lahnmir said: Also, tedious and convoluted don’t equal difficulty, a mistake often made.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
What does equal difficulty, if I may ask?
Should we take another shot at equating corpse runs with difficulty? I always enjoy those topics
It isn't the corpse run it's everything we do to avoid the corpse run that makes it challenging.
I'd argue that the corpse run is what tends to make people avoid challenge.
The fear of failure has that effect in everyday life. Overcoming the fear is itself a challenge.
The challenge is overcoming the failure and succeeding not the fear lol.
Yes, of course, but surely you're not implying that overcoming the fear of negative outcomes isn't a challenge. If that were the case we would all be bungie jumping skydiving small business owners.
I'm just trying to separate this forum's habitual confusion over what is a challenge from the consequences of failing that challenge because posters here are always conflating the two.
Challenge and difficulty to me are simple to define: it's the chance of success or failure when you do something. Whether it's defeating an enemy or making a parkour-like jump doesn't matter and well done challenges let you approach the solution in different ways.
I remember in the early days of ESO a particular quest mini-boss that drove some crazy because it kept healing itself faster than you could damage it. There was actually a pretty trivial solution to the problem: you needed to get close enough to it to bash it whenever it attempted to heal itself to interrupt it. But it was rare outside dungeons to need to pay attention to self-healing NPC mechanics so many failed over and over and took to the forums.
Now the consequences of failure in ESO were trivial. If you died you just self-rezzed on the spot as anyone can. You could immediately go have another attempt at the mini-boss but you weren't going to defeat it until you tried the different approach of interrupting no matter how much damage you could deal. That was the "challenge." Defeating it.
Trivial insta rezz or long corpse runs were irrelevant to the difficulty and challenge. That would be a different game play loop that dictated how often you could try to overcome the challenge: many times in a 10 minute period vs. maybe only once if ESO had punishing corpse runs instead.
But the "challenge" was figuring out how to beat it - and anyone could once you hit on the right approach - so you could complete that quest. Corpse runs would have just made you wait longer between attempts.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
A polished version of an old school MMORPG would be good. But no one would play it except the only 5 guys that would be interested in it. So, it would be good to actually do the stuff we did in those MMORPGs like enemies actually being dangerous, required community help, classes relying on each other etc except in fast forward mode. Because people these days would think it's slow and inconvenient to do something like taking 5 minutes to kill a rat while keeping an eye out for patrols etc.
Totally agree with the OP, Seems he needs to vent with his frustration of the crap we have now.
With one poster trying to look at the good side and naming the few that have harder content, does not help in the huge state of suck the mmorpg market is in. Trying to promote EVE is not working. Without knocking EVE, it's a unique style of game that most people ARE NOT LOOKING FOR.... You like it or don't and nothing could change that. I'm sure it's good but it's still not an mmorpg that everyone would flood too.
Retail WOW is crap, with pockets of hard "mini games". But day to day life in the game goes for the lowest denominator. People are looking for the day-to-day-life !
Overall the OP is right. He talks about first generation mmorpgs being great..... what he gets is back lash on the broken early stages of development.
ALL THIS COULD BE FIXED and polished, It's not 1999 !!!!.... Nothing from this great era was ever fixed... or better yet recreated.
I've watched many videos of modern EQ1... It's still completely broken. Just made easy combat and more of it.
C'mon delete, I gave you two other more challenging MMOs and I'll add another, Project Gorgon, PVE centric even if I recall correctly.
How many games will you or others like the OP shun for various "reasons?"
New World's coming soon, are you all in or not? Lots of other survival centric multiplayer world's out their, each with their own set of challenges to overcome I'm sure.
Crowfall can be played regularly, same for Dual Universe, both with significant challenges, perhaps not the least being a stable environment but still, both are playble unless the gamer choose to disqualify them.
Heck, how about Genshin Impact, from what I read it can be a pretty good game but the "grind" for the better characters can be brutal in terms of both time and impact on one's wallet.
But still no go right?
What isn't available are MMOs with the exact specific design parameters of the first generation games, which isn't really likely to change, especially from any of the big development houses.
We can only hope Pantheon or SOL pull off a miracle, because otherwise it just isn't very likely to happen again.
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
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I'm just trying to separate this forum's habitual confusion over what is a challenge from the consequences of failing that challenge because posters here are always conflating the two.
