Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Eye candy, or substance?
Carufin
Member Posts: 92
Let's take a look at the gaming industry today, for example, "Vanguard: SOH" beta. Golly, the graphics are so sweet. You really need some serious hardware, not to mention some serious hard-disk capacity, to install that monstrosity. I mean hey, my brothers and sisters, if you have the space to install that bad-boy, and the hardware to run it on anything solid graphically, why you must just be hung right down to the sidewalk.
I gotta tell ya, on my Athlon FX-60, SLI, 500gig hard disk in RAID-0, 4 gigs of RAM, watercooled system it just looks so sweet while I run out and attack a beetle with my rusty dagger. That's why I invested $6,000 dollars American in my computer system, so I could attack beetles with a rusty dagger. You too, right?
And when I'm not being killed by garter snakes, that are able to wipe me out completely even with a rusty short sword, at least I can go play whack-a-mole persuasion and argue with a shopkeeper. Or group up with some other guys to chop down a sapling.
Heck, medieval fantasy games on the order of Dungeons and Dragons are so cool anyhow, I mean, it was only invented by Gary Gygax in what.....1973? Hardly can scratch the surface of a "gaming" genre in only 33 years, right?
Hello????
I think the gaming industry needs to apply their design concepts to other "modern" gaming genres. Let's consider for a moment something equally new, like checkers. Why, we could have a checkerboard with such deep, irridescent mahogany textures, specular lighting that is totally authentic. Make it so rich you'd need a SUN workstation to do it right.
I mean what the heck, it's really just all about the graphics, right? Why bother with anything else, as long as you have those solid textures and "hyper realistic" environments. Then you can jump your partner's checker at 112fps, while he's laggin along at 47fps on his pathetic Pentium 4 system.
I mean please. Who needs an interesting game? We could just hire seven amateurs from the Starbucks down the street, and have them do some wooden voice acting too, but be sure to pay Patrick Stewart the going rate for five minutes of opening dialogue. The Dev's can let their mother-in-law write the lines, for maximum depth and immersion. That'll be cool.
Comments
Seriously though, you have a good point, and it's one that's been raised before. We definitely need more variety in our games, but then you come up against the fact that the publishers need to make money, and the best way to make money is to see what is popular, and then copy it. Then if your game becomes popular, other people copy you, and so on ad infinitum.
auryx
Yes, the MMO industry is probably the least inovative of all the game genres. Somewhere they got stuck on the level / grindmill formula and never moved on.
Part of the problem is the large cost to make these games and the lack luster success most of them have had. There are really only about 3 MMO companies making serious money out there (Blizzard - WoW, NCSoft - L2 and Webzen) The rest are just getting by. With a track record like that, making MMO's for the western market is a very risky venture at best, so you tend to see alot of repeat structure.
Within the next few years MMO's will need to evolve or they will die out. This game audiance is only going to do the grind thing so much longer. Not while so may advances are being made in the non - MMO areas. Games like Oblivion are changing the scope of RPG's. Soon Neverwinter Nights will hit the PC realm like a ton of bricks. Why pay to kill rats over and over when you can create your own world of just about any scope and share it with everyone? Yes in an MMO you get to play with many more people but does that mean quality? No.
We can see that MMOs have a technological lifespan of about 5 years before it is just plain old dated looking. We also know an MMO reaches its peak population and growth in about 2 to 3 years, after that it is in decline. Its a pioneer field and the companies are just now see this. Are they worth the huge investment? Maybe....if done correctly. One thing is for sure, the MMO's players have proven to be extreamly picky in the North American market. Blizzard is really the only successful MMO company here in this market. (Asia has proven to be a much better - bigger market even in the case of WoW) Games that should have been blockbusters like SWG have flopped around as the parent company desperately tries to "fix" whats wrong with its appeal.
With the most recent release of games like D&DO and RFO, we see that many game companies are still way off the mark with inovation and creativity.
In your example of Vanguard, the devs have been very upfront about basing gameplay on the original formula. This is the type of thing that will hold MMO's back. The is no true inovation only refinement of the existing design. It will appeal to all the veteren players looking for the "good old days" but will bring very little in terms of creativity.
