I have been reading various articles on the web and are wondering if there is any info on whether the game will have a subsciption fee in the US, like it does in Japan. Any ideas. I personally think it will bomb if they put in a fee. I don't recall the PS2 online Final Fantasy game doing all that well in the US because it also had a monthly subscription fee.
FFXI did great here (Especially in a Pre-WoW World), and even EQOA did fine. The Fact that MH:Tri isnt a true MMO will be the hardest sell in the US though, if there is a fee.
That surprises me. I remember seeing a lot of the hard drive FF kits going on deep discounts for a long time (and stores always having a large stock on hand). I just assumed they shipped the unsold ones back to the manufacturer. Perhaps I am just mistaken. BTY, I live in California.
At its peak, FFXI had around 650k active people playing, which yes, was spread out across multiple platforms in multiple countries, but as an MMO, those numbers are great. That of course doesnt count total sales. If you compare an MMO to a traditional game, you will be disappointed, but as an MMO, bundled with a harddrive, with a monthly subscription fee, the game did fine. Just dont look at it as a millions of sales sort of deal, but rather sustainable numbers. If you have 20k people subscribing, over even 3 months at 10$, it adds up. Let alone the price of the game.
So, if thats the case then Capcom won't have much incentive to let people play for free because they will make more money fleecing online subscription fees. There hasn't been any official word, so it basically all speculation at this point.
I think it's worth looking at the original Monster Hunter on the PS2, which in the US was free to play up until the servers were shut down. They provided online missions, human adjudication and system-wide events. Unfortunately, they also ended up deleting server-side data pretty regularly, which cut into the usage. I don't know the statistics on max/average players, so I won't make any claims about its popularity or stability. I will say that based on my time with the previous game, I don't see why Capcom couldn't continue to provide a bare-bones MMO experience in the same way.
My chief concern would be how they are preventing cheaters online. If it is anything like PSO then I will stay well clear.
I'll say by way of disclaimer that I didn't play as much Monster Hunter as I did PSO, and because I avoided pick-up games in the latter I never did encounter a lot of cheaters. But my impression is that Capcom's in-game judges and gamemasters loved their product a lot more and took complaints and bug reports really seriously. Even in Phantasy Star Universe, Sega's admins seemed to treat it more like a job than a passion. The difference in play is also a consideration. Because you have to build everything up from parts and materials, there's a natural scarcity that makes players more inclined to help one another. By comparison, PSO had all kinds of greed-inducing item drops that made it too easy to players to power-up quickly, with or without cheating.
PSO rarities were insanely rare, but gameshark folks and dupers flooded the game with either very rare high powered weapons or 'hacked' up weapons and add-ons with crazy stats that made people breeze through the game. My concern is whether that is kept in check by keeping it server side (the only real way), or is it client side? Can you play offline and bring the same character online?
Up until this point, all the networked Monster Hunter games have allowed you to take a client-side character online. But it's also worth mentioning that in the MH games, you don't really level up from a numerical standpoint. Monster Hunter is one of the few games where the experience level of the player actually translates into in-game success or failure. So you can have the best armor and the most powerful weapons, but if you don't know that a specific boss monster is only vulnerable to a hit on its head you won't make any progress. Even the info from a FAQ doesn't generally give a player any sort of advantage if he hasn't run out there with a bowgun himself. Put simply, server-side or client-side doesn't worry me either way. Monster Hunter is uniquely hardened against cheaters, at the price of alienating some players who aren't ready to be so invested.
