OP: Hate to burst your bubble but you are more likely in the minority. People don't want realistic death and all that stuff. Of course people who log the most hours have the best chance at getting gear, maxing their characters the fastest ect. But that's not always the case.
Sounds like someone just wanted to complain. But that's the MMO genre. Look elsewhere for games that are more to your liking.
But you loose all credibility with a posting like that. ALL MMOs suck? Sorry clearly you have not played a lot of them. Because I think pretty much everyone here can tell you 2 or 3 great MMOs. *shrug*
It's almost like a brand new group of people came onto the gaming scene and completely redefined the game genres, people who were not originally gamers, but were able to change things with their mass numbers. Imagine if 20% of the population of the United States were to move to a country like the UK and become citizens. Now let's imagine they're far right republicans. They would effectively double the population of the country and use their voting power to completely change how the country works.
That's what happened to gaming, a bunch of foreigners took over and turned it into a mainstream profit machine. With them came mediocrity to appeal to the masses. These people have a minor time investment in gaming compared to those of us who were around playing games like X-Com, Dune 2, the Ultima series, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, etc.... They don't know what makes a game great, and they don't realize that they're playing inferior games that are designed simply to exploit their basic human nature on the level that heroin would.
You call it mediocrity, I call it evolution. I started back in 1999 with EQ and even back then I had a difficult time calling it a game. The social aspect was the only part that was alluring. Suffice it to say that while the genre has been getting better over time, it has a very long way to go before I subscribe to a game for more than a few months. SW: TOR may be the first MMO that has the potential to really capture my interest or they could end up ruining it with all of the typical MMO bullshit, only with decent story content.
What sucks about the genre is the crap load of hybrid MMOs that try to cater to casuals and hardcores, but sucking at both. Everything but end game is way too casual for hardcores, yet I consider the majority of casual content to be hardly casual at all. MMOs should have started specializing long before now, instead it's just a stagnant mess.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
With the main point of this thread, I totally agree with the OP in terms of how leveling is more or less becoming too important within an MMORPG. When people play the game (such as WoW) and dread levels 1-79 and consider leveling a chore, that's when emphasis on levels is too far. Let's face it. It's a measurement of your character's "experience" and overall ability and no one wants to be stuck below the next guy. I have an idea, what if we got rid of levels and make games more about fun these days.
I started playing EVE Online and loved it because I can try everything and do anything I want. I felt like I was living within a world and it does a good job of getting players immersed into its environment. With World of Warcraft, its more I do things to become better than the other person and the only way to do that is if I spend more time in the game than most others at the very least and focus it on one toon. With EVE, the difference between being good and the best is a matter of improving your avatar's skills and using better strategy. I like that the person that does their research and actually learns how to play the game gets rewarded. I seen far too many people with gear on WoW that do not put out the DPS that they should be putting out (to extreme degrees). Like epicced out and only 1500 DPS (WoW players would understand). I think players should be rewarded for being smarter and better strategy (it happens in WoW but not enough) and its a more common occurrence in EVE Online. I think the leveling idea (and collect epic lewts after) takes away from this. All in all, less emphasis on levels and equipment and more emphasis on strategy, skills and choices.
In regards to realism, I don't agree. I believe video games are meant NOT to be real and this is also the very reason why I enjoy anime. Anime worlds tend to have its own rules, laws, physics, you name it, they do it in some form or another. MMORPG's should be the same way. I don't care why Goku can release a massive ball of spirit that only destroys evilness (what defines evil?), I just like to see it done. Or a notebook that can spell death literally for any name written in it (how does the book actually know?!?) but its a really cool idea and I enjoyed every bit of it. Things don't have to make sense when you're living in fantasy
EDIT: I also agree with the poster above, I think MMO's should focus their target audience more rather than try to cater to everyone else and spread themselves thin. Personally, I think an MMO world should cater to casual players for the most part since you'll never satisfy hardcore gamers. I look at a MMO world as a place to hang out at with other people, but also in games like WoW the social aspect of these games get lost more and more and it becomes more about the individual than the community.
FC-FamineFuncom Community ManagerMemberUncommonPosts: 278
Originally posted by Jairoe03
With the main point of this thread, I totally agree with the OP in terms of how leveling is more or less becoming too important within an MMORPG. When people play the game (such as WoW) and dread levels 1-79 and consider leveling a chore, that's when emphasis on levels is too far. Let's face it. It's a measurement of your character's "experience" and overall ability and no one wants to be stuck below the next guy. I have an idea, what if we got rid of levels and make games more about fun these days. I started playing EVE Online and loved it because I can try everything and do anything I want. I felt like I was living within a world and it does a good job of getting players immersed into its environment. With World of Warcraft, its more I do things to become better than the other person and the only way to do that is if I spend more time in the game than most others at the very least and focus it on one toon. With EVE, the difference between being good and the best is a matter of improving your avatar's skills and using better strategy. I like that the person that does their research and actually learns how to play the game gets rewarded. I seen far too many people with gear on WoW that do not put out the DPS that they should be putting out (to extreme degrees). Like epicced out and only 1500 DPS (WoW players would understand). I think players should be rewarded for being smarter and better strategy (it happens in WoW but not enough) and its a more common occurrence in EVE Online. I think the leveling idea (and collect epic lewts after) takes away from this. All in all, less emphasis on levels and equipment and more emphasis on strategy, skills and choices.
I think you're missing a very important part to most online games and that is the progression. Character levels is apart of the character progression much like many other systems in online games. Removing character progression all together may not be the best direction to making a game more fun. I believe creating new and exciting character progression would be all the more ideal in that sense even though in most cases it just replaces things like levels with other forms of measurements.
Just my 2 cents
Glen ''Famine'' Swan Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Gah im so sick of hearing about WoW. Wow sucks, it ruined what was left of the genre. I never played ultima Online, how was it different? WoW is just basically riding the Warcraft RTS series IMO.
I guess permadeath doesn't have to be set in stone. But there better be a good explaination as to why you can come back to life. Maybe you could buy special amulets that save your stats, your "soul". But you have to make a new character or something.
I think games can be realistic without sacrificing playability. What if it didn't take ages to get good to counter dieing often? What if you could be a master swordsman in a few days but some asshole with a bow can kill you if you arent careful?
As for progression.. well thats what I was talking about above. Games like WoW are made to have a very slow progression so players don't get to max really fast, get bored, and then stop paying their prescription. What if progression was faster for a permadeath game?
I guess I just don't fully get the appeal of having an ultra realistic game to the point of perma death and such. I understand that what you're looking for is really more of a simulator than anything, but really... why?
