So how can you design solo quests that offer an appropriate challenge / reward ratio for everyone? Or would separate solo quests have to be designed for every class (and every talent specialization / subclass?). I can see that requiring an awful lot of developer time - especially given that soloers are unlikely to be happy with just a single solo quest or questline.
The idea simply doesn't work.
Some people don't get it do they=) How else can it be explained.
Its not feasible or realistic or even financially beneficial to expect 8 or 12 versions of the same game running in parallell. Imagine if God of War had to be made 8 or 12 times to account for a whole bunch of different classes of Kratos? You think thats a possibility? Look at Fallout3. The game is painfully easy if you just crank up all your combat related skills. I have to add mods just to make the damn game difficult and play on Hard mode. Its not like theres anything different about the difficulty modes besides how many hitpoints everything has or how hard everything hits you for. Its the same game that can only be difficult IF you choose to gimp yourself AND it last only around 20 hrs. How does anyone with a brain expect a MMO developer to design balanced, epic solo encounters for every class that can't be trivialized through grouping, while keeping it all interesting and challenging, while providing 100s of hours of entertainment? Its simply not possible in a realistic situation. Accept it and move on.
You might as well start bitching about not being able to play in the NFL, when you weigh 110pds and have no athletic ability.
City of Heroes/City of Villains have already shown that it can be done. It is possible.
Hey Thorwood, I'm curious (I'm being serious about this too), what did City of Heroes/City of Villains do to make it possible? It just seems to me that a game that's not really role based and is more individual player skill-based would require a very unique and flexible system.
CoH/CoV does this in a number of ways.
There are no armor or weapons. There are dropped items that improve your toon.
You fight villains in their hideouts/headquarters. On entering you go into an instance. This fits in well with the lore of the game. You can see all players in the city area, but each hideout is an instance.
The instances generates enemies to match the size of the group, including to solo play.
The instance generates enemies to match the levels the players.
You can change the level of difficulty of the instance to make it harder or easier. You get better rewards from harder instances.
Each shared city zone has enemies that are within a set range of levels allowed for that zone. Within that set range CoH/CoV spawns enemies that match the level of the players currently running around in that area. This does not work so well when you have 2 solo people running around who are different levels by about 5 levels, as you end up with spawns that are too low for one player, and spawns that are too high for the other player. It can take a while sometimes to find a spawn that matches your level.
CoH/CoV also has the best group mechanics I have seen that allows players of different levels to group by temporarily changing their level so all players in the team can have a challenging encounter and this allows lower level characters contribute to the group effort in a meaningful way.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
CoH/CoV also has the best group mechanics I have seen that allows players of different levels to group by temporarily changing their level so all players in the team can have a challenging encounter and this allows lower level characters contribute to the group effort in a meaningful way.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
Not to mention, no real lore or persistent world to speak of, so the whole concept of autoscaling everything, from dungeons to classes to levels, works fine because COH/COV is barely a step above Diablo. Its just not a full featured MMO at all. Very limited and simplfied as far as MMOs go. Take those kind of concepts into a full featured MMO and everything just falls apart. Immersion falls apart. Purpose falls apart. No reason to care about anything. Boring. But it works very well in a a COH/COV kind of MMO. Try that in WOW or DAOC or old EQ for example and the game disintegrates.
I'm not arguing agains EVE or the EVE model of MMO, user driven content.
I loved UO and it has absolutely no content provided by the devs, EVE has missions and such at least.
EVE has also been around for a long time and has gradually built up their subscription base. They didn't start with the number of subs they have now. Unlike a lot of newer MMOs that start big then fizzle (AoC, WAR, TR, etc.) they started small and have gradually expanded.
You can't really compare EVE to most things though, it really is the needle in the haystack, the small indy MMO that has survived and prospered greatly and only continued to grow and get better over time. I can't think of one other game that has the same success story in the MMO genre.
You can't even compare SWG-pre NGE or UO to EVE because they were totally different. UO was small because it was one of the first, SWG was bigish because it was Star Wars but then fizzled out and nearly died.
What does this mean for solo content?
Well in a "sandbox" MMO you can have lots of solo content because you have the freedom to just whatever, including solo and there really is no end game so you can always solo. But even in UO you had dungeons you didn't want to go into alone most of the time, you had massive Faction vs. Faction PvP too. In SWG you pretty much had to group to do the really proftiable kill mission on planets like Dathomire.
In EVE you have the massive corps and PvP wars etc.
So I dunno.
Sandbox does not = solo and Themepark does not = forced group.
Both can have both solo and group content, forced or unforced. It's all about the individual game, not the systems as a whole.
CoH/CoV also has the best group mechanics I have seen that allows players of different levels to group by temporarily changing their level so all players in the team can have a challenging encounter and this allows lower level characters contribute to the group effort in a meaningful way.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
Not to mention, no real lore or persistent world to speak of, so the whole concept of autoscaling everything, from dungeons to classes to levels, works fine because COH/COV is barely a step above Diablo. Its just not a full featured MMO at all. Very limited and simplfied as far as MMOs go. Take those kind of concepts into a full featured MMO and everything just falls apart. Immersion falls apart. Purpose falls apart. No reason to care about anything. Boring. But it works very well in a a COH/COV kind of MMO. Try that in WOW or DAOC or old EQ for example and the game disintegrates.
Each to their own. CoH/CoV does things differently from WoW, DAoC and EQ. Just because it is different, does not mean it is not a fully featured MMO.
Actually, EQ, did have limited scaling in some dungeons. The LDoN instances and some of the later group instances allowed you to set the level of difficulty. It did not auto scale for group size or class make up, but if you had good enough gear and enough alternate experience levels your group could chose the higher difficulty setting and get better xp and rewards. LDoN was, for me, the best grouping experience I had in EQ. It was fast-paced and pick up groups formed fairly quickly. In fact, it was so good, a lot of the high end raiders joined in and mixed with the rest of the community, raiders that you previously never saw outside of their raiding guild. The fast-paced nail-biting dungeon action made it very immersive.
There are extremists on both sides. Some want to solo all content and some want all content to be group only. Since catering to only one extreme would alienate the other, there has to be a happy medium. To do that the developers have to find a way to make both play styles equally fun and viable.
I only hope that developers do not continue to water down their products by trying to cater to all sides. Although I will not play Darkfall, I do like that a company has tried to cater to a niche audience. It's too bad companies aren't more satisfied with making a good game with a nice playerbase and turning profit year in and year out instead of the business ego competition that goes one. We've got 11 Million Subscribers!!! We're the #2 mmo on the market!
It just seems if companies could provide a good product in a niche market they could enjoy the rewards of a loyal playerbase.
Beautiful thought Greenie. It is difficult to make a niche game successful, but EVE Online proved you could do this and much more. This way, you cater to a loyal fanbase and give them what they want, and the game is super successful. Nowadays, it seems more like companies are trying to cash out as quickly as possible.
Silkroad Online followed this, when originally they had great potential. But, they wanted money more than the fanbase's loyalty, so they kept introducing new ideas to suck money out of people instead of make the game better for the fans, which in return would attract new fans by the original fans that reveals how the company is nice to them. Sure, now they're supposedly killing off the bots and putting in new content, but you already destroyed what was once a good game. Sigh....I will forever miss those highly coordinated merchant raids with fellow thief buddies...
Try and solo Darkfall...you'll be stuck in town crafting...and still need gear unless you're in a heavily fortified guild city! Too bad that game was full of macroers and people with no life who like traveling for an hour to find trash mobs...
Try and solo Darkfall...you'll be stuck in town crafting...and still need gear unless you're in a heavily fortified guild city! Too bad that game was full of macroers and people with no life who like traveling for an hour to find trash mobs...
Comments
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cops chasing after a bad guy lol
^_^
Some people don't get it do they=) How else can it be explained.
Its not feasible or realistic or even financially beneficial to expect 8 or 12 versions of the same game running in parallell. Imagine if God of War had to be made 8 or 12 times to account for a whole bunch of different classes of Kratos? You think thats a possibility? Look at Fallout3. The game is painfully easy if you just crank up all your combat related skills. I have to add mods just to make the damn game difficult and play on Hard mode. Its not like theres anything different about the difficulty modes besides how many hitpoints everything has or how hard everything hits you for. Its the same game that can only be difficult IF you choose to gimp yourself AND it last only around 20 hrs. How does anyone with a brain expect a MMO developer to design balanced, epic solo encounters for every class that can't be trivialized through grouping, while keeping it all interesting and challenging, while providing 100s of hours of entertainment? Its simply not possible in a realistic situation. Accept it and move on.
You might as well start bitching about not being able to play in the NFL, when you weigh 110pds and have no athletic ability.
City of Heroes/City of Villains have already shown that it can be done. It is possible.
Hey Thorwood, I'm curious (I'm being serious about this too), what did City of Heroes/City of Villains do to make it possible? It just seems to me that a game that's not really role based and is more individual player skill-based would require a very unique and flexible system.
CoH/CoV does this in a number of ways.
Each shared city zone has enemies that are within a set range of levels allowed for that zone. Within that set range CoH/CoV spawns enemies that match the level of the players currently running around in that area. This does not work so well when you have 2 solo people running around who are different levels by about 5 levels, as you end up with spawns that are too low for one player, and spawns that are too high for the other player. It can take a while sometimes to find a spawn that matches your level.
