I dont agree with the OP since I've yet to see a mmorpg where difficulty means something else than the monsters simply having more HP and damage than you. That's no fun even if it brings people together imo. I wouldnt play a mmorpg that is based on overpowering everything or call it.
However, introducing more stuff where you need people to be able to get something done not only because of over 9K HP mobs, but since the world is not fully accessible solo. What I mean is like that datacron in SWTOR in Balmorra where you need at least 2 people to push buttons at the same time in order to bring a forcefield down to get to the loot. That's a very simple example but I immediately thought "I hope there's more stuff like this" but sadly it's propably the only environmental "puzzle" there is.
That leads me to: Give players abilities that are not always combat oriented. Give "the engineer" class a portable small bridge so he can give access to people to get over that small canyon, give "the omg ninja" class ability to climb/grapple hook to some high heigths to pull the lever that opens the way, and give "the insert big dude name here" class an ability to ram through jammed doors etc etc, so the characters get useful outside their combat roles too, and it brings people together when others a looking for someone just to "get there" and so on.
Though my hopes for a mmorpg that gets any design love outside the combat and "big size" has faded pretty much away, I'm pretty sure there will never be a mmorpg that I like after I get bored of the combat and gearthreadmill/whatever the main action catch is.
A world full of mobs that I simply cant kill no matter how good I am is a very poor example of stuff that "forces" people together, and that's the traditional mmorpg difficulty idea, at least on the dozen of mmorpgs I've played.
While I agree that games have gotten easier, I also have to say gamers have gotten better and getting an answer to a problem is much easier. Gamers now aren't the gamers of 20 years ago. People have the internet at their fingertips now, so scripted content will only go so far in terms of challenging a player. Generic boss #202 hasn't changed very much either since the majority of encounters are scripted and scripted means "learn the patterns and win". And giving a boss more health/damage/defense is sort of a lazy way to make content artificially harder. It's not. It just becomes a stat game at that point.
In my opinion, the key to a real challenge now should be AI that is less predictable and more dynamic.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
I prefer more more punishing , more 'forcing' to cooperate and depend on each other games. Also games having bit longer level times than current ones like Rift, Swtor or Cata WoW.
Current design which is very conveniant , fast and automated just bore me to tears. I used to enjoy current "easy" as everything-on-a-platter & faceroll though open world games, but well got severely bored and not coming back to it. Not playing any mmorpg atm and that's one of main reasons.
I don't care what word will be used , if it will be "inconveniant" , "difficult" , "time-sink" or "tedious" - it is just semantics to me, but I either want separate servers or mmorpg with diffrent approach than current ones.
Until then I am sticking to single players, maybe will make an exception for GW2 (out of curiosity to check b2p model if I like it or not in mmo) and ArcheAge (cause of open seamless world and more diverse gameplay than current mmorpg designs , will have to be p2p thou for me to play it).
Well until then I am sticking to single player games.
As for "real" difficulty as some people perceive it (though I recommend using English dictionary to check definition for "difficulty" it might be surprising for some people).
Making mobs more "intelligent" and dynamically 'responding' to player combat style ,etc will not happen anytime soon in mmorpg's. Why?
First of all creating decent AI , especially not in confined scripted places, is VERY difficult and costly. A lot of coding / creating algoritchms & then alot of testing & bugfixing - that mean many pay hours of big experienced coders = expensive.
Even huge majority of single player games where it is much easier to code good ai , have bad AI for above reason.
Second thing. Big complicated algorithms for thousands of mobs fighting with hundreads or thousands of players would put HUGE stress on server, cause all of mobs AI have to be done server side. Amount of CPU cycles used with really advanced AI would be very very big.
So not gonna happen anytime soon.
So "difficulty" only can be raised by increasing need to be "patient" , "cautious" , etc
Since alot of people don't like it there are only two options:
I prefer more more punishing , more 'forcing' to cooperate and depend on each other games. Also games having bit longer level times than current ones like Rift, Swtor or Cata WoW.
Current design which is very conveniant , fast and automated just bore me to tears. I used to enjoy current "easy" as everything-on-a-platter & faceroll though open world games, but well got severely bored and not coming back to it. Not playing any mmorpg atm and that's one of main reasons.
I don't care what word will be used , if it will be "inconveniant" , "difficult" , "time-sink" or "tedious" - it is just semantics to me, but I either want separate servers or mmorpg with diffrent approach than current ones.
Until then I am sticking to single players, maybe will make an exception for GW2 (out of curiosity to check b2p model if I like it or not in mmo) and ArcheAge (cause of open seamless world and more diverse gameplay than current mmorpg designs , will have to be p2p thou for me to play it).
Well until then I am sticking to single player games.
As for "real" difficulty as some people perceive it (though I recommend using English dictionary to check definition for "difficulty" it might be surprising for some people).
Making mobs more "intelligent" and dynamically 'responding' to player combat style ,etc will not happen anytime soon in mmorpg's. Why?
First of all creating decent AI , especially not in confined scripted places, is VERY difficult and costly. A lot of coding / creating algoritchms & then alot of testing & bugfixing - that mean many pay hours of big experienced coders = expensive.
Even huge majority of single player games where it is much easier to code good ai , have bad AI for above reason.
Second thing. Big complicated algorithms for thousands of mobs fighting with hundreads or thousands of players would put HUGE stress on server, cause all of mobs AI have to be done server side. Amount of CPU cycles used with really advanced AI would be very very big.
So not gonna happen anytime soon.