I play games for a number of reasons, and I would love to see an MMO that pushed the artistic boundaries of the genre a bit. (I know Love is sort of promising to do that). But still isn't the reason any of us playing these is because they're fun? Because we enjoy advancing a character, we enjoy the interaction and we enjoy the competition.
Plenty of games have managed to fit the idea of not dying into lore. The newest Prince of Persia had you rescued whenever you were about to fall. In Braid you had control over time its self and, thus, could not die. In Bioshock you actually could use those revital chambers. Finally in EVE you have the idea of a clone, which is a perfectly good explanation I think.
I do guess I understand the want for a more persistent, interesting world however. I'm always sort of torn because while I think that if a world like that was done right it could be a hell of a lot of fun to play. The issue is making it so that everyone who plays the game can feel like they're actually a part of some epic happening, even something such as an overarching storyline would do a large persistent world wonders I think. The problem a lot of times is these so called sandbox games just feel very static, and I think they put too much emphasis on the players for creating some sort of story.
Hopefully someone gets what I'm sort of saying here. I think if you had an interesting story going on than there would be something for everyone. Like if the cities are for some reason getting sieged by the lowly creatures around town, that normally are peaceful, you'd have a lot of different things to do. The low skilled players could test their might against the lowly denizens. The explorer types would go and look for the source of the problem, perhaps there is a cave where something larger is happening? You'd also have those players who are the top of their game, banding up to find out what is going on. Of course you might have different goals for doing it (saving the world, money or what have you) so you would have conflict created that way as well.
So I did go off tangent a bit, but I do think a good story is the missing ingredient in a large, persistent world.
I think you're missing a very important part to most online games and that is the progression. Character levels is apart of the character progression much like many other systems in online games. Removing character progression all together may not be the best direction to making a game more fun. I believe creating new and exciting character progression would be all the more ideal in that sense even though in most cases it just replaces things like levels with other forms of measurements. Just my 2 cents
I want to hope there's more ways to portray progression rather than measuring by levels. I understand people need goals in order to play games but it doesn't necessarily have to be levels. How is progression measured at the maximum level of any game then? It definitely isn't by levels and I think even most players wouldn't even measure their own progression by levels. It seems like people measure their progression by what awesome items they have equipped, getting to the maximum level is more or less a prerequisite for many people to feel like they are even actually playing the game it seems.
There are many ways to measure progression or else how would sandbox games be attractive to anyone in the first place if levels were to be that important. In my original post, I was not implying to get rid of levels all together, but to put less emphasis on it. By designing the game around maximum level, people tend to look at the game and treat the game as a chore pre-max level. Then after that, the measuring stick (at least in WoW) seems to be how awesome your equipment is (which I really find no different than attaining levels since all the equipment released tend to have the same attributes used repetitively just with higher values), which to me seems more and more like a pointless and redundant goal when there is really not much else to do in the game.
In conclusion, I agree with Garrett Fuller's most recent article "LFM ULduar 25, PST Stats and Achievements" in providing other rewards/goals that require something else rather than the usual dungeon crawls (especially more rewards based on social aspects). The one thing I'm tired of seeing are people that just play for themselves, that don't bother to share mobs or even have the consideration to tell groups to hurry up so they can catch the latest VoA run. But because the game is designed around the individual, people tend to think only about themselves (they only seem to group or raid when its necessary to progress themselves and sometimes have very little patience for others around them) and I think it defeats a large portion of what MMO's really should be about.
FC-FamineFuncom Community ManagerMemberUncommonPosts: 278
Originally posted by Jairoe03
Originally posted by FC-Famine
I think you're missing a very important part to most online games and that is the progression. Character levels is apart of the character progression much like many other systems in online games. Removing character progression all together may not be the best direction to making a game more fun. I believe creating new and exciting character progression would be all the more ideal in that sense even though in most cases it just replaces things like levels with other forms of measurements. Just my 2 cents
I want to hope there's more ways to portray progression rather than measuring by levels. I understand people need goals in order to play games but it doesn't necessarily have to be levels. How is progression measured at the maximum level of any game then? It definitely isn't by levels and I think even most players wouldn't even measure their own progression by levels. It seems like people measure their progression by what awesome items they have equipped, getting to the maximum level is more or less a prerequisite for many people to feel like they are even actually playing the game it seems.
Well I think that's because everything is centered around that form of progression. Game systems work around each other in sort of a balance between each other much like a circle. Everything feeds into one another and in most cases they all feed into and center around levels or skill points (in the previous non-level example).
I was not implying to get rid of levels all together, but to put less emphasis on it. By designing the game around maximum level, people tend to look at the game and treat the game as a chore pre-max level.
The need to establish your characters placement in the game is very important to how content is introduced to you. If the game can't detect how strong or weak you are then balance around your character becomes much harder. Thus there needs to be systems in place to say "Zork has been playing for 11 hours, character is level 25, has 283 points of equipment and suppose to be in this area." You have to remember this is only the work of engineering. Forms of character progression and measurements will almost always be there. In some way or another one of those systems will be centered around other systems. If not levels, other systems will come into play to do it for you. The mechanics behind those systems MAY differ from one another but ultimately return different outlooks on the system that the norm.
In conclusion, I agree with Garrett Fuller's most recent article "LFM ULduar 25, PST Stats and Achievements" in providing other rewards/goals
I agree too. There should be other achievements and rewards out there. However, I don't think it should be frowned on for developers making those achievements meaningful. Like in the example of restricting players because they don't meet the requirements of those achievements/rewards. Like the above trying to establish your "power" in order to place you is very vital. Then of course just establishing it to remove you can also be very critical. Yet that doesn't mean there can't be more systems to allow you either.
Glen ''Famine'' Swan Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Originally posted by FC-Famine Well I think that's because everything is centered around that form of progression. Game systems work around each other in sort of a balance between each other much like a circle. Everything feeds into one another and in most cases they all feed into and center around levels or skill points (in the previous non-level example). I was not implying to get rid of levels all together, but to put less emphasis on it. By designing the game around maximum level, people tend to look at the game and treat the game as a chore pre-max level. The need to establish your characters placement in the game is very important to how content is introduced to you. If the game can't detect how strong or weak you are then balance around your character becomes much harder. Thus there needs to be systems in place to say "Zork has been playing for 11 hours, character is level 25, has 283 points of equipment and suppose to be in this area." You have to remember this is only the work of engineering. Forms of character progression and measurements will almost always be there. In some way or another one of those systems will be centered around other systems. If not levels, other systems will come into play to do it for you. The mechanics behind those systems MAY differ from one another but ultimately return different outlooks on the system that the norm. In conclusion, I agree with Garrett Fuller's most recent article "LFM ULduar 25, PST Stats and Achievements" in providing other rewards/goals I agree too. There should be other achievements and rewards out there. However, I don't think it should be frowned on for developers making those achievements meaningful. Like in the example of restricting players because they don't meet the requirements of those achievements/rewards. Like the above trying to establish your "power" in order to place you is very vital. Then of course just establishing it to remove you can also be very critical. Yet that doesn't mean there can't be more systems to allow you either.
