Throne & Liberty : finaly so different (edit)

It's a competitor in looks and optimization. No loading on TPs and the game looks incredible even though it's on UE4. And big gatherings of people seem to not lag all that much.

I've heard that it's kinda bad on really old graphics cards, so I'm kinda fucked, but I dunno if UE5 will be any better in that regard.

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This game didn't invent anything. They copied mechanics that have been in other mmos (mainly the Lineage series) for over a decade iirc.

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Yeah, the majority would definitely dislike it, but Ashes is targeting the older demographic and they're also planning to have a pretty hardcore game that requires a ton of time investment. Time that this old demographic doesn't have. This pushes that demographic towards rmt and/or botting (because they have the money for that). So, as much of a meme as it is, auto-play removes that push.

Obviously the farm design suffers from that, but I do think that this will be the future that the west just currently rejects. The current mmo trend is to completely skip low lvl content to then offload a shitton of grind on you at the end of the story. The other side (that's usually in eastern mmos) is to just have a very long grind all throughout. Ashes is going for that second route.

But both of those include grind. And someone out there will definitely automate it illegally, be it through software or super cheap labor. And this will ruin the game for the remaining majority that either don't want to cheat or don't have the money for it. Blizzard decided to "solve" this issue by straight up selling their own p2w currency and NCsoft "solved" it by giving everyone their own bot. It's up to you to decide which one is worse. For me, Bliz way is worse.

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Yeah, just let me get $2k out of thin air and I'm on it

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There's very few conveniences that the current mmo playerbase is used to. I hope I'm wrong, but rn I think that the game will just not appeal to the younger audience.

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Asmon himself said that his audience is ~28++. And I'm talking about 30-40 range. Those who were around teen years back when the inspirations for Ashes were still kinda popular and at their peak.

Young audience is the current teens up to maybe 22-25. Pretty much anyone in studying period of their life (outside of those who're studying at 40 cause their life allows them to).

Steven is kinda making the game for himself, so people around his age would most likely be the TA, because they'd be the most likely ones to have a similar life experience and would have enough nostalgia for those days to want their return.

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Oh, I'm not saying they're making another TL. Just that the current overall design will clash directly with the supposedly younger-targeted combat. Even if they succeed in making a combat that appeals to the action players, there'll still be open world pvp, no TPs, death penalties, contested open world dungeons, open world bosses that give BiS instead of instanced ones, party-required gameplay, very long leveling times, no flying for 99.9% of players - all of those are mainly oldschool design choices.

And it's those things that make me think that the current young gamer population won't like the game all that much. BDO is considered to have the best action combat out there, but how big is the game? A few hundred thousand, if that? I'd attribute that to their overall korean-leaning design, which usually clashes with the western preferences. And even then, if I understood some comments from Azherae correctly, they've gone a bit closer to the western design direction in the last few years.

Which is why I'm saying that even if Ashes does have super cool combat (I personally doubt it) - the game will still not be all that popular with the audience you're seemingly talking about.

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Yep, this was pretty much what I was talking about. We'll just have to see how it pans out in AoC's case.

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It's more of a "what other pvp game is even out there". I feel like BDO has cornered the pvp mmo niche right now, due to it pulling in both the pvpers and the action combat people.

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I'd imagine that sunk cost fallacy plays a big role in that consistency. How many new players does BDO get in a month? Is there even a way to know that? Cause considering its design, I'd assume that majority of its current players are veterans that have invested a shitton of time and money into the game and don't just want to leave (the WoW effect pretty much).

The "combat is amazing" thing definitely plays into BDO's hand, because any newcomer to the genre will probably at least try the game out cause they'd hear about it as soon as they ask "what's a game with good combat". The retention is the big question here. And it'll be an even bigger question when it comes to Ashes.

In other words, I'm somewhat pessimistic towards the game's prospects right now. And I feel like it'll probably only get worse from here. Either through Intrepid changing their core design or by people seeing that Ashes is a niche within a niche game that doesn't appeal to them. I'd definitely be happy to get proven wrong though.

