Garriot cackles darkly in the moonlight

Man, that sucks. I was looking forward to it. I miss my days on UO, and was hoping with UO2 they could alleviate some of the problems. Perhaps I'll just have to get back into the original.

Michael, you might want to try Third Dawn when it's released next week. It's a nice facelift for the game and they have safe areas away from pkers now, I think.

Origin, what happened to you? Man, that's sad.

Wow, and the graphics for UO2 were looking damn sweet. Perhaps EA knows a little something about the future of MMORPGs that we don't. Maybe the fact that everyone and their mother is making an MMORPG has made EA a little wary about trying to compete. Without a doubt most of the new MMORPG games are going to fail and end up costing so much due to the server setup costs that companies are going to go bankrupt over it. That seems like the only reasonable answer I can think of for why EA would cancel such an anticipated title.

Hmm, I guess they just realized Sony/Verant has the first-person fantasy online RPG market sewed up--or maybe that by releasing UO2 they'd be paying for and maintaining two big MMORPGs but splitting their customer base rather than drawing in new customers. I didn't see too many EQ fans gearing up to drop Norrath for Ultima.


I really think there is a very limited pool of people out there who will pay to play (or most importantly have the time to play) these huge time-sink games. I suspect we've about maxed out the pool of customers for EQ/AC/UO type games at around a half-million to 600,000 maybe. I think there's a huge pool of people willing to pay $10/month to play an online game where they can jump in two or three times a week for an hour or two at a time and have fun and be competitive. Thus Motor City Online might survive (hell, there is no competition for that one at least), and if the Star Wars thing Verant is doing pans out like they claim, it too should be more tolerant of casual gamers.


Earth and Beyond from Westwood might be feeling the hot breath of the axeman on its neck though, mainly because I think it's pretty cool and when I like a game it's usually axed. They got Harpoon 4, didn't they? The bastards.

"Earth and Beyond from Westwood might be feeling the hot breath of the axeman on its neck though"

Yipe, I forgot EA owns Westwood. If EA is getting out of the massively multiplayer market all together, I can see that title disappearing within the next few weeks.

I think we're back to the area that we were discussing for people paying for websites. When someone buys a game for $50, they don't want to then pay another $10 a month to play that game. EQ was able to get over the pay-to-play stigma by being the first of its kind to really succeed. Once they broke the 100k barrier, the free plublicity acted as a catalyst to get more and more people to play the game. However, any future game is going to have to be so muc better than EQ that people are going to be willing to abandon hundreds of realtime hours of work to start from scratch somewhere else. Me, well, I love massively multiplayer games, so I'm going to keep my EQ account and also pick one of the new MMORPGs to start up on. Problem is, I'm the minority.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for EA to dump UO2. They must have some decently intelligent bean counters over there, being as they're one of a vew few game companies that has been routinely profitable.

I think Earth and Beyond is far enough along that they'll finish it. It doesn't directly compete with UO, which was one of the problems UO2 had. I bet UO2 was behind schedule as well.

Like Bob, I'm unconvinced that there's much more of a market for the fantasy MMORPGs. The Sims Online is probably a sure bet, and Motor City Online might be a go if there aren't lag problems -- racing with cars warping ahead and behind will kill that game. Planetside can probably find an audience if they don't have lag problems also -- FPS gamers hate lagged games. Star Wars is a sure bet. Other than that, I'm dubious.

The MMORPG rush is the RTS rush all over again, but at five times the development cost.

I don't know, maybe they realized that UO2 was just costing too much to make given the amount of time put into Ultima Online: Third Dawn? They also have to support that for quite awhile. Since it's now 3D, it probably looked like too much money down the same hole.

I doubt they're getting ready to kill all their MMORPG stuff. EA has invested heavily in that new online portal of theirs and it would seem is hoping to cash in on a lot more than just Ultima Online. Earth and Beyond was just announced. I can't imagine they'd pull the plug.

Personally, I thought Ultima Worlds Online: Origin or whatever it was going by now was so far from the canon that it should've been called something different anyway. I wasn't that interested. If they had rebuilt the world and stayed true to Ultima, ok then, I might consider it. As it stands, Third Dawn (in whatever state it's in given the apparently rushed release), makes more sense for a short and long term investment.

