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The Meat and Potatoes of MMORPG's : The Grind -- Let's make It adventure, fun....
Gorakkh
Member Posts: 694
The meat and potatoes of current MMORPG's is grinding. Let's face It, this genre is changing and evolving and with the major advances of technology this means vastly improved graphics and the ability to incorporate more real-time, action based gameplay. But let's face It, that doesn't do It for a lot of us.
I would like to see a game world where there is strong player interactivity and congruency and is not all about who is higher level or who's the first to get Godly Dragon Sword + 2.
A world of adventure, fun and magic. One where gear/equipment and abilities is their to enhance the players own individual personality, not determine the total worth of you as a player.
We as players need to make a sacrifice I believe, If we cut down a little on the hours we play as well as obsessive amounts of playing, this leaves more rich content to be explored and a world that doesn't feel like you went from zone A 1- A2 to get from x to y level and then go to high end raid dungeon after and grind for gear. But to make this work we also need the developers help, they need to make zones that feel worthwhile and are not there for the sake of mere lvl progression and treadmill grind, where It's not about having a couple zones for each level range where one out of each handful of lv x to y zone grinding gives you maximum benefits but a world that is fun and entertaining to adventure through and explore with other players, and gives you items along the way that enhance and allow you to express your personality through your character.
Here's to hoping Developers make gaming into a fun, adventurous ride with enchanted, mystical and unique worlds to play in.
Your thoughts, comments and ideas are welcome.
Thank you for your time.
Comments
I would personally very much like to play a game that was more about exploring and fun/adventure and player interaction, and less about grinding and levels. I can't instantly come up with a good way to implement this though, but I do hope that a developer somewhere does. Sadly more and more I feel as if people like me are the minority though, and that there are too many people that simply like grinding levels and prefer being guided from zone to zone to zone.
MMOs have always been about grinding and levels. WHen you played you first MMO or two, gaining levels was fun. Now, not as much fun. DOing a bunch of quests in WOW as an alternative to grinding was FUN also. Now, its old hat unless the quest is VERY well thought out. But every quest can't be great. Theres has to be filler.
MMOs have gotten more linear since WOW. WOW gave you some direction where there was NONE before. Now the direction is beat over your head ever more with hardly any other option. Aion and WAR are good examples. A road down the center of each zone with quest hubs. There were no hidden quest givers. Nothing to find. No mystery. No reason to go off the beaten path. No REASON to explore anything because the zones have shrunk.
Some direction is OK. MMOs have gone over the deep end lately and their gameplay really hasn't changed in 5 years. FOr newcomers, its great. For anyone playing for 10 years, theres not much out there. Eve or some other niche boring MMO with NO DIRECTION and NO CONTENT at all is NOT an alternative=)
The world has to be designed in such a way to promote adventure and exploration, but the solution is not just size and a lot of empty space & travel times. That wasn't adventure, it was paying $15 to wait around 1/2 the time you were playing=)
Devs have already made MMORPGs into games players are willing to invest more time into than any other genre. That's the primary reason players describe these games as "grindy": we're being tricked into playing games longer than before, so the gameplay patterns are becoming noticeably more repetitive.
Which isn't to say it's the fault of the players (as Neverland insinuates) because the games themselves aren't exactly dishing out huge helpings of varied content. They can't. They have 200+ hours of gameplay to keep us playing for (when most games are only worried about 6-20 hours of gameplay.)
Inevitably it's part of what the genre is. If you want content with a high concentration of adventure/fun, you play those shorter 6-20 hour games. If you want the game which keeps your attention longer, you're going to have to suffer through slightly less adventuresome gameplay. This will never change, as it's an inherent trait with the way the content is divided up.
Which isn't to say things won't become more adventurous and fun. They will. But a game which has to give us its candy over 200+ hours is always going to lag noticeably in interesting content compared to a game willing to hand over all its candy in 20 hours.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't think your as alone as you might think. People who prefer level grinding and treadmill zones are usually people who are newer to this genre or those gameplay design ideas are still fresh to them, or they are hardcore powergamers, which are actually to a large degree a minority.
I think we would all be surprised if we found out how many people would be interested in more MMORPG'S that are about player interactivity and congruency, adventure, fun, exploration and mystical, enchanted and unique worlds. And less about grind and stat gear as the only means of defining your character.
Ok, I know I'm going to sound like an ad, but I like GalaXseeds for the "casual grinding": most activities like the mini-games or taking care of plant or even engaging in a short fight can be seen as some form of casual gaming. instead of just going to a site, you log into a sort of meta-game. The upside is, I get to level my character as I simply enjoy a relaxing casual game.
