noamineo wrote on Jan 28
th, 2015 at 2:29pm:
See now, Ultima Online built a whole new game engine, but left the front-end as-is. Players kept all their stuff, levels, renown, what have you. But the game had a new engine under the hood.
I feel like this concept makes way the hell more sense than "Let's build a whole new game and try to get players to move over".
Even if they let you keep your stuff, in Archon's Quake example if the new game doesn't "feel" quite right, you'll loose players.
This is why sequel MMO always flop.
I'd challenge anyone reading this to name just one "sequel" MMO that wasn't an abject failure.
From a theoretical PoV, I think this approach would be most prudent.
DDO2 likely wouldn't succeed commercially, at least under Turdbine, nor do they have any interest in developing more MMO's so it would seem.
A sensible approach as you suggest would be to keep the databases of players and their stuff, but address the underlying game engine. This is the only way to try to keep your existing playerbase and hopefully bring quite a few back. Starting from scratch won't appeal to many.
Once you pull back the hood on this, I'm sure the task would begin to grow rapidly as the components of DDO are not modular.
Would you change the visuals engine? A large undertaking to be sure, and as some have alluded to, you risk changing the feel/vibe of the game.
Physics engine/character models/interactable models? To fix some of the problems, you probably need to tweak these, but these have knock on effects. If you wanted to free up the developers, you would need to free up 3D movements and make the design engine more amenable to this (so you don't get stuck on rocks 1 inch high).
Game mechanic systems - you would try to keep most of this, but tidy up the code. Some things would be tempting to fix to make the system "better"' but how far do you go? Any change here has knock-on effects.
Also lag could be caused by some of the mechanics as they are now - these might need to be addressed so as not to bring the lag problem with them.
Quests - possibly the biggest problem. Change the engine to be cleaner and better to facilitate faster design and development (this becomes one of the upsides to the business case - quicker development) means either reworking all the existing quests or developing a translation layer for old quests vs new quests.
The knock-on effects will be the unseen killer on a project like this. Revised artwork, revising thousands of legacy item designs/mechanisms, character sheet/GUI changes, balancing and testing are all elements that would need updating.
The time and cost to do this would be significant. The difficult part would be working out the commercial reason to do this - the payback as it were.
The sensible approach would be to do it in parallel (keep revenues and current client base), run extensive testing, and switch over after a period of stress testing under live load conditions.
I reckon you could mount a business case to do it, even get a competent team of programmers to do it in 12-18 mths under an experienced systems lead and have a live switch over inside 2 years.
But it will never happen, and I hope it doesn't happen under Turdbine mgmt. It would be nothing but an unmitigated disaster with their incompetent fingers in the pie.
That's my 10c worth.
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DDO2... why does anyone think this is a good idea? (Read 11448 times)
