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Is it so much to ask for ambition back in this genre?
tixylix
Member UncommonPosts: 1,288
What we used to have back in the day, developers pushing things because they could, because they had an idea and the genre was born to create online persistent worlds. We then had a renaissance after EverQuest, each MMO was different from the last, the key thing that tied them altogether however was that they were ambitious, they all did something new, they all created this online world and they were all very different. I cannot pick two MMOs before 2005 that played the same, yet they were all from big studios with the best graphics engines at the time and they felt what we now call "AAA".
Then post WoW we just had 10 years of trying to clone it and failing, the blandest worst MMOs I've ever played. The problem is they never focused on making a world, they just wanted to try and copy WoWs mechanics and make game levels with no ideas of their own. While I think we're finally over that hump, something even worse has happened and that is the era of the fake MMO...
This is the Diablo, LoL, Destiny etc. games that aren't in the same genre, but somehow they're talked about on MMO sites and people call them MMOs just because they have a 3D Lobby instead of a server browser or 2D UI to connect online.
The MMO has died, the original vision has gone and I just don't get where the developers have all gone that still want this? I cannot believe that the people developing TESO were happy with the crap they made. Why did they take a SP franchise which felt like the MMO we all wanted, then take all that out and make this linear worse WoW?
Everything these days feels churned out by big soulless corps, no ambition what so ever and no love for the MMO genre. They don't want to make big online worlds, they just want to make money, to do that they look at WoW and try to copy it. WoW isn't even a good MMO anymore, it is a Blizzard game and is popular cause of that fact. Blizzard are like Nintendo, any old shit they churn out, people will love... Diablo 3 was pure crap and yet it sold like hot cakes :
The last time I was impressed by an MMO it was EverQuest 2. I don't think it was a good MMO, but the real time voice acting, the graphics, music, quest design etc... it was (on the surface) leaps and bounds beyond anything we had before. The same happened with SWG, EVE Online, the original EQ and even Vanilla WoW... they were all so far ahead of their time and just amazing and ambitious.
We just don't have that any more, I think publishers all have in their minds that all MMOs but WoW fail. This is true for the past 10 years, they all have failed.. but that is only because they're not making good MMOs. Every single MMO has forgotten the one golden rule of what the genre is all about and that is making an online world. They just don't have any ideas of their own either, by the numbers crap....
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Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Look for in a MMO, But many are too wrapped up in arguing about games not having any of this any more lol!
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
My completely uninformed opinion on this is that entrepreneurs are the ones interested in innovation and a high risk/reward ratio. They blaze their own trails, so their efforts are product-driven and they use long money.
This is no longer an entrpreneurial market, though. In a mature market, short money and low risk/reward ratios are in charge. You can't expect any of the major players to consistently make decisions in favor of the fun of the marketplace or product, except where those decisions directly support profits.
It's just like horror films -- big budget movies suck sweaty ass. They're predictable, stale and formulaic. Once in a while you find one that's somewhat fun or a little spooky. But if you want the genuine experience, you've got to hunt down indies and low-budget products. And you have to be willing to sit through a lot of *shitty* indies and low-budget product to find the good ones.
OP: There is ambition to make the best copy of WoW !
Bethesda Studio, and Bethesda the publisher, are two different companies, that split off long ago. The publisher owns the studio. Zenimax is a new studio, with totally different people staffing it. Bethesda the publisher wanted a ES mmo, so the gave the project to Zenimax. Bethesda studio, which is staffed by the same people who have always made the ES series, hate / dislike / don't care for mmo games, they are rather unhappy about the situation, or so I have gathered from what I read online.
Anyway, that's why TESO feels nothing like ES, because it is not at all the same, as it was not made by the same people.
Sorry for the wordy response, I am way to tired to type well.