Challenge and difficulty to me are simple to define: it's the chance of success or failure when you do something. Whether it's defeating an enemy or making a parkour-like jump doesn't matter and well done challenges let you approach the solution in different ways.
I remember in the early days of ESO a particular quest mini-boss that drove some crazy because it kept healing itself faster than you could damage it. There was actually a pretty trivial solution to the problem: you needed to get close enough to it to bash it whenever it attempted to heal itself to interrupt it. But it was rare outside dungeons to need to pay attention to self-healing NPC mechanics so many failed over and over and took to the forums.
Now the consequences of failure in ESO were trivial. If you died you just self-rezzed on the spot as anyone can. You could immediately go have another attempt at the mini-boss but you weren't going to defeat it until you tried the different approach of interrupting no matter how much damage you could deal. That was the "challenge." Defeating it.
Trivial insta rezz or long corpse runs were irrelevant to the difficulty and challenge. That would be a different game play loop that dictated how often you could try to overcome the challenge: many times in a 10 minute period vs. maybe only once if ESO had punishing corpse runs instead.
But the "challenge" was figuring out how to beat it - and anyone could once you hit on the right approach - so you could complete that quest. Corpse runs would have just made you wait longer between attempts.
In that example it's pretty damn intuitive that bashing interrupts casting. No amount of time spent running is going to change the challenge. That doesn't mean that corpse runs adds no difficulty to challenges. For example, what if you had to bash to interrupt and then do 15 other things in sequence? Every time you failed you had to spend 15 minutes getting back to start over from the beginning. Each failure requires more time and more effort. Contrast that with immediately spawning where you left off to throw yourself at it repeatedly until you figured out the sequence.
One requires more time and more effort than the other, which inherently makes it more difficult. In fact, some synonyms for difficult are pitfall, drawback, complication, hinderance, dilemma, hardship, distress, laboriousness, pains, hurdle, stumbling block.... which all describe corpse runs pretty well.
This is a good point, but keep in mind the challenge of the fight itself has not changed, the content is not more or less a challenge in what it takes to win, you are simply adding in an frustration factor, making it a trial of persistence as opposed to just skill.
In short, the people who had the skill to beat the challenge in a very limited number of tries, before they realize the solution will still not see those corpse runs and other stressors as a challenge, they would be little more than speed bumps.
In fact, those stressors really only hurt people who are of average skill that would take a lot of tries to win, and are mainly NOT the people looking for added difficulty to their game, or seeking to make it more frustrating to play.
Let me give you an example. in GW2, I was doing the Mad King Clock Tower Jump Puzzle. I must have failed that run hundreds of times, before I finally got it. That was a challenge to complete.
If they had added in additional stressors to that, that is not making the clocktower more or less a challenge in and of it's own right, that is just the designers being assholes.
To grasp this. Simon Says is a fun little challenging game to keep memorizing the pattern, if you fail, no harm, no foul, just try again.
That is Challenge in a Nutshell.
If you provide good challenge, you don't need to add additional bullshit to it.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Project Gorgon, Legends of Aria, DDO, EQ1 + 2, Salem, Haven & Hearth, UO, DAOC, Runescape + RS OS and the rogue versions of SWG, COH, WAR... why can people longing for the old experiences not find what they want in any of those games?
Maybe the memory of the game experience was in reality much different to what the game was because of that 'first time high'. Ever heard of 'chasing the dragon'?
Maybe the experience of playing the game was just one piece of the puzzle of your life at a certain time that made it magical.
MMO's are in a sad state because devs are not trying to improve the realism of the world nor the AI of the npc's to make their personality more real.
Then on top of that we get so many people making excuses for bad work saying things like "i like the art style".EVERY single piece of art style has a texture on it and if that texture looks like a lazy 8 bit color texture with little to no detail,then yeah it is garbage no matter what art style it is.
Housing,building,water,the worlds we reside in are very lazy work,mostly just a land mass to jot down some mobs so then they can lazily have one database full of quest mobs all tied to a few triggers.
Combat is typically WORSE than many of the original mmo's,so these dev teams are not using any creative thoughts process or any deep formula to allow players to think and react.Instead two mechanics,timing and somersaults....seriously wtf.
How we can have so many employees,so many studios and all of them seem to THINK a boss must reside in a cave/dungeon and be the only way to attain the best items in game.Like NOBODY is able to think outside that puny mindset or what?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I'm just trying to separate this forum's habitual confusion over what is a challenge from the consequences of failing that challenge because posters here are always conflating the two.
