Game longevity; could this be the game to last?

Hippy Nerdbane

I'm just about 50 now.. Cut my teeth on Meridan 59, then EQ and DAoC; honestly, I've played the latter off and on ever since. Thats like 20+ years in a game.

That got me thinking.. I'm going to be retiring in around 15 years and I know I'm in that awesome generation of gaming pioneers that will be buying our killer gaming rigs on our last day of work (fk the watch, give me a GPU !!) and then I'll be looking to game. Any gardening, traveling, and new hobbies will have to be in game ..

I know the community is a HUGE part of the longevity of a game but do those of you here now think that this is the vehicle to carry us 20 years + ?

Devs? Where do you see us in 10 years? Are we releasing expansions every 18-months to keep everyone enticed?

Sorry if a lot of this has been covered elsewhere.. I'm just trying to bridge the gap between creeping and participating.

Cheers,

Ty

Hakaiju

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Release_schedule

It looks like they want to release bigger patches every 3 months. If thats realistic has to be seen in the future. Steven said about a month ago that there are already 3 million registered accounts, with that big of a community the game shouldnt die so easily without major mistakes from interprid.

Yuyukoyay

It's the first game to put as much resources into an MMO as WoW did. Since then no other MMO was even close to the manpower put into even half of that game. Therefore the quality of ashes might be high enough to compete vs it. As long as the mechanics are done well I'm sure it won't get stomped out immediately.

The problem with other games is them being released too early to actually add any quality to the games outside of graphics, but graphics are the least important part of an MMO. It's great when they are good, but mechanics are too important and that's what a lot of MMO's lack that aren't one of the really good ones.

It depends how many people stay invested in it. How fun the game is. How much content is in the game. How fun the PVP is. How quick bugs are dealt with. Bugs that are detrimental to the enjoyment of the game are not left in for prolonged amounts of time. How fair tagging is compared to every class.

All of which we won't really know until the game has been out for like a year. I hope it stays relevant forever though.

Michael

Assuming Intrepid stays true to the goal (Which I'm sure we all think they will!) then I think this game will definitely last. There are other games that have been out for a very long time like 5+ years, and are still hitting record high player numbers. If those games can do it, why can't Ashes of Creation?

Vhaeyne

@Tylaric The game could have an incredible life span. Like EVE, or DAoC. The open world sandbox nature of the game positions AoC to have a insane life. It all depend on how Intrepid steers their ship. It also depends on how many concurrent subs Intrepid considers to be successful. Games like EVE,L1,EVE,DAoC,DDO, and FFXI. Still exist to this day with very dedicated player bases. Is intrepid going to be happy with around 10k concurrent users? I can't be sure, but the game looks good enough to me to gamble on it. I would rather play a good game that is great for me with a single shard of dedicated players, than the biggest MMO with millions of players.

HazardNumberSeven

I hope so.

Atama

Finances could have a lot to do with it. Take City of Heroes, for example. It had a small but dedicated community, similar to what you might expect from Ashes of Creation. When the game was shut down it was still popular, but the people who owned the IP wanted to allocate resources to getting Guild Wars 2 made, and the game didn't have a huge profit margin (it had gone free-to-play a year earlier in an attempt to improve revenue). That dedicated community and the game's popularity is why it came back, this time run for free by fans who had the codebase on unauthorized servers.

I have the feeling that if Intrepid Studios keeps ownership of the game and is able to stay afloat it will have a long life. If you ever see it sold off, no matter how much sunshine is put out about the deal (this game wouldn't attract a buyer if it wasn't great) I would worry about its future.

Of course it's not even in full Alpha yet so all this is a bit premature...

TheHiddenDaggerInn

I really do believe this will be the next big thing to last, as a old timer like you it has been tough finding games to replace the DAoC's and such. Then there is a whole new generation of WoW players that by now must be looking for something different as well. And many of them have not been introduced to fun PvP and I believe Steven will bring all his experience from all the games, that many of us have played and incorperate them.

This is the best possible scenario we could have, a TRUE FAN, with the vision and financial backing to make a game many of us have been looking for years to obtain. With many greedy corperate agendas blocking good idea's intead worried about profitablity and rushing the game.. cough EA and moneygrubbing companies that ran oh say Archeage ..that won't happen here and that's very exciting.

McShave

I think this game will hinge on the node sieging system. For the game to be interesting long term, many nodes will have to rise and fall so that new things can be discovered. If sieging a node is boring, or is too difficult, then every server will be stagnant within a few months. but if sieging is fun then this game will be good forever.

Besides that, there is tons to do. religion, social organization, pve, pvp, trading, exploring the vast open world. I think this game will be great. There is also much room for additional content. expanded map size, new node types, new class types. All sorts of things to add for many many years to come.

Michael

McShave wrote: »

I think this game will hinge on the node sieging system. For the game to be interesting long term, many nodes will have to rise and fall so that new things can be discovered. If sieging a node is boring, or is too difficult, then every server will be stagnant within a few months. but if sieging is fun then this game will be good forever.

Besides that, there is tons to do. religion, social organization, pve, pvp, trading, exploring the vast open world. I think this game will be great. There is also much room for additional content. expanded map size, new node types, new class types. All sorts of things to add for many many years to come.

Exactly this. So much content will be generated throughout the lifespan of each server assuming not every single person has a truce. In that case, we may not see many new nodes grow into a Metropolis

Hippy Nerdbane

Enjoy the feedback and discussion... Can't wait to see you all in Beta !

PlagueMonk

Could this be the game? Yes, absolutely. Hell it could even go on to Dwarf WoW! (remember we are talking "could")

I think the more important question is, "Will" it be the MMO above all other MMOs? That is of course a question we will not be able to answer for a couple years

Lore Dynamic

I tend to think about games like the original EverQuest online, and Final Fantasy XI (11). These are both rather old games, that even had newer 'versions' created meant to be a better replacement (EverQuest II & Final Fantasy 14), but regardless; the first versions are still followed by a large number of dedicated players. Because they are personally invested and genuinely enjoy playing.

So any game can really become that 'special' game for a person, if they choose to make it be.

My father is in his 60's and loves WoW. It's his first MMO ever and that will always likely remain the case. I doubt he'll ever branch out and try different games, because Warcraft will always be "his" game. He's chosen that to be the case, on his own.

Atama

You can also have a great game like SWG that is completely destroyed by the developers.

Yuyukoyay

They definitely need to be careful about what changes they make. WoW made this mistake with the cataclysm world redesign where they changed almost everything about the entire game. It changed the quests permanently which locked you out of the story from before that expansion forever. The gameplay also changed drastically. The gameplay was much slower in wrath or earlier. Which was better because it gave you time to be strategic, gave a reason to be strategic, and gave you time to plan things out. Also was less stressful for healers which is a pretty hard job already due to how high threat was back then.

Changes have to be in the spirit for what the game is about so they have to avoid drastic gameplay changes too. I don't mind a little rebalancing here and there, but that's not the same as completely redesigning every class in the game like they did.

You could play Modern WoW and Classic WoW for an hour each and see how drastically different they are. They truly aren't even the same game. So yeah that would be a big thing to watch out for.

I'm all for new classes and races though. I would be careful if you were to try to add advanced classes and things like that though if the game doesn't already use those systems. This game kinda does already by fusing 2 archetypes together. That is a good example of what kind of changes might be too much though.

Changing too much might make your original fans quit and not actually gain you any more players overall.