The MMO worlds used to be scary. Several people have already talked about this. You didn't do anything without a plan and you were always cautious. It required you to think a little. Now you just run around spamming buttons and watch tons of shit die. There is no danger in MMOs, hence they are easier.
Very few have been "hard" but a lot of games have been labour intensive. Its not hard if it only requires time. Anyone can have time. If it requires skill, its hard, and not everyone has skill. Additionally, harsh death penalty does not increase difficulty - the skill bar. It is merely a punishment and doesn't add to the challenge imo.
The lamest game imaginable would be grindy with harsh death penalties.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
There are no more real mmo's now. All this new stuff is catering to the short attention span customers. Look at the success of games that are out on the smart phone/face book. These new games are chasing WOW and these social games looking at the profits.
Games used to be made by gamers for gamers. Now it is corporations going after gamers wallets. This is what made games now a days what they are.
There are a couple of mmo since WOW that are not hand holding and the old one are still here, if you choose to play these new types of MMO then you only have yourself to blame.
Uh, there's been ONE AAA MMO since WoW came out that was challenging/not a WoW clone.
And no, those old games aren't there anymore, or we'd be playing them.
I wonder if people look at MMOs at a time when they enjoyed them better and start attributing the inevitable decline of interest with them on things like difficulty. Or in other words are people just wearing nostalgia glasses or is game difficulty really so much worse nowdays and as detrimental to current MMOs as some would have you believe?
I'll tell you about my experiences in DAoC when I first started playing it in 2002.
1. Even leveled mobs could kill you if you didn't use your skills wisely. A more secure/guaranteed kill would be a mob 1 con (the color of the mob) lower than you. Fights with even leveled mobs would also take a couple minutes, leaving you endurance drained at the end of the battle. You'd have to rest to regain that endurance for a couple minutes before you could fight another mob. We called this downtime, and grouped with others to minimize downtime and tackle mobs several levels higher than us for the best xp.
In todays MMORPG's, I can tackle mobs several levels higher than me quite easily without any downtime afterwards. The tactics to take down mobs haven't gotten any harder or easier, since the tactics required were always easy. The harder part of knowing how to fight came in groups, and the older games had far more classes to learn in addition to your own, so you can maximize your skills to the benefit of the group. You have less classes to learn in todays games. For example, in DAoC you had over 40 classes you could be, all with 3 different ways they could be built. In todays games you only have a handful, with all classes becoming homeginized.
2. Death penalty. In DAoC, if you died your equipment took damage and you incurred an experience debt. You also took a hit to your stats, which you could cure by visiting a healer. You had to work off the experience debt, which grew with each death before you started gaining xp towards your next level. While this death penalty seems severe to todays standards, it was considered very mild compared to EQ and UO.
3. Getting the best gear was done through crafters. There were special drops in the world, but you almost always got the best gear from crafters. They even enchanted the gear for you, and then spellcrafted it to add stats/effects to them. Glowing, enchanted weapons were extremely rare, unlike in todays games.
4. Getting to max level took a dedicated person a few months of daily grinding to achieve, and that's without trying out alts or standing around socializing. So naturally, it took me a few years before I got my first lvl 50. The journey to max level was fun though, because I was always grouped and socializing.
5. PvP back then was both easier and harder than todays games. It was harder in the sense that it was balanced around having a balanced group. People were good at working together as a group, without voice communication, because they did it every day while leveling. You got to know everyones class just as good as your own, so you worked well together without having to be told what to do. People knew who to target first, how to assist, and etc. However, combat was slower, which allowed you to use your mouse comfortably to click the next ability you wanted to use. In todays PvP, you have so many situational abilities, people don't work together at all, and classes aren't that balanced for 1v1, plus the combat is so fast that it's hard to win fights without vastly outskilling or outgearing your opponents.
6. Raids were rather unimportant in DAoC and mechanically were easy to do. Just tank and spank 100+ man raids. Far easier than todays raids, which has many different mechanics, and where if even 1 person messes up, it can wipe to group.
So in summary, the only things that got harder as the genre grew in age is PvP, because it is so fast paced now, and raids, because there's so many mechanics and is also the endgame.
Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.
let me give you an example...
Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers.
Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.
Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.
Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B. A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to.
Harder= no
More knowledge required= yes
I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one.
There are no more real mmo's now. All this new stuff is catering to the short attention span customers. Look at the success of games that are out on the smart phone/face book. These new games are chasing WOW and these social games looking at the profits.
Games used to be made by gamers for gamers. Now it is corporations going after gamers wallets. This is what made games now a days what they are.
There are a couple of mmo since WOW that are not hand holding and the old one are still here, if you choose to play these new types of MMO then you only have yourself to blame.
Uh, there's been ONE AAA MMO since WoW came out that was challenging/not a WoW clone.
And no, those old games aren't there anymore, or we'd be playing them.
Really, so EQ isn't here no more and Ryzom and EVE,DAOC and what is a wow clone?
There has never been a WOW clone, do you know the meaning of the word clone?
Ah, you mean a MMO that has quests and level progression, if that's the case then you need to stop playing MMO because they all have some sort of progression. Whether it's levelling skills or levelling to, gain skills or questing or levelling crafting they all have it.
Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.
let me give you an example...
Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers.
Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.
Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.
Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B. A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to.
Harder= no
More knowledge required= yes
I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one.
This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.
Unfourtunately when MMORPGs started catering to mass market is when they became easy and casual. That is because the majority in the mass market are lazy low achievers who wants everything on a platter. So the only way to make a hard MMO is to not cater to mass market which means convincing the bean counters, suits and other scum that they will be catering to fewer people, and that is hard.
Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.
let me give you an example...
Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers.
Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.
Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.
Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B. A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to.
Harder= no
More knowledge required= yes
I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one.
This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.
I don't know about EQ, but DAoC has changed since WoW became popular. It now has quests the same way WoW does, and you don't need to group to level anymore. Plus, you can level from 1-50 in a matter of days, instead of years.
Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.
let me give you an example...
Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers.
Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.
Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.
Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B. A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to.
Harder= no
More knowledge required= yes
I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one.
This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.
New EQ1 been changed to EZmode as well. No more corpse retrievals and you can get companions, kind of like swtor. Lol.
For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time. Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious). The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Originally posted by Roxtarr For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time. Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious). The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.
Well put.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
I wonder if people look at MMOs at a time when they enjoyed them better and start attributing the inevitable decline of interest with them on things like difficulty. Or in other words are people just wearing nostalgia glasses or is game difficulty really so much worse nowdays and as detrimental to current MMOs as some would have you believe?
Yes and no.
Some of it is undeniably factual, WoW did ease the restrictions on leveling content pretty dramatically over the years. Blizzard was, after all, looking for the biggest $$$ audience they could grab; shallow learning curve, lack of dramatic consequences for failing, ez cap, eventually ez raiding-entry bars.
It's there. It's also exaggerated; gamers come pre-equipped with Team Hubris t-shirts, and have always been a home for the braggarts and poseurs. Some of them, without a fairly constant source of ego-boo, 733t trophies, just don't feel manly enough, I guess.
It's also a all-time favorite topic of Doom Prophets :P
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.
The WOW mentality: create your character -> get capped in 3 days through a solo campaign-linear quests -> sit the ass in the town until your time to enter an instance arrives -> have fun in multiplayer room -> sit the ass in town again til the next time.
Have ruined MMOs in west forever, there is no hope for western players anymore.
Originally posted by Roxtarr For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time. Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious). The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.
Well put.
I disagree.
Zerging was not an option. Now it's often THE option.
Pug friendly raids? Have you seen that in any old game?
New boss downed the same day it is released. Have you seen that in any old game?
Player at level cap who needs an explanation on how agro works. Have you ever seen that in an old game?
Becouse I have seen that stuff in newer games.
It's ok that you need less time to achieve progress in nowaday's MMOs. Not something I like, but I understand why many players prefer that. But, regardless the amount of time needed, games used to be harder, and I am talking plain difficutly. I am not talking death penalties, time invested, group size or anything like that. I am not even talking about depth. I am talking about how difficult the encounters were. They were harder before.
Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.
let me give you an example...
Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers.
Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.
Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.
Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B. A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to.
Harder= no
More knowledge required= yes
This caught my attention the most early in the thread.. I do believe as this poster has explained that old school MMO's were more about knowledge, then just button pushing.. As a spell caster you really had to know your spells and skill limits.. durations times, etc etc.. And I wanted to add to the above post one more critical area of old school vs current games.. With the exception of raids.. Old school you had to be more ALERT of yourself and your surroundings.. Lazy game play in the past will get you and your group killed quickly..
during the golden age of EQ1 was that around 600- 800 K people were playing MMO's total. That was divided up between a half dozen games. I am sure that if all MMO's would suddenly become "hard" there would still have 400 - 600 K players but there simpley are not "millions" of people interested in that kind of time sink. I think the MMORPG genre has seen it's zenith and in another ten years it be back to a half dozen or so games with less than 1 milllion players playing.
Originally posted by parrotpholk They are easier now for sure. There are many things I hated about the old school. Naked corpse runs being one of them. But the difficulty and the possibility of failure is what made it exciting. It made me more determined and logged in everyday. Now you pretty much breeze through the journey and do some random tank and spank
Who does everyone say naked corpse runs in EQ1 did no one every keep a back up armor set like i did incase i died to help retrive my loot back.
Originally posted by Roxtarr For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time. Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious). The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.
Well put.
I disagree.
Zerging was not an option. Now it's often THE option.
Pug friendly raids? Have you seen that in any old game?
New boss downed the same day it is released. Have you seen that in any old game?
Player at level cap who needs an explanation on how agro works. Have you ever seen that in an old game?
Becouse I have seen that stuff in newer games.
It's ok that you need less time to achieve progress in nowaday's MMOs. Not something I like, but I understand why many players prefer that. But, regardless the amount of time needed, games used to be harder, and I am talking plain difficutly. I am not talking death penalties, time invested, group size or anything like that. I am not even talking about depth. I am talking about how difficult the encounters were. They were harder before.
For example of game being harder a white mob (same lvl) in everquest was acualy quite and even or challenging fight most of the time while in new games such as rift or WoW you can austo attack it to death and loose 5% hp.
Very few have been "hard" but a lot of games have been labour intensive. Its not hard if it only requires time. Anyone can have time. If it requires skill, its hard, and not everyone has skill. Additionally, harsh death penalty does not increase difficulty - the skill bar. It is merely a punishment and doesn't add to the challenge imo.
The lamest game imaginable would be grindy with harsh death penalties.
Dont underestimate the power of harsh death penalty's. Harsh death penalties create immersion aswell as fear sometime it made the game feel much more exciting alot of the time, Playing games with harsher death penalty for long periods of time was much easier than games that didnt have a harsh penalty atleast for me. I could play EQ for 5+ hours stright easy, same thing with Darkfall and not get bored at all, In WoW i would be bored before we made it to the first boss even if it was a raid we never been to, and in GW2 its also the same thing i polay WvW for awhile and get bored after an hour or so (unless i was playing with guildies) soly because there was no immersion it just didnt feel real and i think that come down to death penalties. Ive always felt a great deal more immersed in games that had a harsh death penalty.
That's a good part of the problem but don't tell the NAO generation that.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Again, games weren't 'hard' per se, but they were different. MMO vets are like MTV viewers from 20 years ago - you know, the people who watched it for music. News flash - you're not the target demographic anymore! You're getting older, wondering why nobody is targeting you and your needs anymore. A new generation of MMO gamer has come to the forfront, they are avid consumers and will spend a crap ton of money on whatever's put out. While most of the 'gamers' you used to play with now are married, have jobs and families -you are still here thinking that it's the bad games that drove your friends away - when, nope - Real life did. Developers have to make games that will get attention, appeal to more people and are profitable - and that 'hardcore, classic' jive is nothing more than a grab at a past that is long gone - like MTV that played music.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Originally posted by Roxtarr For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time. Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious). The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.
Well, it's true, early MMO's were designed for players with an abundance of the character traits (dare I call them skills?) of patience, perseverence and persistence, which of course, not really that many players are wired for.
I actually think modern MMO's deliver exactly the quick in and out experience that the majority of the player base favors, it's only the players who wished for a longer term experience in their MMORPGs that really are getting shortchanged.
What you call a timesink, I call gameplay mechanics and we just differ on what they should be and what makes a game "fun" ( a truly over used and misunderstood term if there ever was one)
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
Comments
Very few have been "hard" but a lot of games have been labour intensive. Its not hard if it only requires time. Anyone can have time. If it requires skill, its hard, and not everyone has skill. Additionally, harsh death penalty does not increase difficulty - the skill bar. It is merely a punishment and doesn't add to the challenge imo.
The lamest game imaginable would be grindy with harsh death penalties.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Uh, there's been ONE AAA MMO since WoW came out that was challenging/not a WoW clone.
And no, those old games aren't there anymore, or we'd be playing them.
I'll tell you about my experiences in DAoC when I first started playing it in 2002.
1. Even leveled mobs could kill you if you didn't use your skills wisely. A more secure/guaranteed kill would be a mob 1 con (the color of the mob) lower than you. Fights with even leveled mobs would also take a couple minutes, leaving you endurance drained at the end of the battle. You'd have to rest to regain that endurance for a couple minutes before you could fight another mob. We called this downtime, and grouped with others to minimize downtime and tackle mobs several levels higher than us for the best xp.
In todays MMORPG's, I can tackle mobs several levels higher than me quite easily without any downtime afterwards. The tactics to take down mobs haven't gotten any harder or easier, since the tactics required were always easy. The harder part of knowing how to fight came in groups, and the older games had far more classes to learn in addition to your own, so you can maximize your skills to the benefit of the group. You have less classes to learn in todays games. For example, in DAoC you had over 40 classes you could be, all with 3 different ways they could be built. In todays games you only have a handful, with all classes becoming homeginized.
2. Death penalty. In DAoC, if you died your equipment took damage and you incurred an experience debt. You also took a hit to your stats, which you could cure by visiting a healer. You had to work off the experience debt, which grew with each death before you started gaining xp towards your next level. While this death penalty seems severe to todays standards, it was considered very mild compared to EQ and UO.
3. Getting the best gear was done through crafters. There were special drops in the world, but you almost always got the best gear from crafters. They even enchanted the gear for you, and then spellcrafted it to add stats/effects to them. Glowing, enchanted weapons were extremely rare, unlike in todays games.
4. Getting to max level took a dedicated person a few months of daily grinding to achieve, and that's without trying out alts or standing around socializing. So naturally, it took me a few years before I got my first lvl 50. The journey to max level was fun though, because I was always grouped and socializing.
5. PvP back then was both easier and harder than todays games. It was harder in the sense that it was balanced around having a balanced group. People were good at working together as a group, without voice communication, because they did it every day while leveling. You got to know everyones class just as good as your own, so you worked well together without having to be told what to do. People knew who to target first, how to assist, and etc. However, combat was slower, which allowed you to use your mouse comfortably to click the next ability you wanted to use. In todays PvP, you have so many situational abilities, people don't work together at all, and classes aren't that balanced for 1v1, plus the combat is so fast that it's hard to win fights without vastly outskilling or outgearing your opponents.
6. Raids were rather unimportant in DAoC and mechanically were easy to do. Just tank and spank 100+ man raids. Far easier than todays raids, which has many different mechanics, and where if even 1 person messes up, it can wipe to group.
So in summary, the only things that got harder as the genre grew in age is PvP, because it is so fast paced now, and raids, because there's so many mechanics and is also the endgame.
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I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one.
Really, so EQ isn't here no more and Ryzom and EVE,DAOC and what is a wow clone?
There has never been a WOW clone, do you know the meaning of the word clone?
Ah, you mean a MMO that has quests and level progression, if that's the case then you need to stop playing MMO because they all have some sort of progression. Whether it's levelling skills or levelling to, gain skills or questing or levelling crafting they all have it.
Time for you to stop playing MMOs.
And what AAA MMO do you think is a challenging.
This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.
Unfourtunately when MMORPGs started catering to mass market is when they became easy and casual. That is because the majority in the mass market are lazy low achievers who wants everything on a platter. So the only way to make a hard MMO is to not cater to mass market which means convincing the bean counters, suits and other scum that they will be catering to fewer people, and that is hard.
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I don't know about EQ, but DAoC has changed since WoW became popular. It now has quests the same way WoW does, and you don't need to group to level anymore. Plus, you can level from 1-50 in a matter of days, instead of years.
New EQ1 been changed to EZmode as well. No more corpse retrievals and you can get companions, kind of like swtor. Lol.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Well put.
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Yes and no.
Some of it is undeniably factual, WoW did ease the restrictions on leveling content pretty dramatically over the years. Blizzard was, after all, looking for the biggest $$$ audience they could grab; shallow learning curve, lack of dramatic consequences for failing, ez cap, eventually ez raiding-entry bars.
It's there. It's also exaggerated; gamers come pre-equipped with Team Hubris t-shirts, and have always been a home for the braggarts and poseurs. Some of them, without a fairly constant source of ego-boo, 733t trophies, just don't feel manly enough, I guess.
It's also a all-time favorite topic of Doom Prophets :P
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.
The WOW mentality: create your character -> get capped in 3 days through a solo campaign-linear quests -> sit the ass in the town until your time to enter an instance arrives -> have fun in multiplayer room -> sit the ass in town again til the next time.
Have ruined MMOs in west forever, there is no hope for western players anymore.
I disagree.
Zerging was not an option. Now it's often THE option.
Pug friendly raids? Have you seen that in any old game?
New boss downed the same day it is released. Have you seen that in any old game?
Player at level cap who needs an explanation on how agro works. Have you ever seen that in an old game?
Becouse I have seen that stuff in newer games.
It's ok that you need less time to achieve progress in nowaday's MMOs. Not something I like, but I understand why many players prefer that. But, regardless the amount of time needed, games used to be harder, and I am talking plain difficutly. I am not talking death penalties, time invested, group size or anything like that. I am not even talking about depth. I am talking about how difficult the encounters were. They were harder before.
This caught my attention the most early in the thread.. I do believe as this poster has explained that old school MMO's were more about knowledge, then just button pushing.. As a spell caster you really had to know your spells and skill limits.. durations times, etc etc.. And I wanted to add to the above post one more critical area of old school vs current games.. With the exception of raids.. Old school you had to be more ALERT of yourself and your surroundings.. Lazy game play in the past will get you and your group killed quickly..
I miss DAoC
Who does everyone say naked corpse runs in EQ1 did no one every keep a back up armor set like i did incase i died to help retrive my loot back.
For example of game being harder a white mob (same lvl) in everquest was acualy quite and even or challenging fight most of the time while in new games such as rift or WoW you can austo attack it to death and loose 5% hp.
Dont underestimate the power of harsh death penalty's. Harsh death penalties create immersion aswell as fear sometime it made the game feel much more exciting alot of the time, Playing games with harsher death penalty for long periods of time was much easier than games that didnt have a harsh penalty atleast for me. I could play EQ for 5+ hours stright easy, same thing with Darkfall and not get bored at all, In WoW i would be bored before we made it to the first boss even if it was a raid we never been to, and in GW2 its also the same thing i polay WvW for awhile and get bored after an hour or so (unless i was playing with guildies) soly because there was no immersion it just didnt feel real and i think that come down to death penalties. Ive always felt a great deal more immersed in games that had a harsh death penalty.
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If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Well, it's true, early MMO's were designed for players with an abundance of the character traits (dare I call them skills?) of patience, perseverence and persistence, which of course, not really that many players are wired for.
I actually think modern MMO's deliver exactly the quick in and out experience that the majority of the player base favors, it's only the players who wished for a longer term experience in their MMORPGs that really are getting shortchanged.
What you call a timesink, I call gameplay mechanics and we just differ on what they should be and what makes a game "fun" ( a truly over used and misunderstood term if there ever was one)
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