No one ever said Origin managed money and resources well. In fact, they're well-known to do both really badly. EA is probably just straightening the place out once and for all.

--Dave

I think they were seeing their features being one-upped by Shadowbane. It seems to really be a case of "Name branding vs. above and beyond ambitious feature set"

That and competition was getting mighty thick. Let's look at the usual suspects here:

Anarchy Online
EQ
UO1
UO2
Shadowbane
Citizen Zero
Camelot
Fallout Online (some secret, eh?)
Star Wars Galaxies
The Sims Online
Horizons
Atriarch
Neocron
Asheron's Call
Dawn
Entropia
Middle-Earth
Adellion

Ok, now... here cometh the same pattern we've seen again and again in this industry... somebody makes a little money with a good idea, and about the time people are getting burnt out on it, 50 other publishers whip out clones. Can you say RTS flood? 3D shooter flood?

Yeah, I'm thinking MMORPG is going to go the way of the flightsim in a couple more years. When you've got 2 or 3 solid products to choose from, you can make a choice. When there are 50 titles to pick from, the core audience fragments and then blows away. It's just overload.

EA may be stupid in some things, but maybe it's a wise decision here. Much as I'd like to see UO2... but perhaps they can just incorperate the UO2 goodies they have developed into UO1 over time - whilst milking their 230,000 subscribers for update after update to do so.

That's funny Mark... great minds thinking alike again, eh? I took a while writing that post because I was trying to recall all the MMORPG game names. We both used the RTS flood example. Nice :-)

I'm not so convinced Sims Online will work.
That crowd strikes me as extremely casual tweakers who don't really know that much about their computers.

Like Drew Carey, I'm not sure but I'd bet he couldn't tell you much about the game beyond the fact that he thinks it's "cool" and the only tweaking he's done to it was having someone install the nude skins.

Online gaming still isn't something non-gamers can wrap their heads around. Naturally, I could be very wrong here this is all out of my ass (which is a euphamism for "out of my hat").

Personally I think the future of the Sims lies in better and more unpredictable AI... not having some guy in Queensland controlling the "Girl Next Door".

`Andrew

Asurom said:

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Quote:

Ok, now... here cometh the same pattern we've seen again and again in this industry... somebody makes a little money with a good idea, and about the time people are getting burnt out on it, 50 other publishers whip out clones. Can you say RTS flood? 3D shooter flood?

---

I think that without UO2, Ultima Online will soon (next 2-3 years) be history. There's too much new competition coming.

Qenan said

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Quote:

I think that without UO2, Ultima Online will soon (next 2-3 years) be history. There's too much new competition coming.

---

Dave said:

"I don't know, maybe they realized that UO2 was just costing too much to make given the amount of time put into Ultima Online: Third Dawn?"

More likely they realized that a lot of the audience for UO2 was going to come from UO. So basically they are doubling their upkeep costs to shuffle around a bunch of customers that they already have and who are, apparently, perfectly happy with the game the way it is.

The right way to do UO2 would be as a replacement for UO, but that's risky too--particularly with the game they were working with. A lot of players don't like the 3D first-person thing, so now they are looking at potentially losing happy customers that they already have to fight for customers that are currently playing EverQuest. Not a real smart business plan.

The hard truth is that the market simply can't support all the online RPGs that are currently in development. In fact, I'd bet money that most of them will never even go live. It seems like every day I see some new (and often small and independent) developer announcing their new online RPG. Do these people have any idea how much it costs to make one of these things? Do they have any idea how much it costs to run one on a month by month basis? I'm guessing that they don't. Either that or they've suffered some sort of head trauma.

But this is nothing new for the industry. We go through these cycles every few years, as several posters here have pointed out. Most of these "me too" developers will go under, and the industry is probably better off without them.

"Personally I think the future of the Sims lies in better and more unpredictable AI... not having some guy in Queensland controlling the "Girl Next Door"."

I dunno, Bub. Me so horny. Me love you long time. Fi' dollah?

That could work. For me, anyway.