Challenge and difficulty to me are simple to define: it's the chance of success or failure when you do something. Whether it's defeating an enemy or making a parkour-like jump doesn't matter and well done challenges let you approach the solution in different ways.
I remember in the early days of ESO a particular quest mini-boss that drove some crazy because it kept healing itself faster than you could damage it. There was actually a pretty trivial solution to the problem: you needed to get close enough to it to bash it whenever it attempted to heal itself to interrupt it. But it was rare outside dungeons to need to pay attention to self-healing NPC mechanics so many failed over and over and took to the forums.
Now the consequences of failure in ESO were trivial. If you died you just self-rezzed on the spot as anyone can. You could immediately go have another attempt at the mini-boss but you weren't going to defeat it until you tried the different approach of interrupting no matter how much damage you could deal. That was the "challenge." Defeating it.
Trivial insta rezz or long corpse runs were irrelevant to the difficulty and challenge. That would be a different game play loop that dictated how often you could try to overcome the challenge: many times in a 10 minute period vs. maybe only once if ESO had punishing corpse runs instead.
But the "challenge" was figuring out how to beat it - and anyone could once you hit on the right approach - so you could complete that quest. Corpse runs would have just made you wait longer between attempts.
In that example it's pretty damn intuitive that bashing interrupts casting. No amount of time spent running is going to change the challenge. That doesn't mean that corpse runs adds no difficulty to challenges. For example, what if you had to bash to interrupt and then do 15 other things in sequence? Every time you failed you had to spend 15 minutes getting back to start over from the beginning. Each failure requires more time and more effort. Contrast that with immediately spawning where you left off to throw yourself at it repeatedly until you figured out the sequence.
One requires more time and more effort than the other, which inherently makes it more difficult. In fact, some synonyms for difficult are pitfall, drawback, complication, hinderance, dilemma, hardship, distress, laboriousness, pains, hurdle, stumbling block.... which all describe corpse runs pretty well.
This is a good point, but keep in mind the challenge of the fight itself has not changed, the content is not more or less a challenge in what it takes to win, you are simply adding in an frustration factor, making it a trial of persistence as opposed to just skill.
In short, the people who had the skill to beat the challenge in a very limited number of tries, before they realize the solution will still not see those corpse runs and other stressors as a challenge, they would be little more than speed bumps.
In fact, those stressors really only hurt people who are of average skill that would take a lot of tries to win, and are mainly NOT the people looking for added difficulty to their game, or seeking to make it more frustrating to play.
Let me give you an example. in GW2, I was doing the Mad King Clock Tower Jump Puzzle. I must have failed that run hundreds of times, before I finally got it. That was a challenge to complete.
If they had added in additional stressors to that, that is not making the clocktower more or less a challenge in and of it's own right, that is just the designers being assholes.
To grasp this. Simon Says is a fun little challenging game to keep memorizing the pattern, if you fail, no harm, no foul, just try again.
That is Challenge in a Nutshell.
If you provide good challenge, you don't need to add additional bullshit to it.
I think it's safe to say that most people, in general, have no desire to face difficult challenges in video games that they play for the sole purpose of destressing and escaping their own real-world difficulties.
On one hand if challenges are too easy they don't feel rewarding. Slaying a dragon isn't so great of an accomplishment when anyone with a pulse, 5 minutes, and an ounce of motivation can do it... you just don't get the same chemical payoff. I wonder if there exists a perfect balance of difficulty for challenges, psychologically.
That really depends on the game and the market.
Anyone can tell you that I have always been a proponent of designing games with a target market in mind, and then building the game to target the hell out of that market, be damned anyone else.
So I am going to use a game as an example of knowing your market.
DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online. Imagine, you need to go slay a Balor, AKA Pit Fiend, that is porting their armies into the Prime Material plane, so you and 11 of your closest friends and random strangers gather together, and head off to kill the great Daemon Lord, Harry. However, during all this, in the middle of fighting his minions, you need to also play a game of lights out.
yah.. DDO does that to you.
