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Wait: People say "MMOs are too EASY now, because everybody can Solo" but what does Solo have to do w
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
I notice a common narrative around these parts of the web, which seem to venting belief that MMOs are easier now simply because everybody can Solo.
But the same people saying that above are also praising games like Demon Souls, which is popular for its Difficulty.
But Demon Soul is a good example of what I mean, when I say, "Soloing has nothing to do with Difficulty"
since in Demon Soul, the game is actually harder when Soloing, than when playing with others. So that's a total contradiction.
MMOs can be just as hard as they always been, if not harder, with Solo gameplay.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
MMOs don't scale and more and more are centered around a solo player who is freaking terrible at the game. When you use that as your benchmark for skill, it doesn't leave much for people who tie their own shows and stuff.
So sure they could make it hard but hard makes bads quit in frustration and so far easy hasn't cost them actual money.
There's 2 kinds of difficulty.
Gameplay difficulty, which is seen in games like Demon Soul.
Social difficulty, which was seen in games like Everquest.
The gameplay of Everquest was never that difficult gameplay wise, it was brutal, but not difficult, The difficulty came from the social aspect, having to rely on other people, trusting someone with your corpse, being able to gather 60+ people for a raid, being able to get everyone on the same page, and being able to motivate your guild after you had been losing to a mob for weeks, sometimes months on end without a single win (especially during GoD).
Now that MMO can be solo'd, that social barrier has been removed and much of the difficulty is gone. But instead you often get gameplay difficulty, twitch gameplay and less reliance on others.
Many classes in Everquest could not make it past lvl 14 without a group, you were forced to group, you were forced to participate in the community, and that meant you had to abide by certain standards set by the community, that's where the social difficulty comes in.
MMOexposed if you have 6000 posts on this website you must already know that certain MMO vets on here don't have a clue. Some of the things I've read and heard regarding difficulty are absurd and many don't know the true meaning of something difficult.
Grind =/= Difficulty
RNG =/= Difficulty
Severe death penalties =/= Difficulty
Testing the players gaming ability = Difficulty
Testing the players group skills = Difficulty
Challenging the player to create strategies = Difficulty
MMO's have evolved, some people refuse to evolve with them.
I'll also add, that just because certain MMO's don't force difficulty upon you, doesn't mean it isn't there. Many people like to call an MMO easy because section A of it was easy when in fact section B has a lot of difficulty.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
Your observation is slightly flawed.
At the moment there aren't any MMOs designed around difficult solo content and the amount of solo content is much greater now than in previous MMOs.
Historically the majority of MMO content required a group to complete and when content difficulty was lessened permitting solo players to achieve similar rewards people were upset that their previous group based effort was diminished or disregarded by the developers.
So when people complain that MMOS are " Too Easy now" they are complaining about the limited group content, which by design is more difficult because of the simple fact that it can't be completed solo. Thus requiring extra effort / difficultly coordinate a successful group.
At best, It is a struggle over content, you have two different play styles being serviced by a single game / dev team with each complaining that they aren't getting what they consider their fair share.
At it's worst, you have two different play styles that are intolerant of each other, playing together in a game that wasn't designed to target either group well and instead is a poor compromise.
Basically everyone hopes for the best, then the game only holds the player attention for a couple months before it falls into the F2P arena to recoup development costs and make some slight profits on Whales and restrictive cash shop game play until the process can be repeated with the next latest greatest repackaged derivative MMO.
Calm said it best. There are multiple kinds of difficult.
Older mmos were honsestly in terms of the content themselves simplistic and easy, almost everything was a "tank and spank". What made them seem difficult was the amount of planning and organization it took to take something down.
Going into a fight when you get home to work solo without having to worry about anyone else is easy to do, when compaired to having to organize and plan for 40-50 people needed to take down an epic boss/raid of old times which takes over 1-2 hours to complete with that said allaince.
Example using a more modern mmo and its predesessor. Final Fantasy XIV has much more complex and difficult encounters then FFXI. But FFXI was much harder for the average player to do endgame at all. You needed 18+ people, you needed to have an organized structure in place, and you had to litteraly schedule a playtime with everyone to be able to progress.
So for a player to progress what is harder to do.
1) Extremly difficult boss mechanics
2) Organization of a large group of people to be able to take down a common goal.
Depending on who you talk to you get different answers.
The larger group setting also lead it to where difficult was in the progression. Most older mmo everyone did not get tokens, or a treasure chest for everyone. Those 40 ppl that kill the big dragon got 1,2, sometimes 3 drops and they were not garenteed or sometimes even BIS. So not only did you have to organize a huge group to down the boss, you have to do it multiple times to get everyone something. Thus the game was much harder to progress compaired to going solo. But the content may or may not be easy mode.
It will really depend on what you consider hard. The new generation will not say it is hard, they will say it is a mindless grind. The oldschool generation will call the solo/lowman current game as a gear handout and training wheels due to the easy of access and in most cases speed of progression in the modern mmo.
