I"ve always hoped someone would simply come up with a better version of UO, big sandbox world, skill based ( that actuaklly worked well, sorry Darkfall, but you suck), with lots of things to do in it. In UO, you could craft, save up for a house, build and decorate it,,PvP. help out other players as an anti-pk or give newbs or guildmates good starting equipment (because there wasn't anything ridiculous in place like bind on equip), or be the pk, run a little business, rp. hold events like archery tournaments, merchant caravans, dungeon crawls that anyone could attend ( ahh fond memories of Catskills ), own a boat and go fishing, or look for treasure maps, rp a pirate,or an orc, etc..
It's not just nostalgia. Game designers for today's mmo simply aim lower.Once they found out that by going for the lowest common denominator, they could make huge piles of cash, it was all over.
I mean, seriously can you call clicking on an npc then following the red dot on a radar ( or the big x or circle) a quest?No problem solving, no skill, it's all just busy work till you get the next "ding" .
I realise that a game like UO nowadays would be a "niche" game, that it wouldn't do WoW numbers, but man I'd pay a premium price to play that game if it was done well and worked.
It's funny back in the UO/EQ/AC days, our guild would talk about how much more advanced these games would be in ten years or more.And here we are 10 years later and the mmos ( just the fact they're called mmo instead of MMORPG is telling) have gotten prettier but dumber and more shallow.
Remember when we all thought that future games would almost have to have things like player/guild housing and good character customisation?Then here comes WoW with its Saturday morning cartoon graphics, no housing, and all lvl xx class x characters look almost exactly the same as every other lvl x class x character.
I think the backwards progression that hurts most though is how the agmes since have catered to selfish anti community gameplay.In the older games we didn't need things like greed rolls to sort things out, the games were such that players needed and depended on each other. People helped each other whether it was for equipment, protection in a new or dangerous area from monsters or pks, or just comeraderie. In our guild on Cats all you had to do was jump in the guild chat channel and ask for some help in reparing your armor, or shout out that you just died in some dungeon, or that Fu Manchu or some other pk was running around in moonglow, or just ask if anyone wanted to do a run through Shame dungeon,etc..
The current games really encourage selfish,greedy antisocial gameplay.
I still think the newness of mmos played a much larger part of the feeling old games had as opposed to their sweet game designs.
Going one step further I would say that mmos back then heavily appealed to one demographic and most people were very like minded and tolerated certain gameplay features.
Neither of those aspects are ever going to come back.
I still think the newness of mmos played a much larger part of the feeling old games had as opposed to their sweet game designs. Going one step further I would say that mmos back then heavily appealed to one demographic and most people were very like minded and tolerated certain gameplay features.
Neither of those aspects are ever going to come back.
You're right and nope, people won't tolerate gameplay like old MMOs, just like they won't tolerate Space Invaders or Doom. It might seem cute or nostolgic, but no one is going to pay for it.
I still think the newness of mmos played a much larger part of the feeling old games had as opposed to their sweet game designs. Going one step further I would say that mmos back then heavily appealed to one demographic and most people were very like minded and tolerated certain gameplay features.
Neither of those aspects are ever going to come back.
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
I"ve always hoped someone would simply come up with a better version of UO, big sandbox world, skill based ( that actuaklly worked well, sorry Darkfall, but you suck), with lots of things to do in it. In UO, you could craft, save up for a house, build and decorate it,,PvP. help out other players as an anti-pk or give newbs or guildmates good starting equipment (because there wasn't anything ridiculous in place like bind on equip), or be the pk, run a little business, rp. hold events like archery tournaments, merchant caravans, dungeon crawls that anyone could attend ( ahh fond memories of Catskills ), own a boat and go fishing, or look for treasure maps, rp a pirate,or an orc, etc.. It's not just nostalgia. Game designers for today's mmo simply aim lower.Once they found out that by going for the lowest common denominator, they could make huge piles of cash, it was all over. I mean, seriously can you call clicking on an npc then following the red dot on a radar ( or the big x or circle) a quest?No problem solving, no skill, it's all just busy work till you get the next "ding" . I realise that a game like UO nowadays would be a "niche" game, that it wouldn't do WoW numbers, but man I'd pay a premium price to play that game if it was done well and worked. It's funny back in the UO/EQ/AC days, our guild would talk about how much more advanced these games would be in ten years or more.And here we are 10 years later and the mmos ( just the fact they're called mmo instead of MMORPG is telling) have gotten prettier but dumber and more shallow. Remember when we all thought that future games would almost have to have things like player/guild housing and good character customisation?Then here comes WoW with its Saturday morning cartoon graphics, no housing, and all lvl xx class x characters look almost exactly the same as every other lvl x class x character. I think the backwards progression that hurts most though is how the agmes since have catered to selfish anti community gameplay.In the older games we didn't need things like greed rolls to sort things out, the games were such that players needed and depended on each other. People helped each other whether it was for equipment, protection in a new or dangerous area from monsters or pks, or just comeraderie. In our guild on Cats all you had to do was jump in the guild chat channel and ask for some help in reparing your armor, or shout out that you just died in some dungeon, or that Fu Manchu or some other pk was running around in moonglow, or just ask if anyone wanted to do a run through Shame dungeon,etc.. The current games really encourage selfish,greedy antisocial gameplay. It just makes me sad.
