I can't really argue with this statement. Immersion into a good story line is almost non existent nowadays. Generic story lines and npcs are the norm. Good writing is a thing of the past. I would say over 90% have terrible writing. The immersion into the world; a world that's vast and open and unknown, and that system is dying too. The worlds or areas seem very sectioned off and small. It almost feels each are is its own little instance. Very few games feel open and flowing. Now graphics are important but not the game killer in my opinion. More and more every time I play a new mmo I get deja vu. It always feels like I been here before but somehow they did some kind of minor change to trick me.
In the end it's the lack of imagination and solid interesting story that captures my attention. Also, free flowing world with very distinct areas that don't copy each other. I won't even get into the pve or pvp aspects since that wasn't part of the question.
I can't really argue with this statement. Immersion into a good story line is almost non existent nowadays. Generic story lines and npcs are the norm. Good writing is a thing of the past. I would say over 90% have terrible writing. The immersion into the world; a world that's vast and open and unknown, and that system is dying too. The worlds or areas seem very sectioned off and small. It almost feels each are is its own little instance. Very few games feel open and flowing. Now graphics are important but not the game killer in my opinion. More and more every time I play a new mmo I get deja vu. It always feels like I been here before but somehow they did some kind of minor change to trick me.
In the end it's the lack of imagination and solid interesting story that captures my attention. Also, free flowing world with very distinct areas that don't copy each other. I won't even get into the pve or pvp aspects since that wasn't part of the question.
Beautifully put my friend I couldnt agree with you more, I always get the same feeling like I have been tricked lol. And I think graphics arent as meaningful as art style personally if I like the art style and its immersive to me then were good but in games like wildstar theres to much of a disconnect for me. But this kinda ties back to who their target market is and im a firm believer of that.
From a singleplayer perspective I tend to agree but when it comes to MMORPG's it's the community, the tools/feature's that let the community actually experiance a different world either in sci-fi or fantasy.
Of course a immersive visual world surely helps but a MMORPG needs allot more then just having a beautifull explorable world.
No, what makes an MMO, or any game for that matter, is its gameplay. Nobody wants to see your "amazing game world" if the gameplay sucks. No one is going to stay for very long if the gameplay is lacking.
More than just admiring the virtual environment, you should be playing a game.
Yea except this had been proven to be somewhat false I mean look at FFXIV theres even a post up right now asking players what is the apealing aspect of the game and how its different. All of them say the same thing just about that its the storytelling and the fact its in a FFXIV world and none talk about the generic combat. FFXIV is proof that combat is not why people play you are playing the wrong genre or games if thats what your looking for a matter of fact the only MMO thats doing that great atm with different combat is GW2. This is not an aspect of the mmorpg genre I think we ever asked for anyways it was kind of just thrown at us to appeal to a broader audiance of single player gamers.
I think there is a lot more that can be done to speed up the tab targeting combat system to make it more immersive instead of just goig twitch based. I dont think the community is a big fan of twitch based mmos thats why there is only one on the top and thats GW2 its a great game and appeals to a particular audiance but we only need one.
I believe you could some this up in that most people have no interest in solving problems in a game these days. They are playing a game to relax. Most people who played MMOs during the early days had a lot of time to play around in a virtual world. To really have meaningful decisions you need things in the world of which people interact. Things like fighting over mob spawns. Having to share dungeons with others. Getting together in large groups to barter items. Having to ask other players around for teleports. Basically heavily encouraged interaction with other people. Now you are heavily encouraged to play alone with the option to play with others once in if you want.
Extremist statements like "no interest" are usually wrong.
In this case yes there is a lot of MMORPG playing which is done deliberately to relax, but players want the option of tougher challenges. But it's an option (meaning the world shouldn't necessarily force them into the challenge mode when they're not in the mood for it, or they'll just go play a different game.)
MMORPGs do offer plenty of real meaningful decisions, and the idea that they can only really have meaningful decisions by forcing players to interact with each other in the world is wrong. If I don't interrupt that spell and I die, that's a meaningful decision (whether or not other players are involved.) If I don't interrupt it and it merely damages me, leaving me gradually weaker or forcing me to spend extra time regenerating between mobs, that's still meaningful.
So by extension a lot of the specific details of your list of meaningful decisions aren't necessary. They're just a set of game rule specifics you think you'd enjoy better than existing game rules.
At least with ESO your closing comment is flat-out wrong. Grouping is the fastest way to earn loads of loot and XP. Not sure if it carries through to endgame, but certainly while leveling it's like 20% faster than solo questing (even faster if you haven't done the one-off quest for that particular dungeon yet.) Which MMORPGs are you "heavily encouraged" to play alone?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I believe you could some this up in that most people have no interest in solving problems in a game these days. They are playing a game to relax. Most people who played MMOs during the early days had a lot of time to play around in a virtual world. To really have meaningful decisions you need things in the world of which people interact. Things like fighting over mob spawns. Having to share dungeons with others. Getting together in large groups to barter items. Having to ask other players around for teleports. Basically heavily encouraged interaction with other people. Now you are heavily encouraged to play alone with the option to play with others once in if you want.
Extremist statements like "no interest" are usually wrong.
In this case yes there is a lot of MMORPG playing which is done deliberately to relax, but players want the option of tougher challenges. But it's an option (meaning the world shouldn't necessarily force them into the challenge mode when they're not in the mood for it, or they'll just go play a different game.)
MMORPGs do offer plenty of real meaningful decisions, and the idea that they can only really have meaningful decisions by forcing players to interact with each other in the world is wrong. If I don't interrupt that spell and I die, that's a meaningful decision (whether or not other players are involved.) If I don't interrupt it and it merely damages me, leaving me gradually weaker or forcing me to spend extra time regenerating between mobs, that's still meaningful.
So by extension a lot of the specific details of your list of meaningful decisions aren't necessary. They're just a set of game rule specifics you think you'd enjoy better than existing game rules.
At least with ESO your closing comment is flat-out wrong. Grouping is the fastest way to earn loads of loot and XP. Not sure if it carries through to endgame, but certainly while leveling it's like 20% faster than solo questing (even faster if you haven't done the one-off quest for that particular dungeon yet.) Which MMORPGs are you "heavily encouraged" to play alone?
Ya if you want to just grind like some silly asian mmo lol thats how I did it and it was awful.
This is partly true but what lead to WoW's success is the graphics and how it apealed to a younger crowed plus the way is was marketed, Finally an easy mmo James can play with his 11year old son and they can finally have something in common. AC Everquest and the like previously werent advertised much this all goes back to how WoW mainstreamed MMO's and it was the worst thing that ever happened to the genre because it caused a huge flow of lazy development.
You can say WoW copied other games all you want but really all it copied was the basic ideas and made them easier with childish graphics. But the time is over for clones and we have some good mmos on the horizon that have some great new ideas and look quite immersive and please no more LFG tabs I want to actually go out and meet people again I really miss that.
If graphics and younger-demographic appeal were significant factors, then all of the post-WOW games which had better graphics and appealed to a younger demographic would have experienced similar success.
So it's clear they were smaller factors compared with gameplay.
