I haven't reached some kind of existential crisis, where I find I've outgrown or lost interest in what, for convenience, I'll call "The Hobby". I've noticed a few erstwhile games bloggers hitting that wall lately but I'm not one of them. I'm still enjoying my gaming.
I'm not really even in a lull or slump, one of those times when interest wanes temporarily as you wait for some new game to grab your attention and pull you back in; a state of mind familiar, I'm sure, to plenty of people reading this.
No, it's more of an enforced hiatus, just while I sort out a new gaming PC. The one I'm using to write this post seems entirely reliable so long as I don't ask it to play games but I've decided, rather than try to rehabilitate it for that purpose, it's going to be relegated to a media center role downstairs. I'm still looking into what will replace it. Until I make up my mind about that, I'm kind of off games for now, whether I like it or not.
I've found taking an enforced break from gaming these past few days has been quite useful in clarifying a couple of things for me. I've mentioned a few times that I don't play games as often these days as I used to, or for as long, when I do. It made me wonder if my interest in the hobby might be winding down.
I'm happy to say I'm now reasonably sure that's not what's happening. I found myself getting quite twitchy, not being able to play my games, Neverness To Everness in particular.
Not being able to play, I've been reading about them instead. Nimgimli posted about the upcoming 1.2 update, which looks amazing. I didn't find time for the full hour-long preview but I did watch the almost eight-minute trailer.
It's impressive. Not to say insane. So much packed in to what's going to be a six-weekly update cadence. How do they do it?
Raph Koster was reported by MassivelyOP the other day as saying the theme park model for MMORPGs was unsustainable because of the cost of producing content and the speed at which players get through it, which seems fair enough until you consider games like NTE, Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and the rest of the gacha gang.
I left a comment wondering, among other things, what the difference was in terms of production costs, to which Raph replied with a terse two word answer: "Server costs". I'm not quite clear how that explains the way gacha games can pump out as much plotted, scripted, written, voice-acted content on a six-week cycle as the average Western MMORPG can manage in six months...
The second update for NTE adds an entire game-within-a-game, a fantasy RPG inside the magitech shell, the conceit of which is that the characters themselves will be playing it. I love that part. It even makes the medieval fantasy element palatable. It's permanent content, too, which is just as well for me since I may not have a machine capable of running it before the new update becomes the old update in a few weeks and we're on to the next thing.
My uninformed, outsider's take on how it's possible is that MMORPGs these days just aren't popular enough to generate the kind of income that supports this pace of content production. In that respect, Raph's quite right that the Western model isn't sustainable.
We can see it, over and over, with every new attempt to break the market open. The locust swarm pitches up, strips a new game bare of content then flies away before the first update arrives. When it eventually comes, some come back for a fraction as long as the first visit and after that there's no getting them back at all. With ninety per cent of the customers gone, who can afford to keep making new content for the few that stay?
With the open world gacha titles, though, there's always another substantial content drop on the way. Even then, players still complain about not having enough to do or finishing everything too fast but instead of having to wait months for the next hit they're into the hype cycle almost immediately and the fix lands a week or two after the cravings begin.
Are theme park MMORPGs unsustainable or just inefficient? Is it inherently harder or more expensive to produce content for servers holding hundreds or thousands of players than for those serving solo or co-op play, even when the nature of the content is very similar? I have absolutely no idea but I'll take Raph's word for it that it is, somehow.
Even then, surely server costs can't directly affect the rate at which the content itself is produced, can they? Not even if it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that content in front of the players. The issue of content drought, endemic in MMORPGs for many years, seems like it would be independent of the cost of keeping the servers up.
And when, even in the glory days of World of Warcraft, did MMORPGs ever get content flow at this volume and speed? (I'll answer that one: First five years of EverQuest, that's when. And never since that I've seen.)
But what do I know? Or, frankly, care? My concern with Western theme park MMORPGs these days isn't so much whether they can provide me with content fast enough as whether they can produce content that interests me at any pace. If you remove nostalgia, loyalty and familiarity, the main factors that keep me playing some old favorites, I can't easily come up with many good reasons even to look at most of the MMORPGs I see being promoted or developed these days. They just don't look very... erm... modern.
All of which makes it quite ironic that my current darling, Neverness To Everness, a game a huge part of whose appeal for me is just how very modern it does feel, has chosen to add, for only its second update... a traditional, western medieval fantasy RPG. If they'd asked me what I wanted it wouldn't have been that.
Oh, wait! They did ask me! Several times. And what did I say? Like Mailvaltar, I said I wanted more city.
Still, I'm not complaining. 999 Nights, which in a magnificently confident coup de theatre we're told should be read as ‘One Thousand Less One Nights’, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a go.
Luckily for me, as is generally the case in games of this kind, most of the content won't go away when the next update arrives. The big FOMO push is always for the banner characters, none of which particularly interest me this time around, and the various mini-games and events. The substantive elements, scripted content, items, gameplay additions and innovations, those tend to hang around.
In this case there are a whole load of costumes I might be interested in, including some that have something I did ask for - customization. Okay, it's only colors and hiding some panels, not swapping whole pieces between outfits, but it's a start. And I really want that "Unassuming Warrior" outfit for Flora. Anything that looks like regular clothes is good with me.
There doesn't appear to be much, if any, new story content, which is fine with me, this once. It'll keep me from falling behind while I sort out my hardware problems, something I feel quite motivated to do now.
I'm not saying I'm going to buy a whole, new expensive computer just to play NTE but having a game I really want to play does clarify things a little. I was wondering if I needed to bother getting a gaming computer at all or if I couldn't just make do with this one and do without the gaming part altogether.
