When I look around at the players playing multiplayer online games in 2022 I'm not sure I want anything whatsoever to do with player-driven anything.
For me it begs the question, has the audience changed, or have I changed?
Things were very different when I started playing games like UO, and I'd like to believe that the audience has changed, back then they were newer concepts, people didn't quite know what they were, or what they could be. These days, people seem to know everything, and that makes the perception very different.
Of course who knows, maybe we were the same then, and I'm wearing rose colored glasses, think that it was a different era, with players who approached things differently than today.
I think the audience expanded and where once we had a self-selected crowd of RPG hobbyists playing it's now everyone.
There have always been cheaters, exploiters and scammers in MMOs but it just seems to me like the percentages are much higher now. I mean... the New World developers deserve a lot of criticism for releasing a game that was so easily exploitable but it took a massive number of players to use the many exploits ruining territory control and the economy.
It drove vast quantities of honest players away when they saw they could not play the game seriously and compete against the cheaters.
That's a really good point.
When it was hobbyists, I suspect I had more in common with most players, these days I feel like I have less in common with the population, and that's okay, just makes it harder for me to relate, or I simply don't enjoy some items that they do, and vice versa.
I enjoyed NW for 600+ hours, but it's definitely not something I see myself ever going to back to, and that's odd, because other MMO's I've taken long vacations from, but I've gone back many times. I laugh that it took NW for me to really appreciate ESO. The combat, finally going back to the roots, putting aside my preconceived notion that a class had a role, rather than looking at skills fill roles took 4-5 trips back? I had a single 50 from ESO launch, got as far as 22 CP (and since you played, you realize how long that takes, lol, 20 minutes? If that?) Since going back, I've got 11 50's, with a a few more coming, and just cruised past 700 CP. So why did it take a classless game for me to go back to my roots and make me appreciate ESO?
To the point though, I think the cheaters were a big thing, seeing games become E-Sports another, and the rise of the hard core raiding guilds. (I know they existed in EQ, but I feel like we saw more and more of them.) Different attitudes, different elitism, and the hobbyist felt like they were second fiddle.
Either or....maybe that's all a part of the sandbox generally going away, harder to monetize, and the loss/abandonment of come casual ideals.
Grats on 700 CP I too went back to ESO after NW back in January after having been gone for almost 2 years.
I was already at 900 when I returned and am now at 1550 lol. The way they've structured this CP 2.0 system you get the most benefit from CP passives that increase your power early and it pretty well caps at ~ 1200.
After that point it's mostly QOL passives or situational slottable power nodes for tanking or healing or whatever.
I find the ESO population overall to be just plain nicer than in most other current MMOs.
There are exceptions of course like there are everywhere especially with the many DPS who like to game the group finder queueing as healers or tanks when even the extra DPS they bring to the group is crap... all to avoid the 10 minute wait DPS who queue properly have to wait until the dungeon pops.
I know that the normal dungeons are easy enough that often you barely need a tank or healer but that's still no excuse for gaming the system and essentially scamming the rest of the group. I guess honesty is just not as common as it used to be
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
You know, I'm impressed some people can write comments and make lists, but apparently don't know how to click between pages or on provided links.
As for the current page 3 comments. Oddly ESO was the game I went back to after falling off NW as well.
Think it's interesting in that they're both somewhat free-form experiences, I think it was the case that NW wanted to be presented as something more though, and just jumbled itself up int he process. The fact that player progression through gear and maintaining access to tiered crafting stations is in part influenced by PvP makes just playing the PvE a little bothersome. The lack of any real physical or other influence on the world either beyond PvP town control stunts it too.
Dunno if NW wanted to be a sandbox in particular as much as it wanted to wear the trappings of a survival game, but either way it never really lived up to either. Instead it was just a repetitious themepark with eh PvP.
ESO caters to the open roaming play style a bit better since zones have a bit more individuality, through both visuals and quest narratives.
Cycling onto the player-driven element. Can't say my opinion is far off from what's been shared in the back and forth already. There's cases where community has worked to make an effective player economy, and there's been many occasions where it has not. Think a big part of that is the fact that it's entirely on the player base to have the tools and the impetus to do so, and there's rarely a point in many games.
Wurm and EVE both push skill systems and resource/production methods that require people to adopt professions and interact with players across broader communities as a staple. A lot of games I can think of in contrast allow you to sorta just build your own character (or an alt) up to be everything you need. Sure, community is there, but it quickly becomes a case of not even necessarily needing all that much from clans/guilds save for whatever elements are locked uniquely to them.
It's perhaps one of the detractors I'd levy at a game like 76. Outside of, say, fighting the momma bat or doing some vault stuff, the actual need for playing with another person doesn't really exist. And if you're really gung-ho, I'm relatively certain you can even do that stuff solo. The community itself is also somewhat awkward as a result. People do interact and squad up for stuff, but it's also always had just as many that ignore, and plenty that only use the multiplayer element to serve as bad actors.