The downside is, leveling up gets pretty much the same again and again... but we've just established it's the norm in a MMO.
I lost interest in Aion because even though the Abyss might be different, grinding out all those levels in a gameworld that doesn't promote adventure or exploration at all isn't something I want to suffer through to get to the supposed "good part"!! I didn't fall for it in DAOC and its not something I'll do in Aion either. If you're going to make me PvE in order to get to the PvP, then make the PvE FUN dag nabbit=) If its just a simplistic solo grind that doesn't even compare with a system from a 4 yr old game like WOW, then why bother making us grind levels at all? Just plop us into the Abyss and call it a day. Linear, simple PvE zones just don't work. Mythic failed at it with WAR. Funcom didn't do a good job of it with AOC either. If I didn't play WOW, Aion might seem cool, but it really doesn't offer anything new I haven't done the past 4 yrs.
I'm one of the developers for an MMORPG for iPhone/Android phones called Parallel Kingdom. I think we've made some progress towards the goals that this thread is talking about.
Parallel Kingdom is interesting because it is location-based (it works with the GPS in the phones) so we never had the option to have "zones." Everybody plays together on the same Google Map. Stronger players often play alongside weaker players. To give stronger players stronger monsters to kill, we do a localized spawn that looks at the player's weapons and spawns monsters accordingly. However, the players can leave these monsters behind and lower level players then have to deal with them. This leads to some interesting effects. Eventually, we'd like to have unique, regional types of monsters but we just don't have the manpower since the game is completely global. We'd have to figure out some way to partition the entire world effectively and then create all the different monsters, etc.
To help with the social aspects, we've incorporated group hunting bonuses. Also, it is a territory-based game and players are limited to attacking others' territory only once every 6 hours so if they want to inflict serious damage on another player's lands, they have to enlist a bunch of friends to help them.
Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of grinding to be done in PK, but I just wanted to share a few of the things we've done that might not be in a typical RPG.
If you want to check out the game:
http://www.parallelkingdom.com/home.shtml
I thought DAOC was actually one of the better ones in regards to grind content. It atleast had some interesting dungeons and places to journey through while you were grinding. For It's time I think It was actually quite good. To todays standards and what we have possible, not so much.
Well that is really a big problem for a lot of us I think. When It feels like the same game with a different skin with +2 to features and is solo grind, A lot of us have no interest in playing something of that sort. And sadly, the majority of MMORPGS on the market are designed with the aforesaid.
fury was like that ,mm they werent lucky i guess was in their way lol(again)
Speculation. It's not true at all. While MMOGs aren't currently providing such interesting content, there is one that I can think of that SHOULD provide us with some amazing content for our 200+ hours.
Also, elements such as exploration could (and have, though not very successfully) be implemented into an MMOG with the ability to give depth and perspective to the MMO genre as a whole. At least one would hope that was possible.
THE Rooster Nash
Well I think the meat and potatoes of any mmo is the rpg portion of the game, which also inclused having good gameplay. Yes, games need to be more fun and less like a theme park but alot of mmos lack a good rpg elements.
Speculation. It's not true at all. While MMOGs aren't currently providing such interesting content, there is one that I can think of that SHOULD provide us with some amazing content for our 200+ hours.
Also, elements such as exploration could (and have, though not very successfully) be implemented into an MMOG with the ability to give depth and perspective to the MMO genre as a whole. At least one would hope that was possible.
What kind of math are you using, that x / 200 is greater than x / 20 ?
Given x manhours of dev time from the same dev, that company is always going to produce a higher frequency and quality of content when they're only worried about 20 hours of gameplay.
It doesn't matter if this Game Y of yours is interesting for 200 hours. If the same dev team had made a 20-hour Game Z instead, that game's content quality and frequency would inarguably be superior.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agree that MMORPG's have to be designed this way. You have to keep it general to make all types of players and characters feel like they are important (at least semi important, like a hero). What isn't mentioned in this post is the fact that developers really should make up for the more generic storyline and play environment by utilizing the massive amounts of players contained within these large worlds. I would like to see more systems utilizing player interactions in different ways and less on specific content (since content itself can only go so far in an MMORPG in regards to trying to satisfy the masses). The interactions could be big or small, but I think if a lot of these things can be put together, players might be able to put together some version of their own story whether you're playing a themepark or a sandbox.
You can almost safely say character(s) to character(s) interactions are the basic elements within a story whether they are killing each other, helping each other out whether knowing (directly) or not knowing it (indirectly), conversating/plotting, gathering information on each other or 3rd parties, stealing from each other etc. It's all interaction involving at the very least 2 or more characters. In my opinion, developers should find ways to bring these types of story elements to life especially PC to PC. We already seem to got down the NPC to PC interaction well enough, I think this should be a good next step (PC to PC interactions) for the evolution of the MMORPG.
