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The MMO Magic
pencilrick
Member Posts: 1,550
Am thinking back on what made EQ so magical, and not it wasn't the "first kiss syndrome", but I have landed on a few points:
1. Risk - the stinging death penalty always made me feel like I was cheating death and sometimes got my heart racing. Especially if I made some cross-country journey, trying to avoid the high level werewolf that came out at night in West Karanas, or making it through Blackburrow (thanks to other players taking some of the aggro)), and the treacherous journey (treacherous for a low level) to Qeynos, and then the wonderful Qeynos music that brought a sense of beauty and relief as I made it safely through the city gates.
2. Cities were cities. The cities were safe havens from wandering mobs, the cities had their own mysteries (like hidden walls, hidden sewer tunnels and exits), the cities had different factions of NPC's occupying them (some of which might aggro on you), and the cities sometimes had harbors with periodic stops by ships. Waiting at the dock allowed for time to socialize, while running to catch a ship made for excitement. (Twice, I ran to catch a departing ship and leapt off the dock and into the water, hehe). The shipboard journey's took time, but you could socialize, jump off the ship midway to stop at some island, and when you got to your destination, you felt you had traveled.
3. Sense of geography. With the non-magical classes not being able to port, you truly felt like your character existed in some area of the world. ("Where Hans?" "Oh, he adventured South the the deserts, hope he made it safely.")
4. Hard-earned rewards. Everything was valued. Bronze armor was valued. Magical items, even mediocre ones, were very cool.
5. Hidden stuff, like a dungeon entrace blocked by foilage along a forgotten and seldom-traveled coast.
6. Simplistic, but beautiful music. EQ's Jay Barbeau stuff (before they jazzed it up with orchestras) was very haunting and atmospheric; just great fantasy music. Remember, fantasy is about simpler and more beautiful times, to fancy orchestration is sort of out of place. Think fairytales and the unexplained.
7. TRAINS. Yes, I miss the fact that someone's pull could have consequences for someone not in their party. Some fool pulls a giant and comes running back through a newbie area, and suddenly everyone is in peril. Hilarious stuff.
I could go on and on, but early EQ had some great elements. The graphics and mechanics are in dire need of polish, but the core design elements, IMO, have never been matched for fun and immersion.
Comments
As anyone knows one man's 'magic' is another person's 'junk'.
There is a certain type of pickle that I can't get enough of. Just biting down on one makes my tastebuds feel like heaven. My best friend would take a bite and discard it since the taste has no appeal to him.
Not buying into contrarian arguments (i.e., but you may like it and another person may not). I think most everyone can get enjoyment out of the stuff I mentioned.
I agree with ya, RIck.
I played Anarchy Online back then, and although it was sci-fi, it had a lot of the same elements as EQ.
Even though neither EQ nor AO were technically "Sandbox" games, they still felt like virtual worlds....and that's one of the things that I really miss about these games.
When you died....it was like a punch in the gut. Areas of the world weren't designed in a nice, linear fashion with level appropriate mobs just waiting to be slaughtered by a quest grinder, you'd be working your way through mobs that would kill you in just a couple hits and would chase you for MILES just to get to a sweet spot to level. Pulse-pounding excitement, and the relief of making it there.
Getting a group together to kill stuff twice your own level for the sweet XP and loot.
And the worlds had wonderous things to discover. Some of them served no REAL purpose at all, except to make the world more interesting, and aid in the illusion that this was a living world that you were in.
And one of the things I always really loved about AO, was the fact that EVERY game mechanic was explained in a way that meshed with the fiction of the world. You didn't just die, and respawn...you were "cloned". It cost money, and left you sick and weak for a while. Some of the mobs in the world were supposedly characters who were cloned, and something went wrong....disgusting freaks of genetic misfortune.
If you were in an area where you couldn't attack other players, it was because the all-powerful Omni Tek was dispersing "suppressioin gas" through their weather control machinery, which was designed to keep the planet's citizens docile, and to rpevent rioting and all-out war between the factions. In certain areas, the gas had varying densities....and once in a while the weather machines would go haywire and the gas would suddenly disperse completely, leading to some interesting times.