Note that BDO makes more money in the west than in Korea or Asia as a whole.

The reasons are many, but impossible to explain without 'insulting' someone.

Extrapolating some of those reasons would at least imply Ashes will have a similar success flow towards those player types.

This is relevant to the thread only because TL is not trying to compete with BDO in any market, at all, based on their design. They would compete with Ashes more if Ashes' combat had a specific flow, and take an entirely different niche if the combat used one of the other three main flows.

As for new users, BDO gets some new users who have no intention of playing competitively, because it is basically the prettiest 'lifeskilling' game available until ArcheAge 2 appears.

Azherae wrote: »

Note that BDO makes more money in the west than in Korea or Asia as a whole.

Yeah, I imagined as much, considering that other KR companies are not copying BDO and instead copy the NCsoft model or maybe LA.

Azherae wrote: »

Extrapolating some of those reasons would at least imply Ashes will have a similar success flow towards those player types.

Would that then mean that, if Ashes manages to make their combat as good as they can, they'll compete with BDO? Can they even compete against the sunk cost of all those players, with both games requiring big time investments (BDO does, right?)?

Azherae wrote: »

As for new users, BDO gets some new users who have no intention of playing competitively, because it is basically the prettiest 'lifeskilling' game available until ArcheAge 2 appears.

This can definitely be the saving grace for Ashes as well and seems to be the route that quite a few western mmos are trying to take. Make a pretty and cool world to live in and let the people do random stuff in it. If Ashes somehow manages to come out before the majority of newly announced mmos do (that is if they are even real), I think they'll manage to grab a good piece of the playerbase pie.

AA2 will definitely be the biggest competitor there, if the games come out within months of each other. I'd assume that it won't be a competitor if AA comes out way before Ashes, because it'll ruin itself soon enough and leave the people wanting a similar experience.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Extrapolating some of those reasons would at least imply Ashes will have a similar success flow towards those player types.

Would that then mean that, if Ashes manages to make their combat as good as they can, they'll compete with BDO? Can they even compete against the sunk cost of all those players, with both games requiring big time investments (BDO does, right?)?

No, because the driving functions of BDO's combat don't appeal to the MMO player type that enjoys Ashes-type games as a whole. Ashes would have to explicitly aim to become more like BDO in terms of play structure too (solo-ish, lots of fodder, very 'stunlock opponent to death' heavy).

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

As for new users, BDO gets some new users who have no intention of playing competitively, because it is basically the prettiest 'lifeskilling' game available until ArcheAge 2 appears.

This can definitely be the saving grace for Ashes as well and seems to be the route that quite a few western mmos are trying to take. Make a pretty and cool world to live in and let the people do random stuff in it. If Ashes somehow manages to come out before the majority of newly announced mmos do (that is if they are even real), I think they'll manage to grab a good piece of the playerbase pie.

AA2 will definitely be the biggest competitor there, if the games come out within months of each other. I'd assume that it won't be a competitor if AA comes out way before Ashes, because it'll ruin itself soon enough and leave the people wanting a similar experience.

AA2 is unlikely to ruin itself any more than BDO does, as a game.

The main thing is that there is a subset of MMO players who don't often expect that the industry has moved on from them, and they often fail to understand in which ways the industry has done that. So their perception of 'ruined' is obvious, but basic checks don't bear it out.

AA2 just has to take 'All the people who are into the gaming style of FF14 but comfortable with controlled PvP schemas'. It will be a subsection of the MMO 'pie' as always.

Ashes does not offer what BDO or AA offer, though, so I don't expect overlap.

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Do you personally perceive a difference between BDO's 'people can attack you but there are safe zones and most crafting is done in those and even if you die you just lose time' and Ashes' 'people can attack you, there are minimal safe zones and if you die you lose your gathered things'?

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It is that difference that makes it niche.

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You see, that is just the wrong approach. It doesn't suck, because you can just not use it and be better than everyone who does. It literally makes it easier to be better than casuals.