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End Games...
hubertgrove
Member Posts: 1,141
This is really a question carried over from a WoW thread. I asked people who don't like the game but do, for some reason, play it, what exactly they did not like about the game?
The answer was almost unanimously, 'the end game'.
In other words - I infer - they mean 'the game is not satisfying when I have achieved my ideal level/template'.
I don't understand this myself. WoW offers really two 'end game' choices - a PVE-raid experience rewarded by equipment and PVP-arena experience rewarded by status and equipment. OK, I ask you NOT to turn this thread into a discussion of WoW's end game options. Instead, I ask you - in your ideal MMO, what would be your ideal end-game? And what would it offer to make you continue playing the game after you have reached your maximum level?
Comments
In your game you state you have only 2 broad endgame scenarios.
In my ideal game there will be one. - Do whatever you want. [Sandbox aproach]
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Retired from: Neocron, Everquest, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, RF Online and Final Fantasy VII
Currently Playing : EvE Online.
Oh, I was not limiting people's response to two scenarios. Obviously, I wanted them to suggest what they would like to see in an MMO end game. Perhaps something more specific than 'do whatever you want' - and '[Sandbox Approach]' is also pretty vacuous. Can' t you list anything concrete there?
Oh, I was not limiting people's response to two scenarios. Obviously, I wanted them to suggest what they would like to see in an MMO end game. Perhaps something more specific than 'do whatever you want'.
Which i was by putting the bit that said [sandbox Aproach]
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Retired from: Neocron, Everquest, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, RF Online and Final Fantasy VII
Currently Playing : EvE Online.
If the only end game, in a game is more of the endless tread mill, it's no end game. Getting a chance to go to a new zone or do a new quest to camp loot or get some points to buy more loot isn't much of an end game.
If you could actually take over the world in WoW that would be an end game. If contested zones we actually contestable that would be an end game. As it is now you can go to some zones for the purpose of pointless PvP in Wow. Oh yeah sure you can get points to get more loot but that is just a variation on the evercamp tread mill really.
My ideal MMO would have no "end game" at all like Ultima Online, Starport, and possibly EVE online
I agree with this, I prefer sandbox. However, the way WoW did their end game is fine with me. I use to play it and I find that enjoyable as well, but I prefer sandbox.
DAOC had a revolutionary PvP system which they, for some unknown reason, crammed behind a massive level grind. I never understood that. I loved playing in the battle grounds in that game, but there was no way I was ever going to grind a character to 50 for RvR, it was just mind numbing. Why do that?
What i dont understand about wow is why it has to go from one extreame to another, leveling is fun, it is not as gear driven as end game, the questing areas are enjoyable and there is little grind albeit between a few level gaps there is but i believe they fixed that recently.
Then when you go to end game it turns in to a huge grind where the only progression is through gear the world lacks any real choices its either raid or die at the end of the day, the PvP in wow is a joke it used to have a fun end game where you raided towns non stop but that changed when more reward was given to those who chose the option of battlegrounds.
If you are going to add crafting at end game it should be equally as rewarding as say raiding, raiding should be equally rewarding as PvP, PvP as rewarding as Raiding, and finnally killing mobs repitivily should also be as rewarding. A good end game is one that offers lots of choices with each choice being as equally rewarding for the player to do.
At no point in any game should there be a point where you think god this is a huge grind, you should enjoy it from the moment you log on to the moment you log off.
It is for this reasno that I prefer PvP based games. The end game is fighting other players. IN this, it is never the same, the outcome is never assured , the names, faces, terrains, tactics always are changing.
In PVE based games, end game is basically PVE bosses and repeatedly doing these bosses until another large content expansion which gives you new bosses. After that, you d those bosses over and over again (many times usualy the same tactic to beat them each time). To me, it gets dull.
Torrential
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
If they were endgames, wouldn't they end? And yet they never do ...
Endgame in its original sense of a single player game or a game of chess, sepcifically refers to the part of the game near the "end". It specifically implies that there is an end. Not perpetual timesinks.
Anyone talking about "endgame" is either a dev lying to you or a player/dev living in concept that makes no sense in relation to what they are talking about when it comes to MMORPGs.
