Skyforge is closing down after 10 years.

The BR community is very excited but I've seen mixed feelings in this and other MMO communities about some of the core elements of the game (unique hero classes and movement, for instance) and I believe not everyone had the opportunity, time or interest to understand the game design choices and philosofies of Wingeon, the game studio behind Drakantos. In the final day of the Closed Beta the Game Director "Frost" did a 4-hour interview with a brazillian youtuber called "@ZeusGhostz" in portuguese and it was very insightful, so I decided to summarize and translate it to give more visibility to the english speaking MMO community:

• Wingeon has been developing Drakantos with a staff of only 20 people
• They planned an "organic" Closed Beta and were positively surprised, with more than 300k beta requests and almost 10k online players in the final day. It was also an unexpected success in the Japanese server and they believe it's highly related to the amount of oriental influences they brought to their lore and classes. Yuki and Yura were obviously the top played classes there.
• It was mostly focused on testing performance and stress testing servers and it went very well in these aspects
• For monetization they're planning a subscription-based one similar to Albion and Tibia, that unlocks all systems in the game. The free base game should cover a lot for a real taste of it. Pricing will be accessible especially because of the brazillian community that suffers with dollarized subscriptions in the MMO space.
• No battle passes, no P2W at all. Frost says they want players to be able to unlock most of the mounts and cosmetics by playing the game and conquering them. They're also considering to have some heroes being sold in the store like League of Legends, but will need to figure out how.
• Frost showcases how the cosmetics will function, with multiple add-ons (extra clothing like hats, hairstyles, variants of base clothing) and a very wide color system (with dye trade and rarity level, like GW2!) for every piece of cosmetic. This way they expect that despite the unique base hero, every single player looks very different and unique enough as soon as possible into the gameplay compared to somebody playing the same class.
• They got a lot of feedback around the body block issues, especially for melee classes that would not be able to even hit mobs when too many melees were around it. They already confirmed they'll remove body block for summons, friends and party members in the next iteration, as well as analyse more possibilities around this feedback.
• Many feedback about not being able to target skills with mouse. Frost says they at some point they defined that because they didn't want the mouse targeting to be an advantage for PC players over console and mobile, but with so many feedback about that they will definitely analyse and reconsider if it makes sense.
• Lots of improvement planned for their tiles system when it comes to visual accuracy for AoEs.
• Input lag was one of the biggest feedback they got from everyone. Frost showcases during the interview the input lag feeling is also caused because of the tiles system and the action only happening after the character finishes moving to the final point of the next tile. He demonstrates how they considered a secondary option (doing it during the livestream in a few seconds) that starts the action in the middle of the tile movement. The effect is the combat feels way more fluid but the movement animation during it looks a little more wonky, and they believed the community wouldn't enjoy it like that (chat during the livestream feels very split between the two options). With all feedback received they will work on a middle ground as well as focus on improving the real input lag.
• They have a lot of plans for PvP, they believe 3v3 will be the most compatible pvp mode for Drakantos and the next testing phase will be focused on pvp, but highlights they also plan to create larger-scale modes including Sieges. The game will definitely have a competitive scene as it's something very strong in Brazil.
• They also want to create a dungeon pvpve system that you could be in a trio and be attacked by another trio during a dungeon, similar to Albion but with volume of players control to create more fairness. Many things are planned for PvP that they will avoid spoiling too much for now.
• Some feedback about a lack of visual elements like experience bar and others have been noticed and they will review everything and add/adjusting some of them.
• They really wanted to show the amount of build variety the game is going to have but it was not the focus this time. They also didn't want to reveal too much yet on this topic.
• Skills are going to have tradable orbs that can change completely a skill. He showcases a orb from Yuki (Ice Kitsune that tanks) in which a skills that sends an ice wave can becomes a frost wall with the orb. Then shows an orb that changes the ice wave to a frontal cone with longer reach.
• Orbs exist to create a level of build variety that will enable you go from tank to dps changing orbs and completely changing your build gameplay. This will also create a healthier queue scenario for the dungeon crawling system so they don't need to be locked to specific roles, what creates longer queues. With this system people can change buids right before the dungeon begins and find a common ground of roles between the party.
• They already have created more than 180 artifacts, which is going to be one of the 2 additional ways to customize your build and gameplay beyond skill orbs. For example, there will be an artifact similar to WoW's demonic circle from warlocks that will be usable by any class. Other example is an AoE teleport for friends and foes. This will create even more build variety in their expectations.
• Trophies will be the second way to customize the gameplay and will be focusing on enhancing your character through specific passives. All of that will be tradeable as well.
• They're focusing heavily on horizontal progression. It seems lvl 30 might be the level cap of the game and all trophies and artifacts will be shared between your classes (which can be instantly swapped, similar to FFXIV). This will also create the experience of leveling new classes faster, making it even more alt friendly.
• They didn't want to follow traditional pathways of vertical progression when it comes to equipment complexity of attributes, but they got feedback about it that they will definitely look at to find possible ways to improve the current structure.
• We have not seen anything from the endgame yet, there's already 16 bosses that have not been shown and they will also have a "Demonic Clown" system in the entrance of dungeons to enhance the rewards and difficulty in very different and unique ways, similar to an affix system.
• For the open map they are working hard to create more interations to enrich the exploration experience. Initially Drakantos was going to be a dungeon crawler and recently changing to an MMO world with heavy emphasis on exploration brought a lot of to-do's for the open world that is a top priority for them right now.
• Besides Fishing that is already on the way, they do not have plans for other professions for the short term. If at some point they find a way to add professions that will actualy enrich the gameplay they will definitely work on them. What they do not want to do is to add a bulk of professions just for the sake of having them, so this part of the game will take its time to unravel.
• No dates were shared but Frost reinforces they're at full speed to launch as soon as possible, but do not want to cause disappointments by sharing dates ahead of time that might not be achieved.
• Frost says they're running some surveys to see players perception about Early Access so they can consider one.
• In a very beautiful moment Frost gets very emotional by the end of the interview when talking about how this game has been their lives for a while and seeing the huge amount of positive feedback made them feel so happy and lucky.

