Be Carefull with the MMO

i wanna tell you a my experience,
I bought today Simcity 2013, ok it's not an MMO, but it's completely on-line game, if you are't on-line...you'll not play,
and The servers are givin' a lot of trouble, I read about people bought the game yesterday, 7 March in my country (Italy) and today, 8 March at 21.53 or 9.53 p.m. they're not able to play yet cause the servers crash, and some others problems, and for me is the same, and if it will not get better, in the coming games I'm gonna ask to change the game to my seller!
so I wanna tell to the developers....Are you sure you wanna take only the MMO way???
if it's yes please, be carefully.

[eccy]

I moved your post from offtopic to the correct forum

Simcity is using DRM to control piracy, which means you cannot play your single player game offline anymore. This is different from the new IG MMO, because it will be multiplayer first and foremost, which cannot be done without online.

But, I know where you are going with your point about servers, and we definitely have it in the back of our minds

I advice the same MMOs required maintenance and have higher operating costs for what I understood IG intends to only tax per DLC or content package. This means if you need revenue to cover expenses you will have to release DLCs which also cost to produce.

If many DLCs/packages are produced the playerbase who does not have them might feel alienated and populations might go down and the population renewal requiring new players to try & enjoy the game will find a dead server or zones because most the players are not playing on the original game. So if DLC are made to discriminate player populations it will never work and might eventually kill the game.

Also anyone that knows the current MMO market knows it's way too overcrowded , usually players don't actively play more than 1 MMO and 2 is already rare including F2P games..

Plus developing a MMO takes years and requires skillful and experience workers that cost a great deal plus I have never experience a polished MMO that was free of bugs or issues sometimes a bad launch is enough to kill a game like it happen to Final Fantasy, Tabula Rasa and Earth & Beyond.


For a small company like digital reality making a MMO from scratch at this current stage of MMO market maturity it seems like going "All in!" especially when there is a huge potential on the RTS market especially space where digital reality has still a name and label


PS: As anyone tried the StarDrive Beta on steam? It's already the 2013 Best RTS by far for me and it still needs polishing tought it's like a serious Galactic Civilizations + Sins of a Solar Empire + Space Empire IV and a little of IG 2 like Spying and overmap.
2013 & 2014 seems to be the year of Space and Space Strategy games with StarDrive, Swords & Stars II (promo), Star Citizen, ELITE, FTL, Strike Suit Zero, Star Commander, Starlight Inception and the fuzz of Nexus 2.
It would be smart to Launch IG 3 as an RTS singleplayer + multiplayer( or MMO after launching the singeplayer) to capture some of the buzz and players StarDrive will revive!..

2013 & 2014 seems to be the year of Space and Space Strategy games with StarDrive, Swords & Stars II (promo), Star Citizen, ELITE, FTL, Strike Suit Zero, Star Commander, Starlight Inception and the fuzz of Nexus 2.
It would be smart to Launch IG 3 as an RTS singleplayer + multiplayer( or MMO after launching the singeplayer) to capture some of the buzz and players StarDrive will revive!..

I can also add that a decent city simulator with good management and planning would probably bring some of the thousands of Sim City players who are disappointed with Sim City and can play offline..

[eccy]

I advice the same MMOs required maintenance and have higher operating costs for what I understood IG intends to only tax per DLC or content package. This means if you need revenue to cover expenses you will have to release DLCs which also cost to produce.

Not true, DLC means that some content of the game is not reachable if you do not pay for it. We are doing free to play - all content is reachable for alle players (paying and non-paying), but you can use microtransactions to get there faster

I think there is so much talk about the mess that is Sim City right now, that im sure every gaming developer out there will learn how to NOT follow in the steps of how that game was launched. Stardrive looks very good, but again, yet another space strategy game out there that doesn't even come close to matching what Imperium Galactica II did for the genre. The planet interaction is very bad, plopping your soldiers onto a grid to conquer a planet thats automated is pretty bad in todays age of gaming really, there is no going all the way down to the planets surface with the economy management and planet control of IG2 had. The space combat stuff looks pretty good though seems to play well, good galaxy map.

on the MMO side of things, perhaps making all the homeworlds persistant, not conquerable planets? perhaps having the ability to get it attacked, but not actually loose it though

A little sad of the fact that the game will be a mmo rather than a standard 4x game. Specially if I understood well everything will not be implemented yet.

Really its not what I expected. But lets wait and see. I hope for a good surprise. But looks like defenitily will not be what I was hopping for.

yeah im with you on that Geekoo... im sure they'll supprise us... it might be more of a DRM rather then the traditional MMO approach... maybe a sim city style where the MMO side of things is actually more optional then forced..

[eccy]

I agree that with all the exposure on Sim City right now, it's hard not to draw a comparison. But there are some (big I might add) differences. As far as I gathered Sim City went the DRM route with a game that is still predominantly solo play, our MMO will not be predominantly solo. Technically speaking because it's online only it is a type of 'DRM', but thats where the comparison ends.

I do hope you do take the solo play seriously, because i've been on so many forums lately, and almost everyone is pretty upset its an MMO.... all the fans of the originals really want the option of solo play... weather this means adding in AI or some sort of sandbox instanced galaxy of your own to mess around with or not I dunno... but this is a serious concern for a lot of people