It's not the weak of heart, it's not for people that want to mindlessly escape, if you raid in DDO, you gotta think. And amazingly we play this game way too often drunk and stoned. But DDO does not try to make their game easy, they have a core group of players that like things being as hard as they are, and thirst for the next raid or content pack that will make them cry trying to figure out how to solve it.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Project Gorgon, Legends of Aria, DDO, EQ1 + 2, Salem, Haven & Hearth, UO, DAOC, Runescape + RS OS and the rogue versions of SWG, COH, WAR... why can people longing for the old experiences not find what they want in any of those games?
Maybe the memory of the game experience was in reality much different to what the game was because of that 'first time high'. Ever heard of 'chasing the dragon'?
Maybe the experience of playing the game was just one piece of the puzzle of your life at a certain time that made it magical.
People are expecting the same experience with better graphic and better polish. Which never come.
Old school shouldn't mean poor graphic and poor polish.
lahnmir said: Also, tedious and convoluted don’t equal difficulty, a mistake often made.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
What does equal difficulty, if I may ask?
Should we take another shot at equating corpse runs with difficulty? I always enjoy those topics
It isn't the corpse run it's everything we do to avoid the corpse run that makes it challenging.
I'd argue that the corpse run is what tends to make people avoid challenge.
The fear of failure has that effect in everyday life. Overcoming the fear is itself a challenge.
The challenge is overcoming the failure and succeeding not the fear lol.
hmmm I think it's the fear. Ask anyone with anxiety and especially anxiety attacks. The whole thing is "fear of fear." That fear grows and becomes incapacitating.
Overcoming the fear and realizing that "you won't die" because of that fear helps you then overcome the failure.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Project Gorgon, Legends of Aria, DDO, EQ1 + 2, Salem, Haven & Hearth, UO, DAOC, Runescape + RS OS and the rogue versions of SWG, COH, WAR... why can people longing for the old experiences not find what they want in any of those games?
Maybe the memory of the game experience was in reality much different to what the game was because of that 'first time high'. Ever heard of 'chasing the dragon'?
Maybe the experience of playing the game was just one piece of the puzzle of your life at a certain time that made it magical.
People are expecting the same experience with better graphic and better polish. Which never come.
Old school shouldn't mean poor graphic and poor polish.
The "old" experiences are still available though. If anything I think in many ways people getting into those games now may have a better time seeing as how niche those titles have become and the internet game world as a whole has matured. People behaving better toward each other for reasons of mutual dependence.
Nostalgia is a helluva drug... these posts that pop up repeatedly aren’t actually talking about games of the present versus the past, they are comparing the feelings these games give them now versus 10-20 years ago.
I guarantee if OP got their modern-day “old school” MMO they would find, once the rose colored glasses are removed, that there are many flaws and things to dislike about these older games, and appreciate how far MMO’s have come.
lahnmir said: Also, tedious and convoluted don’t equal difficulty, a mistake often made.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
What does equal difficulty, if I may ask?
Should we take another shot at equating corpse runs with difficulty? I always enjoy those topics
It isn't the corpse run it's everything we do to avoid the corpse run that makes it challenging.
I'd argue that the corpse run is what tends to make people avoid challenge.
In other words... not difficult? (If one equates challenge with difficulty. of course.)
- 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
lahnmir said: Also, tedious and convoluted don’t equal difficulty, a mistake often made.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
What does equal difficulty, if I may ask?
Should we take another shot at equating corpse runs with difficulty? I always enjoy those topics
It isn't the corpse run it's everything we do to avoid the corpse run that makes it challenging.
Challenge is how hard or not it is to defeat an enemy. Corpse runs are the negative reinforcement for failing to defeat that challenging enemy that has the effect of modifying your game play to be more timid and avoid challenge.
True, yet not everyone responds to stimuli the same way. Some "learn" better from negative reinforcement while others do better with positive. Some looked at corpse runs as a chance for adventure, or meet new people as they asked for help. Others rage quit. Look at mobile gaming and the dopamine rush which they dole out minute by minute
Lahnmir used used words that are more like attitude than any definition. (tedious, also known as grind, being the major one, though convoluted is not a great descriptor...)
I can't argue your definition, as "difficult" to one player is "easy-peasy" to another. Some players think simply adding hit points to monsters (bullet sponges) make them "difficult." Others see it as tedious, as it simply prolongs a fight or battle.
- 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
AlBQuirky said: Some players think simply adding hit points to monsters (bullet sponges) make them "difficult." Others see it as tedious, as it simply prolongs a fight or battle.
