Wow, I am late into this discussion, which I might add had some really amazing points.
None of which do I plan to disagree with because they were all very solid points to look at.
What I will say, is two of the games I play, have address this very problem in two very unique ways.
Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Like their namesake, this is a D&D game, based mainly on the 3.x AD&D rule set. And I have got to say, they are about the closest I have ever gotten to playing D&D made into an MMO Form. With the praise aside, it still suffers from Bloat and level cap raising, and all the stuff that typical come with a game that has Expansions and level cap increases. They had so much bloat, that they had to divide the levels into Heroic and Epic levels.
However, In adding in Epic Levels, they also revisited a lot of their older Heroic content and Added an Epic Version to them, so that players return to that originally great content and play it all again, with some minor changes, but, this ensures that it does not get forgotten.
Guild Wars 2
Now this company took a vastly different approach in dealing with bloat and leveling, and dead zones, it simply didn't add bloat. The Cap was 80th when the game was made, 2 Expansions and a huge number of updates and idea changes Later, and the Cap is still 80th.
Not only that, GW2 has down-level scaling, so that content never becomes invalid. As you play, your world expands, you level UP into the higher level, and harder content, but you never truly outgrow the older content.
This made astutely aware to anyone that does world bosses, as there are a few of them in Starter Zones, (Like Jungle Wurm and Shadow Behemoth, for example) and yes, if you are not paying attention they can down your level 80th maxed out toon, and some level 6 player, who does not even have a full set of armor to call their own, is there reviving your dumb ass.
So in that venture, they also have eliminated the whole concept of what bloat in most MMO's.
In this venture, solutions are out there, they are being done, it is simply a matter of experiences them.
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.
So what is the solution? I've laid this out elsewhere before, but I'll repeat it again here. Let's use WoW as an example for concreteness.
Let's suppose that, when The Burning Crusade was added to WoW, it had been structured more as a sequel than an expansion, in the following manner. All of the old characters on Vanilla servers stayed there, and The Burning Crusade content wasn't available on them. Meanwhile, a bunch of new servers for The Burning Crusade were added. Players could copy any character from a Vanilla server to a Burning Crusade server once. That is, once per character, but you could do so for as many characters as you wanted, including characters created long after the launch of The Burning Crusade.
Many players would have left Vanilla in favor of The Burning Crusade, wanting to do the new content. There would still be a lot of characters on the old Vanilla servers, as transferring characters to The Burning Crusade is only a copy and not a move. But the characters on Vanilla servers wouldn't be logged in nearly as much as before, necessitating massive server merging. But WoW had plenty of servers, and there were still plenty enough people who wanted to play Vanilla to keep some servers active.
Meanwhile, if you create a new character, you can create it on a Vanilla server or on a Burning Crusade server. On a Burning Crusade server, you'd start at level 60 with a bunch of level 60 white quality gear. A character who transfers from Vanilla to The Burning Crusade would have his level increased to 60 if it were below there, and be given white quality gear--though he could just keep using his old gear for a little longer if it were better.
And then, when WoW added Wrath of the Lich King, you do the same thing again. Create a bunch of new Wrath of the Lich King servers, have massive server merges of The Burning Crusade servers, and allow any character on a Burning Crusade server to copy to a Wrath of the Lich King server. Someone on a Vanilla server wouldn't be able to jump directly to Wrath of the Lich King, but could copy once to a Burning Crusade server, and then a second time to a Wrath of the Lich King server. And so on with each other expansion that launches.
Once a new expansion launches, updates on the old servers basically come to a halt. Maybe they'd still get updates to the graphics engine if Blizzard decides it's easier to maintain a single, unified graphics engine rather than a separate version for each expansion. Maybe they'd still get some bug fixes or something, especially if they fixed a bug in the latest version and realized that it was still present in older versions. But older servers would get no new features, no new content, no rebalancing, and so forth. Play balance and content difficulty would be frozen in time forever on the older servers.
This would mean that the old content remained playable in its original intended state forever. It never becomes deprecated by newer content. It never becomes trivial due to power creep. Once the next expansion launches, there can never again be any form of power creep applied to the older ones. It's still there for you to play and enjoy whenever you get around to it.
For people who have played through every new expansion as it launched and wouldn't care to return to the old if they could, this only advantage this offers is being able to start any new alts at the latest expansion rather than having to slog through a bunch of deprecated content. But it doesn't offer any disadvantages to those people, either.
For everyone else, however, this offers enormous advantages over the current system. Suppose that you're a new player who tries WoW for the first time today. The overwhelming majority of the lower level content is in some mangled state that isn't what was originally intended. I haven't seen it after Shadowlands, but as of Battle for Azeroth, the lower level content was trivial to the extent of being stupid and boring. Being able to play the original content with the original play balance would be a huge improvement over that.
But even if you're the rush to endgame sort, this has something to offer you, too. If a new player picks up WoW today, he can get through the lower level content, play through Shadowlands, and get however far he gets in the endgame before he decides it's too grindy to continue and quits. Maybe he says, that was fun, but there's nothing left to do, so I quit.
But there used to be a Vanilla endgame, and a Burning Crusade endgame, and a Wrath of the Lich King endgame, and so forth. Now they're all gone, save whatever is the latest, and Vanilla on the "classic" servers. If the old servers are still up, then the rush to endgame sort can go play those endgames, too. Now instead of looping through some tiny sliver of content a bunch of times, he has many times as much endgame content to work on. That's likely to remain interesting for a lot longer.
If you're not done with one expansion by the time the next launches, you don't get your progress wiped out by the new expansion. You can continue playing the old version until you're ready to move on, whether weeks or months or years later.
You don't ever have to move on if you don't want to. How many people have played an MMORPG and said, I used to like the game, but this or that particular expansion ruined it? That's why I quit. With this approach, if you think the new expansion ruins the game, you can just ignore it and keep playing the old. Even if you copy your character to the new expansion before you learn that you hate it, you can just switch back to keep playing the old, as your characters are still there. They were copied off of the old servers, not moved off.
So what are the drawbacks? One is that you divide the playerbase. For games with a large playerbase, that's not really a problem. So long as you have enough players to fill one server at each expansion, everything is fine. For less popular games that struggle to have enough players to make even one server viable, this isn't practical.
The other problem is that it's more work for the developers to maintain. Even so, I'd submit that it's massively less work to maintain old expansions in maintenance mode than it is to constantly create new content to replace the old while trying to keep enough content to make the game remain interesting. That the old expansions are in maintenance mode is a desired feature here, not something to complain about. If people complain about a lack of new content, you can point them to the latest version.
In some games, you would get a problem of name collisions when you merge the old servers. That's just a problem of a botched server architecture, and not a more fundamental issue with my proposal. Granted, a lot of games botch their server architecture. But how to avoid doing so is a solved problem, and in quite a few ways. For example, in Champions Online, your account name is globally unique, and many different accounts can have their own characters with the same character name that are distinguished because the account name is globally unique.
100% agree - why not be able to enjoy old content with a more streamlined quest series that gives you the gist of the zones and story without having to do the other 75 fetch quests in the area? I don't want them to give me a faster way to get from level 1 to max, I want them to make the leveling experience more enjoyable for newcomers or returning players. I haven't played EQ2 seriously since right before before Desert of Flames was released. I want a reason to play the DoF content and not just skip past it because there are other places I could go. I wanted a reason to go to Enchanted Lands and Zek, not because I like those zones - because I hate them both - but there are Lore and Legend quests there as well as the quests for the legendary EQ1 gear but that is all skippable thanks to powerleveling and/or the Agnostic Dungeons.
If I only have 4 hours a night to play, with my end goal being to get to the current expansion content (since that's why I jumped back in), am I going to continually slog through old zones with slow fetch quests that could take hours to gain two levels (you'll hear about this in the next edition of Norrathian Stride), or am I going to run a dungeon that I can master after two or three runs and gain a level or two on autopilot in 30 minutes? It doesn't take a math whiz to see that class gear quests and what not are obsolete since you get tiered for your 10 level bricks in the Agnostic Dungeons when you kill a named mob, and that lasts until you hit level 90 or so. Why have to slog to catch up? Why not go back and tweak older areas and clean up the clutter since those areas are now outdated? Instead of rewarding players 30k XP for doing a main mission and then 5k XP and a piece of gear or a potion or something for a side quest, why cut the rewards and instead give 80k XP for the quest (maybe even increase the length or amount of enemies needed to kill) instead of forcing them to slog through tedious meaningless side quests? Gear would still drop off enemies instead of be guaranteed quest rewards. This would incentivize players to not only NOT get power leveled or run the short cut dungeons, but rather to experience all of the story and older world zones as the developers intended without grinding them to death with uninteresting fetch quests and what not.
Side note: I like League of Legends and Runeterra as a world, but hate the player base, and the newly changed items made it unplayable for me. I'm hoping that Ruined King is going to be solid and not just Battle Chasers: Nightwar w/ LoL skins.
There is no such thing as the "gist" of a zone. There is only the zone. Have you ever watched a movie and said, I really liked that movie, but I wish it had a 20 minute version to give me the gist of the movie? Have you ever read a novel and said, I really liked that novel, but I wish it had a 50 page version to give me the gist of the novel? The shortened version would sacrifice most of what you liked about the original.
The "streamlined" version you're asking for consists of deleting most of the old content. That's the opposite of what games need to do if they're going to have a lot of content.
Why do you play MMORPGs, anyway? Do you play because you want to get to the endgame and show off your epics?
I play games for fun. If a game is fun at the low levels, then there's no need to rush to the high levels. You shouldn't say, this portion of the game is fun to play, so I want to skip it.
I've played DDO for several months now. I've surely spent several hundred hours in-game. My highest level character is currently level 4, as most of the experience I get is wasted from going over the cap before I go ask a trainer to advance me to the next level. But that's okay, because the game tries to be fun to play starting at level 1.
Wow. I couldn't disagree more with everything in this article. To me, EQ2's appeal IS that it has a lot more content, more choices, than any other game out there. Blaming a game for having too much content is like blaming a restaurant for having too many dishes to choose from.
I mean, Gordon Ramsay does point out a lot of failing restaurants have menus that are too large. So it gets too complicated with food inventory and for chefs to make the various dishes.
Again, I think instead, people enjoy the so called journey, which is more or less experiencing something for the first time. After that, the experience has been consumed.
Very different mindsets here I believe - but to give credit where it's due, at least you (unlike OP) didn't straight out say we don't exist, just that you've met maybe 1-2 such players.
Still, it's really odd how you picture the journey,
[,,,] but how many people do you reasonably know that came back just
to experience what it was like to kill undead mobs for hours and hours
until they unfortunately hit max level and it was no longer possible to
kill mobs? That argument doesn't even make sense anyway,
Nope, it doesn't make sense, since (although I can't speak for everyone) I believe very few players roll new alts just to whack-a-mole the mobs all the way to the level cap.
If that's what "life starts at endgame" players think about the journey-players, that actually explains a lot...
You can't really re-read the same book and get the
same amount of enjoyment out of it, you know the story, you know what
happens.
The different mindset again, of course you can re-read books, I do that all the time and I'm certain I ain't alone with this. (it might come as a shock to you, but -hold on to something- I even used to re-watch movies too! Can you imagine? )
Why wouldn't you want to allow people to read the synopsis of the first 12 books, then get right into the 13th book?
Check your targeting, I ain't the one wants to take away anything from anyone, it's the OP (and yourself).
I used to say option is king, and make no mistake, there are several options for your kind of players to "just read the synopsis" and get to the endgame, in almost all games out there.
With actual examples of my main games (precise ones, unlike the OPs "lack of free mounts" )
option 1, the store route
-AoC: was the first in this, offering a jumpstart (and also offline levels) for more than 10 years now, currently you can purchase level 80, with gear, stats, etc.
-LotRO: the Valar gift with different names (updated after each level cap raise), with gear, virtues, etc.
-CO: character boost to 30 (40 is the cap), and also +1 level advances for cheap
Endgame player: but noo, I wanna play not just boost / I don't wanna pay
option 2, in-game mechanics
-AoC: Vanaheim, scalable, run it back to back, get to 80 in days without ever touching the game content
-CO: the Alert system, run it back to back, get to 40 in days without ever touching the game content
-LotRO: skirmish system, as above, stay in the skirmish camp and run it back to back, though it takes a month or two still - LotRO is huge
Endgame player: but noo, I want to see the world too
*
option 3, powerlevel
3/a with friends,
3/b with the use of option 2's mechanics mixed into the leveling outside the world
Endgame player: but noo, I wanna just level... streamlined, fast, and not with others or with mixed into it those boring mechanics
Well, tough luck then, option might be king, but (just like freedom) not on all cost, you can't have options in exchange of wrecking the entire gaming fun of others.
You might not want to read the books just the synopsis of them. That's fine, you have plenty of options for that.
But shredding the books entirely, and making the few pages short synopsis as the only available choice for everyone just because you don't like to read - nope.
Those who want and like to read whole books, those people need the option as well to do that.
*ed: I missed an another option, probably between 2 and 3: just take your capped character and run through the world. Quick, and easy "But noo, that is too easy and I am overleveled, i want to level within the content" LOL .
I've been playing MMO's since I was 9, starting with Ultima-Online. One of the things I absolutely loved about UO was that it didn't have this problem traditionally. We had new expansions that were added to the game but they served to just extend the reach of the available game and create new and interesting areas to explore, but no new linear progression until later expansions...
You have been playing MMORPG's since you were nine and you only just got here? Welcome to the forums!
I can simplify it,the POOR design of mmorpg's is just really turning me off.We are not eve nclose,not remotely close to heading in the right direction.
I have not seen any of Wow's new content but knowing Blizzard and the game,i very highly doubt there is any change in the right direction there either.
I need to see devs completely toss out their idea of how a character would live within a game world.
I also need to see a completely new thought process put into creating the worlds.
The overall design of a mmorpg should resemble a real living world with people doing real living things.
Creating a LINEAR path of levels and items is NOT a mmo nor is it a rpg,so it is in fact a HUGE fail to game design.Just because someone else designed a mmorpg in a way 5/10/15/20 years ago doesn't make it right and should NOT define how a mmorpg is designed.
I feel that most people feel DnD is the godfather of rpg's and where most of the concepts began.I am ok with "concepts" and i am also for the msot part ok with the common sense behind Dnd ideas but "IMPLEMENTATION" of a game design is where it matters most.
DnD relied on the mind,you could just imagine it so it was easy to roleplay it.Actually creating it in 3D and bringing that concept to life is the real tough part and so far nobody has come close.The TOOLS and tech is already here to pull it off so i wonder WHY nobody is able to or not willing to do it.IMO the answer is they are not willing to do it,either they don't have the manpower or the time or the money.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Level-based game design is the real problem. Instead of creating two entirely separate games (solo leveling and party-based endgame), just build a world. Some of it can be difficult, requiring a higher degree of skill or a group (or both), and some of it can be less challenging. It's okay to let the players figure out which is which. It's not like these games have permadeath. But no area should be level-gated the way things have been traditionally. UO was closest to getting this right.
And that's not to say there shouldn't be progression. Pure horizontal progression would be so refreshing, but so far no MMO developer has been brave enough to try it. No one has been willing to say, "Hmm, maybe there's no actual reason to separate the new players from the veterans. Maybe it's okay for people to learn the game while playing the same game as everyone else. Maybe it's okay to let an experienced player be killed by the same goblins that were capable of killing them on day one." The difference should be that the experienced player has learned more skills to help deal with or avoid the goblins, not that you suddenly become goblin-proof at a certain point in your life.
(And by that I mean actual character-based abilities, not just player knowledge.)
Try out DDO - you usually start over lots of times, they routinely release new low level content, there are usually 2 types of players F2P and P2P - there are different paths for leveling for those 2 groups - you could limit your self to different adventure packs, or you could power zerg through and do the same thing all the time.
I personally try different ways through 1 - 20, 21 - 30 each life and take my time.
As for EQ2 I come back at different intervals, the easiest way to power level is just buy collectables, there is one set that will take you from 10 - 80/90 it about a minute, though it sometimes crashes the game as it tries to tell you all the levels you just got
If you like to level, level normally almost all the quests are soloable now, join a guild for your social chat, do the dungeons at level solo and you have some good challenges with a merc.
At the end of the day though I agree they should revisit some of the old places, make some gear worth getting - cosmetics maybe - or something that levels with you?
I have played WoW a few years but left the game. Empty continents and powerleveling just makes everyone skip all content to reach endgame as fast as possible.
I dont know if its possible due to servers or other limitations but one way to make the game playable from start regarding storyline is that make all areas completely equal when reaching max lvl and adjust all rewards so it make sense for everyone to play through the game as intended. A world for endgameplayers only and totally playable in the now empty continents.
Eve Online dont have that problem at all and returning to "noobland" is not an issue so there is other workarounds to this problem.
If the game content is seen as a barrier to what you really want to be doing then you're playing the wrong game.
If you want immediate 'end game' PvP with friends play something like Battlefield (or similar).
If you want immediate dungeon crawling with friends play Diablo (or similar).
I never understood power-leveling.
If the game is just a chore full of stuff you don't want to be doing play something else.
Something that GW2 does that I thought was a great idea. I mean, ideally in GW2, the level 1 - 80 "grind" is little more than the tutorial of the game, and the rest of the game opens up after you make 80th, as chances are, you have not even seen the whole map yet.
Anyway, when you make 80th, that is when Leveling Tomes & Writs tend to drop, this makes, making an alt super easy, stand at the bank and comp tomes till you make the level you wanna make. Never have to level an alt again.
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.
I can simplify it,the POOR design of mmorpg's is just really turning me off.We are not eve nclose,not remotely close to heading in the right direction.
I have not seen any of Wow's new content but knowing Blizzard and the game,i very highly doubt there is any change in the right direction there either.
I need to see devs completely toss out their idea of how a character would live within a game world.
I also need to see a completely new thought process put into creating the worlds.
The overall design of a mmorpg should resemble a real living world with people doing real living things.
Creating a LINEAR path of levels and items is NOT a mmo nor is it a rpg,so it is in fact a HUGE fail to game design.Just because someone else designed a mmorpg in a way 5/10/15/20 years ago doesn't make it right and should NOT define how a mmorpg is designed.
I feel that most people feel DnD is the godfather of rpg's and where most of the concepts began.I am ok with "concepts" and i am also for the msot part ok with the common sense behind Dnd ideas but "IMPLEMENTATION" of a game design is where it matters most.
DnD relied on the mind,you could just imagine it so it was easy to roleplay it.Actually creating it in 3D and bringing that concept to life is the real tough part and so far nobody has come close.The TOOLS and tech is already here to pull it off so i wonder WHY nobody is able to or not willing to do it.IMO the answer is they are not willing to do it,either they don't have the manpower or the time or the money.
One of the things about D&D, which Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson talked about was how the stats, the numbers, HP, AC, Thac0, Levels, all of it, was a vast over simplification to allow for fast gameplay. These gams were started in the 70's, DM's were going to sit there at their computer with a huge loadout to calculate a single hit.
But.. an MMO could.
Just to give an idea.
Leveling.
Leveling was a simplification of learning. When you leveled up, you gained some skill points, HP, Saves, To Hit, etc.
Many people think this is what you get to move forward, but that is not the case, this is the documenting of what you leaned getting from your last level to this current level, it simply all amounts to "What has your character learned"
Case in point. Getting Extra HP. It was explained that your character didn't magically get tougher, that somehow a knife hurt them less when they get stabbed, but, now, by leveling up, they learned to dodge, deflect, evade, and any and all other means to avoid the knife from hurting them. They took this very complex idea of the various means of damage avoidance and mitigation and made it into a simple number: Hit Point. So that players could just play the game at the table and keep things moving along.
Same idea with "To Hit" and "Armor Class" bonus, all the complex training, feinting, attacks and dodges boiled down to two simple numbers. "To Hit" and "AC".
But the thing is, today, MMO's could put in all those complex ideas, they could run all manner metrics to dodging, deflecting, rolling with the blow, etc, etc, and make a large system that reflected the advanced concepts that were boiled down into simple numbers by D&D.
Instead they give you a dodge roll...
allow that to process as you play an MMO. As opposed to your character being given stats that they could use to calculate outcomes like an RPG should work, they gave the players a Dodge Roll, so they had to do it themselves.
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.
You can't solve this problem by using "the WoW formula", i'm afraid. You have to rethink the whole concept of "leveling" and "end game" as well as "catching up to play with my friends", which i think shouldn't exist. This genre revolves around building up a character in a long period of time and giving a new player a shortcut makes the purpose of the game invalid. This also applies to the way they handle expansions. A game doesn't expand if you add 50 hours of gameplay to the one end and cut 200 hours from the other. Besides, a new player doesn't know which content is old and which is new.
Everything that has been tried to solve this problem (scaling, exp boosts, heirlooms, mentoring systems, etc.) are only means to camouflage the broken part. It's like trying to figure out how to modify an automobile to cross a body of water, but a boat or an aeroplane would be a better solution.
If i was a game designer (or their boss) i'd start by thinking why everyone is so excited about an endgame. How does the endgame differs from the rest of the game and could you redesign the rest of the game by using the best parts of the endgame so that eventually there wouldn't be even need for an endgame. I give you a hint: it has something to do with levels.
I have played WoW a few years but left the game. Empty continents and powerleveling just makes everyone skip all content to reach endgame as fast as possible.
I dont know if its possible due to servers or other limitations but one way to make the game playable from start regarding storyline is that make all areas completely equal when reaching max lvl and adjust all rewards so it make sense for everyone to play through the game as intended. A world for endgameplayers only and totally playable in the now empty continents.
Eve Online dont have that problem at all and returning to "noobland" is not an issue so there is other workarounds to this problem.
Yeah, I have a very similar desire for mmo design.
I will say though that I am not a fan of EVE's system, it's VERY much a progression wall. They've done a lot to try and mitigate it over time, the little I've researched it, but essentially they put in fast tracks for people to get to a specific ship. That being said, someone who has a 3 year old account has so many more options and viability when it comes to joining a clan vs someone who is brand new.
I've spent maybe 10 hours playing EVE so I can't really do it justice in any form of critique, I know it's widely used as a reference for people who love PVP. I personally just can't stand SCI-FI universes. They just don't immerse me, they actively turn me off sadly. I also can't stand their character mobility, clicking to move your ship and all that, just not my thing.
I will say that Albion was a lot more my cup of tea, but they made the progression system so absurd, and the inability to macro your way around it pretty much made it to where I just didn't play the game. I was happy I didn't too because the infrastructure was terrible and it completely flopped due to the lag being so abysmal.
Not only that but the pay to win was reallllyyy bad. In addition to allowing griefing. I'll never understand pvp mmo's that setup choke points entirely designed to reward the have's over the have not's so that they literally bleed the game to death lol.
Here's an island with the best resources, that if you don't get to first and control, you will never be able to compete. Now, there is only two ways to get there. In addition to that, you cannot reasonably extract much resources from it unless you zerg in massive caravans, and even then, you have to journey a LONG distance to be able to store any of it, much less sell it on the open market.
Creating scarcity and power imbalances as an actual intended game design? That's absurd to me.
Just a minor note, EVE is not so much a PvP game, as it is a Resource Control Game. If you look at it as little more than a PvP game you will miss what makes the game great.
However, you have to want to play that kind of game for EVE to be enjoyable on any level.
One of things I have noticed over the years, is some MMO's moving away from the idea of the other people in the Game World being your competitor, and instead, they are your ally.
This dynamic shift is changing the entire landscape of MMO's and the people that play them.
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.
You can't solve this problem by using "the WoW formula", i'm afraid. You have to rethink the whole concept of "leveling" and "end game" as well as "catching up to play with my friends", which i think shouldn't exist. This genre revolves around building up a character in a long period of time and giving a new player a shortcut makes the purpose of the game invalid. This also applies to the way they handle expansions. A game doesn't expand if you add 50 hours of gameplay to the one end and cut 200 hours from the other. Besides, a new player doesn't know which content is old and which is new.
Everything that has been tried to solve this problem (scaling, exp boosts, heirlooms, mentoring systems, etc.) are only means to camouflage the broken part. It's like trying to figure out how to modify an automobile to cross a body of water, but a boat or an aeroplane would be a better solution.
If i was a game designer (or their boss) i'd start by thinking why everyone is so excited about an endgame. How does the endgame differs from the rest of the game and could you redesign the rest of the game by using the best parts of the endgame so that eventually there wouldn't be even need for an endgame. I give you a hint: it has something to do with levels.
I don't think leveling is the issue. Especially when there are like-minded people who enjoy leveling.
Part of the problem with that is that these games attract all sorts of people with all sorts of interests and everyone would prefer to have the game cater to their particular interests.
The only problem I see with leveling is that many games make their old areas redundant While this doesn't need to be the case as there could be multiple places in an area for different skill levels, some people might not like that, preferring instead to have very strict level ranges per area so they don't get one shot if they aren't careful.
It just comes down to the idea that games should aim very specific demographics, budget accordingly and not waver from those ideas if they want to keep that demographic engaged.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
You can't solve this problem by using "the WoW formula", i'm afraid. You have to rethink the whole concept of "leveling" and "end game" as well as "catching up to play with my friends", which i think shouldn't exist. This genre revolves around building up a character in a long period of time and giving a new player a shortcut makes the purpose of the game invalid. This also applies to the way they handle expansions. A game doesn't expand if you add 50 hours of gameplay to the one end and cut 200 hours from the other. Besides, a new player doesn't know which content is old and which is new.
Everything that has been tried to solve this problem (scaling, exp boosts, heirlooms, mentoring systems, etc.) are only means to camouflage the broken part. It's like trying to figure out how to modify an automobile to cross a body of water, but a boat or an aeroplane would be a better solution.
If i was a game designer (or their boss) i'd start by thinking why everyone is so excited about an endgame. How does the endgame differs from the rest of the game and could you redesign the rest of the game by using the best parts of the endgame so that eventually there wouldn't be even need for an endgame. I give you a hint: it has something to do with levels.
I don't think leveling is the issue. Especially when there are like-minded people who enjoy leveling.
Part of the problem with that is that these games attract all sorts of people with all sorts of interests and everyone would prefer to have the game cater to their particular interests.
The only problem I see with leveling is that many games make their old areas redundant While this doesn't need to be the case as there could be multiple places in an area for different skill levels, some people might not like that, preferring instead to have very strict level ranges per area so they don't get one shot if they aren't careful.
It just comes down to the idea that games should aim very specific demographics, budget accordingly and not waver from those ideas if they want to keep that demographic engaged.
I think the problem with the old areas is that developers believe they have to fill every zone with mobs of certain level range. In the world, even a fantasy world, monsters and beasts usually don't hang around inhabited areas. They are in caves or wilderness. You may get a quest from "a low level zone" but to complete it you may need to travel somewhere else. Or perhaps there's a cave nearby you didn't have access to until now.
It's not likely a village's problems are now solved when you killed all the rats in their cellars last month. They may have bigger problems which needed more experienced hero to take care of. You just need a reason to pass by to find this out. Now, add a little bit of randomness. Make this NPC give you a different quest for every character you make. If the quest requires you to craft or buy an item, change it for every character. It doesn't always have to be a bronze tube or a deadly blunderbuss.
There is so much you can do to make a gameplay outside of an endgame compelling and interesting for many demographics. But for lazy developers it's just easier and cheaper to write these "kill 10 of these" and "collect 6 of those", which can be found nearby and reward you with 5000xp so you're one step closer to their latest raids. That's boring.
Okay, perhaps I haven't given someone of a different perspective enough consideration. Help me to understand why you re-read the same books or re-watch the same movies over and over again every day. As an MMO player who only plays for the leveling process, I would liken it to that. Can you provide a description of your approach if that is different? I do not want to straw man your argument, I want to steel man it if I can.
(snip)
I'll resum it for your convenience:
Remove progression entirely. No levels, no scaling, no power creep of any kind. Everyone has at any given time complete access to all content.
WoW is one of the most popular MMO's of all time so I'll use it as an example.
Removing levels, stat enhancing gear (It would become purely cosmetic, and with the mod feature customizable), honor, ilevel requirements, attunements etc etc.
So, a brand new created Paladin for example, could walk into the very last encounter in the game the second they created a character. They could engage in any world quest they wanted, or do any quest in the game, watch all of the cinematics, they have 0 barriers to any content.
Instancing remains in tact, as does group finder, cross server all of that. You can even add a raid finder for all difficulties.
When my friends get on, we can all form up a group and jump into an arena, or we could do battlegrounds if we preferred. Pvp would have a ladder, as would Pve, there needs to be a way to distinguish the best players from the average and below average players. World firsts would still be a massive race as they would be fighting the hardest encounters in the world attempting to beat them before anyone else.
In this instance, someone who enjoys nothing but story driven content, gains access to a massive supply of it, and can re-engage it again and again at any time. It never becomes trivial, it's always relevant.
Someone like myself who prefers to raid/pvp competitively, the power creep is removed, access is given instantly, and it's a matter of my skill and coordination with my team that allows me to be successful, not the amount of time I've spent in the game, albeit those usually go hand in hand, but not always.
I see virtually no draw backs to this approach, other than people will complain that there's no "point" to the game. I would argue the point is inherent to the content, if you don't enjoy the content, and you play purely for progression, then yes you will see no point to the game, and in that case the only people who are ostracized in my system are those who play purely for progression.
Another argument I can come up with off the top of my head is how would you balance the encounters if there was no stat gear etc? That to me is rather simple, because when you look at world first encounters or highly rated arena's and pvp, most people are not losing because of gear, they're losing because of a lack of coordination and execution. You normalize the tank health, and defenses to a certain point, and balance the mobs off of that.
Help me to see where you or people in your perspective are ostracized in this, because I don't see it.
Let me ask you a question, Why do a Raid, if you get nothing from it?
See, an MMO is really just an RPG with endless incremental advancement that keeps players playing the game, this is made possible by the abundance of repayable content. Levels, Gold, Gear Scores, Mastery Lines, Crafting Levels, Alternate Advancement, alts, etc.. are really just a incremental advancement put in a package we as players can understand.
Repayable content is the fact that you can keep killing the same raid boss, or running the same dungeon, and there is always MORE reward you can get from it, or in some cases, it could also be something like a rare drop and you didn't get the one super weapon to rule them all, so you need to run it again and again till you do.
Without such mechanics, once you beat the Big Bad, like every other single player game, game is over and it's time to move on to something else. On top of which, you advocate being able to do on day 1 walking into the game. which not even Single Player games would entertain such an idea as being able to face the final boss on log in.
I mean that would be like being able to read the last page of the last book in a 13 book series, and saying "OK done" and legit.. be done.
Now, in a PvP game, since the opponents skill is what changes the encounter, keeping a static, stagnant, game set up with no actual progression can work, because it's a game of player skill, much like a game of Chess, not one of character/toon advancement, but even then, there is often a need to avoid stagnation, often in the form of additional weapons, maps, modes, and the like, and also to have some kind of reward for your efforts, even if it is something as paltry as "Gold Rank! You killed 100 opponents!" or a breakdown at the end of the match where you are tokens for your efforts that you can use to buy cosmetics or some such.
But what Moves PvP players does not move PvE players, the PvE players are there for the rewards, they are playing a game of Character Advancement, not so much Player Advancement. In this vein, If you have someone who has been playing the game for 4 years and they are no better off than someone who just joined yesterday, what's my motive for that player to invest that time into the game.
The sad truth is, outside an amazing community of friends that they would enjoy playing with.. not a damn thing. So the only thing that keeps a stagnant game alive is something the developer cannot provide or really control.
The thing is, because PvE is scripted, so it does not hold attraction in its own right, without being mixed with other means of time sinks and grinds, is becomes a vast world of once and done content.
Which is directly counter intuitive to the very idea of the very idea of an MMO which is being a game without end, dependent upon repayable content and endless advancement, that is keeps MMO's active over the years.
If a once and done style game is what players want, they can find that much better in an single player RPG.
Across this forum you will find that many posters here have mentioned an Aversion to being held up as THE Hero of the MMO Story world, and would rather they be A Hero in a world rich with lore.
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.
Have you ever read a novel and said, I really liked that novel, but I wish it had a 50 page version to give me the gist of the novel?
Yeah, actually - all throughout high school, they're called CliffsNotes.
That's because you didn't like the novel. You just wanted to get through the class that forced you to read a novel that you didn't like. You want shortened versions of things that you dislike so that you can skip doing them. If you dislike a game that you aren't required to play for school or a job, then the sensible thing to do isn't to ask for a shortened version that lets you skip most of it. It's to quit playing the game entirely and go find one that you like better.
Comments
None of which do I plan to disagree with because they were all very solid points to look at.
What I will say, is two of the games I play, have address this very problem in two very unique ways.
Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Like their namesake, this is a D&D game, based mainly on the 3.x AD&D rule set. And I have got to say, they are about the closest I have ever gotten to playing D&D made into an MMO Form. With the praise aside, it still suffers from Bloat and level cap raising, and all the stuff that typical come with a game that has Expansions and level cap increases. They had so much bloat, that they had to divide the levels into Heroic and Epic levels.
However, In adding in Epic Levels, they also revisited a lot of their older Heroic content and Added an Epic Version to them, so that players return to that originally great content and play it all again, with some minor changes, but, this ensures that it does not get forgotten.
Guild Wars 2
Now this company took a vastly different approach in dealing with bloat and leveling, and dead zones, it simply didn't add bloat. The Cap was 80th when the game was made, 2 Expansions and a huge number of updates and idea changes Later, and the Cap is still 80th.
Not only that, GW2 has down-level scaling, so that content never becomes invalid. As you play, your world expands, you level UP into the higher level, and harder content, but you never truly outgrow the older content.
This made astutely aware to anyone that does world bosses, as there are a few of them in Starter Zones, (Like Jungle Wurm and Shadow Behemoth, for example) and yes, if you are not paying attention they can down your level 80th maxed out toon, and some level 6 player, who does not even have a full set of armor to call their own, is there reviving your dumb ass.
So in that venture, they also have eliminated the whole concept of what bloat in most MMO's.
In this venture, solutions are out there, they are being done, it is simply a matter of experiences them.
Let's suppose that, when The Burning Crusade was added to WoW, it had been structured more as a sequel than an expansion, in the following manner. All of the old characters on Vanilla servers stayed there, and The Burning Crusade content wasn't available on them. Meanwhile, a bunch of new servers for The Burning Crusade were added. Players could copy any character from a Vanilla server to a Burning Crusade server once. That is, once per character, but you could do so for as many characters as you wanted, including characters created long after the launch of The Burning Crusade.
Many players would have left Vanilla in favor of The Burning Crusade, wanting to do the new content. There would still be a lot of characters on the old Vanilla servers, as transferring characters to The Burning Crusade is only a copy and not a move. But the characters on Vanilla servers wouldn't be logged in nearly as much as before, necessitating massive server merging. But WoW had plenty of servers, and there were still plenty enough people who wanted to play Vanilla to keep some servers active.
Meanwhile, if you create a new character, you can create it on a Vanilla server or on a Burning Crusade server. On a Burning Crusade server, you'd start at level 60 with a bunch of level 60 white quality gear. A character who transfers from Vanilla to The Burning Crusade would have his level increased to 60 if it were below there, and be given white quality gear--though he could just keep using his old gear for a little longer if it were better.
And then, when WoW added Wrath of the Lich King, you do the same thing again. Create a bunch of new Wrath of the Lich King servers, have massive server merges of The Burning Crusade servers, and allow any character on a Burning Crusade server to copy to a Wrath of the Lich King server. Someone on a Vanilla server wouldn't be able to jump directly to Wrath of the Lich King, but could copy once to a Burning Crusade server, and then a second time to a Wrath of the Lich King server. And so on with each other expansion that launches.
Once a new expansion launches, updates on the old servers basically come to a halt. Maybe they'd still get updates to the graphics engine if Blizzard decides it's easier to maintain a single, unified graphics engine rather than a separate version for each expansion. Maybe they'd still get some bug fixes or something, especially if they fixed a bug in the latest version and realized that it was still present in older versions. But older servers would get no new features, no new content, no rebalancing, and so forth. Play balance and content difficulty would be frozen in time forever on the older servers.
This would mean that the old content remained playable in its original intended state forever. It never becomes deprecated by newer content. It never becomes trivial due to power creep. Once the next expansion launches, there can never again be any form of power creep applied to the older ones. It's still there for you to play and enjoy whenever you get around to it.
For people who have played through every new expansion as it launched and wouldn't care to return to the old if they could, this only advantage this offers is being able to start any new alts at the latest expansion rather than having to slog through a bunch of deprecated content. But it doesn't offer any disadvantages to those people, either.
For everyone else, however, this offers enormous advantages over the current system. Suppose that you're a new player who tries WoW for the first time today. The overwhelming majority of the lower level content is in some mangled state that isn't what was originally intended. I haven't seen it after Shadowlands, but as of Battle for Azeroth, the lower level content was trivial to the extent of being stupid and boring. Being able to play the original content with the original play balance would be a huge improvement over that.
But even if you're the rush to endgame sort, this has something to offer you, too. If a new player picks up WoW today, he can get through the lower level content, play through Shadowlands, and get however far he gets in the endgame before he decides it's too grindy to continue and quits. Maybe he says, that was fun, but there's nothing left to do, so I quit.
But there used to be a Vanilla endgame, and a Burning Crusade endgame, and a Wrath of the Lich King endgame, and so forth. Now they're all gone, save whatever is the latest, and Vanilla on the "classic" servers. If the old servers are still up, then the rush to endgame sort can go play those endgames, too. Now instead of looping through some tiny sliver of content a bunch of times, he has many times as much endgame content to work on. That's likely to remain interesting for a lot longer.
If you're not done with one expansion by the time the next launches, you don't get your progress wiped out by the new expansion. You can continue playing the old version until you're ready to move on, whether weeks or months or years later.
You don't ever have to move on if you don't want to. How many people have played an MMORPG and said, I used to like the game, but this or that particular expansion ruined it? That's why I quit. With this approach, if you think the new expansion ruins the game, you can just ignore it and keep playing the old. Even if you copy your character to the new expansion before you learn that you hate it, you can just switch back to keep playing the old, as your characters are still there. They were copied off of the old servers, not moved off.
So what are the drawbacks? One is that you divide the playerbase. For games with a large playerbase, that's not really a problem. So long as you have enough players to fill one server at each expansion, everything is fine. For less popular games that struggle to have enough players to make even one server viable, this isn't practical.
The other problem is that it's more work for the developers to maintain. Even so, I'd submit that it's massively less work to maintain old expansions in maintenance mode than it is to constantly create new content to replace the old while trying to keep enough content to make the game remain interesting. That the old expansions are in maintenance mode is a desired feature here, not something to complain about. If people complain about a lack of new content, you can point them to the latest version.
In some games, you would get a problem of name collisions when you merge the old servers. That's just a problem of a botched server architecture, and not a more fundamental issue with my proposal. Granted, a lot of games botch their server architecture. But how to avoid doing so is a solved problem, and in quite a few ways. For example, in Champions Online, your account name is globally unique, and many different accounts can have their own characters with the same character name that are distinguished because the account name is globally unique.
There is no such thing as the "gist" of a zone. There is only the zone. Have you ever watched a movie and said, I really liked that movie, but I wish it had a 20 minute version to give me the gist of the movie? Have you ever read a novel and said, I really liked that novel, but I wish it had a 50 page version to give me the gist of the novel? The shortened version would sacrifice most of what you liked about the original.
The "streamlined" version you're asking for consists of deleting most of the old content. That's the opposite of what games need to do if they're going to have a lot of content.
Why do you play MMORPGs, anyway? Do you play because you want to get to the endgame and show off your epics?
I play games for fun. If a game is fun at the low levels, then there's no need to rush to the high levels. You shouldn't say, this portion of the game is fun to play, so I want to skip it.
I've played DDO for several months now. I've surely spent several hundred hours in-game. My highest level character is currently level 4, as most of the experience I get is wasted from going over the cap before I go ask a trainer to advance me to the next level. But that's okay, because the game tries to be fun to play starting at level 1.
I mean, Gordon Ramsay does point out a lot of failing restaurants have menus that are too large. So it gets too complicated with food inventory and for chefs to make the various dishes.
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"But noo, that is too easy and I am overleveled, i want to level within the content" LOL .
I have not seen any of Wow's new content but knowing Blizzard and the game,i very highly doubt there is any change in the right direction there either.
I need to see devs completely toss out their idea of how a character would live within a game world.
I also need to see a completely new thought process put into creating the worlds.
The overall design of a mmorpg should resemble a real living world with people doing real living things.
Creating a LINEAR path of levels and items is NOT a mmo nor is it a rpg,so it is in fact a HUGE fail to game design.Just because someone else designed a mmorpg in a way 5/10/15/20 years ago doesn't make it right and should NOT define how a mmorpg is designed.
I feel that most people feel DnD is the godfather of rpg's and where most of the concepts began.I am ok with "concepts" and i am also for the msot part ok with the common sense behind Dnd ideas but "IMPLEMENTATION" of a game design is where it matters most.
DnD relied on the mind,you could just imagine it so it was easy to roleplay it.Actually creating it in 3D and bringing that concept to life is the real tough part and so far nobody has come close.The TOOLS and tech is already here to pull it off so i wonder WHY nobody is able to or not willing to do it.IMO the answer is they are not willing to do it,either they don't have the manpower or the time or the money.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
And that's not to say there shouldn't be progression. Pure horizontal progression would be so refreshing, but so far no MMO developer has been brave enough to try it. No one has been willing to say, "Hmm, maybe there's no actual reason to separate the new players from the veterans. Maybe it's okay for people to learn the game while playing the same game as everyone else. Maybe it's okay to let an experienced player be killed by the same goblins that were capable of killing them on day one." The difference should be that the experienced player has learned more skills to help deal with or avoid the goblins, not that you suddenly become goblin-proof at a certain point in your life.
(And by that I mean actual character-based abilities, not just player knowledge.)
I personally try different ways through 1 - 20, 21 - 30 each life and take my time.
As for EQ2 I come back at different intervals, the easiest way to power level is just buy collectables, there is one set that will take you from 10 - 80/90 it about a minute, though it sometimes crashes the game as it tries to tell you all the levels you just got
If you like to level, level normally almost all the quests are soloable now, join a guild for your social chat, do the dungeons at level solo and you have some good challenges with a merc.
At the end of the day though I agree they should revisit some of the old places, make some gear worth getting - cosmetics maybe - or something that levels with you?
I have played WoW a few years but left the game. Empty continents and powerleveling just makes everyone skip all content to reach endgame as fast as possible.
I dont know if its possible due to servers or other limitations but one way to make the game playable from start regarding storyline is that make all areas completely equal when reaching max lvl and adjust all rewards so it make sense for everyone to play through the game as intended. A world for endgameplayers only and totally playable in the now empty continents.
Eve Online dont have that problem at all and returning to "noobland" is not an issue so there is other workarounds to this problem.
Anyway, when you make 80th, that is when Leveling Tomes & Writs tend to drop, this makes, making an alt super easy, stand at the bank and comp tomes till you make the level you wanna make. Never have to level an alt again.
But.. an MMO could.
Just to give an idea.
Leveling.
Leveling was a simplification of learning. When you leveled up, you gained some skill points, HP, Saves, To Hit, etc.
Many people think this is what you get to move forward, but that is not the case, this is the documenting of what you leaned getting from your last level to this current level, it simply all amounts to "What has your character learned"
Case in point. Getting Extra HP. It was explained that your character didn't magically get tougher, that somehow a knife hurt them less when they get stabbed, but, now, by leveling up, they learned to dodge, deflect, evade, and any and all other means to avoid the knife from hurting them. They took this very complex idea of the various means of damage avoidance and mitigation and made it into a simple number: Hit Point. So that players could just play the game at the table and keep things moving along.
Same idea with "To Hit" and "Armor Class" bonus, all the complex training, feinting, attacks and dodges boiled down to two simple numbers. "To Hit" and "AC".
But the thing is, today, MMO's could put in all those complex ideas, they could run all manner metrics to dodging, deflecting, rolling with the blow, etc, etc, and make a large system that reflected the advanced concepts that were boiled down into simple numbers by D&D.
Instead they give you a dodge roll...
allow that to process as you play an MMO. As opposed to your character being given stats that they could use to calculate outcomes like an RPG should work, they gave the players a Dodge Roll, so they had to do it themselves.
Everything that has been tried to solve this problem (scaling, exp boosts, heirlooms, mentoring systems, etc.) are only means to camouflage the broken part. It's like trying to figure out how to modify an automobile to cross a body of water, but a boat or an aeroplane would be a better solution.
If i was a game designer (or their boss) i'd start by thinking why everyone is so excited about an endgame. How does the endgame differs from the rest of the game and could you redesign the rest of the game by using the best parts of the endgame so that eventually there wouldn't be even need for an endgame. I give you a hint: it has something to do with levels.
However, you have to want to play that kind of game for EVE to be enjoyable on any level.
One of things I have noticed over the years, is some MMO's moving away from the idea of the other people in the Game World being your competitor, and instead, they are your ally.
This dynamic shift is changing the entire landscape of MMO's and the people that play them.
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
It's not likely a village's problems are now solved when you killed all the rats in their cellars last month. They may have bigger problems which needed more experienced hero to take care of. You just need a reason to pass by to find this out. Now, add a little bit of randomness. Make this NPC give you a different quest for every character you make. If the quest requires you to craft or buy an item, change it for every character. It doesn't always have to be a bronze tube or a deadly blunderbuss.
There is so much you can do to make a gameplay outside of an endgame compelling and interesting for many demographics. But for lazy developers it's just easier and cheaper to write these "kill 10 of these" and "collect 6 of those", which can be found nearby and reward you with 5000xp so you're one step closer to their latest raids. That's boring.
See, an MMO is really just an RPG with endless incremental advancement that keeps players playing the game, this is made possible by the abundance of repayable content. Levels, Gold, Gear Scores, Mastery Lines, Crafting Levels, Alternate Advancement, alts, etc.. are really just a incremental advancement put in a package we as players can understand.
Repayable content is the fact that you can keep killing the same raid boss, or running the same dungeon, and there is always MORE reward you can get from it, or in some cases, it could also be something like a rare drop and you didn't get the one super weapon to rule them all, so you need to run it again and again till you do.
Without such mechanics, once you beat the Big Bad, like every other single player game, game is over and it's time to move on to something else. On top of which, you advocate being able to do on day 1 walking into the game. which not even Single Player games would entertain such an idea as being able to face the final boss on log in.
I mean that would be like being able to read the last page of the last book in a 13 book series, and saying "OK done" and legit.. be done.
Now, in a PvP game, since the opponents skill is what changes the encounter, keeping a static, stagnant, game set up with no actual progression can work, because it's a game of player skill, much like a game of Chess, not one of character/toon advancement, but even then, there is often a need to avoid stagnation, often in the form of additional weapons, maps, modes, and the like, and also to have some kind of reward for your efforts, even if it is something as paltry as "Gold Rank! You killed 100 opponents!" or a breakdown at the end of the match where you are tokens for your efforts that you can use to buy cosmetics or some such.
But what Moves PvP players does not move PvE players, the PvE players are there for the rewards, they are playing a game of Character Advancement, not so much Player Advancement. In this vein, If you have someone who has been playing the game for 4 years and they are no better off than someone who just joined yesterday, what's my motive for that player to invest that time into the game.
The sad truth is, outside an amazing community of friends that they would enjoy playing with.. not a damn thing. So the only thing that keeps a stagnant game alive is something the developer cannot provide or really control.
The thing is, because PvE is scripted, so it does not hold attraction in its own right, without being mixed with other means of time sinks and grinds, is becomes a vast world of once and done content.
Which is directly counter intuitive to the very idea of the very idea of an MMO which is being a game without end, dependent upon repayable content and endless advancement, that is keeps MMO's active over the years.
If a once and done style game is what players want, they can find that much better in an single player RPG.
Across this forum you will find that many posters here have mentioned an Aversion to being held up as THE Hero of the MMO Story world, and would rather they be A Hero in a world rich with lore.