Think something that's lost on many sandbox games is the development of systems which directly fosters reliance between players and puts an impetus on developing and protecting communities, which then allows there to be something players can really feel a part of.
I wouldn't believe the grief/more abusive type of player is a problem to this type of MMO because EvE Online and Albion Online have no lack of toxicity on their playerbases yet it doesn't stop them from being stable successful MMOs.
The concept of player driven economy, the freedom to players to do what they want via skill development and actually live within the game-world is an approach proven to work by ancient titles from Ultima Online to Star Wars Galaxies, and even Archeage that dwelled on that and is loved for it and hated for its overly greedy management.
The demand is clearly there, and so is the frustration a high budget project doesn't happen to achieve just that, especially because, they would live in a place facing little to no competition, while the "wow-like" MMO formula is the one that's oversaturated and growingly uninteresting to players.
The actual evidence of that is how smaller indie projects trying to attempt just that get so much attention, then die down because a small indie group with little to no money is not enough to achieve the content and finish levels an MMO implies.
Palia is a good example, wasn't for the big injection of 30million to grow the studio and make it so, this sandbox MMO would be in trouble. Looking at the hype and growing community surrounding Palia attm is undeniable the demand there is for something like this.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
Other thing would be creating overarching motives as world quests that players achieve as a collective. Something that can push players towards a shared goal, while allowing for personal approach to differ and maybe even conflict.
Yes. And you don't have to look far to see examples in the popular fantasy tales.
What if the players would have to save the world form an overarching enemy, for example one with a burning eye at the top of a tower.
But the players would belong to some factions that are not necessarily friends (such as elves, dwarves and humans?). Moreover there would powerful magical objects in limited number that the faction/players would fight for(e.g. rings? Spherical magical stones made to survey/spy?).
Other thing would be creating overarching motives as world quests that players achieve as a collective. Something that can push players towards a shared goal, while allowing for personal approach to differ and maybe even conflict.
Yes. And you don't have to look far to see examples in the popular fantasy tales.
What if the players would have to save the world form an overarching enemy, for example one with a burning eye at the top of a tower.
But the players would belong to some factions that are not necessarily friends (such as elves, dwarves and humans?). Moreover there would powerful magical objects in limited number that the faction/players would fight for(e.g. rings? Spherical magical stones made to survey/spy?).
Other thing would be creating overarching motives as world quests that players achieve as a collective. Something that can push players towards a shared goal, while allowing for personal approach to differ and maybe even conflict.
Yes. And you don't have to look far to see examples in the popular fantasy tales.
What if the players would have to save the world form an overarching enemy, for example one with a burning eye at the top of a tower.
But the players would belong to some factions that are not necessarily friends (such as elves, dwarves and humans?). Moreover there would powerful magical objects in limited number that the faction/players would fight for(e.g. rings? Spherical magical stones made to survey/spy?).
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
I know these aren't out yet and are only on paper with a very few videos of the actual game available
But these few upcoming MMORPG can be in your watchlist, it might interest you:
Fractured Online Ravendawn Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore
These are probably the few sandbox that should be interesting to watch for if they ever release. But for Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore, they did have a fixed release date, which is 23 April 2023.
I know these aren't out yet and are only on paper with a very few videos of the actual game available
But these few upcoming MMORPG can be in your watchlist, it might interest you:
Fractured Online Ravendawn Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore
These are probably the few sandbox that should be interesting to watch for if they ever release. But for Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore, they did have a fixed release date, which is 23 April 2023.
No, No, No. Small indies struggling projects are not who can pull off an MMO with enough quality to shine around the genre. They have the 101 problem of relying too much on sandbox for gameplay due to giant lacks of content.
When I look around at the players playing multiplayer online games in 2022 I'm not sure I want anything whatsoever to do with player-driven anything.
For me it begs the question, has the audience changed, or have I changed?
Things were very different when I started playing games like UO, and I'd like to believe that the audience has changed, back then they were newer concepts, people didn't quite know what they were, or what they could be. These days, people seem to know everything, and that makes the perception very different.
Of course who knows, maybe we were the same then, and I'm wearing rose colored glasses, think that it was a different era, with players who approached things differently than today.
Sometimes it is inevitable that particular mechanics will break down in a particular way. If it has been tried many times and always broken down in the same way, then people know how it is going to go, and the game ends up in the broken state almost immediately.
The very first time that it is tried, people don't yet know that it is going to end up broken and thus treat the game differently. That might keep it from breaking for quite a while if the reasons why it is going to break are subtle enough, though it is still inevitable that the game will eventually break down.
This creates the unfortunate effect that players learning how to play a game makes the game itself less interesting to play. I think that has happened a lot with open-world PVP in MMORPGs. People now know that it will inevitably mean that a relative handful of high-level gankers slaughter everyone else, and everyone else can't do much about it, so everyone else stays away. But when people didn't know that, it took a while to end up in that degenerate state.
