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WHY?
ZANGFEI
Member Posts: 439
Why? do we still see so many people asking "WHERE IS"? and "HOW DO I"? in Online games, When we have NPC marked with 3' ? or ! above there Body. Mini Maps that are covered with Directional arrows to our next /Town/quest/Taxi stand. lets not forget Auto travel just by clicking on a Town. I wonder how many Read the Quest to begin with.
Now did i send EMails to any of the Developers of any game asking for those things HELL no. It's really to bad soooooo many did, it's the reason why we have so many games on the market that are nothing more than a Race.
Oh! but we still see Where is and how do i.
Mom is calling me i have to go now.
Comments
It is the frustration factor that has led to the race to level syndrome. Players complain that they are frustrated trying to find the parts of a quest or looking for content. When a new game is in developement the marketing department wants player to stay so they tell the devs to make it easier to follow quests this evolves into what we are seeing to day, a lack of exploration just moving from one set of quest givers to another leveling to the so called end game.
""But Coyote, you could learn! You only prefer keyboard and mouse because that's all you've ever known!" You might say right before you hug a rainforest and walk in sandals to your drum circle where you're trying to raise group consciousness of ladybugs or whatever it is you dirty goddamn hippies do when you're not busy smoking pot and smelling bad."
Coyote's Howling: Death of the Computer
Why do you care?
Because, while you are familiar with those WoW-centric gameplay elements, they are NOT entirely intuitive to a new player or a player from MMORPGs which don't try to break immersion with giant dummy markers all over everything.
Also companies these days simply ignore tutorials to their games assuming, incorrectly, that their players will be so familiar with MMORPGs that they'll be able to just know what to do.
Don't forget either that publishers have long ago given up quality over quantity and stopped making useful manuals to games.
Hell if I know. Ultima Online was GLORIOUSLY overwhelming, but that's just my personality type. Every game is a new problem I know I will eventually solve.
But UO is completely different from GenericQuest garbage where you do task #4087 and get your reward in location #248. I think EverQuest was terrible because of the lack of guidance the game offered you while at the same time barraging you with a bunch of tasks to search for mobs/npcs you have never heard of in locations you don't know how to get to. It was just way too much, especially for me where I was used to logging in, thinking of something fun I could do, and going to do it, instead of having NPCs tell me what I should do and where.
Guild Wars fixed the broken crap that was the totally confusing and frustrating quest system that was EverQuest, I dunno if they were the first, but they were certainly successful. You knew exactly where you should go and who to talk to at all times, and you got there simply by clicking an icon and running a little ways. I much prefer that over EverQuest, but IMO the GuildWars campaign was just to give people that couldn't PvP something to do on the side, lol.
I'd still rather have UO where I can log on and my order of the day is something I just make up, and getting to the next highest level or getting the next hottest item hardly matters.
_______________________________
PM me when an MMO as good as UO was comes out.
Ultima Online (was GLORIOUSLY overwhelming) BACK IN THE DAY! Todays UO is nothing but an item based, gear based pile of EA games poo poo! You might as well play WoW if your going to play todays UO. Its a shame that alot of people didnt get to play UO back in the day, I feel bad for you all. Trust me, if I had the powers of Goku or Superman, EA games would not be standing for the evil sin they did against classic UO.
I've been playing online since 96 in various types of online games and what is probably the most annoying thing is a lack of information about a quest or an npc that is given. In alot of games that get churned out by the same companies in south korea the quests get translated over into english rather poorly such as in Asda story where there is also a scrolling text problem with the quest windows with one or more words superimposed over other words and has been that way for as long as I've been playing it. Other games tend to focus more on the visual aspect of a game than content thinking that if the game looks good then it will sell, that may be true but it wont last long because content is key to keeping a game going wich is why muds are still alive and living well.
Now what does bother me are those who come into any game and ask for free stuff or money/credits, this is still such a big problem in any online game and the other resulting scams thats best left for another thread.
Max wedge baby!
It's because nobody cares about story because we've seen peasant number 4024's "Farm tools" being sought a million times before.
Heck i don't even read quests anymore, i skim for where to go, and if i can't find it, i browse the net.
Why?
Because i simply don't care anymore. I don't care what you try to add to your npcs, they are npcs. I don't care if bandits are invading your town nightly and stealing your food.
I just don't care. How do you make me care? You don't. You can't make someone care about this stuff, because it is of no importance to them.
Bandits are invading the town nightly, stealing all our horses and livestock. Now you can't buy/rent horses from town anymore, you can't buy clothes made of wool, theres not enough food for the peasants so they stop working as hard and buildings close down.
Now make it so I(we) have to go stop them and return the horses/etc and the village becomes working for EVERYONE, not me alone in a instance.
That's how they have to get us to care. By making our actions affect the world. Since going through a epic quest chain, the npc handing you a item, and then shouting out a one line message, and then continues to stand there... that's not good at all.
Heck i'd argue against quests in the traditional form. But rather you have to actually find things wrong, and then fix it yourself.
Because the new generation of mmorpg players, most of them a product of WoW, are too lazy to read or do tutorials because they just wanna kill stuff and /dance naked while calling everyone n00b.
Because some of them hardly understand basic English and what different stuff means. Like the guys asking where you can find "Slay Pirates", they only need 10!
I did played the classic UO during its beta and i did not like it at all. It was a boring fest mining for minerals and you got killed every 5 sec by a kid spewing l33t speak.
That is the reason I played EQ instead of UO when both games were released. Whatever EA has done to UO can only be an improvement.
I did played the classic UO during its beta and i did not like it at all. It was a boring fest mining for minerals and you got killed every 5 sec by a kid spewing l33t speak.
That is the reason I played EQ instead of UO when both games were released. Whatever EA has done to UO can only be an improvement.
I have come to the conclusion that the people waxing about UO are the teenagers who spewed l33t speak all those years ago. No other game lets them kill players as freely, so they whine about it here. The teenagers who killed UO have pretty much assured that nobody will ever make a game like UO again.
A good quest is like this and only like this , its not to hard and not to ez.
But you do got to read and there is no arrows pointing where you got to go.
But if you read it should tell you about where the npc is.
Like so , Go to north tower there is a old man standing by a lake named --- give him this letter.
Here take this map your going to need it , its a long haul but someone got to do it!
WWIIOnline The Real War!
Good post.
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