Absolutely fucking nailed it.
All Im feeling right now is a deepdown nerdrage at just how shit this industry has become. Fuck sake.
*edit* Ive read your post twice now, hits deep inside man. Good work.
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
I"ve always hoped someone would simply come up with a better version of UO, big sandbox world, skill based ( that actuaklly worked well, sorry Darkfall, but you suck), with lots of things to do in it. In UO, you could craft, save up for a house, build and decorate it,,PvP. help out other players as an anti-pk or give newbs or guildmates good starting equipment (because there wasn't anything ridiculous in place like bind on equip), or be the pk, run a little business, rp. hold events like archery tournaments, merchant caravans, dungeon crawls that anyone could attend ( ahh fond memories of Catskills ), own a boat and go fishing, or look for treasure maps, rp a pirate,or an orc, etc.. It's not just nostalgia. Game designers for today's mmo simply aim lower.Once they found out that by going for the lowest common denominator, they could make huge piles of cash, it was all over. I mean, seriously can you call clicking on an npc then following the red dot on a radar ( or the big x or circle) a quest?No problem solving, no skill, it's all just busy work till you get the next "ding" . I realise that a game like UO nowadays would be a "niche" game, that it wouldn't do WoW numbers, but man I'd pay a premium price to play that game if it was done well and worked. It's funny back in the UO/EQ/AC days, our guild would talk about how much more advanced these games would be in ten years or more.And here we are 10 years later and the mmos ( just the fact they're called mmo instead of MMORPG is telling) have gotten prettier but dumber and more shallow. Remember when we all thought that future games would almost have to have things like player/guild housing and good character customisation?Then here comes WoW with its Saturday morning cartoon graphics, no housing, and all lvl xx class x characters look almost exactly the same as every other lvl x class x character. I think the backwards progression that hurts most though is how the agmes since have catered to selfish anti community gameplay.In the older games we didn't need things like greed rolls to sort things out, the games were such that players needed and depended on each other. People helped each other whether it was for equipment, protection in a new or dangerous area from monsters or pks, or just comeraderie. In our guild on Cats all you had to do was jump in the guild chat channel and ask for some help in reparing your armor, or shout out that you just died in some dungeon, or that Fu Manchu or some other pk was running around in moonglow, or just ask if anyone wanted to do a run through Shame dungeon,etc.. The current games really encourage selfish,greedy antisocial gameplay. It just makes me sad.
I very rarely reply to things like this. But damn dude, you hit it right on the head. I especially hate that all the quests now a days in any mmo are so simple and no need to figure anything out.
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
Features was probably not the best word, paths would fit better. You could be a fisherman, you could me a crafts person, you could hunt, you could steal, there was more to UO that log on and kill things. Not that logging on and killing things still wasn't a big part of UO by there were so many more ways to do it. UO had variety in character development and places to hunt compared to most mmo since. You can't do that in current mmo.
My love of UO is 1 part nostalgia 1 part UO offered more then most mmo since.
There were some things I loved about EQ, and some things I hated. If bugged boat rides and corpse runs make a game fun to you, then I just pity you. Those are not my fondest memories of EQ.
