
Filed under: Culture, Massively meta, Massively Speaking
Massively Speaking Episode 41 continues our great tradition of inviting in podcasters from beyond the walls of Massively! John "Shuttler" Nicholson of the Limited Edition superhero MMO/comics podcast joins Shawn and Michael for talk of all the day's MMO news! Come along with us as we chat about WoW's 3.0.8 'disaster' patch, our recent feature on Free Realms, and the upcoming Warhammer events that must not be named! Tune in for the commentary, the laughs, and a bit of information along the way.Continue reading Massively Speaking Podcast Episode 41
Massively Speaking Podcast Episode 41 originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
'Space Unicorns FTW' by CindyL
Submitted on 2009-01-29 17:12:31 CST
I wasn't entirely convinced that drastically redesigning Tabula Rasa was that great of an idea, in fact I was disappointed once Tabula was ready to enter beta and most of the fantasy had been axed and turned towards a very military themed game. While it's a cool genre I don't think the community, in general, wasn't all that ready for it just yet.
But anyway, about The Secret World, I am hugely looking forwards to it as to me it is closer to Funcom's The Longest Journey IP, and quite frankly I wish they hadn't bothered on Conan at all and just focused on The Secret World. But my reasons for that are entirely selfish, I'm sick of waiting for TLJ 3 for one, and The Secret World IP sounds soooooo much cooler. :D
But in the long run Conan will have taught Funcom a lot about making a stable MMO that people want to play, stress on the stable XD, and will bring this to TSW. They improved on Anarchy Online, they are improving with Conan, however slowly, and so it can only go up from here for Secret World.
The talk about whether it's a good or bad idea to follow WoW's model or not makes me think back to something that has been nagging at me for a bout a year. And that is a revival of the sandbox. Now I don't think that we'll ever see a successful pure sandbox ever again, but I think there needs to be some genius company who takes the ideas of Ryzom, Vanguard and Star Wars Galaxies and mashes it all together to create the most perfect sandboxy MMO ever made. It's world will be huge and pretty but not using the latest graphics, there will be many travel options like mounts, vehicles and teleports. There will be quests and dungeons like all other MMOs, the economy will be fueled by player crafts and quest rewards will not be any better then what can be crafted.
Most importantly the world will be fully explorable, no invisible walls, or un-surmountable hills. If there's PvP it will be consensual.
That game I think would be different enough to WoW and throw people back to what made MMOs great in the first place that it would do well. Also I don't believe that completely ignoring what WoW has done is very clever either, you need to still be able to solo level if you want and gain levels at a good rate, the return of the grind is not an option. But if a game has enough content or diversity in what you can do that should not be a problem.
^_^
'oh yeah.....' by CindyL
Submitted on 2009-01-29 17:15:46 CST
I'm aware Age of Conan has HP Lovecraft influence also, and maybe more so then TLJ but the Barbarian Age setting is what throws me off a bit, a modern day MMO with fantasy or horror inclinations needs to be done!