As an old school mmo players. I will say the new generation of mmos is a joke to progress compaired to older mmos. Not saying if that is bad or good. But in XI and EQ it took me over 11 months to get a job to cap and ready. In XIV / Current WoW it took me maby 2-3 weeks to get a job to cap. In XIV I got all my jobs capped quicker then 1 job in XI.
There are plenty of examples of solo games designed to either be hard, or with the possibility of being hard.
Dark Soul is a good example. It is hard. It is solo.
D3 is another good example. There is a choice of difficulties, and it is extremely hard to be place top on the leaderboard for greater rifts (Pve). At the same time, you can do normal rifts at low difficulty which is trivial.
But the point is this ... there is no lack of challenge if that is what you want. Most SP games have difficulty levels which will provide a good level of challenge at the top.
Games like D3 has super hard challenge at the top. There are SP games like Dark Soul 1 & 2 which are hard from the start.
I agree with the OP. Challenge has nothing to do with solo. In fact, i will also add challenge has nothing to do with dead penalty either.
It depends on how you define "EASY"....
- You can create a group based game that is challenging or non-challenging for groups. You can create a solo based game that is challenging or non-challenging for solo players. However, if you create a game for BOTH solo and group play and use the SAME content for each without scaling it based on the number of players then pretty much by definition that content is going to be much easier to do with a group because the group brings alot more resources to bear on it. What developers often tend to do is rather then scale content dynamicaly, they scale it so that it is acceptable to be completed solo....which in turn makes it far too easy to do when you bring a group of players with you.
- Traditionaly one of the things to do in MMO's (or MUDS) in the past when you were faced with a situation that was too difficult to solve on your own.... like a difficult corpse run.... was to get help from other players... so you can bring more resources to deal with the situation. However, solo-players don't like having to be dependant upon others to "play the game". Thus Dev's tended to eliminate any situations that they felt might be so difficult that an average player might feel they needed help with. In a group based game (at least in open world, non-instance based games), you are able to risk having more difficult situations in the game because even if it's too tough for the average player... they have a recourse of resorting to other players to help. In a solo-based game, there is no option for recourse. So you can't risk having that sort of difficult content in your game, unless you want significant portions of your game that the average player can't play....which means they might not play the game at all.
- Cooperative play whether it's part of a group or part of a larger game community also add another dimension of play that makes things more complex. You not only have to worry about how you perform but how that performance meshes with that of other people...people who you have no control over. That's why you sometimes see sports teams who have superstar individual talent on them but consistantly lose as a team.... because they can't figure out how to play as a team.
This is probably the stupidiest "trying-to-be-logic" post I've read on the internet.
Nobody say that MMO are too easy because they can be solo'ed, people say that MMO can be solo'ed and that they are too easy.
Not sure if being sarcastic.
Because I can show you somebody saying this on the first 2 pages from today.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I believe an mmo is easy, when you can solo content that is intended to be done by groups.
At the other hand, it might be done by a class without sweating, and impossible with another.
Or the group content can be done by even with 6 monkey, if they have the gear.
EQ was difficult (hard) and some players could solo. I certainly could not
But I do recall, at lower level, being able to tackle an Orc camp in East Commanlands by mesmerizing the Orcs then whittling them down to sizable chunks. There was always a chance the mez could break or run out if not quick enough dispatching the ones you pulled or you could pull an unforeseen add on from the area, but it was soloable.
Soloable does not need to indicate easy, but it does in today's MMOs. It has been a long, long time since I thought an evenly matched mob had any chance in hell of beating me
Heck 2-4 evenly matched mobs are not much of a challenge in most modern MMOs.
As for that last part, I certainly would not mind if the whiny easy-mode players logged off and quit, never to be seen again. But, companies trying to make money do not agree with me
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
1) Random Number Generating (RNG) does make a game a more difficult. It causes a player to have back up plans. When I play Wizard101, each spell has a chance for success. If my Storm wizard casts a storm spell (70% success rate), that spell may fizzle. It is not a given that it will work. Therefor, I have to think ahead and decide what to do "if this spell fails." I have to consider if I have enough health left to even try the spell, should it fail. Auto-hit/success is easy mode, in my opinion.
2) Severe Death penalties do equal difficulty. How hard is it to pay a little silver and respawn than it is to have to retrieve your corpse and items? It makes a player stop and think before charging into a group of mobs.
3) Testing the players ability does not equal difficult, in my opinion. *My* ability should not factor in. My mental ability, yes. My ability to process game mechanics and strategy, for sure. My ability to click a button at the right time? No.
Grinding most definitely does NOT equal difficulty. That equals boring.
Testing a player's grouping ability is difficult.
Challenging a player to create strategies goes hand-in-hand with the grouping and also makes a game difficult.
Difficult is when a player has to stop and think about their actions. What are the possible outcomes? What happens if I fail? What is my back-up plan?
Easy is when a player can literally run through a whole game without nary a care for the outcome and very little fear that they may actually die/fail.
As for the last part, if Section A of a game is 90% of it, it deserves to be judged by that aspect. If section B is at least half of the gameplay, then it also needs to be looked at. I think you were thinking of WoW when you wrote that, so correct me if I'm wrong. WoW is an easy MMO. Section A is 90% (leveling) of the game. Section B less than 1% even try. So telling a player with no inkling to go hard mode raiding that WoW is a difficult game is an outright lie. They will never experience the "difficult" part.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I wouldn't say that. Strict holy trinity can make combat trivial yet, at the same time, any one character wouldn't be able to solo the same content.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Consider it this way: If the outcome of an action is determined by RNG alone, then that action is by no means difficult or easy because there is no input from the player. Maximizing your chances, on the other hand, takes skill. Whatever makes that hard, contributes to difficulty. The diceroll itself is just variance. Or would you consider Trouble a hard game?
There is a reason why e-sports games tend to minimize variance: to promote player skill over chance. A little variance may keep things interesting if done right, but adding RNG doesn't strictly make a game harder.
Severe death penalty does not contribute to difficulty on the account that whatever makes avoiding failure (often death) hard contributes to difficulty; whereas, what happens after failure is punishment.
Clicking a button at the right time requires skill: hand-eye coordination, reaction time, quick thinking, developing mental and muscle routines, possibly harnessing what is called a twitch-reflex etc. Requiring those skills can definitely make a game hard. You can't just arbitrarily rule them out. Everything that goes into producing the correct input at the correct time falls into the category named "player skill" or "player ability".
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
nah ..
Very hard ... because if the encounter reset every time you die, you will never pass it unless you beat the challenge. People can get "stuck" ... even when there is zero death penalty.
Another example. Greater rifts in D3. It is a time run. You only have 15 minutes. You keep dying (even with zero penalty) and you cannot finish and advance to the next level.
In either of those case, people strategizes, play the meta, and cannot just zerg. You don't need ANY death penalty to make a game challenging.
Lol OP, i think you never played the old day's mmo's. In the old days leveling up was a challenge.
Mobs your level could not be taken like a grain of salt. Warriors needed a pocket healer to farm the mobs to level up fast, other wise he was leveling so slow some where quitting before reaching end game. The frost mage was the king at aoe in those days and could take 10 mobs at a time but by using almost all the skills he had and if he made a mistake even a small it was instant death.
You had to use cc in dungeons otherwise you where not finishing that dungeon. And also you have a similar example of what it looks like by doing the Wildstar dungeons. Imagine that almost everyone that played that mmo have quit because they say it is like a second job doing the dungeons and that farming mobs is boring. But now imagine that the dungeons diffculties been what you had to go true to level up in the regular mmo world jsut by killing the mobs. Yes that is what the real mmorpg's use to be.
Also the spells had more to them then today : fire weak against frost, shadow weak against nature spells, etc.. some raids needed you to farm fire resist gear otherwise don't even think about going in because the full time you had fire dmg done to you just by standing still in the raid itself because you where in the couldron and there was lava at the bottom like if you where standing on top of a volcano so you needed something to protect you from the intense heat it generated. Remember at this point you did not hit anything your just standing still so imagine the boss that is immune to fire spells! ( fire mage where not welcome in that said raid ).
It is not because you have a difficult time at solo stuff once your full geared at max level like today mmo's that you can call them hard or challenging. It is because people don't learn there class or there is a mecanic in place that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to do at that level with full gear. And also today's mmo's are all about the gear not the skills. I see multiple people with very good skills trying to get into arenas but are not able to do so without been carried because they don't have the gear, once they have it they almost never loose, so you see they are skilled and use the proper rotation or skills when needed even while leveling but can't do crap at max level until they are full geared. They need there friends or guild to carry them that is why you see them full geared in bg gear with no enchants or gems near the conquest vendors waiting for there friends that are geared in full 550 to do arenas because even with enchants and gems a player in full bg gear will not be able to kill a player in full arena gear and if he does then the arena player is really and i do say really bad at playing his class or the class as issue on its own and not balance properly against the other. eg: dk blood boil hit for 300k to 400k each time you use it. full bg geared players has 460k to 490k hp.
You call today mmo's hard? ROFL
He certainly already knows the answer to his question... he's asked it time and again... just look at his posting history... he posts these damn topics all the time knowing that everyone is going to spout their expertise on the subject. I mean really, if there was ever a definition of a troll... he'd be it. He trolls the forums with these posts ALL THE TIME.
nah .. i wouldn't call camping static mob a challenge. Tedious, yes. Challenge, no.
Funny thing is there was some fun in trying to figure out how to solo these mobs.
I wouldn't dispute that. But after 5 minutes of fun figuring it out, one has to spend days doing the same thing. I call that tedium.
As a point of comparison, it is much harder to get onto the top D3 greater rift leaderboard, and there is no static encounter .. all dungeons are randomly generated, and every situation is different.
MMO should really find new type of challenges, and forget the old "tedium in the guise of challenge" model.
What has confused matters is games like wow that have grossly undertuned content for groups to keep the gear flowing/keep people hooked on fast progression (fast gearing up is the crack cocaine of the mmorpg world)
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D