Personally MMORPGs only interest me as long as they can provide deep interesting PVE, and WOW has consistently been the deepest in that regard. When it comes to mastering your character/class, WOW's rotations offered some interesting challenges whereas most other MMORPGs had dull oversimplistic rotations with fewer dynamic elements. In another thread I had a long-running challenge to find a rotation as involved as one from WOW, and literally the only evidence people could come up with was FFXIV's Lancer class (which looked considerably deeper than that WOW rotation.) Several other games have been reasonably deep over the years, but if it took 7+ years to get a single class in a single game with a deeper rotation than those found in WOW then well...that's pretty strong evidence of WOW's strength in terms of gameplay.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ya if you want to just grind like some silly asian mmo lol thats how I did it and it was awful.
"Grind" isn't really a positive thing players seek out.
When a player calls something a grind they're saying, "this game didn't deliver enough fun per hour." Which usually stems from gameplay which is too repetitive, but it can be a lot of things (fun is a subjective thing, so grind is subjective too.)
But if you want a game which is mostly to relax then WOW-style questing is going to be both relaxing and far less reptitious -- and for most players that'll win out over a game which is relaxing and super repetitive (ie just grinding mobs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agree that the world is one of the most, if not the most important factors in how much I enjoy an MMORPG. These games used to be an escape after classes and work, just relax and go to your rpg world. Unfortunately there are other factors which can make games with good worlds still not appealing to me. I fondly remember epic adventures over many miles to big cities, though, and I haven't felt that in quite awhile.
I feel like the secret world has touched allot of issues that mmorpg has suffered for a long time now, its an amazing mmorpg, soloing is actually fun and unique, the community is just outstanding aside from some elitists. And the classless system, the world, and the many different ways to build your character. People complain about grind but leveling is part of the rpg experience, whats the point in an amazing and unique world if you just want to rush to endgame for grinding for gear? I feel the secret world is more about the journey since you can get every ability with one character, and the crapload of customization with gear hek you can even control how many enemies you hit with certain attacks.
The only thing missing really is more encouraged grouping, but I feel for once that dungeons are enough for group content only because soloing is still very interesting. I can atleast say for once this mmorpg is worth playing for the single player aspects, 99 percent of mmorpgs are not and id rather spend my time playing single player games then non grouping mmorpgs as the point of playing online to me is playing with others.
I believe you could some this up in that most people have no interest in solving problems in a game these days. They are playing a game to relax. Most people who played MMOs during the early days had a lot of time to play around in a virtual world. To really have meaningful decisions you need things in the world of which people interact. Things like fighting over mob spawns. Having to share dungeons with others. Getting together in large groups to barter items. Having to ask other players around for teleports. Basically heavily encouraged interaction with other people. Now you are heavily encouraged to play alone with the option to play with others once in if you want.
Extremist statements like "no interest" are usually wrong.
In this case yes there is a lot of MMORPG playing which is done deliberately to relax, but players want the option of tougher challenges. But it's an option (meaning the world shouldn't necessarily force them into the challenge mode when they're not in the mood for it, or they'll just go play a different game.)
MMORPGs do offer plenty of real meaningful decisions, and the idea that they can only really have meaningful decisions by forcing players to interact with each other in the world is wrong. If I don't interrupt that spell and I die, that's a meaningful decision (whether or not other players are involved.) If I don't interrupt it and it merely damages me, leaving me gradually weaker or forcing me to spend extra time regenerating between mobs, that's still meaningful.
So by extension a lot of the specific details of your list of meaningful decisions aren't necessary. They're just a set of game rule specifics you think you'd enjoy better than existing game rules.
At least with ESO your closing comment is flat-out wrong. Grouping is the fastest way to earn loads of loot and XP. Not sure if it carries through to endgame, but certainly while leveling it's like 20% faster than solo questing (even faster if you haven't done the one-off quest for that particular dungeon yet.) Which MMORPGs are you "heavily encouraged" to play alone?
I don't really believe that making a decision like weather or not to interrupt a spell is much of a decision. It's just a game after all and weather or not you choose to die on purpose or do something silly will not matter in the end. You will just load up and quickly try again. This is how solo encouraged games meant for extreme leisure work. There may be a decision, but it really isn't a meaningful one.
In a game where grouping is heavily encouraged soloing becomes much harder. Achieving anything solo is a task and things begin to take on meaning because of this. This start to gain a measure of value in the game due to the difficulty or if you prefer time and patience it takes to attain things. This does bring out elitist groups and things that of that nature, but that is all part of what gives the game real meaning. Having people that actually care about things in the game is what gives it meaning and to achieve that you have to make things with very long term goals right from the start.
One of the things I actually enjoy about The Witcher 3 (I know it's not an MMO) is that I am alone and nothing I do really matters. I can take my time, I can choose to do evil things to NPCs in game, I can choose to slack off during combat, etc. Generally this is because there are no consequences to my actions and I know I'm going to get to the end no matter what I do and have one of the pre programmed endings. None of the decisions I make will really matter since I'm mostly playing alone and things in the game are made to be fairly easy to complete.
That is similar to an MMO in modern days except they offer the option for mostly meaningless multiplayer PvP where you just respawn and quickly go at it again with no consequences. You also don't really have much in the way of long term goals/achievements IMO. It's designed to be something everyone can easily attain with little in the way of consequences.
In summary I believe you need long term goals and major consequences for a game to start to take on meaning. It has to have a harsh enough environment to encourage people to work together (not force) and plan for the future.
Weather or not anyone wants a game like that or is willing to commit time to a game like that is another story.
What makes an MMO is all the aspects put together, like world, gameplay, exploration, community, progressing your character, etc...
It's not just a singular aspect.
I totally agree, virtual world is only one key aspects, MMORPGs are a sum of their parts, and I think sometimes it's more a piece of luck rather than by design when one succeeds.
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
Im sorry I need to correct you on something those group mmorpgs that you guys call impossible to solo is just wrong almost 80 percent of classes are pretty good at soloing in eq1 to anarchy online, the rest would constantly get into groups because they where more rarely played and literally designed better to be in groups, it worked just fine in those games without complaints as it did in city of heroes. And no people did not wait hours for groups maybe at 3 or 4 in the morning if you where dps.
I don't really believe that making a decision like weather or not to interrupt a spell is much of a decision. It's just a game after all and weather or not you choose to die on purpose or do something silly will not matter in the end. You will just load up and quickly try again. This is how solo encouraged games meant for extreme leisure work. There may be a decision, but it really isn't a meaningful one.
In a game where grouping is heavily encouraged soloing becomes much harder. Achieving anything solo is a task and things begin to take on meaning because of this. This start to gain a measure of value in the game due to the difficulty or if you prefer time and patience it takes to attain things. This does bring out elitist groups and things that of that nature, but that is all part of what gives the game real meaning. Having people that actually care about things in the game is what gives it meaning and to achieve that you have to make things with very long term goals right from the start.
One of the things I actually enjoy about The Witcher 3 (I know it's not an MMO) is that I am alone and nothing I do really matters. I can take my time, I can choose to do evil things to NPCs in game, I can choose to slack off during combat, etc. Generally this is because there are no consequences to my actions and I know I'm going to get to the end no matter what I do and have one of the pre programmed endings. None of the decisions I make will really matter since I'm mostly playing alone and things in the game are made to be fairly easy to complete.
That is similar to an MMO in modern days except they offer the option for mostly meaningless multiplayer PvP where you just respawn and quickly go at it again with no consequences. You also don't really have much in the way of long term goals/achievements IMO. It's designed to be something everyone can easily attain with little in the way of consequences.
In summary I believe you need long term goals and major consequences for a game to start to take on meaning. It has to have a harsh enough environment to encourage people to work together (not force) and plan for the future.
Weather or not anyone wants a game like that or is willing to commit time to a game like that is another story.
"It's just a game" can be used to say every decision in a game is meaningless. The same way that "we all die in the end" can be used to say every decision in life is meaningless. So it's pessimistic but inevitably valid to call everything meaningless.
But if we want to actually discuss meaning, then we do it in context. In the context of a battle, whether you interrupt spells or not does matter. In the context of a life, whether you make friends does matter. These things have meaning.
Grouping doesn't magically give games more meaning. The individual skill required in group-based games still ends up being balanced around the same amount. So it becomes a matter of whether soloing is or isn't allowed at all -- and clearly it should be allowed. Only someone wanting to prevent others from having fun their way would want soloing to be disallowed.
Certainly MMORPGs are probably the worst genre when it comes to letting players select the difficulty that's right for them. CoH did things right, letting players select the difficulty that suited them, and rewarding them relative to the difficulty they chose (and most importantly they balanced the rate of rewards to account for the general slowness in killing tougher mobs.) This was independent of whether you soloed or grouped (because in either case what matters is the individual skill that's required for success; that should determine your reward.)
There are consequences to your actions in Witcher 3. If you do something stupid and fail, you have failed. You can start again, but that doesn't mean you didn't fail. Consequences do not magically cease to exist just because others aren't around to witness the failure. If a player falls in Elwynn Forest and nobody was around to see it, then yes they still died.
The same is true of PVP. In my games of BF4 over the weekend, I respawned hundreds of times. It didn't make my actions each life less meaningful. If I did a lot, I would strongly contribute to victory. If I didn't, I would contribute to a loss. So what I did each life mattered. Respawning doesn't change that. Failure is still failure.
So all of your decisions do have meaning whether or not a game has long-term goals. In the contexts created by the game's various goals (such as "winning this match" in BF4) every single one of your decisions matters. Some more than others, but every one matters. If you treat those decisions like they don't matter, then well...you're going to do very poorly in games.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't really believe that making a decision like weather or not to interrupt a spell is much of a decision. It's just a game after all and weather or not you choose to die on purpose or do something silly will not matter in the end. You will just load up and quickly try again. This is how solo encouraged games meant for extreme leisure work. There may be a decision, but it really isn't a meaningful one.
In a game where grouping is heavily encouraged soloing becomes much harder. Achieving anything solo is a task and things begin to take on meaning because of this. This start to gain a measure of value in the game due to the difficulty or if you prefer time and patience it takes to attain things. This does bring out elitist groups and things that of that nature, but that is all part of what gives the game real meaning. Having people that actually care about things in the game is what gives it meaning and to achieve that you have to make things with very long term goals right from the start.
One of the things I actually enjoy about The Witcher 3 (I know it's not an MMO) is that I am alone and nothing I do really matters. I can take my time, I can choose to do evil things to NPCs in game, I can choose to slack off during combat, etc. Generally this is because there are no consequences to my actions and I know I'm going to get to the end no matter what I do and have one of the pre programmed endings. None of the decisions I make will really matter since I'm mostly playing alone and things in the game are made to be fairly easy to complete.
That is similar to an MMO in modern days except they offer the option for mostly meaningless multiplayer PvP where you just respawn and quickly go at it again with no consequences. You also don't really have much in the way of long term goals/achievements IMO. It's designed to be something everyone can easily attain with little in the way of consequences.
In summary I believe you need long term goals and major consequences for a game to start to take on meaning. It has to have a harsh enough environment to encourage people to work together (not force) and plan for the future.
Weather or not anyone wants a game like that or is willing to commit time to a game like that is another story.
"It's just a game" can be used to say every decision in a game is meaningless. The same way that "we all die in the end" can be used to say every decision in life is meaningless. So it's pessimistic but inevitably valid to call everything meaningless.
But if we want to actually discuss meaning, then we do it in context. In the context of a battle, whether you interrupt spells or not does matter. In the context of a life, whether you make friends does matter. These things have meaning.
Grouping doesn't magically give games more meaning. The individual skill required in group-based games still ends up being balanced around the same amount. So it becomes a matter of whether soloing is or isn't allowed at all -- and clearly it should be allowed. Only someone wanting to prevent others from having fun their way would want soloing to be disallowed.
Certainly MMORPGs are probably the worst genre when it comes to letting players select the difficulty that's right for them. CoH did things right, letting players select the difficulty that suited them, and rewarding them relative to the difficulty they chose (and most importantly they balanced the rate of rewards to account for the general slowness in killing tougher mobs.) This was independent of whether you soloed or grouped (because in either case what matters is the individual skill that's required for success; that should determine your reward.)
There are consequences to your actions in Witcher 3. If you do something stupid and fail, you have failed. You can start again, but that doesn't mean you didn't fail. Consequences do not magically cease to exist just because others aren't around to witness the failure. If a player falls in Elwynn Forest and nobody was around to see it, then yes they still died.
The same is true of PVP. In my games of BF4 over the weekend, I respawned hundreds of times. It didn't make my actions each life less meaningful. If I did a lot, I would strongly contribute to victory. If I didn't, I would contribute to a loss. So what I did each life mattered. Respawning doesn't change that. Failure is still failure.
So all of your decisions do have meaning whether or not a game has long-term goals. In the contexts created by the game's various goals (such as "winning this match" in BF4) every single one of your decisions matters. Some more than others, but every one matters. If you treat those decisions like they don't matter, then well...you're going to do very poorly in games.
There is in essence something that makes something have impact.
I believe for something to have impact you need to make the goals in the game hard to reach for most players. If you just put in a few different difficulties and say everyone can make it to the end and have every item by default that devalues every achievement in the game. You can see this in games like EQ where a certain item had great value both in game and in currency via illegal selling of items for cash outside of game. Items were difficult to acquire and so were levels. We can argue over difficulty vs time here, but the point is people couldn't easily get items. There was competition over spawns, resources, and even raid areas that limited how many people could acquire certain things in a certain amount of time. The fact is time gives items value. When they can quickly acquired in game via playing the game or buying it with real money the value is lost. Rarity and usefulness of items is what really gives them value.
In terms of other values we have the leveling process. Again what gives the leveling process value is that it takes a long time to achieve. It's a long term goal that not everyone can easily acquire in a small amount of time. All of a sudden max level characters become far more valued when not everyone can get to the top level quickly.
In terms of soloing I've always felt there should be soloing. The point is to have anything meaningful you really need content that takes time and encourages grouping. As I said MMOs right now encourage soloing with a very optional grouping. There isn't much reward for choosing to group over soloing.
I don't believe there is any value to winning a game that is setup to be quickly defeated by it's players and I feel most games are setup this way because that's what players want. Even I enjoy that as it removes the stress of dealing with any real competition or having to really think much. You can kind of half fast it.
What makes an MMO is all the aspects put together, like world, gameplay, exploration, community, progressing your character, etc...
It's not just a singular aspect.
I totally agree, virtual world is only one key aspects, MMORPGs are a sum of their parts, and I think sometimes it's more a piece of luck rather than by design when one succeeds.
Obviously they have to get everything right, but the whole genre was made for the world... if that isn't there then it isn't an MMO.
There is in essence something that makes something have impact.
I believe for something to have impact you need to make the goals in the game hard to reach for most players. If you just put in a few different difficulties and say everyone can make it to the end and have every item by default that devalues every achievement in the game. You can see this in games like EQ where a certain item had great value both in game and in currency via illegal selling of items for cash outside of game. Items were difficult to acquire and so were levels. We can argue over difficulty vs time here, but the point is people couldn't easily get items. There was competition over spawns, resources, and even raid areas that limited how many people could acquire certain things in a certain amount of time. The fact is time gives items value. When they can quickly acquired in game via playing the game or buying it with real money the value is lost. Rarity and usefulness of items is what really gives them value.
In terms of other values we have the leveling process. Again what gives the leveling process value is that it takes a long time to achieve. It's a long term goal that not everyone can easily acquire in a small amount of time. All of a sudden max level characters become far more valued when not everyone can get to the top level quickly.
In terms of soloing I've always felt there should be soloing. The point is to have anything meaningful you really need content that takes time and encourages grouping. As I said MMOs right now encourage soloing with a very optional grouping. There isn't much reward for choosing to group over soloing.
I don't believe there is any value to winning a game that is setup to be quickly defeated by it's players and I feel most games are setup this way because that's what players want. Even I enjoy that as it removes the stress of dealing with any real competition or having to really think much. You can kind of half fast it.
But not everyone can or will reach the end in these games. If I arbitrarily decide level 10 is "the end" in WOW, then even with an insanely arbitrary and wrong definition of "end" we know that only 30% of players reached that end, pre-Cataclysm. Meanwhile the only true "end" is best-in-slot-everything, which almost no players achieve.
The value of EQ1 items seems to come from the fact that their items system sucked. If you create a no-bind item system (and was it no level requirements, or just very light requirements?) where any decent item is extremely rare but extremely powerful, then yeah obviously that's going to create an atmosphere where those things sell for insane real-money prices. But that's also a shitty item system, if those traits are accurate.
A game isn't magically going to be more fun or more meaningful if it takes 20,000 hours to get your first item upgrade. That upgrade will certainly feel like a huge change (after having spend 20,000 hours with a Rusty Starter Sword) but it won't actually be any more meaningful overall than the game where you get a new item every hour and experience a lot of change over the course of your character's life. Individually, yeah that one upgrade is going to be 20,000x as meaningful. But in the other game you got 20,000x as many items; so it balances out.
Grouping in many games is balanced pretty well with soloing. In ESO I level considerably faster and get way more items when grouping than when soloing. I'm sure you could provide examples of games where soloing was actually better than grouping, and those would be examples of poorly balanced games, but in most MMORPGs grouping is viable while leveling and virtually the only way to progress past a certain point.
Of course there's value to games which are set up to be quickly defeated. Whether it's a PVP game like LoL or BF4, or a PVE game like I Wanna Be The Guy or Tetris, the short duration of these games doesn't prevent them from being interesting challenges which are strongly rewarding of a player's long-term personal skill development. If anything, there's often less value to games which are predominantly measuring your playtime (progress quest, most MMORPGs.) Any chump off the street can get far in playtime-centric games, whereas not everyone can beat IWBTG or the higher levels of Tetris. The duration of a challenge has no significant bearing on the difficulty of the challenge (the amount of skill required.) IWBTG's maps only last like 10 seconds individually, yet they have a zero-failure policy where one mistake sends you back to the start. The short duration of the map and the instant restart after failure doesn't change the fact that you need to exhibit a lot of skill to pass each map.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There is in essence something that makes something have impact.
I believe for something to have impact you need to make the goals in the game hard to reach for most players. If you just put in a few different difficulties and say everyone can make it to the end and have every item by default that devalues every achievement in the game. You can see this in games like EQ where a certain item had great value both in game and in currency via illegal selling of items for cash outside of game. Items were difficult to acquire and so were levels. We can argue over difficulty vs time here, but the point is people couldn't easily get items. There was competition over spawns, resources, and even raid areas that limited how many people could acquire certain things in a certain amount of time. The fact is time gives items value. When they can quickly acquired in game via playing the game or buying it with real money the value is lost. Rarity and usefulness of items is what really gives them value.
In terms of other values we have the leveling process. Again what gives the leveling process value is that it takes a long time to achieve. It's a long term goal that not everyone can easily acquire in a small amount of time. All of a sudden max level characters become far more valued when not everyone can get to the top level quickly.
In terms of soloing I've always felt there should be soloing. The point is to have anything meaningful you really need content that takes time and encourages grouping. As I said MMOs right now encourage soloing with a very optional grouping. There isn't much reward for choosing to group over soloing.
I don't believe there is any value to winning a game that is setup to be quickly defeated by it's players and I feel most games are setup this way because that's what players want. Even I enjoy that as it removes the stress of dealing with any real competition or having to really think much. You can kind of half fast it.
But not everyone can or will reach the end in these games. If I arbitrarily decide level 10 is "the end" in WOW, then even with an insanely arbitrary and wrong definition of "end" we know that only 30% of players reached that end, pre-Cataclysm. Meanwhile the only true "end" is best-in-slot-everything, which almost no players achieve.
The value of EQ1 items seems to come from the fact that their items system sucked. If you create a no-bind item system (and was it no level requirements, or just very light requirements?) where any decent item is extremely rare but extremely powerful, then yeah obviously that's going to create an atmosphere where those things sell for insane real-money prices. But that's also a shitty item system, if those traits are accurate.
A game isn't magically going to be more fun or more meaningful if it takes 20,000 hours to get your first item upgrade. That upgrade will certainly feel like a huge change (after having spend 20,000 hours with a Rusty Starter Sword) but it won't actually be any more meaningful overall than the game where you get a new item every hour and experience a lot of change over the course of your character's life. Individually, yeah that one upgrade is going to be 20,000x as meaningful. But in the other game you got 20,000x as many items; so it balances out.
Grouping in many games is balanced pretty well with soloing. In ESO I level considerably faster and get way more items when grouping than when soloing. I'm sure you could provide examples of games where soloing was actually better than grouping, and those would be examples of poorly balanced games, but in most MMORPGs grouping is viable while leveling and virtually the only way to progress past a certain point.
Of course there's value to games which are set up to be quickly defeated. Whether it's a PVP game like LoL or BF4, or a PVE game like I Wanna Be The Guy or Tetris, the short duration of these games doesn't prevent them from being interesting challenges which are strongly rewarding of a player's long-term personal skill development. If anything, there's often less value to games which are predominantly measuring your playtime (progress quest, most MMORPGs.) Any chump off the street can get far in playtime-centric games, whereas not everyone can beat IWBTG or the higher levels of Tetris. The duration of a challenge has no significant bearing on the difficulty of the challenge (the amount of skill required.) IWBTG's maps only last like 10 seconds individually, yet they have a zero-failure policy where one mistake sends you back to the start. The short duration of the map and the instant restart after failure doesn't change the fact that you need to exhibit a lot of skill to pass each map.
I would argue it was more meaningful because as I mentioned everything actually had value. As you mention there is a system in place where you quickly acquire and dispose of items in current games. This does indeed remove the feeling that getting an item upgrade actually has any intrinsic value. If you are getting an item upgrade once in a very long while that upgrade has meaning all of a sudden.
You say that most players in a game like WoW do not get the best in slot items. That may be true, but do they really need too? in a game like EQ you could solo and skip all group content, but leveling up from 1 to 50/60 in the original game was quite a challenge unto itself. Every upgrade counted.
I would argue that raiding in modern games is as much about time as in the old days. The difference is that there is little impact in terms of getting the best gear. You can't really visit the newbie zone and power level low level characters (help them out) or do anything impactful in the world once you get those best in slot items.
At least in EQ you could hand some of your old equipment down to new players and help them out. Generally this help was very appreciated due to the difficulty and time consumption of leveling coupled with the rarity of finding an item upgrade.
I don't really believe you can have a system where there is an real impact with the way most games are designed today. They are intentionally designed not to have much impact so that players can't interfere with each others game experiences unless they so choose it to happen. That coupled with lack of time to get to goals and lack of consequences that would really set a player back if they fail bring about a testing environment where nothing really matters.
Comparing this to real life seems a bad idea to me. In real life any action can have dire consequences.
In a game where you are mostly playing alone and can't impact others there is an insulated bubble that prevents you from doing anything bad to anyone else that will have impact on them or them to you. I feel this is an important aspect to create impactful gameplay.
So basically we have time, detrimental consequences, contested content, and far less item upgrades that make the world have impact. All of these things will encourage players to band together and give more value to various different things that happen in the game.
Weather people want to play a game that actually has meaning is another issue. I don't think most people want to.
I would argue it was more meaningful because as I mentioned everything actually had value. As you mention there is a system in place where you quickly acquire and dispose of items in current games. This does indeed remove the feeling that getting an item upgrade actually has any intrinsic value. If you are getting an item upgrade once in a very long while that upgrade has meaning all of a sudden.
You say that most players in a game like WoW do not get the best in slot items. That may be true, but do they really need too? in a game like EQ you could solo and skip all group content, but leveling up from 1 to 50/60 in the original game was quite a challenge unto itself. Every upgrade counted.
I would argue that raiding in modern games is as much about time as in the old days. The difference is that there is little impact in terms of getting the best gear. You can't really visit the newbie zone and power level low level characters (help them out) or do anything impactful in the world once you get those best in slot items.
At least in EQ you could hand some of your old equipment down to new players and help them out. Generally this help was very appreciated due to the difficulty and time consumption of leveling coupled with the rarity of finding an item upgrade.
I don't really believe you can have a system where there is an real impact with the way most games are designed today. They are intentionally designed not to have much impact so that players can't interfere with each others game experiences unless they so choose it to happen. That coupled with lack of time to get to goals and lack of consequences that would really set a player back if they fail bring about a testing environment where nothing really matters.
Comparing this to real life seems a bad idea to me. In real life any action can have dire consequences.
In a game where you are mostly playing alone and can't impact others there is an insulated bubble that prevents you from doing anything bad to anyone else that will have impact on them or them to you. I feel this is an important aspect to create impactful gameplay.
So basically we have time, detrimental consequences, contested content, and far less item upgrades that make the world have impact. All of these things will encourage players to band together and give more value to various different things that happen in the game.
Weather people want to play a game that actually has meaning is another issue. I don't think most people want to.
No, everything actually has value. That one upgrade in the 20,000 hour game provides you +20,000 stats. The 20,000 items in the other game were each +1 stat above the prior item. All of them have value. The same total value is still gained from the 20,000 items.
"Do you really need to?" Again, a pessimist would say you don't need to do anything in any game. But yes, if you enjoy the game and you want to reach the actual end of the game then you'll need those items, and you'll need the slightly weaker set of gear it'll take you to kill those bosses that drop the best gear.
Is there less impact to gear when you can't take your high level gear and do something exploitive like power level a low level character? Yes. Does it avoid an obvious exploit which should be avoided? Yes.
The time investment comment is probably mostly true, although I've never read anything about any early MMORPG that showed it to have rotations as difficult to master as WOW (and the lancer from FFXIV), so there was probably more skill involved there (though the objective difficulty of rotations doesn't really speak to how much room for error any given boss allows, so this isn't something I could say with certainty.)
The limited ability for players to interfere with one another was another obvious problem to be avoided. In some cases it was grief-avoidance. In others it created a better atmosphere of cooperation (like ESO/GW2/WOW where other players can't grief you and mostly can only help you kill a mob faster.) And in other situations it flat out made your gameplay more meaningful (instances and solo-phases, where you can't simply zerg down a tough enemy you actually have to beat it yourself.)
So no, this stuff still has meaning. You're just choosing a very strange perspective of measuring things per-item. Surely you can imagine how my 20,000 hours for 1 item upgrade game would play out, right? While the meaning of that one item would be staggeringly significant, the overall game would be incredibly bland and empty (much like early MMORPGs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I would argue it was more meaningful because as I mentioned everything actually had value. As you mention there is a system in place where you quickly acquire and dispose of items in current games. This does indeed remove the feeling that getting an item upgrade actually has any intrinsic value. If you are getting an item upgrade once in a very long while that upgrade has meaning all of a sudden.
You say that most players in a game like WoW do not get the best in slot items. That may be true, but do they really need too? in a game like EQ you could solo and skip all group content, but leveling up from 1 to 50/60 in the original game was quite a challenge unto itself. Every upgrade counted.
I would argue that raiding in modern games is as much about time as in the old days. The difference is that there is little impact in terms of getting the best gear. You can't really visit the newbie zone and power level low level characters (help them out) or do anything impactful in the world once you get those best in slot items.
At least in EQ you could hand some of your old equipment down to new players and help them out. Generally this help was very appreciated due to the difficulty and time consumption of leveling coupled with the rarity of finding an item upgrade.
I don't really believe you can have a system where there is an real impact with the way most games are designed today. They are intentionally designed not to have much impact so that players can't interfere with each others game experiences unless they so choose it to happen. That coupled with lack of time to get to goals and lack of consequences that would really set a player back if they fail bring about a testing environment where nothing really matters.
Comparing this to real life seems a bad idea to me. In real life any action can have dire consequences.
In a game where you are mostly playing alone and can't impact others there is an insulated bubble that prevents you from doing anything bad to anyone else that will have impact on them or them to you. I feel this is an important aspect to create impactful gameplay.
So basically we have time, detrimental consequences, contested content, and far less item upgrades that make the world have impact. All of these things will encourage players to band together and give more value to various different things that happen in the game.
Weather people want to play a game that actually has meaning is another issue. I don't think most people want to.
No, everything actually has value. That one upgrade in the 20,000 hour game provides you +20,000 stats. The 20,000 items in the other game were each +1 stat above the prior item. All of them have value. The same total value is still gained from the 20,000 items.
"Do you really need to?" Again, a pessimist would say you don't need to do anything in any game. But yes, if you enjoy the game and you want to reach the actual end of the game then you'll need those items, and you'll need the slightly weaker set of gear it'll take you to kill those bosses that drop the best gear.
Is there less impact to gear when you can't take your high level gear and do something exploitive like power level a low level character? Yes. Does it avoid an obvious exploit which should be avoided? Yes.