Quests were something that were uncommon, but were really incredible. None of this "kill 10 rats and come back for a reward" type stuff. http://aovault.ign.com/View.php?view=Guides.Detail&id=126 is a good example....the "Fixer Grid" quest.
Anyway.....after all this raving.....the point is that IMO, these games have lost their magic. Somewhere along the line, everything got a coat of easy-mode paint, and game mechanics are just "there" and accepted now, instead of explained or making sense with the fiction of the world. They are very much "games", and they FEEL like a game, now.
What I wouldn't give for a Classic AO server.
I'm in your thread, agreeing and mourning our loss.
Seriously, I can't stress enough how shitty it feels to know real MMOs are never going to come back /=
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
I agree with you totally!!! I just cannot find a game,since EQ, that has given me that much pleasure in playin it.
http://s36.photobucket.com/user/mhoward48/media/OnwYv97.jpg.html
Agree OP. Though EQ introduced some truly appalling mechanics too which ultimately caused me to /ragequit (the only game I have rage quit in 30+ years gaming).
What I wouldn't give for a Classic AO server. I'd settle for Anarchy II. Loved Anarchy ....what a game!
Whether you buy into it or not, doesn't make it any less true.
While I do agree that some of the things you mentioned would be difficult to actively dislike, it doesn't mean that everyone would actively enjoy them either. Apathy is always possible. Developers tend to devote their finite resources to bolster gameplay elements that the majority of their target audience would actively enjoy. It's all about preference.
We've also seen enough "death penalty" threads on these boards to irrefutably prove that stinging death penalties are something that many people actively dislike. I doubt many people enjoyed being on the receiving end of trains either. I certainly know how I felt about it when other individuals were able to interfere in WoW's open-world raids and wipe out 40 people.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
I think we are in a period of conformity, almost everyone's doing the same thing in hopes of appealing to the widest possible audience. However this means that as more games are released the gamers will float from new release to new release, looking for something that appeals, but that they wont find due to everything having the same feel.
From this point i hope that an age of difference will spring forth, where independants will design games that are different and that appeal to niche audiences, as that is where they will survive and may come to thrive. They will not have the money to compete with the big publisher backed mainstream MMO's, but those MMO's will always do the same thing, appealing to the widest possible audience in order to maximise the returns on the investment.
I hope the smaller outfits will identify a niche group, large enough to support them through their startup and allow them to grow, become more polished and add features. It has been seen to work before in the example of CCP's Eve Online which has grown over the years from a 30k subscriber base to a 300k+ subscriber base, because they did things their own way.
Whether this will happen or not remains to be seen, the lure of easy money selling your game out to the majors must be immense and the majors will try to choke out what they probably view as "weeds" in their cash crop field.
F2P/P2P excellent thread.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/282517/F2P-An-Engineers-perspective.html
I miss the things you listed also. Someday they will return.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Not me .. and not all the milliions of people who like WOW better.
Seriously .. you like trains? You like its down-time? I quit because EQ stopped being a game and pretends to be a world where you have to put in serious work.
You can't ever have that stuff back. Welcome to the Idiocracy!
"Challenge makes me cry!"
Guess what...you and the million of people who play WoW already HAVE a game....WoW.
The rest of the world would like something to play now, TYVM.
WoW is 6 years old now. EQ and UO still exist.
You want a new and shiny next generation MMO? .. so do we.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry, man. There will be no lack of next gen WoW clones.
Happy days!
Though I'm still hoping for a hybrid that combines the best elements of Themepark gameplay with the living breathing world elements of a well constructed Sandbox.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
How can millions of people like WoW better if they haven't tried it?
That was great, right up until you got assholes who did it for fun. Over on Anarchy Online, that was a favorite game for some people to play out at the Temple of the Three Winds. They'd try to grab the longest train they could get, then drag it straight up the main thoroughfare to catch all of the groups getting ready to go in unprepared.
Not so much fun to keep getting wiped by idiots pulling trains.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Those old-school games still exist. Are you playing them? If not, why not?
I know some, like DAoC, were gradually modified to require fewer brain cells and less patience. Did they do that to EQ and AO too? Vanguard and Ryzom are still as old-school as ever. Give them a try. Because they lack development money they have not chased after the WoW market and remain largely uncorrupted.
I don't think any new game will have what you are looking for. If you are willing to live with low server populations and slightly dated graphics then stick with the classics.
