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Core mechanics > Story
Fareas
Member Posts: 75
If we say MMORPGS core mechanics are :
-Player interaction(combat and interaction with the world)
-The world(seamless usually = better)
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Ex: SWTOR story
The story itself is the icing on the cake(a gimmick) it might be very tasty at first but when you run out of it you realize the inside of the cake tastes horrible.
Once you are done with the story you are left with the actual part of the game you're supposed to want to stay in and then what about if the story with VO was the thing it focused on at this point in the game it doesn't matter at all.
- Short lasting (story) -heavily focused by SWTOR
- Long lasting (core mechanics) -Not the primary focus
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I think that devs should improve core mechanics to a ridiculous degree. It's what truly matters to any game.
in MMORPG I feel it's our story that truly matters not the one the game gives us.
Comments
And, provided the mechanics were good, your story could be non-existant. Having a good story and bad mechanics can make a game unplayable.
The Mechanics and systems are the foundation you build everything on, if they are flawed then whatever you build upon them is not going to stand the test of time.
That said SWTOR has taken popular mechanics and refined them even more so really people who have enjoyed similar games like WoW and its many man clones should not really take issue with the foundations and mechanics of SWTOR.
In a good MMO core mechanics and story kinda goes hand in hand.
Good core mechanics can´t cover for a lousy story as well as a great story don't make a great game if the mechanics aren´t good enough.
When you start to make a MMO you need to first visualize the world of the game, then you must create the mechanics that makes that world come to life.
Far to many devs just take a world and some already made mechanics and stick them together and that creates a game that makes little sense.
Like STO and WAR. The Star trek world and the game have very little in common and only the names and a few visuals make you feel like you actually are in the same world as Kirk and Spock.
Warhammer is even worse. There they took a world made for P&P RPG and tabletops and tried to make it into Wow. They cut out most of the world and the entire Warhammer feeling, and the basics mechanics just didn´t work.
If you want to make a game similar like Wow you need to create a world that fits those mechanics, like Trion did with Rift. That does not work when you have a existing IP.
I disagree 66.6%, and while I think things such as combat are really importent, 2 of the three things you listed can be improved upon with polish (Combat) and content(World interaction).
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
It's important to state that there is a difference between core mechanics that are bad, and core mechanics that you don't personally like.
Mechanics make the game. The rest is just icing which gets boring over time.
i fused combat with player interaction because thats pretty much what it is, a way to interact with the world. Also I didn't really understand what you disagreed about very well.
Yeah, and core mechanics that are in themselves good but don´t fit in that particular game.
Like that car MMO NC soft had that used trinity combat and had dedicated car healers, the mechanics in itself work but it just got really stupid anyways.
Each game needs the right mechanics to work best, to use the same mechanics for every game no matter what setting you use just gets silly.
In Lord of the rings only Gandalf and Saruman actually used magic but in the game you have plenty of healers and magic is everywhere. It doesn´t fit the world.
The problem is that the publishers want games as close to Wow as possible and it is in many cases a huge misstake. A game needs mechanics that works well with the world and that means that in many cases should the devs stop copy and paste from different games and figure out what fits the game best instead.
It depend on what you mean by combat, if you mean polish of combat at launch vs 6 months from now then what I typed above follows.
If you mean Combat in the sense of the difference between WoW and Vindicdus then I misread. I believe the type of combat you decide to go with is irrelavent so long as its intertaining. I find the EQ/WoW/TOR style of combat intertaining so what you typed (assuming thats what you mean) does not apply to me much because changing the combat would not do as much for me as adding story/choices. Simply put I believe there is more to a game then combat or an interactive world its a mesh of these things and no matter how different a combat to an MMO is it doesn't mean that it will be fun to that individual person.
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
For the most part, i would agree with you, but i have a few things to say.
SWTOR's focus on story isn't a bad thing, and I think that story should be a bigger focus for a lot of MMOs.
The point where games like SWTOR fall short is assuming that the implementation of core mechanics should be the same for their game as it was for WoW.
There isn't a single best way to implement the core mechanics of an MMO, meaning that, while seamless is better to you, it may not matter for everyone or really be the best for every game. Look at GW1 for example, which is heavily instanced, yet doesn't really feel closed in as you might expect (well, its my opinion, whether you all agree or not).
different games can focus on different things. Not every game has to do everything (not that you said anything about this). SWTOR did story...whether that works for them in the long run is for time to tell.
lastly, I think that a different, and most probably incomplete list of features for MMOs to have is this:
exploration
crafting / gathering materials
combat
social (like guilds, player interaction, trading, group events, etc...)
progression of stats (of any kind, be it strength, PvP rank, or even (for some games) how much money you have)
and more if anyone wants to bother thinking about it.
so, yeah, there is more than one way to make an MMO, but MMOs have kind of become formulaic, and that is the problem, not spending time on the wrong thing.
