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The difference between roleplaying games and roleplaying games
patient32
Member UncommonPosts: 96
Maybe it's just me, but I feel developers have lost sight of what a roleplay game is. Most developers now are under the impression that for a game to be a roleplaying game all it needs is.......
Loads of armour / items / weapons
Loads of character visual customisation like faces and hairstyles
Money to earn to buy the above stuff
To me, a roleplaying game is about playing a role in that gaming world. Making a difference or trying to make a difference in that world through your actions and interactions with the npcs. Siding with certain factions at the exclusion of other factions.
I guess I'm just looking for some sort of bridge between the "single player campaign" games and the mmo gameworlds.
Which is why I am definately in the mood for an mmo that has
A changing/evolving world that changes based on the actions and achievements of the majority of players (changes implemented in weekly or fortnightly patches)
Which I (hopefully) went into in more detail in my other "What I want from mmos of the future" post
Sorry if you feel this is a double post I just wanted to express my frustration at developers trying to trick us into thinking that a roleplaying game is all about character customisation with weapons and armours and items and less about adventure and playing a role in the game world.
"It's like a finger pointing away to the moon... Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all the heavenly glory" (Bruce Lee)
(Insert your favourite mmo here): ......And behold, a pale horse.... And a million hellishly bad mmos followed with it.
Comments
what's this roleplay you speak of
The roleplaying I speak of is, at least in mmos, a game world that changes/evolves based on the actions of the majority of players. Changes added through weekly or fortnightly patches.
The actual act of playing a role in the gameworld.... Sure it won't quite be a single player game where the world changes literally on YOUR actions alone but, just like voting in an election, you completing tasks or making choices will be you adding YOUR vote to the direction of how you want the gameworld to go.
"It's like a finger pointing away to the moon... Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all the heavenly glory" (Bruce Lee)
(Insert your favourite mmo here): ......And behold, a pale horse.... And a million hellishly bad mmos followed with it.
I believe there's already a few games like that. . .mainly p2p titles but I think there is atleast a couple that are somewhat similar to what you're saying. Asking for nightly patches is a little much though, you'll be lucky to even see this kinda stuff once a week. . .you're basically asking them to rewrite the games story once a week based on what everyone did, that's no small feat.
Are you american or something? Fortnightly means every 2 weeks not every night :P It's just what we call 2 weeks here in the UK.... A fortnight.
"It's like a finger pointing away to the moon... Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all the heavenly glory" (Bruce Lee)
(Insert your favourite mmo here): ......And behold, a pale horse.... And a million hellishly bad mmos followed with it.
yeah stupid americans dont u know that geez
im totally not american i promise
most people get paid fortnightly so how anyone doesn't know that word is beyond me...
As for that kind of constant patch system...it NEEDS a big sandbox world for the devs to tweak and change things. It would require someone with decent scripting skills, the tools to change the world (must be created by some programmers) and some sort of ideas guy that picks and chooses what to do.
In short it is quite a heafty task for the devs and does not fit in well with the current crop of MMO's.
I think for now a Monthly update (as some games are doing) is about as close as we will get for a while.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
.
I guess I put this in the wrong post, my other post "what I want from mmos in the future" had more details of what I was talking about but "The difference between roleplaying games and roleplaying games" seems to be more interest to people skimming over the forums :P
Anyway, my point is that I'd expect a game world that evolves and changes based on the actions of the majority of players would be possible...... By Blizzard. They have the money to do it.
I'd think that with a good team of writers to shake things up and an excellent team of programmers and scripters to implement the changes the writers come up with and the changes the community seem to be playing towards it could work.
Maybe it isn't cost effective though, but for me an mmo like that would be my mmo of choice definately.
Just incase anyone mentions it... The system Blizzard seems to be implementing into WoW is NOT what I want. I want the game world to change for everyone. I DON'T want to complete a quest and then it sends me to a version of the world with others who completed that quest and where I CAN'T interact with those who haven't done the quest yet. That is just not good!
"It's like a finger pointing away to the moon... Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all the heavenly glory" (Bruce Lee)
(Insert your favourite mmo here): ......And behold, a pale horse.... And a million hellishly bad mmos followed with it.
I've only heard Fortnight used in movies, not many people use that word in America, or at least all the people I've ever talked to never use it. Now I hear bi-weekly all the time, maybe I should start using fortnight and it can make a comeback in the states.
Edit: Was looking for some new anime to watch an got side tracked on the actual topic.
But i think there really isn't much Roleplaying in MMO's well except for the acting type of Roleplaying but thats only on RP servers. I have a lot of fun doing some RP but its been a while since I've done any, but I used to play DnD and do LARP all the time. Its fun to kill things and get gear and all but I want to interact with NPC's and ask them questions and possibly get different quests because of what I asked or said.
The MMO genre has been in a standstill if not taken a few steps backwards, there has to be some changes soon or a lot of people are going to get bored of playing.
Easy way to remember is "Fort"= fourteenth"night" aka 14 days.
I didn't have a clue what that word meant until about a year ago when a guildmate from London posted a message on the guild forums.
Just to add to the fun, in the UK "bi-weekly" can mean either "every two weeks" or "twice a week". So it's not a great word to use.
Yeah I can see how it can get confusing, Im just going to start using fortnight from now on and see how many people know what it is.
