By "elite", do you mean loser who sits in front of his computer for 8 hours per night?
When did "Time Spent Playing" because what matters most? Time is not difficulty. Any achievement you get simply by putting in "time" is absolutely worthless.
Not at all. But that comment really smacks of "I paid my 15 bucks too!.... waaaah..."
It has less to do with time, and more to do with patience and persistence. And understanding that truly great achievements aren't accomplished in a 90 minute span of time. EverQuest and WoW are the prime examples of extreme opposing ends of the same spectrum. On one end, time is a factor. On the other, its irrelevant.
So the question is:
which is the greater challenge? One of the mind, or one of the reflex? In the older genre, you didn't have minimaps and quest pointers telling you where to go and what to do. Hell, quest givers weren't even marked. Today, as soon as you log in you're standing right in front of your first quest giver with some kind of flashing marker over its head, and thus begins your linear path toward the endgame, whiich usually comes relatively soon after thanks to the endless handholding you'll be receiving from that point on.
The solution? Find a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, that requires the player to utilise more than 5 brain cells, but still lets them take advantage of their reflexes. Reward achievements with items suitable to the types of gameplay the player utilises as an end result. Provide multiple path options for the player to choose their level of challenge. For example: a quest has 5 possible component objectives. When the player acquires the quest, they choose which components they want to utilise right from the start. The end reward for completion being dependant upon the components utilised. In other words, the reward for utilising all the components being a scaled up version of the base reward.
Only have 90 minutes to play tonight? Well, get your quest, and choose a reasonable portion of the available components that allow you to achieve a satisfactory reward in that timeframe. But understand that your time constraint isn't anyones problem but your own.
I have a solution for this dieing breed of out of the box mmo thinkers. If you let companies make things that you consder to be a dreamworld, you will always be disappointed, money will always come first and only those who manage the money will be the ones taken seriously (thanks EA). If you want to have those amazing, dreamworld like experiences, get extemely rich and blow it all on what you want out of an mmo, maybe you will break even, maybe, if your good. For the rest of us (this works for me quite well) get some imagintive friends and start playing good ol PnP rpgs, stop putting your hope into mmo comapnies.
In old games, many of us had great time running open dungeons together, camping spawns. Yes it might sound boring in pure gaming terms but we shared stories, talked about this and that, the game was just a "tool", we just "had fun" being there. Everything in the "heavy quest-based" games screams "come on, play alone!!", Even if i make a friend and we start questing together, tomorrow one of us will not be able to play, the one who played is "ahead" 2-3 quest hubs and we go separate paths. Also, the conversation tends to be dull, "how many wolf skins do you still need?", "how many centaurs you still need to kill?"
No. I did NOT have a great time camping spawns and dealing with lots of down-time.
It is MUCH better now i can run dungeons with my guildies (or a PUG) without ANY waiting, without any camping. No one says you have to quest. You can run dungeons.
Oh, and conversations are not better back then. The difference is that sometimes you have NO CHOICE but to chat.
In old games, many of us had great time running open dungeons together, camping spawns. Yes it might sound boring in pure gaming terms but we shared stories, talked about this and that, the game was just a "tool", we just "had fun" being there. Everything in the "heavy quest-based" games screams "come on, play alone!!", Even if i make a friend and we start questing together, tomorrow one of us will not be able to play, the one who played is "ahead" 2-3 quest hubs and we go separate paths. Also, the conversation tends to be dull, "how many wolf skins do you still need?", "how many centaurs you still need to kill?"
No. I did NOT have a great time camping spawns and dealing with lots of down-time.
It is MUCH better now i can run dungeons with my guildies (or a PUG) without ANY waiting, without any camping. No one says you have to quest. You can run dungeons.
Oh, and conversations are not better back then. The difference is that sometimes you have NO CHOICE but to chat.
That's your personal opinion and you're entitled to have it.
But it's also the opinion of many others that being able to auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops, just to be able to run the next tier of dungeons and/or raids, isn't better than the old way of how things were.
The industry has had a complete paradigm shift from MMOs being complex, involved, and immersive, to being shallow, instantly gratifying, and superficial.
The problem isn't that there are MMOs that cater to the crowd that enjoy their MMOs the way there are now. The problem is that almost every MMO is that way now, and all of the oldschool MMOs either no longer exist or were completely gutted (Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, Star Wars: NGE).
I do agree that the quality of the MMORPG genre of games has went on a steep decline over the years. Personally I didn't start playing mmos until 03'/04'. My first love being Dofus. A Turn Based Strategy MMO that still has a special place in my heart today (and I still play from time to time). Though my main complaint about most MMOs now is not based soley on content (though I keep wishing that more and more of the newer, prettier titles would give way more customization and sandbox features than they do), but more around the community.
When I first started online gaming I remember the community was, for the most part, eager to help, make friends, socialize, etc. They were also very mature. And I can recall many people I gamed with were far older than I was (Me being around 14-15 at the time). By 06' I could see a rapid growth in impatient, fowel natured people that had the vocabulary of a War Veteran. It's my opinion that, WoW started bringing this into what used to be a community driven market. Not because the game itself is bad, but because the commercialization and its appeal to younger, and younger people turned a rather mature community of gamers, into a prepubescent mad-house full of angsty kids with no sembalance of social skills and a constant need to question everyones actions/opinions. It became a place where a newie asking a question turned into a "n00b/nub" being to stupid to figure things out for themselves. And someone wanting to form a party, becoming a waste of everyones time and a hinderance on their advancement; rather than a fun way to enjoy the game.
It also turned what used to be a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) into a MMOSPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Solo Playing Game). A game where if you try to do all the content to immerse yourself in the world, and socialize; people think you're a crackpot because the only thing that matters now is getting to end game the fastest way possible. People that see others as simply tools with no value.
I'm just hoping that with the MMO Action Genre picking up steam, we will start seeing more unity among the gaming community. And less sequestering an neuroticism. But, we'll see .
(And yes, this is MY OPINION based on observations. Not hardwriten facts. Before the trolls come in to feast...)
TL;DR: Indeed, I am disappointed with recent games in many ways. And perhaps the communities as well.
I prefer virtual fantasy worlds with an open-ended experience, aimed more at being an experience for the player rather than just a game of getting experience for a character. There's so much I could hate about what MMORPGs have turned into, but I have just accepted that they aren't virtual worlds these days; they are just games. You just do the content in one map and move to another map. There's nothing special about MMOs. So they have a lot of simultaneous users. Whoop-de-doo. Welcome to the Internet. It's like that.
I hate choosing my dialogue from a menu. I hate it even more when there aren't even choices-- it's straight up click through. There's no puzzle to be solved in that. Alas, even EQ has bracket text now. Anyone else remember when you had to figure out WTF an NPC wanted you to say? Well, I sort of expected that over time, that sort of AI would improve and you'd be able to have maybe a slightly more sensible interaction with an NPC. Instead, we got click through quests that, honestly, aren't worth reading even if you have RP tendencies. How many different excuses do you need to be given to go kill spiders and bring back their legs/fangs/venom sacs/eyebrows? It's just not worth reading.
