Back to the roots?. Really?.. Where would those roots be?.. UO ? EQ? DAoC? where? From my experience, soft penalties came later.
Even single player games used to have fewer check points. You had to play through the entire level and then beat the boss to continue. And that was if you still had lives left.. lose all of them and its back to level one.
You pulled out Civilization earlier as an example, So I will use it again.. what happens if you lose a fight. You lose the army and you will have to rebuild that army and you might even have to do it with less resources than before.
When you died in Super Mario Bros,dying reset the level you were on, which you immediately started playing again.
When you died in nearly every early PC game, it was a reset back to your previous save.
When you die in IWBTG and similar hyper-challenging games, it's an instant reset which sends you back maybe 20 seconds tops (usually 0-5 seconds, because that's how fast you die.)
None of these pre-MMORPG games sent you to a shallow purgatory because you failed. There's just no purpose to that type of mechanic.
Your examples are all different from corpse runs in that you are still actively engaged in the core gameplay where the deepest decisions are found.
Civilization is about more than military decisions, and the core game continues if you let an army get wiped out. Importantly, the game is basically back-to-back interesting decisions. If you have fewer decisions in a turn, turns are shorter. So the pace of meaningful decisions doesn't slow just because you lose an army.
You didnt answer my question of what those roots were..
As for mario.. you were still set back to level one if you lost all lives or had to turn off the game other than that you just repeated what I said.
Civilization... or any grand strategy game. This is more what I want my MMOs to be like.. having other stuff to think about rather than puzzle platforming and action combat.. This is why I like EvE for instance... plenty of other stuff to do besides fighting and plenty of ways to get back even after you lost pretty much everything.
And if you lose a fight in a grand strategy game you are limited in your actions after.. you have less units to move and less cities requireing/allowing actions to help you fight back. On top of that you are also punished for winning poorly.. You may win a battle but have many losses.
Not having failure as an option is why I never complete grand strategy games.. at some point I just grow too powerful and I there is no chance of me being in forced into a fight I cannot win with ease. In stead I start over and try a different strategy and see if I can get to that point even sooner. That is my WIN scenario.. the most efficient first 50 turns. or get to suppremacy in the least amount of moves.
It creates the right level of fear to get it right.
So now we're supposed to fear our games?
Well, it'll certainly make you complain so much more loudly about any death-to-die-roll you may experience.
We are supposed to:
Fear our game
Get frustrated with our game
Feel pain from our game
Fight through tedium to prove our manhood in game
Lol .. aren't we sarcastic today?
Seriously the only thing we are "supposed to" .. in our games .. is to have fun.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
Look I know its not for everyone. But it is important in the flow of a story and that is why it is important to me and many others. We are likely in the minority but we wont accept that every game has to be aimed at a demographric that excludes us.
What story? There is no story in corpse run.
And more importantly, you can decide "not to accept" anything but there is little you can do about it. You don't think there will be niche games for corpse run, do you?
No story?.. you cant say that.. its a reason for going somewhere and doing something.. story grows from there.. In any good story telling there is a point or several points where the protagonist is brought low in some way, motivating him. I will agree that failing to complete an objective and perhaps suffering ridicule is often used in this way. But in many other cases it greater setbacks.
As for what I can do. Well I can keep supporting the MMOs that I think I are good and not waste my time on what I consider to be boring shallow reward fests.. And I can keep advocating the mechanics I think are good in any forum I can be heard.
Im pretty sure there will be another game with corpse running in it. Cant say if it will be any good and I certainly dont think its a fix all solution.. As in: Oh all these games would be so much better if only we had to go and get our corpses back every time we died.
But I do think that success with little to no adversity is tedious. It could be a contributing factor in the low player retention in new games. Or it could not. Wont know until we test it.
That is another reason I advocate for these things. To get more diverse games. So we can all have a game we can enjoy. Instead of how it is now where almost every game is aiming for the center mass of the MMOinterested demographic.
Look I know its not for everyone. But it is important in the flow of a story and that is why it is important to me and many others. We are likely in the minority but we wont accept that every game has to be aimed at a demographric that excludes us.
What story? There is no story in corpse run.
And more importantly, you can decide "not to accept" anything but there is little you can do about it. You don't think there will be niche games for corpse run, do you?
No story?.. you cant say that.. its a reason for going somewhere and doing something.. story grows from there.. In any good story telling there is a point or several points where the protagonist is brought low in some way, motivating him. I will agree that failing to complete an objective and perhaps suffering ridicule is often used in this way. But in many other cases it greater setbacks.
Lol .. that is a story?
So .. oh .. i am going to farm act 3 keep in Diablo 3 is a story because "its a reason for going somewhere and doing something"?
Give me a break. I suppose you can classify everything as stories, but that would be ultraly boring. I am talking about stories like those in Bioshock Infinite or Dishonored, not some random internet dude, whom i don't care about, go somewhere just so he can pick some items up from the ground.
Lol ya i miss them i rember a 12 hour CR in plane of growth raid was about half way done then the puller aggroed about half the zone . after meny tries to get our corpses Damn protectors we had to find a few kind druids to corpse pull our bodys to zone in . one after another we would zone in and grab our stuff and zone out took us forever with 40 .