MMORPG's are only RPG's in the loosest sense. The have a few of the mechanics of an RPG like levels and classes and maybe some grind based crafting but almost nothing else beyond that.
I agree with you whole-heartedly, I am sick of graphics winning over content. Games need good content first and foremost, everything after that is a bonus.
I've found a buncha online games that break the mould however, small games like secondlife will soon take over and the days of grinding and crafting will be over, I hope <crosses fingers>.
well, there are the games now, and coming expansions for some games, which either give environments that change based upon player actions or they'll have areas where players can create what happens (sort of like old school modules). i believe games like shadowbane, eve, and ryzom have already been playing with reactionary environments of one type or another for some time now. their expansions in particular being ones that will expand upon this, plus other games that will be taking a stab at it.
the class and leveling thing is becoming old and stale. you see more games abandoning it, or giving it much greater flexibility. the old swg was an excellent example of flexible classes. it had a lot more than just healer, tank, mage, rogue classes. you could also mix/match skills from any number of classes, learn/unlearn skills to suit your playing needs and you could become anything you wanted. imo this was the best class/leveling system thus far. you couldn't be everything at once, you would have to pick what you WOULD do. therefore specializations were encouraged.
for second place i'd have to put both UO and COx. UO in second because it just doesnt't offer the variety of SWG, COx because even though they have a leveling system that's locked in place once you choose your actual powersets - there are an incredibly number of powersets to choose from, the list which grows with every issue.
next i'll put games like horizon, eve, and ryzom. in these games you can become everything, if you choose to work on that skill. eve gets extra points for it's creative - time based skill progression. but the other two offer just as many, if not more, skill options than any game out there.
All six of these impress me to no end with their class/leveling systems (or whatever you want to call it in the cass of there being no classes and/or no levels).
now, my kudos to COx pretty much end there. they have decent graphics and travel powers can make travelling fun (at least moreso than some other games). Seems every couple of issues i'll go back and try the new powersets and see if they've made changes to things which i find make the game stale. very very slowly they have made some of those changes. with statesman's demotion, maybe they'll move forward in a timely fashion from here out?
UO, if they'd just improve upon their 3d game... everything EQ did wrong, lots of other MMOs picked up on. everything UO did right, well, not so much did other games pick up on it, because it would cause a lot more work for devs and GMs. don't know if UO still has GM-run events, but they used to. Don't see that in too many games. Player housing, tons of areas with big bads, no marathon days-long dungeons, open pvp (still open in parts of the uo world), myriad of craftables to rival a lot of drops -- UO did, and still does, just so many things right. What other game can you grow and cross-breed plants? They've even instituted classes, in a way. each skill can go up to 100 points - grandmaster level. you may use your 700 maximum skill points to pick one (or more) class skills. example - chivalry for paladin powers, necromancy for necromancer powers, bushido for samurai, and ninjitsu for ninja. As far as i know, you COULD take all four, except that chivalry requires you to have positive karma and necro negative. but i think aside from those two conflicts, you could take three of the four. Anywho, seems they've finally made the 7/8 virtues give you some sort of powers for interacting with the shrines or questing or something. Taming has a ton of tamables and you can have up to 5 pets at once; if they're the same *type* you get 20% bonus damage per pet (like canine, feline, arachnid, etc). Lots of great riding pets, some very formidable beasts. Sorry, i'm rambling, it's just that this ancient game has so much RIGHT about it, even with their traditionally non-existent/horrid customer service.
Ryzom, and Eve, both of these i need to go back and just play for a few months and get a better feel for both. I think both of these have great things i've yet to discover and imo, both are great games just not appreciated by the mainstream, ADD/EMO/gimmegimmegimmeNOW types or by the tweens and teens that inhabit blizznet.