Does anyone remember sitting at character creation and saying to yourself, "I can be an agnostic Erudite wizard, and almost nobody will want to kill me. Or I can be an Iksar Shadowknight and have to watch for guards everywhere I go until I gain enough faction that I am welcome somewhere other than my own hometown." It was a choose your own difficulty level thing, and it made the world seem like it was inhabited by NPCs who had some kind of reaction to you for a reason. I had thought that as the games advanced in the future, the worlds would seem to be even more alive, with more interactions between different NPC and PC factions, as the computing power increased to be able to handle that. Well... It didn't work out quite that way.
Sure, EQ and other old games did have different areas with monsters of different levels, but you weren't barred from going there by the game, and you weren't lead by the hand through a progression of areas. Does anyone else remember getting into a good group and doing things people thought you just couldn't do at your level? How many people remember taking a level 4 gnome or wood elf or dwarf from Faydwer to Qeynos? Or taking a shortcut from one town to another in almost any old game through landshark infested hills, sweating and cussing the whole way? It might have not been the smart thing, but it was a possible thing. And there was often even a reason for doing it, even if it was only to catch up with friends who crossed the world while you were logged off.
I sometimes treat a new game as a world to explore. Sometimes the game sort of cooperates with that. Sometimes the game just gets in the way with its gamey-ness. (Gaminess? Hmmm.) Sometimes the community gets in the way... But usually it is the game. Rift is the first game I've played in a long time that, despite it's WoWness, gave me any sense of all of being in a place where something interesting might be happening that I could be a part of, but in the end, it's really still more of the same. It's just a better more-of-the-same than most of what I've played in the last few years.
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
Incidentally, I am mostly a 'carebear', in the sense that I like PvE more than PvP, but I have noticed a signficant increase in the whiny, wussy behaviour of PvE players, even as the death penalties have decreased. They are too scared to do anything where they might die. WTF, people? Do you get an electric shock every time your character dies? I wasn't afraid of take a few deaths even when I knew it would take me DAYS of grinding to make up the difference! I think we can chalk that one up to a change in the player base... But that's a much harder problem to tackle because nobody is 'developing' the community of any given game. It just develops on its own.
In old games, many of us had great time running open dungeons together, camping spawns. Yes it might sound boring in pure gaming terms but we shared stories, talked about this and that, the game was just a "tool", we just "had fun" being there. Everything in the "heavy quest-based" games screams "come on, play alone!!", Even if i make a friend and we start questing together, tomorrow one of us will not be able to play, the one who played is "ahead" 2-3 quest hubs and we go separate paths. Also, the conversation tends to be dull, "how many wolf skins do you still need?", "how many centaurs you still need to kill?"
No. I did NOT have a great time camping spawns and dealing with lots of down-time.
It is MUCH better now i can run dungeons with my guildies (or a PUG) without ANY waiting, without any camping. No one says you have to quest. You can run dungeons.
Oh, and conversations are not better back then. The difference is that sometimes you have NO CHOICE but to chat.
That's your personal opinion and you're entitled to have it.
But it's also the opinion of many others that being able to auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops, just to be able to run the next tier of dungeons and/or raids, isn't better than the old way of how things were.
The industry has had a complete paradigm shift from MMOs being complex, involved, and immersive, to being shallow, instantly gratifying, and superficial.
The problem isn't that there are MMOs that cater to the crowd that enjoy their MMOs the way there are now. The problem is that almost every MMO is that way now, and all of the oldschool MMOs either no longer exist or were completely gutted (Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, Star Wars: NGE).
Well, i disagree with your characterization.
1) It is NOT more complex, nor involed to camp. In fact, you get less to do. Sitting around doing nothing is NOT complex, NOR involved.
2) Gratifying is a GOOD thing. I will take that over frustration and boredom ANYDAY.
3) Superficial? What game is not superficial. Killing the same mob 1000 times to level up is AS superficial as the kill 10 rat quest. At least you get to kill something ELSE after the 10 rats if you are questing.
4) Running the same dungeons over and over again with a dungeon finder tool >>>> camping the SAME dungeon over and over again. At least you get to PLAY the game as opposed to waiting. The old EQ dungeons have static drops too. They are not better. They are a lot WORSE. AT least i get to get the drops once in a while today ... while back in the old EQ, chances are, you camp for HOURS for NOTHING .. except boredom.
So "auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops" is way better than the old way .. which is "camp the SAME dungeons over and over again for a much LOWER chance at pre-determined loot drops".
Yes, I am entitled to my opinions and i am expressing them now.
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
I will take Diablo over Morrowind anyday. Diablo is such a fun game.
In old games, many of us had great time running open dungeons together, camping spawns. Yes it might sound boring in pure gaming terms but we shared stories, talked about this and that, the game was just a "tool", we just "had fun" being there. Everything in the "heavy quest-based" games screams "come on, play alone!!", Even if i make a friend and we start questing together, tomorrow one of us will not be able to play, the one who played is "ahead" 2-3 quest hubs and we go separate paths. Also, the conversation tends to be dull, "how many wolf skins do you still need?", "how many centaurs you still need to kill?"
No. I did NOT have a great time camping spawns and dealing with lots of down-time.
It is MUCH better now i can run dungeons with my guildies (or a PUG) without ANY waiting, without any camping. No one says you have to quest. You can run dungeons.
Oh, and conversations are not better back then. The difference is that sometimes you have NO CHOICE but to chat.
That's your personal opinion and you're entitled to have it.
But it's also the opinion of many others that being able to auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops, just to be able to run the next tier of dungeons and/or raids, isn't better than the old way of how things were.
The industry has had a complete paradigm shift from MMOs being complex, involved, and immersive, to being shallow, instantly gratifying, and superficial.
The problem isn't that there are MMOs that cater to the crowd that enjoy their MMOs the way there are now. The problem is that almost every MMO is that way now, and all of the oldschool MMOs either no longer exist or were completely gutted (Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, Star Wars: NGE).
Well, i disagree with your characterization.
1) It is NOT more complex, nor involed to camp. In fact, you get less to do. Sitting around doing nothing is NOT complex, NOR involved.
2) Gratifying is a GOOD thing. I will take that over frustration and boredom ANYDAY.
3) Superficial? What game is not superficial. Killing the same mob 1000 times to level up is AS superficial as the kill 10 rat quest. At least you get to kill something ELSE after the 10 rats if you are questing.
4) Running the same dungeons over and over again with a dungeon finder tool >>>> camping the SAME dungeon over and over again. At least you get to PLAY the game as opposed to waiting. The old EQ dungeons have static drops too. They are not better. They are a lot WORSE. AT least i get to get the drops once in a while today ... while back in the old EQ, chances are, you camp for HOURS for NOTHING .. except boredom.
So "auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops" is way better than the old way .. which is "camp the SAME dungeons over and over again for a much LOWER chance at pre-determined loot drops".