CoH/CoV also has the best group mechanics I have seen that allows players of different levels to group by temporarily changing their level so all players in the team can have a challenging encounter and this allows lower level characters contribute to the group effort in a meaningful way.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
Not to mention, no real lore or persistent world to speak of, so the whole concept of autoscaling everything, from dungeons to classes to levels, works fine because COH/COV is barely a step above Diablo. Its just not a full featured MMO at all. Very limited and simplfied as far as MMOs go. Take those kind of concepts into a full featured MMO and everything just falls apart. Immersion falls apart. Purpose falls apart. No reason to care about anything. Boring. But it works very well in a a COH/COV kind of MMO. Try that in WOW or DAOC or old EQ for example and the game disintegrates.
I'm not arguing agains EVE or the EVE model of MMO, user driven content.
I loved UO and it has absolutely no content provided by the devs, EVE has missions and such at least.
EVE has also been around for a long time and has gradually built up their subscription base. They didn't start with the number of subs they have now. Unlike a lot of newer MMOs that start big then fizzle (AoC, WAR, TR, etc.) they started small and have gradually expanded.
You can't really compare EVE to most things though, it really is the needle in the haystack, the small indy MMO that has survived and prospered greatly and only continued to grow and get better over time. I can't think of one other game that has the same success story in the MMO genre.
You can't even compare SWG-pre NGE or UO to EVE because they were totally different. UO was small because it was one of the first, SWG was bigish because it was Star Wars but then fizzled out and nearly died.
What does this mean for solo content?
Well in a "sandbox" MMO you can have lots of solo content because you have the freedom to just whatever, including solo and there really is no end game so you can always solo. But even in UO you had dungeons you didn't want to go into alone most of the time, you had massive Faction vs. Faction PvP too. In SWG you pretty much had to group to do the really proftiable kill mission on planets like Dathomire.
In EVE you have the massive corps and PvP wars etc.
So I dunno.
Sandbox does not = solo and Themepark does not = forced group.
Both can have both solo and group content, forced or unforced. It's all about the individual game, not the systems as a whole.
Your opinion is immaterial.
The only problem is II think scaling dungeons are teh suck.
It's not really an obstacle or challenge, when it just gets easier so you can win. It's like all dungeons have a Win! button on them.
I understand others may not feel that way, but for me it's more fun if the dungeon is what it is, and either you can beat it, or you need to level up, gear up, or skill up if you cannot until you can.
If you're level 20 with 5 people in a group, I want to go into the dungeon and beat it, or find out it kicks our ass, then come back after we level, or get a couple more in the group. I don't want it to adjust if we have two, or three, or one person in the party.
Not to mention, no real lore or persistent world to speak of, so the whole concept of autoscaling everything, from dungeons to classes to levels, works fine because COH/COV is barely a step above Diablo. Its just not a full featured MMO at all. Very limited and simplfied as far as MMOs go. Take those kind of concepts into a full featured MMO and everything just falls apart. Immersion falls apart. Purpose falls apart. No reason to care about anything. Boring. But it works very well in a a COH/COV kind of MMO. Try that in WOW or DAOC or old EQ for example and the game disintegrates.
Each to their own. CoH/CoV does things differently from WoW, DAoC and EQ. Just because it is different, does not mean it is not a fully featured MMO.
Actually, EQ, did have limited scaling in some dungeons. The LDoN instances and some of the later group instances allowed you to set the level of difficulty. It did not auto scale for group size or class make up, but if you had good enough gear and enough alternate experience levels your group could chose the higher difficulty setting and get better xp and rewards. LDoN was, for me, the best grouping experience I had in EQ. It was fast-paced and pick up groups formed fairly quickly. In fact, it was so good, a lot of the high end raiders joined in and mixed with the rest of the community, raiders that you previously never saw outside of their raiding guild. The fast-paced nail-biting dungeon action made it very immersive.
I only hope that developers do not continue to water down their products by trying to cater to all sides. Although I will not play Darkfall, I do like that a company has tried to cater to a niche audience. It's too bad companies aren't more satisfied with making a good game with a nice playerbase and turning profit year in and year out instead of the business ego competition that goes one. We've got 11 Million Subscribers!!! We're the #2 mmo on the market!
It just seems if companies could provide a good product in a niche market they could enjoy the rewards of a loyal playerbase.
Beautiful thought Greenie. It is difficult to make a niche game successful, but EVE Online proved you could do this and much more. This way, you cater to a loyal fanbase and give them what they want, and the game is super successful. Nowadays, it seems more like companies are trying to cash out as quickly as possible.
Silkroad Online followed this, when originally they had great potential. But, they wanted money more than the fanbase's loyalty, so they kept introducing new ideas to suck money out of people instead of make the game better for the fans, which in return would attract new fans by the original fans that reveals how the company is nice to them. Sure, now they're supposedly killing off the bots and putting in new content, but you already destroyed what was once a good game. Sigh....I will forever miss those highly coordinated merchant raids with fellow thief buddies...
Darkfall sucks assneck.