So "difficulty" only can be raised by increasing need to be "patient" , "cautious" , etc
Since alot of people don't like it there are only two options:
- leave current situation as it is
- make servers with separate rules
Mount and Blade is difficult, but not because of AI.
Ninja Gaiden is difficult, but not because of AI.
Dificulty lies in controls and combat mechanics. As long as we are using tab-target and dice-roll combat where people play whack-a-mole with an array of different hammers we will never make a difficult game, instead we will continue to make tedious, boring, monotonous grindfests.
When I was in highschool back in 2000 I was playing Everquest fairly hardcore (I slept through classes and my gpa was LOLworthy... but don't worry I do great now). I also played football... why do I mention this?
Well anyone who's played football will tell you 2-a-days and 3-a-days (fairly intense practices) are not only tedious and difficult, but they also build a team... a community. Why? Shared suffering and shared effort brings people together.
If you talk to people (or even remember it yourself if you're like me) some of the best memories of these older games were when things went bad. We all have corpse run stories and how teams of people came to help; friends were made this way. People spent hours carefully crawling through dungeons; and succeeding or failing TOGETHER.
Today's MMORPGs lack the difficulty. I think because there's that lack of shared effort and shared suffering (don't get caught up on that word.. think shared bad stuff) therefore it stops or impedes a strong community from forming.
Without that shared experience people find it harder to relate to eachother. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the community back in the day was perfect, but people did find it easier to relate to eachother. That made the games better in the end.
Your thoughts?
Ofcourse you are right. Who wants to play something easy?
Well WoW player's do but there is something wrong with those guys
When I was in highschool back in 2000 I was playing Everquest fairly hardcore (I slept through classes and my gpa was LOLworthy... but don't worry I do great now). I also played football... why do I mention this?
Well anyone who's played football will tell you 2-a-days and 3-a-days (fairly intense practices) are not only tedious and difficult, but they also build a team... a community. Why? Shared suffering and shared effort brings people together.
If you talk to people (or even remember it yourself if you're like me) some of the best memories of these older games were when things went bad. We all have corpse run stories and how teams of people came to help; friends were made this way. People spent hours carefully crawling through dungeons; and succeeding or failing TOGETHER.
Today's MMORPGs lack the difficulty. I think because there's that lack of shared effort and shared suffering (don't get caught up on that word.. think shared bad stuff) therefore it stops or impedes a strong community from forming.
Without that shared experience people find it harder to relate to eachother. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the community back in the day was perfect, but people did find it easier to relate to eachother. That made the games better in the end.
Your thoughts?
Easier or harder doesn't really make the game in itself better, even if it the right level of it makes it fun. The real problem is that we like different difficulty so no difficulty is perfect for all players.
As I see it is the real problem that more or less all PvE MMOs have 95% very easy content and maybe 5% harder and that sucks, because the games have so similar difficulty that people like us that want more of a challenge really still must go through 95% easy street first.
We need a few really hard games as well as the easy, we don't need all MMOs to get harder, just a few. Otherwise we get the opposite problem that MMOs had in the 90s, they didn't attract so many players because they were either too hard or too time consuming.
The easy games are neccesarily to attract new young bloood into the genre, but harder games are needed as well to keep the people who want a real challenge easy.
Easier or harder doesn't really make the game in itself better, even if it the right level of it makes it fun. The real problem is that we like different difficulty so no difficulty is perfect for all players.
As I see it is the real problem that more or less all PvE MMOs have 95% very easy content and maybe 5% harder and that sucks, because the games have so similar difficulty that people like us that want more of a challenge really still must go through 95% easy street first.
We need a few really hard games as well as the easy, we don't need all MMOs to get harder, just a few. Otherwise we get the opposite problem that MMOs had in the 90s, they didn't attract so many players because they were either too hard or too time consuming.
The easy games are neccesarily to attract new young bloood into the genre, but harder games are needed as well to keep the people who want a real challenge easy.
And a few hard raids just isn't enough.
I don't see why not attracting many players is a bad thing. WoW attracted alot of new players and the end result was totally dumbing down the genre and releasing of endless WoW clones.
I would pretty much be for going back to the times when the MMORPG genre was nische and for nerds. Don't see anything good coming out of it going mainstream but ofcourse I dont care about bottom line, return of investment, time to market etc. I care only about playing complex, compelling and immersive MMORPGs and they simply are not being produced anymore.
I don't personally think that older games were exactly more difficult. Its kind of a broad spectrum thing to me.
When EverQuest first went live you couldn't simply go to google and find the answer to most every question you had. As well as you didn't start EQ and have people yelling in OOC or shouting to ask where everything was.
There really wasn't the concept becuase the market was still rather new.
When a game like TOR goes live.. even if they designed it to appeal to the "old school"... the sheer volume of information out there would make the game not be difficult. You can just go to youtube and watch a video on how to complete a boss fight you can't get past... The early raiders of EQ actually had to figure that stuff out and there was no other way for them to do it.
So the amount of information has changed and obviously as the market expanded a different type of player came into it. I don't have an issue with people who play differently.. but yes obviously companies go after the larger market becuase they want to make a profit.
There is something very ironic to me when I see someone shouting "where is the bounty hunter trainer?". I mean you are supposed to track marks through an entire star system but can't find your trainer?
Of course it is the design too but in so many ways...
A game like EQ could have a difficult fight without bs. Where you fought various mobs and depending on your class and where you were the fights might actually be tough. As opposed to modern design which is to have as many stuns, knockbacks and dot's as possible from every single mob.. regardless of whether the class its based on has those abilities or not... because that's a challenge.