I guess the big thing I was trying to get at is why does everything seem to be centered around the end-game. I understand that levels are used for a variety of things on both ends of the spectrum in regards to MMORPG's, players and designers. Its perfectly fine to use it as a gauge to say this person should be here and shouldn't be here, here and here. However, at the very end, it seems to be, first of all, a much bigger theme park with more access to really a lot of the cool stuff.
Taking WoW for an example, before their first expansion, a good majority of the content but not all of it was at level 60, however there was a good portion of content spread out within the 50s range which people continued to do when at their 60s. People in those days actually ran groups for low level, mid level and high level content to not only earn experience but also gear at all levels. Burning Crusade came out and people did much of the same thing just within 60s-70. Content started getting ignored around the middle levels and people preferred to get a maxed level friend or pay a maxed level player to run them through all the middle content. What was high level content in the 60s and was released in the 60s became pretty much ignored since the first several items you got from Burning Crusade content overshadowed much of the high level items pre-Burning Crusade. The mindset of players were to try and expedite the process to get to the end. Then, with patches, more and more content released was totally focused on the end game making it that much more important to skip to the end so they can actually start "playing the game". Its easy to see how the game design makes pre-maxed level become a chore. When in PvP there's a big difference between the max level and 1 level before it, that where I believe there's too much focus on the maxed level. This trend continues to their next patch in much of the same way.
Why not spread this stuff out and put less disparity in terms of "power" between the max level and the rest and make leveling take a little bit longer but less of a chore (maybe to an extent where players aren't thinking about the next level so much, but looking forward to when their guild runs their next raid because the level requirement is levels 76-80 rather than just 80). Why not release new content that's middle level as well? It doesn't have to be as important as higher level content, but the newness of it might make people interested in at the very least checking it out. When everything seems to focus around maxed level, that content eventually becomes wasted over the long run when the level cap increases again. Then its all thrown away and ignored and at the very least, the company can make those old raids/instances easy to access 5-mans with less restrictions so maybe people can use it to level through the grind and gain equipment easier, making their experience easier through out what some might refer to as the "grind". If everything is going to be focused around the maxed level, then why not just let people skip to the max level after they have acquired 2 or 3 other maxed out level characters. Again, maybe it's all part of the business model but at the same time, people shouldn't have to feel like leveling is such a grind when it should be considered more of a fun experience. After all, that's what games are supposed to be about.
Last year I tried AOC and Warhammer. Those failed miserably. This year I was in beta for Aion and Champions and I must say there will not be a mmo that will keep players happy for a long time. Its sad because I was really hoping Aion and CO would keep me busy but yet again it is back to the drawing board. I think the only hope left for mmos will be Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic and whatever Blizzard has instore for us.
Originally posted by Syphex_7 Gah im so sick of hearing about WoW. Wow sucks, it ruined what was left of the genre. I never played ultima Online, how was it different? WoW is just basically riding the Warcraft RTS series IMO.
The RTS series helped, but saying that was the only thing that made WOW a success is a bit silly.
I guess permadeath doesn't have to be set in stone. But there better be a good explaination as to why you can come back to life. Maybe you could buy special amulets that save your stats, your "soul". But you have to make a new character or something.
Permadeath will never be mainstream unless the gameplay is designed to keep each character's life extremely short (and even then it's dubious.)
I keep saying it in permadeath threads: Characters are players' pets.
Spend a significant amount of time with anything, living or not, and you build an emotional attachment to it. So it's disruptive to kill off that character -- it's like losing a pet -- and the worst part is that perma-death systems usually don't add a lot to compensate for this loss. There's no benefit to offset the huge loss.
I think games can be realistic without sacrificing playability. What if it didn't take ages to get good to counter dieing often? What if you could be a master swordsman in a few days but some asshole with a bow can kill you if you arent careful?
Quick progression is a good way to make permadeath work, but it also undermines a big part of the addictive substance of MMORPGs. Also you just got done saying "games can be realistic without sacrificing playability"..and then immediately say I can be a master swordsman in a few days?
Gameplay trumps realism (which is why the "master swordsman in a few days" part is so effective at making perma-death less painful.)
As for progression.. well thats what I was talking about above. Games like WoW are made to have a very slow progression so players don't get to max really fast, get bored, and then stop paying their prescription. What if progression was faster for a permadeath game?
Progression systems keep players playing. If I hit master swordsman in 3 days, why should I play on the 5th day?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Along the lines of a Perma Death game, I think one way of making it not quite so painfully bad is if progression exists outside of the character you're playing.
An example game: Each player gets their own town. The town is where all of the progression happens that would typically be on your character in a normal MMO. Constructing new buildings, upgrading them, gathering resources, training specialists, and organizing guild halls are all forms of progression available to you.
Certain buildings provide access to new types of citizenry.
Citizens are things like Hunter, Militia Guardsman, Militia Captain, Priest, etc. These are the avatars you control, just like any other MMORPG.
Death is permanent for citizens, and you may choose from your entire list of available avatars each time you spawn. The upgrade state of each building controls how powerful each individual choice is though, so it's likely you'll have a subset of citizen types who are considerably more powerful than your other choices.
Even though death is permanent, that doesn't prevent you as mayor from erecting a statue commemorating some heroic death of a Guard Captain you controlled. A momument like that might inspire even greater heroics (gameplay bonuses) from future Guard Captains.
Such a game would inevitably have to involve instancing (if not for the thousands of towns, then at least for the PVE content,) or suffer the fate of having terrible PVE because so much of the land is occupied by town plots.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"As theres always an end level.. and when you reach it theres nowhere else to go, this is what put me off fallout3."
I barely even noticed when I hit the level cap in Fallout 3. Unless you are trying to get there, it just comes naturally. And it's not like you can't keep playing. So you don't get new perks every few hours. You should have more than enough by then that you don't need more. By the time I hit 20 all my primary skills were close to max just from finding the books. There was plenty more to explore and do, since I was in no hurry to complete the main story quest.
Also, you mention you would like unrestricted PvP and Permadeath, then you may as well just play FPS multiplayer, because there would likely be zero progression in that regard.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
It's almost like a brand new group of people came onto the gaming scene and completely redefined the game genres, people who were not originally gamers, but were able to change things with their mass numbers. Imagine if 20% of the population of the United States were to move to a country like the UK and become citizens. Now let's imagine they're far right republicans. They would effectively double the population of the country and use their voting power to completely change how the country works.
