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More complicated mmorpgs?
Demerzel
Member Posts: 21
Is it just me who thinks that the more complex a game is the better?
The best game ive played so far in that sense is AO, but i havent heard of any other game out or in development that seem to resemble it. (disregarding eve, cant stand flying space ships)
If anyone have a tip where to look id be glad to know.
The best game ive played so far in that sense is AO, but i havent heard of any other game out or in development that seem to resemble it. (disregarding eve, cant stand flying space ships)
If anyone have a tip where to look id be glad to know.
Comments
Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice.
SWG used to have a pretty complex game, but then SOE/LA destroyed it. I believe a LA spokeswoman said, "SWG required too much reading..."
Ryzom can be pretty complex with its crafting and customizable skill system.
That is all I can tell you about, rest of the MMORPGs I tried are EQ Clones mostly...
-I never tried AO though, it is free and you cats keep telling people about the complexity. I might have to try it one of these days.
--When you resubscribe to SWG, an 18 yearold Stripper finds Jesus, gives up stripping, and moves with a rolex reverend to Hawaii.
--In MMORPG's l007 is the opiate of the masses.
--The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!
--CCP could cut off an Eve player's fun bits, and that player would say that it was good CCP did that.
It depends on whether you mean complexity through obsfuscation i.e. WTF does this do? why is the interface clunky? WTH are these awful controls?, or a game where the player is encouraged to think about their character development, skills or abilities, and what to do and how to interact in the game.
I prefer wonderfully simple concepts whose complexity lies in the myriad of options available - by allowing players the freedom to choose how they play the game. What I dislike is complexity through obsfuscation to disguise either bad gaming concepts or failed execution of said concepts. Sadly, many games fall into the latter.
Regards,
Riotgirl
"If you think I'm plucky and scrappy and all I need is love, you're in way over your head. I don't have a heart of gold or get nice. There are a lot nicer people coming up. We call them losers."
Its based around crafting and theres no classes, its kind of like Fable where you level up in what you do most. In example, if you cast spells a lot youll get more points in that tree.
You want complicated?
Try a MUD: http://www.ironrealms.com/ or www.avalon-rpg.com
These games are enormously complicated and take months to master
This seems to be a question of semantics.
I think most people use 'complex' in this manner to describe something with depth and variation, where numerous distinct paths can be taken to accomplish goals. They don't necessarily mean that it should take a 'think tank' or scientific committee to judge every single move for possible outcomes.
Creating a virtual world with enough depth to allow for a supreme level of character design/development and infinite approaches to the challenges of that world also opens the door to an immeasurable amount of exploitation.
It also takes a fair amount of 'guts' to create a system where much of the system may never be accessed or seen.
I keep coming back to the thought of direct human control of the world. Much more like a pen and paper game in a virtual environment....to a much higher degree than Neverwinter and with specialized servers and communities.
Complicated isn't the right word, depth is more accurate. A game with depth is better.
EQ1 had a lot of depth back in the day. Sure it could be grindy if you allowed it to be, but the game still had depth.
Take EQ1 quests for instance. There were no easily identified questgivers with unrealistic icons or glows. You had to engage NPCs and through the use of keywords, some being fairly obvious as given in a previous reply, while others were based on world knowledge, lore, and detective reasoning. Only when the proper questions and responses were offered which included a certain keyword, would more information be given including a possible quest. Some quests were easy while others vague, which then required research and investigation to solve.
The so called 2nd and 3rd generation MMOGs today don't offer quests, they give tasks, spoonfed for any idiot to perform.
Many crafted items also did not have printed or spoken recipes, they were discovered by trial and error. Trial and error which could result in lost expensive ingredients. That's realistic depth, the opportunity cost of loss vs gain which so many new MMOGs have discarded, wether in combat because of insignificant battle loss penalties, or the discovery of crafting. The whiners and instant gratification gamers of late have convinced developers that easy and dumb is more profitable than challenging and fun.
"Granted thinking for yourself could be considered a timesink of shorter or longer duration depending on how smart..or how dumb you are."
try dark ages of camelot then on the classic servers.
I do prefer space now days
Game for your life
You see THIS is the real problem I have with games like Vanguard. Spare me the 25 minute boat ride to reach a location.
What concerns me is the quality of battle that takes place once I get there.
Some NPC not having a yellow Icon over his / her head has jack to do with complexity and everything to do with timesink.
Give us smarter AI that banishes their foes ala EQI, dynamic worlds with breakable objects, more character customization.
Give us foes that you can't possibly brute force through but have to actually avoid head on ala guild wars.
Give us unique armors & weapons that only one person on the entire server can garner. Give us variety.
These were the debates I'd get into with the pseudo hardcore dopes on the Vanguard boards.
Depth doesn't mean camping storm feather for 2 days. Depth is having to split you're raid force into two units to accomplish a goal.
Despite what people say on these boards...deep down they enjoy a challenge. It's the same old tired formula of dragging things out that drives people away.
ZV.
Dutchess Zarraa Voltayre
Reborn/Zero Sum/Ancient Legacy/Jagged Legion/Feared/Nuke & Pave.
They are refering to how the timesinks are handled more so than whether or not they are necessary. Granted i felt that in retrospect, the quests in EQ were a bit hard to access, but all the same, it was intresting that you actually had to negotiate with the NPC to get them, which is a much more intresting idea than simply going to an npc and clicking a quest button. It made the npc's and the world itself seem more lively; The npc's had thier own bit of personality, they wern't just objects you talked to once, clicked quest, and came back later for your reward.
However i do agree with you about the things like 20+ minute boat rides, those are more artificial timesinks that add nothing to the gameplay value.