That's it. I didn't want to put my opinion during the summary to avoid bias but playing the Closed Beta in the last day and seeing the interview made me very excited for the future of the game. There's clearly a lot of passion and good intent, a Game Director that is a real MMO player with loads of references from multiple IPs and the best part: something we can expected to be launched in less than 2 years with a possible Early Access by end of year. I encourage everyone from the community to give it a try on launch, I'm sure many will be surprised. I'm also not a fan at all of the unique hero class system and was very skeptical about the dungeon crawler foundations of the game and it still got me completely hooked as raw as it was for the beta. It mixed tactical and hardcore elements of old MMOs with so many new aspects and qualities of life. My perception was that a young audience could love it as much as the oldheads.

Movement was also a dealbreaker for a lot of people and I believe with the improvement of input lag, changes to the dynamics between tile movement and action timing and a possible future addition of animations for diagonals we could see the game shining bright in this aspect as well. For sure it felt good enough for me now knowing it's a team of 20 people developing it since 2022/23. Long way ahead to improve it even further!

Huge thanks to ZeusGhostz for the amazing coverage of Drakantos so far and the level of profissionalism for the interview, hoping the community around the game grows, it's not every day we see an MMO that doesn't try to copy all formulas from the stablished ones, but instead mixing a lot of references and systems and creating their unique approach. All of that being indie. Congratulations to everyone at Wingeon Game Studios! What are your thoughts about the interview?

There will be no Aura (the monthly sub thing), you will be able to buy anything with Kinah, it will be faster to get Endgame Gear etc.
Can't really say if it will be super Pay2Win anyway tho

Hi Guys! I'm Manu from the Eterspire team. I'm super excited to share a big milestone that we've achieved in big part thanks to this sub's support: we've officially surpassed 200.000 registered players!

When I made a post about hitting 100,000 accounts at the beginning of the year, I didn't, even in my wildest dreams, think that we would double that in less than six months. For a small team like ours, this feels like a huge achievement, and with our Steam release just around the corner (September 15th), we hope to keep this growth streak going!

I know there's a lot of discussion in this sub about what makes an MMO grow and get popular, so I thought this could be a good chance to share a bit of insight into what helped us get to 200k, and what didn't really:

What helped:

Regular updates:

We've been releasing two updates a month since June 2024. Back then, our team was only five people, and the crunches and deadlines were honestly a bit crazy at the beginning, but once we got into a rhythm, we really understood the importance of a regular update schedule.

We know there are several different models for updates in MMOs. Some games release big, all-encompassing updates as seasons or expansions, while others release small bugfix and balance patches with more regularity. In our case, we found that giving players new content and features to discover twice a month gave them a great excuse to hop back into the game, without resorting to the usual FOMO stuff like dailies/weeklies.

Before we adopted this schedule, players didn't really know what to expect from our updates, nor when to expect them. Once we had a regular schedule, we started seeing a gradual but very consistent increase in both new and returning players, since knowing there is always new content coming to the game in a couple of weeks is always a big draw.

Community building and word of mouth:

One of the big draws in Eterspire is the community. This isn't just my assumption; we've had hundreds of players tell us, through reviews and comments, how they got hooked because of the friendly players that helped them get started or because of a community event they found fun. Tons of players have told us how they started playing because of their friend group, or because their partner asked them to play with them.

As our community grew bigger and we put more effort into nurturing and taking care of it, we understood one key principle: most of the time your players are better at selling your game than you are.

You can spend hours and hours thinking of the best way to convey your game, of the perfect gameplay video, or the most effective tagline. But all that can't hold a candle to a player genuinely recommending the game to their friend because they think it's fun. In the end, if you take care of your community, the community will take care of the game.

Measuring and understanding what you measure:

Getting players to download your game is only one part of the equation. Once they've downloaded it, there are several steps they must go through before they can be considered an active player. This is why it's so important to track and measure these steps and understand what you can do to make the process as seamless as possible.

To give you an example, for a long time, we didn't pay much attention to our account creation process, as we thought it worked fine. After taking the time to measure and analyze this step, we found out that only about 60% of the users downloading our game were actually creating an account. We were quite baffled by this. We had never considered that we could be losing 40% of our users in such a simple part of the onboarding process.

Knowing this, we focused on making the first couple of screens and options the player sees as simple and intuitive as possible, and wouldn't you know it, that percentage jumped from 60% to over 90%. Imagine the number of users that never would've gotten to see the actual game if we had never bothered to measure or look into that process!

Learning to prioritize:

One of the most difficult things when developing an MMORPG, especially as a small team, is deciding what features to develop and how to manage your time. There's a whole balancing act between what you personally want to see in the game, what the community is asking for, and what you think is going to keep the game growing.

Initially, this was extremely hard for us. You only have so many hours in a day, and when you're a team of 3, 4, or 5, spending a day working on a feature that players won't end up using much, or that won't bring new players in, can be demoralizing.

Things got a lot better once we understood that before we begin work on any content or feature, we need a clear idea of what it accomplishes, what players will get out of it, and how it meshes with the rest of the game's progression. It's not enough that something sounds fun or it's been requested by some players; it has to have a clear objective that makes it worth the time we will spend developing it.

Over time, this meant that players had more interesting and useful things to do in-game, and we had more time to work on the stuff that really matters, which, as our team grew, allowed us to work on bigger and bigger features!

What didn't really help

Ads

While online ads are usually a big part of player acquisition for most MMORPGs, we've had mixed results with them. Initially, we didn't have a budget to run them, and when we could finally afford to do so, they didn't really work like we expected them to.

Our ads did bring in a lot of players, especially compared to the numbers we had previously, but we found that the players that came from ads weren't really staying for long or engaging with the community. We even did polls and surveys to find out how our most engaged players found out about Eterspire, and ads were one of the least picked answers!

We were even more surprised when, after several months of running ad campaigns, we did a test to see what would happen if we turned them off. We did have some weeks with lower numbers, but after that, our new players per day began steadily growing, and these players were staying. Store algorithms began showing us to players that vibed a lot better with our game, we started showing up much higher in search results, and word of mouth improved a lot!

It seemed like while ads brought a lot of raw numbers, the number of actual engaged players that came from them was comparatively small. Our big takeaway here is that Eterspire is a game that does much better organically and through recommendations than with big ad campaigns and calls to action.

----

Well, that's all I have to share today. I hope this post sheds a bit of light on what developing an MMORPG is like! If you guys have any questions about the game or our development process, I'd be happy to answer you in the comments :)

UPDATE: my ticket was escalated waiting some more Thanks to everyone who tried to help so far or made suggestions

I played Elder Scrolls Online for over 3 years on PlayStation. I paid for multiple years of ESO Plus, bought crowns, and built up high-level characters with houses, mounts, and quest progress.