I can also give you a theoretical example that has been experimentally verified. Two strangers are paired together, not knowing who the other person is. They play a game for five rounds. In each round, each player can either take $1 himself or give $2 to his partner. The money comes from the game organizers either way, so the choices are "I gain $1 and you gain $0" or "I gain $0 and you gain $2".
Obviously, what is ideal for the players is if everyone always chooses to give $2 to his partner. That way, after five rounds, both players have $10. If they always choose to take $1, then at the end of the game, both players only have $5.
Players can often get some amount of cooperation by reciprocity. If I will do in round n+1 whatever you did in round n, then it's to your advantage to give me $2 in one round rather than keeping $1 yourself, as the former will mean that I give you $2 the next round.
The problem is that this breaks down in the final round. Whatever you do in the final round, there is no next round, so I can't retaliate. Thus, in the final round, your best option is always to take $1 for yourself.
Once everyone realizes that everyone else is going to take $1 in the final round, then there's no prospect of retaliation in the next to last round, either. If you know that I'm going to take $1 in the final round, then in the next to last round, you might as well just take $1 yourself rather than giving me $2. This goes all the way back to everyone deciding that it's best to just take $1 from the very start.
Economists have run experiments where they have a bunch of strangers in a room and play this five-round game repeatedly, paired with different strangers and not knowing who they're paired with. There is a lot of cooperation at the start, but eventually, everyone figures out the logic above and there is no cooperation at the end. The result is that as the game is played more, people getting "better" at it means that everyone gets less money.
I know these aren't out yet and are only on paper with a very few videos of the actual game available
But these few upcoming MMORPG can be in your watchlist, it might interest you:
Fractured Online Ravendawn Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore
These are probably the few sandbox that should be interesting to watch for if they ever release. But for Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore, they did have a fixed release date, which is 23 April 2023.
Fixed release dates that far out are extremely suspicious, as you don't know when the game will actually be ready for launch. If the game is ready in February, why sit on it and wait two months for launch? Or far more likely, if the game isn't ready by your anticipated launch date, you have to either launch it when it is completely unready or else push back the launch date, either of which are undesirable. It's far better to delay giving a launch date until you're just about ready to launch.
You know, I'm impressed some people can write comments and make lists, but apparently don't know how to click between pages or on provided links.
As for the current page 3 comments. Oddly ESO was the game I went back to after falling off NW as well.
Think it's interesting in that they're both somewhat free-form experiences, I think it was the case that NW wanted to be presented as something more though, and just jumbled itself up int he process. The fact that player progression through gear and maintaining access to tiered crafting stations is in part influenced by PvP makes just playing the PvE a little bothersome. The lack of any real physical or other influence on the world either beyond PvP town control stunts it too.
Dunno if NW wanted to be a sandbox in particular as much as it wanted to wear the trappings of a survival game, but either way it never really lived up to either. Instead it was just a repetitious themepark with eh PvP.
ESO caters to the open roaming play style a bit better since zones have a bit more individuality, through both visuals and quest narratives.
Cycling onto the player-driven element. Can't say my opinion is far off from what's been shared in the back and forth already. There's cases where community has worked to make an effective player economy, and there's been many occasions where it has not. Think a big part of that is the fact that it's entirely on the player base to have the tools and the impetus to do so, and there's rarely a point in many games.
Wurm and EVE both push skill systems and resource/production methods that require people to adopt professions and interact with players across broader communities as a staple. A lot of games I can think of in contrast allow you to sorta just build your own character (or an alt) up to be everything you need. Sure, community is there, but it quickly becomes a case of not even necessarily needing all that much from clans/guilds save for whatever elements are locked uniquely to them.
It's perhaps one of the detractors I'd levy at a game like 76. Outside of, say, fighting the momma bat or doing some vault stuff, the actual need for playing with another person doesn't really exist. And if you're really gung-ho, I'm relatively certain you can even do that stuff solo. The community itself is also somewhat awkward as a result. People do interact and squad up for stuff, but it's also always had just as many that ignore, and plenty that only use the multiplayer element to serve as bad actors.
Think something that's lost on many sandbox games is the development of systems which directly fosters reliance between players and puts an impetus on developing and protecting communities, which then allows there to be something players can really feel a part of.
This is why I'm enjoying SWG private servers atm: entertainer and doctor buffs/wound system, housing, etc etc means even as a no lifer you want a community to help fill the gaps in your own toons' skills.
Galaxies of Eden promises the same, so I'm excited to get my hands on it.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
Your right they are not artists. But they still need to have some form of creativity. If devs never tried anything we would all be playing new versions of pong still, or trillions of clones of Mario. My point is, until someone decides to step out of the mold and put their own ideas into something, we will never have anything really special. What we have now is literal reskins of other games, nothing new just different skins..
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
Your right they are not artists. But they still need to have some form of creativity. If devs never tried anything we would all be playing new versions of pong still, or trillions of clones of Mario. My point is, until someone decides to step out of the mold and put their own ideas into something, we will never have anything really special. What we have now is literal reskins of other games, nothing new just different skins.
On this end, you don't get new genres of games without people a) taking risks to explore new avenues and b) observing the trends in both new and old concepts in the marketplace to see what kind of niche is under-served.
Of course a niche is always under-served for a reason. Sometimes because it's really prone to issues, sometimes it's because it's not been fleshed out as a concept and it's taken multiple people and iterations to explore what really works.
It's not without people willing to explore creativity and look for new markets that we get innovation. Creativity demands it's own artistry.
On this end, you don't get new genres of games without people a) taking risks to explore new avenues and b) observing the trends in both new and old concepts in the marketplace to see what kind of niche is under-served.
Of course a niche is always under-served for a reason. Sometimes because it's really prone to issues, sometimes it's because it's not been fleshed out as a concept and it's taken multiple people and iterations to explore what really works.
It's not without people willing to explore creativity and look for new markets that we get innovation. Creativity demands it's own artistry.
I don't think it's taking risks when this approach has been taken before, it's just not being done on a "current gen" quality level.
Obviously MMOs are on themselves long and expensive undertakings, that seems to have driven big budget attention away especially because of the venues like mobile that have been getting MMOs left and right, a trend even Blizzard followed, and it paid off.
Then we have the type of game that we tend to call a niche, but it's odd because several of the biggest online games around are sandboxes, from Arks to Conan's, we just don't see the push to achieve a massive world with a large MP scale of those sort of approaches. An MMO like Atlas tried that, was rather trendy when it pitched its release times but then people saw a broken and unpolished game, which is the same problem again the lack of a high quality polished title releasing with this mindset of a game.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
The music industry suffers from the same, and one of the largest culprits is the analytics/algorithmic approach to investing in new talent/ideas.
Since those algorithms and analytics can only be based specifically on the data points of choices and actions already made/taken, they have literally no data to offer support to anything that doesn't sound like what's been successful in the past. Anything too different is discarded because there's no past data to support its attractiveness to consumers. Instead of big new ideas, you get relatively minuscule variations of the same. Algorithms are very good at predicting someone who likes Product A will like Product B because it shares X, Y, and Z with Product A. They're not very good at predicting whether a completely new idea will be received well because of the lack of referential data points.
On this end, you don't get new genres of games without people a) taking risks to explore new avenues and b) observing the trends in both new and old concepts in the marketplace to see what kind of niche is under-served.
Of course a niche is always under-served for a reason. Sometimes because it's really prone to issues, sometimes it's because it's not been fleshed out as a concept and it's taken multiple people and iterations to explore what really works.
It's not without people willing to explore creativity and look for new markets that we get innovation. Creativity demands it's own artistry.
I don't think it's taking risks when this approach has been taken before, it's just not being done on a "current gen" quality level.
Obviously MMOs are on themselves long and expensive undertakings, that seems to have driven big budget attention away especially because of the venues like mobile that have been getting MMOs left and right, a trend even Blizzard followed, and it paid off.
Then we have the type of game that we tend to call a niche, but it's odd because several of the biggest online games around are sandboxes, from Arks to Conan's, we just don't see the push to achieve a massive world with a large MP scale of those sort of approaches. An MMO like Atlas tried that, was rather trendy when it pitched its release times but then people saw a broken and unpolished game, which is the same problem again the lack of a high quality polished title releasing with this mindset of a game.
True, though my point was speaking more broadly to developers and creating games in general.
Though I would say it does somewhat apply, as just taking an old game and delivering a polished new 1:1 isn't entirely a guarantee of success. Part of it is the metrics of what QOL and modern features perhaps benefit the title, but also what elevates it beyond nostalgia.
It's sort of a related problem to game difficulty, the drain that familiarity can similarly have on an experience.
And also much more directly to the point you bring up, whether or not ambition meets ability. Sandbox games require a swathe of tools and mechanics beyond the norm of a combat focused experience of many games, just to do the basic stuff in it. It puts increased requirements on the baseline of the game and it's infrastructure, before even approaching polish or building up of content. And that can really break things, even with experienced devs.
...instead of using ur own brain about crypto you listen to someone on the web,
Damn! We have the "inventor" of Cypto/NFTs amongst us!
- 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 problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
Twenty years ago, there were a lot of things made newly possible by the Internet and the maturation of 3D graphics that could not have been done ten years prior. That drove a lot of apparent innovation as companies tried to take advantage of new things that they could do that could not have been done in the past.
Today, there isn't any analogous technological advances making new things possible. What can games do today that they couldn't have done ten years ago? Real-time ray tracing? Blockchain? Thin clients? None of those are the sort of game-changers that the Internet and 3D graphics were. The marginal advantages of additional memory, storage, and processing power allow for some simulations to be on a larger scale than before, but that's about all of the new gameplay that they enable.
