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Turned off by too many features
Daranar
Member UncommonPosts: 392
Anyone else notice that when a game promises an abundance of features it often is a let down? Think of the great games such as EQ, WoW, or DAoC. None of these came out yapping about a million different features. But what they did do is give total freedom within the features included. DAoC will never be beat in PvP, EQ kicked ass in group play and raids and well everything else (will always be that guy living in 1999 lol) and WoW...well it did marketing well lol...but honestly it was a great solid game.
The point im attempting to make in so many words is that so many games now come out offering some unique class or combat system (which never is unique), player housing, player cities or even nations, create governments, have pets, the ability to craft homes, ships, custom underwear, and of course "Revolutionary" or some other bull shit adjective to describe a half hearted PvP system. While features are great, you can realistically do this all in one game! Or can you? And before I go any further you may suggest some games that did it, and i will respectfully disagree to all except one: Star Wars Galaxies. Never have I seen a crafting system as awesome as SWG, or a variety of classes and levling system that i thoroughly enjoyed, or such an intense pet system, or an incredible system of housing and player run towns, not to mention the economy. But what this all leads me to say is gaming has become so corporate now that its all about turning a quick profit (as we see with SWTOR) and then virtually abandoning the game. Because of this companies promise us amazing features that are as shallow as my cat's water dish.
So if you are going to make a great MMORPG, create great in depth systems. Stop half assing features so that you can cram pack them at launch. Thats what expansions are for! Give me a great crafting system I can get lost in, not just giving me 1 or 2 housing schematics so that you can say you have player housing. Give me 10 starting classes to choose from instead of 4 so you can add a half-asses PvP system that no one is going to play. Wake up devs!
Sorry, Rant Over.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
Comments
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
I agree that it's all about turning a quick buck.
Features are fish hooks. The more you have the more likely you are to catch more fish (box buyers). It's the new norm. Over-extend the feature set, sell a ton of boxes, shove the money in the bank, then 3 months in reviews start popping up that the game is chocked full of features that don't really deliver what is expected.
But by that point, it doesn't matter. The money is already in the bank with plenty more to be made with the new expansion, chocked full of features... (rinse and repeat).
One other situation that I see is that Indies get "large hot dog" disease. They want to prove that they can deliver an amazing feature set just like the AAA devs, but in the end everything falls apart as a buggy mess. Pumping a big ego is almost as bad as trying to make a quick buck, but just as damaging to one's reputation.
I still have hope for The Repopulation.. Most of the features they have promised are already in game. Obviously I could still be let down but I still have hope!
"You are all going to poop yourselves." BillMurphy
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
Oh, give it a break already. You don't like sandboxes. We get it.
Tell me again how big a failure Eve is.
( Note to self-Don't say anything bad about Drizzt.)
An acerbic sense of humor is NOT allowed here.
There are some features I just tune out really because they never exist in a way they want you to believe they are.
Crafting: It's always "Collect X amount of Y unrefined resource to put together Z final product." Would be cool to have patterns and be able to choose the materials you make it with.
Class System: It's always "Skill trees or Freedom based on your stats" and never a free for all, and when it is a free for all, it's complete chaos or players just follow a pattern anyways. Would be cool to have skills just adjust depending on stats.
PvP: It's the same thing "Scaling PvP/FvF/WvW/GvG/FFA". Would be cool to have new modes of combat more than CTF, Kill 'em All, and Oddball.
Not much new comes out because players like a certain amount of familiarity.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Then perhaps instead of marketing these half-assed features, they need to actually come up with something revolutionary to market. Taking a system thats over used and adding your "twist" isn't revolutionary. Rift kept talking about their class system as revolutionary...but it really wasn't. It was shit we have seen over and over with a bit of a twist. When Pepsi came out, it was revolutionary, when Pepsi Max came out, it was just a stunt...im tired of stunts. I do feel it is a fair comparison, someone needs to step up and really take MMOs to the next level like EQ and UO did.
Of course I say all this in hopeful anticipation of the MMO Evil Giant's future release, EQ Next. SOE is of course claiming they will do what EQ1 did, revolutionize Multiplayer RPGs. They have afterall scratched the game twice to avoid becoming just another cookie cutter MMO. Here's to hopes for a change in the norm.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
I like you. +1 an a beer on me.
But Pepsi was a Coke clone....
( Note to self-Don't say anything bad about Drizzt.)
An acerbic sense of humor is NOT allowed here.
Let see .. it was released what .. 7-8 years ago .. and it is stuck at what ... less than 500k players after all these years.
Even MMO failure like TOR has more players .. and sold 2M boxes in its first month.
You need to work on your comparisons. Pepsi wasn't revolutionary, it was just a new twist on Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, and Coke that came before it but I understand what you are saying.
I just think it's a little more complicated than saying come up with something revolutionary. If it was that easy, we wouldn't be having this discussion I guess.
You can't be serious, EVE has steadily grown over it's lifetime, that growth has been continuous, the studio itself went from an unknown indie into practically mainstream due to it's managament of that game. Very few games or studios have had such a track record in this genre.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
DAoC did not have the best PvP. I have no idea why people state so. It was ultimately just a gigantic Battleground.
No thanks. I want some true World PvP, .e.g, multiple factions fighting over the resources of the land, the ability to fortify any area, the ability to sneak inside an opposing faction's main city etc.
I'm sick of this instanced garbage.
Continuous growth to a small sub? So what? EQ reached 500k much faster. Do you think a company prefer quick growth or slow growth?
"sad" from your point of view. "Convenience" is good, from my point of view.
LFD/instance travel .. .is a preference. I prefer the. You don't.
In fact, TOR will be a much better game if it is made an online RPG, instead of a MMO.
Hmm this sandbox I'm playing has twice as many players as WoW.
First of all Eve is in a genre (space sim-like) that isn't nearly as popular as the Fantasy RPG , second what companies want is steady income that doesn't drastically drop. Growth is good, whether it's slow or fast. Third you're moving the goal posts here, you were trying to say EVE wasn't successful.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Shoo, shoo! Your beloved AoW isn't a sandbox. That's for a start. Plus F2P never annonce current number of active and paying players. Only number of registrated players. And that is a complete BS if you ask me.
P.S. About EVE. It is successful sandbox game. Very niche game, but still successful. Sad thing is that it's the only one i can remember (arguably you can add Anarchy Online) as a successful sandbox MMORPG. Exceptio regulum probat.
wushu isnt a sandbox and im so dissapointed in how many people just dont know what a sandbox is.
also wushu was quite dead while i was in, for a game with twice as many...oh wait your probably counting all the free chinese players in china...twice as many free players then im sure.
Sandboxes are a hodgepodge mess (eve excluded) because all major development studios are an have been going after WOW for the last decade, and failing.
Only people who care about sandboxes are indy developers who bite of WAY more than they can chew, and often launch years before they are ready to keep their funding. Its sad i know. Sandbox deserves a few more large budget games, at least one.
Blantant lies. It's okay though. Massively, IGN, MMOhut, Ten-ton hammer, and mmoprg.com all disagree with you.
edit- Forbes disagrees too.
Must have missed all that sandbox getting lost in wushus linear storyline quest hub mechanics.
Yeah all those sources are wrong. Sorry.
Just because they let you choose your skills doesnt make it a sandbox.
Sandbox is a new buzzword unfortunately, and many are going to try to use it to their advantage. Snadboxes do not have linear storylines and quest hubs...nor do they have NPC factions you have to join, while participating in their NPC storyline spying ect.... i dont care what a financial magazine says....and gaming magazines are almost always wrong about everything...
keep livin the dream though if it suits you i guess.
And this shows how little you know about MMO's...as sub numbers aren't the absolute deciding factor in the quality and success of a game. It's been running with increasing sub numbers (P2P mind you) for 7 or 8 years tells it's success alone...as most of the types last 6 months to maybe a year or so these days before merging servers, going F2P, or shutting down all together.
They may get high sub numbers...but only briefly before falling apart.
The biggest problem with newer MMOs is that they want to appease everyone. In doing this, then end up appeasing noone. You will never get a PvE lover to play well with a PvP lover. It's a totally different mindset. You may find some people that like to do both, they're out there, but in my experience the majority of players are one way or the other. I personally am a PvE player, but I do like to PvP. I will never play a game that is PvP focused for very long.
DAoC is the only game that was largely catagorized as PvP, but I find that kind of PvP different than what we have in today's games. In DAoC, you had to fight for your PvE content and bonuses. Which made me want to PvP. Even while playing PvP, the little things counted in DAoC. Not being able to see who you're fighting was actually a big bonus to me. If you think about it, that adds alot to immersion, since irl you almost never know who you're fighting other than thier affiliation and sometimes you don't even know that. Fighting over actual "property" that you felt was yours, and really it was if your guild owned the keep, was also a big bonus. Someone would attack my guild's keep and it made me feel obligated, even though I don't really like to PvP, to show up and rain blows down upon people trying to take what was ours.
I think companies would do alot better if they focused on one aspect of a game. I can think back to a handful of titles to say I'm proud to say I played (and I've played pretty much ANY MMO since 1991, at least a month) and had a great time doing so. Almost every single one of them was focused on something specific. For me personally, the focus of the games are PvE. Neverwinter Nights, Everquest, Final Fantasy 11, World of Warcraft, Rift, and Dark Age of Camelot are my top picks out of the numerous MMOs I've played. Almost all of them are focused on PvE. They do have PvP, but it's not the big focus imho. One of those games, WoW, has done a great job of mixing PvE and PvP, that noone else can seem to duplicate (and they've all tried).
World of Warcraft is really like two separate games really. There's the PvE side of WoW, with the storyline, questing, and raids. There's the PvP side of WoW, with the battlegrounds, arenas, and Open World. Yes there is Open World PvP, and not always on PvP servers. WoW seems to put as much attention to one side as the other. All others seem to focus more on one side or the other.
Rift, another game I am currently playing, has PvP, but I haven't done more than maybe 5 battlegrounds or PvP rifts. In my opinion, Rift is a PvE game and PvP was an afterthought. I know they have focused alot into the PvP side of things, but most people I know don't even touch it. It's not to say it isn't bad, it just seems the crowd that Rift draws is PvE oriented.
hear ye, hear ye!
wow was such a great game sniff.
There are people who play games and then there are gamers.
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