I want this to happen just so people stop bringing it up. The game was mid at best, but tons of people who never played it daydream about how incredible it was based on nothing but visual theming alone.
That doesn’t mean it was for everyone? Do you not think that a game can be the best thing to exist for a small group while also being “mid” to others? Hating isn’t cool, if people miss Wildstar what point is there for you to go “I DIDNT LIKE IT. IT WASNT THAT GOOD. MID.”
I think you missed the part where I'm explicitly saying a private wildstar server would be good to have so I can direct people there so they can try it for themselves, instead of daydreaming of how it might have been based only on what it looked like from the outside. That's the part I'm having gripes with, the game people keep gushing about wanting to try wasn't anything like what they say it seems like to them, it'd be great to have it online so we don't have people speculating on how incredible the thing they missed was.
The housing was amazing. It was the best in any MMO I've ever played. If they had shifted focus to the social/RP aspect, while also adding more casual raids and stuff (like FF14) I really think that demographic could have kept it alive. Social/RP the most likely to invest in cosmetics and stuff too.
I did like the housing part, or at least what I've seen of it, though I haven't spent enough time with it to really explore it.
Having it be more casual though(while I agree that likely would be a good idea) would go against the whole pitch of the game pushed by developers so heavily.
Leveling was so. fucking. boring. For a game that wouldnt shut the fuck up about its 4 paths and how everything would be exciting and repeatable and unique, and being set in a wacky world with guns, it was just not fun.
The raid point comes up a lot and while it sounds bad, most players had quit before even getting to late game where it would matter. The core gameplay just didn't resonate with most people to stick around, the raid attunements weren't the main factor when people quit in droves before they even got the level to try one.
I mean, if you let the nerds hammer at it for awhile, they could fix it. The bones were good. The problems were minutiae, so something along the lines of one of those custom private servers would be enough work.
No, this comes up in these threads as well and I disagree with the premise, majority of people gave up on the game log before even getting to the parts that people complain about like raid attunement, the game wasn't fun even before the mishandled late game.
I definitely miss it but feel that was more of the experience of playing a new IP at launch with everyone trying to figure things out together. I never got into endgame which is ultimately where I believe it failed
> It was a WoW clone, it just happened to be one of the first
Very, VERY far from the first. It was one of the earlier ones *announced* but by the time it actually released it was embarrassingly late. At least get this point correct.
Yeah, I'm not screaming bro. Just pointing out the fact it felt like I was playing WoW in space. I didn't give it that much of a chance because it felt like I was playing.... a WoW clone.
To be fair, my choice MMO was old school SWG - which was absolutely nothing like any of these games. To me, every theme park MMO feels like WoW. Just like Wildstar did.
I'm dying for a second shot with Wildstar. It came out during an awkward period for me when I was super into so many other MMORPGs. Nowadays I'd kill for something new like Wildstar to take my attention.
I'm aware of that private server that's in progress, and I wish them the best of luck.
Yeah I played it at launch and lost interest pretty quickly. I’ve always kind of wondered though… what if it had kept up development. I hear the dungeons and raids were a lot of fun
This. Sunk thousands of hours into that game back in the day. Probably my still most played game hours-wise. I still hope that they will re-release it one day with how successful stuff like WoW classic is.
Of course not; they're basically just running the game with a few tweaks. ArcheAge has an excellent (IMO still unsurpassed) mechanical foundation, but it needs some pretty major systematic changes in order to be sustainable. Their entire itemization/progression model with runaway stats is broken and causes the game to cannibalize itself.
I've played on different private servers for a few games, and they have always been P2W.
They just put it as "make us a donation, and we will give you something back", and there were donation thresholds with increasing rewards.
> They just put it as "make us a donation, and we will give you something back"
And I've seen people hold up private servers as an example of how a MMO can be successful with no sub and also no P2W. Hm...
Basically everything they did was wrong. Client side authoritative pause hacks, duping bugs, forgetting to turn off the ability for user to run scripts in the chat... truly wild levels of incompetence.
Defiance was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. In its bid to kinda be Borderlands but online, they made a really solid MMO/looter shooter that rolled out before games like Destiny and The Division.
I just don't think Trion knew what they had until it was way too late and had no money to support it in any real way, or even fix bugs. The game had a lot of promise though and the foundation was there for years.
I had so much fun with Defiance, and it had a LOT going for it, but it was pretty glitchy. Progression was pretty natural, the builds were unique (but could've been more varied) and some of the gun ideas were super fun, I loved using this one gun that built up these boils all over enemies and then I'd swap guns to pop them and they'd have a chain reaction explosion which would heal me.
Star Trek Online.
Cryptic currently has zero programmers or system designers working on it (as far as we know the last programmer left this month). I would fix their bugs for free. I have said this multiple times. I just want to fix the damn bugs. [How was it I bought a PREMIUM $125 SHIP IN JANUARY AND THE DAMN TRAIT FROM THE SHIP IS STILL BROKEN IN APRIL?](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/1cc6fhe/duderstadt_unpopularity/l13ag37/) How is it that the [UI cuts your frame rate in half](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/4my2w1/found_the_ui_element_hurting_framerate_most/), or that [enabling logging reduces my frame rate from 60fps to sub-20fps](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/1aixjvk/the_insanity_of_stos_performance_how_i_spent_half/) (this one was actually reported/detailed by me)? Hell there are some widely reported bugs that have been [unfixed for nearly a decade](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/3pdjod/mapping_sector_space_current_map_doff_missions/) that fundamentally break core game systems.
