13 Comments

Comment by Futura on May 9, 2008 at 9:41am

lol, I like his jab at Blizzard though.

Comment by Ardwulf on May 9, 2008 at 10:38am

At best it appears to be a simplistic statement. There will be people who level through your five years of content in a matter of days or weeks. Now, if he means that the average player will take five years to get through all the content... well, that's a little smarter but still seems incredibly unlikely to play out in any practical way. For any given player, there's going to be a certain percentage of the total content in the game that he or simply does not pursue, for whatever reason. If there's five years of content but you can get to the top-tier stuff in six months, by and large that's what players are going to do.

Comment by The OTB on May 9, 2008 at 11:09am

You now it might take fives year to see and do every thing if its based on a average players time in game.

Comment by Jade Talon on May 9, 2008 at 11:18am

The content statement may be aimed at people who play every race/class possible.

If you pick a warrior or whatever and play that to end-game, there's not going to be 5 years of content there. But if you play from 1st to 40th level on every race and class, doing every quest in every zone, and also maxing out all trade-skill classes... yea, I can believe there's a good amount of content there.

Comment by KnowledgeJunkie on May 9, 2008 at 12:03pm

well, from what I read, he means to say that they will have no problem providing content for the next 5 years without changing and game mechanics/systems- NOT that they already have their first 5 years of content already done. It may very well be true that they won't mess with the leveling or major aspects of the game for five years- but all in all, what was the positive impact of saying this in the first place? Even if you think you're future-proof for 5 years, you should keep it in-house in case something comes along, or you figure out it will be significantly better to change something.

Comment by SquirrelsOfWar on May 9, 2008 at 12:06pm

They said the world was flat. They said Warhammer Online had 5 years worth of content.

They LIED!

Just because it has 5 years of content doesn't mean it will be good content, probably just 5 years of kill 10 rats. Probably an endurance quest, kill rats solidly for 5 years. Pre-order confirmed.

Comment by ControlFreak on May 9, 2008 at 2:30pm

The people here who aren't quite believing the "5 year" claim probably haven't played DAoC - also by Mythic. Sure, you could level to max level in a week .. but the game wasn't about max level .. it was about Realm Rank and Realm Points. And those took forever to earn.

I'm pretty sure that's what they're talking about when they say 5-years. You might be 40 in a week, but it will take a long, long time to get to finish all your levelling.

Comment by Hudson on May 9, 2008 at 3:52pm

I too think they are counting on PVP to draw this out.

Comment by Dave on May 9, 2008 at 5:50pm

I say six months tops.

Comment by Mephfistus on May 9, 2008 at 7:05pm

You guys really need to read the article and not take things out of context.

"All the under-the-hood numbers all actually scale through the next five years," he said.

"What you don't want is when you launch the game you've got 40 levels - and it takes however long it takes to get to level 40. You then launch an expansion and it now takes two weeks to get to level 40 because now we need everyone to spend six months to get from level 40 to 50," Drescher added.

"So you need to spec the game out in such a way that you actually have those progressions in mind for later - so you don't wind up trampling all over the earlier experiences every time you expand the game."

"We have actually five years' worth of numerology out in front of us in terms of all that," he explained.

The full GamesIndustry.biz interview with Josh Drescher will be available next week.

If you read all the quotes you can see that the developer was talking about how they laid the foundation of the game (ie. the mechanics to leveling, as well as stats and class dynamics) strong enough to be able to smoothly have 5 years of content pushed out on to it. So that they do not need to go back to the first 40 levels and re-balance it like WoW did with the 20-60.

@Hudson: In the future please repost entire articles and not just things torn from it. I know you posted a link but sadly not everyone clicks links.

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