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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Games
Topic ID: 157
Message ID: 4
#4, RE: PSO2 is coming
Posted by Berk on Aug-07-20 at 04:15 PM
In response to message #3
>Did I miss a news story somewhere, or is this just a comment on his
>general impact on the MMO space, particularly Japanese MMOs?

For context. Sega's transitions from 1 PSO game to another have, previously, been hard transitions where they ran both games in parallel for a while and then abruptly scuttled the older game once the new one was stable.

PSO > PSU was a hard cutoff and then PSU > PSO2 was another hard cutoff. No connection between the titles. No transferring of ANYTHING. Often times, the games basically started all over again from the beginning in terms of deployment, sometimes not arriving in places where their predecessor did for various reasons. Sega always had problems losing players during these transitions.

Sega has been quietly, very obviously, working on a secret project for at least the past couple of years. Money was vanishing into a project they didn't want to talk about. Engineers were working on.. something.. and the staff devoted to PSO2 was starting to contract a bit.

Everyone expected PSO3 was eminent, and then PSO2 came out in the West after 8 years of delay following Gearbox's Great Betrayal. Sega had done this before: PSO Blue Burst was really just a network test for PSU in North America by the time it came out. Imagine everyone's SHOCK when New Genesis revealed character customization was going to be imported and PSO2's base game was getting a full graphic engine update.

Naoki Yoshida taught his fellow game designers that you can take a live service game and do a complete reinvention of it without losing your player base.