Ex Blizzard Nick Carpenter, Min Kim, Rob Pardo & Nexon Min Kim start Bonfire Studios

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Good luck to them.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Inb4 mmorpg that takes 7 days played to get to max and no one plays it.

[Armourboy]

Wasn't that the whole point of Wildstar? It was marketed as "difficult like old-school wow" and such?

As others have said, there were a ton of other issues than it just being difficult. Frankly I don't see old school and difficult being in the same vein. Most of their difficulty was based in the amount of time they took, and the knots you had to untie to get there. Game play wise, many weren't that hard.

[Shampro]

The emphasis on ''friendships'' and ''multiplayer'' leads me to belive they have an mmo on the radar. I'm not sure if thats a good idea, but good luck to them. Honestly It's curious how Riot is like a Siphon to ex Blizzard employees, indirectly or otherwise.

[Maudib]

The emphasis on ''friendships'' and ''multiplayer'' leads me to belive they have an mmo on the radar. I'm not sure if thats a good idea, but good luck to them. Honestly It's curious how Riot is like a Siphon to ex Blizzard employees, indirectly or otherwise.

It's an amazing idea. All they have to do make late BC/early Wrath the model and it's insta win.

Make raids only a few % will ever see... and people will join to try and BE that few %.

Make gear hard as shit to get again... leave WoW to the new generation of insta-gratification peeps and make a REAL MMO again.

[stellvia]

Lets hope they don't try for an MMO or a MOBA.

I mean Remember Carbine Studios and their whole "YEAH WE ARE EX BLIZZARD WE'LL MAKE A GREAT MMO!" that failed miserably.

*cough* Wildstar *cough*

It wasn't bad, honestly and had a really fun style and atmosphere. I think what did them in was the keying for the first raid was excessively long and it wasn't well tuned. People are finicky these days and don't put up with much when.there are so many choices. Early.on there were no choices, so people stuck with it.

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It's an amazing idea. All they have to do make late BC/early Wrath the model and it's insta win.

Make raids only a few % will ever see... and people will join to try and BE that few %.

Make gear hard as shit to get again... leave WoW to the new generation of insta-gratification peeps and make a REAL MMO again.

My take is while there may be a decent portion that want that on paper, real life catches up to us all. The original MMO wave of gamers grew up on harder games. Newer gamers fell into the broader audience curve. They've been coddled on simple mobile games, autosaves, unlimited lives, etc. and so their reaction to more involved and/or difficult games is largely negative. The gratification loop to the gameplay is so short these days.

[Rathwirt]

Honestly this sounds more like some sort of online D&D thing, which could be cool if done right.

[Coldkil]

Why? What has he done?

Basically "saved" D3. Then, not saying D3 is insanely good and i agree that as a game is pretty shallow, even if i play every season - but it's just a hit'n'run type of playstyle, while in D2 i played for straight 9 years. Anyway, his intervention made the game infinetly more enjoyable than before and i like his approach (if something doesn't work, just scrap it and focus on making stuff interesting).

[Fenixhart]

Dude...
Runic Games - Torchlight 1, 2 and Hob devs = blizzard offshoots.
GGG - Path of Exile devs = blizzard offshoots.
Shall I add more examples?

Torchlight 1 and 2 are just remakes of Diablo.

Torchlight 2 is Literally DIablo 2 with a new coat of paint Right down to story progression. Is all Blizzard North's division seems to know how to make.

[Shampro]

It's an amazing idea. All they have to do make late BC/early Wrath the model and it's insta win.

Make raids only a few % will ever see... and people will join to try and BE that few %.

Make gear hard as shit to get again... leave WoW to the new generation of insta-gratification peeps and make a REAL MMO again.

Worked amazingly for Wildstar. Wait a minute, no it didn't. Frankly don't have any interest in having this dicussion so I'll say that agree to disagree and hope they dable in other genres.

[Very Tired]

I kind of wish this thread's title was one word shorter to be a lot more interesting.

[stellvia]

This brought up a good point for me: Has any MMO besides EVE really ran with the idea of guild-owned/provided equipment? In EVE you can provide ships and equipment on contract that are only available to your corp or alliance. On a similar thought to that: Why not have an MMO where the guild was bigger than any one person? Drops are guild property and leadership can pass them out as they see fit, but if you leave the guild you can't take it with you. Or if a person can't be there that night, that class/role equipment can be given to someone who can come to raid. (Thereby eliminating the problems of needing to backgear characters or constant "brain drain" of members quitting and having to bring new people up to speed, etc.)

[Deleted]

Lets just hope they make something awesome, original and memorable instead of boring, casual and pointless games the market is saturated with.

[Turil]

It's an amazing idea. All they have to do make late BC/early Wrath the model and it's insta win.
Make raids only a few % will ever see... and people will join to try and BE that few %.
Make gear hard as shit to get again... leave WoW to the new generation of insta-gratification peeps and make a REAL MMO again.