Older games had taunt mechanics that worked as expected and were somehow tough... now you have mobs that simply jump to whatever random person even if they have generated no aggro... or aoe's that hit everyone in the raid even if there is no aoe in the game that should have a 250 foot radius blah blah
I used to raid heal in EQ2... and then instead of healing it became how many cures can I spam per second and I stopped...
So to me its not even just the "difficulty" but the developer concept of how to achieve that difficulty. /shrug
Oh and one of the coolest things I remember in one of my stints in EQ.. was playing my monk. It was after the PoK expansion and I was in some harbour area... I overpulled and ran off a bit to FD. One of the mobs FD'd right beside me and when I stood up we started fighting again...
To me that was just pretty cool... in modern games the same mob would have just hit me with 2000 forms of DoT/bleeds... and then kept attacking me after I FD'd... tho most likely through 50 feet of rock wall with attacks that should have a 4m range limit... or the mob would be in the cliff and attack through FD... that's modern difficulty.
The easy games are neccesarily to attract new young bloood into the genre, but harder games are needed as well to keep the people who want a real challenge easy.
And a few hard raids just isn't enough.
The topic always comes back around to the same question: What is "harder"?
We've seen people insist arguing that traveling slower = harder, fully seriously. Jogging r hard, yes indeed.
Most of the time, when people talk about "too ez", they're discussing leveling content--in some people's opinion, it IS the game, for others it's just a chore to be completed before you get to the Good Stuff at the end.
We've seen people complaining that Quest X is "too hard"--only to be denied by other players, lrn2ply nub. We've seen PVE content 'dumbed down' because to make a low-DPS healer solo-able means that he needs the monsters to be less dangerous than a rock-crushing DPS death machine needs.
Meanwhile, the raiders are laughing at the nubness for insisting leveling content needs to be, or should be, or ever could be, hard. The PVP players are laughing at the raiders, only human opponents could ever be hard. And round and round.
It's all relative. And you have to narrow the focus of the discussion to what your idea of easy/hard is.
Your idea won't be the same as Bob's idea is.
Treating abstract, relative concepts as concretes causes more confusionthan just about anything else on message boards.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Mount and Blade is difficult, but not because of AI.
Ninja Gaiden is difficult, but not because of AI.
Dificulty lies in controls and combat mechanics. As long as we are using tab-target and dice-roll combat where people play whack-a-mole with an array of different hammers we will never make a difficult game, instead we will continue to make tedious, boring, monotonous grindfests.
To a point I agree. Thing is that quite a bit of players would not want removal of grind and making combat very actiony.
If that would be what majority wants then action mmrpg's would be even more popular than they are atm.
I think 'old traditional' combat style need improvements and whole genre need to start differentiating between games (it already started but still long way to go).
Besides it is not answer to everything. I mean controls & combat mechanics.
For example TERA has more actiony combat without sticky target and open world mobs difficulty is even more faceroll than your average mmo. Seriously.
Well at least lower-early mid levels , havent played it on higher levels.
Besides comparing those titles you mentioned with mmropg's it invalid.
In open world mobs with stupid AI and combat dependant on twitch - killing is stupidly easy. Seriously it is memorizing stupid AI move pattern on first mob and then you faceroll through all remaining mobs of the same type.
That's one of reason almost every twitch based mmo out there is instanced. Like f.e. Vindictus.
Cause in thight spaces / dungeons you can script certain things, cause player have very finite options (or none at all) where to go and you can script combat / mob behaviour based on where player is standing, etc
In open world you need much more sophisticated AI or difficulty will be close to non-existant.
Well that or you put severe death penalties, lot of mob HP & high damage like it is done in Dark Souls, but then you come back to exact same 'solutions' you're against
Mount and Blade is difficult, but not because of AI.
Ninja Gaiden is difficult, but not because of AI.
Dificulty lies in controls and combat mechanics. As long as we are using tab-target and dice-roll combat where people play whack-a-mole with an array of different hammers we will never make a difficult game, instead we will continue to make tedious, boring, monotonous grindfests.
Well you're right, but you're also unnecessarily harsh on certain mechanics.
Ninja Gaiden essentially uses a system which is even easier to target with than tab-targeting, yet it manages to be difficult in spite of that.
Dice-rolling doesn't play a huge role in most MMORPGs in my experience. Any critting or blocking usually gets averaged out over time, and instead often serves as a way that the gameplay dynamically serves up reactionary abilities. Granted, dice-rolling definitely dilutes the importance of skill by a little bit in order to achieve this, but it's far less dilution than occurs simply by leveling or getting better gear.
To a degree, MMORPGs will never be purely about player skill because those factors (aka progression) will always exist. But I do feel MMORPGs get into a great groove in endgame, where they're able to socket players into tiers of progression, at which point skill is required to beat well-designed encounters (and in some encounters progress is entirely irrelevant.) The trick is in getting some of that difficulty during the leveling process too (if it's at all time-consuming) so that skilled players can fast track themselves to the end.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
But let's not pretend the word "difficulty" should be used interchangeably with the word "suffering". I don't play MMORPGs to suffer. If your interface or gameplay isn't chock-full of fun, interesting decisions, I'm gone. So are most gamers. Anything else is just a waste of my time.
I'm with you. Sadly, I think too many people have deluded themselves into thinking some very strange things.
I don't see why not attracting many players is a bad thing. WoW attracted alot of new players and the end result was totally dumbing down the genre and releasing of endless WoW clones.
