Oct 25
An Immature Rebuttal to VirginWorlds’ Top Ten List
Brent, buddy, you know I love what you do. But jeezus … your top ten list suuucked.
The Virgin Worlds podcast is a happy part of my week, every week, and at first I was enthused when a ‘Top 10 MMOGs’ list began back on the 12th. Instead of listening to the first back at the start of the month, I waited until the second half was released to start listening.
My biggest beef was the assertion that the higher numbered MMOGs were somehow ‘better’ than the lower numbered ones. I realize it’s less interesing when a top ten list doesn’t imply ranking, but in this case I think that’s the way I would have gone. Otherwise, it seems somewhat offset to compare almost decade-old work to brand new stuff. Likewise, games built on a shoestring compared to juggernauts like WoW? Blah.
I don’t care that WoW was #7. It’s iteratively better, not evolutionarily. Totally agree. You guys are obviously approaching the games from the POV of MMOG snobs, and I respect that at least. No problem.
But Jeezus. The fucking Warden? You’re complaining about the Warden? You’re complaining about their bad Customer Service? “Hi, this is 2003, I want my complaints back.” You then go on to discuss how Asherons Call is better than WoW, because some of its shitty content was hidden from most of the players. That is the most ass backwards thing I’ve ever heard. It’s a game, guys, not a scavenger hunt or geocaching. The point is to have fun, not spend time searching for content. (Subtle glares at Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest.)
On top of that, you then ranked Everquest 2 above WoW on your list. The hell? I’d love to know what alternate reality you folks are living in where EQ2 is a ‘better’ game than World of Warcraft. EQ2 is just like the majority of SOE’s games: lots of promise, plenty of potential, flawed execution. The traditional SOE recipe for failure has kept the greatness of EverQuest 2 from dominating the MMOG conciousness, and positioning it higher than WoW on the list is not going to change that.
Other crankiness elicited by your list:
- Guild Wars is Multiplayer, and it’s Online, but it ain’t Massive by most definitions.
- You should be ashamed of yourselves, making us Westerners remember that Lineage II exists. You gave children nightmares and made our crops blight!
- Ryzom’s big ticket to fame is it Frenchness. Okay, the Ring is really good. I’d like it more if the game the Ring was built on wasn’t so damn boring.
Since it’s my blog and I’ll second guess if I want to, my list would have looked more like this:
- Everquest - teh Winner!
- World of Warcraft - your new lord and master
- FFXI - the much overlooked asskicker
- City of Heroes/Villains - tights make everyone happy
- Dark Age of Camelot - PvP’s home turf
- Everquest 2 - so much potential
- Ultima Online - Grandpa
- Eve Online - funnest screensaver ever
- Puzzle Pirates - puzzles are the future
- Star Wars Galaxies - what not to do
All whining aside, I liked the obvious effort you put into the feature. Nice work, gents. Just, less ganja next time you working on the Science.
11 Comments so far
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Laf. I love your rebuttal. This is exactly the kind of thing we anticipated when we did this list (as Brenden said, “You anger makes him happy”) and of all the responses we’ve seen so far, this one is king.
We did approach this as MMOG snobs, no doubt about. Guilty!
What you didn’t realize when you wrote this is that you just volunteered your self as the 3rd panel member next time we do something like this. :)
Jeez. These captchas really are hard. Think I’ll tone that down a bit.
Thank you for seeing my tongue in my cheek, sir! :D
As I said, I love what you do, I just had to poke the angry stick where I could.
And uhhhh … yay for paneling? :) I’d be glad to help next time, if only so Lineage 2 doesn’t blight our crops again. The corn farmers in Iowa are made very sad!
Good show… nice to have someone from the WI representin’
Anyways I think both your lists are full of shit because they both have Everquest and Everquest 2 listed. For fuck sake its a stolen idea that was never ever even remotely close to the original quality of the Diku MUDs. Not until World of Warcraft did we actually get a refinement of the Diku style which actually opened it up to be enjoyable.
It seems you are just throwing EQ in there simply because it was first with “real” 3D which is a pretty sad reason to be on the list. I bet you can’t even name one thing other than graphics that EQ improved upon from the Diku model. It never did and therefore is a null and void MMORPG in the pits of MMO hell.