Oh, and yeah...i completely agree with that last line, our story does matter most.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
I have mixed feelings about story, mmos with no stories can exist (sandbox) but most mmorpgs focus around quests which of course involve story to make you feel implied in the world. MMORPGS however are not forced to have a "Main story" I guess it's the whole gigantic story that bugs me, because when you finish it feels like you're finally done. That's not a feeling that should exist in a MMORPG.
Mechanics-driven players seem to invariably "burn out" faster.
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 comment on LOTRO, they get away with it though fairly smartly. You actually don't have health, but morale. Once you run out of moral, you get incapacitated and you have to retreat. No one actually dies.
Now to boost your morale, you have minstrels and rune keepers. Minstrels boosts it with song and tunes, while rune keepers boosts it with the spoke word. There are actually no healers in the game that raises your health. So in a way, it fits perfectly, sorta. Like I said, they get away with it.
For what I play MMO's for, I don't care much at all for dev-driven story. To me, in an MMO story is the lore. Beyond that I'm not a fan of a storyline that defines my char (I especially dislike the 'you're the hero of the universe!' ones.)
So, yes, for me mechanics > storyline all the time. Spend more time on providing deep, polished, complex mechanics and less on telling me how awesome my character is.
I agree with you, I think it's because of the carrot on a stick mentality.
When someone has freedom within a world and doesn't have the arrow pointing him in a direction he feels lost, it's not much of a burn-out but rather that games have been focusing on making it so linear that our own minds reject a game not showing us a carrot.
A Nazgul hits you in the head and you lose morale? Sorry, but I don´t really think that was how it was in the books.
So I don´t agree with you, they should have used some other mechanics, like forcing you to conserve health and auto heal up to max after combat to avoid downtime. The trinity combat is nowhere close to how it was in the books.
Levels and stuff like that is not really a problem in the IP though, so that part they get away with. Gear do matter in the books as well so it is fine too but the whole minstreal stuff just doesn´t feel right to me.
That may be due to mmo's providing less or lower quality mechanics lately.
A game can go one of those 2 ways and some people like storylines while others hate them. I would say it is more mechanics than story there though.
Story is lore, what makes the world turn and tells us what was before the players makes sense of NPCs and places.
Without story the game is just some random stuff.
Or it could just be that MMOs haven't really done anything to change things up mechanically (aside from a few minor attempts and the odd game that isn't a standard fantasy themepark.)
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
It isn´t really the fault of the mechanics in themselves, but most MMOs offer a too similar experience when you play them. That will eventually bore anyone.
The mechanics don´t have "lower" quality now, how canthey do when they are more or less all the same?
I started playing Meridian 59 in '96 and frankly is the mechanics very similar in it and the latests games. They are not worse now, but you can just do the exact same thing in almost every game for so long.
Well my whole point was that when story runs out in a setting like SWTOR aka reaching endgame you don't really get anymore story/choices and no matter how many choices you get you can still run out and then you will be left with the player interaction within the world you have made for the players.
I completely agree that theres much more to a game then combat and sadly we can't like every game there is that's just how we are.
I see your point. But I guess it just doesn't bother me. I actually don't mind the trinity system. I wouldn't mind to see some new things though, but I still enjoy playing games that use the trinity.
The problem for me when it comes to MMOs and games like Skyrim or Morrowind is that I get bored of the combat (so to speak) long before I get bored of the MMO aspects (talking with guildies doing dungeons pvp ect ect) or Story. For me this is almost unavoidable or matter how much you dicide to change up combat, for me I'll be bored after about 100-200 hours of playing in a month or so spand.
For me change your problem with story running out and replace it with getting bored of playing the same core mechanice for 100s of hours and you get the same problem.
I don't think there is really a solution for this beyond simply playing different types of games.
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
Clearly the OP doesn't understand what it means to enjoy a good RPG. Whatever system of virtual dice rolling for combat you're using is irrelevant compared to the need for a good storyline and good presentation. The Old Republic had a semi-decent, if rather bland and generic storyline, but it had great presentation and that's why people bought the game. Same with World of Warcraft and every other massively successful MMORPG.
Don't give me this talk about "icing on the cake" either, if I wanted a game with nothing but core mechanics and no plot I'd be playing Counter Strike or something.
Saying that TOR is a refinement of WoW's core mechanics is controversial, at best.
TOR may have imitated WoW in a lot of ways, but they diverged with the extreme linearity and static world design. WoW is practically a sandbox, compared to TOR. I would say elements like that constitute a large part of a game's core mechanics. Maybe you consider it a refinement, but to me, its more like a gaping chasm of a flaw.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.