Just figured I’d check out some Graal Reborn servers, and browse the forums. Tired of the shitholes that are UN and Iclassic.
Welcome to the shithole that is Graal Reborn.
not much to see here anymore, but enjoy your stay
shrugs I generally expect a shithole from anything with graal in the title. I did get a good dose of nostalgia from the old client though.
Graal is dead. I think we can all accept that.
optimism is in short supply these days huh
pssh nothin personal graal
Well I’d say it’s doing better than ever if you’re a 14 year old that likes to play graal on a phone. Our graal is dead yeah…
I kinda said this in a thread not too long before you showed up, but Graal was destined to die as soon as the internet became more professional. An online game which is pretty much just a sloppy mess of scripts and content thrown together isn’t really going to survive in a game market as diverse as today’s. Even games like the new Battlefront have to put up or shut up, or else they fade away.
I know it’s not the most optimistic stance, but it kinda makes me sad how readily we accept this game being over. Not that I’m suggesting we have any choice.
yeah, pretty much what he said.
Graal was pretty new, unique and original and was coming onto the scene at the same time NES and SNES emulation was starting to become usable. A multiplayer zelda game where people could make their own stuff was pretty amazing at that time and far fewer MMOs existed in 1998, especially those that were free, 2d and zelda like.
Graal’s downfall was how it was going to forced pay to play while reducing the quality of content and expecting kids to make their content for them at the same time many better and free MMO’s were coming onto the scene. Unixmad/Stephane was mostly responsible for Graal’s early downfall.
Stephane’s idea was always to turn graal into the stagnant cashcow app that brought in money for no effort, the retarded “casual mobile market” was the wet dream for him and other corrupt/lazy so called “game developers”. Stephane would have done this to Graal back in 1999/2000 except the mass ripoff/dumb kiddie platform for it did not yet exist and Stefan, Fuitad, Galen, Azrael, PACHUKA and dozens of others always pushed back against it.
iGraal and whatever is as much like real Graal as the new Silent Hill Pachinko game is like the real Silent Hill.
Konami’s evolving fail… is a pretty damn good analogy of Graal’s evolving fail come to think of it… If Stephane still had anyone capable of coding he would probably be making iPhone or Facebook slot machine games like all the other seedy cashcowy devs… but alas he is stuck with what Stefan left him.
I have rose colored glasses and nostalgia for the old stuff like Graal, DragonSpires, Furcadia, MUD/Text games/dungeons, Infantry Online, ShockForce/Wulfram II, Shogo MAD, Quake, II, III, Doom, Unreal Tournament, Ultima Online, and others from the period of mid 90’s to early 2000’s.
Everything else nowadays just doesn’t have “that same feel”.
I also prefer Web 1.0 and simple sites/scripts style. Web 2.0 and trendy stuff all just reminds me of facebook/twitter nonsense and causes eye/brain damage from over-clutter also they unnecessarily waste resources, I just want to read the text, see the images and download the files, not bloatware up my browser.
Graal Reborn isn’t all that great nowadays, but it holds some fond memories. Being from iGraal this was an amazing discovery for me, the ability to create levels and essentially do anything. The community was actually worse in my opinion back when I started here. There was a lot of morons like Blazefirexxx123, Calebponessa, Crossfire, Darkblade and some others I remember that would literally just beg for stuff and only host stolen content for their servers. This was my first internet community I was really active in and I got trolled really easily since I was like 11 at the time. I remember it was really frustrating for me when I started out since I wanted to establish a staff team but I soon realized there wasn’t very many competent people and most just wanted to steal files off your server. There were a few good people though, like Tricxta, Alex and a couple others who helped out quite a bit with my original server. It was never that successful but I learned a lot from it. Overall I enjoyed working on it and I think I wouldn’t know much about level-making if it wasn’t for that failed project. I still enjoy developing for games but its really disappointing to work on Graal and see virtually nobody is even here to look at what I’ve made. I’ve just accepted that every game has its expiry date and Graal’s is long overdue.
well it wouldn’t have died if the accessibility to those tools was higher. It’s pretty much as GOATSE just said, Stefan/Unixmad pretty much killed their own game with their business plan. If they would have focused on making the game robust and flexible, yet cheap and reliable, Graal might even be alive today. The concept is pretty standard. Zelda engine + usercreated content = new spin on a classic game. Even if servers were something anyone could make, we’ve seen from Graal Reborn that it would be a combined community effort that would have made Graal great. Having your own server to muck around on is a good thing, but I’m sure people would have hopped on and helped grow the servers that were genuinely interesting instead of the little pet projects that were naturally growing behind the scenes. Pheonix, Xialza and even Zolderon are kinda good examples of this. I honestly believe the engine is what is holding everyone back. It’s not exactly fun to develop with considering how outdated it is. Other engines, like RPG Maker, Game Maker, Unity, Flash, etc. Those have been upgrading regularly in order to help the people using it create something better. Graal, on the other hand, has been upgrading regularly to help people pay for the game better. It’s not exactly developmentally friendly.
Even if we completed an engine today, I don’t really think Graal would spring back to life. We might attract the iPhone kids, and maybe even some official players after a while, but I think the main problem is the laziness stemming from a lack of cooperation amongst the players. Minecraft is a pretty frustrating game to mod for, since there’s all sorts of limits and stuff, and yet you have some cool mods like that Aether mod, and even shaders that push the game’s visuals to the limits. But the reason for this is because the community seems worth the hassle. [spoiler]Yes, I realize I am probably 60% of the reason most of our playerbase has left over these last 5 years, including moderators and administrators.[/spoiler] Playerbase -> Creations -> More playerbase. While Graal’s problem is Hostile playerbase -> Less creations -> Even less playerbase. I think it’s kinda too late unless we whip out something super addictive, and something that will make people actually keep playing for hundreds of hours instead of saying “hey that’s cool” and then logging off in an hour.
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edit: honestly the real fun has been here, these last few years. Chilling out with you guys and getting mad at stupid stuff has been a learning experience I never would have gotten if I didn’t come here. Even if I spent hundreds of hours on projects that didn’t really come to anything, it was still fun. I just wanted to put that out there cause it’s not like this whole project was a waste or anything. People used the server hosting software, and even probably enjoyed their stay for a while. We still have people coming in so it’s not like it’s completely dead. If we keep optimistic we might be able to have a server of at least what we saw the other day (about 10 to 12 people). That’s a lot of people, even if it’s not the hundreds (of thousands) that other games get regularly. There’s still some small hope for Graal Reborn. I don’t think we’ll die very soon, but it’s certainly not helping to have a pessimistic attitude about it.