FOnline 2238 - "The end is nigh" and Mod Database

Dude101

Dude101

Vault Fossil
Modder
For those of you not acquainted with FOnline 2238 it is a classic Fallout style MMO. Unfortunately the world is ending and there is little time to prepare for this apocalypse.<blockquote>On Sunday, June 23rd 2013, the FOnline: 2238 server will be shut down. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons, as always, purely human ones. The interest in the current state of the game is steadily declining, while, at the same time, expectations about further development of the project can't be matched. With a decimated player base and, in turn, low number of donations we can't afford us any further server lease.

For you, the players, this means that there are over two weeks to play and discuss FOnline: 2238 on the current forum. This moment occurs important to many of us and we would like to use this opportunity to invite all the people who have been sharing so many memories from the last four years to login on June 23rd (evening time CET) for a big shutdown party. We definitely would love to have as many people as possible during these very moments and, of course, during the last days of 2238.

We would like to thank the players who supported us with their suggestions, bug reports, patches and content. Special thanks to all wiki editors, moderators and game masters. Last but not least, we would like to thank all our donors, who helped us to keep the 2238 server running for so long! Without you, the last 4 years wouldn't have been the same.

However, this is not the end, merely a new beginning for us - and we hope for some of you as well.</blockquote>If you are a member of the Followers of the Apocalypse or any other religious organisation, you should take this opportunity to log in and save as many blue suit souls as you can. Enjoy the end times.

Fonline 2238 Blog.
Fonline 2238 Discussion Thread.

FO1/2 Mod Database

Drobovik has created a Google drive database of Fallout 1 and 2 mods as well as modding resources. This is extremely noteworthy for those who missed out on mods lost to time, as well as modders for the vast amount of FRM art to be found.

Discusion Thread.
Fallout Database.
 
Aw, I was hoping for a content update when I saw news about 2238, so it's dead for ever then? Not like hiatus for a while or anything?


I'm going to sound a little cold but they would have gotten more people if they gave more attention to the role-play aspect as well as the PVE aspect of the game. The reason why out Dinosaur group quit the game was because after we got the best stuff we failed to see any reason to continue. It was the typical sandbox game like Minecraft, Terraria or Don't Starve where you build up more and more and then you hit a point where you go "...Now what?"

The game was so focused on the PVP aspect that other aspects which potential players would enjoy remained neglected, had there been a reason for our Dinosaur group to keep playing, like a good questline that amped up it's difficulty and rewards we'd have something to strive for.

I don't know what would have suited us, MMO's usually turn out that way for me, I reach a high point in the game where things slow down or dead stop and I can't see a reason to go on. Same happened to most of us.

So, the cold part of my post; They wouldn't have had such a declining playerbase if they would have tried to accomodate the PVE'ers as well as the PVP'ers, instead they left things 'too' open for people to do what they wanted and failed to deliver content to make PVE'ers stick around. Had they done things differently our group (and probably many others before and after) would have stuck around longer, maybe even to this day.

So, that they had to shut down due to a declining player base is their own fault.

If they couldn't accomodate us PVE'ers then it's still their own fault for taking on a project too big/complex for them.

Unless in the time that I've been abscent(?) from the game they did flesh those areas out, in that case I sound like an idiot right now. 8-)
 
Incredible that it was running for this long! A big congratulations is in place. I played this game a long time ago and was blown away by how brutally honest it was. I tried and died but kept on going. Well done all of you. I wish the entire team all the best!
 
Mr Fish said:
abscent(?)
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- C. Absent.
---


And I guess I agree about too much of a pvp focus, maybe trying to moderate some of the excesses to preserve RP'ers might have kept some people playing, since that's pretty much player-created content. Don't ask me how they'd do that with only volunteers, though.

Anyway, crying shame to see this go, especially since as I understand matters they built a new engine from scratch to make this a possibility, and part of the classic FO community will likely be lost as well. Let's hope some of these SDK-made mods take off, at least.


(On a semi-related note, anyone aware of any places to go to for documentation or tutorials suited to a complete and utter noob such as myself? The stuff on the official forums seems to require some degree of knowledge, so maybe I shouldn't try to make sense of it without trying something else first.)
 
Yeah. The problem was, the game became too big. It's hard to focus on two groups of players at the same time and creaing enough content for pve AND pvp is a lot work, especiallty if you have to fix everything else all the time while this.

