07-15-2023, 12:58 PM
Really great perspectives here, and I definitly understand and agree with the majority of it. I realized when making the post that a lot of my points were a stretch, but I figured it would be worth sparking some conversation over anyways ? Me and /index.php?/profile/394-sickness/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="394" href="/index.php?/profile/394-sickness/" rel="">@Sickness have had a lot of these talks through the last couple years so it's nice to see other people jumping on it as well.
To clear up the study I did with the students, I asked them 5 very simple questions about MMO's and Last Chaos, without any priming beforehand except they got to see a trailer. The questions were were:
1. Do you enjoy MMO's?
2. Do you think an old game like Last Chaos could survive today?
3. What are you looking for in a MMO
4. If you have a look at videos of Last Chaos online, how likely are you to start playing?
5. Would you want to see a new server for this game, and would you play it?
The students had options to answer freely in text on question 3, and the rest were multiple choice questions.
Now, this may come as a surprise to many, as it did for me... but people actually want to play a slower pace game these days. People today are jumping in and out of games on battle royales, league og legends and a lot of these "adrenaline" based games, and they get exhausted. So to sit down with some braindead slow paced mmo is a nice change that a lot of people like from time to time.
And to respond to the legal issues, there are ways around it. It's a shitty and less-than-moral way around it but it's there. If you hide behind the right laws, there would have to be some really powerful people in play to make a dent in the server, and if executed correctly, they might not even get the chance to take it down.
There is no way around what you both say about the game not being popular anymore and stuff. The community is mostly shit, yes. And the game is struggling to compare both visually and mechanically. But I think we can all agree that one of LC's strenghts is it's simplicity? It's not an overly complicated game where you have to spend weeks to learn basic mechanics of the game. You can more or less jump straight into the game and enjoy it from the second you step foot in Juno.
In my opinion, it's quite ignorant to say that you can't market the game. Legal issues set aside, you could absolutely market the game! In fact, you can market virtually anything you want, and you will reach an audience. I had been producing music for a small label for a decade, then in 2020 I decided to pursuit my own artist project. After just 2 years I had amassed over 500.000 streams on Spotify alone, been featured in a bunch of music magazines, blogs, radios. Got my music played by a member of the Wu Tang Clan, had crazy artist features with multi platinum selling artists and a lot of incredible things. And I accomplished all of this independently, through good marketing strategies. I had no prior community, no contacts, no nothing. Now my daytime job is to produce music for 3 big labels in Europe, and again, all thanks to me reaching my audience. So yeah there is definitly a place in the world for LC, people just doesnt know it yet.
It would take a lot of work, and you couldn't have done it with the sole intent of making money off of it. You would need a solid team of people who could be trusted, and it would take time. But it would absolutely be doable. LC was good when Aeria had it, the servers were thriving, people everywhere. The problem now is that private servers try to compensate the lack of people with new systems and shit. It's not sustainable. The only way to truly sustain a server these days is to build a player mass, and not the same 60 people that the community has now, but new players. For that to happen, there would need to be a server that actually translates to new people, which also have been lacking.
But yeah that's my take on it at least. I hope you at least can try and see things from a new perspective. I realize that's hard when you've been in the thick of it for so long, but I really don't think we should accept that it's as black and white as you make it to be ?✌️