(MMORPG)Look at ESO, then look at all the other games in the genre. It's mid boggling how much better ESO looks than anything made before. Cyrodiil is largest AvAvA area ever made. 1000s fight every day and night. The skill system, the combat, there has never been anything like it.
(MMOFPS)Look at Planetside 2. Thousands fight across huge continents with tanks, planes, cars, rocket launchers all the way to cross bows. All with physics on every shot. The was Golden Eye then their was Planetside 2. Everything inbetween was just filler.
(Chinese mmorpg) Look at Age of Wushu completely player driven economy and alliances with amazing territory control. Complete free form movement. Anything you see you can touch. Fly over mountains, hide in trees, anything you can think of. Civil FFA world policed by players complete with bounties, jails, and prison.
If you are speaking of PvE, I agree. There is nothing more that can be done. all quest, all mobs, all bosses have been made. The genre is moving forward. It's not all in the same place though. Branch out a bit OP.
And, yes, I think AA has ambition (inevitable flames incoming, no doubt).
But here is the thing with ambition. It involves talking risks, and the gaming community are typically assholes when it comes to forgiving even the slightest failure. Tiny slips are blown out of proportion and games are killed with glee. This is a customer base that revels in the mistakes of others, the condemning of that which they don't personally like, and the vilification of devs.
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.
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....
Because those games are close enough in play style.
And no, i think publishers have plenty of good ideas ... they don't make classical mmos anymore, and make MOBAs, ARPGs, single player RPGs, and other types of games.
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
Originally posted by Amjoco I'm having a blast playing the current mmorpg's. I think the problem is folks are expecting way to much and just bounce from game to game. They basically lose interest and then blame developers even at the slightest bit of boredom. I say stick with it and don't just quit hoping for that feeling that we had 10 years ago. You only really get that once, and it's over. /shrug
This ^.
MMOs remain (and always have been) the most ambitious type of game you can possibly make. There's a reason why most new studios that attempt an MMO as their first project fail, and why most new game designers get told not to attempt a full MMO for their first game. They're way more complex than the average gamer gives them credit for, and they take far more time & effort than most games. This also translates into them costing significantly more money to create, if you want to make one on par w/ what's currently on the market.
In addition to this, many people forget how older MMOs actually were. Most people rarely go back and play older games with a new perspective. Many of the problems older MMOs had have been solved by newer games, but we don't remember that. We only remember the nostalgia, the fun. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's far from a basis for comparison when trying to talk about what's objectively wrong with a game. Something which most people seem to struggle with.
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
Ambition to make what sells and get rich. I support this wholly.
Doesn't mean I am happy with the current rash of games. No I cant go back to my old standby because NC shut it down. I do think about it all the time though, Trying to distill exactly what I liked about CoX. Some days it is character creation. Today it is group play. I want to play with a group, that is what sucked me into MMOs in the first place. Playing with others, finding different solutions to problems, dynamic interaction. The current crop of , level solo, to run a tiered instance for 15 minutes, then go back to solo leveling sucks my desire to play away.
Many times threads of this topic descend into "Greedy shareholder, CEOs, Devs" Blah blah. Seems players forget that it was they that came to a genera that had been peopled by a small unique group. Now that it is a huge population filled with all kinds and therefore must offer a product that satisfies the masses. IE: McDonalds.
TTFN.
Going to go grind so FFXIV for a bit. If anyone has a group centric MMO to offer up, please do.
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
OK I just had to Google wtf a "fruit machine" was - apparently it's what slot machines are called in UK.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
OK I just had to Google wtf a "fruit machine" was - apparently it's what slot machines are called in UK.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
But you actually DID pay more for more drops. You spent more time in game, time was your currency.
You gambled your currency in the hope of a payout.
It was always a casino system.
I am not saying that in are wrong in your sentiments, I actually agree that things have gotten pretty desperate, all I am arguing is that we always gambled in MMORPGs with one currency or another.
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
I do not know how "tedium" can be a favorite part of anything ... but i suppose that is just me. And i am glad games are getting rid of the tedium.
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
OK I just had to Google wtf a "fruit machine" was - apparently it's what slot machines are called in UK.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
But you actually DID pay more for more drops. You spent more time in game, time was your currency.
You gambled your currency in the hope of a payout.
It was always a casino system.
I am not saying that in are wrong in your sentiments, I actually agree that things have gotten pretty desperate, all I am arguing is that we always gambled in MMORPGs with one currency or another.