Yes, I am entitled to my opinions and i am expressing them now.
1) I'm talking about far more than just 'camping' spawns. I'm talking about MMOs in a broader perspective, in that they're much less complex in that they're far more linear. Look at UO or SWG in their hayday. There were several legitimate ways to "play" the game that required absolutely no combat, yet you as a player still 'produced' something of value to yourself and other players. This was part of creating a broad interdependency between players where you actually had to socialize and trade with players to get get or achieve things. Of course, a lot of the more casual and/or solo oriented players hate this, because they can't be anti-social and solo their way through every facet of the game.
2) There's a difference between gratification and instant gratification. For some people, achieving a goal that is difficult for anyone to achieve is significantly more satisfying than achieving a hundred simple goals that anyone with a spare hour with little to no skill or effort can accomplish.
3) See what I stated in point one. Yes you are doing a lot of the same things in a generic sense, but in 'the grand scheme' you're contributing to a greater inter-player comunity and economy. Today's MMOs you can pretty much get by without ever interacting outside of a group the size of whatever content you plan on doing. In an oldschool MMO your gameplay was influenced by every single other player to took part in the server's economy. Eve is a perfect example of this today, in that ships and their equipment are crafted by players. Without the entire web of players gathering resources, hauling, crafting, trading, etc, the game would pretty much grind to a halt.
4) So long as you're a tank, or to a lesser extent a healer, you're still sitting around waiting for 30-45 minutes to get into a dungeon queue. Really, it's not all that much better, it's just more linearly defined. But there was more to it too for farming/camping, in that the random drops made it, in my opinion, a lot more interesting than running the same dungeon over, praying for the pre-determined BoP loot to drop that you need -- and of course praying that idiot pug players you carried through the instance don't roll need for offspec on the item.
My entire point is, it's a matter of opinion. There's nothing wrong with players liking MMOs how they are now. The problem is that there are virtually no choices in MMOs for players who don't like what MMOs have turned into. I honestly don't understand why you and others seem to take such offense to that. We're not trying to take your 'new' MMO WoW clones away from you, we'd just like some new well made MMOs that perscribe to the oldschool design philosophies to also be on the market for us.
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
I will take Diablo over Morrowind anyday. Diablo is such a fun game.
I disagree the Elder Scrolls was for more immersive than Diable could ever hope to be.
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
I dont even think its just the gamers. Theres a whole generation of young people who have grown used to instantaneous stimulation.
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
About sums it up.
I don't agree. If you ask a casual gamer you'll find out they want immersive, complex games just like anyone else. Those games are just getting rarer and rarer. You can blame casuals for that but it doesn't make any sense to do so. Old school gamers are responsible for things like UOs trammel that can arguably be said to have started the trend of streamlining content. Those weren't casuals playing that game. It was oldschoolers that complained enough in all the early mmos to get us where we are today. Casuals only jumped on the bandwagon relatively recently.
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
I will take Diablo over Morrowind anyday. Diablo is such a fun game.
I disagree the Elder Scrolls was for more immersive than Diable could ever hope to be.
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
About sums it up.
I don't agree. If you ask a casual gamer you'll find out they want immersive, complex games just like anyone else. Those games are just getting rarer and rarer. You can blame casuals for that but it doesn't make any sense to do so. Old school gamers are responsible for things like UOs trammel that can arguably be said to have started the trend of streamlining content. Those weren't casuals playing that game. It was oldschoolers that complained enough in all the early mmos to get us where we are today. Casuals only jumped on the bandwagon relatively recently.
Ah, the whole chicken or the egg debate. I guess I'll side with developers shifting the market to target younger players.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I used to think mmos were the pinnacle of the gaming genre, unfortunately I don't think that way anymore. Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls:Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur can't get here fast enough.
Modern MMO's are suffering an identiy crisis. They don;t know who they're trying to please or what they should be doing. What made those old-school games successful was that they had a clear picture of what they were.
UO knew their fan-base were Ultima PRG fans. They designed thier game around that and focused it on those people.
EQ knew their fans were the newer 3d RPG fans that games on the PS1 and N64 had started to introduce. They focused on them and did well.
Then we had what some can argue are second generation MMOs. They still had their original ideas and stories but followed advnaces made by the first ones.
SWG knew their fans were Star Wars fans, but also had a taste for the 3d gameplay, no more isometric views.
EVE drew fans from the plethora of space empire/battle sims that had been around for eons and designed their gameplay to fit with those people.
WoW built its fans from the Warcraft ranks. It wasn't the first RTS game to go first-person, it borrowed that by learning from the "first generation" games.
Problem is, now we have the 3rd generation of MMO's... and I don't mean this like the marketing departments advertise in a good way. Think, copy of a copy of a copy and consider the quality you get.
These games are no longer focusing on a specific original demographic of player; they're focusing on a "cloned" deographic of player. They're focusing on the WoW or SWG fans, in hopes to draw attention, but are too far removed from an original idea to add anything new to the genre.
Darkfall - Tried borrwing the feel of some original MMO's, but included 2nd generation ideas to create their own game. No original thought, ideas or story involved.
Mortal Online - As with Darkfall, tried borrowing ideas from all over the genera, but failed to create, or use an original story or idea as their main draw.
Fallen Earth - Borrowed heavily from the 2nd geration of MMO's and created their own story different from the others. Their story wasn't original, however, as there have been several single-player games that followed the same basic story.
All of thse have some blurry lines as to where their demographic lie. Are they geared towards traditional RPG fans, FPS fans, Adventure game fans, Sim fans? They get lost in their own blurry vision and end up fading away into mediocrity.
What the next generation needs to do is forget about copying from a copy and refocus on what the other generations did well - find their demographic.
The games capable of this would be ones like Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, etc.. Franchises that, like the success stories before them, have a following and a specific group of people they're creating their games for.
Of course, none of this is still an excuse for what's just a bad game...
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
Let's be honest here... you don't hate to say. In fact, I'll bet you couldn't wait to say it. That's the problem with this weird casual vs hardcore schism that has erupted. Hardcores think casuals are entitled and undeserving of rewards, and casuals think that hardcores are elitist pricks who commandeer a majority of developer attention to design end game content how they'd prefer.
And there's never a chance wasted to attack one side or the other.
I like to think MMOs have progressed from their ancestors of yore. I certaintly had fun playing EQ, and am in fact revisiting my old characters there, but DAoC was a vast improvement on the genre. From there I think WoW improved it further.
Everyone hates on WoW because it's popular. For some reason that's a bad thing in our eyes. It's like a band that you love before anyone else ever hears of it, then it becomes "mainstream" and now you hate it, but you reminisce about the days when it was only enjoyed by you and a few others. I think it's the same thing with MMOs. It was a concept we loved dearly before anyone else saw what was so great about them. Now it's popular and it's lost it's ability to make us feel unique.
Couldn't have said it better.
In War - Victory. In Peace - Vigilance. In Death - Sacrifice.
That's your personal opinion and you're entitled to have it.
