Debunking some myths regarding PS1 playerbase demise.

[Klockan]

Originally Posted by JHendy

Well, my issue is this: There are a lot of half-wits on PSU who insist that this game must play, handle and essentially be an upscaled version of Battlefield to have any chance of real success.

I'm with you Figgy. Nice post.

According to that graph PS1 did barely breach 60k subscribers, that is a failure. Just because it failed even harder later doesn't mean that it wasn't a failure from the start, it just means that their desperate tries to fix the mess didn't work. Gaming companies should learn that if you give the consumers shit then don't touch it, people that actually liked the shit were really desperate for something different which gets ruined by mainstreaming the game and none else will be satisfied by sugarcoated shit.

EVE is a great example of this, it is downright a shitty game. But its concept is really unique and pure which is drawing the attention of gamers looking for something they can't find anywhere else. Eve started out with less players than planetside, but they didn't try to fix that. Instead they continued to build upon what made eve unique and thus the game has had a small but steady growth over the years. If they had tried sugarcoating the game to fit a wider audience it would have died instead since the game is way too terrible to survive any form of competition. Its only saving grace is that it is one of a kind. It was the same thing with planetside, it sucked as a game but was legendary as a concept so when the concept got ruined it died.

[Sturmhardt]

Great post, thanks for that.

[Syphus]

I wouldn't call 60K back in 2003 - 2004 a failure for a niche game back at a time when broadband was far from the standard and MMOs were not as well known as they are now.

With the advancement of broadband, and multiplayer FPS games with larger maps and players amounts becoming more and more commonplace, the game was in a perfect position to move into the six digit range. However, SOE themselves ruined the game.

[xSquirtle]

TY OP, you share my thoughts on this matter as well. I see far to often people bashing lots of PS1 idea's and mechanics with no logical reasoning what-so ever. Not to mention the lack of Planetside history knowledge of development. So many people forgot the total black out of development for PS for nearly 3 almost 4 years(during reserves), and Sony's lack of testing things thoroughly when finally introducing something.

PS was a great (and still is) game that kept me motivated to play everyday. PS2; the hype is kind of there but not nearly as much as I had with PS1.

[Klockan]

Originally Posted by Syphus

I wouldn't call 60K back in 2003 - 2004 a failure for a niche game back at a time when broadband was far from the standard and MMOs were not as well known as they are now.

It was a failure compared to the other games of SOE.

Originally Posted by Syphus

With the advancement of broadband, and multiplayer FPS games with larger maps and players amounts becoming more and more commonplace, the game was in a perfect position to move into the six digit range. However, SOE themselves ruined the game.

Yes, I said that in my post. My point however was that it wasn't a good game, it had a great concept though. If infantry combat was as good as UT99 with lots of viable but different weapons and great feel the game would have gotten really big, maybe even up around seven digits. The biggest problem with the mmo's wasn't that they were a niche it was that there were no good mmo games before wow. Planetside could have been the first good mmo and thus would have revolutionized peoples view on the mmo market but as it was that didn't happen.

[igster]

Well put Figment.

SOE will do well to take note of previous mistakes and try not to repeat them.

I've never heard a COD or Battlefield player go all gooy eyed about the time that they spent playing their respective games.

[Syphus]

Originally Posted by Klockan

It was a failure compared to the other games of SOE.


Yes, I said that in my post. My point however was that it wasn't a good game, it had a great concept though. If infantry combat was as good as UT99 with lots of viable but different weapons and great feel the game would have gotten really big, maybe even up around seven digits. The biggest problem with the mmo's wasn't that they were a niche it was that there were no good mmo games before wow. Planetside could have been the first good mmo and thus would have revolutionized peoples view on the mmo market but as it was that didn't happen.

There really weren't many other games that SOE had at that point that really draw that much of a comparison.

But anyway, it's rather disingenuous to try and say there were no good MMOs before WoW. While EQ and UO have not particularly aged all that well, they were still great games for their time, and pre-WoW and pre-screw up, SWG was quite the game and did a number of things that were unique.

Originally Posted by igster

I've never heard a COD or Battlefield player go all gooy eyed about the time that they spent playing their respective games.