If its a sandbox game like Eve, the term end game or even elder game is a pointless distinction. In a game like WoW endgame is simply a lie, its just the point Rob Pardo originally intended to make a handoff to the 40-man raid for "hardcore" players. The ones who will stick around for long periods of time and obsess over things. There was no "end" and it follows the same progression paradigm as the rest of WoW. Its just slowed down and based on gear instead of XP. And I am not making that up. Rob Pardo has explicitly stated this in talks about the design of WoW.
"Endgame" was just a compartment for "hardcores" and normal leveling was the compartment for "casuals". Of course this design cause a bit of a rebellion since its basically just wrong, but that is what "endgame" originally was. And now the simply tweaked the compartments some and shift who they assigning which population tag to. Endgame in this case has little to do with the end of the game its just a cynical and poorly designed way to jam two game paradigms into one game.
Everytime the term "endgame" is used in reference to an MMO it is either a malformed concept or marketing sleight of word or both.
If a game is about soloing or small grouping to gain levels and the occasional random drop of loot then why not simply let it continue that way indefenitely? If it's about PvP then why not forget about making people grind up to the top so they can start enjoying PvP? If it's about PvE raiding then why not throw people into raiding right from the begining, either forget about levels and have progression only through raiding gear progression and/or have raiding be the way to level up.
Personally I'm more in the "sandbox" camp myself but there isn't much effort (or financial backing) going into developing good sandbox games so I'm not too optomistic about that. My dream mmorpg wouldn't have levels and the main focus would not be on character progression at all. It would be a cross between a pure sandbox and a virtual world designed for adventure. It would be dynamic by giving the players themselves the option to earn an opportunity to add things to the world (like new dungeons, new Gods, new Cities, etc.) and of course the chance to destroy things as well.
It would have a sort of soft perma-death. I say soft because with little focus on character progression it wouldn't hurt that much to die and would have a family line inheritance system for items and property. Items could be destroyed, but again it wouldn't hurt that much because there wouldn't be any over-the-top uber crap that you have to grind months to get.
There would be lot's of unlockables to help fill the gap left by moving the focus off of character progression. So you could unlock different races, playable monsters (subject to permadeath), unusual professions and so forth.
Anyway I imagine a great big world that is dynamic and consistant. No level 1 areas and level 50 areas. The whole world is set up for the basic power/toughness range that all characters would be in. I imagine a world in which it could be possible for a player village to be tucked away in the mountains somewhere and most of the playerbase might not even know of it's existance.
Or a city might grow from humble beginings to be a huge sprawling place and a center of trade.
Or a player might, through effort and time, unlock a playable dragon and ravage and rampage. But then other players might manage to kill the dragon...and guess what? He stays dead. At least that specific dragon stays dead.
Oh..anyway. I can dream.
something like eve online, more non combat focused activities, career driven.
Only for those companies that lack vision and creativity. Hopefully, the raiding-only endgame is a thing of the past. Even WoW is starting to give their players some different things to do.
"Those who dislike things based only on the fact that they are popular are just as shallow and superficial as those who only like them for the same reason."
Well, to me the ideal end game (ie we can't have skill based games like EVE) would involve players creating and controlling land masses and buildings and other players trying to take it away from them.
DAOC was a great example of a level based game which had a good end game, same with Shadowbane and Lineage 1/2 (wish I could have reached L2's endgame).
Face it...we always need some sort of leveling or improvement of our characters in terms of skills, abilities or gear, or we'll get bored. One approach (also by EVE) is to make so many skills its impossible for a player to have them all (and still be effective with them)
DAOC added a 2nd tier of leveling, called realm points/abilities which we all chased after we got to level 50.
"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
DAOC had a revolutionary PvP system which they, for some unknown reason, crammed behind a massive level grind. I never understood that. I loved playing in the battle grounds in that game, but there was no way I was ever going to grind a character to 50 for RvR, it was just mind numbing. Why do that?
I am going to echo this as well. In short I feel that if an MMO has an end-game, then its initial design is flawed.If a studio is going to make an EQ clone then they should forgo level caps and make the xp curve steep enough to allow them enough time to add progressively higher level content to accommodate the average dedicated player. Alternatively they could make it casual friendly like WoW and just expect to lose subs as players exhaust the content and are not keen on the end-game alternatives.
I also agree with the DAoC comment. That title IMO was effectively two games in one but you had to complete the first to experience the second. If you did not like the first (as did I), then you were SOL.
Of course a lot of this is theoretical. The reality is that level based MMORPG's sell but it is not a game model to which most studios can add additional content at the same rate as which players burn through it. At some point they either have to put up a big 'Game Over' banner or else add in some other forms of less development resource intensive gameplay (ie PvP battle grounds or repetitive raids).
So count my vote as another one for sandbox-style: one core game model and no end-game.
OP: I'll get to your question in a sec, but first...
Czzare: In its current state, PvP endgame ends up being exactly the same as your PvE endgame. It's just fighting the same people over and over again. Building a city, destroying a city, over and over. The problem is not what the endgame goals are, but what you do during the endgame. In other words, the same thing, no matter what the label, is still just the same thing, over and over. It all gets boring, especially for power players, and when power players take over, the casuals quit because they cannot keep up. Will talk about this more in a second.
gestalt11: The reason we have "endgame" at all is a direct result of customers, not developers. It's what sells the best. What brings in money. What do the MOST people play. Remember, the original "MMORPGS" it wasn't about endgame, but about the game. EQ1 and later, WoW created this problems of needing endgame because of the customer base need after finishing the content ahead of time.
Neanderthal: The game you envision has already been envisioned, created, and failed. Why? Because the majority of people don't want to play this game. Because in a game where players have control and power, only a few will have that power, and everyone else will give up, quit, and play 0-50 in a week game. Everything in the genre, at this time (not saying that it will not someday swing back, known as the pendulum effect), is swinging to the instant gratification, reach "endgame" as fast as possible and then try to keep 9 million customers busy while paying the bills. Your envisioned game is a fantastic idea and I hope they try it again, and maybe have the groundwork to pull it off, but that game, at this time, doesn't pay the bills. Everyone wants to be uber. Everyone wants to be a hero. That game does not allow that.
Kyntor: I don't think we'll see it in a while. Look at the games coming out in the near future. Same crap, different wrapper. Sure they all got hype, WAR and AOC, promises and grandeur. But it's all the same stuff, nothing will change for a while yet, at least not while WoW is sitting at 9 million customers and people keep paying monthly fees. Even those things WoW is doing different is still the same thing other games have been doing for years. They are again, just copying things from other games to keep people busy. They still have not done anything new or inventive, ever.
Ohaan pretty much hit the nail on the head. Level caps, no level caps, no difference. Let's think of it in terms of content. Here's content, some games it's levels, some it's places to explore, some it's things you can make and discover, some it's different combinations of skills, and for some it's how much of the game you can control. No matter what the content entails, different labels = same concepts, you're going to have power players that soak it all up and control it all in a couple weeks, and casual players that may play it for years without even scratching the surface.
The problem started back in the EQ1 days. Here's this awesome game where you could roll up a character, just like in D&D and live out your fantasy fighting bad guys and building this character in power and skill. At first, it was GREAT. This is one of the reasons EQ was and will always be the best, because there was danger, real danger, wonderment, you could do and be whatever you wanted, and you could play with friends, make friends and meet people while enjoying a form of entertainment you liked. It was something you could take part in and choose whether you wanted to work and get better faster, or just stop and smell the roses.
Then customers/players started coming into the game, and everything went to crap. I always say, take a great and awesome idea, add about 500,000 people to it and it'll be garbage in about a year (actually, I just made that up). Players demand this (i'm the customer), players demand that (i'm the customer), and players whine and cry about everything imaginable whether it's in the game or not (because gdi, i'm the customer). At first, the game held up very well against the onslaught, and Brad (aka "The Vision") held his ground for a very long time, but eventually, the floodgates broke and the changes started pouring in. Some for the better, and some for the worse, but if you think a Utopia Game can exist with actual living human beings playing, you are sadly misguided.
There are good players, there are bad players, there are the "idontneednosleepmustplaymore" players, and there are the evil, I'm gonna ruin your game players. It is impossible to please all players all the time, and there is such a disparity of players that most companies are going to try to hit the highest number of "common denominators" as possible. WoW did this very well, as much as we hate it, and catered to the highest number of players with their "easy mode" gameplay, but as you would guess, that leads to endgame, and the only (easiest) endgame WoW knew about was raiding (EQ1), and PvP (DAOC).
Hopefully, and I give Blizzard kudo's for this, enough people have been brought into the genre, and enough interest has been generated to be able to get funding, and talented companies to come up with "the next best thing". I'm afraid we are going to go through a lot of copies and a lot of flops until someone breaks that mold.
"Granted thinking for yourself could be considered a timesink of shorter or longer duration depending on how smart..or how dumb you are."
The whole concept of 'end game' is an anomaly that started with WoW and should end with WoW.
MMOs should not consist of:
Step 1) Get to max level
Step 2) Play the game
I wonder why people keep posting that gets boring? There are still people playing FPS games that has way less features then that and they pay more per month to maintain their Clan servers. Heck, I can go boot up Counterstrike right now and see a flood of servers
The key is that publishers dont understand how to recreate the 'magic' that traditional good games have whereas players play them over and over for many years. But they do understand how to dangle loot out there
Sandbox is a huge risk how do we guarantee how long players will stay without dangling loot? Heck, even city of heroes has loot now (well guess it always had Hami-Os)
I like the way Asheron's Call handled it. There were 126 levels, but nobody was ever supposed to get to 126. The diminishing returns were such that it just wasn't expected to happen. Then it did. They added another 124 levels to the game and softened the curve a bit. I really enjoy "dings" of various types: skill-ups, levels, advanced achievements, et cetera that are achieved just by playing the "core" game. That normal game experience is what I like, not the capped-out pvp/raiding scenario that seems to be the norm these days.
I loved that Turbine just kept extending the game so that fun part could continue, and they did it in a big way. I enjoyed the base game in World of Warcraft, too, but after reaching level 60, that game disappeared entirely and was replaced by something else. It felt a bit like a bait-and-switch, and I just wasn't interested in that. Unfortunately, WoW's questing model didn't really leave them much room for anything else. Given that the game is mostly quest-oriented, they couldn't really double the number of levels, add new land, and just throw in a bunch of monsters with scaled up stats like Turbine did for AC; they would've had to come up with 60 more levels of quests as well, which would've been significantly more work. All in all, 10 levels every two years just isn't enough for me, though.
Basically, if I start playing a game and like it enough to subscribe, what I'm subscribing to is the experience I'm having at that time. If the game reaches a point where that experience transforms into something else (a.k.a. an end game), then it really is the end of the game for me.
Sandbox games have been made, of course, but I don't believe that the specific ideas I have in mind (which I cannot easily explain in a few short paragraphs) have ever all come together in one game. What exists in my mind is perhaps not pure sandbox but rather a sandbox with certain limitations and it's own set of rules and game mechanics to keep things enjoyable and sane. As with the standard level based, linear games it's not just the general idea that makes it a good game it's the details.
I'm strongly tempted to do a point-counterpoint with you to see if I could offer solutions to any failing points you might bring up because I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this crap. But that's not the topic of this thread and you probably wouldn't want to do it anyway.
I will answer the statement that, "...in a game where players have control and power, only a few will have that power..."
If you are talking about PvP mega guild domination of the world there is a way to address that. First, if the world is really big, and I mean huge, and there is no instant or rapid transportation, it would be logistically difficult to conquer the world. The difficulty increasing with distance from your home base.
Second, and this may seem odd in addressing this particular question, you set up the game so that everyone has a home. A house, mansion, shack, or whatever. There are no banks to store items in. Your home is the only place to store things. It's also the spot at which your new characters appear when your old ones die (which is important in a world with no easy travel options). The point here is that your home is important and it isn't a trivial thing to move, you can but it's a pain. This would tend to tie people's intersts to their home, which would tend to tie their interests to the village/city it's in.
In addition to this you set it up so that the bigger a city gets the more problems it has. Law enforcement, sanitation-disease, etc. Thus players would have a reason to not want to grow their cities too ungodly huge.
Ok, the point of this is to keep people living in separate settlements rather than everyone running off to live in the biggest most successfull one.
Now, when a big city/kingdom (I imagine city states rather than actual kingdoms) conquers a small city the small city is still a seperate entity. So now what? Either the big city destroys the small one in which case the people in the small city disperse to other places or the big guys make it a subject city. If they make it a subject city they HAVE to levee a tax on all of the inhabitants. And this tax would be in addition to the normal taxes the small city already levees on it's own people.
The point here is that the two groups would still be separate groups but the conquered group could never be happy with the situation. They would have a permanent grievance and a reason to scheme against the bigger group. Thus, the more cities the big group conquers the more likely it is that they will band together to rebel. And logistical difficulties would make it unlikely for any empire of this sort to engulf the world (if that would even be possible) before the subject peoples rebelled against them.
And I better shut up now because I could go on and on for hours about this stuff.
After reading this thread I thought of AC1. I think that was the game that had the best level based PvE. In hindsight I realize how great the monthly storyline and content updates were. Current titles seem so static - you get very little until they release the big Xpac once every year that you have to pay additional for.
Also agree about the 'bait and switch' with WoW. Perfect way to call it. 0-59 Was this laid back fun game and then at level 60 it was like chinese water torture...
You know this is exaclty whi i dont paly such games anymore. I paly games to have fun. NOT to spend the next month or so grinding my way to a level where i can have fun.
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Retired from: Neocron, Everquest, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, RF Online and Final Fantasy VII
Currently Playing : EvE Online.
If a game is about soloing or small grouping to gain levels and the occasional random drop of loot then why not simply let it continue that way indefenitely? If it's about PvP then why not forget about making people grind up to the top so they can start enjoying PvP? If it's about PvE raiding then why not throw people into raiding right from the begining, either forget about levels and have progression only through raiding gear progression and/or have raiding be the way to level up.
Personally I'm more in the "sandbox" camp myself but there isn't much effort (or financial backing) going into developing good sandbox games so I'm not too optomistic about that. My dream mmorpg wouldn't have levels and the main focus would not be on character progression at all. It would be a cross between a pure sandbox and a virtual world designed for adventure. It would be dynamic by giving the players themselves the option to earn an opportunity to add things to the world (like new dungeons, new Gods, new Cities, etc.) and of course the chance to destroy things as well.
It would have a sort of soft perma-death. I say soft because with little focus on character progression it wouldn't hurt that much to die and would have a family line inheritance system for items and property. Items could be destroyed, but again it wouldn't hurt that much because there wouldn't be any over-the-top uber crap that you have to grind months to get.
There would be lot's of unlockables to help fill the gap left by moving the focus off of character progression. So you could unlock different races, playable monsters (subject to permadeath), unusual professions and so forth.
Anyway I imagine a great big world that is dynamic and consistant. No level 1 areas and level 50 areas. The whole world is set up for the basic power/toughness range that all characters would be in. I imagine a world in which it could be possible for a player village to be tucked away in the mountains somewhere and most of the playerbase might not even know of it's existance.
Or a city might grow from humble beginings to be a huge sprawling place and a center of trade.
Or a player might, through effort and time, unlock a playable dragon and ravage and rampage. But then other players might manage to kill the dragon...and guess what? He stays dead. At least that specific dragon stays dead.
Oh..anyway. I can dream.
interesting a Permadeath proponent. You are a rare breed my friend. I would like to try your game. I tried out HAZE (NWN2 roleplay PD server) but the roleplayers on that server are major socializers. I found myself wanting to pull out my sword and start PKing. so never stuck around to see how it would all playout. also, it was timed XP which was brutal too me cause it meant I was doomed to be a lowbie for a long time
yeah in the presence of PD its great to see how everyone teams up. The player run guards and cities and even the conversations could be interesting.
DOFUS will be putting up a Heroic server I hope it will be decent and death can be incurred from at leas tPVE
I would just like to add something to Neanderthals idea.
How to solve sandbox = lack of content problem? Compleete freedom and starting from scratch sounds great but it's very tricky and could easyly become very boring, very fast. What I have in mind is to have a wide range of skills and abilitys, from farming to spellweaving, even city managment (something like SimCity minigames) and when the game starts everything is set up and working with NPCs at key positions. Over time and with the right skills, players can start taking over those positions and eventualy the whole game world would be player run. There wouls also need to be some perks with certain postions...
There would ofcourse need to be all sorts of rules about that, but the most important would be some kind of voting options so that players who don't want to PVP can PVP too. If teh player in a position doesen't do his job and other players don't vote him out, NPC would do it and an NPC would retirn to position, keepind status quo!
I prefer a sandbox approach. It's not fair to say people don't want it, look at Ultima Online in it's day. I don't think anyone has brought out a sandbox fantasy game since. Maybe it's about time?
I don't really see the point in grinding away, game after game, to collect better items then beat some big guy at the end for the uber item. *yawn*
End games.....pfffft.