But it's also the opinion of many others that being able to auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops, just to be able to run the next tier of dungeons and/or raids, isn't better than the old way of how things were.
The industry has had a complete paradigm shift from MMOs being complex, involved, and immersive, to being shallow, instantly gratifying, and superficial.
The problem isn't that there are MMOs that cater to the crowd that enjoy their MMOs the way there are now. The problem is that almost every MMO is that way now, and all of the oldschool MMOs either no longer exist or were completely gutted (Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, Star Wars: NGE).
Well, i disagree with your characterization.
1) It is NOT more complex, nor involed to camp. In fact, you get less to do. Sitting around doing nothing is NOT complex, NOR involved.
2) Gratifying is a GOOD thing. I will take that over frustration and boredom ANYDAY.
3) Superficial? What game is not superficial. Killing the same mob 1000 times to level up is AS superficial as the kill 10 rat quest. At least you get to kill something ELSE after the 10 rats if you are questing.
4) Running the same dungeons over and over again with a dungeon finder tool >>>> camping the SAME dungeon over and over again. At least you get to PLAY the game as opposed to waiting. The old EQ dungeons have static drops too. They are not better. They are a lot WORSE. AT least i get to get the drops once in a while today ... while back in the old EQ, chances are, you camp for HOURS for NOTHING .. except boredom.
So "auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops" is way better than the old way .. which is "camp the SAME dungeons over and over again for a much LOWER chance at pre-determined loot drops".
Yes, I am entitled to my opinions and i am expressing them now.
1) I'm talking about far more than just 'camping' spawns. I'm talking about MMOs in a broader perspective, in that they're much less complex in that they're far more linear. Look at UO or SWG in their hayday. There were several legitimate ways to "play" the game that required absolutely no combat, yet you as a player still 'produced' something of value to yourself and other players. This was part of creating a broad interdependency between players where you actually had to socialize and trade with players to get get or achieve things. Of course, a lot of the more casual and/or solo oriented players hate this, because they can't be anti-social and solo their way through every facet of the game.
Well, in EQ, 99% of the time is spent in leveling before max level and that means camping spawns. There is NO OTHER legit way to play EQ than mob grind to level. UO is different .. even worse. The griefing brought the worse out of players but that is another discussion.
The EQ economy is no difference than the WOW one .. except it is a lot LESS efficient because there was no AH in the beginning.
2) There's a difference between gratification and instant gratification. For some people, achieving a goal that is difficult for anyone to achieve is significantly more satisfying than achieving a hundred simple goals that anyone with a spare hour with little to no skill or effort can accomplish.
That is elitist talking. It does not matter to the 98% of the players who never finish Sunwell how great Sunwell is.
3) See what I stated in point one. Yes you are doing a lot of the same things in a generic sense, but in 'the grand scheme' you're contributing to a greater inter-player comunity and economy. Today's MMOs you can pretty much get by without ever interacting outside of a group the size of whatever content you plan on doing. In an oldschool MMO your gameplay was influenced by every single other player to took part in the server's economy. Eve is a perfect example of this today, in that ships and their equipment are crafted by players. Without the entire web of players gathering resources, hauling, crafting, trading, etc, the game would pretty much grind to a halt.
That is just BS & double talk. You influence the economy today as much as back in EQ days. Plus, most MMORPGs are focused on combat, economy is only a small part of it. For all the combat centric or PvE MMOs, the new way >>> the old way.
4) So long as you're a tank, or to a lesser extent a healer, you're still sitting around waiting for 30-45 minutes to get into a dungeon queue. Really, it's not all that much better, it's just more linearly defined. But there was more to it too for farming/camping, in that the random drops made it, in my opinion, a lot more interesting than running the same dungeon over, praying for the pre-determined BoP loot to drop that you need -- and of course praying that idiot pug players you carried through the instance don't roll need for offspec on the item.
Only at max level. If you level by dungeon, the queue is around 5 min for dps on my server. Plus, even at max level, before CATA, the wait time is only 10-15 min. The reason is CATA is out of balance and bliz just implement a fix. Furthermore, waiting 30 min automatically where i can read or surf the net is MUCH BETTER than yelling "LFG" every 30 sec for 30 min.
You are totally illogical. There is NOTHING more to camping. It is the SAME pre-determined loot table. You can't seriously think the loot tables are better in the EQ days than now. What is the difference? A pre-determined list of items, with a pre-determined chance of drop ... no more and no less.
Plus, the EQ dungeons are also the same .. there is NO differene the second time you run it.
My entire point is, it's a matter of opinion. There's nothing wrong with players liking MMOs how they are now. The problem is that there are virtually no choices in MMOs for players who don't like what MMOs have turned into. I honestly don't understand why you and others seem to take such offense to that. We're not trying to take your 'new' MMO WoW clones away from you, we'd just like some new well made MMOs that perscribe to the oldschool design philosophies to also be on the market for us.
Of course not. Not only there is nothing wrong .. it is where the market is going. No, i don't take offense. But if you talk down to people who like modern MMOs (oh that r easier .. oh EQ is more "deep") .. i do have a right to express my disagreement.
Lol again a topic thats been discussed million times:P
Beating on dead horse are yah:D
Bring some new ideas come with some constuctive critisism instead start over and over again same discussion hehe.
We alreeady know and agree that its become alot worse but still millions are playing these worse games and many new millions starting only few old vets here know its nightmare.
But there is still hope at least for me like TSW that at least try outside the tolkien and D&D fantasy world with no trolls orcs elfs and dwarfs. And no lvls no classes.
Hope more developers start looking that directions and come up with amazing sandbox ala TSW.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
MMORPGs have moved from a relative obscurity to the mass market. We have and will continue to see trends very typical to any other market. Few major developers and a number of smaller ones, and a lot of consolidation in the middle.
The major issue with MMORPGs is the development time. In my opinion, smaller developers would be better of trying to do a single player RPG prior to even thinking about MMOs.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Hate to say it, but it's the casual gamers with a sense of entitlement that's ruined the genre.
They don't want their games to be immersive, complex, and require some measure of effort to accomplish goals. They want everything to be instant gratification with as little time, effort, downtime, and consequences as possible.
I remember a time when playing an MMO meant being part of a community on an online virtual world that you were apart of. Today it's more synonymous with playing a massive multiplayer online single player game on rails.
I dont even think its just the gamers. Theres a whole generation of young people who have grown used to instantaneous stimulation.
Totally agree Arcken.
In all fairness, who really doesn't hate to wait on anything? We've spent our entire lives seeing things in RL become more convenient with reduced waiting, its what we all want because time is precious.
A large part of what made early games challenging was the time they made you wait and your efforts to minimize that, be it from effectively traveling between locations, reducing your downtime by winning fights as efficiently as possible, to making sure you didn't die and have to respawn in PVP because it was going to take you out of the fight for 10 or more minutes.
But at the same time, I recall many people who I tried to introduce tot he genre refusing to play, saying they didn't have the time (or inclination) to "wait" or play MMO's.