A top 10 list of MMORPGs can’t really exist since there isn’t 10 to be listed that really have done anything other than put graphics in place of text. Really the sticking point here is massive otherwise we’d be singing Bartle’s praise till the early morning.
I’ll just run down my quick list of MMORPGs that meant something.
1. Ultima Online. First and only game to come out like it. Really perfected the monthly subscription model and is probably the reason MMORPGs of today are so damn cheap to play. Could you imagine if UO started out at $19.99 a month?
2. EVE Online. New breed game that really is going for the massive. Only game to actually build a single world. Sure they have branched with the Chinese server, but that is a language/cultural barrier. A lot of real world (politics, corporate antics, banking, etc.) makes it into the game and we’ve yet to see if that really is meant for the MMORPG market or not. But EVE is out there doing it without the big dollar budget.
3. WoW. Like I’ve said before. It actually did something with the model it was working from. It didn’t just poorly rip it off and attach a 3D engine like Everquest. Want further proof that EQ didn’t have a clue… watch what happens when Vanguard shits a fat turd at launch :)
4. Puzzle Pirates. Casual web games are played more than any other type of video game in the world. That is why a few hours with a Java editor can make someone millions. PP just plugged that into a very enjoyable online world full of great pirate”ism”.
5. Dark Ages of Camelot. This game didn’t do anything except wake up the casual PvP crowd and therefore holds a spot in my heart. The “rule of three” as Mark Jacobs likes to call it really was spot on for the design. Now DAoC made a lot of mistakes as it grew up, but really it is on the list for one reason. That reason is that launching smoothly is more important than having a complete feature list. DAoC is to this day the best MMORPG launch I’ve ever experienced and it has yet to be touched. WoW did pretty good, but it fell to the zerg eventually. DAoC from a small little company sold way better than expected and never once buckled under the pressure. A couple hours of downtime and the game ran forever it seemed.
** Star Wars Galaxies. The only reason this one is here is to prove that attaching MMORPG to a proven brand does not equal success. This is the excuse so many people make for WoW… “Oh it’s only because its Warcraft.” Bullshit… Star Wars is quite a bit larger than Warcraft ever will be, but bad game design coupled with a shifty company and any household name can be sunk.
PS: The captcha is still horrible, but fortunately I know to cut/paste and save my writing befor eposting here :P
Holy hell, Heartless, you must be drunk.
Puzzle priates? You got your Pokemon graphics in my MMORPG!
Diku and EQ… eff it, I’m not going to go there….
“I bet you can’t even name one thing other than graphics that EQ improved upon from the Diku model. It never did and therefore is a null and void MMORPG in the pits of MMO hell.â€Â
Betting someone, or really challenging someone, to answerer you, then just following it up with your own assertion isn’t really a good dialogue for an argument.
That aside DAOC did not launch well at all. I don’t know what you remember, but for me it was laggy(of course, it was launch day), patching was needed badly, and 2 of the three factions needed to be worked, content-wise, badly still. Brent even went over that in his podcast. I really haven’t seen a mmo to date have a “smooth†launch. Really I’d like someone to define what a “smooth launch†should be. Little lag? No server downtime? No patches? Everything polished? No game I’ve played(I have played almost every mmo released in america to date) has had a smooth launch by those definitions, though I suppose those might be to restrictive.
Either way cut Brent some slack, I think his list was pretty accurate. I went out and bought EQ2 because of it. I had played it at launch and quit shortly after(if you played at launch you’d know why). After hearing about it again and the improvements upon it I went out and got copy. He was right, it is allot better, and I’m enjoying it.
Also to the original poster, you wrote Ultimate online, its actually Ultima…sorry it bugged me.
Update from Michael: Thanks Jeff, fixed. UO isn’t *that* great. :)
1. Ultima Online. First and only game to come out like it. Really perfected the monthly subscription model and is probably the reason MMORPGs of today are so damn cheap to play. Could you imagine if UO started out at $19.99 a month?
Did you ever play Shadow Of Yseribus or Meridian 59? Yseribus was way before UO and charged a monthly fee on Sierra’s Network. I can’t remember if M59 was pay or not, but very similiar imho to UO, UO was just done a little better (and had some decent bankroll behind it), M59 was still a blast though. UO was the first boxed MMO available at big box mart, but hardly the first pay/graphical one.
Sorry, but EQ gets far too much credit where credit isn’t due.