The time investment comment is probably mostly true, although I've never read anything about any early MMORPG that showed it to have rotations as difficult to master as WOW (and the lancer from FFXIV), so there was probably more skill involved there (though the objective difficulty of rotations doesn't really speak to how much room for error any given boss allows, so this isn't something I could say with certainty.)
The limited ability for players to interfere with one another was another obvious problem to be avoided. In some cases it was grief-avoidance. In others it created a better atmosphere of cooperation (like ESO/GW2/WOW where other players can't grief you and mostly can only help you kill a mob faster.) And in other situations it flat out made your gameplay more meaningful (instances and solo-phases, where you can't simply zerg down a tough enemy you actually have to beat it yourself.)
So no, this stuff still has meaning. You're just choosing a very strange perspective of measuring things per-item. Surely you can imagine how my 20,000 hours for 1 item upgrade game would play out, right? While the meaning of that one item would be staggeringly significant, the overall game would be incredibly bland and empty (much like early MMORPGs.)
I didn't find those games to be bland and empty. Generally they were more alive because the world was one place (no instances) and everyone had to learn to live together in some form. This didn't mean you couldn't solo, but generally meaningful interactions were much more prevalent.
What gives an item value is nothing different then in real life. One is rarity and the other is it needs to give you something meaningful to do with said item. This might be twinking your alts, giving items to friends/low level characters, or in general being able to show off and impact those around you (not just those of equal level).
It's fairly obvious that items and characters in games have little value or impact. This is shown by the fact that they aren't really valued for real money in any form. In older games both items and characters were valued at very high prices in terms of real money. In today's games that is not really the case because it is more easily obtained and perhaps more importantly it doesn't gain you anything outside of being able to do another boring raid or group content where you are again grinding for more equipment.
To me, it is quite simple, the players and community.
Originally posted by laokoko "if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
I didn't find those games to be bland and empty. Generally they were more alive because the world was one place (no instances) and everyone had to learn to live together in some form. This didn't mean you couldn't solo, but generally meaningful interactions were much more prevalent.
What gives an item value is nothing different then in real life. One is rarity and the other is it needs to give you something meaningful to do with said item. This might be twinking your alts, giving items to friends/low level characters, or in general being able to show off and impact those around you (not just those of equal level).
It's fairly obvious that items and characters in games have little value or impact. This is shown by the fact that they aren't really valued for real money in any form. In older games both items and characters were valued at very high prices in terms of real money. In today's games that is not really the case because it is more easily obtained and perhaps more importantly it doesn't gain you anything outside of being able to do another boring raid or group content where you are again grinding for more equipment.
You're focused on per-item value. I'm focused on fun gameplay.
A game doesn't magically become fun because it has one item that takes 20,000 hours to get and so it's worth $50,000 USD. A game is fun when you're actively engaging in a world with plenty of fun things to loot.
Most of the examples of item use you're giving are known bad designs:
Twinked alts marginalized challenge. What one character found difficult, another will find trivial due to their superior gear. Nowadays it's rare for games to repeat this mistake.
If a game has BoEs then giving items to friends/lowbies is great. It makes the item that much more meaningful (when my friend in WOW bought me an expensive BoE it wasn't simply a hand-me-down; it was only ever used by me and he spent his hard-earned gold on it.)
If a game has no-bind items then that results in a dangerous amount of inflation, and a dangerous amount of item devaluation. "You killed Ragnaros for Thunderfury? Why? There are at least a hundred of them on the AH." Suddenly items don't carry the same meaning they once did -- those shiny pauldrons don't mean that guy is a raider, they only mean he had a lot of gold to buy them because anything can be bought.
In today's games items aren't typically* valued for lots of real money because these problems are solved.
Also your closing comment that gear is only useful for playing the game is a bit strange. Between that and your fixation on per-item value it makes me wonder if you were just playing those early games to Ebay loot, and not because you actually cared about fun gameplay.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
The question is: What makes an MMO is it's World?
I can't really argue with this statement. Immersion into a good story line is almost non existent nowadays. Generic story lines and npcs are the norm. Good writing is a thing of the past. I would say over 90% have terrible writing. The immersion into the world; a world that's vast and open and unknown, and that system is dying too. The worlds or areas seem very sectioned off and small. It almost feels each are is its own little instance. Very few games feel open and flowing. Now graphics are important but not the game killer in my opinion. More and more every time I play a new mmo I get deja vu. It always feels like I been here before but somehow they did some kind of minor change to trick me.
In the end it's the lack of imagination and solid interesting story that captures my attention. Also, free flowing world with very distinct areas that don't copy each other. I won't even get into the pve or pvp aspects since that wasn't part of the question.
Beautifully put my friend I couldnt agree with you more, I always get the same feeling like I have been tricked lol. And I think graphics arent as meaningful as art style personally if I like the art style and its immersive to me then were good but in games like wildstar theres to much of a disconnect for me. But this kinda ties back to who their target market is and im a firm believer of that.
From a singleplayer perspective I tend to agree but when it comes to MMORPG's it's the community, the tools/feature's that let the community actually experiance a different world either in sci-fi or fantasy.
Of course a immersive visual world surely helps but a MMORPG needs allot more then just having a beautifull explorable world.
Yea except this had been proven to be somewhat false I mean look at FFXIV theres even a post up right now asking players what is the apealing aspect of the game and how its different. All of them say the same thing just about that its the storytelling and the fact its in a FFXIV world and none talk about the generic combat. FFXIV is proof that combat is not why people play you are playing the wrong genre or games if thats what your looking for a matter of fact the only MMO thats doing that great atm with different combat is GW2. This is not an aspect of the mmorpg genre I think we ever asked for anyways it was kind of just thrown at us to appeal to a broader audiance of single player gamers.
I think there is a lot more that can be done to speed up the tab targeting combat system to make it more immersive instead of just goig twitch based. I dont think the community is a big fan of twitch based mmos thats why there is only one on the top and thats GW2 its a great game and appeals to a particular audiance but we only need one.
Extremist statements like "no interest" are usually wrong.
In this case yes there is a lot of MMORPG playing which is done deliberately to relax, but players want the option of tougher challenges. But it's an option (meaning the world shouldn't necessarily force them into the challenge mode when they're not in the mood for it, or they'll just go play a different game.)
MMORPGs do offer plenty of real meaningful decisions, and the idea that they can only really have meaningful decisions by forcing players to interact with each other in the world is wrong. If I don't interrupt that spell and I die, that's a meaningful decision (whether or not other players are involved.) If I don't interrupt it and it merely damages me, leaving me gradually weaker or forcing me to spend extra time regenerating between mobs, that's still meaningful.
So by extension a lot of the specific details of your list of meaningful decisions aren't necessary. They're just a set of game rule specifics you think you'd enjoy better than existing game rules.
At least with ESO your closing comment is flat-out wrong. Grouping is the fastest way to earn loads of loot and XP. Not sure if it carries through to endgame, but certainly while leveling it's like 20% faster than solo questing (even faster if you haven't done the one-off quest for that particular dungeon yet.) Which MMORPGs are you "heavily encouraged" to play alone?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ya if you want to just grind like some silly asian mmo lol thats how I did it and it was awful.
I played a lot of funny for a while themeparks, but the only real mmorpgs have been AO and SWG (didnt play EQ or UO).
big open worlds
would be cool if that games would be relaunched with graphics and (combat) gameplay from 2015.
If graphics and younger-demographic appeal were significant factors, then all of the post-WOW games which had better graphics and appealed to a younger demographic would have experienced similar success.
So it's clear they were smaller factors compared with gameplay.
Personally MMORPGs only interest me as long as they can provide deep interesting PVE, and WOW has consistently been the deepest in that regard. When it comes to mastering your character/class, WOW's rotations offered some interesting challenges whereas most other MMORPGs had dull oversimplistic rotations with fewer dynamic elements. In another thread I had a long-running challenge to find a rotation as involved as one from WOW, and literally the only evidence people could come up with was FFXIV's Lancer class (which looked considerably deeper than that WOW rotation.) Several other games have been reasonably deep over the years, but if it took 7+ years to get a single class in a single game with a deeper rotation than those found in WOW then well...that's pretty strong evidence of WOW's strength in terms of gameplay.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Grind" isn't really a positive thing players seek out.
When a player calls something a grind they're saying, "this game didn't deliver enough fun per hour." Which usually stems from gameplay which is too repetitive, but it can be a lot of things (fun is a subjective thing, so grind is subjective too.)
But if you want a game which is mostly to relax then WOW-style questing is going to be both relaxing and far less reptitious -- and for most players that'll win out over a game which is relaxing and super repetitive (ie just grinding mobs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I feel like the secret world has touched allot of issues that mmorpg has suffered for a long time now, its an amazing mmorpg, soloing is actually fun and unique, the community is just outstanding aside from some elitists. And the classless system, the world, and the many different ways to build your character. People complain about grind but leveling is part of the rpg experience, whats the point in an amazing and unique world if you just want to rush to endgame for grinding for gear? I feel the secret world is more about the journey since you can get every ability with one character, and the crapload of customization with gear hek you can even control how many enemies you hit with certain attacks.
The only thing missing really is more encouraged grouping, but I feel for once that dungeons are enough for group content only because soloing is still very interesting. I can atleast say for once this mmorpg is worth playing for the single player aspects, 99 percent of mmorpgs are not and id rather spend my time playing single player games then non grouping mmorpgs as the point of playing online to me is playing with others.
I don't really believe that making a decision like weather or not to interrupt a spell is much of a decision. It's just a game after all and weather or not you choose to die on purpose or do something silly will not matter in the end. You will just load up and quickly try again. This is how solo encouraged games meant for extreme leisure work. There may be a decision, but it really isn't a meaningful one.
In a game where grouping is heavily encouraged soloing becomes much harder. Achieving anything solo is a task and things begin to take on meaning because of this. This start to gain a measure of value in the game due to the difficulty or if you prefer time and patience it takes to attain things. This does bring out elitist groups and things that of that nature, but that is all part of what gives the game real meaning. Having people that actually care about things in the game is what gives it meaning and to achieve that you have to make things with very long term goals right from the start.
One of the things I actually enjoy about The Witcher 3 (I know it's not an MMO) is that I am alone and nothing I do really matters. I can take my time, I can choose to do evil things to NPCs in game, I can choose to slack off during combat, etc. Generally this is because there are no consequences to my actions and I know I'm going to get to the end no matter what I do and have one of the pre programmed endings. None of the decisions I make will really matter since I'm mostly playing alone and things in the game are made to be fairly easy to complete.
That is similar to an MMO in modern days except they offer the option for mostly meaningless multiplayer PvP where you just respawn and quickly go at it again with no consequences. You also don't really have much in the way of long term goals/achievements IMO. It's designed to be something everyone can easily attain with little in the way of consequences.
In summary I believe you need long term goals and major consequences for a game to start to take on meaning. It has to have a harsh enough environment to encourage people to work together (not force) and plan for the future.
Weather or not anyone wants a game like that or is willing to commit time to a game like that is another story.
I totally agree, virtual world is only one key aspects, MMORPGs are a sum of their parts, and I think sometimes it's more a piece of luck rather than by design when one succeeds.
"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
"It's just a game" can be used to say every decision in a game is meaningless. The same way that "we all die in the end" can be used to say every decision in life is meaningless. So it's pessimistic but inevitably valid to call everything meaningless.
But if we want to actually discuss meaning, then we do it in context. In the context of a battle, whether you interrupt spells or not does matter. In the context of a life, whether you make friends does matter. These things have meaning.
Grouping doesn't magically give games more meaning. The individual skill required in group-based games still ends up being balanced around the same amount. So it becomes a matter of whether soloing is or isn't allowed at all -- and clearly it should be allowed. Only someone wanting to prevent others from having fun their way would want soloing to be disallowed.
Certainly MMORPGs are probably the worst genre when it comes to letting players select the difficulty that's right for them. CoH did things right, letting players select the difficulty that suited them, and rewarding them relative to the difficulty they chose (and most importantly they balanced the rate of rewards to account for the general slowness in killing tougher mobs.) This was independent of whether you soloed or grouped (because in either case what matters is the individual skill that's required for success; that should determine your reward.)
There are consequences to your actions in Witcher 3. If you do something stupid and fail, you have failed. You can start again, but that doesn't mean you didn't fail. Consequences do not magically cease to exist just because others aren't around to witness the failure. If a player falls in Elwynn Forest and nobody was around to see it, then yes they still died.
The same is true of PVP. In my games of BF4 over the weekend, I respawned hundreds of times. It didn't make my actions each life less meaningful. If I did a lot, I would strongly contribute to victory. If I didn't, I would contribute to a loss. So what I did each life mattered. Respawning doesn't change that. Failure is still failure.
So all of your decisions do have meaning whether or not a game has long-term goals. In the contexts created by the game's various goals (such as "winning this match" in BF4) every single one of your decisions matters. Some more than others, but every one matters. If you treat those decisions like they don't matter, then well...you're going to do very poorly in games.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There is in essence something that makes something have impact.
I believe for something to have impact you need to make the goals in the game hard to reach for most players. If you just put in a few different difficulties and say everyone can make it to the end and have every item by default that devalues every achievement in the game. You can see this in games like EQ where a certain item had great value both in game and in currency via illegal selling of items for cash outside of game. Items were difficult to acquire and so were levels. We can argue over difficulty vs time here, but the point is people couldn't easily get items. There was competition over spawns, resources, and even raid areas that limited how many people could acquire certain things in a certain amount of time. The fact is time gives items value. When they can quickly acquired in game via playing the game or buying it with real money the value is lost. Rarity and usefulness of items is what really gives them value.
In terms of other values we have the leveling process. Again what gives the leveling process value is that it takes a long time to achieve. It's a long term goal that not everyone can easily acquire in a small amount of time. All of a sudden max level characters become far more valued when not everyone can get to the top level quickly.
In terms of soloing I've always felt there should be soloing. The point is to have anything meaningful you really need content that takes time and encourages grouping. As I said MMOs right now encourage soloing with a very optional grouping. There isn't much reward for choosing to group over soloing.
I don't believe there is any value to winning a game that is setup to be quickly defeated by it's players and I feel most games are setup this way because that's what players want. Even I enjoy that as it removes the stress of dealing with any real competition or having to really think much. You can kind of half fast it.
I didn't enjoy EQ1 world that much,EQ2 i felt was really good.
I don't agree though,aside from my usual pet peeve of 2D structures versus 3D,i usually look closest at the character/racial and combat system/depth.
A perfect example is i really love the FFXIV world but the combat and class structure is just not good enough,so i don't play it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Obviously they have to get everything right, but the whole genre was made for the world... if that isn't there then it isn't an MMO.
But not everyone can or will reach the end in these games. If I arbitrarily decide level 10 is "the end" in WOW, then even with an insanely arbitrary and wrong definition of "end" we know that only 30% of players reached that end, pre-Cataclysm. Meanwhile the only true "end" is best-in-slot-everything, which almost no players achieve.
The value of EQ1 items seems to come from the fact that their items system sucked. If you create a no-bind item system (and was it no level requirements, or just very light requirements?) where any decent item is extremely rare but extremely powerful, then yeah obviously that's going to create an atmosphere where those things sell for insane real-money prices. But that's also a shitty item system, if those traits are accurate.
A game isn't magically going to be more fun or more meaningful if it takes 20,000 hours to get your first item upgrade. That upgrade will certainly feel like a huge change (after having spend 20,000 hours with a Rusty Starter Sword) but it won't actually be any more meaningful overall than the game where you get a new item every hour and experience a lot of change over the course of your character's life. Individually, yeah that one upgrade is going to be 20,000x as meaningful. But in the other game you got 20,000x as many items; so it balances out.
Grouping in many games is balanced pretty well with soloing. In ESO I level considerably faster and get way more items when grouping than when soloing. I'm sure you could provide examples of games where soloing was actually better than grouping, and those would be examples of poorly balanced games, but in most MMORPGs grouping is viable while leveling and virtually the only way to progress past a certain point.
Of course there's value to games which are set up to be quickly defeated. Whether it's a PVP game like LoL or BF4, or a PVE game like I Wanna Be The Guy or Tetris, the short duration of these games doesn't prevent them from being interesting challenges which are strongly rewarding of a player's long-term personal skill development. If anything, there's often less value to games which are predominantly measuring your playtime (progress quest, most MMORPGs.) Any chump off the street can get far in playtime-centric games, whereas not everyone can beat IWBTG or the higher levels of Tetris. The duration of a challenge has no significant bearing on the difficulty of the challenge (the amount of skill required.) IWBTG's maps only last like 10 seconds individually, yet they have a zero-failure policy where one mistake sends you back to the start. The short duration of the map and the instant restart after failure doesn't change the fact that you need to exhibit a lot of skill to pass each map.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I would argue it was more meaningful because as I mentioned everything actually had value. As you mention there is a system in place where you quickly acquire and dispose of items in current games. This does indeed remove the feeling that getting an item upgrade actually has any intrinsic value. If you are getting an item upgrade once in a very long while that upgrade has meaning all of a sudden.
You say that most players in a game like WoW do not get the best in slot items. That may be true, but do they really need too? in a game like EQ you could solo and skip all group content, but leveling up from 1 to 50/60 in the original game was quite a challenge unto itself. Every upgrade counted.
I would argue that raiding in modern games is as much about time as in the old days. The difference is that there is little impact in terms of getting the best gear. You can't really visit the newbie zone and power level low level characters (help them out) or do anything impactful in the world once you get those best in slot items.
At least in EQ you could hand some of your old equipment down to new players and help them out. Generally this help was very appreciated due to the difficulty and time consumption of leveling coupled with the rarity of finding an item upgrade.
I don't really believe you can have a system where there is an real impact with the way most games are designed today. They are intentionally designed not to have much impact so that players can't interfere with each others game experiences unless they so choose it to happen. That coupled with lack of time to get to goals and lack of consequences that would really set a player back if they fail bring about a testing environment where nothing really matters.
Comparing this to real life seems a bad idea to me. In real life any action can have dire consequences.
In a game where you are mostly playing alone and can't impact others there is an insulated bubble that prevents you from doing anything bad to anyone else that will have impact on them or them to you. I feel this is an important aspect to create impactful gameplay.
So basically we have time, detrimental consequences, contested content, and far less item upgrades that make the world have impact. All of these things will encourage players to band together and give more value to various different things that happen in the game.
Weather people want to play a game that actually has meaning is another issue. I don't think most people want to.
No, everything actually has value. That one upgrade in the 20,000 hour game provides you +20,000 stats. The 20,000 items in the other game were each +1 stat above the prior item. All of them have value. The same total value is still gained from the 20,000 items.
"Do you really need to?" Again, a pessimist would say you don't need to do anything in any game. But yes, if you enjoy the game and you want to reach the actual end of the game then you'll need those items, and you'll need the slightly weaker set of gear it'll take you to kill those bosses that drop the best gear.
Is there less impact to gear when you can't take your high level gear and do something exploitive like power level a low level character? Yes. Does it avoid an obvious exploit which should be avoided? Yes.
The time investment comment is probably mostly true, although I've never read anything about any early MMORPG that showed it to have rotations as difficult to master as WOW (and the lancer from FFXIV), so there was probably more skill involved there (though the objective difficulty of rotations doesn't really speak to how much room for error any given boss allows, so this isn't something I could say with certainty.)
The limited ability for players to interfere with one another was another obvious problem to be avoided. In some cases it was grief-avoidance. In others it created a better atmosphere of cooperation (like ESO/GW2/WOW where other players can't grief you and mostly can only help you kill a mob faster.) And in other situations it flat out made your gameplay more meaningful (instances and solo-phases, where you can't simply zerg down a tough enemy you actually have to beat it yourself.)
So no, this stuff still has meaning. You're just choosing a very strange perspective of measuring things per-item. Surely you can imagine how my 20,000 hours for 1 item upgrade game would play out, right? While the meaning of that one item would be staggeringly significant, the overall game would be incredibly bland and empty (much like early MMORPGs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I didn't find those games to be bland and empty. Generally they were more alive because the world was one place (no instances) and everyone had to learn to live together in some form. This didn't mean you couldn't solo, but generally meaningful interactions were much more prevalent.
What gives an item value is nothing different then in real life. One is rarity and the other is it needs to give you something meaningful to do with said item. This might be twinking your alts, giving items to friends/low level characters, or in general being able to show off and impact those around you (not just those of equal level).
It's fairly obvious that items and characters in games have little value or impact. This is shown by the fact that they aren't really valued for real money in any form. In older games both items and characters were valued at very high prices in terms of real money. In today's games that is not really the case because it is more easily obtained and perhaps more importantly it doesn't gain you anything outside of being able to do another boring raid or group content where you are again grinding for more equipment.
Originally posted by laokoko
"if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
You're focused on per-item value. I'm focused on fun gameplay.
A game doesn't magically become fun because it has one item that takes 20,000 hours to get and so it's worth $50,000 USD. A game is fun when you're actively engaging in a world with plenty of fun things to loot.
Most of the examples of item use you're giving are known bad designs:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It not wrong after all , just missed one word , "persistent". What make an MMO is the persistent world.
Without persistent world , one can't be called MMO.
And if fun in MMO mean to play alone then i better avoid MMO , i get tired of game publishers ruin the games for more money.
For example in games that allow player to mod , if i don't like something , i change it.
But in MMO , i have to accept what i don't like or quit the game , it isn't good for me.
All i want from an MMO is a good multiplayer game. Sadly , MOBA are better multiplayer game than MMO.