Developers heard this, started removing the mechanics that kept players waiting, and the more casual players flocked to them (at least for one MMO anyways)
Of course, this streamlining took away some of the charm that many of us posting in this thread really enjoyed, but the investment in the games is too great, they have to target the largest market of players in order to be profitable.
Because despite what we may think, while games such as LOTRO, AOC, AION, WAR and now Rift may not end up WOW killers, they seem to be profitable enough to recover the cost to build them and keep running so as long that happens I don't see the trend stopping.
What might happen is that the cost to build MMO's may continue to escalate so that only the big houses really can create them, and finally we'll reach a tipping point where huge losses are occurred and the market may implode and reset itself to new level.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
I will take Diablo over Morrowind anyday. Diablo is such a fun game.
I liked Diablo also, and it was a very fun game. It's just not what I am looking for in a MMORPG. It is a great hack-n-slasher (and there are some good online hack-n-slashers out there, too), but you have to admit, as a virtual world, it's pretty thin. I really am looking for a deeper experience of an open world where I can go see what's over the next hill just because it is there. The problem is when the next hill is just a checkmark on my NPC-assigned To Do list, and there's nothing interesting or unexpected to see over there anyway.
There's a magical land where immersion and fun live together in peace and harmony again. I can feel it in my bones. I really don't think we're all just old and jaded. I think we've all had those moments, long after our first MMO, where we saw something, even in new games, that was a glimpse of what we're after-- I love seeing animals in Ryzom and WoW moving in herds, for instance. And those little details matter, as long as you're not putting lipstick on a pig. If the game world is thin, and you're being ushered through it by tour guides with shiny golden things over their heads, that's not immersive (a word I hate, btw) and it is only fun until it gets boring, generally somewhere between 2 weeks and 2 months later.
Well, in EQ, 99% of the time is spent in leveling before max level and that means camping spawns. There is NO OTHER legit way to play EQ than mob grind to level. UO is different .. even worse. The griefing brought the worse out of players but that is another discussion.
The EQ economy is no difference than the WOW one .. except it is a lot LESS efficient because there was no AH in the beginning.
FWIW, it's simply not true to say "ther is NO OTHER legit way to play EQ" at this point. There have been instanced missions for a long time and EQ offers quite a lot of questing and 'tasks' these days. If people buy a merc ASAP and then grind it out in hot zones (high exp zones), it is because the game is top heavy and they are just trying to get to where the people are, not because the content isn't there to do-- LDoN was a year before WoW, so it's not like they were just chasing after the 800 pound gorilla at that point.
There were some places in EQ that made the grind feel less static even back in the day. We did a lot of runs on Tower of Frozen Shadows in the Velious era, for instance, which was a crawl-through, not a camp. We did a fair amound of crawl through in Acrylia Caverns. We crawled through Howling Stones when that was out-of-date. But I don't mind grinding. I actually really hate having to run back to town periodically to talk to NPCs. Questing is a drag, to me.That really is a matter of taste.
I can't comment on the player economy because I hardly ever use it, in any game that I play. I wear what I quest, craft, or loot myself. It's my thing. But there's a trade-off between the original EQ system and an auction house of any sort-- you actually had to interact with another human being in order to get your stuff in the original EQ system, which many people would argue was a good thing. The bad thing, of course, was that you'd have to hope you were on at the same time a person selling what you wanted to buy (or vice versa), or you were going to have to hang out (and not AFK) in Fay-mart or the East Commonlands until such time as the item came up or someone looking for that item arrived.
Re: some other raised issues in the thread, because I hate triple posting
I don't think complexity and depth are necessarily the same thing. For instance, Perfect World Entertainment has a series of essentially pretty-much-the-same games that many people try and dismiss as "just another Asian grinder-- nothing to do at all but grind", when, in fact, those games have some really complex systems that can chew up your time if you're fully engaged in playing them seriously. The more you play and learn, the more freakin' complicated the games get, especially when those complications combine... But the worlds aren't necessarily super immersive just because the game systems get pretty complex. You can have a relatively simple game that is pretty deep, and complicated games that are just complicated and not much else.
A lot of what made EQ interesting and immersive has been stripped out of it over the years. For instance, player racial faction doesn't particularly matter now, especially because there's basically one starter town on the regular servers, unless you specifically choose to start in your racial hometown. The only town faction that mattered when I stopped playing was Freeport, and that could be fixed by grinding out a crocodile-killing quest, and it really doesn't take that long, especially compared to killing orcs in East Commons back in the good old/bad old days. There's a lot less class interdependence with potions and mercs readily available. It's just a different world now. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the new EQ and I understand the reason behind almost every change SOE has made, from the point of view of a long-haul player (e.g. corpse runs got old years ago, so I didn't miss them when they went away) ... But those factors that are gone now were the sort of systems that some people would truly like to see in games they play now, and the market has narrowed to a completely different sort of game.
Anything that
made EQ feel deep and interesting has pretty much been stripped out of it at this point, or it is there but nobody bothers with it. Everyone starts in the same hometown, racial factions are largely meaningless, and the one or two that still matter at all can be fixed with a short, easy quest grind (a minimal effort compared to fixing it the old way)... Or you can just invis past everything that you're KOS to-- potions are cheap. They did away with a lot of keys and flags for older zones, so that content is accessible to people who would never in a million years be able to put together the required series of raids to even get to some of that content. There's a lot less interdependence between the different class roles, now that you can buy mercs and potions. But I totally understand all of the changes and I don't blame SOE for implementing them-- the game is older and very top heavy, and a lot of what they did away with was only fun for people who were feeling nostalgic, not for the majority of the long-haul player base.
Anything that made EQ feel deep and interesting has pretty much been stripped out of it at this point, or it is there but nobody bothers with it. Everyone starts in the same hometown, racial factions are largely meaningless, and the one or two that still matter at all can be fixed with a short, easy quest grind (a minimal effort compared to fixing it the old way)... Or you can just invis past everything that you're KOS to-- potions are cheap. They did away with a lot of keys and flags for older zones, so that content is accessible to people who would never in a million years be able to put together the required series of raids to even get to some of that content. There's a lot less interdependence between the different class roles, now that you can buy mercs and potions. But I totally understand all of the changes and I don't blame SOE for implementing them-- the game is older and very top heavy, and a lot of what they did away with was only fun for people who were feeling nostalgic, not for the majority of the long-haul player base.
Comments
Not at all. But that comment really smacks of "I paid my 15 bucks too!.... waaaah..."
It has less to do with time, and more to do with patience and persistence. And understanding that truly great achievements aren't accomplished in a 90 minute span of time. EverQuest and WoW are the prime examples of extreme opposing ends of the same spectrum. On one end, time is a factor. On the other, its irrelevant.
So the question is:
which is the greater challenge? One of the mind, or one of the reflex? In the older genre, you didn't have minimaps and quest pointers telling you where to go and what to do. Hell, quest givers weren't even marked. Today, as soon as you log in you're standing right in front of your first quest giver with some kind of flashing marker over its head, and thus begins your linear path toward the endgame, whiich usually comes relatively soon after thanks to the endless handholding you'll be receiving from that point on.