Peace
I do agree, for the most part. The main problem is that many of the up and coming games are made with lousy engines. Hero engine, Unity engine, even Cryengine, are pretty crap. Cryengine is crud mostly because Crytech did not pay their employees for 6 months this year, so the engine has not seen much development.
The games that are soon to come out were begun 3-4 years ago, with second rate last gen engines, I feel, imho, that this holds them back.
Call me a fanboi if yall must, but UE4 is the god-king of engines, and as it only came out earlier this year, it will be 2-3 years before we really see the best of what indy devs can do. Ok, I should explain this. UE4 can stop a punch animation when it hits its target, this is a standard feature; it has physic based materials, meaning that a flame thrower can boil water into steam, or melt ice to water, or water can dynamically put out a fire, as a standard feature; it can handle map sizes that are way too big to be practical, there is no software limit to map sections, the limit is much more a hardware problem; it can stream maps for a seamless world; the source code is on github, and is available at no extra cost; the source code compiles with no warnings, and is of very high quality, with concise, useful comments. Best of all, kismet is gone, replaced by pure c++ blueprints, that reduce most coding to a drag n' drop, point and click process, with full dynamic data flow charts. This thing, is a beast in code. Yes, I am a subscriber, for the price of $20 bux a month. If you are considering making a game, any game at all, check UE4 out.
Yes , it too much to ask for ambition back in this genre .
You need hundreds millions (or billions) US dollar to bring ambition back .
Then again , i don't think it problem .
If you look at the big picture , majority of player base don't play 3D MMORPG ,
they spend money and time on web base browser games or mini games . Some of those game only cost thousand to hundreds to make.
All i see are puffer fish try to make something big but empty .
It wouldnt be too hard to satisfy me, actually.
Just make a good solid old style MMO with depth and 3D graphics on the level of Lineage 2 (i.e. when that game was young, I dont know how the graphics are nowadays). Manga style a la Lineage 2 is okay, western comic style a la WoW is not. I dont need the best graphics, but the game should be aesthetic.
And make the classes old style static, with a ton of abilities. Ideally it should be like Vanguard - no matter how long I played, I kept finding new ways to play my characters, it was big fun. Static classes make balancing easier and they allow it to have different classes that work fundamentally different - something thats not possible with skilllists.
I dont even demand crafting or anything. Just give me a seamless world to travel and explore, with lots of involved questlines, and then over time keep adding new quests to the game.
But unfortunately, the MMO genre as a whole is moving in the opposite direction. Gaming gets simpler and simpler, skilllists are getting shorter and shorter, and challenge is on the way out. Thats why I dont play anything.
I always love it when old school MMO gamers confuse time consuming dedication with challenge. Possibly to keep up the illusion that their games were somehow "better" than the modern games.
Challenge is more prevalent than ever. Time consuming dedication on the other hand is on it's way out.
Because it doesn't take any ambition at all to create your own game engine for your particular game that doesn't neatly fit what any off the shelf game engine can handle? There are still games doing that; among the relatively recent ones that did are Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Neverwinter, The Secret World, Eldevin, and probably a number of others that don't come to mind off hand.
The basic problem is that you're using "ambition" to mean "games that you personally like". That's not what the word means.
I totally agree with this. Actually, it's an interesting shift in the MMORPG paradigm. I remember I used to spend a considerable number of hours in Excel back during Vanilla WoW/BC days. I love math, so I actually found all the theorycrafting quite interesting and fun. Until I remember those days when Blizz released patches and me cursing them and having to go back and make changes, recalculate, etc. We can, probably, thank the Internet for this part. Online build optimizers are basically squashing any need for variation and differentiation in classes.
Challenge can/is alive and well in many games, you just have to look to find it, if that's your bag.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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There are some future games that on paper atleast show sign of "ambition" as you define it.
You don't get much more ambition than EqNext. Camelot unchained is seriously ambitious. Star Citicen.. Uhm..
