Celtic Heroes

First off, I don’t quite think this belongs in feedback and suggestions because that is not the intent of this post. Rather, I am gauging interest, generally, for an idea like this. If there is interest and some good feedback, I will make a more formal suggestion in the proper forum.

When I was 9 years old, I stumbled upon a desktop game called RuneScape. A couple of my friends mentioned that it was called an MMO—a phrase completely foreign to me at the time. I quickly jumped in, started dumping loads of time and energy into it, and played for quite a few years. At that time, I fell in love with MMORPGs. I then went on to play WoW and a few other desktop games.

Fast forward a few years, and I am fifteen years old. I downloaded the first MMORPG I had ever seen available for my IPod Touch—Celtic Heroes. Me and some of my original RuneScape friends jumped on and started having a blast. After a few weeks of playing, Dustwither Catacombs and Shalemont Ravine were released. We had a blast!

My time with Celtic Heroes was awesome! I was one of the original recruits for a clan called Avalon. We played together for around 10 years straight, and, although there were plenty of issues with OTM and VR, we loved this game. After so much time of doing the same things on repeat for years, especially with no feedback taken into consideration from the player base, we decided to close up our clan. Nearly everyone quit within a matter of a couple of months (although we still have an active group chat).

After quitting (a couple of years ago), I came across a game on the AppStore—Old School RuneScape Mobile. It blew my mind. I downloaded it right away and started doing all the quests I loved from my childhood. I bought a membership right away and found other ways to financially contribute to the creators, Jagex. They essentially let their game original game continue to progress and update it, but they created the Old School servers for people who liked the more rugged play style that they enjoyed as kids/teenagers. They essentially made these servers without the updates from the most recent years. You see, the game developers quickly learned that nostalgia is the best marketing strategy one can afford. This is the same thing that the creators of Pokémon Go, Niantic, realized when they released their game 7-8 years ago. People want to play the games they grew up on. Not only that, Jagex and Niantic realized these children were now adults with real money who were willing to spend it on nostalgia.

DECA finds themself in a very similar situation to Jagex and Niantic. There are people, like myself, who played this game 10-12 years ago and would love to relive some nostalgia.

My question for the players that have read this far: Does the Old School RuneScape model seem like something that would intrigue you? What would it look like to create a separate version of Celtic Heroes that starts with Lirs Reach and slowly starts adding in the zones in the chronological order they were released in—potentially capping things at Stonevale or Other World? Or, is the market of players simply not large enough to make it worth the time and investment of DECA?

No, simply because the game back then was so bare bones. There was nothing to it. Only reason why it seemed so great back in 2011/2012 was because mobile mmos did not exist, Celtic heroes was one of the first. If you were to play the 2011/2012 version of CH today, you’d get sick of it within a week or two.

What would be cool is to go back to when the game was bare bones, and rebuild it back up. Avoiding all the mistakes OTM made and making it a true mmo experience, not an experience that relied on events and extremely high level cap raising.

There is demand for classic releases of mmos. You saw this in the the years leading up to the release of OSRS and it success since. You could see the demand for classic WoW in the sheer amount of players going to private servers for the nostalgic barebones gameplay. Even smaller MMOs like Archeage still have a decent chunk of its player base turn to private servers to obtain the classic barebones gameplay.

If a classic CH, even a single server, was released and slowly progressed in a community approved fashion… I imagine I’m not the only one who would return to the game.

That’s not to say there aren’t blaring issues with that idea, mainly, CH’s playerbase is SMALL.

No, simply because the game back then was so bare bones. There was nothing to it. Only reason why it seemed so great back in 2011/2012 was because mobile mmos did not exist, Celtic heroes was one of the first. If you were to play the 2011/2012 version of CH today, you’d get sick of it within a week or two.

The classic, “you think you do, but you don’t”

Though truthfully I agree with you, to a degree.

Yes CH player base is extremely small, and it was even smaller back then so there are very few who even know what it was like back then. RuneScape and WoW were still much bigger, more fleshed out games at release than ch was. Ch had few very very small zones, essentially no basic mmo features (which the game still lacks to this day), and no raids to battle. All there was to do really was slowly progress through the catacombs, shalemont and later stonevale. Which are all very small zones, imagine trying to fit a server the size of say Epona in those few zones trying to progress.

Celtic Heroes immediately makes it clear that this is survival of the fittest. From the beginning of the game you will have to fight every mob, and the difficulty is constantly increasing. However, there are a lot of in-game bugs in the game related to the in-game store. One time I bought a platinum and got an error, I didn't see the platinum, but the money was deducted. I usually never had this problem. I often bought rank upgrades in World of Tanks and everything was perfect. You might be interested in learning more at skycoach.gg. Hopefully the developers can sort out this problem and I'll get my money back.