play. $3.75 a week instead of $15 a month is something I’d be willing to pay for.
It’s like watching a Scarlet Blade character running through an anime MMO.
On the subject of marketing, you’re right, there was never a whole lot. Until about about a week and a half ago in Boston. Suddenly, every taxi and most public trash bins and subway signs have WildStar ads. Plugging for PAX East, I guess.
Well… bummer. I was really looking forward for this one.
I still am, but the monthly fee is a bit too much for me at the time being.
Oh well, I just hope they will realize that they’ll gain much more audience by going pay-to-play, for example.
Anywho, thanks for covering this one in your episode. Cheers.
I remembered hearing about this game from some time, especially since the whole video intro stuff they released. I was surprised not many heard about it at first (Since my friends clued me in.) and when I saw the style and humor, I was really liking it. The game itself was shaping up fine. I questioned some of the choices but eventually I heard that it was going to be Pay to Play. Now unlike ESO, Wildstar could hold a subscription but with the market of Sub games being as you said in the video “Well established franchises” they should go the Secret Route way or make it Guild Wars 2 with pay 50$ and no online fee.
The game does look great. The combat is…alright…but besides the change of quests and what you do, the housing system and the famous voice actors, I saw no reason to invest in this game. Granted I am still one of those old vets who are dedicated to wow not just due to the hours i put in but because i know Blizzard has grabbed my attention every time (Every time before expansion is announced I attempt to play a new MMO…then i am pulled back in.)
It happened with FF14 ARR. New raids and stuff added to the endgame of Wow. As old as that game is, they just keep adding stuff in to bring me back despite the community (Which is only super horrid on RP servers) and the lore being messed up.
As a Sci-fi game, Wildstar is shaping to be better than Star Trek Online in my opinion but that barrier is very worrying. I want the game to do well. I really do…
But then i saw people saying the same thing you pointed in the video of how it will kill wow or how it will be better than wow when they are completely different genres of MMO (Sci-fi against Medieval Fantasy with Steam Punk elements.)
I thank you for doing the sidequest for us.
Everything I hear about this game makes me care about it less and less. It’s “sci-fi,” supposedly, yet it takes place in the standard Fantasy forest setting fighting the standard Fantasy forest creatures. Yay. It’s “comedic.” Yay… I’m as sick of the grim-and-gritty brown-and-grey nonsense as much as anybody else, but tongue-in-cheek comedy is NOT the answer to that. Hopeful, positive, idealistic settings are. Going from depressing games to funny games is like being depressed and then getting drunk so it seems funny to you.
And besides, it’s published by NCsoft. I don’t like NCsoft. They have a tendency to pull the rug from under their MMOs, fire their entire development team overnight and then sit on the license so nobody can ever make anything out of it. Luckily for me, they make not liking them easy, since they don’t actually publish anything I want.
You’d think former devs of City of Heroes are the LAST people who’d want to work with NCSoft…
I played the beta for ESO and Wildstar, I will wait for the games to go to F2P. Until then I will continue to play WoW.
The point that I think summarized this the best was the comparison to ESO and asking how many of us would pay for it. I honestly don’t see why they don’t make Wildstar a B2P like Guild Wars 2, and as much as I harp on GW2 the fact I have an option to go back someday down the line without spending money to do so will always give it an edge on other games with subscription models.
You’d think they would look at their fellow NCSoft published colleague Guildwars 2 to see how going B2P from the get go can be a working revenue model. But alas, this game and ESO went for that same pitfall of monthly fees and I feel that that’s going to hurt them in the long run…while it certainly didn’t have to had been that way.
WoW really messed up market expectations when they became successful under a fifteen dollar a moth subscription model. Now when a mmo requires a subscription companies go to a fifteen a month system automatically. Hell, I don’t think there’s a well known Pay to Play MMO that isn’t at base fifteen (Eve, FF14, Wild-star, and elder scrolls are all 15 unless you buy multiple months at a time). Why not ten, seven, or heck even five dollars a month?
I just can’t swallow $15 a month fee in today’s market. Not because I can’t afford it. Its because I just cant justify spending that much on one game month after month when I can go on steam and find a dozen or so individual games that could hold my interest just as well for the same price. Or better yet, a F2P MMO where I can spend as much as I want on things I actually want rather then a flat fifteen just to keep playing.
I don’t think I’m the only one, given how many mmo’s fail or have gone f2p in recent years. Its gotten so bad people predicted swtors change to f2p just a few months after release. People are already claiming Elder scrolls and Wild-star will be eventually f2p, and honestly I can’t blame them. I just wish companies would give more thought into subscriptions instead of fallowing the pack. I don’t hate subscriptions, but companies should really consider other options. (other than grind my game for a month so you can pay for the the next month where you can grind for the month after that ect. approach).
FF 14 ARR has a 12$ a month sub option that limits you to three characters actually.
and i thought this was going to be F2P
Wildstar’s payment model, just in case someone tells you otherwise:
https://www.wildstar-online.com/en/game/features/business-model/
Now that’s just worse. Players have to buy 30 days of the game in order for other players to sell them to. Basically, it inflates the price of the damn thing that you’re better off just paying.
That’s not offering 2 options. The ‘free’ players get paid for by the paying players.
Doesn’t that seem wrong?
Oh, so that’s Wildstar… yeah, you’re right, I really haven’t heard much about that title. It does look interesting, but yeah, with that subscription wall, not sure if I’ll get a chance to check it out. Still, hope it doesn’t do bad, because it would be nice to see more games similar to this.
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