"Largest expansion content to date for 2023"

Your point was that monetization=bad. But they aren’t a charity. The game has to have a continuing revenue stream or the lights get shut off. One time purchases don’t count.

Actually I think Monetization is legit in live service/ or just games that will receive minimum updates and all, What I don't understand is how people talk about lack of content at the same time complains about Monetization, like you've stated doesn't take brain surgery to figure out, no revenue means lights out lmao.

Also what people need to understand is just because you paid $60 up front doesn't mean the game is covered income wise, especially when they are creating new content, it's the reason why DLC/Expansions are not free, but here you actually get free characters of no charge yet you complain about something that is optional.

THIS!

I mean it brags that he was @ the helm of City of Heroes. But thats like bragging you were the captain of the Titanic.

Requirement for the Marvel MMO:

Let's us have the same exact powers as the heroes instead of generic powers.

Super Soldier

Spider Powers

Power Armor

Gamma

Feral powers (wolverine)

Weather control

Luke Cage powers

F4 powers

Sorcery

Phychic powers (it's not marvel without phychics. Don't make the same mistake you did with Super Strength in DCUO).

That's really up to the folks at Marvel/Disney, though. If they decide they don't want exact copies of their characters running about being controlled by players, there probably won't be much that can be done about it.

And with the money coming in from Marvel movies and projects, it's VERY easy to imagine the owners of that IP being just as (if not more) protective of the IP as WB/DC has been with this game.

The language used here is important: "investment in graphics upgrade [...]"

If they were just uprezzing some textures like they did last time it wouldn't be an "investment" at all. This all but confirms that there will be a graphics engine upgrade. Pairing this with the point about developing a Marvel MMO also, it's more plausible since they can do all the work developing that game and share the knowledge and experience back into DCUO team. For anyone arguing (or has been arguing on their YouTube channels) that it's too expensive still and a fantasy etc; this would make the resource investment cost neutral essentially.

It does raise some concerns about the potential Marvel game though too. I'm not sure I would trust DI to develop a Marvel MMO if their stand is that [using DCUO as an example] this is enough and so on. All the statements to date about what's currently delivered here being satisfactory are now nails in a coffin for their ability to deliver on this future project. In fairness though, most of us knew that these statements were just PR / fluff and we understood they were just saying what they had to say understanding that the game has to deliver on more core fundamentals than it has. So, we can probably stop pretending that things like new powersets, movement types, pvp and so on aren't coming -- because they obviously are. If they weren't, it would be a sign that the upcoming Marvel MMO would be dead on arrival.

If Marvel Heroes is any indication Marvel will not mind or care if you can play the game as their Marvel characters.
And they won't care either if there is multiple Captain America or Iron-man or Spider-man in the game.

That has always been a bit strange about DC.

The very first thing the DCUO does is introduce players to the concept of the Multiverse...... but then somehow it was an issue if we had many Batman or Superman.... or Ambush Bug in the game.

Also.... a bit strange how DC is protective of their characters with DCUO.... but not so much with Fortnite..... or how they pretty much ruin their characters in their movies.... or in their comics for that matters.

Uhm... what?

City of Heroes is a genre-defining game. It was still making money for Cryptic and NCSoft when NCSoft pulled the plug so they could focus their resources on Guild Wars 2.

The game remained so popular that after it went dark some of the devs kept their own private server active. When the code was released in the wild a couple of years ago homemade servers began popping up. Homecoming, probably the best known server, is doing active updates and patches, has introduced a couple of new powersets and new content. As of this writing it (the Sunday after Thanksgiving when many are out shopping and/or travelling and the weather across much of the country is nice) there are ~2k people playing.

Unfortunately, DI/Daybreak/EG7 does not make their total population numbers available so the best we can do is look at Steam and guess that it's about half the actual playerbase (maybe more, maybe less but doubling it probably gets us closer to the actual number). Currently there are 791 players playing DCUO through Steam. Doubling that means 1,582. That's still not as many as are playing City of Heroes right now.

At the very least we could say the populations of the two games are roughly equal. That's comparing a game with 2004 graphics, which was essentially dead for almost a decade (thus saw no new content until recently) to a game with ~2010 graphics but has been getting new content for over a decade.

