NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4914268" data-attributes="member: 2067">So, wait, distilling the actual information  here, all this reveals is that there were probably some ruminations somewhere of a NWN MMO, that has almost nothing to do with the lawsuit aside from maybe being off-handedly mentioned in it?Okay. Working on this from a "potentially something there" angle.It doesn't matter if it's an MMO. MMO's are giving CEO's a billion boners right now because of subscription-based steady income streams and possible additional content. WoW is huge. There's a lot of suits who would axe their own auntie just to get a fraction of that pie. The MMO formula is seen as the way to do it.The MMO formula has also so far been unable to really support more than one big MMO at a time, so you either have to be that game, or suffer from vast wastelands of silent servers where a few truefans and luddites stay around after the first month. I'm playing some FFXI (because I am nothing if not slightly obsessive. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />), and I'm awed that there are 10 other people in the game region I'm in! Sometimes, at once! So if the next big D&D game is an MMO, it has a potential to be that game. But it's an unsteady time to be an MMO. We're in the "react to WoW" phase, where people are taking the things that the public might not like about the game genre (such as the grind, the forced partying, the level climb, the "kill a rabbit, now kill a dire rabbit, now kill a super dire rabbit" redundancy of the quests, etc.) and toying with how to do it in a new way. You can't just follow WoW's model this time out. It's hard to do the same thing. It's going to be a bit about the brand, but it is also going to be about more than just the brand. The brand will sell you $20 start up discs and get people on for that first free month, and might keep a few truefans on. Beyond the brand (and Neverwinter Nights should be a pretty strong brand!), you need the best MMO out there. The one that will convince people that they don't need WoW anymore.'cuz the fraction of the market that pays for two monthly MMO subscriptions at a time is itty bitty.D&D has some unique potential to be a really good MMO, though. Stormreach didn't exactly cut it because it was crazy limited. Ideas include customization (let "DMs" design new adventures! Make a toolkit where people can add on their own content!), flexibility (make a character of any level you want, and jump in! No grind!), and quirky rules adherence (a grid-based, turn-based MMO? That's intersting and different!). You can't just clone WoW and get something good at this point in the market.Unfortunately, AFAIK, Atari still has the power to do as they wish with the D&D name in videogames, and they have a history of doing pretty silly things, muddy and buggy and full of half-insane design choices. It does not inspire confidence in me. And out of left field: Honestly, I would adore a Planescape MMO. It would work major-excellently. A big hub (Sigil) with a lot of diverse lands (the...er...entire multiverse). PC-joinable organizations with a (mostly) nonviolent competition (Factions). Endless possibilities for expansion sets (there's nothing you can't add out of extreme left field). I wouldn't expect it, and I'm a big biased PS dork, but every time I play an MMO, I just think, "This would be so much better if I was a modron sensate on my way to Pandaemonium instead of some elf in a desert beating up dire bunnies."</blockquote>

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