That's what happened to gaming, a bunch of foreigners took over and turned it into a mainstream profit machine. With them came mediocrity to appeal to the masses. These people have a minor time investment in gaming compared to those of us who were around playing games like X-Com, Dune 2, the Ultima series, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, etc.... They don't know what makes a game great, and they don't realize that they're playing inferior games that are designed simply to exploit their basic human nature on the level that heroin would.
You call it mediocrity, I call it evolution. I started back in 1999 with EQ and even back then I had a difficult time calling it a game. The social aspect was the only part that was alluring. Suffice it to say that while the genre has been getting better over time, it has a very long way to go before I subscribe to a game for more than a few months. SW: TOR may be the first MMO that has the potential to really capture my interest or they could end up ruining it with all of the typical MMO bullshit, only with decent story content.
What sucks about the genre is the crap load of hybrid MMOs that try to cater to casuals and hardcores, but sucking at both. Everything but end game is way too casual for hardcores, yet I consider the majority of casual content to be hardly casual at all. MMOs should have started specializing long before now, instead it's just a stagnant mess.
Evolution implies that there is an improvement. I look back on Asheron's Call and I see an incredible ingame story that progresses every month and players participate in it together, I see a death penalty that hurts but not so much that you might consider quiting when you die, quests that are actually quests rather than kill/gather tasks, there is much focus on content of all types, exploring is viable, being a trader/crafter is viable, going out and fighting is viable, straight up questing is viable, even PvP only is a viable means to play the game. If you compare that to a modern game like World of Warcraft where there is only one thing to do in the game, and that is to advance by doing raids or PvPing and replace your current items with better ones, I would call that devolution. You've literally taken out much of the content that made the MMORPGs of old fun to many different kinds of people and gave us the variety that prevented us from getting bored and replaced that with what might as well be an addictive substance such as heroin. It takes an extremely weak mind to fall victim to that trap, and a majority of the population of the world are extremely weak willed unfortunately. The only kind of person a modern MMORPG will appeal to is someone who hates their life and wants to make the time pass quickly, or someone who doesn't know what the genre has to offer and has offered in the past. The former will go from MMORPG to MMORPG while under the illusion that they're having fun, the latter will come here and complain about how MMORPGs suck and how they should have x feature that existed in one of the old awesome games like UO or Asheron's Call.
like others have said give the free trial of eve online a go and also maybe try planeshift for its unusual take on death(you have to escape from the underworld when you die)
as said by others also look into mortal online and earthrise
although i don't think the entire genre beeds to be redefined I do think it really needs some originallity from some of the bigger developers rather than just having them release cloned games for 8yr olds
Man, this is a terrible thread. Trying to devolve the genre by adding permadeath is not the right way around it. There is a reason why most developers are straying away from "punishing" the player. if you've noticed more and more games are going away from the idea of "checkpoints" and instead are allowing players to save anywhere. Really, the idea of an ultra harsh death penalty is just bad game design. Having a death penalty is fine, depending on the context of the game. I'm not going to say that a death penalty like in EVE is a terrible thing (it isn't) but it needs to fit the game. Like in Aion, for instance, the death penalty works because it scales to the players AP level. That means that the players who have a lot of AP (and thus are more powerful due to AP skills, and are getting closer to being able to purchase some of the best gear in the game) are going to risk more when PvPing than some new player will. In WoW the death penalty works because no one wants to have to try and grind their gear or XP again after a death (especially after max level!) while repair bills certainly do enough to make dying hurt.
Permadeath is just such an ass backwards idea. If you want a permadeath MMO, well, look around you. I really hate to say that but it is true -- real life is pretty much it. It's not really a crack at you not getting outside either, it's just that I don't want to play a game that acts like real life. I don't want to lose everything because my internet connection shut off, or I had a power surge or I had something more important I had to take care of immediately. (like if someone was hurt or needed my help). It's stupid to lose hundreds of hours of gameplay due to a small mistake, and no game is going to make you do that because it is a terrible idea. The games back in the day that had the idea of "permadeath" were often short games in comparison, it doesn't matter if you lost all your lives in Mario because you could get back to where you were pretty easily. In an MMO that is a totally different story, and it would not encourage players to even attempt a challenge.
The thread should have ended here. Nadril summed it up perfect.
The only thing I would add would be...numbers. To the guys arguing that "hardcore gamers" playing 5-10 hours at a stretch matter...are there even a million such gamers on WoW? How many people does Darkfall have playing it? Not that many. Guess who pays for the servers, development and updates. Surely not the basement trolls. It's those casual gamers that make it possible for you to chug Monster cola by the case and do those epic raids.
Hardcore gamers serve a purpose insomuch as to test the limits of a game, to see how far it will go. That's why they have betas. They allow the hardcore to stretch the game's bonds to the limit, because they know these guys will be playing long hours and giving the engines and servers a workout. However, please don't try to argue that hardcore gamers matter to a game's ultimate success. The numbers are against you.
Permadeath ..If a developer is bold enough to create such a game I'll be there ! Just count on it !!
The problem most of you see with permadeath, is that you think of general MMORPG's(WoW, EQ etc) then picture it with permadeath, that would naturally NEVER work as a game..
If a game added permadeath it would need the whole game to be built around it, a real life simulator of sorts, a game where each end every fight could mean "the end"...
The problem with such a game however is that it would risk to become the most intence game or the most boring one.
PS !! Has none of you ever played a classic pen and paper roleplaying game, they are all permadeath(all the ones i know)
I used to be a fan of the idea of an MMORPG.. living an alternate life, competing with other people, making friends etc.. Somehow I stumbled onto playing muds, the first mud I played was gemstone 3.. I even paid for it. But right away I could see something was missing. I went out looking for more "realism". I started playing RPI(Roleplay intensive)'s like armageddon and SoI(shadows of isulder). But found them to depend too healivy on "roleplay", often without being backed up by code. I don't know how I managed to stumble on here but I saw something that confirmed what I've known all along.. the genre sucks. But I too have searched for that one game that might keep me interested but they're just a bunch of clones, all about the next level, a rat race to the "final level". To me.. this just seems to be what kills the genre in the fist place.. this... power levelling. Its just a matter of who can log the most hours and get the L337est shit. And it doesn't matter if you die, you might lose some *gasp* exp but thats it. I think the WHOLE genre needs to be redefined, or even a new one created from the ashes. What if MMORPG's were real? What if when you died you lost EVERYTHING, no respawning, nothing. I think this would definately up the adrenaline of trying to survive. What if it wasen't who loggest the most hours and got the best levels? As theres always an end level.. and when you reach it theres nowhere else to go, this is what put me off fallout3. Im talking about realistic MMORPGS. Permadeath, unrestricted PVP, everything. If this exists please show it to me. I say games should still have skill levels, but not on such a greater scale as games like WoW. Higher levels are grandiously overpowered. Enough of the crappiest guys should be able to take down the most powerful, as a matter of balance. And as for dying, when you die you lose everything, this makes the aim of the game to survive, as it should be, and not killing endless monsters with little penalty for death. IS there anyone out there who wants a realistic, roleplaying-intensive, permadeath MMORPG?