For every memory I have of corpse runs with friends building stronger community I have just as many if not more of people bailing after a hard fight that would make corpse recovery near impossible.
I don't know why and maybe it's me but I just don't do small group content with personal friends much in MMO's anymore. And this is coming from a person who still raids with a fixed guild group. When I do group I tend to do PUG's for which corpse runs are a nightmare.
So unless someone can create a game that can bring back those strong personal relationship building experiences corpse runs are more a hinderance than a benefit. And no I don't think removing corpse runs is the reason for the lack of community. I just think that the way people play MMO's is very different than it was even 5-10 years ago. People just don't sit down for 6-10 hour dedicated play sessions anymore and are more inclined to just move on than try and fight though a tough encounter.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
In MMOs it should always be about PvP. (to some degree - a bit of hyperbole, sorry). Or PwithP.. It should always be people in the focus.
What I mean is you compare yourself to others all the time even if two people have both achieved the same level or boss kill, they start comparing when they achieved those landmarks or how they achieved them.
Oh and you should feel like you are playing with other people. It should not feel like they could just as easily be replaced by NPCs.. I mean; what is the point of the game being online if not to interact with others in some way?
And I dont want to play through the same experience as everyone else.. once I hear about how someone played through a game it cheapens the experience for me when I see Im going through the exact same progress.. and during that progress I might hear a similar story again and again and again.. so when I finally get to the interesting part I feel like I've already done it.. because people talk about overcomming bosses.. In games where you get derailed by a corpse run or item losses or whatever your story will diferentiate from that of others. And people will talk about that time they lost all their stuff and had to claw their way back in the game or how they had to sneak through 5 different zones to get their stuff back.
Im not a masochist. But I see the plot of these linear stories coming a mile away..
Originally posted by jdlamson75 For those who enjoy the challenge of having to retrieve your corpse, I'm with you. For everyone else who wants easy mode, I'll get right to work on a game that plays for you. That way, you can spend more time on MMO forums complaining about how the game is still too inconvenient for you.
No need, theres already a decades worth of mmorpgs with fluffybunny death mechanics those guys can explore...
Oh nvm, I forgot those games usually have a lifespan of 2months each due to the lack of consequence or timesinks.
Also found it funny that someone brought up mario, and failed to realise that the mario games death penalty is usually far more severe then anything we see in todays mmos
I am under no illusion that we will see corpse runs again anytime soon in a "AAA" mmo, however my hope is that some developer will soon realise what they gave up by completly removing consequence from the mix.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
We weren't talking about PvE either. Were talking about the only thing your supposed to do in a game is have fun. I disagree with that notion. Sometimes setbacks, challenges and other things are not going to be 100% fun and reward without challenge becomes hallow.
The reason I brought up basketball was to show that during some point of games they are not meant to be fun. The fact that playing a whole season only to lose every single time in the playoffs was not 100% fun. Especially the losing part. But if I had won it would have been worth it. It doesn't matter if those were real players (pvp) or androids(pve). But if I won every year just by showing up because the challenge was gone it would get boring no matter what trophy I was given.
Also found it funny that someone brought up mario, and failed to realise that the mario games death penalty is usually far more severe then anything we see in todays mmos
Hmm I brought it up first specificly pointing that out.. Are you perhaps refering to Axehilts reply where he only noted the soft penalty of restarting the same level?
Because Mario and the like were basicly 3 strikes you are out perma death with the possibiity of earning extra lives.
Atleast corpse runs offer the possibilty of playing to regain your stuff. So that is already softer than it used to be.
Might be that most people that played arcade games and what came later never actually completed them.. But they still loved playing them.
Agent Smith: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
We weren't talking about PvE either. Were talking about the only thing your supposed to do in a game is have fun. I disagree with that notion. Sometimes setbacks, challenges and other things are not going to be 100% fun and reward without challenge becomes hallow.
The reason I brought up basketball was to show that during some point of games they are not meant to be fun. The fact that playing a whole season only to lose every single time in the playoffs was not 100% fun. Especially the losing part. But if I had won it would have been worth it. It doesn't matter if those were real players (pvp) or androids(pve). But if I won every year just by showing up because the challenge was gone it would get boring no matter what trophy I was given.
And some people enjoy endurance sports while others like sprints.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
We weren't talking about PvE either. Were talking about the only thing your supposed to do in a game is have fun. I disagree with that notion. Sometimes setbacks, challenges and other things are not going to be 100% fun and reward without challenge becomes hallow.
The reason I brought up basketball was to show that during some point of games they are not meant to be fun. The fact that playing a whole season only to lose every single time in the playoffs was not 100% fun. Especially the losing part. But if I had won it would have been worth it. It doesn't matter if those were real players (pvp) or androids(pve). But if I won every year just by showing up because the challenge was gone it would get boring no matter what trophy I was given.
You can disagree all you want. If my entertainment is not 100% fun, i am going somewhere else. Challenges are fun, as long as you can try again, and the actual gameplay while trying to beat the challenge is fun (i.e. good combat).