The solution? Find a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, that requires the player to utilise more than 5 brain cells, but still lets them take advantage of their reflexes. Reward achievements with items suitable to the types of gameplay the player utilises as an end result. Provide multiple path options for the player to choose their level of challenge. For example: a quest has 5 possible component objectives. When the player acquires the quest, they choose which components they want to utilise right from the start. The end reward for completion being dependant upon the components utilised. In other words, the reward for utilising all the components being a scaled up version of the base reward.
Only have 90 minutes to play tonight? Well, get your quest, and choose a reasonable portion of the available components that allow you to achieve a satisfactory reward in that timeframe. But understand that your time constraint isn't anyones problem but your own.
I have a solution for this dieing breed of out of the box mmo thinkers. If you let companies make things that you consder to be a dreamworld, you will always be disappointed, money will always come first and only those who manage the money will be the ones taken seriously (thanks EA). If you want to have those amazing, dreamworld like experiences, get extemely rich and blow it all on what you want out of an mmo, maybe you will break even, maybe, if your good. For the rest of us (this works for me quite well) get some imagintive friends and start playing good ol PnP rpgs, stop putting your hope into mmo comapnies.
No. I did NOT have a great time camping spawns and dealing with lots of down-time.
It is MUCH better now i can run dungeons with my guildies (or a PUG) without ANY waiting, without any camping. No one says you have to quest. You can run dungeons.
Oh, and conversations are not better back then. The difference is that sometimes you have NO CHOICE but to chat.
That's your personal opinion and you're entitled to have it.
But it's also the opinion of many others that being able to auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops, just to be able to run the next tier of dungeons and/or raids, isn't better than the old way of how things were.
The industry has had a complete paradigm shift from MMOs being complex, involved, and immersive, to being shallow, instantly gratifying, and superficial.
The problem isn't that there are MMOs that cater to the crowd that enjoy their MMOs the way there are now. The problem is that almost every MMO is that way now, and all of the oldschool MMOs either no longer exist or were completely gutted (Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, Star Wars: NGE).
I do agree that the quality of the MMORPG genre of games has went on a steep decline over the years. Personally I didn't start playing mmos until 03'/04'. My first love being Dofus. A Turn Based Strategy MMO that still has a special place in my heart today (and I still play from time to time). Though my main complaint about most MMOs now is not based soley on content (though I keep wishing that more and more of the newer, prettier titles would give way more customization and sandbox features than they do), but more around the community.
When I first started online gaming I remember the community was, for the most part, eager to help, make friends, socialize, etc. They were also very mature. And I can recall many people I gamed with were far older than I was (Me being around 14-15 at the time). By 06' I could see a rapid growth in impatient, fowel natured people that had the vocabulary of a War Veteran. It's my opinion that, WoW started bringing this into what used to be a community driven market. Not because the game itself is bad, but because the commercialization and its appeal to younger, and younger people turned a rather mature community of gamers, into a prepubescent mad-house full of angsty kids with no sembalance of social skills and a constant need to question everyones actions/opinions. It became a place where a newie asking a question turned into a "n00b/nub" being to stupid to figure things out for themselves. And someone wanting to form a party, becoming a waste of everyones time and a hinderance on their advancement; rather than a fun way to enjoy the game.
It also turned what used to be a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) into a MMOSPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Solo Playing Game). A game where if you try to do all the content to immerse yourself in the world, and socialize; people think you're a crackpot because the only thing that matters now is getting to end game the fastest way possible. People that see others as simply tools with no value.
I'm just hoping that with the MMO Action Genre picking up steam, we will start seeing more unity among the gaming community. And less sequestering an neuroticism. But, we'll see
.
(And yes, this is MY OPINION based on observations. Not hardwriten facts. Before the trolls come in to feast...)
TL;DR: Indeed, I am disappointed with recent games in many ways. And perhaps the communities as well.
I prefer virtual fantasy worlds with an open-ended experience, aimed more at being an experience for the player rather than just a game of getting experience for a character. There's so much I could hate about what MMORPGs have turned into, but I have just accepted that they aren't virtual worlds these days; they are just games. You just do the content in one map and move to another map. There's nothing special about MMOs. So they have a lot of simultaneous users. Whoop-de-doo. Welcome to the Internet. It's like that.
I hate choosing my dialogue from a menu. I hate it even more when there aren't even choices-- it's straight up click through. There's no puzzle to be solved in that. Alas, even EQ has bracket text now. Anyone else remember when you had to figure out WTF an NPC wanted you to say? Well, I sort of expected that over time, that sort of AI would improve and you'd be able to have maybe a slightly more sensible interaction with an NPC. Instead, we got click through quests that, honestly, aren't worth reading even if you have RP tendencies. How many different excuses do you need to be given to go kill spiders and bring back their legs/fangs/venom sacs/eyebrows? It's just not worth reading.
Does anyone remember sitting at character creation and saying to yourself, "I can be an agnostic Erudite wizard, and almost nobody will want to kill me. Or I can be an Iksar Shadowknight and have to watch for guards everywhere I go until I gain enough faction that I am welcome somewhere other than my own hometown." It was a choose your own difficulty level thing, and it made the world seem like it was inhabited by NPCs who had some kind of reaction to you for a reason. I had thought that as the games advanced in the future, the worlds would seem to be even more alive, with more interactions between different NPC and PC factions, as the computing power increased to be able to handle that. Well... It didn't work out quite that way.
Sure, EQ and other old games did have different areas with monsters of different levels, but you weren't barred from going there by the game, and you weren't lead by the hand through a progression of areas. Does anyone else remember getting into a good group and doing things people thought you just couldn't do at your level? How many people remember taking a level 4 gnome or wood elf or dwarf from Faydwer to Qeynos? Or taking a shortcut from one town to another in almost any old game through landshark infested hills, sweating and cussing the whole way? It might have not been the smart thing, but it was a possible thing. And there was often even a reason for doing it, even if it was only to catch up with friends who crossed the world while you were logged off.
I sometimes treat a new game as a world to explore. Sometimes the game sort of cooperates with that. Sometimes the game just gets in the way with its gamey-ness. (Gaminess? Hmmm.) Sometimes the community gets in the way... But usually it is the game. Rift is the first game I've played in a long time that, despite it's WoWness, gave me any sense of all of being in a place where something interesting might be happening that I could be a part of, but in the end, it's really still more of the same. It's just a better more-of-the-same than most of what I've played in the last few years.
I wish MMORPGs were more open, persistant world RPGs and less quest-and-level treadmill RPGs-. I wish they were more Morrowind and less Diablo. But they are what they are, and I have found some fun in them by accepting them for what they are-- just games with big chat rooms and a lot of users.