Standard video games don't have these things so I hardly see your point other than to say these are things you want, I for one wouldn't want to spend months to years gaining things only to lose them upon game loss where exactly does challenge come into your equation it simply couldn't be too difficult as most people would die now could it? I was expecting to be wowed by this post but it doesn't move me at all except to say you are asking for a game that maybe you and five other people in the world want and that's just not good business wether you make mmo's pc games or console games the idea is just lame to ninety five percent of the video game laying population and it doesn't or wouldn't necesarrily make you hard core just a lemming to keep playing after about five deaths or so.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Evolution implies that there is an improvement. I look back on Asheron's Call and I see an incredible ingame story that progresses every month and players participate in it together, I see a death penalty that hurts but not so much that you might consider quiting when you die, quests that are actually quests rather than kill/gather tasks, there is much focus on content of all types, exploring is viable, being a trader/crafter is viable, going out and fighting is viable, straight up questing is viable, even PvP only is a viable means to play the game. If you compare that to a modern game like World of Warcraft where there is only one thing to do in the game, and that is to advance by doing raids or PvPing and replace your current items with better ones, I would call that devolution. You've literally taken out much of the content that made the MMORPGs of old fun to many different kinds of people and gave us the variety that prevented us from getting bored and replaced that with what might as well be an addictive substance such as heroin. It takes an extremely weak mind to fall victim to that trap, and a majority of the population of the world are extremely weak willed unfortunately. The only kind of person a modern MMORPG will appeal to is someone who hates their life and wants to make the time pass quickly, or someone who doesn't know what the genre has to offer and has offered in the past. The former will go from MMORPG to MMORPG while under the illusion that they're having fun, the latter will come here and complain about how MMORPGs suck and how they should have x feature that existed in one of the old awesome games like UO or Asheron's Call.
Yet another excellent post and I once again agree completely.
While we are on the subject I would like to tell a little story about my time in Asheron's Call many, many years ago.
I had this patron who was a really great guy and a good friend of mine for several years when we were both playing Asheron's Call. His name was Shinwa Po. Like pretty much everyone else in Asheron's Call Shinwa Po had a "mule" character. An alt who existed for the sole purpose of carrying around extra gear and money that Shinwa did not want to keep on his main character.
One day Shinwa Po asked me to meet with his mule character in a town I had not been to in a very long time. When I arrived in the town I was shocked by what I saw. This was not one of the major towns in the game. It was quite far off the "beaten path" so to speak and there was nothing nearby it that was of great interest as far as I knew. Yet the town was overflowing with people! People trading, people crafting and people talking. The majority of them were not armed and were fairly low in level. It was some kind of "mule town" where people would bring their alt characters to conduct purely non-combative activities.
But what was more shocking than that was Shinwa Po's mule. It was level 33! All of my mule characters were still level one and had never traveled far from the towns where I had created them. I asked Shinwa Po how he had leveled his mule character, expecting to hear some outlandish story of how he stayed online one weekend for 48 hours straight killing the weakest rats in the game down in some tiny forgotten dungeon in the middle of nowhere. What he told me was totally different. He had given his "mule" character every possible non-combat skill in the game when he created it. In Asheron's Call that was a LOT of skills. There were crafting skills, skills to identify items and many other random skills that most people paid no attention to. However Shinwa Po's mule made it all the way to level 33 just by using these skills to the benefit ot Shinwa Po's main character and his vassals.
For the record, my main character only ever made it to about level 45. I got that far by killing every hostile creature that came within spitting distance of me. And yet some other character who existed for the sole purpose of hauling around some other guys stuff almost became as high in level as I was. Just by hauling around some other guys stuff. Thats exactly the kind of thing that would never happen in todays MMOs like WoW or City of Heroes. Does that make these games "bad" games? No. It just means that they could be so much BETTER if they took the emphasis off of trying to "max out" your character by preforming repetitive actions and put the emphasis back where it belongs: Sending your character on a unique adventure by giving you a HUGE OPEN WORLD to explore and FRIENDS to explore it with.
Along the lines of a Perma Death game, I think one way of making it not quite so painfully bad is if progression exists outside of the character you're playing. An example game:
Each player gets their own town. The town is where all of the progression happens that would typically be on your character in a normal MMO. Constructing new buildings, upgrading them, gathering resources, training specialists, and organizing guild halls are all forms of progression available to you. Certain buildings provide access to new types of citizenry. Citizens are things like Hunter, Militia Guardsman, Militia Captain, Priest, etc. These are the avatars you control, just like any other MMORPG. Death is permanent for citizens, and you may choose from your entire list of available avatars each time you spawn. The upgrade state of each building controls how powerful each individual choice is though, so it's likely you'll have a subset of citizen types who are considerably more powerful than your other choices. Even though death is permanent, that doesn't prevent you as mayor from erecting a statue commemorating some heroic death of a Guard Captain you controlled. A momument like that might inspire even greater heroics (gameplay bonuses) from future Guard Captains. Such a game would inevitably have to involve instancing (if not for the thousands of towns, then at least for the PVE content,) or suffer the fate of having terrible PVE because so much of the land is occupied by town plots.
Comments
OP: Hate to burst your bubble but you are more likely in the minority. People don't want realistic death and all that stuff. Of course people who log the most hours have the best chance at getting gear, maxing their characters the fastest ect. But that's not always the case.
Sounds like someone just wanted to complain. But that's the MMO genre. Look elsewhere for games that are more to your liking.
But you loose all credibility with a posting like that. ALL MMOs suck? Sorry clearly you have not played a lot of them. Because I think pretty much everyone here can tell you 2 or 3 great MMOs. *shrug*
Stop QQing start Playing.
You call it mediocrity, I call it evolution. I started back in 1999 with EQ and even back then I had a difficult time calling it a game. The social aspect was the only part that was alluring. Suffice it to say that while the genre has been getting better over time, it has a very long way to go before I subscribe to a game for more than a few months. SW: TOR may be the first MMO that has the potential to really capture my interest or they could end up ruining it with all of the typical MMO bullshit, only with decent story content.
