I played literally thousands of hours on several early MMORPG's such as Ultima Online, Everquest, etc. I LOVED them! I have concluded that the reason I loved them so was NOT because it was easy to get to the end-game, but because it was HARD! It was hard because if/when I died, there was a consequence...a consequence that I feared. In Ultima Online, death meant anyone could loot your corpse...or at the very least, the monster actually grabbed an item off your body and you had to go kill the monster to get it back. In Everquest, when you died, you had to go do a corpse-run...sometimes at the bottom of a dungeon. I FEARED that!! And it was a rush to play every moment in a dungeon BECAUSE of that fear. To succeed in a dungeon meant a LOT. Nowadays, in almost all MMO's, there is no fear...if I die...bleh...so what...
I miss the fear of death...doesn't have to be perma death...doesn't mean you have to lose all your stuff...but death has to be something I fear for me to stick with a game...otherwise...its all Chutes and Ladders....
I too enjoy being smashed with a brick in the head every time I die in an MMO. I also like to put myself in an electric chair every time I lose a fight, to make it really dangerous. Anything less and that is just too carebear.
That might be stretching it a bit considering it's not real life. Some people might enjoy smashing a brick against their head in a games similar to how they live out their violent fantasies that they can't commit in reality for various reasons. If you receive a penalty in game it's not actually hurting you in reality. It's just an impediment to make the game more challenging.
The genre is basically boiled down to being predictable and not challenging. The challenges you can get are trapped behind elitism. SInce the challenges are premeditated they are also plotted out. Meaning if you don't know the dungeon or raid people are all over you. They plot your numbers to see if you suck. They check your gear ratings.
Where are the spontaneous challenges or something more open world that can't be plotted.
This is why I would choose horizontal progression where area's of the world bring challenge to limited growth characters vs. challenges being trapped behind raids/dungeons.
PvP is not the problem, see the success of non-MMORPG PvP games.
PvP games where the fighting chances are fair have a HUGE success, and get even more popular with each new implementation of them.
Most players love PvP. Most players don't enjoy unfair fights where they have not a single chance to win.
You'd have to be very dumb or very biased to not understand that.
The problem is not PvP. It's the poorly designed version implemented in MMORPGs.
What makes the moba different from the MMORPG? My answer is - the consequences in the game world. PvP without consequences is moba - you can place it into the game world, or in some instance, it does not matter.
and in a lot of ways the MOBAs fit the modern player perfectly.....They are just giving them what they are asking for.
I also remember the fear of disconnections during a fight, which happened quite often back then with the crappy modems.
A lag spike or a disconnection, and you lose all your gear because of something you have no control on. Great mechanism, really.
</sarcasm>
I know it was sarcasm, but why not re-implement it now, with the very much improved internet connectivity these days. Some folks are getting 1GB up now and after fighting with my own local company for about 6 months, finally got a consistent 200+MB/s up.
You know, make use of improved technology?
I have fiber with 1gb down 300 mb up. You can still die from loss of connection with the server for whatever Internet reason.
My point is, I don't think too harsh death penalties are appropriate for MMORPGs. It only discourages exploration. Balanced is the magic world.
At the end of the day, ANY death penalty is about making you lose some time. Having lost hours or even days of progression, or all your equipment, just because of some random event you don't always control. That's bad design. Even worse when some random asshole coward can do it to you without any risk just because he's a few levels higher than you.
And I agree. The tough part is programming a game to know the difference between player stupidity and technical difficulties.
I only hated EQ's "corpse run" mechanic when it happened due to something out of my control, like internet troubles. Otherwise, they became an unscripted event where I needed to scramble to recover my corpse, possibly by interacting with pother players for help.
That's a lot different from WoW's where I will use death as a means of fast travel, since the death penalty(?) is so paltry, I don't even blink. The last time I played WoW, I never even came close to dieing anyway in the PvE environment (beginning levels).
What I liked was, as a specific example in EQ, taking my Enchanters through High Pass to get a certain spell only available at High Pass Hold. Of coarse High Pass (and many of the intervening zones between) was a bit over the level of my Enchanters when that spell became learn-able, but I felt the "fear" of trying to avoid encounters on my way.
I do agree that there needs to be some kind of "middle ground" where there are consequences for death, but possibly not as severe as EQ's was. Of course each player has their own definition of where this is
PS: Because of mentioned "random cowards", I will never play on PvP servers...
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The genre is basically boiled down to being predictable and not challenging. The challenges you can get are trapped behind elitism. SInce the challenges are premeditated they are also plotted out. Meaning if you don't know the dungeon or raid people are all over you. They plot your numbers to see if you suck. They check your gear ratings.
Where are the spontaneous challenges or something more open world that can't be plotted.
This is why I would choose horizontal progression where area's of the world bring challenge to limited growth characters vs. challenges being trapped behind raids/dungeons.
There's a reason for these things happening. A raid/dungeon constitutes repeatable content that has a standardized difficulty, hence it's easy to allot rewards for it. Sucking at it doesn't happen forever, you have to take it as your initiation ritual. Checking others' numbers is the best thing in MMOs, it allows you to improve/replace the weakest links, which is of great importance if you raid. From experience, NOBODY likes being stuck on the same boss for 3 weeks, while other guilds have passed you already. Nobody likes doing 1000 DPS while 5 other dudes die all the time to stupid crap, or even worse, fail mechanics and kill the entire raid, AND do bad dps/hps as well.
Spontaneous means pretty much random. How will you ensure a proper experience for a MMORPG with it? How would you ensure a nice story, with a big bad boss at the end? How would you ensure people come together to overcome a challenge, which is the best thing to happen in an MMO? And no, stuff like "open world" bosses is irrelevant, they need to be tuned way too easy since people with all kinds of gear and experience will attempt it, and you cannot frustrate them forever.
Not sure why people think spontaneous works. How often a great spontaneous event happens RL? Not that often at all. MMORPGs are still RPGs. Crafted stories, with some grind, some friendly nudging to play with others, some clear endgame progression work best. It's just a shame devs are too damn lazy to do it again, cause it's easier to make one map, throw 100 kids on it, give em guns and reap the benefits.
Reads more like your extrapolation of personal views onto a larger demographic. One set of devs that studied up on their players found that the delay of getting back into the combat/game was the biggest death penalty.
I find most MMOs to be just too shallow to keep my interest nowadays. A death penalty isn't going to help that. For me.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
No game has instilled in me a fear of death as much as Everquest. Which is why the mobs seemed more real to me in that game. And why I played with my head on a swivel, expecting trouble at every turn. I want Pantheon to bring that back.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I remember my first couple of minutes in EQ I didnt wander too far from the Kelethin guards, then all of a sudden whap! and I was dead....From that moment on my relationship with the crushbone orcs was never the same.
Being afraid to die is something I am glad has mostly disappeared from MMOs. It just meant that the majority of players kept things safe as much as possible, preferring to grind easy mobs instead of pushing themselves, avoiding pvp and often avoiding dungeons.
I don't want that. I want players to be constantly pushing the envelope. I want more people getting involved in PvP, not more people avoiding it due to fear of dying. I want more people taking on difficult mobs, learning to play their classes to the limit, rather than keeping it simple and safe.
Fear is just not a good motivation.
Stick with something positive instead. For example, every time I've been raiding and we've been learning a new boss, the excitement we get each time we make progress is a far better motivation to keep playing than fear. If we were afraid to die, there is no way we'd have raided as much, or pushed ourselves as hard, or tried out weird new tactics.
That's not to say I don't think we need harsher death penalties or some extra forced downtime, I do. I just don't ever want to see any mechanics in game that discourage players from trying something new.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
As the OP alludes to there is a middle ground between permadeath and the easymode no penalty design we have now. For me looting goes to far but penalties like a small xp loss or enforced down time are fine.
Full loot may be frustrating. But some loot is necessary for any MMORPG. That makes the PvP meaningful. I do not fight with you to count some fights, or you to lose some xp. I fight for your gear (well part of it), for your farming spot, for your castle. Or, the whole pointless fighting shall be removed, and to make a dress up competition instead for example - my armor is fancier, I win - is some kind of competition too.
This is pretty subjective. I fight to win, not because I want another player's gear. Also, I fight to have a good fight. There is nothing meaningful if I two shot a player and there is especially nothing meaningful if I two shot another player and get their gear.
I'd rather win territory, I'd rather win the war and I'd rather have the "win" on my list of accomplishments.