It's a different style of game than DCUO (takes longer to level and then you want to focus on crafting top tier enhancements and get badges) but it's far more immersive and tells stories far better (because they used the expansion model instead of the DLC model).

Yes, being at the helm of City of Heroes is something worth bragging about.

That's a bit of apples vs. helicopters though. Marvel Heroes was a game built on the Marvel IP and made for players to play AS Marvel characters. There's a world of difference between that and a non-Marvel MMO which allows players to mix and match costume pieces to eventually create that game's closest version of a Marvel character.

Remember, when CoH came out and you could make reeeeally good (for the time) Marvel clones of many Marvel characters?





Marvel didn't like that and took them to court over it. While many of the claims were thrown out or dropped, enough were allowed by the judge that Marvel and NCSoft settled out of court. More than you could ever want to know about this.

Fast-forward to DCUO and Marvel/Disney has never gone after them for copyright infringement even though it can be done much better in DCUO.


Much, much better.



In all though, considering DI has the IP to make the next Marvel MMO and that Marvel/Disney hasn't gone after them yet for allowing Marvel-resembling characters in DCUO, I think it's safe to say they decided to let that sort of thing go somewhere between 2005 and now and will continue to do so.

Thing is, the whole Multiverse thing didn't really start in DCUO until later in the game. The most we were told was that we were our own little pocket of the Multiverse but we didn't see any hints of interacting with the rest of the DC multiverse until content like Metal or Patchwork Themyscira. And it was solidified with House of Legends.

Also, I'm not sure Marvel Heroes was the best example, as it's an "apples and oranges" comparison at best. As far as I know of you couldn't make your own character in Heroes, it was all using versions of existing Marvel characters.

All of the MMOs I've played have been based on existing IPs. Star Wars Galaxies, Clone Wars Adventures (hey, it was MMO-ish LOL), Champions Online and DCUO. The only one that I played that didn't have limitations placed on it by the IP owners was CO, and that's because Cryptic bought the IP itself and had control over it. There just seems to be something about games where players can make their own characters that brings out the protective nature of the IP holder, and they put conditions in place to make sure their IP and characters are protected to a degree they determine to be necessary.

I saw it time and again in SWG and here, and given Disney's own seemingly inherent protective nature I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see that kind of behavior rear its head again.

It is worth pointing out that the landscape has changed since then also. What might have seemed like attentive copyright protection at the time has aged poorly -- enough for both players and copyright holders to realize that if you want the business you have to allow players to do this to some extent. That said, it's easier to let slide in a licensed product where the IP holder holds the rights to the characters being approximated. For unrelated and unlicensed products like CoH, (especially back then) it was seen as a threat to the copyright. Now, I'd like to imagine that perception is better informed. I think for the most part it is. I don't think that kind of tight approach would be followed if it all happened in today's culture. On the other hand, there's no competition to put it to the test (at the time of this writing).

Creating a game from scratch using UE4 is VERY different to upgrading an already existing game to it. Whilst some experience can be gained and then applied, it would not cover everything that would need to happen. There will be many hidden dependencies and unexpected breakages, especially with such a huge project. A lot of time would need to go into this and having worked on the Marvel game wouldn't exactly speed it up. It would also not "make the resource investment cost neutral", as time is also a major resource when it comes to something like this. Simply upgrading the version of an engine is already such a pain (4.25 to 4.26 for example) and this is a MUCH bigger task.

I don't think you're completely wrong though as I agree that the wording suggests it's a big thing and moving to UE4 seems reasonable. I just don't agree on how the Marvel project will influence it.

I would really take Steam numbers for DCUO with a huge grain of salt. Many PC players don't play the game through Steam. I play on PC but not through Steam, and the majority of my PC based friends playing the game don't play through Steam either, we just use the standalone launcher for the game. Then there's PS4, PS5, Xbox and Switch players to take into consideration after that. Unless you were talking strictly about PC players only, but that wasn't mentioned in your post so I'm assuming you mean the playerbase across all platforms.