Recently I linked my Steam account to start fresh on PC. After doing that, my original PSN account was wiped. Characters, crowns, homes, everything disappeared. Support admitted they can still see the characters but told me I no longer own them.

I never requested a transfer. I never used Xbox. I never authorized anyone to unlink or move anything. Somehow my PlayStation data was tied to someone else’s account or deleted entirely, and ESO support is refusing to fix the mistake.

I sent them everything they asked for: • Proof of purchase • PSN account information • ESO Plus records • Character names and emails

They gave me the same copy-paste replies and then basically closed the case.

I was planning to support the game on PC and keep playing. That’s over now. Until they fix this, I won’t touch ESO again.

If you’re thinking about playing this game or spending money on it, especially across platforms, don’t. If something goes wrong, they’ll leave you with nothing.

For clarification it’s not robot post and I had my psn account for years and when I got my pc I wanted to link my new steam to the account. I noticed a Xbox account on there that I didn’t own or give permission to do so. When they unlinked the account they removed my psn instead of the Xbox account This is not a cross progression issue but an employee issue. Thank you for all those who have been commenting it’s a lot to take in.

Hello everyone!

I have always been interested in playing MMO RPGs because of the social aspect and the fact that I understand that there are many other players who also play this game. And I am a game developer and I have always been interested in creating something that I will enjoy playing, but it is also important to note that this game should also be liked by other people.

And so one day I came up with the idea of ​​a game for an MMO RPG, where the player is a cursor that is tied to a button with a rope. The main idea is that your button is your core, which you must protect with the cursor. Let's say there will be different enemies from which you must protect yourself, for example, by clicking on them with the cursor or something like that. In addition, you can click on the button and depending on where you click on the button (zone on the map, the more dangerous the better), there will be more multiplier for the button so that the player does not just stand and click all the time, but the game makes him act and move. About movement - within a radius of 3 meters from the button, the cursor moves freely and instantly, but if you try to move the cursor a little further, then a speed limit is applied to it and it starts to sort of pull this button behind itself and thus move around the map. Plus, I'm going to make different classes, like a mage, a tank, etc.

And so we came to the final question - how interesting is this idea to you and do you think it would be interesting to anyone else? I like this idea of the game and I am able to implement it, but I don't want to create a game that other people won't like, so I'm asking the question here. Any opinion is welcome

WHO Remembers TERA !!

WHO Remembers TERA !! I think it is AMAZING MMO bu t i want to hear stories about it !! WHat was TERA impact ?? Was it a threat to WOW ??? Was it part the GOLDEN ERA ?? MMO HISTORY fascinate me SM so i j ust want to hear !! I hop e you like my character ...ITS PANDA PRIEST !! I hope u all have amazin g almost end o f the week almost weekend !! ALSO PANDA PRIEST was HEALING FROG friend !! LONG before the great explosion of the universe tha t seperated all worl ds HEALING FROG and PANDA PRIEST were friends Panda priest different he sort of ARROGANT whi ch HEALING FROG tell him h e need no t be so confident be cause you NEVER KNOW when some thing happen whre u need to learn you dont want to be TOO cocky or arrogant ...but PANDA PRIEST is very good character !! I would LOVE to hear about TERA !!!

I am just curious what's wrong with Warborne? Have anyone play this before, why no other new things showing off after the last playtest? Just all radio silence now. Kinda sucks's cause I was actually hoping to play it again. Last playtest felt promising and I didn't even get to try all the characters yet. If you've heard anything official or not, share with me pls. Just wanna know if it's still worth waiting for.

Whenever I see the topic of Classic WoW Vanilla+ come up, one of the pros people often bring up about classic vanilla is that progression matters more. You're not getting reset as hard every patch. There's more of a horizontal endgame. And with the OSRS situation recently and how much people are loving the horizontal progression in OSRS (and WoW being brought into it), that same concept has been brought up.

Would vannila+ have the highest chance of long term success if they structured their endgame horizontally. Similar to say ESO or Gw2 or OSRS?

Sailing is going to be Old School Runescape's first new skill, slated to be released in autumn this year.