Bullet sponge enemies are lazy programming and all too frequently the only "challenge" that more "difficult" content provides. It's funny though, when that's missing, as in level scaled games like ESO, some whine about not being able to feel the progression.
The alternative with the tech currently used in games though, is "tricks up their sleeve" as in the ESO example I used of the self-healing mini boss. Most MMOs use tricks in dungeons and raids but once you've done the content a few times that "difficulty" fades and they become trivial when you know the choreography for hurting the bad guy and avoiding the one-shot mechanics.
True sophisticated AI in games is very rare, if it even exists. What we run against in 99% of them are the bullet sponges and/or the tricks that fool us once or twice.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
For me, enjoyable difficulty is simply making a gaming challenging through making the right choices and actions - whether it's using the right skills or dodging at the right times, or solving a puzzle. IMO, anything that doesn't allow for me to succeed or fail through my group's actions and decisions diminishes the thrill and aggravates me.
To me, the biggest down side(imo) for old MMOs is they can be more about who can spend most time rather than who plays best.
I understand the OPs sentiments, but you know, EVE Online still has almost everything they long for yet probably aren't playing it for "reasons."
Can't take such complaints all that seriously if gamers are going to ignore what few available choices there are today.
Life is Feudal is shuttering their doors so I have to ask if the OP had supported them?
How about Albion Online, actually doing pretty well for itself, is the OP playing it?
The thing is, if gamers don't well support what is available why would anyone bother to make a newer, more expensive version without any solid evidence it might be a success?
The reasons are pretty big tbh...I don't play it because I dislike the turn spread sheet combat and the huge entry level via grinding and competing against people that have been playing for years.
I have been playing MMO's from the time the first one came out. IMHO Asheron's Call 1, was hands down the best MMO ever. It was extremely difficult to level and play. "Dungeons REQUIRED large groups at different leveled brackets to open doors for other level brackets. The character skills you would build were things like run speed, strength, jumping skill, focus, etc... what made it unique is you could explore all those traits. I fought a guy (pvp) and was chasing him (i had a very high run skill so he wasn't getting away. Then he literally jumped over a building to get away. Apparently, he had put many points into that skill. That is just one example of many, that made the game challenging and FUN !!! It seems to me, MMO's today have been built for this generation of everyone gets a trophy. Kill x of x. Turn in, repeat, join a group of nameless individuals, complete the dungeon/raid, collect purples, repeat. Aion was a fun game for me, once again, MANY people, hundreds, fighting over resources, epic battles, coordination, teamwork, FUN. Every MMO today seems to be on autopilot using the template from WOW. Just let me mash the 3 same buttons every fight (i know I'm exaggerating but you get the idea...)
Everything is a grind. AC1 again was hard, challenging and exciting. My son and I left about 10 of our bodies on the road trying to run past a shreth. We eventually had one of us be the bait while the other would loot our corpses and get our prize possessions back. Yes, you dropped EVERYTHING you had on you when you died, clothes, armor, special weapons, etc... - it required social skills just to accomplish a simple task, higher level hero's made names for themselves helping others, some make a name for themselves killing and grieving others. Whole guilds were built on character or lack thereof. The fact that you drop EVERYTHING you are carrying made each fight a real adrenaline rush. So much at stake. If you win, you could get very outstanding loot, if you lose you give up everything. Enter a whole new way of communicating with your enemy, begging, talking trash, etc...
Hours would be spent trying various scarab, taper, herb variations (to learn a spell). It was unique and different for each player. Once learned it was amazing and people would gather around just to see it cast.
The marketplace was always busy. So many variations of armor and weapons to choose from. Weapons could do one type of damage, frost, acid, fire, piercing, blunt damage, etc... you would have to equip the right gear for each elemental type complicating each fight. Mages trained in item magic, could buff a weapon for each elemental damage and could also buff armor for each type of elemental resistance. Melee types would have to make friends and communicate with mages for those buffs, and mages needed the melee types to help defend them.
All MMO's today seem to be on cruise control with very little relationships between people, especially when you get grouped with people from other servers never to see them again.
It is sad and I long for the "old days" when character meant something. People actually had good and bad reputations, and that meant something. Adventuring was fun and dangerous, like almost every mob could kill you easily. It revealed the weaknesses of your toon and meant you needed others to help you succeed. Some people had become famous and notorious and people respected that. Now, people just have silly names that mean nothing, and you will never see them again, or they pop from guild to guild, or guilds come and go on the regular.