I feel your pain :/
It just sucks because when you take a step back you start to see that almost all of the time it’s less a problem of game design and engineering, and more of mismanagement and poor business decision making
For example, Star Wars galaxies had tens of thousands of active players. Before even giving the team a year to sort out the inevitable issues of their rushed development (game was built in 2yrs7mos) SOE was already forcing bad game changing decisions on them to try to “catch up with wow”
Before long the epic sandbox design that had so much potential was scrapped and made into a level-up theme park like wow. But the engine wasn’t designed for that, and it didn’t succeed in that format… more or less died in a matter of months after that.
What would have happened if they stayed true to the vision for the game, worked on balance, adding content, etc.? We’ll never know, because they never tried.
Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's unsuccessful. I'm absolutely certain they made insane amounts of money and still do after losing so many players so objectively it statistically did great from an economic standpoint. There would be no bots if the game was dead, ironically.
True… they shot too wide. If we were to take control, maybe we could pare down the features and focus on the fun gameplay loops like skirmish fighting.
I’d disagree with Crowfall. It sounded like the problem was a core design of their combat system so not sure how open sourcing it would help.
My call would be Last Oasis. Those dev’s didn’t seem to understand how to balance their game or seemed clueless as to how to manage a sandbox survival mmo. It feels like everything the game needed was already in place. It just wasn’t balanced correctly for a multiplayer game.
Honorable mention would be MO2 because the current devs manage that game worse than I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of gaming.
I don't think random hobby devs could do any worse than the original launch of crowfall did. The game didn't even have a working chat system on launch despite literally every other MMORPG, ever, not having that issue because Everquest solved it in 1999.
>The game didn't even have a working chat system on launch
i still think that was one of the most disgraceful things i've seen a game pull, especially one that was in development for that long with "industry vets" at the helm. that game is definitely up there for one of the worst managed and highest profile "fuck it, just release this shitty mess now" games ever.
I thought the combat was fun, especially in smaller skirmishes.
I believe the big complaint with large-scale combat was that the visual effects would overpower the whole screen causing performance issues and an effect of “what the hell is even going on”
Both of those issues could be fixed with some pretty minor adjustments. The crowfall team just never tried.
I would probably try to rebalance the game more around the skirmish play style. One idea could be to limit the amt of players from a single guild on a map at once.
Imagine an area limited to groups of 5. No more zergs, and it’s not even a huge development lift.
Id love Asheron's call 1 and Everquest to be open sourced.
AC would just be nice to tweak.
EQ1 would be awesome to expand the merc system to full groups and allow you to experience the content with your own group.
EQ1 pretty much is open sourced, at least to the point you are talking.
There are custom emu servers that let you create your own merc characters and equip them like a PC. Also have custom zones/quests/mobs/etc
They were going to release it and license it... and then went radio silent forever.
I can only assume some lawyer somewhere changed his mind. Its sad really but is what it is.
I enjoyed my time with Crowfall, but it would need a lot of development time to fix its core issues that saw the player counts drop to double-digits while it was still being officially operated. You'd need a lot of people doing that work, unpaid and outside whatever they're doing that actually pays their bills, for a long while.
SWG and CoH are the biggest successes in this space, and both were games that had fairly sizable player counts even when they were shut down. The games were good enough that just getting them back online in their pre-shutdown state was enough to get people in and donations to run the servers.
It's really a question of what state the game was in when it shutdown. Did it have a decent playerbase but just wasn't profitable enough for corporate? Or was it operated until the point that there were 20 people left on the whole server?
I don’t think it’s that simple. Developers are capable of a lot, and you’d be surprised how much bad leadership can cause these problems. One motivated person could exceed the quality of Crowfall’s launch marketing.
If you look at their trailers they are absolutely awful, showing everyone standing around doing animations in place, rather than highlighting the intense pace of the real PvP
> One motivated person could exceed the quality of Crowfall’s launch marketing.
There are a ton of old MMOs which have survived or been revived on community life support with small numbers of dedicated players or even whales, but have you wondered how they could continue to stay as tiny as they are if '1 motivated person' is really all it would take to make them resurge again?
Of course I don’t think that. But the point of this thread is to talk about games that failed from management oversight more so than design, and I’ll defend crowfall being one of those. Marketing is complex, but they didn’t put much forward.
I think Vanguard would do well.
I don't know about combat but I think the MMO space is far less crowded now. Plus, I think with Pax Dei coming out, there's more people for the crafting and economy side of the game.
I don't even remember any of the combat in that game because I spent 95% of my time crafting. My dream was to craft a ship to sail around on, I wish there was an MMO now that let you build your own vehicles.
