The need for more variety in on-line games

Wyke

Greetings folks,

 

The last seven years of my on-line gaming has more or less been totally taken up with Eve on-line. However, about a year ago, as I started to wind down my participation in the Great Delve War, I found myself starting to become jaded and burnt out with the game. So I put my Eve character into semi-retirement. (He’s gone from being the hard null space PvP vet to a high sec ‘gentleman farmer’ where I just need to spend ten to fifteen minutes a day sorting out his planetary colonies.

 

With all of my free gaming time I set out on the quest to find a replacement for Eve. My first stop, was the hated WOW (Well hated within the Eve community) and actually found that it wasn’t hateful, but actually a jolly little game. However, after about a month my interest waned quickly. So then I moved onto LotR, which held my interest a bit longer, about four months. I am a bit of a Tolkien fanboi and quite enjoyed how you ‘bounce off’ the main story without actually getting involved in it. But still I ended up wandering off looking for gaming horizons anew. Next I spent some time in PotBS. The promise of salt in my hair and the wind in my face and what seemed to possibly be an historical version of Eve tempted me. That lasted about three months too. Finally I tried my hand at Fallen Earth. FE held my attention the longest of all, some five months. But I must say, the main reason I enjoyed it was not for the game play, but because it seems to be a bit of a haven for Eve players, so many a happy hour was spent discussing events in Eve with clan mates, who often as not had been fighting on the ‘other side’ , or comparing the merits of the Abaddon battleship (my ship of choice) over other battleships.

 

However, even FE didn’t manage to ‘scratch that itch’ which Eve did for so long.

 

The thing is, all of those games share one thing in common, they all rely on ‘levelling up’ to reach this almost mythical ‘end game’ where you can then do some limited PvP in carefully controlled areas. Without exception, the only real way to ‘level up’ in all of the games was to go to a quest/mission giver, get a task to do, which invariably involved killing lots of NPCs, then going back for your rewards, which included a decent XP boost.

 

And that, for me is where in the problem lies. All that you are doing, is being railroaded in the direction the game designers want you to go in, rather than letting you free to do your own thing.

 

That is what I loved about Eve. In Eve, you as the player are free to do what the heck you want without artificial game systems to guide you in the direction the developers want you to go. OK, in Eve it’s your fellow players who are often doing their best to stop you doing what you want to do, but that’s how the game is. If I want to go into null sec, I go into null sec, though I either have to join up with the local players who lay claim to that bit of space, or make sure that I, at the least, have the ability to avoid them.

OK, that’s a pretty militant example; I was a hard PvPer for a long time. But equally, there are players in Eve, who have been in the game for years, who never leave high sec (the safest areas) hardly ever fire a shot, at either an NPC or other player but still enjoy playing the game their way.

 

That for me, is what a good MMO should boil down too, just giving the players the area to ‘play’ in and let them get on with it. OK, you do need some structure, especially if you want to have both PvE players and PvP players in the same world setting. That is what I need, and I suspect that many other players want too.

 

So why oh why do game developers insist on giving us the same old Disneyesqu, let’s all play nice together, drivel?

 

Players demand lots of carefully crafted content?

No, I want lots of content, but in the role of different things to do, things that I can do when I decide to do them, not when some game developer thinks when or that  I want to do something.

 

Players want lots of organised events?

Again no, give the control to the players and they will make their own events. Be it, in Eve terms, half a dozen guys getting together to ninja mine asteroid belts so that they can build a Capitol ship, or the thousands and thousands of guys who aligned with or against The Band of Brothers, Against All Authority or Red Alliance, just to mention three of the main groups who took part in the Great Delve war.

That war was a 100% player driven event that lasted a good two and a half years, and which is still rumbling on. Yes, developers and GMs have given time to supporting it. But it was them responding to what the players wanted, to what direction the players were pushing the game in.

 

It isn’t always a nice form of playing; it’s loud, ungracious and on occasion personal, but it is what the majority of (Eve) players want, and it works.

 

I’m not saying that there is no place for the casual, lead you by the hand quest/levelling game, quite the contrary, and there is obviously a big market for them. But, there is a huge demand for more freeform sandbox games, be they be PvP, PvE or a mix of the two.

 

I suspect that the crux of the problem is not with the developers, but with the ‘suits’ that control the finances. Yes, we know that it is not a cheap thing to develop and run an on-line game. I have a memory of something like $8,000,000 being the absolute minimum needed to take a game from conception to going live.