Incidentally, I am mostly a 'carebear', in the sense that I like PvE more than PvP, but I have noticed a signficant increase in the whiny, wussy behaviour of PvE players, even as the death penalties have decreased. They are too scared to do anything where they might die. WTF, people? Do you get an electric shock every time your character dies? I wasn't afraid of take a few deaths even when I knew it would take me DAYS of grinding to make up the difference! I think we can chalk that one up to a change in the player base... But that's a much harder problem to tackle because nobody is 'developing' the community of any given game. It just develops on its own.
Well, i disagree with your characterization.
1) It is NOT more complex, nor involed to camp. In fact, you get less to do. Sitting around doing nothing is NOT complex, NOR involved.
2) Gratifying is a GOOD thing. I will take that over frustration and boredom ANYDAY.
3) Superficial? What game is not superficial. Killing the same mob 1000 times to level up is AS superficial as the kill 10 rat quest. At least you get to kill something ELSE after the 10 rats if you are questing.
4) Running the same dungeons over and over again with a dungeon finder tool >>>> camping the SAME dungeon over and over again. At least you get to PLAY the game as opposed to waiting. The old EQ dungeons have static drops too. They are not better. They are a lot WORSE. AT least i get to get the drops once in a while today ... while back in the old EQ, chances are, you camp for HOURS for NOTHING .. except boredom.
So "auto-queue to be dumped into a dungeon party to run the same dungeons over and over again for a chance at pre-determined loot drops" is way better than the old way .. which is "camp the SAME dungeons over and over again for a much LOWER chance at pre-determined loot drops".
Yes, I am entitled to my opinions and i am expressing them now.
I will take Diablo over Morrowind anyday. Diablo is such a fun game.
1) I'm talking about far more than just 'camping' spawns. I'm talking about MMOs in a broader perspective, in that they're much less complex in that they're far more linear. Look at UO or SWG in their hayday. There were several legitimate ways to "play" the game that required absolutely no combat, yet you as a player still 'produced' something of value to yourself and other players. This was part of creating a broad interdependency between players where you actually had to socialize and trade with players to get get or achieve things. Of course, a lot of the more casual and/or solo oriented players hate this, because they can't be anti-social and solo their way through every facet of the game.
2) There's a difference between gratification and instant gratification. For some people, achieving a goal that is difficult for anyone to achieve is significantly more satisfying than achieving a hundred simple goals that anyone with a spare hour with little to no skill or effort can accomplish.
3) See what I stated in point one. Yes you are doing a lot of the same things in a generic sense, but in 'the grand scheme' you're contributing to a greater inter-player comunity and economy. Today's MMOs you can pretty much get by without ever interacting outside of a group the size of whatever content you plan on doing. In an oldschool MMO your gameplay was influenced by every single other player to took part in the server's economy. Eve is a perfect example of this today, in that ships and their equipment are crafted by players. Without the entire web of players gathering resources, hauling, crafting, trading, etc, the game would pretty much grind to a halt.
4) So long as you're a tank, or to a lesser extent a healer, you're still sitting around waiting for 30-45 minutes to get into a dungeon queue. Really, it's not all that much better, it's just more linearly defined. But there was more to it too for farming/camping, in that the random drops made it, in my opinion, a lot more interesting than running the same dungeon over, praying for the pre-determined BoP loot to drop that you need -- and of course praying that idiot pug players you carried through the instance don't roll need for offspec on the item.
My entire point is, it's a matter of opinion. There's nothing wrong with players liking MMOs how they are now. The problem is that there are virtually no choices in MMOs for players who don't like what MMOs have turned into. I honestly don't understand why you and others seem to take such offense to that. We're not trying to take your 'new' MMO WoW clones away from you, we'd just like some new well made MMOs that perscribe to the oldschool design philosophies to also be on the market for us.
I disagree the Elder Scrolls was for more immersive than Diable could ever hope to be.
About sums it up.
Totally agree Arcken.
I don't agree. If you ask a casual gamer you'll find out they want immersive, complex games just like anyone else. Those games are just getting rarer and rarer. You can blame casuals for that but it doesn't make any sense to do so. Old school gamers are responsible for things like UOs trammel that can arguably be said to have started the trend of streamlining content. Those weren't casuals playing that game. It was oldschoolers that complained enough in all the early mmos to get us where we are today. Casuals only jumped on the bandwagon relatively recently.
fun != immersive
Ah, the whole chicken or the egg debate. I guess I'll side with developers shifting the market to target younger players.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I used to think mmos were the pinnacle of the gaming genre, unfortunately I don't think that way anymore. Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls:Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur can't get here fast enough.
Modern MMO's are suffering an identiy crisis. They don;t know who they're trying to please or what they should be doing. What made those old-school games successful was that they had a clear picture of what they were.
UO knew their fan-base were Ultima PRG fans. They designed thier game around that and focused it on those people.
EQ knew their fans were the newer 3d RPG fans that games on the PS1 and N64 had started to introduce. They focused on them and did well.
Then we had what some can argue are second generation MMOs. They still had their original ideas and stories but followed advnaces made by the first ones.
SWG knew their fans were Star Wars fans, but also had a taste for the 3d gameplay, no more isometric views.
EVE drew fans from the plethora of space empire/battle sims that had been around for eons and designed their gameplay to fit with those people.
WoW built its fans from the Warcraft ranks. It wasn't the first RTS game to go first-person, it borrowed that by learning from the "first generation" games.
Problem is, now we have the 3rd generation of MMO's... and I don't mean this like the marketing departments advertise in a good way. Think, copy of a copy of a copy and consider the quality you get.
These games are no longer focusing on a specific original demographic of player; they're focusing on a "cloned" deographic of player. They're focusing on the WoW or SWG fans, in hopes to draw attention, but are too far removed from an original idea to add anything new to the genre.
Darkfall - Tried borrwing the feel of some original MMO's, but included 2nd generation ideas to create their own game. No original thought, ideas or story involved.
Mortal Online - As with Darkfall, tried borrowing ideas from all over the genera, but failed to create, or use an original story or idea as their main draw.
Fallen Earth - Borrowed heavily from the 2nd geration of MMO's and created their own story different from the others. Their story wasn't original, however, as there have been several single-player games that followed the same basic story.
All of thse have some blurry lines as to where their demographic lie. Are they geared towards traditional RPG fans, FPS fans, Adventure game fans, Sim fans? They get lost in their own blurry vision and end up fading away into mediocrity.
What the next generation needs to do is forget about copying from a copy and refocus on what the other generations did well - find their demographic.
The games capable of this would be ones like Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, etc.. Franchises that, like the success stories before them, have a following and a specific group of people they're creating their games for.
Of course, none of this is still an excuse for what's just a bad game...
Couldn't have said it better.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
Lol again a topic thats been discussed million times:P
Beating on dead horse are yah:D
Bring some new ideas come with some constuctive critisism instead start over and over again same discussion hehe.
We alreeady know and agree that its become alot worse but still millions are playing these worse games and many new millions starting only few old vets here know its nightmare.
But there is still hope at least for me like TSW that at least try outside the tolkien and D&D fantasy world with no trolls orcs elfs and dwarfs. And no lvls no classes.