Not like before. If you joined Blood on the PVP server in AC1 you know what I am talking about, blood in blood out basically, and if you made enemies there was no escape. Just as important it was to have alliances and friends. The age of the cell phone...
If you liked AC1 (best game ever) then check out Project Gorgon. Graphics are old school but the game play is unmatched. Totally sand box play. Hundreds of skills in combat, crafting, performance (dance, instruments) and others. Characters do not have levels. The weapon skills level as you use them and determine your level.
Its a small indie company made up of two of the original AC1 devs. They farm out aspects of development. So if you want something different and like me don't care if it is state of the art graphics then check it out I think old school AC1 EQ'ers might really enjoy it.
I love the subject of what constitutes difficulty and used to spend a lot of time thinking about it and reading up on the subject. I found three very good theories that helped me understand it, especially in relation to gaming.
The first is the theory of multiple intelligences. This posits that our abilities (intelligence) can be split up into multiple categories, like visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-arithmetic etc. Challenges can therefore be objectively measured by how intelligent you need to be in these specific categories in order to overcome them. Something like an FPS, for example, targets bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (can you aim well and react quickly) as well as visual-spatial, but doesn't really touch on logical-arithmetic intelligence.
The second is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow. Also known as being "in the zone", the psychologist researched how to get in the zone, or experience flow. In short, we get in the zone when the perceived challenge is equal to our perceived ability. If the challenge is too low, we get bored, if it's too high, we get stressed. If its just right, we get in the zone and have the most fun. This is why it is important for games to have a variety of difficulty levels, so that we can each find the challenge that is right for our own abilities.
The third is Raph Kosters' "A Theory of Fun for Game Design". In his book, he states that humans are basically pattern-matching machines and that we have the most fun when we are learning a new pattern. However, once that pattern has been learned, it becomes boring and we need new patterns or new variations to keep things interesting. This is why games need a progression of difficulties: we learn the first, easy patterns, then those patterns need to get progressively harder in order for us to have something to learn and thus find the fun. He also states this is why games have a natural end point: no matter how great the game, the human brain is too good at learning, we'll eventually learn all there is to learn, match all the patterns, and then we'll get bored and quit.
So, putting this all together, if you want a challenge, you need to pick the type of intelligence you want to target, then put a progression from low-intelligence to high-intelligence in order to provide your playerbase with challenges suitable to their perceived current ability as well provide something new once they've mastered their current level.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
I love the subject of what constitutes difficulty and used to spend a lot of time thinking about it and reading up on the subject. I found three very good theories that helped me understand it, especially in relation to gaming.
The first is the theory of multiple intelligences. This posits that our abilities (intelligence) can be split up into multiple categories, like visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-arithmetic etc. Challenges can therefore be objectively measured by how intelligent you need to be in these specific categories in order to overcome them. Something like an FPS, for example, targets bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (can you aim well and react quickly) as well as visual-spatial, but doesn't really touch on logical-arithmetic intelligence.
The second is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow. Also known as being "in the zone", the psychologist researched how to get in the zone, or experience flow. In short, we get in the zone when the perceived challenge is equal to our perceived ability. If the challenge is too low, we get bored, if it's too high, we get stressed. If its just right, we get in the zone and have the most fun. This is why it is important for games to have a variety of difficulty levels, so that we can each find the challenge that is right for our own abilities.
The third is Raph Kosters' "A Theory of Fun for Game Design". In his book, he states that humans are basically pattern-matching machines and that we have the most fun when we are learning a new pattern. However, once that pattern has been learned, it becomes boring and we need new patterns or new variations to keep things interesting. This is why games need a progression of difficulties: we learn the first, easy patterns, then those patterns need to get progressively harder in order for us to have something to learn and thus find the fun. He also states this is why games have a natural end point: no matter how great the game, the human brain is too good at learning, we'll eventually learn all there is to learn, match all the patterns, and then we'll get bored and quit.
So, putting this all together, if you want a challenge, you need to pick the type of intelligence you want to target, then put a progression from low-intelligence to high-intelligence in order to provide your playerbase with challenges suitable to their perceived current ability as well provide something new once they've mastered their current level.
I am 100% in Raph's Pattern matching camp. I have always had the most fun when learning a game's system and much less so when I eventually get to the stage that I have mastered it, It becomes too trivial and not enough fun for me at that point.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Just to follow up on my previous post, the theory of multiple intelligences helped explain to me why I much preferred old-school MMORPGs and why I really dislike modern ones.
