State of the game
Here's the next installation of the regular "state of the game" address from Mythic's President and CEO:
Folks,
It’s the week before Christmas and all through the ‘Nets, all the creatures are stirring including their pets. With a land that is dark, and a world made for war throw in a place made forever, there is no room for snores. There’s excitement and mirth, laughter and beer, in the end though what counts, Mythic’s still here. We’ve worked and we’ve slaved, and we’ve delivered our best, now the next question from you is “What are you giving us next???”
So, holiday rhymes aside, what the heck am I talking about? Well, the last six weeks has seen the release of two of the most anticipated and expensive, MMORPGs to date along with the release of our next, but certainly not last, expansion pack Catacombs. These games were built to crush the competition but they will not succeed. Yes, we have lost subscribers but we aren’t hiding and we certainly aren’t running from the competition. As I’ve always preached, competition is good for the industry and good for the soul (even if it is a little hard at times). So, what are we going to ensure that DAoC continues to be one of the top US MMORPGs? Simple, we are going to continue to improve it. Catacombs injected a new graphics engine that puts the game right up there or ahead of anything else on the market. Our instanced areas and other changes have made the game easier than ever to play and succeed in than ever before. New classes and new areas have added new depth to an already deep world. And, best of all, the Catacombs launch was the cleanest launch of all time from our perspective (least downtime, fewest bugs, fewest customer support calls, etc.) and we have set the standard (again) for the launch of a product. However, that is not good enough and over the next few months, here are some of the presents that players will find under their Mythic trees. Matt will be giving out more details on all these things tomorrow.
First, we are going to be adding a lot more options for customization of your characters. What we’ve done is great, but we want to be even better. So look for an ongoing effort to make a diverse world even more diverse.
Second, as always Mythic has been listening to its player base and we know that on some servers, the lack of a large number of players engaged in RvR at any one point in time can be an issue. Because DAoC is both a PvE and RvR game, we are particularly vulnerable to downturns in the population of a server. So, we have been thinking and trying to come up with a good solution. While we could do something like a server merge, we wanted to come up with something better since even a “simple” merge has a host of problems associated with it. Well, it has taken a bit but we have come up with something that is even better. Thus, we introduce server clustering. Without going into too much details, what this means is that players will have a lot more friends and enemies in RvR, but not change the home server’s community unless the players seek to do so. We believe this will make for even better RvR without any of the problems associated with server merges and players leaving their communities. We are the first to ever do this in the industry and we hope that you will enjoy it.
The third present is Instanced RvR areas. This is one of the most requested features by our players and, as always, we have been listening. Adding iRvR to our game takes it to an entirely different level and the stuff that we are working on for it I think will surprise you.
As required by lawyers everywhere, the usual disclaimer that this letter is a guide as to what we hope to do during this period and not as a guarantee of any kind. I always hate saying this but that’s what lawyers are for, to make us say things that we hate.
So, that is a quick State of the Game from here. We’re gearing up to celebrate a great year, full of things that went right, some things that went wrong and some things that apparently can’t make up their mind (you know some things are just that way!). From all of us at Mythic, a Happy Holidays and we thank the community for its continued support and patronage of DAoC!
Mark
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Originally Posted by SharTeel