I can't accept that, as the time was going to be spent anyway and you could not pay to jump the queue. The only area of play where what you say could possibly apply is raids. Even then what is the difference between "I am on Saturday evening to level" and "I am on Saturday evening to raid"? You are still on, if the raid was not on you would do something else, you were going to play anyway. I am not saying there is no similarity at all, but it is too tenuous.
As to do I enjoy the new elements. No, or if I do its only for too short a time. These elements occurring the most in what are successors to MMOS, like MOBA's etc. Obviously many players do enjoy that style of play more than I do, but long term (by which I mean the next five years) I see their playerbase relying more and more on the youngest players new to gaming.
We vets got tired of games far better than LoL, so how long do you think they can last? That said there will always be teens to keep them going.
I play MH, because I am a comics fan, not a fan of the game. I started playing about a month ago, it might see me out till Xmas. But in one month it seems repetitive and lacking, even though they have done some very good work on it. The game itself is well designed but the framework of the gaming model handicaps it.
Indeed things have got desperate, every time I log into MH I am accosted by adverts for the cash shop, they need your money!!! Mind you I believe in supporting my games, it is just so in your face and the methods they use to get you to pay are transparent. But unfortunately not transparent to those who end up paying a fortune on their parents credit card.
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."
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.
No.
MMORPGs today do not present the same challenge today as was true of older titles. The ceiling is much, much higher. I disagree.
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.
Was WOW your first MMO? The early MMORPG's I played, (Lineage 1/2, DAOC, Shadowbane) had none of this, wasn't until I played WOW that I first ran into these mechanics, and learning to gear up how to fight to reduce the time of clearing trash more efficiently was part of the game play. My early Molten Core runs went easily for 5-6 hours, later on we had them down to 2.5 hours tops.
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.
Again, you still seem focused on vanilla WOW game play. First, it is a challenge in itself to coordinate 40 people to complete a challenging raid, especially the ones such as early BWL, AQ40 and the 4 Horseman. You call the hoops dumb, I call them part of the game play, just a matter if you have the fortitude and patience to fight through them. Most people don't, just the nature of things these days. Meanwhile in EVE we have to coordinate anywhere from 5 to 2000 people, sometimes across multiple language barriers, and again, part of the challenge.
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.
What skill, this challenge you speak of is nothing more than a complicated "dance with the stars", you learn the dance moves, make sure everyone else does, and then burn it down. There is nothing particularly random or challenging about it. Heck, in old school DAOC dungeons, no matter how well you played them, the gods of RNG were always present, and for some reason known only to them, your careful pull turned into a disaster of a horde of npcs flattening your group, just something you learned to accept, most of that randomness has been removed.
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.
If the developers take the time to carefully script everything, and remove all the random challenge out, is it any surprise the player base has no problem figuring out how to overcome all content almost immediately? The players are not any better today, they have less challenge to deal with. (OK, maybe then need to learn a few more dance moves, but that's just a matter of memorization and practice)
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.
Again, your entire focus seems very WOW centric, you really should have played some other games and your perspective might be a bit different.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
OK I just had to Google wtf a "fruit machine" was - apparently it's what slot machines are called in UK.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
But you actually DID pay more for more drops. You spent more time in game, time was your currency.
You gambled your currency in the hope of a payout.
It was always a casino system.
I am not saying that in are wrong in your sentiments, I actually agree that things have gotten pretty desperate, all I am arguing is that we always gambled in MMORPGs with one currency or another.
I can't accept that, as the time was going to be spent anyway
You clearly didn't ever camp a 12 hour stretch overnight or whatever in EQ, when you definitely would never have been on under normal circumstances.
People definitely played times they wouldn't normal have in order to gain a drop. They spent extra currency, in other words.
In games like EQ, the time rich were the wealthy. In a modern game the cash rich are the wealthy. The wealthy are still there, all that's changed is the currency.
But, yes, no shock that you can't accept it I guess. It doesn't matter really though. Take it or leave it, it's all good
Originally posted by Scot The genre has turned into a fruit machine game. Fruit machines don't have a lot of ambition, other than making you put more coins in.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
OK I just had to Google wtf a "fruit machine" was - apparently it's what slot machines are called in UK.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
But you actually DID pay more for more drops. You spent more time in game, time was your currency.
You gambled your currency in the hope of a payout.
It was always a casino system.
I am not saying that in are wrong in your sentiments, I actually agree that things have gotten pretty desperate, all I am arguing is that we always gambled in MMORPGs with one currency or another.
I can't accept that, as the time was going to be spent anyway
You clearly didn't ever camp a 12 hour stretch overnight or whatever in EQ, when you definitely would never have been on under normal circumstances.