I am much better at logical-arithmetic intelligence, and not so good at bodily-kinesthetic.
So, games where the challenge is focused on stats and numbers, predicting what will happen next, make me feel great. I'm good at it and I enjoy learning about it and typical endgame raids - which are really all about inputs (dps and healing) and outputs (boss damage) and predictions (choosing what skill to use next to alter the outcome) - are the perfect level of challenge for me to experience flow.
Conversely, games focused on bodily-kinesthetic (action) I tend to hate. They are targetting a type of intelligence I just don't find interesting. I know that getting good at them is a simple case of putting in the time to increase my physical intelligence, but i just don't enjoy it. This is why this modern era of action-combat mmos just annoys the hell out of me.
Weirdly, in Raph's book, he actually says that if we want to get the most out of gaming, we should actually be playing the games that we suck at most, as that generally means they have the most to teach us, the most patterns to learn, and thus the most potential fun.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
I understand the OPs sentiments, but you know, EVE Online still has almost everything they long for yet probably aren't playing it for "reasons."
Can't take such complaints all that seriously if gamers are going to ignore what few available choices there are today.
Life is Feudal is shuttering their doors so I have to ask if the OP had supported them?
How about Albion Online, actually doing pretty well for itself, is the OP playing it?
The thing is, if gamers don't well support what is available why would anyone bother to make a newer, more expensive version without any solid evidence it might be a success?
The reasons are pretty big tbh...I don't play it because I dislike the turn spread sheet combat and the huge entry level via grinding and competing against people that have been playing for years.
No cherry picking please, what about Albion Online then, or Project Gorgon?
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
When I see people talk about the old games, I often wonder if they supported and funded those games to the bitter last day of day of shutdown.
Or did they play it for a bit, and then go screw off to some other stuff.. leaving "The best game ever made!" to die into oblivion, only to come back a decade later and mourn it's loss with what amounts to crocodile tears.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
When I see people talk about the old games, I often wonder if they supported and funded those games to the bitter last day of day of shutdown.
Or did they play it for a bit, and then go screw off to some other stuff.. leaving "The best game ever made!" to die into oblivion, only to come back a decade later and mourn it's loss with what amounts to crocodile tears.
In my case i support them until the developer gone full retard with the patchs
It's always like that , game is good at release , then they start to patching some stupid stuffs in to tested player's limit .
Normally they try to fix them , but it's always too late and people ready migrated to other game .
The problem with MMORPG is they never be the same game that you once play , and if you want to play the same game that you was played , you have to go for the private servers , but private severs is illegal with risk and can be close down anytime so it make people feel unsafe to inverst into it like official servers .
Comments
Challenge and difficulty to me are simple to define: it's the chance of success or failure when you do something. Whether it's defeating an enemy or making a parkour-like jump doesn't matter and well done challenges let you approach the solution in different ways.
I remember in the early days of ESO a particular quest mini-boss that drove some crazy because it kept healing itself faster than you could damage it. There was actually a pretty trivial solution to the problem: you needed to get close enough to it to bash it whenever it attempted to heal itself to interrupt it. But it was rare outside dungeons to need to pay attention to self-healing NPC mechanics so many failed over and over and took to the forums.
Now the consequences of failure in ESO were trivial. If you died you just self-rezzed on the spot as anyone can. You could immediately go have another attempt at the mini-boss but you weren't going to defeat it until you tried the different approach of interrupting no matter how much damage you could deal. That was the "challenge." Defeating it.
Trivial insta rezz or long corpse runs were irrelevant to the difficulty and challenge. That would be a different game play loop that dictated how often you could try to overcome the challenge: many times in a 10 minute period vs. maybe only once if ESO had punishing corpse runs instead.
But the "challenge" was figuring out how to beat it - and anyone could once you hit on the right approach - so you could complete that quest. Corpse runs would have just made you wait longer between attempts.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
How many games will you or others like the OP shun for various "reasons?"
New World's coming soon, are you all in or not? Lots of other survival centric multiplayer world's out their, each with their own set of challenges to overcome I'm sure.
Crowfall can be played regularly, same for Dual Universe, both with significant challenges, perhaps not the least being a stable environment but still, both are playble unless the gamer choose to disqualify them.
Heck, how about Genshin Impact, from what I read it can be a pretty good game but the "grind" for the better characters can be brutal in terms of both time and impact on one's wallet.
But still no go right?
What isn't available are MMOs with the exact specific design parameters of the first generation games, which isn't really likely to change, especially from any of the big development houses.
We can only hope Pantheon or SOL pull off a miracle, because otherwise it just isn't very likely to happen again.
"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
Even then a lot of pvp is broken and unbalanced.
In short, the people who had the skill to beat the challenge in a very limited number of tries, before they realize the solution will still not see those corpse runs and other stressors as a challenge, they would be little more than speed bumps.
In fact, those stressors really only hurt people who are of average skill that would take a lot of tries to win, and are mainly NOT the people looking for added difficulty to their game, or seeking to make it more frustrating to play.
Let me give you an example. in GW2, I was doing the Mad King Clock Tower Jump Puzzle. I must have failed that run hundreds of times, before I finally got it. That was a challenge to complete.
If they had added in additional stressors to that, that is not making the clocktower more or less a challenge in and of it's own right, that is just the designers being assholes.
To grasp this. Simon Says is a fun little challenging game to keep memorizing the pattern, if you fail, no harm, no foul, just try again.
That is Challenge in a Nutshell.
If you provide good challenge, you don't need to add additional bullshit to it.
Then on top of that we get so many people making excuses for bad work saying things like "i like the art style".EVERY single piece of art style has a texture on it and if that texture looks like a lazy 8 bit color texture with little to no detail,then yeah it is garbage no matter what art style it is.
Housing,building,water,the worlds we reside in are very lazy work,mostly just a land mass to jot down some mobs so then they can lazily have one database full of quest mobs all tied to a few triggers.
Combat is typically WORSE than many of the original mmo's,so these dev teams are not using any creative thoughts process or any deep formula to allow players to think and react.Instead two mechanics,timing and somersaults....seriously wtf.
How we can have so many employees,so many studios and all of them seem to THINK a boss must reside in a cave/dungeon and be the only way to attain the best items in game.Like NOBODY is able to think outside that puny mindset or what?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Anyone can tell you that I have always been a proponent of designing games with a target market in mind, and then building the game to target the hell out of that market, be damned anyone else.
So I am going to use a game as an example of knowing your market.
DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online. Imagine, you need to go slay a Balor, AKA Pit Fiend, that is porting their armies into the Prime Material plane, so you and 11 of your closest friends and random strangers gather together, and head off to kill the great Daemon Lord, Harry. However, during all this, in the middle of fighting his minions, you need to also play a game of lights out.
yah.. DDO does that to you.
It's not the weak of heart, it's not for people that want to mindlessly escape, if you raid in DDO, you gotta think. And amazingly we play this game way too often drunk and stoned. But DDO does not try to make their game easy, they have a core group of players that like things being as hard as they are, and thirst for the next raid or content pack that will make them cry trying to figure out how to solve it.
People are expecting the same experience with better graphic and better polish. Which never come.
Old school shouldn't mean poor graphic and poor polish.
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
The "old" experiences are still available though. If anything I think in many ways people getting into those games now may have a better time seeing as how niche those titles have become and the internet game world as a whole has matured. People behaving better toward each other for reasons of mutual dependence.
- 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
Lahnmir used used words that are more like attitude than any definition. (tedious, also known as grind, being the major one, though convoluted is not a great descriptor...)
I can't argue your definition, as "difficult" to one player is "easy-peasy" to another. Some players think simply adding hit points to monsters (bullet sponges) make them "difficult." Others see it as tedious, as it simply prolongs a fight or battle.
- 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 alternative with the tech currently used in games though, is "tricks up their sleeve" as in the ESO example I used of the self-healing mini boss. Most MMOs use tricks in dungeons and raids but once you've done the content a few times that "difficulty" fades and they become trivial when you know the choreography for hurting the bad guy and avoiding the one-shot mechanics.
True sophisticated AI in games is very rare, if it even exists. What we run against in 99% of them are the bullet sponges and/or the tricks that fool us once or twice.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
To me, the biggest down side(imo) for old MMOs is they can be more about who can spend most time rather than who plays best.
MurderHerd
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
"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
Or did they play it for a bit, and then go screw off to some other stuff.. leaving "The best game ever made!" to die into oblivion, only to come back a decade later and mourn it's loss with what amounts to crocodile tears.