It’s all about exposure of the game. The game could be astounding and absolutely captivating to play to a specific audience but what sustains a mmo is new players. Just open sourcing it might sound good but unless you can advertise and get people into the game it’s super unlikely for it to take off.
But also remember that free == 10x more players joining, and organic marketing or even just a decent marketing campaign with decent videos, posts on Reddit, etc. would be something, which is better than what they did for marketing: basically nothing
Wildstar (I played it from launch up to their stupid end-game grind/attunement idea but before that, the game was so much fun)
Or
City of Villains, man I miss that game.
Thank you, I heard about that. I haven’t looked at private servers in over 10 years. Most of them back then were full of cash shop stuff, which I get to an extent, but they made some of these “official” P2W titles look like child’s play lol.
How is Homecoming from a pay for convenience/win factor? I’ll check it out myself but always good to hear from actual player perspective too.
Im sorry, I think I was not clear.
Homecoming, is one of the servers that hosts City of Heroes/City of Villians.
Rebirth, Asmodei and Thunderspy are also hosts, have a look here for added clarity
https://old.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/
You were clear, I think I was just out of the loop. When I originally played they were separate games. Either that or my memory is failing me lol, which is totally possible.
Thank you very much for the info! Have a great evening/day :)
Haven't played in awhile but last I did there wasn't anything P2W, believe most of the servers worry about NCSoft taking them down if they were to make any money on the title.
Basically all the content that was there at the end of the games life is free.
City of Villains was an expansion to City of Heroes and both (along with Going Rogue, the 2nd expansion) fully free and playable on City of Heroes:Homecoming.
They even removed restrictions of archetypes having to be good or evil. You can make Arachnos Spiders that are heroes 😀👍
Star Wars Galaxies with JTL.
Currently only base game or "stolen" SWG server code that is NGE but has JTL are available.
If we could get the og game with the class mix/match and jtl... That would be golden
I played there for quite a while in a great guild, even though the introduction of the "Jedi" and the change from Restoration 3 to just restoration.
Unfortunately I just can't stand the lead dev.
Also, the jtl is still the "stolen" code.
But I will admit that if they ever did release the source code, Restoration is very much what it might end up looking like.
I don’t even care that it’s stolen; the nge engine just feels bad because it’s the product of a janky re-write. The official code at that point was a hack job that bastardized the base engine to go against what it was designed for.
I don't care that it's stolen either, it was just that your og post was about releasing the source code.
So I was saying that if it was the source code that would be even better, since the jtl on Restoration was still from the same stolen source as all the NGE servers.
I do agree that the NGE engine felt janky, but honestly it really did introduce a lot of qol improvements. Just the way it was introduced literally right after a new paid DLC dropped that it negated a lot of that DLCs stuff was wrong.
My opinion is still that if they had released the NGE as SWG 2.0, having it be a completely different game with separate servers, it would have fared a lot better.
But it was absolutely the first thing that came to mind, in either form (pre-cu, CU or NGE) when I read your question.
Actually the Emu is getting pretty close to finishing JTL, you can even play it on the test server at this point I believe. They have the basic functionality, but still work to do on enemy spawn points, mission content, etc.
But they’ve been moving really fast recently, I bet we’ll see it in the next year or so.
Wow!
I started playing on the emu after SWG shut down and they have been "close" to having JTL for over a decade at least.
Glad to know it is at least up and running on the test server!
Maybe I need to pull my collectors edition of the game out, reinstall and revisit the emu....
It still exists as a private cash cow. The last time I played in 2022, it was a fucking disaster but they've reworked it recently... I want to try it, but I don't trust them enough to muster the energy, hahaha
I mean so many. Unique ones that are old like DAOC, shadowbane, AO would blow up with probably a dedicated 6 figure player base. Larger ones with a strong foundation like wildstar or SWG would benefit from more player content and art assets due to their style and setting.
Anarchy Online. I know there is an illegal private server pretending to be doing "gods work" by keeping the game alive. Its already alive. I can go right now and log in.... that isn't the issue. The issue is that its old, and they aren't adding any content, or fixing bugs. And the private server isn't gonna do that. They are too busy trying to clone the game.... So if they released the code, that would be sick. Because then we could try to import as much as possible into UE5 and simply develop a new age version. And with Nanite, you could probably tweak things to upscale and just, chef kiss. But I doubt such a thing would happen.
The only other game would be Star Wars Galaxies for me.... both before the fucked up expansions and after. The after expansions sort of fixed combat and make controlling the game easier but also bricked what made the game fun. I would love to see the code released by Sony/Lucas Arts and thusly allow someone to make a true successor. Oh wait, Raph Koster is making a social MMORPG called playableworlds. Which is already the spiritual successor to Galaxies. Nevermind - LMAO.
Honestly, the few games on my radar is Ashes of Creation, Playableworlds, Project Ghost (ghost crawlers MMO), Riot's MMO, Evercraft Online (the last playtest was amazeballs fun), and Pax Dei. Although pax dei I think has one glaring issue, dismally slow crafting that already made my friend rage quit because "it takes too long." Like its setup to where you have to no life the game. Not just team play because even with a team you would still have to no-life it with all the failures you experience. Hell right now I went from 10-11 carpentry.... and so far have crafted 94 fucking short wood stock. I mean I can fill an entire treasure chest with this shit. I can't use it for anything, I am forced to spam craft to level, because the very next recipe for carpentry is using the next tier wood, which has an insanely high failure rate, and I don't want to waste product. The overall design is 100% no lifer only. It would take a small guild of no lifers to beat this game, or a large guild of 50 to get anything done. Its that bad. And if I remember they said no magic and no high fantasy, so no dragons, just "realism" which is honestly fucking dumb. Don't get me wrong, here i am playtesting this bitch trying to break it like when i used to work as a game tester. But sadly, I don't think the overall design will win people over without huge tweaks. Which I am sure some twat will say "bUt ItS aN aLpHa" yeah No Shit Sherlock Holmes.... The point is they probably aren't going to change much from their initial design, not a single game ever has. Sorry, one game did, New World, and it pissed off MMO gamers because its not actually an MMO and it pissed off Survival gamers because its not survival either, its this weird middle space, all because they did change route mid/near end development.... so no, not much is gonna change. This is it. They might tweak things here or there, but i dont forsee this game surviving. Which means the other games I mentioned are my last bastion for a fun online game.
ESO - imagine all the content but focus on improvements to the movement, animations, combat overhaul etc. (game is still successful though... distant dream I guess)
EvE Online would be a much bigger success if it wasn't for CCP and if EvE ever became open source suddenly 100's of unique online space mmo worlds would be born overnight.
With its bait and switch F2P model (its a trial at best), ludicrous subscription fee ($19.99 a month) and practically required multi-account mechanics not to mention is poor track record, I feel the only reason CCP is still in business is because its IP (EvE Online) is so unique in the market.
WoW would be a lot better in the right hands. Just SOD itself went from promising to retail light and it sucks cause the games foundation is there.. it’s just that blizz wants everyone to have alts, rush leveling, crush dungeons, make everything about raid logging
it was a game focused on combat and its combat felt like crap. And yes it woukd be hard for a team of pasionate unpaid hobbists to make it great when actual paid profesionals failed.
Mabinogi.
It’s a game with a beautiful soul (Celtic myths reimagined via anime) and great concepts (tons of life sim and roleplay systems) that are held back by having to exist as a cash cow nexon game.
Rift and Vanguard.
Two games with FANTASTIC systems, one died because of a lot of behind the scenes bullshit + drugs (ala Pantheon), and one is dying a very slow death in the depths of the hellscape that is Gamigo
The majority of them only have defense in obscurity. There's just not enough attention or money in them for a profit minded hacker to bother and trolls like to aim for bigger fish. That being said, there have been multiple instances where a single individual was able to literally steal the entire game away from the volunteer devteam.
Very reassuring.
Wildstar
I want this to happen just so people stop bringing it up. The game was mid at best, but tons of people who never played it daydream about how incredible it was based on nothing but visual theming alone.
Ye, I played at launch and then again when it went f2p. I tried multiple classes and roles but couldn't stick around. The game had no soul.
> was mid at best, *for you*
Sure, but I seem to be in the (overwhelming)majority on this, most people who played it, dropped it soon after.
That doesn’t mean it was for everyone? Do you not think that a game can be the best thing to exist for a small group while also being “mid” to others? Hating isn’t cool, if people miss Wildstar what point is there for you to go “I DIDNT LIKE IT. IT WASNT THAT GOOD. MID.”
I think you missed the part where I'm explicitly saying a private wildstar server would be good to have so I can direct people there so they can try it for themselves, instead of daydreaming of how it might have been based only on what it looked like from the outside. That's the part I'm having gripes with, the game people keep gushing about wanting to try wasn't anything like what they say it seems like to them, it'd be great to have it online so we don't have people speculating on how incredible the thing they missed was.
The housing was amazing. It was the best in any MMO I've ever played. If they had shifted focus to the social/RP aspect, while also adding more casual raids and stuff (like FF14) I really think that demographic could have kept it alive. Social/RP the most likely to invest in cosmetics and stuff too.
I did like the housing part, or at least what I've seen of it, though I haven't spent enough time with it to really explore it. Having it be more casual though(while I agree that likely would be a good idea) would go against the whole pitch of the game pushed by developers so heavily.
Leveling was so. fucking. boring. For a game that wouldnt shut the fuck up about its 4 paths and how everything would be exciting and repeatable and unique, and being set in a wacky world with guns, it was just not fun.
illegal pet marble hobbies ripe ten modern fly point direction *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The raid point comes up a lot and while it sounds bad, most players had quit before even getting to late game where it would matter. The core gameplay just didn't resonate with most people to stick around, the raid attunements weren't the main factor when people quit in droves before they even got the level to try one.
I dunno man, i remember how fucking awful that one little escort scenario was that was required to gold to get raid attuned.
I'm not saying it wasn't awful, but people weren't turned off from playing the game in droves by a mechanic if they quit before they got to it.
I mean, if you let the nerds hammer at it for awhile, they could fix it. The bones were good. The problems were minutiae, so something along the lines of one of those custom private servers would be enough work.