Basketball is a bad example. Video games are not sports .. they are entertainment products, like movies & books. I don't play sports precisely because it is not 100% fun ... i will go biking for my health, but that is a poor substitute for true entertainment.
Miss them, I do not. For players with lots of friends or a solid guild, they weren't so bad but for the solo player it was often a bloody nightmare getting to your body. The joy of having your gear disappear because it took too long, or dying multiple times and deleveling was nothing remotely fun. Getting gouged by a necro to summon your corpse if you were really screwed (like getting knocked off the damn boat when it zoned) and then begging for a cleric to rez.....no thanks.
Don't worry. I doubt SOE will be so boneheaded to put in corpse run in EQN. It is F2P anyway, so you can always try it out.
And if they indeed go against the trend and put something like that in EQN, there are plenty of other games, and entertainment. I will see (again, F2P is great .. i will keep an open mind and try it) if EQN is fun for me. But there is no great loss if not. I don't have time for all the gameS i want to play anyway.
You didnt answer my question of what those roots were..
As for mario.. you were still set back to level one if you lost all lives or had to turn off the game other than that you just repeated what I said.
Civilization... or any grand strategy game. This is more what I want my MMOs to be like.. having other stuff to think about rather than puzzle platforming and action combat.. This is why I like EvE for instance... plenty of other stuff to do besides fighting and plenty of ways to get back even after you lost pretty much everything.
And if you lose a fight in a grand strategy game you are limited in your actions after.. you have less units to move and less cities requireing/allowing actions to help you fight back. On top of that you are also punished for winning poorly.. You may win a battle but have many losses.
Not having failure as an option is why I never complete grand strategy games.. at some point I just grow too powerful and I there is no chance of me being in forced into a fight I cannot win with ease. In stead I start over and try a different strategy and see if I can get to that point even sooner. That is my WIN scenario.. the most efficient first 50 turns. or get to suppremacy in the least amount of moves.
The roots were pre-MMORPG games. All of them. Any of them. Pick one if you want; chances are high that it didn't involve excessive death penalty. All RPGs basically used saved/load and let you instantly get back to playing the game.
Civilization's density of interesting decisions is in some ways unreplicable in an MMO. Online strategy MMOs get reasonably close, but their pacing inevitably is off, either forcing you to go offline while you wait for resources (which is fine, since your time in the game consists of making all the interesting decisions then leaving to do other things) or to stay online 24/7 micromanaging all the stuff you have going on (which is a complete pain in the ass, especially since failure to micro things results in you losing everything to another player.)
As I mentioned before, having fewer options is irrelevant because it doesn't slow the pace of interesting decisions. If turns were a fixed duration -- say 3 minutes -- then that might be perfect for moving a large army but once your army was gone you'd have big periods of inaction and it'd be boring.
Incidentally that's exactly why multiplayer TBS games fail: one player taking long turns while the other has short turns, and so even in a simultaneous-move system (which is really the only workable option) you end up waiting forever if you're the person with the short turns. The exception being asynchronous TBS games like Hero Academy where you can take as long or short as you want and the game isn't really intended to be played live -- it's basically oldschool PBEM TBS on smartphones.
I highly doubt you "never fail" in grand strategy games like Civilization unless you're (a) playing really bad grand strategy games, or (b) playing on a wimpy difficulty level. Certainly some of them have awkward mechanics which prevent a won game from finishing in a reasonable number of turns, but that's not too common, or it's intentional (Civ5 seems to want to simulate the true difficulty of conquering the entire world while maintaining happiness; you can easily conquer a few nearby civs but beyond a certain point happiness is prohibitively penalized -- but honestly I feel like that's sort of part of the unique challenge of the game, and it's something you end up strategizing around.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't miss corpse runs themselves I miss the social aspect that it brought. If not for corpse runs I may have never met my wife to be who needed the service of a necromancer to summon her corpse to zone. Were still together 11 years later happy as can be.
I'll have you note that life didn't punish you because you lost the basketball game. You didn't have to do a corpse run. I would assume no one kicked you in the junk to teach you a lesson. The punishment of losing was not being rewarded. Dying in an mmo is like losing your basketball game - you don't get the reward and you feel bad for not succeeding.
No one here, to my knowledge, has suggested that not winning (e.g.: dying) should be rewarded. They are suggesting that extra and additional punishment for failing, just for the purpose of driving home what a super loser you were, is over the top and unnecessary. Losing the game was bad enough.
If your coach punished you for losing, even though you tried your hardest, did it make you a more skilled player? There is a tangible motivation to avoiding punishment that is certain, but it is demotivational as opposed to encouraging. More practice is encouraging. A condescending kick to the junk is not.
Honestly, I wasn't really talking about a corpse run. I was talking about games not being 100% fun. With MMORPG there are certain aspects of gaming that don't have to be fun. Sometimes its nice to accomplish things or solve problems that suck at the time but working with someone else becomes a good memory.
But as far as basketball. Was I punished? No. Did I have to endure things I hated like practice, losing, bad calls, physical pain? Yes.