"think there's a huge pool of people willing to pay $10/month to play an online game where they can jump in two or three times a week for an hour or two at a time and have fun and be competitive. "

Didn't I tell you guys that valve and blizzard need to charge for those "free" cd-keys, and just deliver a bit more regular content updates? Mark my words, it's coming.

Does it seem crazy to anyone else that I've been using the same valve cd-key from my circa 1998 copy of half-life for.. god.. hundreds of hours of online play? I mean spread across half-life dm and counter-strike. And I haven't paid a penny to anyone for this privilege.

I'm sure avid Starcraft players could make a similar argument. Imagine a world where the Brood Wars expansion pack was doled out in small doses of new units and maps (even single player sections) over a period of time.. not so implausible after all, and clearly worth $5 or $10 a month.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

---Does it seem crazy to anyone else that I've been using the same valve cd-key from my circa 1998 copy of half-life for.. god.. hundreds of hours of online play? I mean spread across half-life dm and counter-strike. And I haven't paid a penny to anyone for this privilege.---

No.

Not a bit. The stark contrast between paying monthly for a game, and paying once for the title and getting unlimited usage from it is simply one of server structure and backend support.

Basically, in a MMO environment the chief requirement is that everyone be on the same playing field. This obliges the developer to support the infrastructure of the game by supplying servers, bandwidth, and a support staff to maintain these. In a distributed server model, such as Q3, UT, HL or whatever, the end users themselves are filling the infrastructure requirements from their own pocket. It would be simply rude to try to double-tax your user base by charging them a fee merely for the "priveledge" of authentication with some server list.

Of course, if that were to come to pass, you can rest assured that said authentication scheme would be attacked with extreme prejudice by the mod community... and would become instantly ineffectual. With the current talk of non-online PS2 titles requiring online authentication (yes, this is going on) the "scene" is already scheming workarounds.

"Does it seem crazy to anyone else that I've been using the same valve cd-key from my circa 1998 copy of half-life for.. god.. hundreds of hours of online play? I mean spread across half-life dm and counter-strike. And I haven't paid a penny to anyone for this privilege."

Yeah, but do you know what happened to the Yahoo auction listings when Yahoo started to charge people for listing? They dropped by 90%.

I'd be surprised if people would pay to play Diablo 2 an Counter-Strike online for any length of time. Yes, there would be a core of avid users, but that core would just be a fraction of the current player base.

"It would be simply rude to try to double-tax your user base by charging them a fee merely for the "priveledge" of authentication with some server list."

The cost covers the development fees for new game types, new maps, new weapons, etc. Like I said, imagine getting Brood Wars or the Diablo Expansion doled out in monthly increments rather than buying a $39.95 retail box.

And personally I *much* prefer the distributed server model. Let us build the napster or gnutella like server network. Heck, it's easier, faster, and cheaper for everyone.

I would also argue that there needs to be a central server that all subservers report to, so there can be some kind of universal tracking of user data. Whether it be simple stuff like name and preferences-- your basic ladder-- or for more advanced mods, 'level' and 'inventory' and what have you. So your money would also go to fund that.

"Of course, if that were to come to pass, you can rest assured that said authentication scheme would be attacked with extreme prejudice by the mod community... and would become instantly ineffectual. With the current talk of non-online PS2 titles requiring online authentication (yes, this is going on) the "scene" is already scheming workarounds."

Online cd-key validation is actually about as hack-proof as it gets. The only existing hacks are essentially social engineering exploits-- tricking people into providing their valid CD-KEY to you. If you get a large enough pool of stolen cdkeys, you can distribute a "crack", but it's really just stolen keys-- and said keys can easily be invalidated by attentive admins as soon as they obtain a copy of the "crack".

"I'd be surprised if people would pay to play Diablo 2 an Counter-Strike online for any length of time. Yes, there would be a core of avid users, but that core would just be a fraction of the current player base."

