The fact that there was 10x the pve in War than in Daoc refutes your point. Furthermore, you pvpd in War to get the privilege of doing more pve. LOL. So the facts refute your hypotheses.

Rift is like a cross between Failhammer and WoW. It's VERY polished, so that is an enjoyment. But in the end, the game design is flawed just like both WoW and Failhammer. The PvP servers could have been similar to DAOC, except they only have 2 realms, and you can make characters in both realms on the same server, and there are no meaningful PvP objectives...oh and they added in instanced PvP arenas, like Failhammer just to ensure you will find little open world pvp.

The classes have immense imbalance, so much so that if you aren't playing a handful of specs it's like tieing one hand behind your back.

However, I still have to give Trion credit for making a very polished game with a lot of attention to detail...it's just too bad that they failed at the big picture kind of things.

 

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Which is something one expects in a new game anyway.. hardly a deal breaker.. you can only do so much testing upfront.. there's always going to be certain creative individuals that find that FOTM build.

Just look at daoc.. after 10 years they are still tweaking classes.. and with each tweak you create a new imbalance (or just get more ppl trying out the "new" shiny class.. ie. just look at how many savages you see in daoc compared to 3 months ago)


Anyway it's a polished game.. but it's indeed a mix of WoW+WH.. the PvP is mildly entertaining, but without some investment in their PvP part of the game, it's not going anywhere imho.

Well the class imbalances I am talking about are so vast it is mind blowing...anyone that plays the classes can see it. Also a lot of abilities and mechanics are broken. To me since the rest of the game is polished they should have been able to devote more resources to fixing class imbalance/broken abilities prior to release. And they haven't released a patch that addresses any of these issues yet, even though they are well known on their official forums.

But I agree, the end game is very boring and there isn't even a looking for group social option in the game...it becomes a big solofest unless you have real life friends in game.

 

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You are presuming a large portion of those box sells were bought because of interest in RvR. The reality is that most of those box sales were due to the extremely large fanbase of Games Workshop's Warhammer products which have been around for decades.

The point stands, that "rvr-centric" mmo games are a niche market. DAOC was successful for 3 reasons:
1. They were a big fish in a small pond - there were bigger fish (EQ, UO), but there was not a lot of competition.
2. They combined two key elements of fantasy: Camelot Lore and Tolkein's Fantasy World (which almost all fantasy games are based on)
3. They made PvP combat non-personal and very accessible. For example, I would never have played a "PvP" game; but once I was introduced to my first RvR, I was hooked and now I won't bother with a pve game.

There are other aspects that certainly added to the success of the game, but I don't think most of those are unique to DAOC. It takes many elements to put together a good game. Subsequent games have hit on all the bases but still fail to reach the heights of DAOC, EQ, UO, and of course no one is going to match WoW's success.

I haven't tried rift, and most likely wont bother. But I enjoy reading feedback about all new games, so thanks for sharing OP.

 

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You also presume... since neither have a market research report, both can be right / wrong... just because you think it's a certain way, doesn't make it so.

You have to admit Morgash has a pretty reasonable argument.

 

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Stands up to reason though, Doc, whereas his presumption does not. Fact is, pvp is a niche market, as far as fantasy centric mmo's are concerned. If you disagree, would you kindly name me one fantasy MMO that is pvp centric that survives today with a reputation for having been, and is currently considered successful?

Having been an interested party in Games Workshop's quest to make a mmo since 2002/2003, and watching them scrap the game in 2004 (before it ever launched), I know there was simply a tidal wave of interest in the game from GW fans once it got back on track with Mythic getting the license. And from being involved with the GW community, they had a very different understanding of what we call pvp/rvr, and it was not a factor in their interest in seeing this tabletop game come to life in a virtual world.

On the flip side, if such a large portion of the subs were from folks who wanted pvp/rvr as we commonly define those terms, why did record box sales not equate to longevity? I played the game - it was beautiful, and they did a bang up job of staying true to the world created by GW. PvP was all over the place. And the bugs were not as bad as folks made them seem - I'd say they were average in that dept. when you consider most new games have issues.

So sure, my comment is a presumption, but it is a presumption that stands up to reason once you take into consideration the things we do know about the development of the game, the long history of the company, and the long anticipated release of the online version. whereas his comment was more of a naked presumption imo.

Lasraik hit the nail on the head, pve is the foundational aspect to any successful fantasy MMO, and you need it to support a thriving pvp environment. There are a couple reasons that come to mind to explain this, but the only one that applies to this debate is also the most obvious: PvP is a niche market! It's much easier to piggy back a bicycle on top of your SUV and have a functional mode of transportation than it is to put your SUV on top of your bike.

I would love to see a great next gen fantasy based mmo come out that can rival the level of pvp entertainment that DAOC has provided...but I can almost guarantee you that if it's a game supported entirely by the RvR-centric segment of players, it will necessarily be a very small niche game - and there is nothing wrong with that! (since that is essentially what DAOC is now )

 

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I can just say, as a veteran DAOC player (got the game when I was 11, back in 2001), who played it through till a bit after Catacombs/TOA. Rift is probably one of the most polished MMO's experiences to come out in a while, and is one of the most relative to DAoC.

Why? The Soul System. Yeah, it looks completely different to DAOC, but it isn't in a way. Hell, the Rift "Bard" is a mix of a ministrel, bard, or skald depending on what mix of souls you use (Bard/Assassin/Nightblade is a ministrel, Bard + any melee is similar to Skald, etc.) This is just an example.

Rift isn't anything thats completely innovative and mindblowing, but the soul system and its notion of rift invasions have not been explored before fully.

Let's face it, DAoC, unless revived by Mythic (although I feel Mythic is in shambles right now), is not going to be remade. It died with Dawn of Camelot after it got cancelled, and Warhammer sucked up all of Mythic's resources I feel.

If you quit rift because OPvP doesn't have a point right now why did you continue playing DAOC...?


It didn't have a point to RvR when it first came out...

 

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