I'll get my own gear other ways.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I guess that depends on your point of view. Keeping players from certain content unless they are adventurous makes that rarely done content feel more special. It gives it a certain amount of meaning. One might argue that is the point of an adventure.
Wouldn't almost any open world PvP MMO accomplish the same thing? It's not "the game" that is hard, it the other players making it so, right?
How is EVE's PvE? I found it boring as all get out when I tried their 14 day trial. Heck, I didn't even stay logged in. I'd give orders and instead of sitting there watching my skills or whatever go slowly up, I'd log out, play something else , and log back the next day. Not an ounce of fear engaged.
That was just my experience, though. I'm sure EVE's fans have quite a different one.
Yes it is possible to never leave the station and make decent isk just playing the market. Some people have done just that. But like you said it can be very boring. Nothing like getting out there and taking greater risks for greater rewards.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I guess that depends on your point of view. Keeping players from certain content unless they are adventurous makes that rarely done content feel more special. It gives it a certain amount of meaning. One might argue that is the point of an adventure.
Perfect argument of a bully, too. Except that a real life bully at least risks something. A level 40 ganking a level 20 and looting him dry risks nothing.
Your word is adventurous. Mine is coward.
How is difficult content that excludes players who don't want to put in the effort to do the bullying?
I was responding to the post before mine mostly about fear and content needing to be available easily to everyone who plays.
I was one of those people who soloed a lot in EQ, but the fact that content wasn't readily available to all players made it more exciting and also kept higher end items rarer.
As the OP alludes to there is a middle ground between permadeath and the easymode no penalty design we have now. For me looting goes to far but penalties like a small xp loss or enforced down time are fine.
Full loot may be frustrating. But some loot is necessary for any MMORPG. That makes the PvP meaningful. I do not fight with you to count some fights, or you to lose some xp. I fight for your gear (well part of it), for your farming spot, for your castle. Or, the whole pointless fighting shall be removed, and to make a dress up competition instead for example - my armor is fancier, I win - is some kind of competition too.
This is pretty subjective. I fight to win, not because I want another player's gear. Also, I fight to have a good fight. There is nothing meaningful if I two shot a player and there is especially nothing meaningful if I two shot another player and get their gear.
I'd rather win territory, I'd rather win the war and I'd rather have the "win" on my list of accomplishments.
I'll get my own gear other ways.
That's a major thing as everyone doesn't PvP for the same reason. Some players want a win because they used skill to achieve victory against an equally matched player or while being out numbered. Some players enjoy PvP in a group setting, some just want an easy win against players that have no chance against them. Some love the thrill of not being able to tell the level of the player they go up against until the fight has started. Then players who like different types and players who prefer only one or two types. Our rules boil down to being a matter of personal choice and finding a game which is most compatible with them.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Fear is severely diminished when you have other people bunny hopping and one shotting everything around you. Fear inducing moments are stronger in single player games.
Give me a good challenge in mmos. Fear shows up naturally if the setting/atmosphere of the game is on point when a possibly imminent death awaits from either a player or AI.
I agree with fear being a non factor at this point and that more MMO's should have some form of thing to fear.
I think that's what drew me to Darkfall so much, was the full loot and fear that you could lose everything you are carrying at any point. Walking 4 hours accross the world isn't an enticing sounding thing, but when you find a chaos chest with a house deed, that 4 hours of walking could become the scariest 4 hours trying to protect that thing.
The fear of loss, or the fear of something negative happening for a death is something games need more often. At this point in MMORPG's it's become an inconvenience to die, nothing more. Half the time the games offer some form of instant rez where you lose nothing and are in the same spot ready to try again.
I remember in L2 if you died and lost a % of exp, that could take days to grind back, it was a big deal to die.
As the OP alludes to there is a middle ground between permadeath and the easymode no penalty design we have now. For me looting goes to far but penalties like a small xp loss or enforced down time are fine.
Full loot may be frustrating. But some loot is necessary for any MMORPG. That makes the PvP meaningful. I do not fight with you to count some fights, or you to lose some xp. I fight for your gear (well part of it), for your farming spot, for your castle. Or, the whole pointless fighting shall be removed, and to make a dress up competition instead for example - my armor is fancier, I win - is some kind of competition too.
This is pretty subjective. I fight to win, not because I want another player's gear. Also, I fight to have a good fight. There is nothing meaningful if I two shot a player and there is especially nothing meaningful if I two shot another player and get their gear.
I'd rather win territory, I'd rather win the war and I'd rather have the "win" on my list of accomplishments.
I'll get my own gear other ways.
That's a major thing as everyone doesn't PvP for the same reason. Some players want a win because they used skill to achieve victory against an equally matched player or while being out numbered. Some players enjoy PvP in a group setting, some just want an easy win against players that have no chance against them. Some love the thrill of not being able to tell the level of the player they go up against until the fight has started. Then players who like different types and players who prefer only one or two types. Our rules boil down to being a matter of personal choice and finding a game which is most compatible with them.
For me it's sieges. It's the only pvp that I find exciting because of the "energy" of everyone around. I've had more fun in sieges than most any other type of pvp I've ever participated in.
Now, there isn't a game called "nuttin' but sieges" so there it is.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I see some saying that it's not a fear he misses, but the challenge he misses.
I disagree in that there's a difference.
Games today do have challenges. Challenges to win a battle, challenges to get the mechanics right to down a raid boss. There's plenty of challenges and whether or not you think they're too easy nowadays is another topic. (one that's been done more than once!)
But the OP was talking about fear in the old games. And i have to agree with him. My first experience was the long grinding in DAOC. We had to get large groups and go down the dungeons and every death was a backwards step on the path to leveling. It sucked, and it was awesome!
But it also changed my experience while grouping with ones. I literally was afraid to die. While leveling in DF, i was always looking around my shoulder for those dam hibs. Yes there was fear. NOT just a challenge, because that's too broad a term. There's plenty of "challenges" that don't give you fear.
So yes, I'm with the OP. I miss the fear.
ehh, no. The 'fear' that you describe is probably the best feature that designers left for dead when WoW came out. WoW showed that you did not have to punish people into the ground for them not wanting to die, just the act of having to run back to where you were is enough punishment because it means you just wasted 5 minutes of real life time. That's all you need and the mind set of the old games was just wrong. Back then, nobody was saying man I can't wait to die so that I can lose 25% of my xp! There are reasons why WoW destroyed EQ2 and all other MMORPGs and this is one of the biggest ones. EQ2 at release was trying to make the EQ1 people happy with corpse runs, xp debt etc.. and it almost went out of business until they pulled that out.
And yes, I played the old games and the single biggest bullsheit mechanic of DAOC was xp loss. I remember grinding for days trying to get to 50... taking a death because of some troll or idiot in your group and watching your xp bar go down by 25%.. that basically equated to hours/days of time lost grinding the same thing over and over... there was nothing, absolutely nothing enjoyable about that. There were times where I wanted to jump on a plane to Virginia, walk into Mythic's office and start beating the sheit out of everybody I could find. lol
What the real problem today is exactly what has been said, there is absolutely no challenge in MMORPGs today... NONE. In just about every single MMORPG released in the past 10 years you could log in.. close your eyes, run forward and pound your keyboard and you will be level 30 by the time you open your eyes. Yes that's an exaggeration.. but not by much. Leveling in today's MMORPGs is about the most pointless activity a person can spend their time on. Once they reach max level then things start getting a little more challenging but at that stage what's the point?
The problem is the games today put no value in leveling, no value in the journey to get to max level. They design games where players get to max level in just a couple days after release.. and that's just stupid.
Take DAOC for example, go play that game as it was designed from the start (no battlegrounds etc). Note that I think xp loss has been taken out.. but I'm talking about the fighting and interaction with mobs. Are you going to take on 10 mobs at once at level 2? Let me know how that goes for you. You going to take on 2 mobs at once?? Again, let me know how that goes for you. You get a group of 8 together and pull 2 mobs at once... if you don't know how to manage those mobs.. let me know how that goes for you. lol Are you just going to walk around the world willy nilly and not worry about what is around you.. let me know how that goes for you.
That's what people are talking about, in the old games mobs had meaning, there was strategy behind the fight. You needed to learn the mechanics and use intelligence during the fights. You had to manage your power, manage your endurance.. it was a challenge during combat.. even at level 2 when you had little to no abilities. That is what is really missing in games. In DAOC it was challenging from level 1 to 50 and it took months to get to 50 (at release).