Exploration, meeting new people, and achieving goals that weren't trivial is what I enjoyed.
forget the bug one secopnd lol,thery mean the idea of the game were good .
true a buggy game suck ,but hell back then if you could count to 3 with your computer you had a speed demon lol
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
You can flip that various ways (edited for clarity)... Ask a PvP player how much of a modern mmo is "game play". Heck open the can of worms and ask a UO PvP player about current "gameplay" on every level including pvp.
When UO was still young "most people" would have thought it was all gameplay. So your question wouldn't have worked out to well in 1997.. 98.. as examples.
In 2009 when a game like WoW even in North America alone has 5 times the player base... most people didn't even play UO.. and as such don't even have the ability to speak on the game with personal experience. They can't play it now.. because its not the game it was.
Its like asking "if we took the core group of UO players and asked them about WoW .. would most of them consider it has more gamply than UO.."
Its easy to load things in any paticular manner you wish to.
The market is bigger now .. but the question or the "idea" as I see it is about game development.
Game development is now on the path of "ez mode development" that is why choice is taken away. That is why MMO's start to follow the linear story teller path. Its an attempt to remove "random" and make it easier to design things to "work as intended".
The only thing WoW (or most any modern MMO) can offer me over UO is Quests. Plain and simple.
Any similar system to earlier MMO's has been chopped down and steamlined.. with options taken away.
Many early "ideals" were simply removed all together.
This doesn't mean UO was better than game X.. or that eq is better than game X.. or that WoW isn't as good.
It certainly does mean you get a lot LESS in todays games.
Just a point of view.... (which doesn't make yours wrong.. but I don't agree with it).
I think a lot of it has to do with nostalgia. Playing an MMORPG for the first time is a very special feeling. Almost overwhelming, knowing that every person you meet is a real person. A new player and a person who experienced an MMORPG before approach a new mmorpg in very different ways.To a person who never played an mmorpg before, an mmo might seem like an experience with endless possibilities and no limits. You probably have no idea what kind of things can be done in the game and you just pick the class that sounds fun to you, having no idea what "tank" or "dps" means. you just explore the world and try different things to discover more of the game, all while being impressed you're part of a world with thousands of real players. The experienced mmorpg player on the other hand will first visit multiple websites to check the skills to pick a class, plan skill tree if necessary, log into the game and looking for his first quest, wondering when he is going to get his first skill and if he gets more XP by going solo or grouping up.
That's why a lot of players play really bad games such as Runescape and Tibia. That's not because these games are oh so amazing, they do so because they still have that "magic feeling" of playing an mmorpg for the first time.
Not even close... for me...
UO was a wide open world, that could be explored from head to toe.. It was brutal, it was exciting, it was a living breathing world, where you made your own armor and weapons, where you sold them from vendors in your house. Where folks made "musuems" in their houses, from the most odd things. RP was thriving, guilds held "events" for the entire server to take part in.
Folks built player towns, communities were formed.
Reds and PKs would plan nights to attack these player made towns, and the defense alarms were sounded (typically through icq). Hacoc ensued...
To me UO was carebear, and hardcore all rolled into one.. It was a crafters dream, it was a pvpers haven, RPers flourished, soloers could partake in almost any facet of the game as well as groupers... It was a living breathing world.
Was it perfect? No. But there was so many aspects to the game, that any type of player could enjoy it.
Todays games seem closed off.. From instances, to lock out timers, to gear disparity... from the haves, and have nots.. The zones.. to character classes, and levels... perhaps its just me, but i feel very confined.
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
Features was probably not the best word, paths would fit better. You could be a fisherman, you could me a crafts person, you could hunt, you could steal, there was more to UO that log on and kill things. Not that logging on and killing things still wasn't a big part of UO by there were so many more ways to do it. UO had variety in character development and places to hunt compared to most mmo since. You can't do that in current mmo.
My love of UO is 1 part nostalgia 1 part UO offered more then most mmo since.
Most of those features can be found in many other games. Perhaps not in the same combination, but UO is also missing many features that other mmos offer in return.
Don't get me wrong, I loved UO. More for the people than anything else. The game was fun. Some of it was the sandbox design, but most of it was the community and the absolute newness of it all.
The problem with UO, was that is too was made in a different time by a different breed of developers. People who were raised by rolling dice and using imagination, graph paper, minatures and a handful of rulebooks.
That has been replaced by "devs" who grew up with trading card games and playstations.
There is good and bad to both, but there just are not enough people who could possibly design a social sandbox mmo anymore. Fewer still are companies that might take that chance. I have no issue with theme park games, but there should be more social sandbox games as well.
To bad the companies managing the only 2 decent ones didn't do the best job managing them to show their potential.
I do think a lot of modern games are they way they are do to having to fight against exploiting players. Games switched to the only good gear comes from quests and is BoP. This allowed them to stop twinking of characters, and allowed them to control what gear you had for which quest you were up, which made it much easier to balance the content for the player.
Games reduced the mob xp to reduce players macroing to reach high levels.
Games went with instanced dungeons so that players couldn't bring in 30 people to make a quest way too easy and once again power level people, same reason why quest/level restrictions are on all the instances.
The real problem is players will do whatever they can to make the content easier/break it/ruin it for other players. So now PvP is controlled to reduce griefing and all the other restrictions are there to prevent twinking and power leveling.
Really most of the changes in the industry are due to reaction from players doing the wrong things in the game. UO had macros the same month it was released to raise skills. EQ had twinking and powerleveling almost immediately.
I loved original UO, I love AC. But you can't make games like that now because they would be abused to no end, which would also ruin it for the true fans of that game style. I would love a new UO/AC within the same style of either of those games, but even they would have lots more restrictions then the originals.
I too dislike WoW, but I can understand the model. A very linear experience that can controlled and balanced the entire way.
I have to say that while I'm all for solo play, the reason MMOs were established is so that we the community could have a place to enjoy games with our friends. Teamwork is a fundamental aspect in the MMO genre, and for someone to suggest that it is a dying trend; that they'd rather have a single player concept on the same scale as an MMO, then I say to you go enjoy Morrowind or Fallout 3. I, for one, found that Fallout 3 was a tad boring, mainly because I'm an MMO type, and it doesn't offer anything to that extent.
The reason they were established was to make money, the same reason they are being made today. They were written to the audience that they had at the time and that audience has evolved and expanded over time. Today's MMOs are written for their paying audience, just like any game. The idea that EQ or UO were somehow altruistic ventures written purely for the enjoyment of geeks is absurd.
You're right and nope, people won't tolerate gameplay like old MMOs, just like they won't tolerate Space Invaders or Doom. It might seem cute or nostolgic, but no one is going to pay for it.
That's exactly true, if any of those games came out today, even with upgraded graphics, they'd be immediate failures. The majority of MMO players would never look at them and would certainly never play them. The world has changed and all the "good old days" nonsense in the world isn't going to change it.
I"ve always hoped someone would simply come up with a better version of UO, big sandbox world, skill based ( that actuaklly worked well, sorry Darkfall, but you suck), with lots of things to do in it. In UO, you could craft, save up for a house, build and decorate it,,PvP. help out other players as an anti-pk or give newbs or guildmates good starting equipment (because there wasn't anything ridiculous in place like bind on equip), or be the pk, run a little business, rp. hold events like archery tournaments, merchant caravans, dungeon crawls that anyone could attend ( ahh fond memories of Catskills ), own a boat and go fishing, or look for treasure maps, rp a pirate,or an orc, etc.. It's not just nostalgia. Game designers for today's mmo simply aim lower.Once they found out that by going for the lowest common denominator, they could make huge piles of cash, it was all over. I mean, seriously can you call clicking on an npc then following the red dot on a radar ( or the big x or circle) a quest?No problem solving, no skill, it's all just busy work till you get the next "ding" . I realise that a game like UO nowadays would be a "niche" game, that it wouldn't do WoW numbers, but man I'd pay a premium price to play that game if it was done well and worked. It's funny back in the UO/EQ/AC days, our guild would talk about how much more advanced these games would be in ten years or more.And here we are 10 years later and the mmos ( just the fact they're called mmo instead of MMORPG is telling) have gotten prettier but dumber and more shallow. Remember when we all thought that future games would almost have to have things like player/guild housing and good character customisation?Then here comes WoW with its Saturday morning cartoon graphics, no housing, and all lvl xx class x characters look almost exactly the same as every other lvl x class x character. I think the backwards progression that hurts most though is how the agmes since have catered to selfish anti community gameplay.In the older games we didn't need things like greed rolls to sort things out, the games were such that players needed and depended on each other. People helped each other whether it was for equipment, protection in a new or dangerous area from monsters or pks, or just comeraderie. In our guild on Cats all you had to do was jump in the guild chat channel and ask for some help in reparing your armor, or shout out that you just died in some dungeon, or that Fu Manchu or some other pk was running around in moonglow, or just ask if anyone wanted to do a run through Shame dungeon,etc.. The current games really encourage selfish,greedy antisocial gameplay. It just makes me sad.
Gotta quote this...again. This reply should be a mandatory read to every developer out there. These poor gamers that started playing mmo's with Wow/runescape/AoC/WAR etc missed out on the most magical era of MMORPG's.
Backwards progression is the perfect term that could have been used to describe what the hell went wrong. Depressing. Give us a game where we rely on other players, a game where we NEED to communicate with other players, a game where your repuatation as a player on your server is important, a game where you need to earn what you get, a game where you make friends, a game where you are part of something BIG...a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLEPLAYING GAME.
Sh*t if I had money to invest in an MMO i'd be set for life.
dont know about backward progression but i shure hell didnt move forward ,not for the lack of trying gees
baught every aaa mmo that came out in last 4 years lol
i even baught eq2 in 07 but couldnt play it my comp didnt like it
so i stuck mostly with wow till june finally stopped resubing
where i went i retried eq2 because i kept earing good game good game lush graphic the whole nine yard
wnet for thee trial ,game worked on my comp ,i was like i ll be dam took me 2 days to fiddle my comp game etc
but now men i get to see what other player like ,i love this game ,i will buy aion and the new eq2 simply because i have a lot of doubt about aion, but since i want to really try it i wont bother i ll get both that way
i f aion really is like my pile sitting in the closet it will go take vacation with the rest and ill be ready to jump on shard of eternity
(i dont really know why i bother with aion tho im not really into it
but i sure would love it if this was the next big game for the next 4 years
I have to say that while I'm all for solo play, the reason MMOs were established is so that we the community could have a place to enjoy games with our friends. Teamwork is a fundamental aspect in the MMO genre, and for someone to suggest that it is a dying trend; that they'd rather have a single player concept on the same scale as an MMO, then I say to you go enjoy Morrowind or Fallout 3. I, for one, found that Fallout 3 was a tad boring, mainly because I'm an MMO type, and it doesn't offer anything to that extent.
The reason they were established was to make money, the same reason they are being made today. They were written to the audience that they had at the time and that audience has evolved and expanded over time. Today's MMOs are written for their paying audience, just like any game. The idea that EQ or UO were somehow altruistic ventures written purely for the enjoyment of geeks is absurd.
No quite exactly. There wasn't much money to make back then. But those guys had a passion for the new genre and it showed in the games they made. Now developers have a passion for the money and that shows too in the games they make, in general, there are excepcions.
I do take exception to a comment someone else made a page or two back when they compared the older mmos to Space Invaders or Asteroids and said the games and gamers have evolved.I think you've got that part backwards.
The gameplay in current mmos has been dumbed down and simplified for the most part.
To me, it's like being introduced to a board game like chess or Axis and Allies, then you walk into your local games shop. and all you see on the shelves is variations of Candyland.
Now Candyland can be a fun game,sure, and it can even be kind of amusing to see all the variations people can come up with, and some publishers can even add all kinds of nice artwork and spit and polish to it ( Hey look, it's Candylad with Wings!And pvp!And elves! And here's the Lord of the Rings edition ! )..
And that's fine, really.And I don't begrudge publishers of all the WoW a likes, because that's what "the majority" of mmo gamers are happy with paying for, I guess ( then again, I really think if someone combined the open sandbox gameplay of a UO or even a pre NGE SW:G with the spit and polish of WoW , you'd get a lot of subscribers)...
But Goddammit, there's some of us who'd love to play some Axis and Allies, too.
Comments
I"ve always hoped someone would simply come up with a better version of UO, big sandbox world, skill based ( that actuaklly worked well, sorry Darkfall, but you suck), with lots of things to do in it. In UO, you could craft, save up for a house, build and decorate it,,PvP. help out other players as an anti-pk or give newbs or guildmates good starting equipment (because there wasn't anything ridiculous in place like bind on equip), or be the pk, run a little business, rp. hold events like archery tournaments, merchant caravans, dungeon crawls that anyone could attend ( ahh fond memories of Catskills ), own a boat and go fishing, or look for treasure maps, rp a pirate,or an orc, etc..
It's not just nostalgia. Game designers for today's mmo simply aim lower.Once they found out that by going for the lowest common denominator, they could make huge piles of cash, it was all over.
I mean, seriously can you call clicking on an npc then following the red dot on a radar ( or the big x or circle) a quest?No problem solving, no skill, it's all just busy work till you get the next "ding" .
I realise that a game like UO nowadays would be a "niche" game, that it wouldn't do WoW numbers, but man I'd pay a premium price to play that game if it was done well and worked.
It's funny back in the UO/EQ/AC days, our guild would talk about how much more advanced these games would be in ten years or more.And here we are 10 years later and the mmos ( just the fact they're called mmo instead of MMORPG is telling) have gotten prettier but dumber and more shallow.
Remember when we all thought that future games would almost have to have things like player/guild housing and good character customisation?Then here comes WoW with its Saturday morning cartoon graphics, no housing, and all lvl xx class x characters look almost exactly the same as every other lvl x class x character.
I think the backwards progression that hurts most though is how the agmes since have catered to selfish anti community gameplay.In the older games we didn't need things like greed rolls to sort things out, the games were such that players needed and depended on each other. People helped each other whether it was for equipment, protection in a new or dangerous area from monsters or pks, or just comeraderie. In our guild on Cats all you had to do was jump in the guild chat channel and ask for some help in reparing your armor, or shout out that you just died in some dungeon, or that Fu Manchu or some other pk was running around in moonglow, or just ask if anyone wanted to do a run through Shame dungeon,etc..
The current games really encourage selfish,greedy antisocial gameplay.
It just makes me sad.
I still think the newness of mmos played a much larger part of the feeling old games had as opposed to their sweet game designs.
Going one step further I would say that mmos back then heavily appealed to one demographic and most people were very like minded and tolerated certain gameplay features.
Neither of those aspects are ever going to come back.
You're right and nope, people won't tolerate gameplay like old MMOs, just like they won't tolerate Space Invaders or Doom. It might seem cute or nostolgic, but no one is going to pay for it.
Not entirely true. UO offered many more features then any game since. It definitely had it's flaws but no game since has offered more game play styles.
Absolutely fucking nailed it.
All Im feeling right now is a deepdown nerdrage at just how shit this industry has become. Fuck sake.
*edit* Ive read your post twice now, hits deep inside man. Good work.
PAST: UO-SWG-DAOC-WOW-DDO-VG-AOC-WAR-FE-DFO-LOTRO-RIFT-GW2
PRESENT: Nothing
FUTURE: ESO
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
There were some things I loved about EQ, and some things I hated.
If bugged boat rides and corpse runs make a game fun to you, then I just pity you. Those are not my fondest memories of EQ.
Exploration, meeting new people, and achieving goals that weren't trivial is what I enjoyed.
I very rarely reply to things like this. But damn dude, you hit it right on the head. I especially hate that all the quests now a days in any mmo are so simple and no need to figure anything out..
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
Features was probably not the best word, paths would fit better. You could be a fisherman, you could me a crafts person, you could hunt, you could steal, there was more to UO that log on and kill things. Not that logging on and killing things still wasn't a big part of UO by there were so many more ways to do it. UO had variety in character development and places to hunt compared to most mmo since. You can't do that in current mmo.
My love of UO is 1 part nostalgia 1 part UO offered more then most mmo since.
forget the bug one secopnd lol,thery mean the idea of the game were good .
true a buggy game suck ,but hell back then if you could count to 3 with your computer you had a speed demon lol
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
You can flip that various ways (edited for clarity)... Ask a PvP player how much of a modern mmo is "game play". Heck open the can of worms and ask a UO PvP player about current "gameplay" on every level including pvp.
When UO was still young "most people" would have thought it was all gameplay. So your question wouldn't have worked out to well in 1997.. 98.. as examples.
In 2009 when a game like WoW even in North America alone has 5 times the player base... most people didn't even play UO.. and as such don't even have the ability to speak on the game with personal experience. They can't play it now.. because its not the game it was.
Its like asking "if we took the core group of UO players and asked them about WoW .. would most of them consider it has more gamply than UO.."
Its easy to load things in any paticular manner you wish to.
The market is bigger now .. but the question or the "idea" as I see it is about game development.
Game development is now on the path of "ez mode development" that is why choice is taken away. That is why MMO's start to follow the linear story teller path. Its an attempt to remove "random" and make it easier to design things to "work as intended".
The only thing WoW (or most any modern MMO) can offer me over UO is Quests. Plain and simple.
Any similar system to earlier MMO's has been chopped down and steamlined.. with options taken away.
Many early "ideals" were simply removed all together.
This doesn't mean UO was better than game X.. or that eq is better than game X.. or that WoW isn't as good.
It certainly does mean you get a lot LESS in todays games.
Just a point of view.... (which doesn't make yours wrong.. but I don't agree with it).
Not even close... for me...
UO was a wide open world, that could be explored from head to toe.. It was brutal, it was exciting, it was a living breathing world, where you made your own armor and weapons, where you sold them from vendors in your house. Where folks made "musuems" in their houses, from the most odd things. RP was thriving, guilds held "events" for the entire server to take part in.
Folks built player towns, communities were formed.
Reds and PKs would plan nights to attack these player made towns, and the defense alarms were sounded (typically through icq). Hacoc ensued...
To me UO was carebear, and hardcore all rolled into one.. It was a crafters dream, it was a pvpers haven, RPers flourished, soloers could partake in almost any facet of the game as well as groupers... It was a living breathing world.
Was it perfect? No. But there was so many aspects to the game, that any type of player could enjoy it.
Todays games seem closed off.. From instances, to lock out timers, to gear disparity... from the haves, and have nots.. The zones.. to character classes, and levels... perhaps its just me, but i feel very confined.
And how many of those features are actually considered gameplay by most people? How many have been replaced with basic passive features we see today? Name some. Remember, If it invovles Rping,thats not a feature.
Features was probably not the best word, paths would fit better. You could be a fisherman, you could me a crafts person, you could hunt, you could steal, there was more to UO that log on and kill things. Not that logging on and killing things still wasn't a big part of UO by there were so many more ways to do it. UO had variety in character development and places to hunt compared to most mmo since. You can't do that in current mmo.
My love of UO is 1 part nostalgia 1 part UO offered more then most mmo since.
Most of those features can be found in many other games. Perhaps not in the same combination, but UO is also missing many features that other mmos offer in return.
Don't get me wrong, I loved UO. More for the people than anything else. The game was fun. Some of it was the sandbox design, but most of it was the community and the absolute newness of it all.
The problem with UO, was that is too was made in a different time by a different breed of developers. People who were raised by rolling dice and using imagination, graph paper, minatures and a handful of rulebooks.
That has been replaced by "devs" who grew up with trading card games and playstations.
There is good and bad to both, but there just are not enough people who could possibly design a social sandbox mmo anymore. Fewer still are companies that might take that chance. I have no issue with theme park games, but there should be more social sandbox games as well.
To bad the companies managing the only 2 decent ones didn't do the best job managing them to show their potential.
one of the biggest issue that stop lot of dev from doing various stuff ingame are bot and gold digger
check this exemple
silkroad online could not hop on that game any hour of the day for years not month years
oup suddenly you can
not a bit!i mena all server you can log on not one server is red did
silkroad do what they ve been saying they would do to bot and gold digger maybe
but it sound awfully more like farmer decided to go to aion
if thats what happen aion will be full but for the wrong reason lol
i was so surprised lol tyo see i could finally go in silkroad online
but my question!
WHERE DID THOSE FARMER AND BOTTER FREAKING GO?
I do think a lot of modern games are they way they are do to having to fight against exploiting players. Games switched to the only good gear comes from quests and is BoP. This allowed them to stop twinking of characters, and allowed them to control what gear you had for which quest you were up, which made it much easier to balance the content for the player.
Games reduced the mob xp to reduce players macroing to reach high levels.
Games went with instanced dungeons so that players couldn't bring in 30 people to make a quest way too easy and once again power level people, same reason why quest/level restrictions are on all the instances.
The real problem is players will do whatever they can to make the content easier/break it/ruin it for other players. So now PvP is controlled to reduce griefing and all the other restrictions are there to prevent twinking and power leveling.
Really most of the changes in the industry are due to reaction from players doing the wrong things in the game. UO had macros the same month it was released to raise skills. EQ had twinking and powerleveling almost immediately.
I loved original UO, I love AC. But you can't make games like that now because they would be abused to no end, which would also ruin it for the true fans of that game style. I would love a new UO/AC within the same style of either of those games, but even they would have lots more restrictions then the originals.
I too dislike WoW, but I can understand the model. A very linear experience that can controlled and balanced the entire way.
The reason they were established was to make money, the same reason they are being made today. They were written to the audience that they had at the time and that audience has evolved and expanded over time. Today's MMOs are written for their paying audience, just like any game. The idea that EQ or UO were somehow altruistic ventures written purely for the enjoyment of geeks is absurd.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
That's exactly true, if any of those games came out today, even with upgraded graphics, they'd be immediate failures. The majority of MMO players would never look at them and would certainly never play them. The world has changed and all the "good old days" nonsense in the world isn't going to change it.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Gotta quote this...again. This reply should be a mandatory read to every developer out there. These poor gamers that started playing mmo's with Wow/runescape/AoC/WAR etc missed out on the most magical era of MMORPG's.
Backwards progression is the perfect term that could have been used to describe what the hell went wrong. Depressing. Give us a game where we rely on other players, a game where we NEED to communicate with other players, a game where your repuatation as a player on your server is important, a game where you need to earn what you get, a game where you make friends, a game where you are part of something BIG...a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLEPLAYING GAME.
Sh*t if I had money to invest in an MMO i'd be set for life.
nerdrage ftl.
dont know about backward progression but i shure hell didnt move forward ,not for the lack of trying gees
baught every aaa mmo that came out in last 4 years lol
i even baught eq2 in 07 but couldnt play it my comp didnt like it
so i stuck mostly with wow till june finally stopped resubing
where i went i retried eq2 because i kept earing good game good game lush graphic the whole nine yard
wnet for thee trial ,game worked on my comp ,i was like i ll be dam took me 2 days to fiddle my comp game etc
but now men i get to see what other player like ,i love this game ,i will buy aion and the new eq2 simply because i have a lot of doubt about aion, but since i want to really try it i wont bother i ll get both that way
i f aion really is like my pile sitting in the closet it will go take vacation with the rest and ill be ready to jump on shard of eternity
(i dont really know why i bother with aion tho im not really into it
but i sure would love it if this was the next big game for the next 4 years
i ll keep eq2 as my life line
The reason they were established was to make money, the same reason they are being made today. They were written to the audience that they had at the time and that audience has evolved and expanded over time. Today's MMOs are written for their paying audience, just like any game. The idea that EQ or UO were somehow altruistic ventures written purely for the enjoyment of geeks is absurd.
No quite exactly. There wasn't much money to make back then. But those guys had a passion for the new genre and it showed in the games they made. Now developers have a passion for the money and that shows too in the games they make, in general, there are excepcions.
I do take exception to a comment someone else made a page or two back when they compared the older mmos to Space Invaders or Asteroids and said the games and gamers have evolved.I think you've got that part backwards.
The gameplay in current mmos has been dumbed down and simplified for the most part.
To me, it's like being introduced to a board game like chess or Axis and Allies, then you walk into your local games shop. and all you see on the shelves is variations of Candyland.
Now Candyland can be a fun game,sure, and it can even be kind of amusing to see all the variations people can come up with, and some publishers can even add all kinds of nice artwork and spit and polish to it ( Hey look, it's Candylad with Wings!And pvp!And elves! And here's the Lord of the Rings edition ! )..
And that's fine, really.And I don't begrudge publishers of all the WoW a likes, because that's what "the majority" of mmo gamers are happy with paying for, I guess ( then again, I really think if someone combined the open sandbox gameplay of a UO or even a pre NGE SW:G with the spit and polish of WoW , you'd get a lot of subscribers)...
But Goddammit, there's some of us who'd love to play some Axis and Allies, too.