I would pretty much be for going back to the times when the MMORPG genre was nische and for nerds. Don't see anything good coming out of it going mainstream but ofcourse I dont care about bottom line, return of investment, time to market etc. I care only about playing complex, compelling and immersive MMORPGs and they simply are not being produced anymore.
90% of what players consider "dumbing down" is simply removing the stupid inconveniences of the past -- most of which didn't make the game harder in any meaningful or fun way.
Case in point: players whining about fast leveling. Games don't magically become harder or more fun when a developer flips a switch so that leveling requires 10x as much XP. But when the developer flips the switch back off, you have a mysterious contingent of players who insists the game is "easier" and somehow less fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
At least, I wish companies would at least have 'hard level' servers. There are many people who will argue against you. they can go to the 'normal' servers.
EQ had 3 different types of PvP servers, a special RP server, and normal servers; Now it has progression servers...
It should be doable.
Wow has 3 difficulties of RAID, and that is essentially the same thing. Hard mode raid is extremely challenging and only the top guild (and you can build community & team work all you want with those hard core people) in can even has a chance.
The problem with EQ is not that it is hard, is that it is a time-sink, frustrating and punish unnessarily. (I was there since the beginning so i know).
Today's WOW hard mode raid is NOT easier than many of the encounters in EQ. In fact, many EQ pre-raid dungeons are way easier, particularly if you factor in 50 people camping a spot and helping u kill the boss.
The only difference is that you suffer through wait-times, and non-essential road blocks like corpse runs which make EQ a very boring game and luckily, that kind of days is over.
There's a lot of discussion in here about what the definition of "hard" is in the first place. I think nailing that down is pretty important to the comparison about whether or not MMORPG X is better than MMORPG Y, or whether the games of 10 years ago are better than the games of the present.
I don't know what the proper definition of hard is, but I can say that my two cents are that there are really two incomparable camps of players right now, and there's been a lot of discussion about how they ruin each others' games.
The first group is PVP players that insist as others have mentioned here that you can't truly have a "difficult" encounter with predictable mob AI. This is a fallacy, however, depending on your interpretation of difficult. First, the PVE endgame as it stands today consists almost entirely of raids. I personally can't stand this type of gaming, because the difficulty isn't in the operation of the game itself, it's in the difficulties of managing the individual personalities and capabilities of such a large player contigent into a cohesive, cooperative team. NOT ONLY is that difficult, but it's difficult enough that people get paid good money to exercise that skill in "real-life" jobs. Second, even though the AI is scripted, raid encounters have become sufficiently complex that executing the best-known strategy is still difficult-to-perform maneuver. For instance, many people can juggle 3 balls. Even though the body mechanics of juggling 17 balls are more qualitatively similar to juggling 3 balls than doing jumping jacks, there are far more people who can juggle 3 balls AND do jumping jacks than there are people who can juggle 17 balls. The difference in the difficulty of the actual execution/performance of leveling vs raiding in an MMORPG is the akin to the difference in difficulty of juggling 3 balls vs 17 balls.
In summary, PVE is not difficult in terms of strategy and decision making, with the exception being the lead progression teams that actually develop the strategies that are simply read on FAQ sites and executed by the 99% of players that aren't in the lead progression teams. However the difficulty in planning, social engineering, execution, and performance is shared by all 100% of those players. Hell, even figuring out a reasonably fair loot distribution algorithm could be the topic of a game theorist's PHP thesis.
In contrast, PVE players that insist that PVP is not as hard as raiding are failing to understand that in a game that is fair and balanced, PVP provides an infinitely varied set of circumstances and scenarios which require difficult on-the-spot strategy and tactical decision making that simply isn't found in PVE because of the scripted nature of the AI that dictates one side of the battle. One could argue that a game that is fair and balanced doesn't exist right now because the nature of MMORPGs to provide power upgrades to player characters as a reward for "effort" is a reverse handicap that makes the strong stronger and leave the rest behind, but that's another topic.
The critical element in PVP often isn't whether or not your team has more twitch skill with regards to button-pushing (contrary to popular belief), but whether or not your team has faster situational awareness which can adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances. For instance, I used to do martial arts, and I can tell tens or hundreds of little details that give clues how an opponent fights: Which foot is in front? How is each foot turned? Does the angle from heel-to-butt-to-heel face in the same or opposite direction from their face? What do they do when you switch stances? Do they mirror or pivot when you step side to side? Are their hands generally open or closed? Knowing a larger list probably makes you a better trainer/coach, but might not make you a better fighter. What makes a better fighter is being able to quickly observe all of these things, throw out the information not important to the current fight, and adapt according to the rest. The difficulty in doing that is the same difficulty in doing PVP. Often times, a combatant that has this skill can actually survive with very sloppy execution skill, where as sloppy execution skills in a difficult raid would get you killed.
In summary, PVP is not difficult in terms of planning (the best laid plans oft go to waste as soon as the situation changes), execution, and performance as was the case in PVE, but instead is difficult in terms of there not being a specific strategem which can be read from the collective conscious of the internet and executed perfectly to guarantee a win every time. It's also less difficult than PVE in the sense that maintaining a capable team of 25 is far more than 5x as complicated as maintaining a team of 5 (the target number for most E-sport PVP teams at this time). Instead, those important capabilities from PVE must be replaced by one which quickly responds to ever-changing circumstances that may even never have been experienced before.
These are two very different types of games. A company that seeks to create some future "hard" game to satisfy those of us that want such a game will require us as players to determine which of these types of "hard" we're really interested in.
I have the sneaking suspicion that the answer is almost never going to be "both", and that's why PVP and PVE players often don't get along on game forums
Do you dedicated forum readers read all this? I try but get distracted very quickly, keep it simple, hard mmorpg's where better because, there was something we could take that was better than the rest, give me a mmo where I can “find” something in the world that is unique and god like, old school
Old mmorpgs were better because there was a lot more group content vs solo content. I supposed you could define that as being harder. More grouping meant more players would socialize more. Corpse runs would present opportunities to have a friend, guild or group member, or local to help out. Ofcourse this was back in a pre-social networking era where it felt special to do stuff with other people on the internet. Now there's hundreds of thousands of anyomous entities represent by a string of text and an avatar with apathy for each other.
No matter what anyone will try to argue... the simple fact that harder games mean more challenge, thus more reward.
It is only the ignorant & unaccociated who don't understand this. Honestly, what is more rewarding; playing basketball and beating up on grade schoolers..? Or, playing against kids who play high school basketball.. & beating them?
One is just killing time, the other is a real match with real circumstances on the line.
Let's face it, most of the newbies don't play to be challanged, or as an esport, but just as something to do other than tv.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
No matter what anyone will try to argue... the simple fact that harder games mean more challenge, thus more reward.
It is only the ignorant & unaccociated who don't understand this. Honestly, what is more rewarding; playing basketball and beating up on grade schoolers..? Or, playing against kids who play high school basketball.. & beating them?
One is just killing time, the other is a real match with real circumstances on the line.
Let's face it, most of the newbies don't play to be challanged, or as an esport, but just as something to do other than tv.
You obviously do not understand that fact that just ATTEMPTING something challenging is not rewarding. You have to SUCCESSFULLY complete it to be rewarding.
Thus, 99% of the players are NOT rewarded by Sunwell because they COULD NOT FINISH IT. Surely it rewards the 1%. That is a very bad design for a game.
If being challenging is enough, we should have games that requries solving differential equations, and all sort difficult math. That is challenging right?
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
Biased thread by a WoW-lover. In fact, EQ...DAOC....SWG...Shadowbane, and even UO were ALL harder than todays MMOs. Please stop trying to troll my friend.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity: Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Play games that allow for players to set the rules they wish, i.e. EvE. Wanna kill people in hisec? Feel free, but at the cost of your ship. Wanna scam? Go right ahead. CCP provides it's players with a sandox and guidelines....the rest is up to you. Someone scams you out of 200 mil b/c you didn't read the fine print? Should you complain? Should you ask around?
Oh woes me...what should I do? Oh that's right...I can kill you in game, repeatedly. I can join your corp with an alt, and empty out your corps loot and sell it back to you with a seperate alt. I can join your corp and give your alliance vent/TS info out to all of your enemy's and literally offline all of your equipment and let them steal it all.
The possiblities are endless, b/c CCP understands that players have really only one thing in game...and it isn't isk, ships, power, knowledge...none of it...it's reputation and reputation alone.
Games that empower the players to gather, manage and ultimately protect their assets...understand this. Stop playing games that don't allow you to do this, and you won't notice the lack thereof of difficulty.
Playing: BF4/BF:Hardline, Subnautica 7 days to die Hiatus: EvE Waiting on: World of Darkness(sigh) Interested in: better games in general
Comments
If you think your MMO is too easy, go to an area with monsters that are five levels higher than you.
I dont agree with the OP since I've yet to see a mmorpg where difficulty means something else than the monsters simply having more HP and damage than you. That's no fun even if it brings people together imo. I wouldnt play a mmorpg that is based on overpowering everything or call it.
However, introducing more stuff where you need people to be able to get something done not only because of over 9K HP mobs, but since the world is not fully accessible solo. What I mean is like that datacron in SWTOR in Balmorra where you need at least 2 people to push buttons at the same time in order to bring a forcefield down to get to the loot. That's a very simple example but I immediately thought "I hope there's more stuff like this" but sadly it's propably the only environmental "puzzle" there is.
That leads me to: Give players abilities that are not always combat oriented. Give "the engineer" class a portable small bridge so he can give access to people to get over that small canyon, give "the omg ninja" class ability to climb/grapple hook to some high heigths to pull the lever that opens the way, and give "the insert big dude name here" class an ability to ram through jammed doors etc etc, so the characters get useful outside their combat roles too, and it brings people together when others a looking for someone just to "get there" and so on.
Though my hopes for a mmorpg that gets any design love outside the combat and "big size" has faded pretty much away, I'm pretty sure there will never be a mmorpg that I like after I get bored of the combat and gearthreadmill/whatever the main action catch is.
A world full of mobs that I simply cant kill no matter how good I am is a very poor example of stuff that "forces" people together, and that's the traditional mmorpg difficulty idea, at least on the dozen of mmorpgs I've played.
While I agree that games have gotten easier, I also have to say gamers have gotten better and getting an answer to a problem is much easier. Gamers now aren't the gamers of 20 years ago. People have the internet at their fingertips now, so scripted content will only go so far in terms of challenging a player. Generic boss #202 hasn't changed very much either since the majority of encounters are scripted and scripted means "learn the patterns and win". And giving a boss more health/damage/defense is sort of a lazy way to make content artificially harder. It's not. It just becomes a stat game at that point.
In my opinion, the key to a real challenge now should be AI that is less predictable and more dynamic.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
I prefer more more punishing , more 'forcing' to cooperate and depend on each other games. Also games having bit longer level times than current ones like Rift, Swtor or Cata WoW.
Current design which is very conveniant , fast and automated just bore me to tears. I used to enjoy current "easy" as everything-on-a-platter & faceroll though open world games, but well got severely bored and not coming back to it. Not playing any mmorpg atm and that's one of main reasons.
I don't care what word will be used , if it will be "inconveniant" , "difficult" , "time-sink" or "tedious" - it is just semantics to me, but I either want separate servers or mmorpg with diffrent approach than current ones.
Until then I am sticking to single players, maybe will make an exception for GW2 (out of curiosity to check b2p model if I like it or not in mmo) and ArcheAge (cause of open seamless world and more diverse gameplay than current mmorpg designs , will have to be p2p thou for me to play it).
Well until then I am sticking to single player games.
As for "real" difficulty as some people perceive it (though I recommend using English dictionary to check definition for "difficulty" it might be surprising for some people).
Making mobs more "intelligent" and dynamically 'responding' to player combat style ,etc will not happen anytime soon in mmorpg's. Why?
First of all creating decent AI , especially not in confined scripted places, is VERY difficult and costly. A lot of coding / creating algoritchms & then alot of testing & bugfixing - that mean many pay hours of big experienced coders = expensive.
Even huge majority of single player games where it is much easier to code good ai , have bad AI for above reason.
Second thing. Big complicated algorithms for thousands of mobs fighting with hundreads or thousands of players would put HUGE stress on server, cause all of mobs AI have to be done server side. Amount of CPU cycles used with really advanced AI would be very very big.
So not gonna happen anytime soon.
So "difficulty" only can be raised by increasing need to be "patient" , "cautious" , etc
Since alot of people don't like it there are only two options:
- leave current situation as it is
- make servers with separate rules
Mount and Blade is difficult, but not because of AI.
Ninja Gaiden is difficult, but not because of AI.
Dificulty lies in controls and combat mechanics. As long as we are using tab-target and dice-roll combat where people play whack-a-mole with an array of different hammers we will never make a difficult game, instead we will continue to make tedious, boring, monotonous grindfests.
Ofcourse you are right. Who wants to play something easy?
Well WoW player's do but there is something wrong with those guys
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Easier or harder doesn't really make the game in itself better, even if it the right level of it makes it fun. The real problem is that we like different difficulty so no difficulty is perfect for all players.
As I see it is the real problem that more or less all PvE MMOs have 95% very easy content and maybe 5% harder and that sucks, because the games have so similar difficulty that people like us that want more of a challenge really still must go through 95% easy street first.
We need a few really hard games as well as the easy, we don't need all MMOs to get harder, just a few. Otherwise we get the opposite problem that MMOs had in the 90s, they didn't attract so many players because they were either too hard or too time consuming.
The easy games are neccesarily to attract new young bloood into the genre, but harder games are needed as well to keep the people who want a real challenge easy.
And a few hard raids just isn't enough.
I don't see why not attracting many players is a bad thing. WoW attracted alot of new players and the end result was totally dumbing down the genre and releasing of endless WoW clones.
I would pretty much be for going back to the times when the MMORPG genre was nische and for nerds. Don't see anything good coming out of it going mainstream but ofcourse I dont care about bottom line, return of investment, time to market etc. I care only about playing complex, compelling and immersive MMORPGs and they simply are not being produced anymore.
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I don't personally think that older games were exactly more difficult. Its kind of a broad spectrum thing to me.
When EverQuest first went live you couldn't simply go to google and find the answer to most every question you had. As well as you didn't start EQ and have people yelling in OOC or shouting to ask where everything was.
There really wasn't the concept becuase the market was still rather new.
When a game like TOR goes live.. even if they designed it to appeal to the "old school"... the sheer volume of information out there would make the game not be difficult. You can just go to youtube and watch a video on how to complete a boss fight you can't get past... The early raiders of EQ actually had to figure that stuff out and there was no other way for them to do it.
So the amount of information has changed and obviously as the market expanded a different type of player came into it. I don't have an issue with people who play differently.. but yes obviously companies go after the larger market becuase they want to make a profit.
There is something very ironic to me when I see someone shouting "where is the bounty hunter trainer?". I mean you are supposed to track marks through an entire star system but can't find your trainer?
Of course it is the design too but in so many ways...
A game like EQ could have a difficult fight without bs. Where you fought various mobs and depending on your class and where you were the fights might actually be tough. As opposed to modern design which is to have as many stuns, knockbacks and dot's as possible from every single mob.. regardless of whether the class its based on has those abilities or not... because that's a challenge.
Older games had taunt mechanics that worked as expected and were somehow tough... now you have mobs that simply jump to whatever random person even if they have generated no aggro... or aoe's that hit everyone in the raid even if there is no aoe in the game that should have a 250 foot radius blah blah
I used to raid heal in EQ2... and then instead of healing it became how many cures can I spam per second and I stopped...
So to me its not even just the "difficulty" but the developer concept of how to achieve that difficulty. /shrug
Oh and one of the coolest things I remember in one of my stints in EQ.. was playing my monk. It was after the PoK expansion and I was in some harbour area... I overpulled and ran off a bit to FD. One of the mobs FD'd right beside me and when I stood up we started fighting again...
To me that was just pretty cool... in modern games the same mob would have just hit me with 2000 forms of DoT/bleeds... and then kept attacking me after I FD'd... tho most likely through 50 feet of rock wall with attacks that should have a 4m range limit... or the mob would be in the cliff and attack through FD... that's modern difficulty.
The topic always comes back around to the same question: What is "harder"?
We've seen people insist arguing that traveling slower = harder, fully seriously. Jogging r hard, yes indeed.
