Former WoW devs announce new studio: Fantastic Pixel Castle
Former WoW devs announce new studio: Fantastic Pixel Castle
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/13613260
Greg Street (aka Ghost Crawler) and Bryan Holinka are 2 names I recognize.
Side note: Is the "former wow-devs" population larger than the current staff?
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I'm not really interested in any MMOs these days which all deemphasize player interaction and prioritize content completion. I'm sure it appeals to the widest audience and thus is the easiest way to pay the bills, but it also makes for a braindead experience.
I'm reservedly optimistic given the wow vets involved, but if they do stuff like:
- adding fast travel portals instead of reliance on player mages,
- random dungeon finder,
- random cross-realm interaction at the cost of fostering server communities,
- and otherwise make a single player experience where other players might happen to appear,
then It's not interesting to me. Also, I don't think being a retail wow clone will be enough to dethrone retail wow.
Sounds like you want to play guild wars 2 for the most part.
Guildwars 2 is guilty of most of the same things.
I mean, it has fast travel points. It has cross sever interaction (mega servers). The dungeon finder needs work for sure. It’s definitely playable as a solo experience and when other people show up it isn’t bad. Not lining up to kill a mob as anyone who hits it gets credit. No sharing resource deposits so you don’t get upset if someone else is mining shit while you are. They’ve done an okay job at making endgame more accessible with strikes and challenge modes recently, though if you want pure endgame it’s likely not the game for you. But from what the poster had said, it has almost everything they asked for.
Honestly the dungeon finder is super helpful to people like me who have a small amount of time to play. I think they should have treated it like Raid Finder though and had it give lesser loot to encourage doing it properly.
RDF is useful if the goal is completing content, but not if the goal is interacting with other people, which I believe is a crucial part of the MMO acronym, even when I don't have much time to game. If my goal is to complete content, there are more interesting single player games I can spend my limited amount of game time playing than WoW.
IMO modern WoW is designed to give you the sensation of completing content so rapidly that you mistake the resulting dopamine hits for the feeling of having fun. Meanwhile, anything that could interrupt that cycle of hits has been optimized out, which includes virtually any dependency on another player. (Vanilla has quests that require you to find another player to craft you an item! They never made that "mistake" again...)
I currently run a 10m "dad" guild in WotLK classic. We're only on for 1 night a week for 3h to raid, and virtually every week at least 2 people can't make it due to work, family, or other reasons. And it's fine. Yeah, we progress slower, we still haven't even fully cleared Ulduar which was 2 phases ago, but it makes for a more rewarding experience IMO. The goal isn't completing content, it's interacting with other people.
Meanwhile, when you queue in RDF, no one talks, everyone already knows all the fights, and if you don't keep up you will be vote kicked. I don't see the appeal. TBH I don't even see anything "massively multiplayer" about WoW these days. Everyone else running around could be bots and I wouldn't have any way of knowing. The hardcore WoW servers are probably where the most interesting multiplayer experiences are happening these days.