Just like punishment and challenge doesn't always equal fun neither does convenience. For me having games that don't use the advantages that MMORPG's have are horrible. Making a MMORPG a single player game only highlights the horrible combat, difference making MMORPG's have these day.
You didnt answer my question of what those roots were..
As for mario.. you were still set back to level one if you lost all lives or had to turn off the game other than that you just repeated what I said.
Civilization... or any grand strategy game. This is more what I want my MMOs to be like.. having other stuff to think about rather than puzzle platforming and action combat.. This is why I like EvE for instance... plenty of other stuff to do besides fighting and plenty of ways to get back even after you lost pretty much everything.
And if you lose a fight in a grand strategy game you are limited in your actions after.. you have less units to move and less cities requireing/allowing actions to help you fight back. On top of that you are also punished for winning poorly.. You may win a battle but have many losses.
Not having failure as an option is why I never complete grand strategy games.. at some point I just grow too powerful and I there is no chance of me being in forced into a fight I cannot win with ease. In stead I start over and try a different strategy and see if I can get to that point even sooner. That is my WIN scenario.. the most efficient first 50 turns. or get to suppremacy in the least amount of moves.
The roots were pre-MMORPG games. All of them. Any of them. Pick one if you want; chances are high that it didn't involve excessive death penalty. All RPGs basically used saved/load and let you instantly get back to playing the game.
Civilization's density of interesting decisions is in some ways unreplicable in an MMO. Online strategy MMOs get reasonably close, but their pacing inevitably is off, either forcing you to go offline while you wait for resources (which is fine, since your time in the game consists of making all the interesting decisions then leaving to do other things) or to stay online 24/7 micromanaging all the stuff you have going on (which is a complete pain in the ass, especially since failure to micro things results in you losing everything to another player.)
As I mentioned before, having fewer options is irrelevant because it doesn't slow the pace of interesting decisions. If turns were a fixed duration -- say 3 minutes -- then that might be perfect for moving a large army but once your army was gone you'd have big periods of inaction and it'd be boring.
Incidentally that's exactly why multiplayer TBS games fail: one player taking long turns while the other has short turns, and so even in a simultaneous-move system (which is really the only workable option) you end up waiting forever if you're the person with the short turns. The exception being asynchronous TBS games like Hero Academy where you can take as long or short as you want and the game isn't really intended to be played live -- it's basically oldschool PBEM TBS on smartphones.
I highly doubt you "never fail" in grand strategy games like Civilization unless you're (a) playing really bad grand strategy games, or (b) playing on a wimpy difficulty level. Certainly some of them have awkward mechanics which prevent a won game from finishing in a reasonable number of turns, but that's not too common, or it's intentional (Civ5 seems to want to simulate the true difficulty of conquering the entire world while maintaining happiness; you can easily conquer a few nearby civs but beyond a certain point happiness is prohibitively penalized -- but honestly I feel like that's sort of part of the unique challenge of the game, and it's something you end up strategizing around.)
I might fail a few times till I figure it out.. but then I usually fail at the start. Takes me a few tries to find something that works and then I basicly concentrate for 50 turns or so and then I see check mate in 100 turns of micro management. Ahead in tech and ahead in power.. I could only lose these games by someone slipping a wonder victory past me when Im too far away conquering someone else. This has happened to me once. Might have happened more but I play for the early game.
The diplomacy is shallow and awfully predictable and exploitable. And going for a science/wonder/diplo victory is just so tedious.
The only dificulty after figuring out the game is from a random events such as resource allocation and stuff like ancient ruins in Civ.. is it a horde of barbarians or a wonderful piece of tech or a settler.. You might be punished for risking it or you may be rewarded.. A tiny bit of unpredictability to spice things up..
I will admit I was baiting you to respond by being deliberatly simplistic and perhaps extreme when I asked how you saw things.
Anyway, about focus and what happens when you die. Well I wanted to know what you meant by focus.. Is it like: "The Hardcore MMO™ - The game with EXITING Corpse Runs and some other stuff", or did you mean the developers shouldnt spend any thought on what happens to your characters when they die in their game.. I mean come on.. its been an important part of games forever. What happens when a knight takes a pawn or when the ghost catch pacman.
It is definatly about pacing though on that we agree 100%, although we may disaggree on the merits of actually having to travel in the world over teleporting everywhere.
I hope the red text isnt too hard to reed.. didnt feel green was distinct enough with you using turqoise though.
Weird that you'd address the "not about action" point by saying you didn't see the relevance. I mean you pretty much cited the exact reason it was worded that way earlier, by mentioning a preference for slower pacing (because it's not about a game being action, it's about a game not ceasing its stream of interesting decisions.)
Are you also attempting to bait a response by saying everything "should be considered to be PVP"? Because there are more players interested solely in PVE than there are MMO PVPers. Fights are puzzles to be solved -- they don't need to reflect "real" (PVP-like) combat situations (in fact that imposes an undesirable limitation to the types of bosses which can exist.)