EDIT: To those that have a problem with time spent in an MMORPG, first of all, its supposed to be constantly changing/added to so you can maintain an environment for many players to enjoy over long periods of time. Don't try and make it sound like your time is being "wasted" on an MMORPG when the whole point video games even exist today is to pass time. I think this has been forgotten by many, time itself should not be a complaint for MMORPG's, it just means its doing its job and if you're still playing it, apparently its doing it well.
I wouldn't mind alot more exploration to these mmo's. Personally I don't like the fact you can just open up a map and instantly know where everything is. There is no sense of mystery when traveling around, even something as simple as uncovering the world map as you walk through it would be a plus.
More "uncharted" areas should be available, like randomly placed dungeons to creep through, some with multiple ways to go, and depending on which paths you choose could lead you to other surprizes. Things like bosses, secret paths to main cities, treasure, or even lead right back to the enterance, anything really. Of course these would have to be instanced and be mostly for soloing, that way any mobs/bosses inside could be generated based on your current level. Some of them could require a group between x-x level too I suppose. There would also need to be some sort of limit to going through these places, otherwise no one would use the open-world lol.
Anyways just a random thought and I do not expect anything like that to ever be implimented, but one can dream.
Fact is that there is still much that can be added to any of these mmo's out today, it is just that developing new features can be costly and very risky. Most companies would just rather stick to what is already proven to work so they can make a profit. Though I don't know how much longer people can keep creating the same games over and over and expect them to be profitably successful.
Just wait till we get the AI for procedural story telling up and running.
There is actually a few masters thesis done on this subject especially pertaining to videogames.
PaSSAGE is one you might want to look at if you want to have some hope for the future, it actually works to profile the player and alter the game slightly to make it more interesting to there style of gameplay.
I can't remember some of the other projects, but one of the problems for procedural story generation is that among the artsy fartsy people nobody can settle on a satisfactory defintion of a story in which you.
Grinding is for the most part a side effect of the state of AI in videogames being decades behind the other technologies.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
Fixed that for you.
Saying EVE has no content illustrates a complete lack of experience with the game. It lacks traditional kill/quest/level content, and in it's place is an unpredictable metagame that a lot of people find compelling.
Personally, I love games with epic storylines. I'm a reader, and yes, I'm one of those people who actually read the quest text, and I refuse to skip through cutscenes if they are present in the game. Have quests that are more than just fedex quests, and I would definitely be more than happy to play.
But other points mentioned are very valid as well. The interesting thing about MMORPGs is that you actually interact with real life, living players as opposed to npcs in single-player games. Another idea is to make use of this, and to make socialising meaningful. I like the idea of having to spy on another team and so on, and if our actions can have an impact on society as a whole, it would be all the more meaningful.
Main characters:
Jinn Gone Quiet (Guild Wars)
Princess Pudding (Guild Wars)
Indeed. The strength of this genre is in people from all over the world populating a fantasy world and having it magically come to life through player interactivity, congruency and the most dreaded of the three, player dramas.
I do not believe MMORPG's should be about heavy single playing focused adventuring, If I want to do that, I can go play a Single Player game that will deliver me the experience in a largely enhanced way.
It seems like developers need to find a way to make the multi user experience enhanced through player interactivity and congruency without resorting to group gear grinding etc. Now on the other hand, is technology advanced enough to the point were developers can utilize It to create these experiences? On one hand, if through an Ancient game such as Ultima Online, through It's game design had stronger player interactivity then MMORPG's of today, even though Ultima Online had many single playing focused styles to It, It still helped blend players of all breeds together, maybe not incredibly well, but better than many pure level/gear based MMORPG'S today.
Then the real question is, Is it a matter of how the developers are making the game design, technological limitation or player preference? Quite frankly I think all three of the aforesaid are at fault to one degree or another.
PvE content is going to be grindy, because players can burn through it faster than Devs can produce it. Hence the artificial speed bump called grind.
PvP has great potential to avoid most grind, if players are given enough important things to fight over.
The only hope for low-grind PvE is randomized content, which as of now is pretty horrible. If programmers can come up with good routines to make random content varied AND believable, then a lot of grind can be removed.
If each dungeon run had a different map, mobs, and loot table, that would greatly improve their replay value. Mobs and loot tables should be doable, but practicality probably limits how random the maps can be, as you need calculate lighting, pathing, and collision for a new map. I can see a super-dungeon with perhaps 100 chambers and passage ways, only a small set of which are available (unblocked) for each run. That could work pretty well, but pathing might still be an issue.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2