I completly agree with the OP though; Things have gotten far too simplistic, so much so that it takes away alot of what made MMO's fun. Everything has been streamlined.
Offer challenge that rewards players for their ability to understand and implement their character's abilities well, not one that rewards just those who have played longer for playing longer's sake. Give me a MMORPG where gear is helpful, but not the beginning and end of what your character means. Give me a MMORPG where combat is real time, like a FPS in that regard, and players reflexes and timing combined with strategic thinking and application sets them apart, not the fact that their paperdoll has bigger numbers because they sold their soul to the MMORPG. I think that if a MMORPG can make itself accessible but still challenging and the fun to be had is in the playing not just the finishing and acquiring of items, then subscriber longevity will be self assured because people stick with what's fun, not what's mindlessly addicting and hard to leave only because of the hope that you can justify your prior investment into the game no other way.
I don't however think that a more accessible game means it needs to be a dumbed down game, in fact I have long since felt that MMORPG developers have taken a free ride on providing less content and "perceiving" that the players will entertain themselves. MMORPG's often feel like less game than single player ones do for this reason. I dislike the concept that for a game to be accessible it needs to be dumbed down, its both insulting to the general public because it means developers think we are stupid, and inaccurate because even the "harder" games aren't actually that hard, so much as they are just poorly designed/implemented and not user friendly.
Is it a challenge to overcome the user unfriendliness and clunkiness of poorly designed games? Is it a challenge to coordinate 40 people, and by that I don't mean strategically, so much as get them all to show up at all? Is it a challenge to be able to sink 40 hours a week into a MMORPG not so much because its just that fun, but because you don't feel like you can accomplish anything any other way? Sure to all of them, however many people also find that doing taxes, accounting, navigating commute traffic, law enforcement, and quantum physics challenging as well, it doesn't mean they all do it for fun in their spare time though. An amusing challenge is different from an annoying/tedious one, and MMORPG's in a lot of ways still can't tell the difference, and that is the problem, not losing challenge by making their games more accessible.
As an aside: In Blizzard's case I would have thought them best situated to correct this issue in MMORPG's, people didn't play Diablo 2 and Starcraft for years and years because it required that much commitment and time to succeed, in fact most people played them long after they had beaten those games. They kept playing because it was just that damn fun. Having understood the longevity of game play they displayed with these previous titles, I had hoped WoW could have been the MMORPG that broke the mold as the game with long lasting game play value, not long lasting tedium grinding. I feel somewhere in the mix, they looked at EQ, instead of using just their own innovation as they did with their other titles, and got sucked into their predecessor's mistakes. My 2 cents.
Its true that i really dont theres any point in haveing games be hard to use just for the sake of it. But i personally dont think its wise to loose any depth just to gain more user friendlyness.
In my oppinion a good example of brilliant game design with great depth and challange for the players is the equip/twink system in AO.
Every item there have a stat requirement to equip. And as in most other rpgs items can also give stats. This looks simple at first, but what you can do with it is great. By equipping the right items in the right order you can progressively equip more and more powerfull equipment. And with above average (guessing 25+ dont remember) item slots, the possibilies are endless.
This example is great because its a mechainc that actually makes you think while playing.. rather than look for info and apply it. (eg. "what do i need to do for this quest?"... thn look it up on a fansite)
What i want is a game soo deep that it is knowledge of the game mechanics that mostly decide how powerfull your character are, not how long you play or how much gold you can buy on ebay.
Steelwill, perfectly said. Couldn't agree more with every word!
Unfortunately, we mature (and casual?
) players are only the minority for publishers.
For developers? That's another debate
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
Pretty much sums up my thoughts. All MMORPGs I've played lately aren't complex, just boring grinding games. All the 7 year old MMORPGs own them...
I like to use the word "Complex" but yes, I really really miss the complex MMOs of old, the whole reason I started with MMOs in the first place. I gladly pay 15 bucks a month for a game with more dimensions and layers than a singleplayer game, more advanced, more complex, more work put into it, like a PnP game.
Anarchy Online is and will be the king for a long time coming. Building and maintaining a character is a challenge like no other, the planning that go into it take weeks. And for a long time, no skill reset. What you built was what you had. It was wonderful.
EVE, good second place. Easier to build a character but with so many dimension in other areas. Huge, an unequalled trade system and itemizationm and where almost all decisions come with a consequence.
Then Ultima Online, launch. Also a huge responsiblity to get your character right, but the biggest challenge here was hwo new it was. Roleplayers cold grasp it quickly, and they understood instantly what those 15 bucks paid for. It was really a new level of gaming.
Then.. Nothing.. Simplified, level based, one class with one skilltree, no choices, just a singlepath walk up to last level... MMOs other that these three are all beaten to a bloody pulp challengewise by the Elder Scroll series and other singleplayer games that are free. Its simplified to the extreme, making a childRPG like AD&D seem like a giant of complexity....
Unfortunatly. there are more simple folk in the world than people that thrive on intellectual challenges. Today "patience" and "boredom resistance" are considered "gaming skills", and people talk about how "hardcore" a game is because its slow and tedious, without a single choice or a single multipath anywhere in sight. CHoices has been removed because they were considered too advanced. People only wanted the "best choice" anyway, so they tremoved everything but ONE way to build a character. And people are so happy... Finally a challenge they can grasp.
Skillbased MMOs are probably a thing of the past. Us that want a real game, a game where we make the choices, where we have the power over our character, not the software or the developer with us as a passive audience, will have to turn our eyes to the singleplayer market in the future. Quantity will always win over quality.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
haha this is soo true