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A look into the future of MMO design?
Ghost12
Member Posts: 684
Lets go forward in time, 20 years into the future.
VROOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!
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The year is 2031. You are playing “Fantasy Quest” the hugely popular MMO, which has over 10 million active players.
You log into the game. You see that a friend is online, and make plans to meet up. You decide that today, you want to find some treasure. So you decide to head out into the wilderness, perhaps to the Dark Forest Caves. You cast some buffs on yourself to make you run faster and jump higher, because there could be dangerous monsters along the way. You dont want to die, because if you do, you will lose a random item and a little xp. Death has meaning and consequence.
On your way, CRAP - a flesh eating lizard attacks you, and its a high level, and its faster than you! Your heart is pounding as it lunges at you. But you can take it. You switch to melee mode, bring out your player-crafted fist weapon, and nail the lizard. In melee, you have the option of striking your opponent high, mid, or low, and the option of slow, mid, or fast strikes, depending on the weak points of the opponent. Since you know the lizard's weak point is in its legs, you switch your melee weapons to “low”. Doing this, you deal bonus damage and clobber the lizard. Looting the corpse you come across a surprising find – a potion of invulnerability (4 sec invuln). Wow! And its worth quite a bit. You didnt expect such a high level item to drop off such a creature.
You meet up with your friend at the dark forest caves. You two decide to do a run through these caves. Seeing that the mobs are Dark Spiders, you know the both of you, working together, can take them down. Both of you run into the caves, and begin clobbering the spiders. You begin to pull half of the entire cave, 6 or 7 spiders – but these spiders shoot poison. Since you can dodge projectiles, you take out your magic wand and begin firing magic bolts back at the spiders, while dodging the poison spit.
Your friend takes some serious damage, so you throw a heal spell at him. Your friend, being an older gamer, tells you -
“Damn man, I almost died, thanks! Thank god we arent forced into classes like in the old days, that was sooo 2010's....”
By the strength of both your character stats and skills, both of you take down the entire cave. While looting, you come across some crap items, while you get some new specials. You come across a new fist weapon, really powerful, and you equip it happily. The item is not restricted by levels.
Traveling down the cave, you come across the boss! The giant Spider Queen, you cant take it down on your own. Since its too powerful, you go outside and get some other players to help you take it down. You decide amongst yourselves that the other players that helped you need the drops more than you do, so you give it to them. At the end of the dungeon however, you come across a strange gem, and a note is written in your quest journal. It speaks of a lengthy and difficult quest, with a huge reward, which surely you and your friend could be up for the challenge.....
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Damn, that game sounds pretty advanced, doesnt it? Man....
Oh wait a sec, I'm so, so, sorry guys. That game I'm referring to isnt from the future, its from 1999, called “Asheron's Call”. Guess it isnt so advanced after all....
My bad.
Comments
No. Get over yourself. Playing a game != a fucking job.
Go play Catherine, see what a hard game is supposed to be like. Tedious and stupid != hard.
Instead of waiting another 30 years, you could have been playing that MMO for the past 10.
EDIT: LOL! I had read everything except the part under the dashed line. It seems that was where you were going with that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I admit that I have been spoiled somewhat by good looking graphics. That is really the only thing that keeps me away from going back to games like AC. It has nothing to do with the gameplay. The gameplay, and system is way superior to newer games. I just can't stand to look at the old style graphics anymore.
<p align="center" style="font-family: arial;"><a href="http://www.wizards.com/magic/playmagic/whatcolorareyou.asp"; target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/whatcolor_isblue.jpg"; border="0"><br/><b>Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.</b></a></p>
I have to get off the time travel ride ?)
EQ2 fan sites
When reading this I thought you was heading into a Guild Wars 2 advert
Seriously though, it's interesting that these concepts existed in games a decade ago and now were all making a big thing about having it in GW2; well the dodging and classless systems at least! I think WoW's success set in stone certain gameplay values that have been hard to shift, in my opinion.
Good to know.
Sounded good to me until the no classes part...I totally love classes
"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security." -Norman Vincent Peale
Dodging in MMORPGs have been there since some years ago. I've seen a 4 year old Korean MMORPG where you can actually dodge magic missiles by moving (combat is collision based).
Now I think that the trend is the simplifying of the current game mechanics. Losing experience with death will go. Probably the MMORPGs will finally fuse themselves with social games (World of Farmville?), to allow a very broad variety of users to enjoy the games at their own pace. Grinding should be replaced with more fun ways to acquire new items. Game should not be so item-centric.
My friend and I checked out Asheron's Call back in the day. We were playing it for I dunno, an hour or so. I was fighting this mob and it turned and ran away. And it just kept on running, in a straight line, for literally like 5-10 minutes. I stayed only a few steps behind it the whole way, I was determined to catch this guy. After all that running, he finally ran right into an NPC camp and they all jumped and killed me. When I respawned, the random item it took away was, naturally, the only weapon we had. We weren't about to run back there.
Any other item, I'm sure we would have kept playing that game. Instead we just said, "well, that seems like enough of that" and turned it off.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Huh? what the what?
GW2 is complete opposite of Older School MMO
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Sure, only been playing MMO's the past say five to six years so my concept of an old school MMO is not fantastic. However a classless MMO is exactly what GW2 is trying to champion and dodging is also something they are putting a lot of empahsis on. These two elements were highlighted quite strongly above - whether in the broader picture things are almost opposites then I really couldn't say.
HUH? WTF?
Dude/Lady,,, what the crap you talking about?
Really?
Do you GW2 fans just like making up random facts about the game?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Yeah...GW2 has classes. Fixed classes for that matter. The fact that they call them professions instead of classes doesn't magically make it mean something different.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Future MMORPG design will...if they drop the console centric push, will including advanced player generated content and an alternate input method to go along with mouse and keyboard. See future of Kinnect and motion/voice capture.
This is the prevailing attitude. Pull a lever, get a prize. The future direction of MMORPG is similar to Pacman.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Ah, I see my mistake, what I meant to say was 'roles' in the sense the healer/tank/dps method and dodging is an element of GW2.
Doesn't sound very fun.
Apart from a genuinely badass progression system, AC wasn't fun. It was grindy, repetitive, directionless, and got old within the free month.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Personally I found higher levels in pac man harder than MMO's new and old.
Venge
Lol guildwars 2 im sure it will improve on some stuff but it will not get as close and as epic asheron call was.
And i blame you and your friend for all the easymode carebear mmos we have now.
Easy?
Show me your Endgame Acievements on your WoW character.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Why on hell would i have a WoW character? and if you are saying with that wow is not easy mode you sir should play hello kitty online.
hahahahahah
ok lets examine this shell we?
1) you say you dont have a WoW Character,,, so how in the world would you know if its Easy or not? hummmmm,,, interesting
2)What does Hello Kitty have to do with WoW's difficulty?
3)Better question,, what does Hello Kitty have to do with WoW at all?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Where did you see me saying hello kitty has something to do with WoW READ MY post again i mentioned Hello Kitty online for you.
I know WoW is easy mode i have played in the past when it was still reasonable yet boring to play and deleted my whole account when i started playing with 9 year olds cheering eachother they could do something such easily.
dunno why im having this conversation im not on forumfall.
Oh wow,,, really!!!?
haha So you telling me, you completed all the HC 25Raids, and they where easy? thats what it seem like you are saying. may I ask. Did you play during Vanilla,TBC,WoTLK,or CAT? and what level were you
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Wow is as easy or difficult as you choose to make it, just like any other bloody MMO.
Venge