What sucks about the genre is the crap load of hybrid MMOs that try to cater to casuals and hardcores, but sucking at both. Everything but end game is way too casual for hardcores, yet I consider the majority of casual content to be hardly casual at all. MMOs should have started specializing long before now, instead it's just a stagnant mess.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
With the main point of this thread, I totally agree with the OP in terms of how leveling is more or less becoming too important within an MMORPG. When people play the game (such as WoW) and dread levels 1-79 and consider leveling a chore, that's when emphasis on levels is too far. Let's face it. It's a measurement of your character's "experience" and overall ability and no one wants to be stuck below the next guy. I have an idea, what if we got rid of levels and make games more about fun these days.
I started playing EVE Online and loved it because I can try everything and do anything I want. I felt like I was living within a world and it does a good job of getting players immersed into its environment. With World of Warcraft, its more I do things to become better than the other person and the only way to do that is if I spend more time in the game than most others at the very least and focus it on one toon. With EVE, the difference between being good and the best is a matter of improving your avatar's skills and using better strategy. I like that the person that does their research and actually learns how to play the game gets rewarded. I seen far too many people with gear on WoW that do not put out the DPS that they should be putting out (to extreme degrees). Like epicced out and only 1500 DPS (WoW players would understand). I think players should be rewarded for being smarter and better strategy (it happens in WoW but not enough) and its a more common occurrence in EVE Online. I think the leveling idea (and collect epic lewts after) takes away from this. All in all, less emphasis on levels and equipment and more emphasis on strategy, skills and choices.
In regards to realism, I don't agree. I believe video games are meant NOT to be real and this is also the very reason why I enjoy anime. Anime worlds tend to have its own rules, laws, physics, you name it, they do it in some form or another. MMORPG's should be the same way. I don't care why Goku can release a massive ball of spirit that only destroys evilness (what defines evil?), I just like to see it done. Or a notebook that can spell death literally for any name written in it (how does the book actually know?!?) but its a really cool idea and I enjoyed every bit of it. Things don't have to make sense when you're living in fantasy
EDIT: I also agree with the poster above, I think MMO's should focus their target audience more rather than try to cater to everyone else and spread themselves thin. Personally, I think an MMO world should cater to casual players for the most part since you'll never satisfy hardcore gamers. I look at a MMO world as a place to hang out at with other people, but also in games like WoW the social aspect of these games get lost more and more and it becomes more about the individual than the community.
I think you're missing a very important part to most online games and that is the progression. Character levels is apart of the character progression much like many other systems in online games. Removing character progression all together may not be the best direction to making a game more fun. I believe creating new and exciting character progression would be all the more ideal in that sense even though in most cases it just replaces things like levels with other forms of measurements.
Just my 2 cents
Glen ''Famine'' Swan
Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Gah im so sick of hearing about WoW. Wow sucks, it ruined what was left of the genre. I never played ultima Online, how was it different? WoW is just basically riding the Warcraft RTS series IMO.
I guess permadeath doesn't have to be set in stone. But there better be a good explaination as to why you can come back to life. Maybe you could buy special amulets that save your stats, your "soul". But you have to make a new character or something.
I think games can be realistic without sacrificing playability. What if it didn't take ages to get good to counter dieing often? What if you could be a master swordsman in a few days but some asshole with a bow can kill you if you arent careful?
As for progression.. well thats what I was talking about above. Games like WoW are made to have a very slow progression so players don't get to max really fast, get bored, and then stop paying their prescription. What if progression was faster for a permadeath game?
I guess I just don't fully get the appeal of having an ultra realistic game to the point of perma death and such. I understand that what you're looking for is really more of a simulator than anything, but really... why?
I play games for a number of reasons, and I would love to see an MMO that pushed the artistic boundaries of the genre a bit. (I know Love is sort of promising to do that). But still isn't the reason any of us playing these is because they're fun? Because we enjoy advancing a character, we enjoy the interaction and we enjoy the competition.
Plenty of games have managed to fit the idea of not dying into lore. The newest Prince of Persia had you rescued whenever you were about to fall. In Braid you had control over time its self and, thus, could not die. In Bioshock you actually could use those revital chambers. Finally in EVE you have the idea of a clone, which is a perfectly good explanation I think.
I do guess I understand the want for a more persistent, interesting world however. I'm always sort of torn because while I think that if a world like that was done right it could be a hell of a lot of fun to play. The issue is making it so that everyone who plays the game can feel like they're actually a part of some epic happening, even something such as an overarching storyline would do a large persistent world wonders I think. The problem a lot of times is these so called sandbox games just feel very static, and I think they put too much emphasis on the players for creating some sort of story.
Hopefully someone gets what I'm sort of saying here. I think if you had an interesting story going on than there would be something for everyone. Like if the cities are for some reason getting sieged by the lowly creatures around town, that normally are peaceful, you'd have a lot of different things to do. The low skilled players could test their might against the lowly denizens. The explorer types would go and look for the source of the problem, perhaps there is a cave where something larger is happening? You'd also have those players who are the top of their game, banding up to find out what is going on. Of course you might have different goals for doing it (saving the world, money or what have you) so you would have conflict created that way as well.
So I did go off tangent a bit, but I do think a good story is the missing ingredient in a large, persistent world.
I want to hope there's more ways to portray progression rather than measuring by levels. I understand people need goals in order to play games but it doesn't necessarily have to be levels. How is progression measured at the maximum level of any game then? It definitely isn't by levels and I think even most players wouldn't even measure their own progression by levels. It seems like people measure their progression by what awesome items they have equipped, getting to the maximum level is more or less a prerequisite for many people to feel like they are even actually playing the game it seems.
There are many ways to measure progression or else how would sandbox games be attractive to anyone in the first place if levels were to be that important. In my original post, I was not implying to get rid of levels all together, but to put less emphasis on it. By designing the game around maximum level, people tend to look at the game and treat the game as a chore pre-max level. Then after that, the measuring stick (at least in WoW) seems to be how awesome your equipment is (which I really find no different than attaining levels since all the equipment released tend to have the same attributes used repetitively just with higher values), which to me seems more and more like a pointless and redundant goal when there is really not much else to do in the game.
In conclusion, I agree with Garrett Fuller's most recent article "LFM ULduar 25, PST Stats and Achievements" in providing other rewards/goals that require something else rather than the usual dungeon crawls (especially more rewards based on social aspects). The one thing I'm tired of seeing are people that just play for themselves, that don't bother to share mobs or even have the consideration to tell groups to hurry up so they can catch the latest VoA run. But because the game is designed around the individual, people tend to think only about themselves (they only seem to group or raid when its necessary to progress themselves and sometimes have very little patience for others around them) and I think it defeats a large portion of what MMO's really should be about.
I want to hope there's more ways to portray progression rather than measuring by levels. I understand people need goals in order to play games but it doesn't necessarily have to be levels. How is progression measured at the maximum level of any game then? It definitely isn't by levels and I think even most players wouldn't even measure their own progression by levels. It seems like people measure their progression by what awesome items they have equipped, getting to the maximum level is more or less a prerequisite for many people to feel like they are even actually playing the game it seems.