The word focus was used in a sentence, implying what it means: that a game should focus on providing deep/interesting challenges rather than expend extra effort building out its penalties. Basically if you have 500 dev hours to do something in a game, why would you spend them increasing a game's penalties when you could spend them increasing a game's depth instead? The latter will make the game deeper (a more interesting challenge) while the former will simply make the game more penalizing to play. Better to create the richer game than the penalizing one.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Why allow the player to die at all if that's the case? Corpse runs were not so excessive compared to the old, carry the corpse to the local church if you didn't have a high enough level priest in your group, pen and paper model that all of these games were created to mimic. And even that was not that bad in comparison to total character re-roll death, which in reality would be the real penalty in any kind of actual simulation of a somewhat real world. But all of these things served to add just a little element of danger and consequence to a players actions, and that danger and consequence served to make players stop and think before making certain decisions, and that's what playing a role as a being in an alternate universe should be about.
When you take away the consequence you take away the role-playing, and once you take that away you are no longer playing an RPG, you are just playing a game.
But I can understand why you think the way you do.
Why allow the player to die? Well because for the way MMORPGs are set up, failure to exhibit enough skill needs to result in a mob reset or you're going to kill the boss even when you fail. You see this with boring zergable open world bosses still sometimes, where players can die and still kill the boss by graveyard-zerging it. Boring.
Death isn't technically required in all games, and a game can actually offer significant challenge without any failure state at all. Geometry Wars 2's Deadline game mode provides infinite lives but you only get 3 minutes with which to try to make a high score. Granted, dying is actually rather significant in that mode (it wipes the board and disables enemy spawning for a few seconds.) But it's not hard to imagine a similar timed-bonus-game style game without any concept of death which is extremely hard to place high on a leaderboard because it's a very deep, skill-rewarding game. (Actually I would imagine skateboard games are probably like this, but I haven't played one of those in like 10 years.)
But for MMORPGs, with how their rewards are set up, you need death or a similar reset to be the penalty for failing to exhibit enough skill. But any penalty beyond that reset is just excessive time-wasting; a relic of either the subscription business model (which makes money by making you waste more time) or poor design sense.
Death in early tabletop games was fairly poorly designed. Nobody was all that excited at having to sit out 2/3rds of a tabletop session just because their character died. The point of tabletop RPGs was to have a fun balance of collaborative story-telling and tactical combat. Forcing someone to sit out for more than half the session was just garbage
You know, your opener summed up the entire reason corpse runs were great. Because, in fact, without a more substantial penalty for death than just a reset, killing a mob boss is indeed just a zerg.
Tell me if I am being truthful here or lying.
In many games today people don't even wait for a rez anymore, they just click to respawn or even worse, in some games, pop right back up on the spot. This almost nullifies the reason for having a resurrecting class in the group for anything other than to facilitate more forward momentum through heals. This, in turn, makes players far less dependent on each other to do the particular tasks that each of them were built to do as there is no longer a reason to protect one another and THIS nullifies the need for almost any social interaction.
All you really need to do is get into a group, zerg your way through the content, and leave once you've accomplished whatever task you came to accomplish.
I see this happening all the time now, and it really takes a LOT away from the idea that these are supposed to be actual characters living in an actual world. Setting up alternatives like timed events and other things like you have stated, only serves then to remove the player yet another step away from being able to enjoy the purpose that many people enter these games to fulfill, which is to play make believe.
Now we just have another game like any other game. May as well play on your console, because you have about as much chance or opportunity of feeling like a character in a 3d shooter or in a fighting game is representative of you (actually more at that point) than you do in a game where you are nothing but extra dps or heals.
Actual death penalties however, change all of that. If for no other reason than they prevent forward momentum until the group either reconfigures or addresses the death. Sure, in a world where people are going to be impatient, are working with limited time, or are just plain not smart enough to know when to stop spamming their biggest damage spell, this in inconvenient. But I, for one, believe that people can be taught to be better at these things, and that in the learning and overcoming of such shortcomings there are greater rewards such as a sense of accomplishment, a sense of improvement, a sense of community etc.... all the things that people come here and complain that they don't feel anymore.
Right now the devs are just trying to make it so that everyone, young or old, smart or dumb, impatient or patient can play. I don't hate on that because I know that they do this in order to make as much money as possible. But just like your argument that they only had corpse runs in order to make money, the same can be said for not having them as well.
The devs are going to get paid no matter what they do. They don't do things that don't get them paid. That's why they are devs. Taking corpse runs, or other heavier death penalties out of the game however, shortchanges YOU, the player.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, I could go on in about 5 different ways.
You know, I'm on my soapbox with Axehilt in favor of corpse runs but just so you all don't think I am completely crazy, let me just say that I remember why they took them out of the game as well.
Corpse runs made people who didn't have enough time to get into something that might involve a corpse run not get involved with certain things. This, in turn, made it more difficult for others to find solid groups in order to accomplish things, and this, in turn, caused people to log out. And anything that causes a player to log out is bad.
Corpse runs also led to elitism when it came to letting Mental Eddie into your group, even though everyone liked Mental Eddie well enough, he couldn't tank for crap and that was going to make this run take twice as long as it need to take, refer back to my previous statement.