Horizons. For me, i don't know, this game has a lot to offer and the crafting is just incredible. I just couldn't get into it. Could be my mindset. Could be that, like UO, i just wished the graphics were better. well and since i was new to it, i wanted some sort of guides/reference to help me along. either i couldn't figure out how to use their ingame one (to the extent that it had guides and such) or they didn't have guides ingame. also, on the forums/internet i just wasn't finding guides. on the forums it seemed like people wanted to play 'i have a secret' with stuff like um how to find clay to use in alchemy. what the... so i guess the lack of documentation and the community sort of turned me off on this one. but i still think it's probably a great game throughout.
since i mentioned swg above, i'll comment here as well. the old swg was the one i sing the praises of as to the skill/class system. today's swg is just a totally watered down, wannabe-nothing-special game with the swg title. today's post-nge swg is not on my list for anything good. like games that only offer eye candy and endless grind (wow comes to mind), or cookie cutter class skill/talent/build templates (wow).
shadowbane, a land of pvp, where player cities and alliance actually mean something. leveling to 20 can be very fast in this game. at 20, you can join the rest of the world and it's battles for domination. this is another game i think is probably a great game, i just need to actually play it a few months straight, while being in a good guild. this game and eve both, you should research and find a good guild/corporation to join before even making your first toon. on a sidenote, with the dissolution of wolfpack and the creation of Stray Bullet, (for now at least) shadowbane is free to play.
i think the games i've mentioned pretty much all (aside from swg and wow) have something new and unique to offer their customers. or, at the least, they've taken a good idea/game mechanic and made it into a great game mechanic.
on the plus side, and i could be wrong, but i don't think any of these games require you to go and buy a brand new $3,000+ computer in order to play. Beautiful graphics will enhance a game for me, but they won't BE the game. if i want a game of beautiful graphics, then i'll get in my car and go driving.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
Also remember that not everyone started playing in 1996 on Ultima or Meridian 59, or even EQ. Although those games captured most of the market for their time, the Western subscriber base is still growing as far as anyone can tell. Those people are all experiencing MMO's for the first time.
hey damian7,
Just few little comments.
(IMHO) I noticed you focused on the mechanic of the the class and skills. Although this is important, it really doesn't do much without dynamic gameplay. Look at old (or new) SWG. Yes it had a very rich detailed skill system however there was no compelling content whatso ever (then or now) and thus it was nothing more then then a grind game.
Good mechanics mean nothing without good story/content to go with it.
SWG was easily fixable long ago. All that was needed was a clear focus and direction when it came to the design. The devs are now swinging back and forth (at the whim of the whinny community) with core mechanic designs for things like combat and classes while the "real" game has made no progress and has in fact stepped back and that would be the content and gameworld. SWG has to be the only MMO with LESS working content then it started with. (thats just weird)
Points is, you can swap the game mechanics around all you want, it makes no difference how you kill the rat, you are still stuck killing rats with no real compelling purpose or reason. RPGs are not about levels, loot and skills. These things are simple gages or measurments of a character, they do not make the character. (SWG was a prime example, it doesn't matter, then or now, whether you are a Jedi or Smuggler, you ended up doing the same grind task, show me kill the Bol, NO dynamic or even remotely interesting content at all. You may as well call the game "Generic Space Adventures" as it had / has nothing to do with SW)
This is not the case with "true" RPG's. (remember MMO's are RPG's) True RPG's have evolved and become MORE dynamic and story driven with MMO's have become less. (at the same time become LESS complex from a character mechanic standpoint)
SWG is a mish mass of Star Wars pictures what you can shoot stuff with. RFO made NO attempt whatso ever to even bother with anything dynamic or story based. Not even the PvP is dynamic. Its a fight over one single static area on a map. Any Battlefield game has more diversity then this game. D&DO made an effort but went about it wrong. They focused strictly on the "dungeon" experience. They ingored all other RPG elements.
What has become VERY clear is that the mechanics of a game (classes, combat, levels and loot) do NOT make it a good one. It is the world and content that make it a success.