Yeah. Not happening! Bring on the One Thousand Less One Nights.
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Inside the RPG the outfits will actually consist of independent pieces that you can mix and match. Why they won‘t allow us to do the same in Hethereau beats me.
ReplyDeleteIt‘s kind of a shame that it will be restricted to those four characters, too, but maybe they‘ll add more over time.
Still, I can imagine that some players, especially those who always spend enough money to get every limited character, might be a bit miffed about not one of the first four being included for now. I guess I would be, too.
I knew there was something in that video about independent costume pieces! I remember spotting it when I watched it. I left it out of the post because I couldn't find it again on a quick scan through and I was too lazy to rewatch the whole thing.
DeleteI hope they do bring it into the main game, though. It would make a huge difference to personalization.
I always assume, with no data at all, that the difference is cost of labor. In the same way all our clothing is made in China because it's cheaper, is it also cheaper to develop gaming content in China?
ReplyDeleteThat's the only difference I can think of. Unless Raph adds new servers to support every new content drop, I don't see how server costs factor in.
I didn't want to start arguing with him in the thread but I couldn't see what the connection was, either. I think the labor cost issue obviously accounts for some of it but there's also the sheer scale of the success of the gacha games as compared to most MMOs. NTE reportedly made back about a third of what it cost to make on the first day! It's made back two and a half times its development cost now and its only been out for a couple of months. If you have money coming in on that scale, presumably you can afford to keep producing content so it keeps coming in. MMOs seem to make a lot on the initial purchase if they're buy-to-play but then the revenue stream just dries up.
DeleteServer costs and other maintenance overheads used to be what they said the subscription paid for so where the funding for content came from back then I have no clue. Except, in the case of EverQuest between 1999 and 2004, which did have a very fast content delivery pipe by modern standards, they were selling the base game and expansions to new players all the time because the population kept growing and growing until WoW arrived. And presumably the same would have applied to WoW, except Blizzard never really seemed to use that income to make content quickly.
I am not sure what is up with server costs. We can see the server costs in COH Homecoming, since they solicit donations to cover them. And based on that six packed out MMO servers costs about 5,500 a month. However, if you go looking you can easilly find estimates of 100K a month to run MMO servers. Put those two facts together, and it is obvious I have no damn idea how much a MMO server costs ;-)
ReplyDeleteCoHH is an interesting data point. By modern standards, I guess that's a fairly successful game, albeit certainly not approaching what you'd think of as mainstream success. And they don't need to make a profit, just cover costs. And they don't have to recoup development costs either. Still, almost a thousand dollars per server per month is quite a lot.
DeleteSorry I was too terse, I probably misunderstood the question.
ReplyDeleteBut this stuff just always comes down to money.
Server costs for an open world gacha game that is not MMO are fractional compared to an MMO. That means way higher margins, more to reinvest.
Dev costs for getting the basics of a game like Genshin are a fraction of the costs for just getting a server you can log into before you have any game at all in an MMO.
Making content for single player linear experiences is a lot simpler.
Dev costs in China are currently still much lower than here.
Games aimed at the Chinese market have access to a market that dwarfs NA plus EU, with an audience that does not mind gacha and pay to win.
Lastly, Genshin still cost $100 million dollars at launch, with all that.
Thanks for the clarification. I think it's clear - shall we call them Eastern - games have a number of advantages Western games lack and I have no understanding of the different costs involved in the servers an open world RPG runs as compared to those needed for an MMO. I think part of the problem in comparing them, though, is that, for those and other reasons, it's apples and pears to the developer but from the player's perspective the two kinds of games - theme park MMO and Gacha RPG - feel remarkably similar, particularly in these days of many people playing MMOs mostly solo or in small friend groups. I play both and for me the experience is almost identical - only the gacha games give me much more content, much more reliably and more often.
DeleteIf you're looking for the full MMO experience with lots of interaction with strangers and big events and fights where you have to work as a team with many other players, then there's no real similarity but for the experience of an open world with quests and "dungeons" and exploration and all the other things that used to make MMOs so widely popular, the Gacha games do a really good job of bringing that experience back. Not to mention the writing is generally of a higher standard, even allowing for translation problems.
My feeling is that the many millions of casual players who used to play WoW would feel a lot more at home pottering around in an open world RPG than in an endgame-focused, raid-centric modern MMO. I certainly do. I'd love to see a Western theme park MMO give me the same quality of entertainment but it doesn't seem to be happening.
My 2 cents: I guess that gacja games just are precooked and then finished with a new batch each few weeks. As in develop three years worth of content according to a master plan, stay focused on it, never deviate from the plan and then splice the whole content in fifteen to twenty incremental releases.
ReplyDeleteAlso, gacja games rarely run on customer generated content aka a mechanic being abused into breaking the game for other players as gacha are meant to be played alone so there's no "wait for next spawn because boss dies within three seconds and you didn't get your content for the eleventh time in a row".
But I'm guessing, didn't check with an AI. Certainly gacja look exhausting to play with so many content and only your basic gameplay loop to consume it...
Whether they produce the content long in advance or not, one thing they definitely have is a coherent, long-term narrative structure. MMOs often seem to lurch from one story to the next with barely any coherency. It's jarring. As for the old "wait for your mob to spawn" thing, modern MMOs generally have so much instancing and give shared credit to everyone who does any damage to a mob, I think that's mostly a thing of the past. Playing alone together is the modern MMO way, at least outside of raiding.
Delete...amd now I found the mental image I was looking for, all you can eat buffet versus à la carte: why one kind of restaurant delivers large amounts of food as soon as you step in, the other takes longer for everything? That's Gacha Vs MMORPG. Maybe.
ReplyDelete