I think the last MMORPG I tried was one of the latest Korean MMORPGs, I don't even remember the name of it because it doesn't matter. I logged in, proceeded to run randomly at level one.. 1 shotting everything and then all of a sudden I'm level 19. What just happened? What was the point? The sad thing is somebody spent a lot of time and effort designing the art for the zones, the models for the mobs etc.. and in less than 35 minutes I blew through all of it.. not having to use my brain at all. That is the problem with today's MMORPGs... and the real tragedy is, I don't really see it changing.
The very first time myself and a friend logged into Asheron's Call on day 1 as noobs we were faced by level 1-3 Drudge which killed us over and over and over again. The world was massive, mysterious and always had a frontier over the horizon where death lingered.
We fucking loved it. We were addicted.
As I've said since the beginning: Real MMORPGs have always been a fully fledged survival game and developers have long ago completely forgotten this because the RPG influence was forgotten.
My RPG group is currently playing Savage Rifts. Survival is a skill, lack of sleep has rules, healing has limitation and the game is brutal hard with limited upward scaling (some things always possess the ability to hurt you ... you just gain a far better ability to statistically take them on as you gain xp). The fear is real and the fun is even more real.
Fear is the driving force in the real world. Fear is the consciousness of consequence. It and it alone can be the soul drive to over come something. Without it MMORPG worlds are soulless and this is evident across the current industry.
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
Comments
Where are the spontaneous challenges or something more open world that can't be plotted.
This is why I would choose horizontal progression where area's of the world bring challenge to limited growth characters vs. challenges being trapped behind raids/dungeons.
I only hated EQ's "corpse run" mechanic when it happened due to something out of my control, like internet troubles. Otherwise, they became an unscripted event where I needed to scramble to recover my corpse, possibly by interacting with pother players for help.
That's a lot different from WoW's where I will use death as a means of fast travel, since the death penalty(?) is so paltry, I don't even blink. The last time I played WoW, I never even came close to dieing anyway in the PvE environment (beginning levels).
What I liked was, as a specific example in EQ, taking my Enchanters through High Pass to get a certain spell only available at High Pass Hold. Of coarse High Pass (and many of the intervening zones between) was a bit over the level of my Enchanters when that spell became learn-able, but I felt the "fear" of trying to avoid encounters on my way.
I do agree that there needs to be some kind of "middle ground" where there are consequences for death, but possibly not as severe as EQ's was. Of course each player has their own definition of where this is
PS: Because of mentioned "random cowards", I will never play on PvP servers...
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Spontaneous means pretty much random. How will you ensure a proper experience for a MMORPG with it? How would you ensure a nice story, with a big bad boss at the end? How would you ensure people come together to overcome a challenge, which is the best thing to happen in an MMO? And no, stuff like "open world" bosses is irrelevant, they need to be tuned way too easy since people with all kinds of gear and experience will attempt it, and you cannot frustrate them forever.
Not sure why people think spontaneous works. How often a great spontaneous event happens RL? Not that often at all. MMORPGs are still RPGs. Crafted stories, with some grind, some friendly nudging to play with others, some clear endgame progression work best. It's just a shame devs are too damn lazy to do it again, cause it's easier to make one map, throw 100 kids on it, give em guns and reap the benefits.
I find most MMOs to be just too shallow to keep my interest nowadays. A death penalty isn't going to help that. For me.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Being afraid to die is something I am glad has mostly disappeared from MMOs. It just meant that the majority of players kept things safe as much as possible, preferring to grind easy mobs instead of pushing themselves, avoiding pvp and often avoiding dungeons.
I don't want that. I want players to be constantly pushing the envelope. I want more people getting involved in PvP, not more people avoiding it due to fear of dying. I want more people taking on difficult mobs, learning to play their classes to the limit, rather than keeping it simple and safe.
Fear is just not a good motivation.
Stick with something positive instead. For example, every time I've been raiding and we've been learning a new boss, the excitement we get each time we make progress is a far better motivation to keep playing than fear. If we were afraid to die, there is no way we'd have raided as much, or pushed ourselves as hard, or tried out weird new tactics.
That's not to say I don't think we need harsher death penalties or some extra forced downtime, I do. I just don't ever want to see any mechanics in game that discourage players from trying something new.
I'd rather win territory, I'd rather win the war and I'd rather have the "win" on my list of accomplishments.
I'll get my own gear other ways.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I was responding to the post before mine mostly about fear and content needing to be available easily to everyone who plays.
I was one of those people who soloed a lot in EQ, but the fact that content wasn't readily available to all players made it more exciting and also kept higher end items rarer.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Give me a good challenge in mmos. Fear shows up naturally if the setting/atmosphere of the game is on point when a possibly imminent death awaits from either a player or AI.
My thoughts.
I think that's what drew me to Darkfall so much, was the full loot and fear that you could lose everything you are carrying at any point. Walking 4 hours accross the world isn't an enticing sounding thing, but when you find a chaos chest with a house deed, that 4 hours of walking could become the scariest 4 hours trying to protect that thing.
The fear of loss, or the fear of something negative happening for a death is something games need more often. At this point in MMORPG's it's become an inconvenience to die, nothing more. Half the time the games offer some form of instant rez where you lose nothing and are in the same spot ready to try again.
I remember in L2 if you died and lost a % of exp, that could take days to grind back, it was a big deal to die.
Now, there isn't a game called "nuttin' but sieges" so there it is.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Also, when I used to PK/Duel in diablo 2 hc (no hacks of course) always had the adrenaline going.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
And yes, I played the old games and the single biggest bullsheit mechanic of DAOC was xp loss. I remember grinding for days trying to get to 50... taking a death because of some troll or idiot in your group and watching your xp bar go down by 25%.. that basically equated to hours/days of time lost grinding the same thing over and over... there was nothing, absolutely nothing enjoyable about that. There were times where I wanted to jump on a plane to Virginia, walk into Mythic's office and start beating the sheit out of everybody I could find. lol
What the real problem today is exactly what has been said, there is absolutely no challenge in MMORPGs today... NONE. In just about every single MMORPG released in the past 10 years you could log in.. close your eyes, run forward and pound your keyboard and you will be level 30 by the time you open your eyes. Yes that's an exaggeration.. but not by much. Leveling in today's MMORPGs is about the most pointless activity a person can spend their time on. Once they reach max level then things start getting a little more challenging but at that stage what's the point?
The problem is the games today put no value in leveling, no value in the journey to get to max level. They design games where players get to max level in just a couple days after release.. and that's just stupid.
Take DAOC for example, go play that game as it was designed from the start (no battlegrounds etc). Note that I think xp loss has been taken out.. but I'm talking about the fighting and interaction with mobs. Are you going to take on 10 mobs at once at level 2? Let me know how that goes for you. You going to take on 2 mobs at once?? Again, let me know how that goes for you. You get a group of 8 together and pull 2 mobs at once... if you don't know how to manage those mobs.. let me know how that goes for you. lol Are you just going to walk around the world willy nilly and not worry about what is around you.. let me know how that goes for you.
That's what people are talking about, in the old games mobs had meaning, there was strategy behind the fight. You needed to learn the mechanics and use intelligence during the fights. You had to manage your power, manage your endurance.. it was a challenge during combat.. even at level 2 when you had little to no abilities. That is what is really missing in games. In DAOC it was challenging from level 1 to 50 and it took months to get to 50 (at release).
I think the last MMORPG I tried was one of the latest Korean MMORPGs, I don't even remember the name of it because it doesn't matter. I logged in, proceeded to run randomly at level one.. 1 shotting everything and then all of a sudden I'm level 19. What just happened? What was the point? The sad thing is somebody spent a lot of time and effort designing the art for the zones, the models for the mobs etc.. and in less than 35 minutes I blew through all of it.. not having to use my brain at all. That is the problem with today's MMORPGs... and the real tragedy is, I don't really see it changing.
We fucking loved it. We were addicted.
As I've said since the beginning: Real MMORPGs have always been a fully fledged survival game and developers have long ago completely forgotten this because the RPG influence was forgotten.
My RPG group is currently playing Savage Rifts. Survival is a skill, lack of sleep has rules, healing has limitation and the game is brutal hard with limited upward scaling (some things always possess the ability to hurt you ... you just gain a far better ability to statistically take them on as you gain xp). The fear is real and the fun is even more real.
Fear is the driving force in the real world. Fear is the consciousness of consequence. It and it alone can be the soul drive to over come something. Without it MMORPG worlds are soulless and this is evident across the current industry.
You stay sassy!
"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™
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