While the first two CODs were the only ones I really liked, I have tons of great stories from BF1942.

[Klockan]

Originally Posted by Syphus

There really weren't many other games that SOE had at that point that really draw that much of a comparison.

But anyway, it's rather disingenuous to try and say there were no good MMOs before WoW. While EQ and UO have not particularly aged all that well, they were still great games for their time, and pre-WoW and pre-screw up, SWG was quite the game and did a number of things that were unique.

Think like this, would the game sell as a singleplayer game with the same mechanics(and less grind ofc)? If not then the mmo is a bad game. But yes, you are right, there were good mmo's before wow, just not as good. The point is that somehow the developers forget about the actual game and just focuses on the mmo part which makes the game lackluster. No matter how awesome concepts and unique your game is you will never make it very successful without good gameplay. PS1 had terrible gameplay compared to any big shooter that was released even well before its time, thus I conclude that it was a bad game with its saving grace being the unique concepts. WoW on the other hand would beat most singleplayer games in the same genre at the time which made it unique among the mmo's, it wasn't just a massive multiplayer online game but it was actually a really good game in itself, that was the only thing that made it unique on the mmo market.

[Syphus]

Really?

While I don't want to get off-track here, WoW as a singleplayer game is nothing but a relentless grind and then nothing at all at the top. Raiding and playing with people is what made the game.

Around that time, the big RPGs of a similar style were: Knights of the Old Republic, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Deus Ex, even Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale and Fallout 2 still got a lot of play.

WoW was simply the right game, at the right time, making the right advancements over EQ. And, taking some things away from games like UO and SWG. Such as the player towns etc.

I just don't think you can say that as a single-player game it could compete against any of those listed.

But you're right, PS would not have sold as a single-player game, but neither would Counterstrike, BF1942, Quake 3, or any of the multitude of other multiplayer games people might've been playing then.

[Klockan]

Originally Posted by Syphus

Really?

While I don't want to get off-track here, WoW as a singleplayer game is nothing but a relentless grind and then nothing at all at the top. Raiding and playing with people is what made the game.

Read my post, I specifically stated that it would get altered so that it would be less grindy.

Originally Posted by Syphus

Around that time, the big RPGs of a similar style were: Knights of the Old Republic, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Deus Ex, even Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale and Fallout 2 still got a lot of play.

Neverwinter nights is basically a worse WoW in another setting, WoW is way better than that game. If you ported the Neverwinter nights campaign to wow with wow mobs, wow classes, all wow mechanics and scaled the leveling so you leveled to 60 during it then it would have been a better game. The other games have slightly different mechanics making it harder to just make raw statements like that.

Originally Posted by Syphus

But you're right, PS would not have sold as a single-player game, but neither would Counterstrike, BF1942, Quake 3, or any of the multitude of other multiplayer games people might've been playing then.

I mean as a non mmo game, or you would make a singleplayer game based on the same mechanics, PS1 wouldn't had sold if it was packaged in the same style as UT or so. Or, all games sell a few copies but it would have been a game none would have remembered today, well below games like cnc renegade.

[Canaris]

you forgot to mention SOE stripping the PS1 dev talent pool and reassigning them to SWG, leaving a lot of.... well very DNA shallow pool ones to make do.

[Baneblade]

OP would make a good article for the wiki.

[MrBloodworth]

You forgot something that lead to the breaking of the cert system.

Cert bundles.


All the stuff you mention in the OP is SOE chasing the session based players. Session based thinking does not belong in a team based, objective based, persistent game.

Originally Posted by Klockan

According to that graph PS1 did barely breach 60k subscribers, that is a failure.

Not for the time. No. Not for the Budget. No. Also, it was the only FPS with a subscription requirement. Failure means they did not recoup the development investment. They did, many times over.

Perspective.


Sad thing is, for Planetside 2. Its session based thinking all the way. Coupled with the idea that scale is the only defining feature. They scraped everything else ( to a point ) in the hut for speed. But have thrown many thing out with the bathwater.

Originally Posted by username

DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TL;DR make ur things shorter there to long to read -_-

You are part of the problem with modern gaming.

[Bocheezu]

The key with PS1, above any other MMO, is maintaining the population. Kind of a "no shit!" thing to say, but PS1 gameplay gets significantly less interesting when pops are low; it just devolves into a 3-way battle on some random continent because nobody has enough pop to open two fronts at a time. Other MMOs (especially WoW with all the cross-server stuff they do) don't suffer as much with low pop. So this sort of game has to be very careful that they don't add shit that people don't want.

My personal opinion on the stuff they added during my time:

1. Caves. I started PS1 a couple months after Core Combat came out and I played a good 3-4 months without buying the expansion. When I finally did, most of the time the caves were pretty empty with small-scale battles. As TR, I felt I was at a disadvantage against the other two factions. VS Max is absolutely broken in the caves with its ability to fly; in PS2, I am glad they are giving jetpacks to every faction with the light assault class. Jackhammer was a nightmare with the small, confined buildings. Maybe not "broken," but I sure as hell couldn't beat it. I just felt useless in there and couldn't kill anybody.

2. BFRs. Personally, I didn't hate them that much. They were overpowered, but at least it was overpowered for everybody and there wasn't faction bias. My outfitmates had a much more severe opinion and ragequitted after a couple weeks. My outfit left en masse to WoW, and I went with them.

After rejoining during the free 30 days, I found that the game hadn't changed much since I left it. The only things that were different were the continent/planet incentives and the new CE. Pops were nice and high and they actually had to raise the pop cap on continents. It was like the good 'ol days. Now it's back to sub-100 populations per faction and nothing but 3-way battles.

[Figment]

Originally Posted by MrBloodworth

You forgot something that lead to the breaking of the cert system.

Cert bundles.


All the stuff you mention in the OP is SOE chasing the session based players.

Well if we're going to look into this in particular, yes.

UniMAX was definitely a problem. It was mostly introduced to make the AA MAX more popular, because they wern't popular due to their extreme specialist role and because solo aircav was a bit too popular and needed counters. The AV MAX had similar problems, but was more popular for obvious reasons: it was multipurpose.

The Reaver was made cheaper by being an option on top of Light Scout, which in itself already was a combination of buggies and Mosquito, which was done just to make buggies more interesting (instead of giving buggies better advantages, like they did later in the game by giving them more anti-mine endurance and a bit more armour).

Electronics Expert (Virals and Expert Hacking) and Advanced Engineering (combination of Fortification and Assault Engineering) were created because these specialisations took up loads of certs - as they should. Unfortunately, few people would specialise this deep, because it was more important to keep up with the HA folks. Again, it was primarily added to make it more affordable due to expecting little use. Instead, they should have made HA and Aircav more expensive...

IMO, after the addition of more cert points, they should have taken the opportunity to make Raider and Sunderer the basic Ground Transportation cert, switch Deliverer to TR and create a second 1 point cert for Advanced Ground Transportation. Three good vehicles for two cert points was a steal.



But, if we're talking about simplifications and catering to the masses while making certs less meaningful, then the certification timer reduced from 24 to 12 to 6 hours should be mentioned as well. That made it far easier to alter your character and reduced the impact of long term decisions.

Then there's also the secondary consequence of server mergers: Fourth Empire. Or: players that could suddenly swap empires on the same server. To this day I'm personally "one empire, one server", but I know few others that are still really loyal to an empire.

Of course, if we want to examplify just how far out of touch SOE was with its game and how its played, you can just go and name ANY official SOE event. And I literally mean, any. From Black Ops to Commander, to Home Cont Defense, Rabbit or Halloween or any of the others... They're all "meh" and poorly implemented. Even if some had potential, they would never get recoded to player's wishes simply because there were no coders.

Another fail on behalf of SOE was the code itself: there were no significant design notes left with the original code after acquisition. There was no base or terrain builder that could alter maps that were already downloaded (if they changed anything beyond adding anything on flat terrain, they would have to force a full redownload which they didn't want to due to the 56k connections: they couldn't cut through the map or edit it to fit the surrounding terrain again! :/).




If SOE had given PlanetSide a full dev team for the duration of the game... Everything would have been different.