See above. You're not only paying to play but to get new game features over time. A pretty sweet deal if you ask me; something I would pay for in a heartbeat.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

"But this is nothing new for the industry. We go through these cycles every few years, as several posters here have pointed out. Most of these "me too" developers will go under, and the industry is probably better off without them. "

I kind of feel . . . a little pity for all the UO2 fans and developers who were all hyped for the game. It didn't look too bad, other mmrpgs deserved a harsher fate than UO2.

though UO2 was probably gonna be a money sink for EA...though its kind of odd they didn't do this earlier in the UO2 dev cycle.

anyway, im betting none of the next gen mmrpgs will do well, or surpass EQ (even Star Wars Galaxies)... the steeper PC system requirements being the main reason and the "niche" crowd for these games. plus nothing in the next gen mmrpgs games seems truly groundbreaking imo.

etc

Is it just me, or is the only thing that EA has going for it anymore their sports franchise? At least right now, anyways. I mean, off the top of my head (and it's late, so I could be forgetting some things) I can't really recall many of EA's subsidiaries having any, uh, big games coming out anytime soon.

I mean, Westwood's just about the only really Big Huge Developer (tm) left. Maxis is out for awhile until the next Sim thing is out, and even then you can't bank on ripoffs or expansions forever. Jane's has been dead for awhile. Bullfrog... uh, yeah. Virgin? Same as Bullfrog.

Well Bullfrog just released Sim Coaster and one other coming "soon". Maxis has like 4 games in development (Sims online, Sims 2, Simville, Sim City 4000). Lion Head is EA so B&W will be out soon.

I don't think that UO2's fate will be shared by a huge number of other MMORPGs. Like many people said, I think that the key problem was that they new most of the people that played UO2 would come from UO. It was probably going to be more cost than profit. I'll just have to look into Third Dawn a little more. It looks interesting.

I thought I read somewhere that UO2 was gonna keep an isometric view. I guess not, as I seem to be the only one who thought that. It wouldn't have made much sense, either.

My dream for the next Ultima MMORPG would look like Ultima: Ascension. I know that I'm the only person in the world who liked that game, but most agree on one thing -- it was beautiful. My wife even liked to watch me play that one, because it was just so darn pretty. Sure, that would be hard to do online, because lag would be sure and kill a lot of people, but it sure would be cool.

But, that could just be a dream. They could just upgrade and expand UO forever. They've got a pretty solid base. I think a lot of their customers will stay with them for a long time.

I'd pay a monthly fee for a game that I liked, if for that fee I not only received supported and updated multiplayer stuff, but also single-player updates--new missions, new campaigns, new characters, etc.

Man I was finally going to try an MMORPG for once! I've never played one and UO was lookin so sweet. I can't believe EA thinks that the subscribers they have on board now are going to stay. The game is getting very old, and I can see there user base depleting. Also, EA may be a little worried about the over abundance over MMORPG's coming out in the next year or two but they have something what these other MMORPG's don't have. A committed and loyal user base. With over 230, 000 subscribers how can the new version go wrong! I bet the majority of the subscribers would have gladly bought the new game and in the process EA waould have gained new subscribers with the new game. Now UO is done and EA is going to lose big time. This was a bad move. If they needed to cut costs they should have looked else where. Oh well, maybe I'll give Planetside a spin. That looks awesome. That will be after I get bored of Tribes 2 and Black and White. Who says PC gaming is done! :)

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Quote:

Now UO is done and EA is going to
lose big time.

---

If UO2 had been a replacement for UO, then yeah, it would make little sense. But it wasn't. It was going to run side by side, and aye, there's the rub.

Here's what I don't get -- why is Westwood doing Earth and Beyond instead of C&C Online? Origin should be doing Privateer Online, but Earth and Beyond caused that title to be killed.

It would have made so much more sense for Westwood to do a persistent world C&C and Origin to do a persistent world Privateer or Wing Commander.

"t would have made so much more sense for Westwood to do a persistent world C&C"

I would just love to see a persistant world RTS game. No idea how it would work, but at least Verant is trying to do it with Sovereign(sp). What I would kill for is a persistant universe Battletech system. You have disputed planets that each team can drop forces on. If a player from the other team is on, he can take control of the mechs from a command standpoint or jump into a selected mech and fight toe to toe with the invading forces. You set it up so each game has X number of planets and each planet provides Y number of resources that you can spend on constructing, repairing, and equiping mechs. It's probably too complex to actually make it, but damn would I even love it.

No one's been able to do a persistent RTS world yet, which is why you haven't seen one . The kicker, and Sovereign hasn't as yet solved this either as far as I can see, is what to do when the player isn't on line. If you force players to be online 24/7 to defend their conquests, you won't have any players. If you make it impossible to attack players who aren't online, you'll have folks abusing the system and eventually whole areas of the gameworld going inactive because they're occupied by absentee conquerors I'm afraid.

When I last talked to Verant about this, the plan was to have your bases automatically defend themselves while you were offline, and to have the game email you when you were under attack. Still, I expect that players who log off at night with a healthy city and log on the following evening to find it under seige and halfway destroyed will be quite unhappy with the game.

I wouldn't be surprised if they either shorten games so they start and finish in one night or force players to commit to playing at scheduled times.

Sovereign won't really have a persistent world anyway. Games will begin and end. It's just that Verant has said games could last as long as six weeks. The persistent element is in the player's character which is used from game to game. You get experience points and starting bonuses based on your character, etc.

I thing the game might be kind of a mess actually. It sounds really complicated and isn't really an RTS like we know it. It's much more complicated than that, at least as I understood the game when I saw it more than a year ago.

Just a guess, but it looks like EA may be like a lot of other semi-large companies out there, and not entirely in touch with itself. They might have people not really associated with any of the product looking at spreadsheets and deciding not to have self-competing products based on name, like having 2 Ultima games. They may know very little about the games themselves. they may also be looking at UO being eclipsed by Everquest, and looking in new directions for their new ventures.

Personally, privateer online makes perfect sense to me. A well-known name, a well-respected game (the first one, anyway), and Chris Roberts appears to be available right about now. People would run their little businesses/ships, and there could be safe points where you could quit with no fear of being blasted to bits while offline. Pretty slick, and probably a good bet with the sci-fi/sim crowd.

Earth and Beyond actually sounds a lot like FreeLancer or Privateer, more like the former because of the non-joystick combat in the game (as I understand it, it won't be an action/sim based system). I think it looks pretty interesting, at least in theory.

CnC Online makes ALOT more sense then Earth and Beyond. Who the heck knows what is up with EA! As long as they dont cancel Freedom Force. . . I'll still have a LITTLE respect for EA.

etc

You can already play C&C games online, on Westwood's own servers and other places. Creating a persistant world "wrapper" or other mulitplayer shell that would be feasible, entertaining, and attractive to paying customers seems a long shot. People can play all the multiplaye C&C games they want now for free, after all, and the game system isn't suited to anything but that sort of standard RTS 2-8 player matchup type of thing.


What would make more sense would be a persistent world game where the setting was something out of C&C, though where you'd place it in either the main C&C or the Red Alert timeline is a mystery. Also a mystery is what, exactly, you would actually do in this game....

That would be the real problem with C&C online, and the same problem carries over to a lot of other genres -- not everything can become a massively-multiplayer online game. Games like C&C, and Quake and UT are designed for relatively quick games against a few people. The genres just aren't designed to create a character and live in some online world. Heck, I can't really think of any genre other than RPG that would make for a smooth transition to the MMO market -- which is likely why it was the first, and so far the only, genre to make such a transition.

Who would've imagined five years ago that games like UO and EQ would ever exist?

Five years ago? Try ten, because it was in 1991 that Neverwinter Nights debuted on AOL. Yeah, it's old and hokey by today's standard but it was online multiplayer RPGing with persistent characters and a world, though far less attractive visually than EverQuests, wasn't that much if any more shallow.

"Who would've imagined five years ago that games like UO and EQ would ever exist?"

People who were playing Meridian 59 and the Realm I suspect. ;-)

~Andrew

Okay, okay, so I was not so aware of things five or ten years ago...What can I say? I'm young, I guess. Then again, maybe I was aware and just didn't realize how long it's been...I was playing UO two and a half years ago, so three years ago I was wanting it...Sure, five years was way off. I just didn't realize it. I remember the first mention I heard of the internet, and could only imagine...But then, that would have been about thirteen years ago or so...