Finally, Mental Eddie's cousin, Sour Johnny, couldn't handle losing his gear because he was hanging out with Mental Eddie (who got him killed all the time) and he was at home giving his poor single mom a fit, and she was like "Damn that!" and made Sour Johnny stop playing. Refer back to my first statement about logging out.
And so I understand why they took them out of the game. Still, they did have their place, as I am discussing from my soapbox.
Comments
Today? I'm sarcastic EVERYDAY 24/7!!! :-)
Now you sound like my younger son
You didnt answer my question of what those roots were..
As for mario.. you were still set back to level one if you lost all lives or had to turn off the game other than that you just repeated what I said.
Civilization... or any grand strategy game. This is more what I want my MMOs to be like.. having other stuff to think about rather than puzzle platforming and action combat.. This is why I like EvE for instance... plenty of other stuff to do besides fighting and plenty of ways to get back even after you lost pretty much everything.
And if you lose a fight in a grand strategy game you are limited in your actions after.. you have less units to move and less cities requireing/allowing actions to help you fight back. On top of that you are also punished for winning poorly.. You may win a battle but have many losses.
Not having failure as an option is why I never complete grand strategy games.. at some point I just grow too powerful and I there is no chance of me being in forced into a fight I cannot win with ease. In stead I start over and try a different strategy and see if I can get to that point even sooner. That is my WIN scenario.. the most efficient first 50 turns. or get to suppremacy in the least amount of moves.
Ugh that's a horrible way to look at things. When I lost in basketball playoffs after playing my heart out I felt like crying at the time. Sometimes the rewards are only worth it because you have overcome. Playing games that are boring, easy and pointless gets old. But I forgot in this culture the winless teams are griven last place trophies to not fill left out.
Who says anything about easy?
Hard mode raid is hard .... just that you have no penalty to try try and try again. And people still celebrate world first.
You are confused between a challenge, and a penalty. You don't need the second to have the first.
Plus, we are not talking about pvp. There is no first or last place. Only if you beat the content.
No story?.. you cant say that.. its a reason for going somewhere and doing something.. story grows from there.. In any good story telling there is a point or several points where the protagonist is brought low in some way, motivating him. I will agree that failing to complete an objective and perhaps suffering ridicule is often used in this way. But in many other cases it greater setbacks.
As for what I can do. Well I can keep supporting the MMOs that I think I are good and not waste my time on what I consider to be boring shallow reward fests.. And I can keep advocating the mechanics I think are good in any forum I can be heard.
Im pretty sure there will be another game with corpse running in it. Cant say if it will be any good and I certainly dont think its a fix all solution.. As in: Oh all these games would be so much better if only we had to go and get our corpses back every time we died.
But I do think that success with little to no adversity is tedious. It could be a contributing factor in the low player retention in new games. Or it could not. Wont know until we test it.
That is another reason I advocate for these things. To get more diverse games. So we can all have a game we can enjoy. Instead of how it is now where almost every game is aiming for the center mass of the MMOinterested demographic.
Lol .. that is a story?
So .. oh .. i am going to farm act 3 keep in Diablo 3 is a story because "its a reason for going somewhere and doing something"?
Give me a break. I suppose you can classify everything as stories, but that would be ultraly boring. I am talking about stories like those in Bioshock Infinite or Dishonored, not some random internet dude, whom i don't care about, go somewhere just so he can pick some items up from the ground.
For every memory I have of corpse runs with friends building stronger community I have just as many if not more of people bailing after a hard fight that would make corpse recovery near impossible.
I don't know why and maybe it's me but I just don't do small group content with personal friends much in MMO's anymore. And this is coming from a person who still raids with a fixed guild group. When I do group I tend to do PUG's for which corpse runs are a nightmare.
So unless someone can create a game that can bring back those strong personal relationship building experiences corpse runs are more a hinderance than a benefit. And no I don't think removing corpse runs is the reason for the lack of community. I just think that the way people play MMO's is very different than it was even 5-10 years ago. People just don't sit down for 6-10 hour dedicated play sessions anymore and are more inclined to just move on than try and fight though a tough encounter.
In MMOs it should always be about PvP. (to some degree - a bit of hyperbole, sorry). Or PwithP.. It should always be people in the focus.
What I mean is you compare yourself to others all the time even if two people have both achieved the same level or boss kill, they start comparing when they achieved those landmarks or how they achieved them.
Oh and you should feel like you are playing with other people. It should not feel like they could just as easily be replaced by NPCs.. I mean; what is the point of the game being online if not to interact with others in some way?
And I dont want to play through the same experience as everyone else.. once I hear about how someone played through a game it cheapens the experience for me when I see Im going through the exact same progress.. and during that progress I might hear a similar story again and again and again.. so when I finally get to the interesting part I feel like I've already done it.. because people talk about overcomming bosses.. In games where you get derailed by a corpse run or item losses or whatever your story will diferentiate from that of others. And people will talk about that time they lost all their stuff and had to claw their way back in the game or how they had to sneak through 5 different zones to get their stuff back.
Im not a masochist. But I see the plot of these linear stories coming a mile away..
No need, theres already a decades worth of mmorpgs with fluffybunny death mechanics those guys can explore...