CoH was brought back by a community of players and is completely disconnected from NCSoft and any licensing...at least thats what I last heard...then again I never paid much attention to it. 2nd of all, he's made every game hes been in charge of P2W. TCs weren't a glimmer in the eye of the dev team until he came in and said "hey, lets turn this game into a superhero themed casino". Artifacts were his idea, this game has gotten so much more P2W since hes taken lead. He was in charge of Neverwinter when they put the best set of gear to be buyable on the marketplace, which is just blatantly P2W. And given the opportunity, I guarantee you he'd do that in this game. Hell, you can already buy SP in the form of TCs and CR skips (yes I know they make up a small percentage of overall, but still) and we're not too far off from them just openly putting SP packs in the MP. You see a thread every now and then about someone wanting SP packs in the MP. All it takes is a small minority being very vocal and the DCUO team invariably conflates it with the populous opinion and then they do it. Thats exactly how we got stat clamping, although I already know you disagree with that fact, but thats beside the point.

That guy makes everything P2W. Its a viscous cycle in this game. They introduce a P2W system like TCs, they lose subscribers>to make up that income they have to introduce another P2W system>lose subs>introduce another P2W system to make up that money and so on.

I mean seriously, look @ artifacts. Sure they're great in that they open up different play styles, and not required to get content done but they sure as hell make things a bit easier. But artifacts make up a massive difference vs those that don't have them. If you and I healed in a raid, same power same loadout. You had PHR, Page, and Trans card and I had no artifacts you'd easily double to triple my healing out. The same thing can be said about damage. Take Fire ST for example (All other things being the same), if you had Trans/Strat/SolarAmp and I had no artifacts, you would annihilate me in damage.

You cannot dispute the fact that this game is becoming more and more P2W and it started when he took the helm. And they did release public numbers in the investor report when EG7 acquired them. As of Sept 2020 this game had just under 420k players (40k of which were subscribers) across all platforms and servers [Pg 15 HERE]. That means this game had less than 500k ACTIVE players after all MAU in the report stands for monthly active users. I can almost guarantee this game has the same or even less, but is yet unproven. But lets say it doesn't. Lets this game has gotten more popular and we have 500k players across all platforms and servers, you realize thats not a lot right? I mean why did they have to create allies? I'd be willing to bet you had a dropoff in the people playing and they had to makeup the income somehow and thus allies were born. And my guess you had several players leave the game because of allies and the fact that they were broken for the first few weeks of them going live despite 2-3 weeks of testing and some of them remain broken 3 or so months into them being released.

Yes, it does make the effort cost neutral *effectively*. More or less. You can quibble about the margins but it's a fair thing to say rather than incorrect. In fact when we do this we're essentially making a sandbox using the modern graphics engine that can then be ported to the old game. All of the assets are already made and constitute the bulk of content for a transition like this. What remains is porting the missions themselves and that's where the shakedown would have to happen. And yes, it would take time to do depending on the staffing and labour they put onto it. It'd be pretty hard to justify not tasking a transition team like that when your client is WB/DC Comics and they expect their product to be given the same attention by your team as their competitor product gets. Not doing so would likely ruin the relationship and they'd ultimately lose the license -- of course they'd have the Marvel license at that point and may not care at all.

Incoming crazy talk ... prepare your tinfoil hats.

What If ... the 2023 expansion and the Marvel MMO ... were one and the same?

-Daybreak has spent 2021 upgrading servers as though they might be expecting a surge in players.
-Episode 41 was entirely built around the concept of creating a new Multiversal Hub where everyone can play together.
-Episode 42 will bring us our first real-world city, perhaps preparing for something one might call their 'largest expansion to date': New York City
-The DCUO segment of the investor report is focused on 2023, not next year ... as though they're working on a project that's too massive for just one year's worth of work.
-Enhanced graphics before a (potential) huge influx of new players

Perhaps they'll even rename the whole game ... Legends of the Multiverse, maybe?

(With that said, I'm actually excited if this is a wholly new Marvel MMO. I've spent the better part of a decade fending off Marvel Zombies when talking about DCUO, responding to their constant inane comments like 'lol, that game still exists?' I can't wait to go to their message boards and get eleven years of payback. )

While I don't see the upgrade sharing that much code with the Marvel MMO (MMMO), they could share tools. Presumably, they'd have tools to migrate assets from the current format to UE4, and then once in that format, they could use a common tool to put the finishing touches on them.

yea a large expansion update were they are building a direct competitor and then shutting down the old one. by large expansion they really mean big expansive hole in the mmo market they will be freeing up lol

large loot boxes maybe

ha!