World 7 (HnH)

[Dallane]

Why bother spend alot of time building nice char/base when in the end there will be reset?

Because its fun

[Claeyt]

The hearthling pop will drop back down, It's just maxed out now because of W7. I truly doubt the dev's will give up their actual money making game to go back to HnH. They've been saying they're going to develop and bug fix HnH for the last 6 months and they did. They'd be idiots to give up on Salem. Game developer's don't get a lot of shots from publishers and they've only been in open Beta for 3 months.

as for population, Salem's had about 150 online over the 3 server's since W7 went up, and popped up to about 240 or so yesterday.

As for HnH, I tried it again for a bit in W7 and, honestly, I don't know what you guys see in it. It reminds me of some games 20 years ago. Maybe I'm just spoiled by 3D now, and maybe the mechanics make up for the graphics, but really, how can you guys stand the 2D graphics?

[Kandarim]

what graphics?

All I see are sprites, lovingly drawn pixel-by-pixel.

[Claeyt]

what graphics?

All I see are sprites, lovingly drawn pixel-by-pixel.

... and you can see every pixel as if it was it's own 0 or 1

....and those sprites, those are simply the wavy lines from all the distortion from the simple 2D generation. So cute. Although I do hope they add Ents to Salem.

It's almost like an homage to the gaming graphics of the 90's.

[Dallane]

how can you guys stand the 2D graphics?

graphics don't make a game good. only idiots think this way.

Use this child.
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... 27&t=19037

[belgear]

"money making game"

I seriously doubt the ~250 people that play this game can support the production costs.
This game is in my opinion definitely in the red. The question is simply how long Lorb can milk it before Paradox does something.

We will see after launch, I s'pose. The game has money making potential for sure.

[Dallane]

This game is definitely in the red.

Do you have the numbers to prove that?

[belgear]

This game is definitely in the red.

Do you have the numbers to prove that?

Sorry, rephrased

[MagicManICT]

Pretty hard to know what the profitability of a project is if you don't know all the details of the business.

As glad as I am to see a world reset on Haven, it's not really doing much other than cleaning a few things up that I can see. Also, what these Haven vets aren't telling you is that the world may be seeing 800 people online, but the start of W6 (or was it 5?) Saw peaks of 1500 players in the first couple of days.

[MagicManICT]

As for HnH, I tried it again for a bit in W7 and, honestly, I don't know what you guys see in it. It reminds me of some games 20 years ago. Maybe I'm just spoiled by 3D now, and maybe the mechanics make up for the graphics, but really, how can you guys stand the 2D graphics?

Compared to the other games I play, sprite-based 2D is beautiful and hi tek. Of course, Dwarf Fortress and ASCII art has its own low tek beauty, too. Just remember, after a while, you don't see the code anymore, you just see dwarf, elf, rat, sword, etc.

Seriously, quit being so spoiled and come back down to Earth. It's the price of hiring dozens of modelers and artists that have the cost of game production in the $50-100 million (USD) range now for top of the line titles. (Have you looked at the credits of a typical AAA title? Compare that to a lot of these highly rated indie games that give, overall, 10x better game play.) Even middling priced titles can run several million. Granted, you can do rudimentary 3D for a few hundred thousand now due to the licensing on some of the engines like Unreal and Crytek if you're not going for a complex game and don't need to hire outside talent to either do graphics design (modelling and 2D texture art) or programming. It also helps that countries like the Philippines and India (and even several Eastern European countries) have talent capable of doing these things at a fraction of the cost to produce the same thing in the US.

I am, of course, leaving out the whole discussion of where the investment of resources should be: high end art vs amount of gameplay--are they interchangeable, etc? When games like the latest Call of Duty, Halo, Assassins Creed, Elder Scrolls, etc. can still make a serious profit even at those nosebleed development costs, it's obviously worth the investment of money, so that's not even the discussion. But if we're going to get a 10-15 hour game when 15 years ago a typical game was twice as long for the same relative cost (compared to the income of the average gamer), something just isn't quite right. (I do realize that the consumers could very well be the total sum of the blame here as developers tend to do things that the players want, else they don't stay in business long.)

Guess I'll get off my soapbox. I just get irked when I see something going for $60 that has little more gameplay value than something I can get off of Steam from an indie dev for $10 or $20