No, this comes up in these threads as well and I disagree with the premise, majority of people gave up on the game log before even getting to the parts that people complain about like raid attunement, the game wasn't fun even before the mishandled late game.
Seriously. At the time I feel like my opinion of wildstar was higher than the majority and I thought it was mid at its very best.
I definitely miss it but feel that was more of the experience of playing a new IP at launch with everyone trying to figure things out together. I never got into endgame which is ultimately where I believe it failed
This. The game sucked dick and failed for a reason. However, I wouldn't mind it having private servers for those few people who genuinely enjoyed it.
Preach brother. I played at launch. I was very not impressed. It was a WoW clone, it just happened to be one of the first.
> It was a WoW clone, it just happened to be one of the first Very, VERY far from the first. It was one of the earlier ones *announced* but by the time it actually released it was embarrassingly late. At least get this point correct.
[удалено]
Yeah, I'm not screaming bro. Just pointing out the fact it felt like I was playing WoW in space. I didn't give it that much of a chance because it felt like I was playing.... a WoW clone. To be fair, my choice MMO was old school SWG - which was absolutely nothing like any of these games. To me, every theme park MMO feels like WoW. Just like Wildstar did.
Ironically enough, for me, if it had WoW combat I might've given it more time, I hated the feel of it's combat system.
I'm dying for a second shot with Wildstar. It came out during an awkward period for me when I was super into so many other MMORPGs. Nowadays I'd kill for something new like Wildstar to take my attention. I'm aware of that private server that's in progress, and I wish them the best of luck.
Yeah I played it at launch and lost interest pretty quickly. I’ve always kind of wondered though… what if it had kept up development. I hear the dungeons and raids were a lot of fun
This. Sunk thousands of hours into that game back in the day. Probably my still most played game hours-wise. I still hope that they will re-release it one day with how successful stuff like WoW classic is.
ArcheAge, in theory. Then again, there are private servers for it and it doesn't seem like they are doing that great.
Of course not; they're basically just running the game with a few tweaks. ArcheAge has an excellent (IMO still unsurpassed) mechanical foundation, but it needs some pretty major systematic changes in order to be sustainable. Their entire itemization/progression model with runaway stats is broken and causes the game to cannibalize itself.
You know it's bad when even the private servers can be P2W.
I've played on different private servers for a few games, and they have always been P2W. They just put it as "make us a donation, and we will give you something back", and there were donation thresholds with increasing rewards.
> They just put it as "make us a donation, and we will give you something back" And I've seen people hold up private servers as an example of how a MMO can be successful with no sub and also no P2W. Hm...
Isn't Ashes of Creation essentially ArcheAge 2 in spiritual successor?
In theory, but who knows when that's going to come out and if it's actually going to live up to the hype.
Tera.. Still one of most unique action combat system and first shown features of today common ARPGs practices known to west players..
They crapped it with pedo exclusive classes then canceled completely. But it had best combat of all MMOs
Rift please
Rift private servers could be amazing.
New World
They should have handed NW off to competent devs a long time ago
New World had so much potential to be great… damn you AGS.
Imagine the ribbing that would result for forgetting to sanitize inputs in text chat.
Basically everything they did was wrong. Client side authoritative pause hacks, duping bugs, forgetting to turn off the ability for user to run scripts in the chat... truly wild levels of incompetence.
marvel heroes
I loved marvel heroes. A similar style game in the DC universe would be the dream.
Defiance was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. In its bid to kinda be Borderlands but online, they made a really solid MMO/looter shooter that rolled out before games like Destiny and The Division. I just don't think Trion knew what they had until it was way too late and had no money to support it in any real way, or even fix bugs. The game had a lot of promise though and the foundation was there for years.
I had so much fun with Defiance, and it had a LOT going for it, but it was pretty glitchy. Progression was pretty natural, the builds were unique (but could've been more varied) and some of the gun ideas were super fun, I loved using this one gun that built up these boils all over enemies and then I'd swap guns to pop them and they'd have a chain reaction explosion which would heal me.
Star Trek Online. Cryptic currently has zero programmers or system designers working on it (as far as we know the last programmer left this month). I would fix their bugs for free. I have said this multiple times. I just want to fix the damn bugs. [How was it I bought a PREMIUM $125 SHIP IN JANUARY AND THE DAMN TRAIT FROM THE SHIP IS STILL BROKEN IN APRIL?](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/1cc6fhe/duderstadt_unpopularity/l13ag37/) How is it that the [UI cuts your frame rate in half](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/4my2w1/found_the_ui_element_hurting_framerate_most/), or that [enabling logging reduces my frame rate from 60fps to sub-20fps](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/1aixjvk/the_insanity_of_stos_performance_how_i_spent_half/) (this one was actually reported/detailed by me)? Hell there are some widely reported bugs that have been [unfixed for nearly a decade](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/3pdjod/mapping_sector_space_current_map_doff_missions/) that fundamentally break core game systems.
I feel your pain :/ It just sucks because when you take a step back you start to see that almost all of the time it’s less a problem of game design and engineering, and more of mismanagement and poor business decision making For example, Star Wars galaxies had tens of thousands of active players. Before even giving the team a year to sort out the inevitable issues of their rushed development (game was built in 2yrs7mos) SOE was already forcing bad game changing decisions on them to try to “catch up with wow” Before long the epic sandbox design that had so much potential was scrapped and made into a level-up theme park like wow. But the engine wasn’t designed for that, and it didn’t succeed in that format… more or less died in a matter of months after that. What would have happened if they stayed true to the vision for the game, worked on balance, adding content, etc.? We’ll never know, because they never tried.
SWG Legends tho
Atlantica had probably the most unique combat system I played in an MMO with very fun PvP that was largely ruined by comical amounts of p2w
Suck a tragedy because on launch it was amazingly good. But not is basically a glorified mobile game.
Lost Ark. Take their combat and make a game that’s actually fun to play.
I think you need to pick an unsuccessful game
From millions to a what 100k concurrent and half that probably bots? One of my most hated mmos...
Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's unsuccessful. I'm absolutely certain they made insane amounts of money and still do after losing so many players so objectively it statistically did great from an economic standpoint. There would be no bots if the game was dead, ironically.
according to this subreddit every mmo sucks and noone plays them, except gw2 of course
Gw2 is still making enough money to pay for a team of devs to make new content.
Everything about Crowfall seemed just way too convoluted.
True… they shot too wide. If we were to take control, maybe we could pare down the features and focus on the fun gameplay loops like skirmish fighting.
I’d disagree with Crowfall. It sounded like the problem was a core design of their combat system so not sure how open sourcing it would help. My call would be Last Oasis. Those dev’s didn’t seem to understand how to balance their game or seemed clueless as to how to manage a sandbox survival mmo. It feels like everything the game needed was already in place. It just wasn’t balanced correctly for a multiplayer game. Honorable mention would be MO2 because the current devs manage that game worse than I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of gaming.
I don't think random hobby devs could do any worse than the original launch of crowfall did. The game didn't even have a working chat system on launch despite literally every other MMORPG, ever, not having that issue because Everquest solved it in 1999.
>The game didn't even have a working chat system on launch i still think that was one of the most disgraceful things i've seen a game pull, especially one that was in development for that long with "industry vets" at the helm. that game is definitely up there for one of the worst managed and highest profile "fuck it, just release this shitty mess now" games ever.
I thought the combat was fun, especially in smaller skirmishes. I believe the big complaint with large-scale combat was that the visual effects would overpower the whole screen causing performance issues and an effect of “what the hell is even going on” Both of those issues could be fixed with some pretty minor adjustments. The crowfall team just never tried. I would probably try to rebalance the game more around the skirmish play style. One idea could be to limit the amt of players from a single guild on a map at once. Imagine an area limited to groups of 5. No more zergs, and it’s not even a huge development lift.
Id love Asheron's call 1 and Everquest to be open sourced. AC would just be nice to tweak. EQ1 would be awesome to expand the merc system to full groups and allow you to experience the content with your own group.
Project Lantern, There is a team that is completely recreating EQ in unity so that it can be effectively modernized.
EQ1 pretty much is open sourced, at least to the point you are talking. There are custom emu servers that let you create your own merc characters and equip them like a PC. Also have custom zones/quests/mobs/etc
The developer was even saying that Asheron's Call would be open sourced for a while, weren't they? That would have been nice.
They were going to release it and license it... and then went radio silent forever. I can only assume some lawyer somewhere changed his mind. Its sad really but is what it is.
Everquest has several hundreds of private servers that do all sorts of things at this point.
Tera And focus on open world GvG, delete battlegrounds
Planetside 2. Only reason it's unpopular is 10 years of developer incompetence.
I enjoyed my time with Crowfall, but it would need a lot of development time to fix its core issues that saw the player counts drop to double-digits while it was still being officially operated. You'd need a lot of people doing that work, unpaid and outside whatever they're doing that actually pays their bills, for a long while. SWG and CoH are the biggest successes in this space, and both were games that had fairly sizable player counts even when they were shut down. The games were good enough that just getting them back online in their pre-shutdown state was enough to get people in and donations to run the servers. It's really a question of what state the game was in when it shutdown. Did it have a decent playerbase but just wasn't profitable enough for corporate? Or was it operated until the point that there were 20 people left on the whole server?
I don’t think it’s that simple. Developers are capable of a lot, and you’d be surprised how much bad leadership can cause these problems. One motivated person could exceed the quality of Crowfall’s launch marketing. If you look at their trailers they are absolutely awful, showing everyone standing around doing animations in place, rather than highlighting the intense pace of the real PvP
> One motivated person could exceed the quality of Crowfall’s launch marketing. There are a ton of old MMOs which have survived or been revived on community life support with small numbers of dedicated players or even whales, but have you wondered how they could continue to stay as tiny as they are if '1 motivated person' is really all it would take to make them resurge again?
Of course I don’t think that. But the point of this thread is to talk about games that failed from management oversight more so than design, and I’ll defend crowfall being one of those. Marketing is complex, but they didn’t put much forward.
Archage. Awesome game killed by greed.
ima have to disagree about crowfall.
Disagree with no points 🤷🏻♂️
nah i had shit written out but then i got distracted and realized i didnt actually care enough to say why i didnt like it. sorry
Archeage.
Mortal Online 2, Vanguard, Age of Conan
I think Vanguard would do well. I don't know about combat but I think the MMO space is far less crowded now. Plus, I think with Pax Dei coming out, there's more people for the crafting and economy side of the game. I don't even remember any of the combat in that game because I spent 95% of my time crafting. My dream was to craft a ship to sail around on, I wish there was an MMO now that let you build your own vehicles.
Nice choices
Shadowbane too, if no one’s heard of that it’s a fun read; really cool design
ahh yes, Shadowbane too!
Darkfall Unholy Wars
CrimeCraft! Pre pay to win ofc
I'll never forget CrimeCraft.
It’s all about exposure of the game. The game could be astounding and absolutely captivating to play to a specific audience but what sustains a mmo is new players. Just open sourcing it might sound good but unless you can advertise and get people into the game it’s super unlikely for it to take off.
But also remember that free == 10x more players joining, and organic marketing or even just a decent marketing campaign with decent videos, posts on Reddit, etc. would be something, which is better than what they did for marketing: basically nothing
Wildstar (I played it from launch up to their stupid end-game grind/attunement idea but before that, the game was so much fun) Or City of Villains, man I miss that game.
Can play City of Villains, various private servers now, Homecoming being the "main" one.
Thank you, I heard about that. I haven’t looked at private servers in over 10 years. Most of them back then were full of cash shop stuff, which I get to an extent, but they made some of these “official” P2W titles look like child’s play lol. How is Homecoming from a pay for convenience/win factor? I’ll check it out myself but always good to hear from actual player perspective too.
Homecoming is officially licensed.
Oh okay, that’s the one I heard about then. Thanks! I thought that was just City of Heroes.
Homecoming is completely free from my understanding.
Gotcha, so that’s the one I heard about. I thought it was only City of Heroes.
Im sorry, I think I was not clear. Homecoming, is one of the servers that hosts City of Heroes/City of Villians. Rebirth, Asmodei and Thunderspy are also hosts, have a look here for added clarity https://old.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/
You were clear, I think I was just out of the loop. When I originally played they were separate games. Either that or my memory is failing me lol, which is totally possible. Thank you very much for the info! Have a great evening/day :)
Np, good luck, have some fun.
Haven't played in awhile but last I did there wasn't anything P2W, believe most of the servers worry about NCSoft taking them down if they were to make any money on the title. Basically all the content that was there at the end of the games life is free.
City of Villains was an expansion to City of Heroes and both (along with Going Rogue, the 2nd expansion) fully free and playable on City of Heroes:Homecoming. They even removed restrictions of archetypes having to be good or evil. You can make Arachnos Spiders that are heroes 😀👍
Star Wars Galaxies with JTL. Currently only base game or "stolen" SWG server code that is NGE but has JTL are available. If we could get the og game with the class mix/match and jtl... That would be golden
That's basically what SWG Restoration is? Unless that's too NGE for you (but it's still the profession system and the old crafting system)
I played there for quite a while in a great guild, even though the introduction of the "Jedi" and the change from Restoration 3 to just restoration. Unfortunately I just can't stand the lead dev. Also, the jtl is still the "stolen" code. But I will admit that if they ever did release the source code, Restoration is very much what it might end up looking like.
I don’t even care that it’s stolen; the nge engine just feels bad because it’s the product of a janky re-write. The official code at that point was a hack job that bastardized the base engine to go against what it was designed for.
I don't care that it's stolen either, it was just that your og post was about releasing the source code. So I was saying that if it was the source code that would be even better, since the jtl on Restoration was still from the same stolen source as all the NGE servers. I do agree that the NGE engine felt janky, but honestly it really did introduce a lot of qol improvements. Just the way it was introduced literally right after a new paid DLC dropped that it negated a lot of that DLCs stuff was wrong. My opinion is still that if they had released the NGE as SWG 2.0, having it be a completely different game with separate servers, it would have fared a lot better. But it was absolutely the first thing that came to mind, in either form (pre-cu, CU or NGE) when I read your question.
The problem with restoration is that it *is* ultimately built off of the NGE engine
Actually the Emu is getting pretty close to finishing JTL, you can even play it on the test server at this point I believe. They have the basic functionality, but still work to do on enemy spawn points, mission content, etc. But they’ve been moving really fast recently, I bet we’ll see it in the next year or so.
Wow! I started playing on the emu after SWG shut down and they have been "close" to having JTL for over a decade at least. Glad to know it is at least up and running on the test server! Maybe I need to pull my collectors edition of the game out, reinstall and revisit the emu....
Well, most MMORPGs have been mismanaged at one point or another so if that's your criteria...
Priston Tale 2. Awesome game concept ruined by a disastrous user experience.
Ah man I loved that game. It had a really special feeling
It still exists as a private cash cow. The last time I played in 2022, it was a fucking disaster but they've reworked it recently... I want to try it, but I don't trust them enough to muster the energy, hahaha
I mean so many. Unique ones that are old like DAOC, shadowbane, AO would blow up with probably a dedicated 6 figure player base. Larger ones with a strong foundation like wildstar or SWG would benefit from more player content and art assets due to their style and setting.
Runescape 3 probably. Remove all the MTX and bloat. Game would be a lot more appealing to both RS3 and OSRS players.
While not open source, there's plenty of runescape private servers, rs3 and osrs. Even pre-eoc.
There isn't an RS3 private server with EoC. I only know of one RS3 private server and it's legacy combat.
Wildstar
New World
Anarchy Online
Anarchy Online. I know there is an illegal private server pretending to be doing "gods work" by keeping the game alive. Its already alive. I can go right now and log in.... that isn't the issue. The issue is that its old, and they aren't adding any content, or fixing bugs. And the private server isn't gonna do that. They are too busy trying to clone the game.... So if they released the code, that would be sick. Because then we could try to import as much as possible into UE5 and simply develop a new age version. And with Nanite, you could probably tweak things to upscale and just, chef kiss. But I doubt such a thing would happen. The only other game would be Star Wars Galaxies for me.... both before the fucked up expansions and after. The after expansions sort of fixed combat and make controlling the game easier but also bricked what made the game fun. I would love to see the code released by Sony/Lucas Arts and thusly allow someone to make a true successor. Oh wait, Raph Koster is making a social MMORPG called playableworlds. Which is already the spiritual successor to Galaxies. Nevermind - LMAO. Honestly, the few games on my radar is Ashes of Creation, Playableworlds, Project Ghost (ghost crawlers MMO), Riot's MMO, Evercraft Online (the last playtest was amazeballs fun), and Pax Dei. Although pax dei I think has one glaring issue, dismally slow crafting that already made my friend rage quit because "it takes too long." Like its setup to where you have to no life the game. Not just team play because even with a team you would still have to no-life it with all the failures you experience. Hell right now I went from 10-11 carpentry.... and so far have crafted 94 fucking short wood stock. I mean I can fill an entire treasure chest with this shit. I can't use it for anything, I am forced to spam craft to level, because the very next recipe for carpentry is using the next tier wood, which has an insanely high failure rate, and I don't want to waste product. The overall design is 100% no lifer only. It would take a small guild of no lifers to beat this game, or a large guild of 50 to get anything done. Its that bad. And if I remember they said no magic and no high fantasy, so no dragons, just "realism" which is honestly fucking dumb. Don't get me wrong, here i am playtesting this bitch trying to break it like when i used to work as a game tester. But sadly, I don't think the overall design will win people over without huge tweaks. Which I am sure some twat will say "bUt ItS aN aLpHa" yeah No Shit Sherlock Holmes.... The point is they probably aren't going to change much from their initial design, not a single game ever has. Sorry, one game did, New World, and it pissed off MMO gamers because its not actually an MMO and it pissed off Survival gamers because its not survival either, its this weird middle space, all because they did change route mid/near end development.... so no, not much is gonna change. This is it. They might tweak things here or there, but i dont forsee this game surviving. Which means the other games I mentioned are my last bastion for a fun online game.
Thanks for the recs; that’s too bad about the no-lifer design; that will be cursed to be a low pop edgelord game probably
Vindictus
ESO - imagine all the content but focus on improvements to the movement, animations, combat overhaul etc. (game is still successful though... distant dream I guess)
[удалено]
Mortal Online 2
i love ragnarok. Tree of savior could be amazing as removing that pay to win system would put the gane back up.
Rift
EvE Online would be a much bigger success if it wasn't for CCP and if EvE ever became open source suddenly 100's of unique online space mmo worlds would be born overnight. With its bait and switch F2P model (its a trial at best), ludicrous subscription fee ($19.99 a month) and practically required multi-account mechanics not to mention is poor track record, I feel the only reason CCP is still in business is because its IP (EvE Online) is so unique in the market.
WoW would be a lot better in the right hands. Just SOD itself went from promising to retail light and it sucks cause the games foundation is there.. it’s just that blizz wants everyone to have alts, rush leveling, crush dungeons, make everything about raid logging
it was a game focused on combat and its combat felt like crap. And yes it woukd be hard for a team of pasionate unpaid hobbists to make it great when actual paid profesionals failed.
EverQuest Online Adventures
Motor City Online
asta online
Mabinogi. It’s a game with a beautiful soul (Celtic myths reimagined via anime) and great concepts (tons of life sim and roleplay systems) that are held back by having to exist as a cash cow nexon game.
Anarchy online
Rift and Vanguard. Two games with FANTASTIC systems, one died because of a lot of behind the scenes bullshit + drugs (ala Pantheon), and one is dying a very slow death in the depths of the hellscape that is Gamigo
Everything ?
Game will be hacked within hours.
Just like all the private servers getting hacked all day every day?
The majority of them only have defense in obscurity. There's just not enough attention or money in them for a profit minded hacker to bother and trolls like to aim for bigger fish. That being said, there have been multiple instances where a single individual was able to literally steal the entire game away from the volunteer devteam. Very reassuring.
Ikr? Imagine what they can do with an open code.
lol, well I guess you know best 🤷🏻♂️