Most of the time, when people talk about "too ez", they're discussing leveling content--in some people's opinion, it IS the game, for others it's just a chore to be completed before you get to the Good Stuff at the end.
We've seen people complaining that Quest X is "too hard"--only to be denied by other players, lrn2ply nub. We've seen PVE content 'dumbed down' because to make a low-DPS healer solo-able means that he needs the monsters to be less dangerous than a rock-crushing DPS death machine needs.
Meanwhile, the raiders are laughing at the nubness for insisting leveling content needs to be, or should be, or ever could be, hard. The PVP players are laughing at the raiders, only human opponents could ever be hard. And round and round.
It's all relative. And you have to narrow the focus of the discussion to what your idea of easy/hard is.
Your idea won't be the same as Bob's idea is.
Treating abstract, relative concepts as concretes causes more confusionthan just about anything else on message boards.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
To a point I agree. Thing is that quite a bit of players would not want removal of grind and making combat very actiony.
If that would be what majority wants then action mmrpg's would be even more popular than they are atm.
I think 'old traditional' combat style need improvements and whole genre need to start differentiating between games (it already started but still long way to go).
Besides it is not answer to everything. I mean controls & combat mechanics.
For example TERA has more actiony combat without sticky target and open world mobs difficulty is even more faceroll than your average mmo. Seriously.
Well at least lower-early mid levels , havent played it on higher levels.
Besides comparing those titles you mentioned with mmropg's it invalid.
In open world mobs with stupid AI and combat dependant on twitch - killing is stupidly easy. Seriously it is memorizing stupid AI move pattern on first mob and then you faceroll through all remaining mobs of the same type.
That's one of reason almost every twitch based mmo out there is instanced. Like f.e. Vindictus.
Cause in thight spaces / dungeons you can script certain things, cause player have very finite options (or none at all) where to go and you can script combat / mob behaviour based on where player is standing, etc
In open world you need much more sophisticated AI or difficulty will be close to non-existant.
Well that or you put severe death penalties, lot of mob HP & high damage like it is done in Dark Souls, but then you come back to exact same 'solutions' you're against
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@Icewhite
Agreed.
Hence the proposition of making diffrent kind of servers , so players can choose server with rules / difficulty they want.
Well you're right, but you're also unnecessarily harsh on certain mechanics.
Ninja Gaiden essentially uses a system which is even easier to target with than tab-targeting, yet it manages to be difficult in spite of that.
Dice-rolling doesn't play a huge role in most MMORPGs in my experience. Any critting or blocking usually gets averaged out over time, and instead often serves as a way that the gameplay dynamically serves up reactionary abilities. Granted, dice-rolling definitely dilutes the importance of skill by a little bit in order to achieve this, but it's far less dilution than occurs simply by leveling or getting better gear.
To a degree, MMORPGs will never be purely about player skill because those factors (aka progression) will always exist. But I do feel MMORPGs get into a great groove in endgame, where they're able to socket players into tiers of progression, at which point skill is required to beat well-designed encounters (and in some encounters progress is entirely irrelevant.) The trick is in getting some of that difficulty during the leveling process too (if it's at all time-consuming) so that skilled players can fast track themselves to the end.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
90% of what players consider "dumbing down" is simply removing the stupid inconveniences of the past -- most of which didn't make the game harder in any meaningful or fun way.
Case in point: players whining about fast leveling. Games don't magically become harder or more fun when a developer flips a switch so that leveling requires 10x as much XP. But when the developer flips the switch back off, you have a mysterious contingent of players who insists the game is "easier" and somehow less fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Wow has 3 difficulties of RAID, and that is essentially the same thing. Hard mode raid is extremely challenging and only the top guild (and you can build community & team work all you want with those hard core people) in can even has a chance.
The problem with EQ is not that it is hard, is that it is a time-sink, frustrating and punish unnessarily. (I was there since the beginning so i know).
Today's WOW hard mode raid is NOT easier than many of the encounters in EQ. In fact, many EQ pre-raid dungeons are way easier, particularly if you factor in 50 people camping a spot and helping u kill the boss.
The only difference is that you suffer through wait-times, and non-essential road blocks like corpse runs which make EQ a very boring game and luckily, that kind of days is over.
There's a lot of discussion in here about what the definition of "hard" is in the first place. I think nailing that down is pretty important to the comparison about whether or not MMORPG X is better than MMORPG Y, or whether the games of 10 years ago are better than the games of the present.
I don't know what the proper definition of hard is, but I can say that my two cents are that there are really two incomparable camps of players right now, and there's been a lot of discussion about how they ruin each others' games.
The first group is PVP players that insist as others have mentioned here that you can't truly have a "difficult" encounter with predictable mob AI. This is a fallacy, however, depending on your interpretation of difficult. First, the PVE endgame as it stands today consists almost entirely of raids. I personally can't stand this type of gaming, because the difficulty isn't in the operation of the game itself, it's in the difficulties of managing the individual personalities and capabilities of such a large player contigent into a cohesive, cooperative team. NOT ONLY is that difficult, but it's difficult enough that people get paid good money to exercise that skill in "real-life" jobs. Second, even though the AI is scripted, raid encounters have become sufficiently complex that executing the best-known strategy is still difficult-to-perform maneuver. For instance, many people can juggle 3 balls. Even though the body mechanics of juggling 17 balls are more qualitatively similar to juggling 3 balls than doing jumping jacks, there are far more people who can juggle 3 balls AND do jumping jacks than there are people who can juggle 17 balls. The difference in the difficulty of the actual execution/performance of leveling vs raiding in an MMORPG is the akin to the difference in difficulty of juggling 3 balls vs 17 balls.
In summary, PVE is not difficult in terms of strategy and decision making, with the exception being the lead progression teams that actually develop the strategies that are simply read on FAQ sites and executed by the 99% of players that aren't in the lead progression teams. However the difficulty in planning, social engineering, execution, and performance is shared by all 100% of those players. Hell, even figuring out a reasonably fair loot distribution algorithm could be the topic of a game theorist's PHP thesis.
In contrast, PVE players that insist that PVP is not as hard as raiding are failing to understand that in a game that is fair and balanced, PVP provides an infinitely varied set of circumstances and scenarios which require difficult on-the-spot strategy and tactical decision making that simply isn't found in PVE because of the scripted nature of the AI that dictates one side of the battle. One could argue that a game that is fair and balanced doesn't exist right now because the nature of MMORPGs to provide power upgrades to player characters as a reward for "effort" is a reverse handicap that makes the strong stronger and leave the rest behind, but that's another topic.
The critical element in PVP often isn't whether or not your team has more twitch skill with regards to button-pushing (contrary to popular belief), but whether or not your team has faster situational awareness which can adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances. For instance, I used to do martial arts, and I can tell tens or hundreds of little details that give clues how an opponent fights: Which foot is in front? How is each foot turned? Does the angle from heel-to-butt-to-heel face in the same or opposite direction from their face? What do they do when you switch stances? Do they mirror or pivot when you step side to side? Are their hands generally open or closed? Knowing a larger list probably makes you a better trainer/coach, but might not make you a better fighter. What makes a better fighter is being able to quickly observe all of these things, throw out the information not important to the current fight, and adapt according to the rest. The difficulty in doing that is the same difficulty in doing PVP. Often times, a combatant that has this skill can actually survive with very sloppy execution skill, where as sloppy execution skills in a difficult raid would get you killed.
In summary, PVP is not difficult in terms of planning (the best laid plans oft go to waste as soon as the situation changes), execution, and performance as was the case in PVE, but instead is difficult in terms of there not being a specific strategem which can be read from the collective conscious of the internet and executed perfectly to guarantee a win every time. It's also less difficult than PVE in the sense that maintaining a capable team of 25 is far more than 5x as complicated as maintaining a team of 5 (the target number for most E-sport PVP teams at this time). Instead, those important capabilities from PVE must be replaced by one which quickly responds to ever-changing circumstances that may even never have been experienced before.
These are two very different types of games. A company that seeks to create some future "hard" game to satisfy those of us that want such a game will require us as players to determine which of these types of "hard" we're really interested in.
I have the sneaking suspicion that the answer is almost never going to be "both", and that's why PVP and PVE players often don't get along on game forums
Do you dedicated forum readers read all this? I try but get distracted very quickly, keep it simple, hard mmorpg's where better because, there was something we could take that was better than the rest, give me a mmo where I can “find” something in the world that is unique and god like, old school
Old mmorpgs were better because there was a lot more group content vs solo content. I supposed you could define that as being harder. More grouping meant more players would socialize more. Corpse runs would present opportunities to have a friend, guild or group member, or local to help out. Ofcourse this was back in a pre-social networking era where it felt special to do stuff with other people on the internet. Now there's hundreds of thousands of anyomous entities represent by a string of text and an avatar with apathy for each other.
It is only the ignorant & unaccociated who don't understand this. Honestly, what is more rewarding; playing basketball and beating up on grade schoolers..? Or, playing against kids who play high school basketball.. & beating them?
One is just killing time, the other is a real match with real circumstances on the line.
Let's face it, most of the newbies don't play to be challanged, or as an esport, but just as something to do other than tv.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
You obviously do not understand that fact that just ATTEMPTING something challenging is not rewarding. You have to SUCCESSFULLY complete it to be rewarding.
Thus, 99% of the players are NOT rewarded by Sunwell because they COULD NOT FINISH IT. Surely it rewards the 1%. That is a very bad design for a game.
If being challenging is enough, we should have games that requries solving differential equations, and all sort difficult math. That is challenging right?
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/311902
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
Biased thread by a WoW-lover. In fact, EQ...DAOC....SWG...Shadowbane, and even UO were ALL harder than todays MMOs. Please stop trying to troll my friend.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
LMAO!
No.
Silly thread indeed.
Play games that allow for players to set the rules they wish, i.e. EvE. Wanna kill people in hisec? Feel free, but at the cost of your ship. Wanna scam? Go right ahead. CCP provides it's players with a sandox and guidelines....the rest is up to you. Someone scams you out of 200 mil b/c you didn't read the fine print? Should you complain? Should you ask around?
Oh woes me...what should I do? Oh that's right...I can kill you in game, repeatedly. I can join your corp with an alt, and empty out your corps loot and sell it back to you with a seperate alt. I can join your corp and give your alliance vent/TS info out to all of your enemy's and literally offline all of your equipment and let them steal it all.
The possiblities are endless, b/c CCP understands that players have really only one thing in game...and it isn't isk, ships, power, knowledge...none of it...it's reputation and reputation alone.
Games that empower the players to gather, manage and ultimately protect their assets...understand this. Stop playing games that don't allow you to do this, and you won't notice the lack thereof of difficulty.
Playing: BF4/BF:Hardline, Subnautica 7 days to die
Hiatus: EvE
Waiting on: World of Darkness(sigh)
Interested in: better games in general