And smaller projects which despite their ambitions, will have a hard time surviving to fill them. Ambitions require heavy funding and is risky, so it's not surpricing that the many ambitious projects are crowd funded. One of these crowdfunded projects will succeed and change the scene because they had ambition and vision, and just enough luck and skill to make it happen.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Exactly!!!!!!
I'd be interested in knowing what MMORPG's today present the same challenge today as was true of older titles, and why you think so.
As for ambition to innovate, Raph probably summarized it best, "We likely will not see true reinvention come to the space until there are massive changes in content delivery, such as near-unlimited cloud server power, or virtual reality displays, that both permit and force truly different experiences to be created."
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/ten-years-of-world-of-warcraft/
I have to agree with him, truth is the player base is too conditioned to play a certain way, generally in the easiest, most convenient fashion, and it will take something really groundbreaking to shake genre.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I only played during Beta, but Wildstar, for one. TSW for a more current one. WoW is still challenging, for their group content and I don't mind less challenging content during the story-driven content. It's, really, where I'll spend the least amount of my time anyway, right? EQ? Although I haven't played EQ in forever, so I can't comment on the current state. Strictly from a complexity point of view, EVE. I'm sure there are other games out there which are unforgiving as well, but those few pop up immediately.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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No.
MMORPGs today do not present the same challenge today as was true of older titles. The ceiling is much, much higher.
Old school MMOs had one thing going for them. Doing content took time, and it took manpower. More often than not, you had artificial roadblocks in place to avoid content from getting exhausted immediately. Lockouts that prevented you from even trying to clear the content. Time consuming trash to wade through before getting to attempt the hard stuff.
Old school MMOs would fall apart if they were given as much room to breath as today. Today you can retry fights immediately. There is no 4h of trash to get to the hard battles. There is no managing 30+ people to do simple tasks. Today you have less people who have to perform to the best of their ability. Today the only thing standing between your group and victory is your skill and teamwork. The content is out there for you to beat. There are no dumb hoops to jump through.
Today MMOs require nothing but skill from you. Not time. Not stats. The content is designed exactly for a set group of people, fine-tuned to perfection because all the variables are known. The playerbase plays in the most convenient fashion (and old school players don't? el oh el) and that is why the developers need to know what the most convenient fashion is and design the content around it. There is absolutely no way MMOs can provide challenge unless the developers know how their game is played. Old school open world content? The devs aren't in control of the open world. There can be 30 players tackling 8 player content. There can be 100 people tackling 30 player content. There can be 10 extra healers keeping everyone up. What's the class set-up? If the devs don't know what it is, they can't tune the content accordingly. The only way to make open world challenging is to treat it like an instance.
Challenge always comes back to the devs and how the content is designed. The devs need to know what the players will do. They need to know their strength, set-up, and the tactics they will use. If they don't - the players will find the loopholes in the design and abuse it. Old school, new school, the community will abuse all and any oversights.
Old school MMOs were simply full of oversights. Yet what they lacked in fine-tuning difficulty, they more than made up for with lockouts, big group requirements and high consumption of your time. In short, all kinds of BS ways to make content """""harder"""" than it really was.
Well said.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
And who is going to fund it?
A few devs get together and try to make something and if they can't make it on par with a AAA game then people start with the "welcome to 2004" jokes. Or if it has bugs suddenly you get the people with their "too bad, had a lot of potential, I'll follow this to see if they can get it together" posts.
or you have the larger studios that need to justfiy how they spend their money. They can't just say "hey let's be innovative", then fail and say "oh well, let's do it again!"
Years and years of development, millions of dollars only to have players say "nah, not this next?"
The game development landscape isn't what it used to be. It's not in its infancy where they could be experimental in their garage and still come up with something that was decent.
Expectations are too high.
Not to mention that people are playing ESO, SWToR, WoW, LOTRO, Aion, Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and hosts of other games out there.
I think it's too easy for people to post on forums decrying the work that is being done when they themselves aren't a part of it, don't live what's going on first hand, and have the benefit of just being able to walk away from a game if they don't like it, only having to say ...
"Next!"
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MMORPGs today do not present the same challenge today as was true of older titles. The ceiling is much, much higher.
Old school MMOs had one thing going for them. Doing content took time, and it took manpower. More often than not, you had artificial roadblocks in place to avoid content from getting exhausted immediately. Lockouts that prevented you from even trying to clear the content. Time consuming trash to wade through before getting to attempt the hard stuff.
Old school MMOs would fall apart if they were given as much room to breath as today. Today you can retry fights immediately. There is no 4h of trash to get to the hard battles. There is no managing 30+ people to do simple tasks. Today you have less people who have to perform to the best of their ability. Today the only thing standing between your group and victory is your skill and teamwork. The content is out there for you to beat. There are no dumb hoops to jump through.
Today MMOs require nothing but skill from you. Not time. Not stats. The content is designed exactly for a set group of people, fine-tuned to perfection because all the variables are known. The playerbase plays in the most convenient fashion (and old school players don't? el oh el) and that is why the developers need to know what the most convenient fashion is and design the content around it. There is absolutely no way MMOs can provide challenge unless the developers know how their game is played. Old school open world content? The devs aren't in control of the open world. There can be 30 players tackling 8 player content. There can be 100 people tackling 30 player content. There can be 10 extra healers keeping everyone up. What's the class set-up? If the devs don't know what it is, they can't tune the content accordingly. The only way to make open world challenging is to treat it like an instance.
Challenge always comes back to the devs and how the content is designed. The devs need to know what the players will do. They need to know their strength, set-up, and the tactics they will use. If they don't - the players will find the loopholes in the design and abuse it. Old school, new school, the community will abuse all and any oversights.
Old school MMOs were simply full of oversights. Yet what they lacked in fine-tuning difficulty, they more than made up for with lockouts, big group requirements and high consumption of your time. In short, all kinds of BS ways to make content """""harder"""" than it really was.
This.
TBH, I think studios have tried really hard to bring something special to the table, to be ambitious, like Storytelling (SWTOR) or persistent PvP (WAR) or SandPark (Vanguard). I used to think they just screwed these games up because they focused too much on one thing and didn't care about the other.
After numerous returns to WoW I kind I've changed my mind there: I think they just didn't have the talent, the money or the manpower to bring polished, balanced content to the table...
They had to try to copy WoW (probably because the corporate management said so) AND develop something special, but Blizzard as a highly experienced, well funded and incredibly talented company just set the standard too high.
So the WoW Killer never came because studios could not reach WoWs standard of polish PLUS add the desired specialization... Only during the last 2 years or so, studios have reached the point where WoW is no longer regarded the industry standard...
Let's just hope this plays out well (with titles that actively abandon WoWs basic concept of race-class-quest-raid-items)...
M
Just a guess but did any of you ever break Fear when Rubicite was a thing or ever set foot in Veeshans Peak, Plane of Mischeif or Sleepers Tome?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
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Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/It is definitely an advantage towards old school MMOs that the communities weren't as organized as they are today, and that information scarcity was a legit method of keeping content "challenging". Maybe we can forbid people from taking games apart immediately post-release unlike what happened in 1999...
I don't think the problem is ambition.. I think the problem is financial greed.. The gaming companies now generally don't give a rats ass about niche gaming or quality gaming.. They only care about appealing to the masses and maximizing the bottom line.. Take a look at cafes for example.. You can open up a pub, a 5-star restaurant, or diner, or fast food chain, etc etc.. , knowing you are NOT going to attract everyone and you are specializing in a certain demographic group..
Personally I feel gaming execs and devs are a complete mess of ideas with no organization or structure to design a culture within their game.. It feels like a diner with too many chefs in the kitchen.. Each one putting their own ideas into the recipe and you end up with a pot luck stew.. lol