Unfortunately, it seems that the ‘suits’ have decided on a formula which will give them the best return on their ‘investment’, and that formula is all about pretty games which follow the quest/levelling style of play. Encouraging the style of play that is driven by the ‘I want all the bling now’ crowd and cramming in as many players as possible, even if the majority of those players only stay a few weeks or months as opposed to years.

 

So where does that leave the future of on-line game?

For me, and I suspect others, as a transient thing that I’ve done, read the book, seen the film, and yes, got the tee-shirt, but which ultimately I am moving on from. I am actually finding myself returning more and more towards off-line games and that is such a shame, as I do feel that on-line gaming is where things should be.

 

I dread to think how Eve would have turned out had CCP only now been looking for the finances to get the game up and running. I would put a sound bet on them never getting to the state they are at now, where they can boast that they have more accounts then the population of their home county (Iceland). They would never be able to boast that even the venerable old auntie beeb (The BBC) has actually done reports on in-game player instigated events as it has done on a couple of occasions, it would be just another nice little game that would quickly vanish into the seas of blandness that seems to be washing over on-line gaming.

 

Is there any hope for the future of on-line games?

I don’t know, I would like to think that there is. I have tried games like A Tale in the Desert IV, Wurm and Love and it is to those that I am being drawn too, small, indie games. Yes they tend to look like they were designed for the old Atari ST, or the Amoeba, sorry Amiga; they may be a tad ‘cranky’ in their implementation. But that’s to be expected when you have a development team of just two or three dedicated people who are also struggling to get the funds together to run their single server. But people who are brave enough to develop their games in the direction the player base wants, or to take the even braver step of saying, “This is our game, this is how it will be and nobody will dictate to us how it will develop.”

 

But for these games to develop and flourish, we, the player base also need to be brave and start looking away from the bland money making products that the big companies are trying to force feed us on and start giving our support to those small games which actually offer what we want and not what we are told that we want.

 

Force feeding. A good thought to end up on. Do we want to spend our time playing the gaming version of all of those McDonald clone food outlets, or eat in a better class local restaurant where the food might look a bit strange, may well be a bit more expensive, but is so much better and fulfilling and with so much more variety on offer?

znerd

i can agree with you. maybe the devs will wake up and produce a game for advanced players and for a older generation of players who seek just more as the typical mmo offers. 

but maybe you can just made more cash with average games for average players. a advanced mmo requires also a advanced strategy, marketing and of course advanced content. this are things who will requirer more time and (financial) effort. 

Evasia

Why dont you try opposite of spacegame and tryout Darkfall fantasy mmo with free for all full loot pvp.

If i read you correctly seems right choice a sandbox mmo but fantasy.

No you go worse of worse WoW LotR FE themeparks that hurt your brain:P

Ok we dont have areas where you can spent for years without pvp AGON the Darkfall world is open free roaming world where you are nowhere realy safe but its a freedom and a nice world to explore and do whatever you want.

Join a clan and you will see how nice Darkfall can be.

Axehilt

Given how much their popularity is dwarfed by themepark games, it's a bit of a stretch to say there's a "huge market" for sandbox MMOs.  There's a market for them, but let's not pretend that market segment is "huge", because in the grand scheme of videogame genres it's really not all that impressive.  But sure, the market segment does exist and is worth making games for.

Honestly as far as "online games" go, it's an even bigger stretch to assert that there's somehow a lack of variety in online gaming.  There's countless variety to online gaming nowadays, and new ideas enter the market all the time.  Old ideas resurface too (Alien Swarm is a great mix of Smash TV's overhead perspective, L4D's coop gameplay, Aliens the movie's atmosphere, and a class/advancement system.)

The OP sounds slightly like the frequent complaint MMORPG players make, where they clamor for something different while automatically rejecting anything genuinely different.  I've been in threads where someone said, "I'm bored of MMORPGs X, Y, and Z!  They're all the same!" and then I'll suggest "How about Game D?" to which the reply is, "But that's not even an MMORPG!" which of course is the exact reason the person thinks all games feel too similar.

To be fair, "The same, but different" is how most great games get made.  Elements of familiarity twisted and combined in new ways.  But there's a certain irony to players wanting something which is both familiar and distinct.

Sovrath

Originally posted by Axehilt

Given how much their popularity is dwarfed by themepark games, it's a bit of a stretch to say there's a "huge market" for sandbox MMOs.  There's a market for them, but let's not pretend that market segment is "huge", because in the grand scheme of videogame genres it's really not all that impressive.  But sure, the market segment does exist and is worth making games for.

