Rift is WoW with a snooze button.
I played it for a couple of hours on Tuesday. Soo boring. I totally don't get the hype.
I played it for a couple of hours on Tuesday. Soo boring. I totally don't get the hype.
Blizzard's new MMO
- Thread starter Kaziarl
- Start date
Rift is a WoW clone with graphics that, while technically "better" than WoW's, have about a tenth of the artistic design backing it. I haven't played it, just watched some movies, read reviews, heard the opinions of a couple of friends who've played it, and it doesn't sound like it's worth investing time in. "I'm bored of WoW, I'm going to go spend three months playing an inferior clone of it", just doesn't make sense to me.
You can't half-ass WoW to beat WoW. Hell, you can't even be on par with WoW to beat WoW. In order to take a significant chunk of their market, a developer is going to have to offer every aspect of gaming that WoW does so well plus more.
I honestly think it's not within the power of any other game to supplant WoW on its own. Take a big chunk of their market? Perhaps. But WoW will be the big dog in the market by a country mile until WoW players get bored of it naturally. Like the alpha dog, eventually it will get old, and tired, and weak, and someone younger and stronger will come along and take it out. But while they've got 12 million players and at least a couple more expansions left in it, it will be on top.
You can't half-ass WoW to beat WoW. Hell, you can't even be on par with WoW to beat WoW. In order to take a significant chunk of their market, a developer is going to have to offer every aspect of gaming that WoW does so well plus more.
I honestly think it's not within the power of any other game to supplant WoW on its own. Take a big chunk of their market? Perhaps. But WoW will be the big dog in the market by a country mile until WoW players get bored of it naturally. Like the alpha dog, eventually it will get old, and tired, and weak, and someone younger and stronger will come along and take it out. But while they've got 12 million players and at least a couple more expansions left in it, it will be on top.
So Rift is Alganon?
The only other MMO I see doing "well" is Guild Wars 2 and by "well" I mean has a small but sustainable player base due to not having a monthly fee. I won't touch other pay to play MMO's anymore after Warhammer Online flopped they went from 800k players and 60 servers and now they are down to a meagre 6 servers and maybe a few thousand at best. Just about every MMO to come out since WoW has had this problem AoC, WAR, and now I bet Rift and DCUO will suffer the same fate.
I think SWTOR will be pretty big.
By the way not saying SWTOR will beat Wow or anything. SWTOR only needs 500k subscribers to be profitable according to the EA conference a couple of weeks ago. Which i think it can do and maybe a little more.
Well, for a game that cost about a hundred million dollars, they'd need to extract about $200 apiece out of 500K users. So, that's $60 plus ~9 months of a $15 subscription, per member.
Yeah, I guess that could work--to break even.
It probably works in their favor that SWG has almost totally collapsed as a viable MMO. Less competition.
My money is on a post-apokalyptic setting ala Fallout.
We all know how Blizzard loves to "steal" ideas and perfect them.
Blizzard also likes their games to be laced with humour, and their graphics to feel warm and rich, and exaggerated in a cartoon-like way.
I also suspect the theme will be post-apocalyptic, but I think the style of the game will be optimistic and focused about the social aspect: post-apocalyptic fashions of youth culture, rather than being a dismal post-apocalyptic survival game
Blizzard also recycle a lot of their material: taking an idea from on older game, and adapting it to work with the new game.
So we can imagine there being two factions:
- pro-industry (chaotic/horde), who want to rebuild the old industrial regimes of ruthlessly exploiting the earth's natural resources, mass production of technology, and believing in their ability to adapt to any eventuality they may themselves cause;
- pro-nature (lawful/alliance), who want humanity to live in greater harmony with their environment and achieve sustainable growth.
Well it's hard to say for sure, but one thing is for certain and that's a good chunk of the filling is made up of Star Wars fans.
I think that's really going to help its case, and if it offers half of what BW has promised, that it will be "new" enough to at least get people to try it.
It's already done a good job of killing the Galaxies stigma. And I seems like they're really trying to polish up so it doesn't wind up like STO. Because, as Bishop said, it's a foregone conclusion we won't see it this year. The September date will be pushed back again by May.