Oh nvm, I forgot those games usually have a lifespan of 2months each due to the lack of consequence or timesinks.
Also found it funny that someone brought up mario, and failed to realise that the mario games death penalty is usually far more severe then anything we see in todays mmos
I am under no illusion that we will see corpse runs again anytime soon in a "AAA" mmo, however my hope is that some developer will soon realise what they gave up by completly removing consequence from the mix.
We weren't talking about PvE either. Were talking about the only thing your supposed to do in a game is have fun. I disagree with that notion. Sometimes setbacks, challenges and other things are not going to be 100% fun and reward without challenge becomes hallow.
The reason I brought up basketball was to show that during some point of games they are not meant to be fun. The fact that playing a whole season only to lose every single time in the playoffs was not 100% fun. Especially the losing part. But if I had won it would have been worth it. It doesn't matter if those were real players (pvp) or androids(pve). But if I won every year just by showing up because the challenge was gone it would get boring no matter what trophy I was given.
Hmm I brought it up first specificly pointing that out.. Are you perhaps refering to Axehilts reply where he only noted the soft penalty of restarting the same level?
Because Mario and the like were basicly 3 strikes you are out perma death with the possibiity of earning extra lives.
Atleast corpse runs offer the possibilty of playing to regain your stuff. So that is already softer than it used to be.
Might be that most people that played arcade games and what came later never actually completed them.. But they still loved playing them.
Agent Smith: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."
And some people enjoy endurance sports while others like sprints.
You can disagree all you want. If my entertainment is not 100% fun, i am going somewhere else. Challenges are fun, as long as you can try again, and the actual gameplay while trying to beat the challenge is fun (i.e. good combat).
Basketball is a bad example. Video games are not sports .. they are entertainment products, like movies & books. I don't play sports precisely because it is not 100% fun ... i will go biking for my health, but that is a poor substitute for true entertainment.
Miss them, I do not. For players with lots of friends or a solid guild, they weren't so bad but for the solo player it was often a bloody nightmare getting to your body. The joy of having your gear disappear because it took too long, or dying multiple times and deleveling was nothing remotely fun. Getting gouged by a necro to summon your corpse if you were really screwed (like getting knocked off the damn boat when it zoned) and then begging for a cleric to rez.....no thanks.
I hope there is nothing like corpse runs in EQN
Don't worry. I doubt SOE will be so boneheaded to put in corpse run in EQN. It is F2P anyway, so you can always try it out.
And if they indeed go against the trend and put something like that in EQN, there are plenty of other games, and entertainment. I will see (again, F2P is great .. i will keep an open mind and try it) if EQN is fun for me. But there is no great loss if not. I don't have time for all the gameS i want to play anyway.
The roots were pre-MMORPG games. All of them. Any of them. Pick one if you want; chances are high that it didn't involve excessive death penalty. All RPGs basically used saved/load and let you instantly get back to playing the game.
Civilization's density of interesting decisions is in some ways unreplicable in an MMO. Online strategy MMOs get reasonably close, but their pacing inevitably is off, either forcing you to go offline while you wait for resources (which is fine, since your time in the game consists of making all the interesting decisions then leaving to do other things) or to stay online 24/7 micromanaging all the stuff you have going on (which is a complete pain in the ass, especially since failure to micro things results in you losing everything to another player.)
As I mentioned before, having fewer options is irrelevant because it doesn't slow the pace of interesting decisions. If turns were a fixed duration -- say 3 minutes -- then that might be perfect for moving a large army but once your army was gone you'd have big periods of inaction and it'd be boring.
Incidentally that's exactly why multiplayer TBS games fail: one player taking long turns while the other has short turns, and so even in a simultaneous-move system (which is really the only workable option) you end up waiting forever if you're the person with the short turns. The exception being asynchronous TBS games like Hero Academy where you can take as long or short as you want and the game isn't really intended to be played live -- it's basically oldschool PBEM TBS on smartphones.
I highly doubt you "never fail" in grand strategy games like Civilization unless you're (a) playing really bad grand strategy games, or (b) playing on a wimpy difficulty level. Certainly some of them have awkward mechanics which prevent a won game from finishing in a reasonable number of turns, but that's not too common, or it's intentional (Civ5 seems to want to simulate the true difficulty of conquering the entire world while maintaining happiness; you can easily conquer a few nearby civs but beyond a certain point happiness is prohibitively penalized -- but honestly I feel like that's sort of part of the unique challenge of the game, and it's something you end up strategizing around.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Sweet self portrait dude Rock on!
I don't miss corpse runs themselves I miss the social aspect that it brought. If not for corpse runs I may have never met my wife to be who needed the service of a necromancer to summon her corpse to zone. Were still together 11 years later happy as can be.
Honestly, I wasn't really talking about a corpse run. I was talking about games not being 100% fun. With MMORPG there are certain aspects of gaming that don't have to be fun. Sometimes its nice to accomplish things or solve problems that suck at the time but working with someone else becomes a good memory.
But as far as basketball. Was I punished? No. Did I have to endure things I hated like practice, losing, bad calls, physical pain? Yes.