Well I think that's because everything is centered around that form of progression. Game systems work around each other in sort of a balance between each other much like a circle. Everything feeds into one another and in most cases they all feed into and center around levels or skill points (in the previous non-level example).
I was not implying to get rid of levels all together, but to put less emphasis on it. By designing the game around maximum level, people tend to look at the game and treat the game as a chore pre-max level.
The need to establish your characters placement in the game is very important to how content is introduced to you. If the game can't detect how strong or weak you are then balance around your character becomes much harder. Thus there needs to be systems in place to say "Zork has been playing for 11 hours, character is level 25, has 283 points of equipment and suppose to be in this area." You have to remember this is only the work of engineering. Forms of character progression and measurements will almost always be there. In some way or another one of those systems will be centered around other systems. If not levels, other systems will come into play to do it for you. The mechanics behind those systems MAY differ from one another but ultimately return different outlooks on the system that the norm.
In conclusion, I agree with Garrett Fuller's most recent article "LFM ULduar 25, PST Stats and Achievements" in providing other rewards/goals
I agree too. There should be other achievements and rewards out there. However, I don't think it should be frowned on for developers making those achievements meaningful. Like in the example of restricting players because they don't meet the requirements of those achievements/rewards. Like the above trying to establish your "power" in order to place you is very vital. Then of course just establishing it to remove you can also be very critical. Yet that doesn't mean there can't be more systems to allow you either.
Glen ''Famine'' Swan
Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
I guess the big thing I was trying to get at is why does everything seem to be centered around the end-game. I understand that levels are used for a variety of things on both ends of the spectrum in regards to MMORPG's, players and designers. Its perfectly fine to use it as a gauge to say this person should be here and shouldn't be here, here and here. However, at the very end, it seems to be, first of all, a much bigger theme park with more access to really a lot of the cool stuff.
Taking WoW for an example, before their first expansion, a good majority of the content but not all of it was at level 60, however there was a good portion of content spread out within the 50s range which people continued to do when at their 60s. People in those days actually ran groups for low level, mid level and high level content to not only earn experience but also gear at all levels. Burning Crusade came out and people did much of the same thing just within 60s-70. Content started getting ignored around the middle levels and people preferred to get a maxed level friend or pay a maxed level player to run them through all the middle content. What was high level content in the 60s and was released in the 60s became pretty much ignored since the first several items you got from Burning Crusade content overshadowed much of the high level items pre-Burning Crusade. The mindset of players were to try and expedite the process to get to the end. Then, with patches, more and more content released was totally focused on the end game making it that much more important to skip to the end so they can actually start "playing the game". Its easy to see how the game design makes pre-maxed level become a chore. When in PvP there's a big difference between the max level and 1 level before it, that where I believe there's too much focus on the maxed level. This trend continues to their next patch in much of the same way.
Why not spread this stuff out and put less disparity in terms of "power" between the max level and the rest and make leveling take a little bit longer but less of a chore (maybe to an extent where players aren't thinking about the next level so much, but looking forward to when their guild runs their next raid because the level requirement is levels 76-80 rather than just 80). Why not release new content that's middle level as well? It doesn't have to be as important as higher level content, but the newness of it might make people interested in at the very least checking it out. When everything seems to focus around maxed level, that content eventually becomes wasted over the long run when the level cap increases again. Then its all thrown away and ignored and at the very least, the company can make those old raids/instances easy to access 5-mans with less restrictions so maybe people can use it to level through the grind and gain equipment easier, making their experience easier through out what some might refer to as the "grind". If everything is going to be focused around the maxed level, then why not just let people skip to the max level after they have acquired 2 or 3 other maxed out level characters. Again, maybe it's all part of the business model but at the same time, people shouldn't have to feel like leveling is such a grind when it should be considered more of a fun experience. After all, that's what games are supposed to be about.
Last year I tried AOC and Warhammer. Those failed miserably. This year I was in beta for Aion and Champions and I must say there will not be a mmo that will keep players happy for a long time. Its sad because I was really hoping Aion and CO would keep me busy but yet again it is back to the drawing board. I think the only hope left for mmos will be Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic and whatever Blizzard has instore for us.
Don't worry, there's more than that!
The RTS series helped, but saying that was the only thing that made WOW a success is a bit silly.
Permadeath will never be mainstream unless the gameplay is designed to keep each character's life extremely short (and even then it's dubious.)
I keep saying it in permadeath threads: Characters are players' pets.
Spend a significant amount of time with anything, living or not, and you build an emotional attachment to it. So it's disruptive to kill off that character -- it's like losing a pet -- and the worst part is that perma-death systems usually don't add a lot to compensate for this loss. There's no benefit to offset the huge loss.
Quick progression is a good way to make permadeath work, but it also undermines a big part of the addictive substance of MMORPGs. Also you just got done saying "games can be realistic without sacrificing playability"..and then immediately say I can be a master swordsman in a few days?
Gameplay trumps realism (which is why the "master swordsman in a few days" part is so effective at making perma-death less painful.)
Progression systems keep players playing. If I hit master swordsman in 3 days, why should I play on the 5th day?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Along the lines of a Perma Death game, I think one way of making it not quite so painfully bad is if progression exists outside of the character you're playing.
An example game:
Each player gets their own town. The town is where all of the progression happens that would typically be on your character in a normal MMO. Constructing new buildings, upgrading them, gathering resources, training specialists, and organizing guild halls are all forms of progression available to you.
Certain buildings provide access to new types of citizenry.
Citizens are things like Hunter, Militia Guardsman, Militia Captain, Priest, etc. These are the avatars you control, just like any other MMORPG.
Death is permanent for citizens, and you may choose from your entire list of available avatars each time you spawn. The upgrade state of each building controls how powerful each individual choice is though, so it's likely you'll have a subset of citizen types who are considerably more powerful than your other choices.
Even though death is permanent, that doesn't prevent you as mayor from erecting a statue commemorating some heroic death of a Guard Captain you controlled. A momument like that might inspire even greater heroics (gameplay bonuses) from future Guard Captains.
Such a game would inevitably have to involve instancing (if not for the thousands of towns, then at least for the PVE content,) or suffer the fate of having terrible PVE because so much of the land is occupied by town plots.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"As theres always an end level.. and when you reach it theres nowhere else to go, this is what put me off fallout3."
I barely even noticed when I hit the level cap in Fallout 3. Unless you are trying to get there, it just comes naturally. And it's not like you can't keep playing. So you don't get new perks every few hours. You should have more than enough by then that you don't need more. By the time I hit 20 all my primary skills were close to max just from finding the books. There was plenty more to explore and do, since I was in no hurry to complete the main story quest.
Also, you mention you would like unrestricted PvP and Permadeath, then you may as well just play FPS multiplayer, because there would likely be zero progression in that regard.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
You call it mediocrity, I call it evolution. I started back in 1999 with EQ and even back then I had a difficult time calling it a game. The social aspect was the only part that was alluring. Suffice it to say that while the genre has been getting better over time, it has a very long way to go before I subscribe to a game for more than a few months. SW: TOR may be the first MMO that has the potential to really capture my interest or they could end up ruining it with all of the typical MMO bullshit, only with decent story content.
What sucks about the genre is the crap load of hybrid MMOs that try to cater to casuals and hardcores, but sucking at both. Everything but end game is way too casual for hardcores, yet I consider the majority of casual content to be hardly casual at all. MMOs should have started specializing long before now, instead it's just a stagnant mess.
Evolution implies that there is an improvement. I look back on Asheron's Call and I see an incredible ingame story that progresses every month and players participate in it together, I see a death penalty that hurts but not so much that you might consider quiting when you die, quests that are actually quests rather than kill/gather tasks, there is much focus on content of all types, exploring is viable, being a trader/crafter is viable, going out and fighting is viable, straight up questing is viable, even PvP only is a viable means to play the game. If you compare that to a modern game like World of Warcraft where there is only one thing to do in the game, and that is to advance by doing raids or PvPing and replace your current items with better ones, I would call that devolution. You've literally taken out much of the content that made the MMORPGs of old fun to many different kinds of people and gave us the variety that prevented us from getting bored and replaced that with what might as well be an addictive substance such as heroin. It takes an extremely weak mind to fall victim to that trap, and a majority of the population of the world are extremely weak willed unfortunately. The only kind of person a modern MMORPG will appeal to is someone who hates their life and wants to make the time pass quickly, or someone who doesn't know what the genre has to offer and has offered in the past. The former will go from MMORPG to MMORPG while under the illusion that they're having fun, the latter will come here and complain about how MMORPGs suck and how they should have x feature that existed in one of the old awesome games like UO or Asheron's Call.
like others have said give the free trial of eve online a go and also maybe try planeshift for its unusual take on death(you have to escape from the underworld when you die)
as said by others also look into mortal online and earthrise
although i don't think the entire genre beeds to be redefined I do think it really needs some originallity from some of the bigger developers rather than just having them release cloned games for 8yr olds
The thread should have ended here. Nadril summed it up perfect.
The only thing I would add would be...numbers. To the guys arguing that "hardcore gamers" playing 5-10 hours at a stretch matter...are there even a million such gamers on WoW? How many people does Darkfall have playing it? Not that many. Guess who pays for the servers, development and updates. Surely not the basement trolls. It's those casual gamers that make it possible for you to chug Monster cola by the case and do those epic raids.
Hardcore gamers serve a purpose insomuch as to test the limits of a game, to see how far it will go. That's why they have betas. They allow the hardcore to stretch the game's bonds to the limit, because they know these guys will be playing long hours and giving the engines and servers a workout. However, please don't try to argue that hardcore gamers matter to a game's ultimate success. The numbers are against you.
Permadeath
..If a developer is bold enough to create such a game I'll be there ! Just count on it !!
The problem most of you see with permadeath, is that you think of general MMORPG's(WoW, EQ etc) then picture it with permadeath, that would naturally NEVER work as a game..
If a game added permadeath it would need the whole game to be built around it, a real life simulator of sorts, a game where each end every fight could mean "the end"...
The problem with such a game however is that it would risk to become the most intence game or the most boring one.
PS !! Has none of you ever played a classic pen and paper roleplaying game, they are all permadeath(all the ones i know)
A lot of people seem to like a game called mount and blade, I think that has permadeath but never tried it myself
It's a great singleplayer sandbox RPG. But it doesn't have permadeath.
Standard video games don't have these things so I hardly see your point other than to say these are things you want, I for one wouldn't want to spend months to years gaining things only to lose them upon game loss where exactly does challenge come into your equation it simply couldn't be too difficult as most people would die now could it? I was expecting to be wowed by this post but it doesn't move me at all except to say you are asking for a game that maybe you and five other people in the world want and that's just not good business wether you make mmo's pc games or console games the idea is just lame to ninety five percent of the video game laying population and it doesn't or wouldn't necesarrily make you hard core just a lemming to keep playing after about five deaths or so.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Yet another excellent post and I once again agree completely.
While we are on the subject I would like to tell a little story about my time in Asheron's Call many, many years ago.
I had this patron who was a really great guy and a good friend of mine for several years when we were both playing Asheron's Call. His name was Shinwa Po. Like pretty much everyone else in Asheron's Call Shinwa Po had a "mule" character. An alt who existed for the sole purpose of carrying around extra gear and money that Shinwa did not want to keep on his main character.
One day Shinwa Po asked me to meet with his mule character in a town I had not been to in a very long time. When I arrived in the town I was shocked by what I saw. This was not one of the major towns in the game. It was quite far off the "beaten path" so to speak and there was nothing nearby it that was of great interest as far as I knew. Yet the town was overflowing with people! People trading, people crafting and people talking. The majority of them were not armed and were fairly low in level. It was some kind of "mule town" where people would bring their alt characters to conduct purely non-combative activities.
But what was more shocking than that was Shinwa Po's mule. It was level 33! All of my mule characters were still level one and had never traveled far from the towns where I had created them. I asked Shinwa Po how he had leveled his mule character, expecting to hear some outlandish story of how he stayed online one weekend for 48 hours straight killing the weakest rats in the game down in some tiny forgotten dungeon in the middle of nowhere. What he told me was totally different. He had given his "mule" character every possible non-combat skill in the game when he created it. In Asheron's Call that was a LOT of skills. There were crafting skills, skills to identify items and many other random skills that most people paid no attention to. However Shinwa Po's mule made it all the way to level 33 just by using these skills to the benefit ot Shinwa Po's main character and his vassals.
For the record, my main character only ever made it to about level 45. I got that far by killing every hostile creature that came within spitting distance of me. And yet some other character who existed for the sole purpose of hauling around some other guys stuff almost became as high in level as I was. Just by hauling around some other guys stuff. Thats exactly the kind of thing that would never happen in todays MMOs like WoW or City of Heroes. Does that make these games "bad" games? No. It just means that they could be so much BETTER if they took the emphasis off of trying to "max out" your character by preforming repetitive actions and put the emphasis back where it belongs: Sending your character on a unique adventure by giving you a HUGE OPEN WORLD to explore and FRIENDS to explore it with.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
Cool idea