Says the guy who can't capitalize, use proper grammar and who thinks "u" is a word.
Glad you're not American, we certainly wouldn't want to claim you.
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Strange that we dropped the tern "sennight" (literally 'seven nights') to use the word "week", but still use "fortnight".
??? he is American.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Well, the meaning of RPG changes over time. The success of Diablo shows developers that you really don't need playing a role is really not important.
You can call the new breed of RPG hack-n-slash RPGs .. but essentially people are interested in combat mechanics, minmaxing, well designed encounters, char customization & good loot.
They didn't lose sight. It is you who is not catching up to the trend.
From a design standpoint, patches are not the answer.
You create a spaghetti code nightmare if you do it this way.
When you make an MMORPG, MOST of them rely on servers. Yes EVE is one big game, but that's because most of the game empty space compared to rocks and trees and streams and towns and villages of a land based MMORPG.
So generally, you fill up a server, and then open up another one, like WoW.
In order to keep track of the game code, and not spend a bazillion dollars on full time programmes, every server must be identical.
Otherwise, instead of keeping track of one code for one game, you eventually have 100's of different games with different codes,a nd you need a programming team for each one.
for example, we start with two servers, each with 5K players. Let's say there is a scripted event. There's a fight over a bridge to Orc Land. If the players win, the bridge is destroyed, if the players lose, the bridge remains standing, and the Orcs take over Sleepy Town. Cool right?
But, the players on Server A win, the players on Server B lose.
Now we have two different games, that require upkeep of two different game codes.
Ok, so now we have new scripted events. The refugees of Sleepy Town on SErver B make and alliance with the Elves or something, where as the playes on Server A are plagued with giant rats. Now we have two more different outcomes.
Eventually, becaues o fall the code changes, Server A game code, is nothing like Server B game code. You have now doubled the programming team required. The team on Server A doesn't know what's going on in Server B, etc.
Now imagine you do this on a hundred servers.
The game will cost at least 100 dollars per month.
The success of bioware's games shows otherwise. I don't know if the trend is Diablo nowadays.
So you change the world, and...then I can't do the quest, because I didn't get it done before you did!
Great, thanks!
People complain enough about patches and expansions modifying existing content, you think they'd want it as part of the regular experience? Or are you going to just have nothing of consequence change, or work around everything?
Seems like that would be giving an illusion of change, not a meaningful one.
Now don't get me wrong, I'd like a world we could change, but I think you're going about it the wrong way, putting more onus on the existing crop of games and developers while ignoring the challenges involved. Believe it or not, they aren't doing things the way they are because they hate your idea (AFAIK anyway), but because they can't think of how to implement it readily.
Cuz it ain't easy.
Let's look at some other role-playing games. Try a Choose-your-Adventure book. WOW such options such freedom...wait, no, you're picking from 2, 3 maybe 4 choices that the author has picked for you, and some of which script back into themselves to get you through the story. Such an awesome straitjacket! You hardly know you're confined!
Now let's have some of those classic adventure games. Zork, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, whatever. You're still following a script, anything that the programmer didn't account for...won't work. You're still on a narrow path.
Huh.
Ok, let's try the classic group of people, with one as the DM/GM/ST/GJ. Ever done that? Have you noticed what happens when the players go off on a sidetrack? Because they can you know. Or they can come up with something new and some rule is made around it. There's a lot of freedom But how many games are ruined because of that? How many DM's are caught flat-flooted because the players did something unexpected? Sadly more than a few.
So yeah, nice dream, but if you can come up with a way to do it, I'm going to be quite impressed with you.
It isn't rocket science, and it's been done before. It's called simulation. You simply simulate a virtual fantasy world to the best of your ability, and if you get the right playerbase everyone becomes both player and Game Master for other players.
Other people like to call it a sandbox.
The only trick is in getting the right playerbase, which might actually rival rocket science if you are dealing with the MMO industry as it currently exists.
Actually rocket science does include simulation.
But hey, give us some names, and tell us how they let you truly change the world. I have yet to see a game where I truly felt I could make an impact upon the world based on my actual choices as opposed to those presented to me.
The game I'm currently playing is Darkfall. It's a great simulation, but has completely the wrong playerbase. In the first few months, though, it had a ton of roleplayers that helped create a kingdom called "Hyperion" that threatened to dominate every city and hamlet in the entire world of Agon (Darkfall's game world). I wasn't playing at the time (I waited for the initial chaos to die down a little, which it never really did...) and I'm not completely clear on why things buckled, but I think it might have had some real world exchanges involved.
In any case, the kingdom Hyperion was completely player-constructed. It had a player king. It had player officers who had missions and expectations. Darkfall was designed to immitate old school Ultima Online to a degree, which also had a great deal of player-created content and player-driven impacts on the world. Any game that lets the environment change due to player influences is the type of game we're talking about.
Like I said, though, it requires having like-minded imaginative people involved. If too many grinders get involved, it puts a really damper on other people's ingenuity.
Social construct is not quite what I'm going for though, how much did they change the actual world itself? Not the players, but the world.
The success of bioware games show that many want to go through stories designed by developers, and NOT what the OP is talking about.
And true that this can be another MMO trend. TOR has a good shot to blaze a new trail away from the hack-n-slash type MMOs.