Because the players don´t want anything diffrent, its that simple. look at the numbers. WoW, same old thing, 6 million subscribers. Lineage 2, same old thing, 4 million subscribers. FFXI, same old thing, over 1 million subscribers.
now the MMO´s that try to change the genre
EVE: Only 100k subscribers
Auto Assault: I give it a year before it dies of a lack of players
Necron: don't know the numbers, but I doubt they reach the 50k
and same with other games that have tried to be unique. its not working, its not what the players want. in fact, the mmo market is only GROWING without new, unique games being released. its WoW, FFXI and Everquest that brings in the new people, and its the same old stuff.
In a strange way you are right lol.
But WOW, L2 and FFXI do bring one thing to the table that most other games do not and that is FULL complete worlds with lots of "content" although basic and non-dynamic.
I'm not sure about you EVE, Auto Assault and Necron examples as I have never tried any of them (proof he is right?)
EQII, although a solid game, has not done as well as one might expect either. I find this strange also. EQII is missing nothing from the successful MMO formula. Maybe its a stylistic appeal?
Yes, the MMO industry is probably the least inovative of all the game genres. Somewhere they got stuck on the level / grindmill formula and never moved on.
Probably because everytime someone tries anything the least bit different, people scream that it's not a "real" MMOIn a strange way you are right lol.
But WOW, L2 and FFXI do bring one thing to the table that most other games do not and that is FULL complete worlds with lots of "content" although basic and non-dynamic.
I'm not sure about you EVE, Auto Assault and Necron examples as I have never tried any of them (proof he is right?)
EQII, although a solid game, has not done as well as one might expect either. I find this strange also. EQII is missing nothing from the successful MMO formula. Maybe its a stylistic appeal?
i know a number of players who won't give eq2 a try because of either 1-eq or 2-soe or 3-both 1&2. i tried it, the crafting was just... i'm not sure the word. too many subcomponents needing too many parts from too many other skills, have to stock up on X of this to get Y of that... tedious maybe? it WASN'T fun. pve was average, same stuff as in other pve mmo games.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
WoW and games like it are great for bringing in new players to the genre, but once people get tired of those game mechanincs the last thing they are going to want is to start playing another game that recycles the exact same gameplay over and over again, they will look for games that do things differently. It's the same situation that a lot of veteran MMO'ers are running into now. Future generations of MMO's will HAVE to do things different if they want to keep growing the market but there will still be a place for the simpler game mechanics of the first and second generation MMO's.
In my opinion I think there will end up being 3 different categories of MMO's that any game will end up fitting into:
1. Level based progression - Simple game mechanics.
2. Skill based progression - more complex sandbox type mechanics.
3. Twitch based gameplay - more based on reflexes than character skill.
You also have to look at advertising, WoW, Lineage 2 and FFXI have had TONS of advertising. Neocron and EVE virtually none. Auto-Assault is just out so it will take a few months before its population stabilizes.
Sure, solid advertising plays a roll but it doesn't KEEP subscribers. Only solid gameworlds can do that.
Why did SWG fall on its face and L2 didn't? The world of L2 is complete and SWG is a big f*cking mess that can't sort out what game it wants to be let alone have any sort of meaningful content. The players don't know month by month what version of the game they will be playing.
WoW and games like it are great for bringing in new players to the genre, but once people get tired of those game mechanincs the last thing they are going to want is to start playing another game that recycles the exact same gameplay over and over again, they will look for games that do things differently. It's the same situation that a lot of veteran MMO'ers are running into now. Future generations of MMO's will HAVE to do things different if they want to keep growing the market but there will still be a place for the simpler game mechanics of the first and second generation MMO's.
In my opinion I think there will end up being 3 different categories of MMO's that any game will end up fitting into:
1. Level based progression - Simple game mechanics.
2. Skill based progression - more complex sandbox type mechanics.
3. Twitch based gameplay - more based on reflexes than character skill.
The only thing about your categories is they are all "mechanic based" Thats the problem with MMO's. They are mechanic based and not RPG based. (remember they are MMORPG's)
Like I said, you can have the BEST character mechanics in the world and it will not save the game if it has no interesting compelling content. See SWG. Sure it HAD a good enough mechanic pre-NGE but the game world sucked. Show me kill the Bol. SWG was always failing because the average player lost interest in it after about a month of grind a few professions out.