Today, if you want to know why game developers aren't doing something that they weren't doing ten years ago, you can ask, why weren't they doing it ten years ago? The answer generally isn't going to be that they couldn't do it ten years ago but now they can. If they couldn't do it ten years ago, then they probably still can't. If they didn't think it was interesting ten years ago, then they probably still don't.
The limitations on games today are mostly developer time, competence, and cleverness, not limitations of hardware. Those limitations aren't going away because humans don't scale with anything analogous to Moore's Law.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
Twenty years ago, there were a lot of things made newly possible by the Internet and the maturation of 3D graphics that could not have been done ten years prior. That drove a lot of apparent innovation as companies tried to take advantage of new things that they could do that could not have been done in the past.
Today, there isn't any analogous technological advances making new things possible. What can games do today that they couldn't have done ten years ago? Real-time ray tracing? Blockchain? Thin clients? None of those are the sort of game-changers that the Internet and 3D graphics were. The marginal advantages of additional memory, storage, and processing power allow for some simulations to be on a larger scale than before, but that's about all of the new gameplay that they enable.
Today, if you want to know why game developers aren't doing something that they weren't doing ten years ago, you can ask, why weren't they doing it ten years ago? The answer generally isn't going to be that they couldn't do it ten years ago but now they can. If they couldn't do it ten years ago, then they probably still can't. If they didn't think it was interesting ten years ago, then they probably still don't.
The limitations on games today are mostly developer time, competence, and cleverness, not limitations of hardware. Those limitations aren't going away because humans don't scale with anything analogous to Moore's Law.
It not only technology that drives innovation. Someone with a creative spark has to be willing to be different. They also have to have a large supply of money, and managers who are willing to be patient. We're stuck with combat, magic and crafting systems, but no abstractions of political, legal, social, or other systems in our games mostly because no one has tried. It's too risky. It's difficult. Management is impatient. The investors want their ROI. The forces acting on the creative aspects of game development have mired the entire industry in an intellectual quagmire.
Games still using Hit Points as the base abstraction for the human body. That's a hold-over from D&D (1972). Medical science has different ways of monitoring and evaluating the human body (with existing technology), without a hint of Hit Points. Few games have ventured away from HPs because they are easy. So, we have an aging abstraction designed around integer math and dice.
The games industry (including customers) have had a fixed mindset for a very long time.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
Twenty years ago, there were a lot of things made newly possible by the Internet and the maturation of 3D graphics that could not have been done ten years prior. That drove a lot of apparent innovation as companies tried to take advantage of new things that they could do that could not have been done in the past.
Today, there isn't any analogous technological advances making new things possible. What can games do today that they couldn't have done ten years ago? Real-time ray tracing? Blockchain? Thin clients? None of those are the sort of game-changers that the Internet and 3D graphics were. The marginal advantages of additional memory, storage, and processing power allow for some simulations to be on a larger scale than before, but that's about all of the new gameplay that they enable.
Today, if you want to know why game developers aren't doing something that they weren't doing ten years ago, you can ask, why weren't they doing it ten years ago? The answer generally isn't going to be that they couldn't do it ten years ago but now they can. If they couldn't do it ten years ago, then they probably still can't. If they didn't think it was interesting ten years ago, then they probably still don't.
The limitations on games today are mostly developer time, competence, and cleverness, not limitations of hardware. Those limitations aren't going away because humans don't scale with anything analogous to Moore's Law.
It not only technology that drives innovation. Someone with a creative spark has to be willing to be different. They also have to have a large supply of money, and managers who are willing to be patient. We're stuck with combat, magic and crafting systems, but no abstractions of political, legal, social, or other systems in our games mostly because no one has tried. It's too risky. It's difficult. Management is impatient. The investors want their ROI. The forces acting on the creative aspects of game development have mired the entire industry in an intellectual quagmire.
Games still using Hit Points as the base abstraction for the human body. That's a hold-over from D&D (1972). Medical science has different ways of monitoring and evaluating the human body (with existing technology), without a hint of Hit Points. Few games have ventured away from HPs because they are easy. So, we have an aging abstraction designed around integer math and dice.
The games industry (including customers) have had a fixed mindset for a very long time.
I think it would be foolish to change Hit Points as the abstract to bodily health. All you're really doing is complicating things for the sake of being different. That's not good.
On this end, you don't get new genres of games without people a) taking risks to explore new avenues and b) observing the trends in both new and old concepts in the marketplace to see what kind of niche is under-served.
Of course a niche is always under-served for a reason. Sometimes because it's really prone to issues, sometimes it's because it's not been fleshed out as a concept and it's taken multiple people and iterations to explore what really works.
It's not without people willing to explore creativity and look for new markets that we get innovation. Creativity demands it's own artistry.
I don't think it's taking risks when this approach has been taken before, it's just not being done on a "current gen" quality level.
Obviously MMOs are on themselves long and expensive undertakings, that seems to have driven big budget attention away especially because of the venues like mobile that have been getting MMOs left and right, a trend even Blizzard followed, and it paid off.
Then we have the type of game that we tend to call a niche, but it's odd because several of the biggest online games around are sandboxes, from Arks to Conan's, we just don't see the push to achieve a massive world with a large MP scale of those sort of approaches. An MMO like Atlas tried that, was rather trendy when it pitched its release times but then people saw a broken and unpolished game, which is the same problem again the lack of a high quality polished title releasing with this mindset of a game.
True, though my point was speaking more broadly to developers and creating games in general.
Though I would say it does somewhat apply, as just taking an old game and delivering a polished new 1:1 isn't entirely a guarantee of success. Part of it is the metrics of what QOL and modern features perhaps benefit the title, but also what elevates it beyond nostalgia.
It's sort of a related problem to game difficulty, the drain that familiarity can similarly have on an experience.
And also much more directly to the point you bring up, whether or not ambition meets ability. Sandbox games require a swathe of tools and mechanics beyond the norm of a combat focused experience of many games, just to do the basic stuff in it. It puts increased requirements on the baseline of the game and it's infrastructure, before even approaching polish or building up of content. And that can really break things, even with experienced devs.
About that last paragraph, UO did a lot of that "tools and mechanics" infrastructure. And UO was way back when.
The problem is devs have no vision anymore.. No creativity. You might get some decent game that isn't that great but is solid so then every company makes that same game with a different skin. We saw that with survival games, battlegrounds, theme parks and so on. What happens is the genres then get so barren that those players will literally hype and play anything and claim it's amazing but live in denial (look at pvp games)
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
You've nicely summed up what I've been saying for years. Game businesses don't want real innovation; they want to give players a slightly different spin on what the previous generation gave them. The MMORPG community seems to fall in love with the concept of Indie developers, not realizing the 'indie' is just rehashing the same ideas and conventions established by prior games. It's no wonder that this genre is stagnant; there is no one driving evolution.
What irritates me is that, for all the bluster, no company, large or small, is actually trying to develop anything really new. Game companies have gone from being trailblazers to trying to dress up yesterday's pig with new semantic makeup. They talk a good game, but deliver nothing.
Twenty years ago, there were a lot of things made newly possible by the Internet and the maturation of 3D graphics that could not have been done ten years prior. That drove a lot of apparent innovation as companies tried to take advantage of new things that they could do that could not have been done in the past.
Today, there isn't any analogous technological advances making new things possible. What can games do today that they couldn't have done ten years ago? Real-time ray tracing? Blockchain? Thin clients? None of those are the sort of game-changers that the Internet and 3D graphics were. The marginal advantages of additional memory, storage, and processing power allow for some simulations to be on a larger scale than before, but that's about all of the new gameplay that they enable.
Today, if you want to know why game developers aren't doing something that they weren't doing ten years ago, you can ask, why weren't they doing it ten years ago? The answer generally isn't going to be that they couldn't do it ten years ago but now they can. If they couldn't do it ten years ago, then they probably still can't. If they didn't think it was interesting ten years ago, then they probably still don't.
The limitations on games today are mostly developer time, competence, and cleverness, not limitations of hardware. Those limitations aren't going away because humans don't scale with anything analogous to Moore's Law.
It not only technology that drives innovation. Someone with a creative spark has to be willing to be different. They also have to have a large supply of money, and managers who are willing to be patient. We're stuck with combat, magic and crafting systems, but no abstractions of political, legal, social, or other systems in our games mostly because no one has tried. It's too risky. It's difficult. Management is impatient. The investors want their ROI. The forces acting on the creative aspects of game development have mired the entire industry in an intellectual quagmire.
Games still using Hit Points as the base abstraction for the human body. That's a hold-over from D&D (1972). Medical science has different ways of monitoring and evaluating the human body (with existing technology), without a hint of Hit Points. Few games have ventured away from HPs because they are easy. So, we have an aging abstraction designed around integer math and dice.
The games industry (including customers) have had a fixed mindset for a very long time.
I think it would be foolish to change Hit Points as the abstract to bodily health. All you're really doing is complicating things for the sake of being different. That's not good.
Project Zomboid does this, and it works quite well.
Bones can be broken, splinted, and healed. Internal bleeding can occur, illness (zombie for one, obviously), etc.. And armor/clothing only applied protection to the parts it covered, and could cause overheating or hypothermia if it wasn't weather appropriate, etc..
PZ is actually one of the best zombie apoc sims on the market right now. Maybe the best, if you can accept the graphics.
Comments
I was already at 900 when I returned and am now at 1550 lol. The way they've structured this CP 2.0 system you get the most benefit from CP passives that increase your power early and it pretty well caps at ~ 1200.
After that point it's mostly QOL passives or situational slottable power nodes for tanking or healing or whatever.
I find the ESO population overall to be just plain nicer than in most other current MMOs.