For example, we reworked pvp mechanics very often over the last 4 years, because people where constantly talking about it being bad, regardless of what we tried. So ultimately we spend more work on reworking every system all the time than working on new content. This is exhausting and not exactly motivating (at least for me).
 
I played for about a year or so and it was fun for a little bit.

IMO, it was way too PVP focused and the difficulty kept it interesting to only a few niche players. If you look at the history of open/uncontrolled PVP, sadly humans cannot be trusted with it.

Well, again, congratulations for doing as well as you did and best of luck to your future endeavors.
 
Lexx: I do like the idea of turning the 2238 forum into an english version of fonline.ru; could be very useful and interesting.
I'm looking forward to it and will pass the word to the french community and Surface Dwellers team.
 
Yeah, we didn't wanted to abandon the FOnline engine, so this project seems to be the best thing right now. Especially because browsing fonline.ru is quite hard without russian language skills...

The FOnline community feels very separated right now, with mod teams seeing themself as enemies or something like that, which makes no damn sense. So I'll hope the new project can help to even this out.
 
Lexx said:
The FOnline community feels very separated right now, with mod teams seeing themself as enemies or something like that, which makes no damn sense. So I'll hope the new project can help to even this out.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's quite sad. With people from different old PvP teams that went on to make their own server, but forgetting that the enemies in Fo:2238 were only their enemies in this game and they shouldn't be in real life or in other FOnline projects.
To be honest, our project (SD) is not targeting the FOnline community and we don't plan to advertise it there. We do plan to share what we can with other devs and help them or at least discuss with them, though. Everyone in the team has been away from active FOnline servers for such a long time now that we don't even remember who we liked or who we disliked, and we want it to stay like that. No enemies, no friends, and if the game is launched one day, we plan to consider every player as if we had never met him. :p

Maybe we'll finally be able to setup a nice mapping database, in that new forum. That would be good.
 
When you have un-restricted PVP, its extremely difficult to take emotions out of the equation. People are essentially spending large amounts of their time playing a game only for all the hardwork to vanish because of some trololo.

The only way to play is to join some kind of guild/clan thing which also usually comes with all sorts of drama and bullshit. It works in EVE but most folks agree that game is essentially a job away from your job.

If your talking about something else than just please ignore.
 
Izual said:
To be honest, our project (SD) is not targeting the FOnline community and we don't plan to advertise it there.
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Target of your game doesn't matter, because it won't be some general "FOnline MMOs community site". The new website will be dedicated primarily to developers not players - people who try to do something with the engine. To any kind of development with the engine, not limited just to ideas revolving around "Multiplayer Fallout". So it would be still ontopic to discuss creative aspects, ask questions, look for help or post informations about your game, no matter for whom you make it. Anything related to actual development with this engine.
 
As I said years ago, this project could thrive if they made it into a mature MMO with the usual measures taken in a WoW-like game to ensure

a) solid PvE content
and
b) inability to gank unsuspected players at will anytime, anywhere

Somehow, they didn't seem to care for that. Did someone hope that leaving the game in this state would make it popular? Really?
 
Well. But that was the whole point of the game: PvP everywhere, at any day or night. This is what made it fun and (more or less) unique in the first place. And the (now) death of the game is also not related to this, but other things that went wrong.
 
I think the loss of audience of the game is mostly due to PvP, yes.
- PvP that went too big, too unavoidable, between only a handful of super-large factions with a real-life hatred among them. No new player would want to get involved in that, and it was tiresome for most old players as well (and they left).
- PvP that was everywhere, as shihonage said: any newcomer would get killed so fast he couldn't learn the ropes... Bombed in NCR (safe town), killed in random encounters by other players, followed to his tent and slaughtered with all his items stolen, and I'm not even talking about the insults he'd receive. The final topic of the forum pretty much shows all of this.

However, I don't think going for more PvP was a bad move from the developers. It's even puzzling me... What I liked in OBT2 (october 2008, our first contact with FOnline to all) was this ever-present and savage PvP. I'm really curious about what has gone wrong with projects that only aimed to improve it
Now, with the 2238 experience behind us, I think going for "factions mod" was a mistake. PvP in FOnline (and even in Fallout) is fun when it's between small groups, that rise and fall daily. Many times, back in OBT2, my small team lost everything, then became weathy again, then lost again everything, in only hours.
Setting up key objectives in the map obviously went wrong too. With big stakes come big emotions. People started to hate each other when it took forever to craft an item, and five seconds to lose it, and when the control of a town became so important it required hours of getting prepared.
So yeah, just my two cents of what went wrong with PvP in 2238. I'm not blaming anyone. Had I been a dev, I would have made the same choices: factions and PvP were fun in OBT2, I'd have focused on it too. Now that it has ended, it's easy to teach lessons. But there had to be pioneers to develop that game. :)
 
Quite simply their was to much PVP. It was forced down your throat whether you wanted it or not. Walk into town get ganked, mine get ganked, standing in cell in the middle of nowhere get ganked, talking to people in the middle of the NCR get ganked. It should of been obvious that people would get pissed at every time they try to do something someone come along and kill them. The first months should of made that clear as the forums here and the chat channel they had was filled with people getting upset about it.

Honestly though it wouldn't of been so bad if they gave the players more info on what was going on in towns sooner and force safe towns to actually be safe. Limit PVP at the start as you build up some PVE to give people something to do other then shoot people you didn't know.

Izual I would say Factions weren't a mistake at all but a great idea they just pushed it out too fast to try and get back lost players. I love the idea of having to gear up and strike out to take over a town but the problem was that was all their really was to do. Most every town was now a death trap since who knows when a fraction will strut in to kill everyone in sight. Forcing people to stay at the NCR to sell anything.
 
How can the games failure not be related to the un-restricted PVP when its un-restricted PVP thats causing all the drama and the BS?

Lexx said one of the major failures leading to the shutdown was lack of interest. When I was playing a few years back, the server was like 400-500 tops maybe?

Un-restricted PVP caters to only ONE set of audience, the majority made up of folks looking to trololo all day long. Is this the type of players the devs wanted to attract?

I remember when I was playing and the PK guys (who loved to quote 'The wasteland is harsh" trololos started bitching and moaning because other trololos like themselves were using bank interest to fund super mutie artillery via camping spawn points. What ended up happening was bank interest ended up getting nerfed, eliminating the sole way for 'loners', to get into the game without joining some guild bullshit.

So when regular folks complain about the learning curve, they are just whining but when the PVPers complain, they get top billing.

When all the nice people essentialy leave the game, all thats left for the trololos to do is mess with their own kind and that stays fun only for so long until anger or boredom sets in.
 
Lexx said one of the major failures leading to the shutdown was lack of interest.
Click to expand...

I did not said this.

The interest was always there, but the games problems lies in different areas. That means, as Izual already pointed out, the huge pvp groups and the huge amount of time needed to gain access to items, which you could lose again in just a few seconds. A lack of repeatable content, that doesn't start to feel like a second job and some other things like:
For example, we reworked pvp mechanics very often over the last 4 years, because people where constantly talking about it being bad, regardless of what we tried. So ultimately we spend more work on reworking every system all the time than working on new content. This is exhausting and not exactly motivating (at least for me).
Click to expand...

What made the game interesting and tensing in the first place is the open pvp. If we would have removed this, the game would be nothing but a boring loot grinder and after a few days you would have stopped to play it, as - unlike in games such as Diablo - there isn't any item randomization to keep you hooked up for longer.

Ultimately the game was about pvp and the whole "pk and anti-pk" drama stuff always felt a bit hilarious to me. Trust nobody, some people just didn't learned it.


But beside this, a few years ago I realized that building a good Fallout MMO simply isn't possible. You can make a post-apocalyptic MMO quite easily, but one with a true Fallout feeling... nope. That will never work out, as the areas of interest for Fallout players (story, RPG) and MMO players (item grind, pvp) are two different kind of shoes.
 
So sorry Lexx, had one monumental brainfart in regards to quoting. I apologise.

dude101 said:
The interest in the current state of the game is steadily declining, while, at the same time, expectations about further development of the project can't be matched. With a decimated player base and, in turn, low number of donations we can't afford us any further server lease.
Click to expand...
 
It is related to the decreasing player numbers, I was more pointing at the general project interest. Oh well, I didn't wrote the announcement. :p But everything I am posting here is only my personal view anyway. I am not talking for the whole team.
 
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