Isn't that the recipe Wildstar failed so hard with? Or Black Desert Online?
Why does an insane amount of grind equal a "real" MMO for you?

My take is while there may be a decent portion that want that on paper, real life catches up to us all. The original MMO wave of gamers grew up on harder games. Newer gamers fell into the broader audience curve. They've been coddled on simple mobile games, autosaves, unlimited lives, etc. and so their reaction to more involved and/or difficult games is largely negative. The gratification loop to the gameplay is so short these days.

This so much. I started playing video games in the early 1990s and still love playing single player games that are "hard".
But while I have fond memories of vanilla WoW for example I don't miss these super grindy MMOs of old. I don't enjoy being ganked by someone who simply got more spare time on his hands in Black Desert Online for example where gear matters more than the players skill.

[dextersmith]

Honestly this sounds more like some sort of online D&D thing, which could be cool if done right.

Have they announced ip's?

[Maudib]

Isn't that the recipe Wildstar failed so hard with? Or Black Desert Online?
Why does an insane amount of grind equal a "real" MMO for you?

No one said anything about a grind. Wildstar failed because of story/world.

The fantasy genre doesn't need lasers and gunslingers and bombs and other bullshit.

It needs magic, and swords, and Paladins, dragons, spiders, undead...

It needs a gear progression like BC... You have to run normals to be able to run heroics... heroics to run raids... raids to get the good gear.. no more 5 man mythics that hand you gear equivalent to raiding. Sorry guys but if you can;t make friends and join a guild.. in my game you don't get the best gear unless you group with a guild.

There would be no more LFR or Dungeon finder... it's an MMO.. you don't like people GTFO.

Leveling to max level would take a couple weeks.. not this 8 hour bullshit. But you will FEEL the progression.

The very reason WoW has gone to this bullshit insta-gratification is that there is no sense of progression... it's zoom to max and gimme, gimme, gimme. Zone scaling completely has screwed the feeling of levels/leveling. You might as well be leveling 1 level.. 100 to max level. SO they have to throw epics at you left and right.

What is pathetic? I got a Mythic iLevel 840 item (not titanforged or anything) for clicking on 15 nuts and 10 squirrels. Are you fucking kidding me? What a joke. Absolute joke.

[Aggrophobic]

Cool. Intresting to see if this turns into something.

[Beazy]

No one said anything about a grind. Wildstar failed because of story/world.

LoL wait, you think Wildstar failed because the story sucked? That's a new one.

[Maudib]

LoL wait, you think Wildstar failed because the story sucked? That's a new one.

If you cannot "get into it" it fails. The mix of various themes did not work. The reason WoW did so well is that it had a clear, recognizable fantasy theme.

Players looking for a traditional fantasy want mages, warlocks, melee, various fantasy creatures, etc... not gunslingers, exosuits, spaceships...

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Same. I thought it would be a sore blow when Bill Roper left (Diablo 2) and looked forward to his first Flagship Studio game. Looked great. Hellgate:London. Things really didn't go well.

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Yeah, not only is it amazing, the theory has also been posted year after year in multiple, countless threads here.

Wonder why nobody did it since apparently "All they have to do make late BC/early Wrath the model and it's insta win."

BTW: I think you are contradicting yourself. Naxx in Wrath was piss easy, TotGC hailed as the worst shit raid ever. The game was called "Wrath of the casual King". It was hated here on the forum (famous sig: "Tell them the Lich King is dead and WoW died with him") and yet it had 12 million subs at the end.

Clearly TotGC was not early Wrath. Naxx wasn't "easy" it was the intro raid however. But you knew that...

[PixelFox]

There are a number of platitudes on their web site among the dramatic photographs of the founders. The last one is "Challenge Makes the Journey Worthwhile", so that worries me a little bit because the whole "players want a harder challenge" has killed more games than it has saved.

They also have no game in development. They've gotten $25M in funding from investors Riot and Adreessen Horowitz to sit around and try to think up The Next Big Thing and to hire people to help them brainstorm and prototype ideas.

There's no "partnership" with Riot really, they're just investing in this new startup company.

So at this point it's cool that there's another game company startup out there, and this one has some experienced people who have been associated with the Blizzard way of developing games until they're great, but really there's little reason to believe they are magically going to come up with, and implement, the next great game idea.

Definitely worth watching to see what they decide to do. A traditional MMOG seems unlikely as that's almost a certain recipe for disaster these days, but it's also kind of what these guys know, and it's common for developers to fall back on what they're familiar with when things don't go well.

These days everything is "mobile" (but there are a half million games in the app store) and "social" (but not everyone wants to have facebook and twitter forced on them).

I think they have an uphill climb ahead of them.