There are exceptions of course like there are everywhere especially with the many DPS who like to game the group finder queueing as healers or tanks when even the extra DPS they bring to the group is crap... all to avoid the 10 minute wait DPS who queue properly have to wait until the dungeon pops.
I know that the normal dungeons are easy enough that often you barely need a tank or healer but that's still no excuse for gaming the system and essentially scamming the rest of the group. I guess honesty is just not as common as it used to be
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
We need a handful of devs to branch out and create the next step in each catagory.. When that happens it will be awesome, sadly that seems far away.
As for the current page 3 comments. Oddly ESO was the game I went back to after falling off NW as well.
Think it's interesting in that they're both somewhat free-form experiences, I think it was the case that NW wanted to be presented as something more though, and just jumbled itself up int he process. The fact that player progression through gear and maintaining access to tiered crafting stations is in part influenced by PvP makes just playing the PvE a little bothersome. The lack of any real physical or other influence on the world either beyond PvP town control stunts it too.
Dunno if NW wanted to be a sandbox in particular as much as it wanted to wear the trappings of a survival game, but either way it never really lived up to either. Instead it was just a repetitious themepark with eh PvP.
ESO caters to the open roaming play style a bit better since zones have a bit more individuality, through both visuals and quest narratives.
Cycling onto the player-driven element. Can't say my opinion is far off from what's been shared in the back and forth already. There's cases where community has worked to make an effective player economy, and there's been many occasions where it has not. Think a big part of that is the fact that it's entirely on the player base to have the tools and the impetus to do so, and there's rarely a point in many games.
Wurm and EVE both push skill systems and resource/production methods that require people to adopt professions and interact with players across broader communities as a staple. A lot of games I can think of in contrast allow you to sorta just build your own character (or an alt) up to be everything you need. Sure, community is there, but it quickly becomes a case of not even necessarily needing all that much from clans/guilds save for whatever elements are locked uniquely to them.
It's perhaps one of the detractors I'd levy at a game like 76. Outside of, say, fighting the momma bat or doing some vault stuff, the actual need for playing with another person doesn't really exist. And if you're really gung-ho, I'm relatively certain you can even do that stuff solo. The community itself is also somewhat awkward as a result. People do interact and squad up for stuff, but it's also always had just as many that ignore, and plenty that only use the multiplayer element to serve as bad actors.
Think something that's lost on many sandbox games is the development of systems which directly fosters reliance between players and puts an impetus on developing and protecting communities, which then allows there to be something players can really feel a part of.
The concept of player driven economy, the freedom to players to do what they want via skill development and actually live within the game-world is an approach proven to work by ancient titles from Ultima Online to Star Wars Galaxies, and even Archeage that dwelled on that and is loved for it and hated for its overly greedy management.
The demand is clearly there, and so is the frustration a high budget project doesn't happen to achieve just that, especially because, they would live in a place facing little to no competition, while the "wow-like" MMO formula is the one that's oversaturated and growingly uninteresting to players.
The actual evidence of that is how smaller indie projects trying to attempt just that get so much attention, then die down because a small indie group with little to no money is not enough to achieve the content and finish levels an MMO implies.
Palia is a good example, wasn't for the big injection of 30million to grow the studio and make it so, this sandbox MMO would be in trouble. Looking at the hype and growing community surrounding Palia attm is undeniable the demand there is for something like this.
Developers aren't artists. Their creativity must be tempered by conceived commercial viability. Nothing says viable better than that already established so. Inspiration is safer than innovation and established companies tend to be risk adverse.
A handful of developers branching out and creating that next step will simply be followed by numerous other games taking much the same step for the same reason. Inspiration will remain safer than innovation. That in itself inhibits trailblazing. What's the point when it will soon be followed by so much blaze that original trail will be lost in the conflagration.
Moreover there would powerful magical objects in limited number that the faction/players would fight for(e.g. rings? Spherical magical stones made to survey/spy?).
(Old, overused link that even a MOD got sick of....)
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/487824/the-greatest-quest-artifact-to-ever-exist-in-mmorpgs#latest
Once upon a time....
Must have been an AC or EQ1 fan.
"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
But these few upcoming MMORPG can be in your watchlist, it might interest you:
Fractured Online
Ravendawn
Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore
These are probably the few sandbox that should be interesting to watch for if they ever release. But for Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore, they did have a fixed release date, which is 23 April 2023.
So What Now?
The very first time that it is tried, people don't yet know that it is going to end up broken and thus treat the game differently. That might keep it from breaking for quite a while if the reasons why it is going to break are subtle enough, though it is still inevitable that the game will eventually break down.
This creates the unfortunate effect that players learning how to play a game makes the game itself less interesting to play. I think that has happened a lot with open-world PVP in MMORPGs. People now know that it will inevitably mean that a relative handful of high-level gankers slaughter everyone else, and everyone else can't do much about it, so everyone else stays away. But when people didn't know that, it took a while to end up in that degenerate state.