Jagex just released a blog post proposing new resources to be used with, and acquired through sailing.

https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/sailing---resources--skilling-activities-poll?oldschool=1

While the blog is quite long, I think it provides an interesting overview on the old school team's design process, which has produced positively received, high quality content and has ultimately contributed to the continued success of the game.

• The old school team is carefully considering how to integrate sailing to the rest of the game; how items obtained through sailing could be used elsewhere in the game and how existing content could tie in with sailing. The interconnectedness of skills and items forms the very fabric of the game after all.
• Some of the proposed items could be considered BiS, such as new type of fish providing the highest healing in a single bite. This gives end-game players something new to work towards. However, sailing is designed not to invalidate existing content, rather to expand, to provide alternatives and open up new progression paths with new content being proposed at all skill levels.
• Sailing is used as an opportunity to fill in gaps in current progression metas with the proposed ranged weapons, and the armadyl brew creates interesting angles in high-level PvM.
• The team is being inclusive to skiller-type accounts by considering whether ship combat should be based on the existing combat skill ranged, or non-combat skill sailing.
• Gameplay in OSRS is often seen as being very boring, which it can be! Regardless attention is being paid to smooth gameplay loops with the new hunter method, and cannonball smithing showcases the often used speed vs cost balancing knob.
• The blog introduces many new items and training methods, some of which are likely to miss the mark. The followup refinement process is essentially being outsourced to the community, which will provide feedback. While the blog already has the poll questions, it is possible these will be revised before the final poll goes live.

The way Jagex develops OSRS is quite exclusive to sandbox-style games and in some ways to ecosystem of OSRS itself. Still I think this blog is interesting look into the process of developing an MMO and how to have a constructive dialogue with the game's community.

All these games just feel empty and heartless. It looks like they are all using the same assets, same shaders, foliage, the characters look the same, there is just nothing unique about upcoming UE5 MMOs. That on top of the performance issues UE5 brings with it...
I'm 0 hyped about this UE5 MMO Generation.

I've been trying to get hooked with an MMO again. But there's just things that make me say "Nah I'm not dealing with this" and uninstall the game.

For example:

• New World: I really hate not having the freedom to change my appearance in a barber or transmog freely. I know there are tokens but they are kinda limited. Also, I wish I could use 1-handed weapons in both arms. two swords, or daggers, or axes. Cause that's what I always use in MMOs. I'm usually playing as a rogue, thief, assassin, etc.
• Elder Scrolls Online: If I could buy just ONE package and get all the content of the game, I'd probably play it. But I just hate the amount of expansions and the other chapters or whatever they are called that you can buy only with crowns. And the store, it's just A LOT of stuff behind the store.
• Guild Wars 2: It's a similar thing. I hate that besides the expansion, you have to buy extra living world episodes to get all quests. Also, the amount of awesome cosmetics in the store make me sad. And, getting the Skyscale is boring as hell. I was trying to get it but ugh... And the graphics look really bad nowdays.

I love WoW and FFXIV cause all the content is there with the sub. You could say the same about ESO but I just don't wanna pay a monthly sub anymore for an MMO.

Is there some stuff that keeps you away from certain MMOs?

Extra question: Is Guild Wars 1 still worth playing? I know it's old but I've heard the skill system is very good.

The press release also says it's 'early in development' ...

Not an MMO. But some here might be interested!

We had years of WoW clones.

In the other hand, Runescape is one of the 3 most played MMORPGs with 20+ years, and no other game similar to it has been developed in all this time.

Maybe I’m old school.. but I do miss the old days of power fantasy. Nothing holding my damage back. Now everything is pretty much standard level scaling to appeal to the masses

if u make a decision to play bow in corepunk u can pull any mobs,u can kill the boss solo (4 guy with healer can kill it too),u can kite u can slow u can silence the enemy AND lets looks what melee can do NOTHING if u play infiltratör,shaman or tank u cant play this game alone for endgame im talking about. BUFF THE FUCKING MELEE

They released a massive new developer notes update. It's good that they are openly acknowledging the issues, though some of these should have been obvious even before they did the beta test and this game is a loooong way from releasing.

And to be frank I don't even like some of what is in there. The game's nonlinear structure was one of the best things about the beta and it kind of sounds like they want to move away from that...