Honestly as far as "online games" go, it's an even bigger stretch to assert that there's somehow a lack of variety in online gaming.  There's countless variety to online gaming nowadays, and new ideas enter the market all the time.  Old ideas resurface too (Alien Swarm is a great mix of Smash TV's overhead perspective, L4D's coop gameplay, Aliens the movie's atmosphere, and a class/advancement system.)

The OP sounds slightly like the frequent complaint MMORPG players make, where they clamor for something different while automatically rejecting anything genuinely different.  I've been in threads where someone said, "I'm bored of MMORPGs X, Y, and Z!  They're all the same!" and then I'll suggest "How about Game D?" to which the reply is, "But that's not even an MMORPG!" which of course is the exact reason the person thinks all games feel too similar.

To be fair, "The same, but different" is how most great games get made.  Elements of familiarity twisted and combined in new ways.  But there's a certain irony to players wanting something which is both familiar and distinct.

I completely agree and good post. I've seen this type of thing more often than not. someone says they want something new but what they really want is a remake of the older games with better graphics.

Another thing I've seen are people wanting indy games over AAA titles. But when an indy game is posted on this site we see the complaint "it looks like it was made in '97" or "nice graphics lol".

They want an indy game but they want a AAA, millions of dollars spent, cutting edge graphics "indy game".

kevnon

completly agree with ya  Axehilt. 100%. hugs

Codenak

Currently there are only three games in the western marketplace that have more than a million subs, Runescape, Aion and World of Warcraft, Aion being the second largest and having less that 4 million subs, http://mmodata.net/

WoW is a blip, an oddity, they got lucky and have built on that success. to judge all other mmorpg's against the wow numbers would seem, to me at least, to be wrong and even game developers are starting to say WoW was only good for WoW and didnt pull more people into the actual genre of mmorpg's.

Western audiences usually have a hard time with asian style grinders. Eastern and western cultures are different and what they look for in an mmorpg is different due to those cultural differences.  Having a game that has crossover appeal has proven to be difficult.

If you look at western style games and discount wow, sandboxes actually have a much healthier percentage of the mmorpg population than if you include WoW.

MumboJumbo

Originally posted by Wyke

Greetings folks,

 

The last seven years of my on-line gaming has more or less been totally taken up with Eve on-line....I just need to spend ten to fifteen minutes a day sorting out his planetary colonies.

 

 

The thing is, all of those games share one thing in common, they all rely on ‘levelling up’ to reach this almost mythical ‘end game’

 

And that, for me is where in the problem lies. All that you are doing, is being railroaded in the direction the game designers want you to go in, rather than letting you free to do your own thing.

 

Eve it’s your fellow players who are often doing their best to stop you doing what you want to do,

 

That for me, is what a good MMO should boil down too, just giving the players the area to ‘play’ in and let them get on with it.

 

So why oh why do game developers insist on giving us the same old Disneyesqu, let’s all play nice together, drivel?

 

 

give the control to the players and they will make their own events.

 

Greeting Wyke,

I had to laugh at your experience of lasting a few months in those game after experiencing the game EVE.

Why Theme-Parks are made: With a railroad levelling up gear system, a player can bite of chunks of the game at a time but the problem you correctly point out is this reward system eventually runs out = "End-Game" or "No-More Game"! but it does cater to log-in behaviors of a large population of gamers.

EVE type of games: Where the real rewards are the player interactions creating a deeper/personal/organic story and game experience that is an expanded complexity of player interactions within the mmo by comparison to the theme-park mmo's linear reward system. What this means is that I agree with you eg EVE has a lot longer potential ingame experience that runs itself.

...ANALOGY: a bit like a football game where the chaos of the interactions between players is almost infinite as compared to a platform single-player game where the same executions of actions are repeated once completing of ALL LEVELS is achieved and each level is module of the next anyway.

But as a casual player, this is too much of a commitment so some linear theme-park gameplay has a necessity. Personally I see SW:TOR as being the ace of spades when it comes to this linear design that will be so well told, large and immersive ppl will be happy with it for a lot longer than usual and it can be topped up with expansions. So this could be a solution of sorts from the pov of theme-park games. But some games that develop a huge PvP successfully integrated into a persistent online world with the sort of RTS that Eve has, I can see this game going closer to the EVE style of longevity. Hopefully GW2 will do this.

Eve sounds like a great game, for those that have the time to put into it.

Aeroangel

I enjoyed reading your post, but I can't help but wonder why you want to replace Eve and leave the genre of MMOs altogether if you enjoyed Eve so much? Also I disagree that there isn't a variety of online games, but as far as MMOs are concerned it does seem like the majority these days are fantasy based and going with the WoW/EQ formula.