Jeff; I don’t know what DAoC you played, but frankly I never had any lag at launch and that was true for months. The only time servers went down was for a 2 hour patch to fix a problem with arrows going on forever that was causing the system to get stuck in loops.
Cyanbane; I was refering to how UO was and still is the only MMO of its type to ever be released. I didn’t mean to imply it was the first to do monthly subscriptions, but when it launched at $9.99 it “perfected” the monthly subscription plan at a level subscribers were happy with. UO truly set the bar for the rest of the market that followed… and if UO had started at $19.99 you damn well better believe we’d be paying $29.99 now a days. That is a little speculation, but it is something I can not ignore.
I never played M59 and never heard of the other. M59 to my knowledge has really had no lasting effect on the market outside of keeping Phsycochild busy :)
Everquest did have a lasting effect on the market, but really it never did anything other than impede the progress of the MMO genre so it really goes on my second idea for a list (aka top 10 games that are or have already hurt the MMO genre). UO to its credit at least had a relatively unique approach to it whereas EQ was really a bunch of diehard DIKU muddders that wanted a graphical version. Those same people are out there making Vanguard and when it flops you will see me proven correct.
And Brent; I wanted to ask you if you were the drunk one when you started your list on the podcast :P The fact that Ryzom made it anywhere near a list is a sad little tale.
I’ll just say this flat out. There isn’t too many games that did anything for this market because of their design. Mostly what I see happening is whatever one had the most subscriptions gets the most list space. Sad fact.
Heartless,
I think you’re missing the impact EQ had on the genre, because for the most part it isn’t one of design. Most of what we think of as “EQ Design” elements were, as you say, from the MUD days.
BUT, what EQ did for the genre was provide a rallying point. Hundreds of thousands of people played the game. For most of the time that MMOGs have been around, ‘Everquest == MMOG’, in the minds of many non-gamers. The term catass was created as the result of a fluff piece on an EQ player, as you well know. ‘Dragon Kill Points’, a holdover from the days when downing Nagafen and Vox was the height of raiding.
EQ certainly may not have revolutionized Massive games, but community-wise they are the alpha and the omega. In fact, I believe that the success of World of Warcraft can directly be tied to their imitation of EQ. As Foton noted in our interview last week, WoW is in many ways far more of an ‘EverQuest 2′ than EQ2.
Your appreciation for UO is admirable, but it just never resonated with the population of the U.S. the way EQ did. The FPS design was more friendly to the American mindset, we liked having multiple races … whatever reason drew the D&D nerds, system administrators, and unicorn fanciers of the U.S. to EverQuest, it was the start down the road to the greatness that is the modern MMOG genre.
So, while I understand your pooh-poohing the game for the here and now, my inclination is to give some respect to the there and then.
It is damn entertaining when we spar. We should organize blogger grudge matches. Throw a topic at three, give a one day time limit for rebuttals and then piece it all together in a massive cage match.
Oh and Heartless, I’m not surprised to see you bagging EQ and Ryzom in the same breath here, because frankly, if you don’t like one, you won’t like the other.
I think Michael’s statement sums up my feelings on the subject pretty well -> “Your appreciation for UO is admirable, but it just never resonated with the population of the U.S. the way EQ did.”
Good discussion. Next time, the top ten methods will be even more scientific and incontestable!
Like I said Brent it really feels like EQ is only on the list becaues it is the assumed “winner” between the first round of succesful commercial MMORPGs. Subscriber numbers a good game does not make.
Look at what EQ did for the market. Nothing. NOTHING. And a history lesson for all of you. Catass stems from an article that Lum originally linked a long time ago in regards to a UO player that was helplessly addicted and failed to clean his cat’s litter box. Catass = UO, not EQ.
If “MMORPG keywords” are part of being included in the list lets talk about UO. UO brought out PK, RPK, anti-PK, etc from MUDs… something that EQ never did. UO also brought us the term mule.
Really though all of this can be traced back into MUDs. However, you won’t find a MUD that really had the mechanics of UO. You will find tons that play out just like EQ!
DKP was born in EQ, but like I said… EQ was a stolen idea that they didn’t improve AT ALL otherwise DKP would of never been an issue. Anyone that played a loot centric MUD had all been introduced to kill stealers and ninja looters well before EQ came around though I can’t remember what we called them back then… maybe asshole or fucker?