Hope more developers start looking that directions and come up with amazing sandbox ala TSW.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
MMORPGs have moved from a relative obscurity to the mass market. We have and will continue to see trends very typical to any other market. Few major developers and a number of smaller ones, and a lot of consolidation in the middle.
The major issue with MMORPGs is the development time. In my opinion, smaller developers would be better of trying to do a single player RPG prior to even thinking about MMOs.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
LOL
The "problem" is not WoW. It's people.
In all fairness, who really doesn't hate to wait on anything? We've spent our entire lives seeing things in RL become more convenient with reduced waiting, its what we all want because time is precious.
A large part of what made early games challenging was the time they made you wait and your efforts to minimize that, be it from effectively traveling between locations, reducing your downtime by winning fights as efficiently as possible, to making sure you didn't die and have to respawn in PVP because it was going to take you out of the fight for 10 or more minutes.
But at the same time, I recall many people who I tried to introduce tot he genre refusing to play, saying they didn't have the time (or inclination) to "wait" or play MMO's.
Developers heard this, started removing the mechanics that kept players waiting, and the more casual players flocked to them (at least for one MMO anyways)
Of course, this streamlining took away some of the charm that many of us posting in this thread really enjoyed, but the investment in the games is too great, they have to target the largest market of players in order to be profitable.
Because despite what we may think, while games such as LOTRO, AOC, AION, WAR and now Rift may not end up WOW killers, they seem to be profitable enough to recover the cost to build them and keep running so as long that happens I don't see the trend stopping.
What might happen is that the cost to build MMO's may continue to escalate so that only the big houses really can create them, and finally we'll reach a tipping point where huge losses are occurred and the market may implode and reset itself to new level.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I liked Diablo also, and it was a very fun game. It's just not what I am looking for in a MMORPG. It is a great hack-n-slasher (and there are some good online hack-n-slashers out there, too), but you have to admit, as a virtual world, it's pretty thin. I really am looking for a deeper experience of an open world where I can go see what's over the next hill just because it is there. The problem is when the next hill is just a checkmark on my NPC-assigned To Do list, and there's nothing interesting or unexpected to see over there anyway.
There's a magical land where immersion and fun live together in peace and harmony again. I can feel it in my bones. I really don't think we're all just old and jaded. I think we've all had those moments, long after our first MMO, where we saw something, even in new games, that was a glimpse of what we're after-- I love seeing animals in Ryzom and WoW moving in herds, for instance. And those little details matter, as long as you're not putting lipstick on a pig. If the game world is thin, and you're being ushered through it by tour guides with shiny golden things over their heads, that's not immersive (a word I hate, btw) and it is only fun until it gets boring, generally somewhere between 2 weeks and 2 months later.
FWIW, it's simply not true to say "ther is NO OTHER legit way to play EQ" at this point. There have been instanced missions for a long time and EQ offers quite a lot of questing and 'tasks' these days. If people buy a merc ASAP and then grind it out in hot zones (high exp zones), it is because the game is top heavy and they are just trying to get to where the people are, not because the content isn't there to do-- LDoN was a year before WoW, so it's not like they were just chasing after the 800 pound gorilla at that point.
There were some places in EQ that made the grind feel less static even back in the day. We did a lot of runs on Tower of Frozen Shadows in the Velious era, for instance, which was a crawl-through, not a camp. We did a fair amound of crawl through in Acrylia Caverns. We crawled through Howling Stones when that was out-of-date. But I don't mind grinding. I actually really hate having to run back to town periodically to talk to NPCs. Questing is a drag, to me.That really is a matter of taste.
I can't comment on the player economy because I hardly ever use it, in any game that I play. I wear what I quest, craft, or loot myself. It's my thing. But there's a trade-off between the original EQ system and an auction house of any sort-- you actually had to interact with another human being in order to get your stuff in the original EQ system, which many people would argue was a good thing. The bad thing, of course, was that you'd have to hope you were on at the same time a person selling what you wanted to buy (or vice versa), or you were going to have to hang out (and not AFK) in Fay-mart or the East Commonlands until such time as the item came up or someone looking for that item arrived.
Re: some other raised issues in the thread, because I hate triple posting
I don't think complexity and depth are necessarily the same thing. For instance, Perfect World Entertainment has a series of essentially pretty-much-the-same games that many people try and dismiss as "just another Asian grinder-- nothing to do at all but grind", when, in fact, those games have some really complex systems that can chew up your time if you're fully engaged in playing them seriously. The more you play and learn, the more freakin' complicated the games get, especially when those complications combine... But the worlds aren't necessarily super immersive just because the game systems get pretty complex. You can have a relatively simple game that is pretty deep, and complicated games that are just complicated and not much else.
A lot of what made EQ interesting and immersive has been stripped out of it over the years. For instance, player racial faction doesn't particularly matter now, especially because there's basically one starter town on the regular servers, unless you specifically choose to start in your racial hometown. The only town faction that mattered when I stopped playing was Freeport, and that could be fixed by grinding out a crocodile-killing quest, and it really doesn't take that long, especially compared to killing orcs in East Commons back in the good old/bad old days. There's a lot less class interdependence with potions and mercs readily available. It's just a different world now. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the new EQ and I understand the reason behind almost every change SOE has made, from the point of view of a long-haul player (e.g. corpse runs got old years ago, so I didn't miss them when they went away) ... But those factors that are gone now were the sort of systems that some people would truly like to see in games they play now, and the market has narrowed to a completely different sort of game.
Anything that
made EQ feel deep and interesting has pretty much been stripped out of it at this point, or it is there but nobody bothers with it. Everyone starts in the same hometown, racial factions are largely meaningless, and the one or two that still matter at all can be fixed with a short, easy quest grind (a minimal effort compared to fixing it the old way)... Or you can just invis past everything that you're KOS to-- potions are cheap. They did away with a lot of keys and flags for older zones, so that content is accessible to people who would never in a million years be able to put together the required series of raids to even get to some of that content. There's a lot less interdependence between the different class roles, now that you can buy mercs and potions. But I totally understand all of the changes and I don't blame SOE for implementing them-- the game is older and very top heavy, and a lot of what they did away with was only fun for people who were feeling nostalgic, not for the majority of the long-haul player base.
Anything that made EQ feel deep and interesting has pretty much been stripped out of it at this point, or it is there but nobody bothers with it. Everyone starts in the same hometown, racial factions are largely meaningless, and the one or two that still matter at all can be fixed with a short, easy quest grind (a minimal effort compared to fixing it the old way)... Or you can just invis past everything that you're KOS to-- potions are cheap. They did away with a lot of keys and flags for older zones, so that content is accessible to people who would never in a million years be able to put together the required series of raids to even get to some of that content. There's a lot less interdependence between the different class roles, now that you can buy mercs and potions. But I totally understand all of the changes and I don't blame SOE for implementing them-- the game is older and very top heavy, and a lot of what they did away with was only fun for people who were feeling nostalgic, not for the majority of the long-haul player base.