I can also give you a theoretical example that has been experimentally verified. Two strangers are paired together, not knowing who the other person is. They play a game for five rounds. In each round, each player can either take $1 himself or give $2 to his partner. The money comes from the game organizers either way, so the choices are "I gain $1 and you gain $0" or "I gain $0 and you gain $2".
Obviously, what is ideal for the players is if everyone always chooses to give $2 to his partner. That way, after five rounds, both players have $10. If they always choose to take $1, then at the end of the game, both players only have $5.
Players can often get some amount of cooperation by reciprocity. If I will do in round n+1 whatever you did in round n, then it's to your advantage to give me $2 in one round rather than keeping $1 yourself, as the former will mean that I give you $2 the next round.
The problem is that this breaks down in the final round. Whatever you do in the final round, there is no next round, so I can't retaliate. Thus, in the final round, your best option is always to take $1 for yourself.
Once everyone realizes that everyone else is going to take $1 in the final round, then there's no prospect of retaliation in the next to last round, either. If you know that I'm going to take $1 in the final round, then in the next to last round, you might as well just take $1 yourself rather than giving me $2. This goes all the way back to everyone deciding that it's best to just take $1 from the very start.
Economists have run experiments where they have a bunch of strangers in a room and play this five-round game repeatedly, paired with different strangers and not knowing who they're paired with. There is a lot of cooperation at the start, but eventually, everyone figures out the logic above and there is no cooperation at the end. The result is that as the game is played more, people getting "better" at it means that everyone gets less money.
Galaxies of Eden promises the same, so I'm excited to get my hands on it.
Of course a niche is always under-served for a reason. Sometimes because it's really prone to issues, sometimes it's because it's not been fleshed out as a concept and it's taken multiple people and iterations to explore what really works.
It's not without people willing to explore creativity and look for new markets that we get innovation. Creativity demands it's own artistry.
I don't think it's taking risks when this approach has been taken before, it's just not being done on a "current gen" quality level.
Obviously MMOs are on themselves long and expensive undertakings, that seems to have driven big budget attention away especially because of the venues like mobile that have been getting MMOs left and right, a trend even Blizzard followed, and it paid off.
Then we have the type of game that we tend to call a niche, but it's odd because several of the biggest online games around are sandboxes, from Arks to Conan's, we just don't see the push to achieve a massive world with a large MP scale of those sort of approaches. An MMO like Atlas tried that, was rather trendy when it pitched its release times but then people saw a broken and unpolished game, which is the same problem again the lack of a high quality polished title releasing with this mindset of a game.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Since those algorithms and analytics can only be based specifically on the data points of choices and actions already made/taken, they have literally no data to offer support to anything that doesn't sound like what's been successful in the past. Anything too different is discarded because there's no past data to support its attractiveness to consumers. Instead of big new ideas, you get relatively minuscule variations of the same. Algorithms are very good at predicting someone who likes Product A will like Product B because it shares X, Y, and Z with Product A. They're not very good at predicting whether a completely new idea will be received well because of the lack of referential data points.
Though I would say it does somewhat apply, as just taking an old game and delivering a polished new 1:1 isn't entirely a guarantee of success. Part of it is the metrics of what QOL and modern features perhaps benefit the title, but also what elevates it beyond nostalgia.
It's sort of a related problem to game difficulty, the drain that familiarity can similarly have on an experience.
And also much more directly to the point you bring up, whether or not ambition meets ability. Sandbox games require a swathe of tools and mechanics beyond the norm of a combat focused experience of many games, just to do the basic stuff in it. It puts increased requirements on the baseline of the game and it's infrastructure, before even approaching polish or building up of content. And that can really break things, even with experienced devs.
Damn! We have the "inventor" of Cypto/NFTs amongst us!
- 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
Today, there isn't any analogous technological advances making new things possible. What can games do today that they couldn't have done ten years ago? Real-time ray tracing? Blockchain? Thin clients? None of those are the sort of game-changers that the Internet and 3D graphics were. The marginal advantages of additional memory, storage, and processing power allow for some simulations to be on a larger scale than before, but that's about all of the new gameplay that they enable.
Today, if you want to know why game developers aren't doing something that they weren't doing ten years ago, you can ask, why weren't they doing it ten years ago? The answer generally isn't going to be that they couldn't do it ten years ago but now they can. If they couldn't do it ten years ago, then they probably still can't. If they didn't think it was interesting ten years ago, then they probably still don't.
The limitations on games today are mostly developer time, competence, and cleverness, not limitations of hardware. Those limitations aren't going away because humans don't scale with anything analogous to Moore's Law.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Once upon a time....
Once upon a time....
Bones can be broken, splinted, and healed. Internal bleeding can occur, illness (zombie for one, obviously), etc.. And armor/clothing only applied protection to the parts it covered, and could cause overheating or hypothermia if it wasn't weather appropriate, etc..
PZ is actually one of the best zombie apoc sims on the market right now. Maybe the best, if you can accept the graphics.