Just like punishment and challenge doesn't always equal fun neither does convenience. For me having games that don't use the advantages that MMORPG's have are horrible. Making a MMORPG a single player game only highlights the horrible combat, difference making MMORPG's have these day.
I might fail a few times till I figure it out.. but then I usually fail at the start. Takes me a few tries to find something that works and then I basicly concentrate for 50 turns or so and then I see check mate in 100 turns of micro management. Ahead in tech and ahead in power.. I could only lose these games by someone slipping a wonder victory past me when Im too far away conquering someone else. This has happened to me once. Might have happened more but I play for the early game.
The diplomacy is shallow and awfully predictable and exploitable. And going for a science/wonder/diplo victory is just so tedious.
The only dificulty after figuring out the game is from a random events such as resource allocation and stuff like ancient ruins in Civ.. is it a horde of barbarians or a wonderful piece of tech or a settler.. You might be punished for risking it or you may be rewarded.. A tiny bit of unpredictability to spice things up..
Weird that you'd address the "not about action" point by saying you didn't see the relevance. I mean you pretty much cited the exact reason it was worded that way earlier, by mentioning a preference for slower pacing (because it's not about a game being action, it's about a game not ceasing its stream of interesting decisions.)
Are you also attempting to bait a response by saying everything "should be considered to be PVP"? Because there are more players interested solely in PVE than there are MMO PVPers. Fights are puzzles to be solved -- they don't need to reflect "real" (PVP-like) combat situations (in fact that imposes an undesirable limitation to the types of bosses which can exist.)
The word focus was used in a sentence, implying what it means: that a game should focus on providing deep/interesting challenges rather than expend extra effort building out its penalties. Basically if you have 500 dev hours to do something in a game, why would you spend them increasing a game's penalties when you could spend them increasing a game's depth instead? The latter will make the game deeper (a more interesting challenge) while the former will simply make the game more penalizing to play. Better to create the richer game than the penalizing one.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You know, your opener summed up the entire reason corpse runs were great. Because, in fact, without a more substantial penalty for death than just a reset, killing a mob boss is indeed just a zerg.
Tell me if I am being truthful here or lying.
In many games today people don't even wait for a rez anymore, they just click to respawn or even worse, in some games, pop right back up on the spot. This almost nullifies the reason for having a resurrecting class in the group for anything other than to facilitate more forward momentum through heals. This, in turn, makes players far less dependent on each other to do the particular tasks that each of them were built to do as there is no longer a reason to protect one another and THIS nullifies the need for almost any social interaction.
All you really need to do is get into a group, zerg your way through the content, and leave once you've accomplished whatever task you came to accomplish.
I see this happening all the time now, and it really takes a LOT away from the idea that these are supposed to be actual characters living in an actual world. Setting up alternatives like timed events and other things like you have stated, only serves then to remove the player yet another step away from being able to enjoy the purpose that many people enter these games to fulfill, which is to play make believe.
Now we just have another game like any other game. May as well play on your console, because you have about as much chance or opportunity of feeling like a character in a 3d shooter or in a fighting game is representative of you (actually more at that point) than you do in a game where you are nothing but extra dps or heals.
Actual death penalties however, change all of that. If for no other reason than they prevent forward momentum until the group either reconfigures or addresses the death. Sure, in a world where people are going to be impatient, are working with limited time, or are just plain not smart enough to know when to stop spamming their biggest damage spell, this in inconvenient. But I, for one, believe that people can be taught to be better at these things, and that in the learning and overcoming of such shortcomings there are greater rewards such as a sense of accomplishment, a sense of improvement, a sense of community etc.... all the things that people come here and complain that they don't feel anymore.
Right now the devs are just trying to make it so that everyone, young or old, smart or dumb, impatient or patient can play. I don't hate on that because I know that they do this in order to make as much money as possible. But just like your argument that they only had corpse runs in order to make money, the same can be said for not having them as well.
The devs are going to get paid no matter what they do. They don't do things that don't get them paid. That's why they are devs. Taking corpse runs, or other heavier death penalties out of the game however, shortchanges YOU, the player.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, I could go on in about 5 different ways.
You know, I'm on my soapbox with Axehilt in favor of corpse runs but just so you all don't think I am completely crazy, let me just say that I remember why they took them out of the game as well.
Corpse runs made people who didn't have enough time to get into something that might involve a corpse run not get involved with certain things. This, in turn, made it more difficult for others to find solid groups in order to accomplish things, and this, in turn, caused people to log out. And anything that causes a player to log out is bad.
Corpse runs also led to elitism when it came to letting Mental Eddie into your group, even though everyone liked Mental Eddie well enough, he couldn't tank for crap and that was going to make this run take twice as long as it need to take, refer back to my previous statement.
Finally, Mental Eddie's cousin, Sour Johnny, couldn't handle losing his gear because he was hanging out with Mental Eddie (who got him killed all the time) and he was at home giving his poor single mom a fit, and she was like "Damn that!" and made Sour Johnny stop playing. Refer back to my first statement about logging out.
And so I understand why they took them out of the game. Still, they did have their place, as I am discussing from my soapbox.