TOTW used to piss me off, yeah...but I'd take that any day of the instanced crap that is spoon fed to ppl now.
I used to train out of there once in a while, /shouting "CHOOO CHOOOO!!!!" so people would know there was a train coming....
Used to have a lot of fun in there with my 'crat when the trains would come...just mezz them all. I got so many /tells of gratitude from the lives I saved.
These trains led to some really fun, creative, chaotic moments. Man, I LOVED those with my Trader.....get all buffed up from the drains and one-shot the Hell out of the cultists with my shotty. BOOM!!!
Anarchy online is a shade of it's former self. They've added so much......stuff to the game that it's not even the same world anymore.
If a classic (Pre-SL) server opened up, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Tried VG....another quest grind. Tried Ryzom....too "alien" for me.
Played Darkfall for about a year...love it, but due to the politics and the FFA PVP, it became something that HAD to be played every single day for at least 3 hours...and I just don't have the time for that right now.
Believe it or not, I'm thinking SWTOR might be the next virtual world. I know that sounds....odd, considering some of the speculation that's been going around...but based PURELY on dev comments and interviews....I have a positive feeling about the game.
TIme will tell, though.
I agree with everything except the trains point. I do see the fun that can come from having to be wary of them but they were too often used specifically for griefing.
In my opinion a lot of the people who claim they don't enjoy some of these things have never really given them a chance. They play WoW, enjoy it, and suddenly come to the conclusion that nothing else can be fun. They also don't give a game long enough to see where the fun actually comes from before crying that it's too hard. The older MMOs were fun because they were challenging and you had to put a lot of time into accomplishing some of the more prestigious goals. Modern MMOs are 'fun' because you constantly get stuff for doing next to nothing.
Think of it like a kid having to be good to get a treat. It's a challenge for the kid to consciously avoid being naughty so that his parents will reward him but when he gets that reward he feels like he's accomplished something. This is similar to the way older MMOs functioned.
Now, all the while he wishes he could have those treats more often and asks his parents to give him more. Eventually they cave in to his whining and give him those treats for doing less. At first he's happy, he's not having to put as much effiort into being a good boy but he's getting better rewarded for it. Soon though he gets bored of the treats, he's getting them so easily now that they aren't really a treat any more. At this point he realises that the taste of said treat was only half the reason he enjoyed it, the other half was the actual feeling of accomplishment he got from being a good boy. This is where modern MMOs have now ended up. Players want to be rewarded for doing less and they're now addicted to this cycle of constant rewards, but players are burning out much faster because the rewards aren't enough any more. There's no challenge to acquiring them so players hold no value to them.
The problem is because so many gamers have joined the genre with WoW they have no clue how it used to work. They equate fun to rewards without understanding that the rewards themselves were not what was fun in older MMOs. As a result they instinctively cry 'fail' at any mechanic that does not give them an immediate reward for little effort. This is what has lead to the loss of all the features you've listed.
I agree with everything except 2 points. Risk and Music.
First, Risk, I've played the hardcore games, FFXI, EQ, DArkfall and you can take that deleveling and that xp loss and full loot pvp crap elsewhere. I play games for fun, not challenge. I play them for new experiences, not whether I can beat that guy over there or look better.
Second, music is getting much better and I prefer the full fledged orchestras to some pansy ass Midi music looping over and over. I want an EPIC feel to the music and orchestras give this. Playing Ryzom and having no soundtrack, made me want to smack some developers around. Listening to EQ2, WoW, Lotro, and AoC music when I'm not in the game made me want to hop in and find those zones and just have fun in them.
Anyway, the rest of your points are fine. But I'm a huge stickler for game music and fun gameplay(i.e. slight death penalty).
Pretty much in the same boat. DF is the best for what i like out there, don't have time for it. And I honestly have no high hopes for any games coming out save for SWTOR.
Only takes me 2 min of previewing a game to come out to chuck it into some generic category. (WOW CLONE, ASIAN GRINDFEST, ULTRA LOW BUDGET, etc.)
Developers have lost the feel of magic in games. They have centralized the market and turned the industry on to making shallow insignificant games.
If i had to pick one aspect to blame, it would probably be meaningful exploration and discovery.