People definitely played times they wouldn't normal have in order to gain a drop. They spent extra currency, in other words.
In games like EQ, the time rich were the wealthy. In a modern game the cash rich are the wealthy. The wealthy are still there, all that's changed is the currency.
But, yes, no shock that you can't accept it I guess. It doesn't matter really though. Take it or leave it, it's all good
I think many forget that time is one of the only important commodities that is irreplaceable.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
You clearly didn't ever camp a 12 hour stretch overnight or whatever in EQ, when you definitely would never have been on under normal circumstances.
I started with AC and moved then to DAOC, never done an overnight, but I have raided into the wee hours. I see what you are getting at, but even if I agreed, I would say time wealthy is more in line with gaming ethos than cash wealthy.
To go back to the OP's question; it is not just MMO's, it is gaming that has lost its ambition, at least in the big gaming houses. Repeating past success is the norm, you can get away with resting on your laurels if that's what everyone else is doing. Those who are trying to do something new are indies and suffer from a lack of budget.
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."
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.
No.
MMORPGs today do not present the same challenge today as was true of older titles. The ceiling is much, much higher. I disagree.
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.
Was WOW your first MMO? The early MMORPG's I played, (Lineage 1/2, DAOC, Shadowbane) had none of this, wasn't until I played WOW that I first ran into these mechanics, and learning to gear up how to fight to reduce the time of clearing trash more efficiently was part of the game play. My early Molten Core runs went easily for 5-6 hours, later on we had them down to 2.5 hours tops.
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.
Again, you still seem focused on vanilla WOW game play. First, it is a challenge in itself to coordinate 40 people to complete a challenging raid, especially the ones such as early BWL, AQ40 and the 4 Horseman. You call the hoops dumb, I call them part of the game play, just a matter if you have the fortitude and patience to fight through them. Most people don't, just the nature of things these days. Meanwhile in EVE we have to coordinate anywhere from 5 to 2000 people, sometimes across multiple language barriers, and again, part of the challenge.
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.
What skill, this challenge you speak of is nothing more than a complicated "dance with the stars", you learn the dance moves, make sure everyone else does, and then burn it down. There is nothing particularly random or challenging about it. Heck, in old school DAOC dungeons, no matter how well you played them, the gods of RNG were always present, and for some reason known only to them, your careful pull turned into a disaster of a horde of npcs flattening your group, just something you learned to accept, most of that randomness has been removed.
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.
If the developers take the time to carefully script everything, and remove all the random challenge out, is it any surprise the player base has no problem figuring out how to overcome all content almost immediately? The players are not any better today, they have less challenge to deal with. (OK, maybe then need to learn a few more dance moves, but that's just a matter of memorization and practice)
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.
Again, your entire focus seems very WOW centric, you really should have played some other games and your perspective might be a bit different.
You're betting all your chips on the unlikely fact that WoW is the only game Hyanmen has played? What a weak argument. What if he has played all the games? What is your argument then?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
You clearly didn't ever camp a 12 hour stretch overnight or whatever in EQ, when you definitely would never have been on under normal circumstances.
I started with AC and moved then to DAOC, never done an overnight, but I have raided into the wee hours. I see what you are getting at, but even if I agreed, I would say time wealthy is more in line with gaming ethos than cash wealthy.
To go back to the OP's question; it is not just MMO's, it is gaming that has lost its ambition, at least in the big gaming houses. Repeating past success is the norm, you can get away with resting on your laurels if that's what everyone else is doing. Those who are trying to do something new are indies and suffer from a lack of budget.
Have you looked at any indie games, or games from smaller companies lately?
Sherlock Holmes Crime & Punishment - AAA products of a point & click adventure with new novel deduction gameplay. I would call that ambitious (though some complain the game is not that challenging .. but that is not the point).
Divinity Origin Sin
Dark Souls 2 - where challenge is the selling point
Gone Home - a FP "drama" ... there is no violence, no puzzle, no traditional gameplay elementss.
Incredible Adv of Van Helsing - indie quirky steampunk ARPG with almost Diablo level of polish (worse combat, but better characters).
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
I do not know how "tedium" can be a favorite part of anything ... but i suppose that is just me. And i am glad games are getting rid of the tedium.
Oh I agree, and I am glad as well.
However I think it's hard to not see, if you spend any sort of time on these forums, that there are still quite a few people who miss the days of fighting with other players for rare boss spawns. Or camping an area grinding mob kills to lvl. Or waiting for hours trying to get a group, because there were no competent healers or tanks online.
These are problems all these older games have/had. Problems which many of the newer games have solved.
Those aspects did add a sense of accomplishment, because they involved significantly more work & time investments. However, in today's market it also means less people will play your game. Because they are all barriers that get in the way of enjoying the game.
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
I do not know how "tedium" can be a favorite part of anything ... but i suppose that is just me. And i am glad games are getting rid of the tedium.
Oh I agree, and I am glad as well.
However I think it's hard to not see, if you spend any sort of time on these forums, that there are still quite a few people who miss the days of fighting with other players for rare boss spawns. Or camping an area grinding mob kills to lvl. Or waiting for hours trying to get a group, because there were no competent healers or tanks online.
These are problems all these older games have/had. Problems which many of the newer games have solved.
Those aspects did add a sense of accomplishment, because they involved significantly more work & time investments. However, in today's market it also means less people will play your game. Because they are all barriers that get in the way of enjoying the game.
Oh yeah ... i know there are those who like what i would see as tedium. The good news is that i don't have to play those games anymore.
And personally i don't think playing a game accomplish anything. I have much bigger fish to fry when it comes to achievement (work & career) and games are just .. entertainment. But again, that is just me.
Was WOW your first MMO? The early MMORPG's I played, (Lineage 1/2, DAOC, Shadowbane) had none of this, wasn't until I played WOW that I first ran into these mechanics, and learning to gear up how to fight to reduce the time of clearing trash more efficiently was part of the game play. My early Molten Core runs went easily for 5-6 hours, later on we had them down to 2.5 hours tops.
Again, you still seem focused on vanilla WOW game play. First, it is a challenge in itself to coordinate 40 people to complete a challenging raid, especially the ones such as early BWL, AQ40 and the 4 Horseman. You call the hoops dumb, I call them part of the game play, just a matter if you have the fortitude and patience to fight through them. Most people don't, just the nature of things these days. Meanwhile in EVE we have to coordinate anywhere from 5 to 2000 people, sometimes across multiple language barriers, and again, part of the challenge.
What skill, this challenge you speak of is nothing more than a complicated "dance with the stars", you learn the dance moves, make sure everyone else does, and then burn it down. There is nothing particularly random or challenging about it. Heck, in old school DAOC dungeons, no matter how well you played them, the gods of RNG were always present, and for some reason known only to them, your careful pull turned into a disaster of a horde of npcs flattening your group, just something you learned to accept, most of that randomness has been removed.
If the developers take the time to carefully script everything, and remove all the random challenge out, is it any surprise the player base has no problem figuring out how to overcome all content almost immediately? The players are not any better today, they have less challenge to deal with. (OK, maybe then need to learn a few more dance moves, but that's just a matter of memorization and practice)
Again, your entire focus seems very WOW centric, you really should have played some other games and your perspective might be a bit different.
My only focus in the post is on game design. It applies to any and all MMORPG's of the past, of the present and of the future. You chose to think of the post as WoW centric, which kind of makes sense, even though WoW is just one MMORPG designed in a certain way. You also interpreted that I haven't played some other games (implying old school games?) and that is why my perspective is not different. I have played the EQ clone out there for six years since 2003 (FFXI) so you are mistaken.
You're saying getting anywhere in Lineage didn't take time nor manpower? No grind to be had in DAoC? My examples are based on FFXI, using game design largely copied from EQ. About your Molten Core example, you're saying every time you fought a boss and lost you had to fight the trash all over again, possibly after days of waiting for a chance at retry? I do not think WoW worked that way even at first, but if it did, it sure had some old school MMO game design.
You do not have to tell me about the """"challenge"""" of coordinating 40 people to complete a raid. Back in 2004-2005 I was the main leader of a massive raid guild in FFXI with 120+ members and 30-50 members on each raid. It was a challenge because it was a) a pain in the ass to manage and b) because it took SO MUCH OF MY TIME. I mentioned old school MMOs being all about time consuming dedication in my earlier post. I vividly remembered my raid leader times while writing that term, believe me. I differentiated between time consuming dedication and challenge for a good reason. The raid itself was rather easy. Getting 40 people to do simple things was the hard part. That's not something I would consider a challenge. What can I do to make these people operate the way I want them to? There's only so much I can do. Actually recruiting 120 somewhat skilled players on my timezone (EU&Asia) was a bitch.
By the way, back then I wasn't actually that good of a player but fortunately the game didn't require me to be one with the class I played. More important was being good at fixing all the drama caused by drop rates and some people not being as involved as others. I was a good leader or so I was told by many. But it's not because I was a skilled player. It's because I didn't tolerate BS and had no personal agenda.
Because you had to question my perspective I must give another example. In 2006 new content was released designed for a roster of 20 or so people. I was, again, leader of this content. It was a) much easier to manage and b) didn't take as much of my time. I can't say I was ever sad about this """"challenge"""" you're talking about being removed from my game experience. I never saw it as a challenge because it was just consuming my time, and there was only so much I could do when other people would f*ck me over due to greed, lack of motivation or whatever. In the end I'm playing a video game, not managing an organization (from which I would actually get paid too). Do you think I can use this experience on my resumé in the future? What is the worth of these virtual items I got as a reward for my endeavours? It felt like work, not challenge, and it didn't give me much of anything in return. Let me tell you that much.
Proper game design focuses on the game being challenging, not the social network management being challenging while the game makes your life as hard as possible due to demanding too much of your group, random drop rates, et cetera.
Your "dancing with the stars" comparison is a bit funny. Everything you can do in this universe ceases to be challenging when you state it like that. Oh, learning to play the piano is just about learning the notes and then executing them. Learning a new language is just about learning the patterns and then memorizing them. Yet somehow learning the piano is considered challenging, and so is learning a language. If these things are not challenging the word ceases to have any meaning. Okay, managing a multinational organization can take dedication and time, but at least people get paid for it - who does that out of sheer enjoyment or because it's challenging? "In my free time I like to solve all the drama between a massive group of people and try to make them jump difficult hoops in sync. How jolly!" Not to mention this challenge only applies to the leaders, while the normal members simply have to do whatever the game throws at them and watch other members fail over and over again. So to say, the content can't be that challenging mechanically because 40 members need to be able to do it (and you can't always just choose your members but have to take what's available).
Finally, one of my favorite topics, randomness! What's an anti-challenge? When random game mechanics screw you over. You had no chance in the first place, because the mechanics simply happened to line up in a certain way you couldn't possibly deal with. How fair and fun is that? Not very much. So as a game dev you want to avoid that kind of fun challenge. They must make sure that no combination of randomness will cause an unavoidable wipe. So they ease the mechanics until the worst-case-scenario is survivable by the most efficient groups (here you better hope the devs actually know the variables that make up the most efficient group in the game). So that's taken care of, but what if the worst-case-scenario doesn't come to be? The most efficient groups clear the content easily, because everything is tuned for the worst-case-scenario. Or should be, because randomness is only fun when it is fair.
Summa summarum, randomized content = easy content. Scripted content = challenging content. When you know exactly how every single fight will play out, as a game developer you can tune the mechanics accordingly, so that the most efficient (most skilled) groups are against the (survivable) worst-case-scenario every single time.
This is game design 101. For your social networking challenges with no meaningful rewards, I suggest getting some experience in management in real life and then applying to manage a multi-national organization with the reward consisting of badges you can put on your suit.
Using LOL is like saying "my argument sucks but I still want to disagree".
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
I do not know how "tedium" can be a favorite part of anything ... but i suppose that is just me. And i am glad games are getting rid of the tedium.
Oh I agree, and I am glad as well.
However I think it's hard to not see, if you spend any sort of time on these forums, that there are still quite a few people who miss the days of fighting with other players for rare boss spawns. Or camping an area grinding mob kills to lvl. Or waiting for hours trying to get a group, because there were no competent healers or tanks online.
These are problems all these older games have/had. Problems which many of the newer games have solved.
Those aspects did add a sense of accomplishment, because they involved significantly more work & time investments. However, in today's market it also means less people will play your game. Because they are all barriers that get in the way of enjoying the game.
Oh yeah ... i know there are those who like what i would see as tedium. The good news is that i don't have to play those games anymore.
And personally i don't think playing a game accomplish anything. I have much bigger fish to fry when it comes to achievement (work & career) and games are just .. entertainment. But again, that is just me.
You seem to have a hell of a time differentiating between life accomplishments and those done in games. Here, from thefreedictionary.com:
ac·com·plish·ment
n.
1. The act of accomplishing or the state of being accomplished; completion.
2. Something completed successfully; an achievement.
3. An acquired skill or expertise: a singer known for his accomplishment in vocal technique.
4. Social poise and grace.
So yeah, an accomplishment in life is much more important that anything done in a video game (clue: we all understand this if we're old enough to type a post up for an internet forum), but even something as simple as completing a jigsaw puzzle is an accomplishment. So maybe we can now move from the subtle insults you throw at people every time someone uses "game" and "accomplishment" in the same sentence. You're schtick is getting old, buddy.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Comments
(MMORPG)Look at ESO, then look at all the other games in the genre. It's mid boggling how much better ESO looks than anything made before. Cyrodiil is largest AvAvA area ever made. 1000s fight every day and night. The skill system, the combat, there has never been anything like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pubOg5HV8Fw
(MMOFPS)Look at Planetside 2. Thousands fight across huge continents with tanks, planes, cars, rocket launchers all the way to cross bows. All with physics on every shot. The was Golden Eye then their was Planetside 2. Everything inbetween was just filler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Ty3eRL0zw
(Chinese mmorpg) Look at Age of Wushu completely player driven economy and alliances with amazing territory control. Complete free form movement. Anything you see you can touch. Fly over mountains, hide in trees, anything you can think of. Civil FFA world policed by players complete with bounties, jails, and prison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrn4YbfpO0
If you are speaking of PvE, I agree. There is nothing more that can be done. all quest, all mobs, all bosses have been made. The genre is moving forward. It's not all in the same place though. Branch out a bit OP.
I think GW2 had ambition.
I think EQ:N has ambition.
And, yes, I think AA has ambition (inevitable flames incoming, no doubt).
But here is the thing with ambition. It involves talking risks, and the gaming community are typically assholes when it comes to forgiving even the slightest failure. Tiny slips are blown out of proportion and games are killed with glee. This is a customer base that revels in the mistakes of others, the condemning of that which they don't personally like, and the vilification of devs.
No wonder they choose to play it safe.
Ah, right
Now they are after copying LoL.
But I honestly dont know if its good or bad for MMO industry
Because those games are close enough in play style.
And no, i think publishers have plenty of good ideas ... they don't make classical mmos anymore, and make MOBAs, ARPGs, single player RPGs, and other types of games.
Depends on what you call MMOs. It is obviously good if you count MOBAs as a sub-genre of MMO.
It always was a fruit machine. Ask anyone who camped 12 hours for rare drops.
It's just the currency that's changed.
This ^.
MMOs remain (and always have been) the most ambitious type of game you can possibly make. There's a reason why most new studios that attempt an MMO as their first project fail, and why most new game designers get told not to attempt a full MMO for their first game. They're way more complex than the average gamer gives them credit for, and they take far more time & effort than most games. This also translates into them costing significantly more money to create, if you want to make one on par w/ what's currently on the market.
In addition to this, many people forget how older MMOs actually were. Most people rarely go back and play older games with a new perspective. Many of the problems older MMOs had have been solved by newer games, but we don't remember that. We only remember the nostalgia, the fun. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's far from a basis for comparison when trying to talk about what's objectively wrong with a game. Something which most people seem to struggle with.
Games nowadays are much more robust than the majority of older MMOs. However, most of them have gotten rid of much of the tedium associated with the genre. For some people this was their favorite part, for others it was a huge barrier to enjoying the genre.
Plenty of ambition going around.
Ambition to make what sells and get rich. I support this wholly.
Doesn't mean I am happy with the current rash of games. No I cant go back to my old standby because NC shut it down. I do think about it all the time though, Trying to distill exactly what I liked about CoX. Some days it is character creation. Today it is group play. I want to play with a group, that is what sucked me into MMOs in the first place. Playing with others, finding different solutions to problems, dynamic interaction. The current crop of , level solo, to run a tiered instance for 15 minutes, then go back to solo leveling sucks my desire to play away.
Many times threads of this topic descend into "Greedy shareholder, CEOs, Devs" Blah blah. Seems players forget that it was they that came to a genera that had been peopled by a small unique group. Now that it is a huge population filled with all kinds and therefore must offer a product that satisfies the masses. IE: McDonalds.
TTFN.
Going to go grind so FFXIV for a bit. If anyone has a group centric MMO to offer up, please do.
You learn something new every day.
P2P was standard fee, it was not a casino system. Yes, there was random drops and so on, but you did not pay more for more drops. Look at the direction of travel: EQ P2P, LOTRO Hybrid, LOL casino. And it is not going to stop there, the game play is going to depend more and more on money.
That's why I call it cashplay, gaming ethos is a bygone word on the floors of a gambling house.
But you actually DID pay more for more drops. You spent more time in game, time was your currency.
You gambled your currency in the hope of a payout.
It was always a casino system.
I am not saying that in are wrong in your sentiments, I actually agree that things have gotten pretty desperate, all I am arguing is that we always gambled in MMORPGs with one currency or another.
I do not know how "tedium" can be a favorite part of anything ... but i suppose that is just me. And i am glad games are getting rid of the tedium.
I can't accept that, as the time was going to be spent anyway and you could not pay to jump the queue. The only area of play where what you say could possibly apply is raids. Even then what is the difference between "I am on Saturday evening to level" and "I am on Saturday evening to raid"? You are still on, if the raid was not on you would do something else, you were going to play anyway. I am not saying there is no similarity at all, but it is too tenuous.
As to do I enjoy the new elements. No, or if I do its only for too short a time. These elements occurring the most in what are successors to MMOS, like MOBA's etc. Obviously many players do enjoy that style of play more than I do, but long term (by which I mean the next five years) I see their playerbase relying more and more on the youngest players new to gaming.
We vets got tired of games far better than LoL, so how long do you think they can last? That said there will always be teens to keep them going.
I play MH, because I am a comics fan, not a fan of the game. I started playing about a month ago, it might see me out till Xmas. But in one month it seems repetitive and lacking, even though they have done some very good work on it. The game itself is well designed but the framework of the gaming model handicaps it.
Indeed things have got desperate, every time I log into MH I am accosted by adverts for the cash shop, they need your money!!! Mind you I believe in supporting my games, it is just so in your face and the methods they use to get you to pay are transparent. But unfortunately not transparent to those who end up paying a fortune on their parents credit card.
Again, your entire focus seems very WOW centric, you really should have played some other games and your perspective might be a bit different.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You clearly didn't ever camp a 12 hour stretch overnight or whatever in EQ, when you definitely would never have been on under normal circumstances.
People definitely played times they wouldn't normal have in order to gain a drop. They spent extra currency, in other words.
In games like EQ, the time rich were the wealthy. In a modern game the cash rich are the wealthy. The wealthy are still there, all that's changed is the currency.
But, yes, no shock that you can't accept it I guess. It doesn't matter really though. Take it or leave it, it's all good
I think many forget that time is one of the only important commodities that is irreplaceable.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I started with AC and moved then to DAOC, never done an overnight, but I have raided into the wee hours. I see what you are getting at, but even if I agreed, I would say time wealthy is more in line with gaming ethos than cash wealthy.
To go back to the OP's question; it is not just MMO's, it is gaming that has lost its ambition, at least in the big gaming houses. Repeating past success is the norm, you can get away with resting on your laurels if that's what everyone else is doing. Those who are trying to do something new are indies and suffer from a lack of budget.
You're betting all your chips on the unlikely fact that WoW is the only game Hyanmen has played? What a weak argument. What if he has played all the games? What is your argument then?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Have you looked at any indie games, or games from smaller companies lately?
Sherlock Holmes Crime & Punishment - AAA products of a point & click adventure with new novel deduction gameplay. I would call that ambitious (though some complain the game is not that challenging .. but that is not the point).
Divinity Origin Sin
Dark Souls 2 - where challenge is the selling point
Gone Home - a FP "drama" ... there is no violence, no puzzle, no traditional gameplay elementss.
Incredible Adv of Van Helsing - indie quirky steampunk ARPG with almost Diablo level of polish (worse combat, but better characters).
.. there is plenty of ambition going around ....
Oh I agree, and I am glad as well.
However I think it's hard to not see, if you spend any sort of time on these forums, that there are still quite a few people who miss the days of fighting with other players for rare boss spawns. Or camping an area grinding mob kills to lvl. Or waiting for hours trying to get a group, because there were no competent healers or tanks online.
These are problems all these older games have/had. Problems which many of the newer games have solved.
Those aspects did add a sense of accomplishment, because they involved significantly more work & time investments. However, in today's market it also means less people will play your game. Because they are all barriers that get in the way of enjoying the game.
Not worth time and effort?
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
Oh yeah ... i know there are those who like what i would see as tedium. The good news is that i don't have to play those games anymore.
And personally i don't think playing a game accomplish anything. I have much bigger fish to fry when it comes to achievement (work & career) and games are just .. entertainment. But again, that is just me.
My only focus in the post is on game design. It applies to any and all MMORPG's of the past, of the present and of the future. You chose to think of the post as WoW centric, which kind of makes sense, even though WoW is just one MMORPG designed in a certain way. You also interpreted that I haven't played some other games (implying old school games?) and that is why my perspective is not different. I have played the EQ clone out there for six years since 2003 (FFXI) so you are mistaken.
You're saying getting anywhere in Lineage didn't take time nor manpower? No grind to be had in DAoC? My examples are based on FFXI, using game design largely copied from EQ. About your Molten Core example, you're saying every time you fought a boss and lost you had to fight the trash all over again, possibly after days of waiting for a chance at retry? I do not think WoW worked that way even at first, but if it did, it sure had some old school MMO game design.
You do not have to tell me about the """"challenge"""" of coordinating 40 people to complete a raid. Back in 2004-2005 I was the main leader of a massive raid guild in FFXI with 120+ members and 30-50 members on each raid. It was a challenge because it was a) a pain in the ass to manage and b) because it took SO MUCH OF MY TIME. I mentioned old school MMOs being all about time consuming dedication in my earlier post. I vividly remembered my raid leader times while writing that term, believe me. I differentiated between time consuming dedication and challenge for a good reason. The raid itself was rather easy. Getting 40 people to do simple things was the hard part. That's not something I would consider a challenge. What can I do to make these people operate the way I want them to? There's only so much I can do. Actually recruiting 120 somewhat skilled players on my timezone (EU&Asia) was a bitch.
By the way, back then I wasn't actually that good of a player but fortunately the game didn't require me to be one with the class I played. More important was being good at fixing all the drama caused by drop rates and some people not being as involved as others. I was a good leader or so I was told by many. But it's not because I was a skilled player. It's because I didn't tolerate BS and had no personal agenda.
Because you had to question my perspective I must give another example. In 2006 new content was released designed for a roster of 20 or so people. I was, again, leader of this content. It was a) much easier to manage and b) didn't take as much of my time. I can't say I was ever sad about this """"challenge"""" you're talking about being removed from my game experience. I never saw it as a challenge because it was just consuming my time, and there was only so much I could do when other people would f*ck me over due to greed, lack of motivation or whatever. In the end I'm playing a video game, not managing an organization (from which I would actually get paid too). Do you think I can use this experience on my resumé in the future? What is the worth of these virtual items I got as a reward for my endeavours? It felt like work, not challenge, and it didn't give me much of anything in return. Let me tell you that much.
Proper game design focuses on the game being challenging, not the social network management being challenging while the game makes your life as hard as possible due to demanding too much of your group, random drop rates, et cetera.
Your "dancing with the stars" comparison is a bit funny. Everything you can do in this universe ceases to be challenging when you state it like that. Oh, learning to play the piano is just about learning the notes and then executing them. Learning a new language is just about learning the patterns and then memorizing them. Yet somehow learning the piano is considered challenging, and so is learning a language. If these things are not challenging the word ceases to have any meaning. Okay, managing a multinational organization can take dedication and time, but at least people get paid for it - who does that out of sheer enjoyment or because it's challenging? "In my free time I like to solve all the drama between a massive group of people and try to make them jump difficult hoops in sync. How jolly!" Not to mention this challenge only applies to the leaders, while the normal members simply have to do whatever the game throws at them and watch other members fail over and over again. So to say, the content can't be that challenging mechanically because 40 members need to be able to do it (and you can't always just choose your members but have to take what's available).
Finally, one of my favorite topics, randomness! What's an anti-challenge? When random game mechanics screw you over. You had no chance in the first place, because the mechanics simply happened to line up in a certain way you couldn't possibly deal with. How fair and fun is that? Not very much. So as a game dev you want to avoid that kind of fun challenge. They must make sure that no combination of randomness will cause an unavoidable wipe. So they ease the mechanics until the worst-case-scenario is survivable by the most efficient groups (here you better hope the devs actually know the variables that make up the most efficient group in the game). So that's taken care of, but what if the worst-case-scenario doesn't come to be? The most efficient groups clear the content easily, because everything is tuned for the worst-case-scenario. Or should be, because randomness is only fun when it is fair.
Summa summarum, randomized content = easy content. Scripted content = challenging content. When you know exactly how every single fight will play out, as a game developer you can tune the mechanics accordingly, so that the most efficient (most skilled) groups are against the (survivable) worst-case-scenario every single time.
This is game design 101. For your social networking challenges with no meaningful rewards, I suggest getting some experience in management in real life and then applying to manage a multi-national organization with the reward consisting of badges you can put on your suit.
You seem to have a hell of a time differentiating between life accomplishments and those done in games. Here, from thefreedictionary.com:
ac·com·plish·ment
n.
2. Something completed successfully; an achievement.
3. An acquired skill or expertise: a singer known for his accomplishment in vocal technique.
4. Social poise and grace.
So yeah, an accomplishment in life is much more important that anything done in a video game (clue: we all understand this if we're old enough to type a post up for an internet forum), but even something as simple as completing a jigsaw puzzle is an accomplishment. So maybe we can now move from the subtle insults you throw at people every time someone uses "game" and "accomplishment" in the same sentence. You're schtick is getting old, buddy.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb