The goal is to make PVE content that is an interesting challenge for groups of several people working together. That is as opposed to solo content. It is also as opposed to group content that is really just a check of whether you can get enough people there at once or high enough level people, without it particularly mattering what the people actually do once there.
I'm not so sure I agree.
Where is it written whether a dungeon is a solo or a raid experience?
If I designed a dungeon I would try to design it in a way that made it more believable. Is that a better way?
I believe that if players see a huge cool looking monster that packs a punch, they are going to want to team up and take it down.
I dont know what MMOs the OP has played. Sounds like they are pretty bad.
I've played (very little) Lineage 2 (had some maxlevel characters at a point thanks to player servers with much faster xp, though) and then Vanguard (for most of its runtime). Basically none of the things claimed by the OP applied to either game.
L2 soloing was possible but depending upon class extremely painful at higher levels. Then again L2 was a riddiculous game in so many regards, even if castle sieges have been huge fun.
Vanguard soloing was possible but rewards would be poor and gaming would be boring/repetitive. Dungeons quickly became impossible.
1) Um. Join a guild ?
6) L2 healers, dont get me started. At higher levels I was literally unable to level anymore with a healing healer, unless I could find some undead somewhere, and even then it was a PITA.
Vanguard healers - so friggin awesome. All four classes have been kickass solists, some of the best solists in the game. Thus there was no shortage of VG healers.
7) High level in Vanguard, if you lose the tank or only have one healer, you had to wait for replacement. Too few damage dealers also was sometimes a problem.
10) Well then play on the same server ? Or all start new characters on a server nobody has a character on, yet.
11) You could lower your level to the group in Vanguard, but it wasnt fun to do so. All your higher level abilities stopped working, your macros didnt work anymore, etc. I still did it sometimes, of course, at least on my tank. On the plus side you'd be still super powerful, especially if your character was maxlevel and in best raid gear.
ive said it before but voice to text and back to voice technology could make things more interesting by giving players unique voices so if you play a dwarf you sound like one. This also filters out all background noise in the process.
Alot of people dont want to hear other peoples lives in the background of their game or eating chips or whatever. This would help in that regard since much of this can be removed.
This would be client side as all you would get is the text. the game ( or you) could decide what voice(s) to use to decode the text from a default list based on race etc or a custom one you make yourself. You could also choose to leave some voices as text if you would rather just see the text than hear them.
there is alot you could so with this. Every bit of text in the game can be affected. You could have books read to you while your playing etc. So you pick up a book in game open it up and it narrates the story to you while you continue on.
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
This is why i think a three man group is the ideal group size. Your not forced to group at all since its theoretically possible to solo such content as evidenced by eso dungeons.
of course if your skill is insufficient to solo them that's on you not the developers really.
Being able to socialize with other players, chat, trade, building that social interaction, is far more valuable than "OMG lets zerg rush this Dungeon together and somehow this will make us bond, even if in reality we all hate the very fact that we are being forced together to do this content"
That's exactly what I'm trying to kill with this proposal. That you sometimes come in a little under level and level up by failing means there's a challenge. It's not just a case of winning because you show up. If you're going to win whether you communicate or not, then why stop to communicate? That just wastes time that you could have spent zerg rushing the dungeon and getting loot. If discussing strategy is likely to be the difference between success and failure, there would be a lot more of it.
The other thing that makes zerg rushing common is when everyone knows all of the dungeons. When you have to do a given dungeon six or eight or ten times to gear up before moving on to the next, you learn that dungeon really well, and expect that everyone else does so, too.
In my proposal, as soon as you clear a dungeon just once, that characters is discouraged from going back to that dungeon again. While there will still be alts, I want it to be expected that a large fraction of players won't have beaten the dungeon before, so they have to talk about what's coming and how to do it.
Wouldn't the logical thing be to change the design of the dungeons rather than try to accommodate an existing bad design?
If you think a different way to design dungeons could make group content work well, then make your own thread and explain how.
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
There's always going to be players with competing requirements and mutually exclusive designs though. You could see it as "choosing your audience". Some studios have the bandwidth to provide both playstyle options, others don't, or just select designs which are incompatible with one of them.
The design of @Quizzical sounds very linear though, with little exploration or surprises... a bit like SW:TOR actually.
There's probably a public for such games though, I'm enjoying that kind of games in solo (Tomb Raider) or ARPG (Diablo III), but in a MMORPG I rather have a wide open world than to be on rails. That's what made me stop playing WoW.
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
I really don't understand what situation you are talking about.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
25 years later Ultima Online still has the best MMORPG Virtual World
SHUT UP SCOR... er ... actually you make a fine point.
Here's the thing, you want to make an MMO group friendly, first you need to stop making players compete against each other, thereby making a less proficient player the group's enemy. So much of dungeon and raiding mechanics have come to rely on pure gear score, and not skill, that it makes the more hardcore players come to absolutely hate the more casual players. And more importantly, hate and reject the biggest majority of the player base. Stop basing your game mechanics around how big an e-peen your players have and instead create tasks and goals all types and levels of players can contribute to, and then just maybe you'll have a game worth playing by all.
25 years later Ultima Online still has the best MMORPG Virtual World
SHUT UP SCOR... er ... actually you make a fine point.
Here's the thing, you want to make an MMO group friendly, first you need to stop making players compete against each other, thereby making a less proficient player the group's enemy. So much of dungeon and raiding mechanics have come to rely on pure gear score, and not skill, that it makes the more hardcore players come to absolutely hate the more casual players. And more importantly, hate and reject the biggest majority of the player base. Stop basing your game mechanics around how big an e-peen your players have and instead create tasks and goals all types and levels of players can contribute to, and then just maybe you'll have a game worth playing by all.
And relative to the OP, UO dungeons are really done well , open world, difficulty amps up deeper you go , Mob stats and spawn points vary , one Dragon for ex. can be much easier or difficult than the next depending on the stats it spawned, .. yes Death has meaning making dungeon delving much more interesting , immersive, blindly rushing to 3rd level of Destard and dying carelessly can you lead to some corpses deteriorating..
Also mobs looting your corpse is just fucking brilliant and every game should do it , especially when they do it in an intelligent way ( a lichen will take reagents for ex) a Ogre may take a weapon or armor ..
If you are in Trammel , folks coming I to help in tuff situations is a regular occurrence which leads to some great friendships and comraderie...
Randomized loot I just love , the fact that you can get an item that there is truly only 1 of in the entire game is just amazing ..
And yes UO is very much a skill driven game , you will certainly know when you see a skilled player in action
You don't want people to need to group. You need people to want to group.
edited to make sense lol
ideally you want it to be theoretically possible to do yourself but not efficient, practical or easy to do yourself.
This has already been proven to a degree in eso. People solo dungeons all the time. They can do this because the dungeons are designed for 4 not 6 or 8. It would work even better if the design was for 3.
when you have that equation what you say will work itself out especially if you use a different model than tank/dps/healer.
I dont know what MMOs the OP has played. Sounds like they are pretty bad.
I've played (very little) Lineage 2 (had some maxlevel characters at a point thanks to player servers with much faster xp, though) and then Vanguard (for most of its runtime). Basically none of the things claimed by the OP applied to either game.
L2 soloing was possible but depending upon class extremely painful at higher levels. Then again L2 was a riddiculous game in so many regards, even if castle sieges have been huge fun.
Vanguard soloing was possible but rewards would be poor and gaming would be boring/repetitive. Dungeons quickly became impossible.
I've played quite a few MMORPGs: WoW, GW2, FFXIV, Champions Online, Neverwinter, and quite a few more obscure ones. I've never yet found one that made grouping work well. GW1 made "grouping" with mostly NPCs work, which at least made the game playable. Elsword and GW2 made it mostly work, but only by scaling everything to be really easy. And yes, I've played Vanguard, since you want to talk about that one. I never played Lineage 2.
Vanguard grouping was an unmitigated disaster. When I'd try to group, there might be a grand total of five players on the entire server within the reasonable level range of what I wanted to do. That doesn't exactly make it practical to get a group quickly, slowly, or ever. And joining a guild to restrict my attention to a small (and likely empty) subset of those other players isn't going to help.
The goal is to make PVE content that is an interesting challenge for groups of several people working together. That is as opposed to solo content. It is also as opposed to group content that is really just a check of whether you can get enough people there at once or high enough level people, without it particularly mattering what the people actually do once there.
I'm not so sure I agree.
Where is it written whether a dungeon is a solo or a raid experience?
If I designed a dungeon I would try to design it in a way that made it more believable. Is that a better way?
I believe that if players see a huge cool looking monster that packs a punch, they are going to want to team up and take it down.
Organically
The problem is that wanting to group doesn't magically conjure up other players who want to group with you to do the same thing that you want to do when you want to do it. That's why most group content gets completely ignored in most MMORPGs.
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
This is why i think a three man group is the ideal group size. Your not forced to group at all since its theoretically possible to solo such content as evidenced by eso dungeons.
of course if your skill is insufficient to solo them that's on you not the developers really.
A dungeon that is soloable is probably going to be ridiculously easy if you bring a 3-man group, each of which could solo it. I think that's boring.
This is why i think a three man group is the ideal group size.
... seriously ?
In any game which has tanks and healers you want an as large group size as possible so if you get your hands on at least one tank and at least one healer you can go with as many other classes you want.
Having only three characters and still tanks and healers in place means the urgency to play tank or healer would be completely maximized.
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
This is why i think a three man group is the ideal group size. Your not forced to group at all since its theoretically possible to solo such content as evidenced by eso dungeons.
of course if your skill is insufficient to solo them that's on you not the developers really.
A dungeon that is soloable is probably going to be ridiculously easy if you bring a 3-man group, each of which could solo it. I think that's boring.
theoretically possible and easy arent the same thing. Almost every dungeon has been soloed on vet in eso by extreme skilled players.
that doesnt mean anyone can do it, and certainly in that game few can. The principle is the same though. It can be done.
up the groupsize to 5 or 6 or 8 and its usually no longer viable.
This is why i think a three man group is the ideal group size.
... seriously ?
In any game which has tanks and healers you want an as large group size as possible so if you get your hands on at least one tank and at least one healer you can go with as many other classes you want.
Having only three characters and still tanks and healers in place means the urgency to play tank or healer would be completely maximized.
yes we have to get rid of the tank/dps/healer baggage.
My basic thesis is that the most challenging part of non-endgame group content in an MMORPG should be something other than getting a reasonable group together. That's rare, even in games with automated group finders. Elsword is the only game that I can think of where that was true.
I'm just going to make a short comment... FORCING people to do something they don't want to only makes you lose players.
You can't simultaneously do everything well, as a lot of different design choices conflict with each other. A game that tries to do everything well will probably do nearly everything badly. I say that it's better to do something well than a lot of things badly.
The more I think about it and I’ve been thinking about it for decades. If you make a super cool virtual world that’s entertaining. Make the game so people can just go about their business and you will have a happy customer.
Comments
Where is it written whether a dungeon is a solo or a raid experience?
If I designed a dungeon I would try to design it in a way that made it more believable. Is that a better way?
I believe that if players see a huge cool looking monster that packs a punch, they are going to want to team up and take it down.
Organically
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
ive said it before but voice to text and back to voice technology could make things more interesting by giving players unique voices so if you play a dwarf you sound like one. This also filters out all background noise in the process.
Alot of people dont want to hear other peoples lives in the background of their game or eating chips or whatever. This would help in that regard since much of this can be removed.
This would be client side as all you would get is the text. the game ( or you) could decide what voice(s) to use to decode the text from a default list based on race etc or a custom one you make yourself. You could also choose to leave some voices as text if you would rather just see the text than hear them.
there is alot you could so with this. Every bit of text in the game can be affected. You could have books read to you while your playing etc. So you pick up a book in game open it up and it narrates the story to you while you continue on.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
of course if your skill is insufficient to solo them that's on you not the developers really.
The design of @Quizzical sounds very linear though, with little exploration or surprises... a bit like SW:TOR actually.
There's probably a public for such games though, I'm enjoying that kind of games in solo (Tomb Raider) or ARPG (Diablo III), but in a MMORPG I rather have a wide open world than to be on rails. That's what made me stop playing WoW.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Also mobs looting your corpse is just fucking brilliant and every game should do it , especially when they do it in an intelligent way ( a lichen will take reagents for ex) a Ogre may take a weapon or armor ..
If you are in Trammel , folks coming I to help in tuff situations is a regular occurrence which leads to some great friendships and comraderie...
Randomized loot I just love , the fact that you can get an item that there is truly only 1 of in the entire game is just amazing ..
And yes UO is very much a skill driven game , you will certainly know when you see a skilled player in action
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
edited to make sense lol
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
This has already been proven to a degree in eso. People solo dungeons all the time. They can do this because the dungeons are designed for 4 not 6 or 8. It would work even better if the design was for 3.
when you have that equation what you say will work itself out especially if you use a different model than tank/dps/healer.
Vanguard grouping was an unmitigated disaster. When I'd try to group, there might be a grand total of five players on the entire server within the reasonable level range of what I wanted to do. That doesn't exactly make it practical to get a group quickly, slowly, or ever. And joining a guild to restrict my attention to a small (and likely empty) subset of those other players isn't going to help.
that doesnt mean anyone can do it, and certainly in that game few can. The principle is the same though. It can be done.
up the groupsize to 5 or 6 or 8 and its usually no longer viable.
Imho
edit: damn cell phone
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee