Who's to say it can only be fun for 10% of the players?
In general, if a game allows unlimited ability for one player to "affect" another, the majority will be controlled by the minority. While being constantly beaten, battered, and bruised is indeed fun for some people, such people would do better to just pay Mistress Cruella her 100.00/hour. (125.00 an hour for the 'deluxe' treatment.)
Every game will always have a top 10%. No matter the game there is always a top level that the rest can't compete at. Their skill or their time commitment will not allow it. WoW is no different, there are top level guilds, raiders, arena teams, etc. It doesn't drive away 90%.
This is true. However, there's two things to consider: a)Even if you're not in a high-end raiding guild, you're only 'locked out' of a very small amount of content. Since Blizzard keeps 'downgrading' formerly high-end content as new, even-higher-end content comes out, people who have to rely on PUGs or small 'family' guilds can eventually go the raids, dungeons, etc, which you used to have to be uberleet to do.
b)Your ability to access, or not access, content in WoW is determined by developers who want to keep you as a customer (and thus do not wish to frustrate/limit you too much), not by other players who consider it "winning" if they make you quit or otherwise impede you. Basically, Blizzard (and most other MMORPGs) have performed a fairly complex calculation which boils down to "We need to have 'exclusive' content to attract the hard-core players who will be very long term subscribers, bring in huge guilds from other games, and provide a goal that all players can aspire to, the ultimate 'carrot'. How much of that can we have before the majority of players, who can't/won't see it, will feel ripped off and quit?" The success of WoW shows they've performed this calculation correctly. EQ1 catered too much to the high-end raiding guilds and basically locked out anyone who couldn't be part of a 70 person raid from the majority of content released in later expansions.
[qupte]Most games aren't wow. There will likely never be another wow. People forget that prior to wow games only needed a few hundred thousand to be wildly successful. Hell, WWII Online has been going for a decade on just 10k subscribers. EVE is a huge success. 300k subscribers and still growing. That population beats out UO, DAOC and AC. Comes close to EQ1 and EQ2 at their peaks. Not bad for only appealing to a very small percentage of the MMO market. Studios on multiple continents. A number of games in development, expanding into books, magazines, rumors of TV and Movies too. Successful indeed. You don't need to grab a huge market, just grab a small market and provide tons of content and keep growing(even at a slow pace) and you'll make money. Free expansions certainly help.[/quote]
EVE is an exceptional game in many, many, ways. It's something I'd probably be playing as my primary game if I had the time to commit to it, but, sadly, I don't. Also, much like WOW, I don't think there will be another EVE. The game market no longer allows "start small, grow slow".
Way back in Ye Olde Dawne Of Tyme, there were a good half-dozen competing home computer systems -- Apple, Commodore, Atari, TRS-80. You could introduce a new computer with a new OS and grab some decent market share. Over time, the market changed -- there's now Windows and *nix. (Mac OSX is a *nix variant, just to be clear I'm not forgetting it.) You can't introduce a new computer hardware platform with a custom OS now and hope to grab any market share. (You can turn the game around and do what Google is doing, however, which may be a major success and may be a hideous flop, I don't know.) Point is, as markets evolve, windows (no pun intended) close. And open. That's what makes things interesting. I could write two long essays, one arguing that WoW's dominance of the market has closed out competitors, one arguing that because WoW grew the market so much, grabbing even 1-5 percent of the now much larger market can still be profitable. Depending on what day you ask me, I'll argue one or the other.
Even should you only have 10% of the population you can still make money. If you make another wow you aren't going to take away wow subscribers. Not people who have so much time invested in it. They aren't likely to let go for more of the same. You have to make something different enough to draw people away. Which means breaking the mold and innovating.
This is true, but "We're not WoW!" isn't enough. There's reasons WoW is successful, and just being "not WoW" and ignoring those reasons is foolish. (About as foolish as not understand what makes WoW successful, and trying to copy it without understanding what you're copying.) EVE works in ways a more traditional MMORPG (i.e, elves, dwarves, orcs) couldn't. It is the only MMORPG I know of that is actually large enough that it's not really possible for any group of players, no matter how well organized, to control gameplay. (Compare to UO, when any halfway competent guild could basically lock the rest of the shard out of a dungeon by establishing themselves in the right place and exploiting server line bugs.) (EVE also has very large 'safe' zones and carefully gradiated levels of risk of exposure to PVP, something which people who want 'player driven content' tend to despise, because it means you can only gank n00bz by exploiting bugs and loopholes which are quickly fixed.)
Obviously, nothing lasts forever. I remember when Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase were the "standards" and Windows was a joke. (Hell, I remember Apple's "Welcome, IBM" ad!) There will be successful games beyond WoW, and eventually it will be running in maintenance mode on a few forgotten servers. However, just as WoW attained dominance by being, basically, a better Everquest than Everquest, I strongly suspect the "WoW killer" will be a better WoW than WoW -- not something radically different. I also believe that while there is a niche for games which promote a different style of gameplay, that will remain a small niche, and one where there is only room for one or two thriving games. Right now, EVE really has that niche sewn up and the competitors are also-rans, at best. UO is still tottering along, but it's radically different (so I'm told) from the "sandbox" it used to be. Shadowbane, I believe, has gone belly up. Darkfall has its fans, and claims to be growing, but I'm dubious. I can name a bunch of others, but that's like naming the dozen or so web browsers not called "Explorer", "Opera", or "Firefox". Sure, they exist and some people use them, but they're not really relevant.
Most MMORPGS these days seem to focus on combat solely as the source of player interaction. At their foundation they are one-dimensional. Go here, kill that. Or, engage these other player characters in combat for some meaningful/meaningless bauble. The rest of the "game" just centers on gearing your character to rend flesh in a more efficient and fantastical manner.
But, there are so many other ways in which characters/players can interact that, in my opinion, haven't been accessed or addressed in the same way as SWG did in the days before the NGE. Entertainers spending their time to dance/play and buff you at the same time. Doctors setting up shop to cure battle fatigue. Pure genius! Professions that you could enjoy, and not once have to engage in combat if that were your choice. And professions that were both sought out and valuable to all other players combat and crafter alike. Want a house, you can have one, just go ask the architect to build you one...again, pure genius in design.
Until the dependence on combat as the main source of social interaction is broken, I fear that not much of the 'fun' will return to the genre anytime soon. Create a world where people have options to choose their method of social interaction both within and outside of crossing swords and let them create their own fun.
Ok I haven't really seen a fun game since the old days of games like Drakkar. It created a NEED to help others.. for example as a paladin you could get the best armor early in the game by the first boss but as a Paladin you were way too weak to even fight the Red Dragon that the other classes. So the other classes helped you the Paladin to obtain your best armor so you can help out with the other bosses. Next mob was a turtle that gave a cloak so you go help out to get the cloak that everyone can wear but is the only gear those like Barbarians and Monks could wear for defense. And the mobs went on.. it required 2 or 3 healers healing a barbarian that was truely berserk.. the barb would have to go offscreen from everyone.. pump up berserk until he could barely click where he wanted to go and run back on screen HOPING not to kill anyone in the process and run into the den for the creature under attack.. The barbarian hit point tripled and strength quadrupled.. but their defense dropped so everyone would run in to give support to the barb.. healers healing because the BARBARIAN was a human pin cushion.. the mentalist if they had shielding would shield and the others all helped hit on the boss.. and the Barb was keeping pumped up to keep the boss on him and not the others.. it was cooperative play at it's best.
Now the game was interesting from the start.. as soon as you logged on and joined the pub.. you saw tables with avatars representing the others and you could if they did not lock the table listen in on the plans of big hunts and strategies to defeat the next boss.. it was fun.. though grinding was at a premium to buy hit points especially with the Vamps because they drained hit points. Gone is game play like this where it took many working toward the next goal to the point that PvP was never an issue because the challenge was to defeat the next boss and obtain the next gear for the next class.. who in turn will help than to be able to defeat the next boss.. growth was exciting and productive if it wasn't for the grinding for hit points.
Than you had games that did some things right like EQ1 that had camouflage, levitation, free fall, swimming under water for dungeons.. to only remove all that was unique and fun to do a cookie cutter mold removing the unique game play aspects EQ1 had.. Innovation keeps dying not innovating.. if it was innovating we would be seeing features like these in all games..
Think if game companies kept innovation.. the cooperative game play with it's pub tables for chat rooms, the unique game play like levitation, free fall, jumping, resurrection, underwater cities and dungeons, mobs that are dangerous but give great rewards like the vamps, fast and furious fighting, little resting with bandages, fast leveling, more interactive combat like Asheron's Call 1 had. The innovation would be to take the best of the games and keep expanding not dropping them. Abilities that would let you actually control the weather.. imagine a powerful mage causing a blizzard that hindered everyones view and travel, or tornado that caused anyone in the area to possibly get sucked up and discarded who knows where hurt from the fall. Random weather in game that caused this to happen.. their would be excitement and fear in traveling not knowing if it is going to be safe or not. Travel forms and travel methods like Champions Online. Expand on what is current and not limit.. not remove.. but add.. Realms vs Realms and not player vs player but realms like WoW intended.
Guess you just have to take a long hard look at the reasons you play these games in the first place. Those elements are still there. They're just harder to find beneath all the muck.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Its simple MMOS are not fun or exciting because there is no risk. Think of all the things the human race does for kicks, run with the bulls, sky diving, bungie jumping, ect ect. What happens if it goes wrong good chance you going to die or be F*cked for life. Why do people do these things cause they are exciting and subconciously are risky. So then how as a race are we expected to be excited by mmos when if you die you respawn as you were with a minor pissy negative to xp or stats that regens over a short time anyways. You get killed in pvp you dont even lose you gear anymore, its all super safe for the lil tard burgers that use mum and dads money to buy subscriptions. In my opinion until we go the way of perma death or death with a big penalty, and pvp where you actually lose something of importance to you, its going to be the same old grind die rinse repeat. THINK about it people we live for risk/reward make it risky hard and reward us the same we will come and bring our cash too.
MMOs have declined in fun factor for me, because they try to be too many things. So many games try to do the solo/group/raid thing. Jack of all trades master of none. WAR was like this. Everything ended up being bland. EQ2 is like this. So many group things to do, but there are no groups.
What is the point in having group content when not enough people play the game? It ends up creating animosity for the poor guy trying to level. He sees so much he could be doing, but instead his only option is to grind out on mobs.
Games need to pick a playstyle, and master it. They shouldn't be delving into all types. Not to say that games shouldn't have options. Just use most of your resources for what makes your game fun. You can't point to a game nowadays, and say "This game really excels in this area." Why? Too much emphasis on being everything.
I'm just gonna agree with nicopherous here, sure there's alot more with a similiar view point but i can be bothered goin through every comment.
The way MMO's are is basically just the way its done- I'm a wow player myself and if you take wow as an example (specifically in how it has expanded so much that it actually enters the main stream).
Blizzard may well have done all starting areas they way in which they did the deathknight. It was amazing when we first got loaded into it, but you know after that... your still gonna have those daft "I need you to kill 100 boars for eyes, but not all boars have eyes.. P.S I'm gonna ask you to go back for their feet (which some, again, don't have) then I'm gonna need you to kill the king of the boars (you can't miss him he's that really hard boar you've killed 30 times already)...but only after I have the eyes".
Thankfully In wrath they have become a tad bit more creative in how they do quests and how they lead into each other, but you still get the odd "FFS YOU D*CK I killed that frickin thing five times now... you saw me I was just over there!".
Sure it would be amazing to have the DK starting experience all the way to 80, but if you think about it that wouldn't really be more fun. You will just expect the next thing to be even more mega... then the thing after that... and so on. You say that creating exciting content is just down to money (I'm sure you don't mean it as simplistically as that) but it really isn't, mean take a moment to think about what is required in ways of talent to carry that off.
What really needs to be done, bring a lot more focus on creating engaging environments to play in. I love warcraft, I've played City of heroes for a bit, but really after you've jumped the 3rd tall building its kinda boring. I played some other thing I cant remember... had like a orcy side and a human side, looked amazing but neither side interacted unless you went into a specific area... but can't remember what it was (maybe thats why). Star wars galaxies...just kind of ...meh...Lord of the Rings was good, computer couldn't handle it all that well though- I think it cried a little when i tried to run conan and warhammer. Unfortunately I really liked EvE but they updated the computer req's for it, just as I got going.
What Warcraft has is just a atmosphere to it (that is a personal view, I am entitled to that). At end-game, sure we itch for the next expansion and there is still the same old thing to do countless times, but its not usually a grind, maybe thats the guild chat or my prefrence for a pvp server- the threat of gettin annihilated just works for me. We have a continous storyline (ish) thats been going since my mate first shown me warcraft (original) and I was used to playing on an Atari (I imagine I'd feel the same about warhammer, and probably Conan- still think about that sex scene with that witch the got thrown on the fire..).
New MMO's have more of a problem with creating atmosphere than excitement, because lets be honest warcraft didn't get where it is today by attracting gamers. It attracted non-gamers, and then kept them playing. Even in the crawl that was vanilla WoW. I haven't played a free, or pay, MMO that has matched it.
1) the developer saying "it should take a level 3 10 minutes to do this" IS the problem.
And your solution is....?
Quit dictating that things have to take a long time.
This equation is definitely built on the premise that the max dollars to time spent on development ratio is to force players to take as much time as possible and still be enjoyable.
While it works pretty well for the first time seeing an area, it completely fails when leveling an alt. I don't mind spending time on quests if it means something and is interesting. The first time I had to kill piggies was memorable. I needed a pie to convince a little kid to fess up. The 500 times after that, i skipped those quests. It got to the point where I skipped every random drop quest...even while leveling the first time. Some were parts of important chains and I was forced to do them, if I wanted to progress.
Instead, how about quests that make a difference (impossible in the current 'persistent world' model). The world has to be persistent because it takes too much effort to write AI that tells quest givers to assign quests based on whats currently going on.
Take a game like call of duty. A lvl 1 private can duel and win a lvl 55 general. Just because hes level 55 doesn't make him untouchable. All content becames accessable at all levels if we drop the level gap paradigm and do something fresh.
2) a little realism could solve your "100 sets of armor and 100,000 knives" in your magic backpack.
realistically, you couldn't/wouldn't carry that much crap.
realistically, you wouldn't want to loot every damned thing.
But this is what players DO. This was one of the first discoveries made by the UO developers. Their original engine assumed "Resource recycling" where a rabbit equaled, say, 1 meat resource and 1 fur resource, so when you killed a rabbit, it wouldn't spawn another one until 1 meat and 1 fur had been consumed by the players. The problem? People hoarded stacks of hundreds of pieces of fur and meat. The entire spawn engine had to be redone.
Increasing spawn rate doesn't fix or return UO to the intent of the original idea. Increasing spawn rate only catered to the hoarding effect. They could have expired food products after a time rendering hoarding such things a complete waste. Where do they keep 100s of stacks of meat and what were the consequences. In a pen and paper game, they couldn't haul that around and they wouldn't! Not unless they wanted to set up shop as a butcher.
After you've killed 20 thieves in the forest, and you've tried and failed to carry 20 sets of leather and cloth armor and their weapons, you'll realize pretty quickly that its pointless to fill your pockets with crap you can't carry. Once again, if a game isn't loot driven then you wouldn't care to pick up 20 sets of gray quality crap...but if I wanted to disrobe them and carry what i could, and try to come back before they were looted by someone else (or de-spawned) then let me. Maybe I'm poor and stuff they're wearing is better than what I have. Perhaps everything is bloody and cut up. Fine. But at least I had to option to look.
3) Your arguments stem from the idea that "grind = good" so therefore the developers are totally justified in making me kill 400 piges to get 4 pig livers...when it would actually take less than even 1 liver to make that freekin pie.
And so then what? Great, you've killed a pig and now you've got 1 pig heart, 2 pig lung, 1 pig spleen, etc, etc, etc. So you make your pie. And now you do... what? Kill another pig, make another 5 pies? Go kill a cow? A sheep? Open a butcher shop?
Get bored and quit?
Because that's what will happen.
Exactly my point. Such quests are truly POINTLESS no matter what iteration. Also, if i'm hunting boar, let me take what I want...skin, livers, meat...and leave the rest. My ability to do this could be part of the skinning skill or cooking or synergy of the two. Whatever. But killing 50 spiders to get 4 eyeballs is beyond stupid/ rediculous.
Solution? Quit doing lame quests like this. You want me to kill Spiders to cut down their numbers? Fine....but random drops for body parts is stupid. If one of those guys has the key, then a random drop for that is understandable. But if I've killed every darn orc in the instance and it hasn't dropped...and I have to wait for respawn, thats also very stupid.
Solution = remove the grind effect. I saw your post about various hobbies and how they could seem like a grind to someone else. I understand. Painting miniatures is a "grind" of sorts. While I find painting mini-s a bit tedious, I did collect and paint some. The satisfaction for me was seeing them go from a flat single tone devoid of life, to a vibrant fully colored one...seeing my imagination and creativity pay off with each stroke.
Remove the grind by removing the level gap scenario. Instead, have levels indicate a finite improvement in skills and learning of new skills. A high level mage has a greater variety of skills and talents...but low level mage could still catch the high level off guard and defeat him. This is not possible even in my sacred "old style paper and pen rpg" Leveling still has the appeal of learning new skills, but because your level gap is so narrow, any zone in the vast world become a viable place to adventure...i'm not forced to adventure in darkshire because I'm level 25...and i can play with my friend who just started without rolling a new toon or sucking up all his XP cause I'm so high leveled.
4) your other arguement is purely loot driven. Forget anything else that could make a game more enjoyable. Its all about the loot. Its worth it to grind 2 minutes per orc x 500 orcs (aka several days later) for the chance he might drop a nice knife. NM the fact that I have some great elf buddies who are artisan craftsman and can make a glowing knife of orc slaying....oh, except I can't wield it until i'm level 65! WTF? Somehow, the knife is too leet for me to grip it. "...Its not a matter of where he grips it! a lvl 5 noob cannot wield a 5lb sword!" - monty python - with some artisic liberties.
I disagree. I think that it would be possible to bring a much higher degree of the P&P ethos to MMORPGs.
Again, the mechanic here is to maximize the time spent playing for every dollar spent on development. To run a business, you have to make that kind of decision. Just because a game style hasn't been tried, or a winning combination of that style hasn't been successful, doesn't mean that it cannot be done. It just means there is more risk, and more genius needed.
First off, I think there is a general idea that it is too expensive to make dynamic content and that procedural content is yucky. GM driven events will cause jealousy between realms and anger by those who were unable to participate. Enter years of flame wars here.
I think the creative community out there has shown astounding talent and willingness to add to their favorite community when permitted. Indeed, there are illegal wow servers that have been customized...so it could be said that people will do it, even if told they cannot! This is a vast resource of content that could be gleaned for the gems that will arise...
With the advances in AI and programming, I believe that it is not a stretch to be able to allow a world to change and have NPC's intelligent enough to reflect that local change. I'm not talking about phasing like WotLK. I mean, its different for everyone all the time...because....we kicked those kobolds out of our mine and now we are getting wealth and ore out of them...until a band of thieves takes up residence...etc. Heck, a lot of these events could be triggered by the opposite faction. Undead would have a vested interest in gathering the skeletons south of Stormwind and getting them to follow them on a seige on SW. Player driven content triggering AI response from the NPC kings/nations sounds awesome to me.
As a DM, I can easily keep a first level character from getting a +5 Vorpal Sword, no matter how much he whines that his brother is a master smith and I'm just being a meanie. In MMORPGs, you can't keep players from "helping" each other, and that means some sort of limiting mechanic on items. Likewise, as a DM, I can place Really Cool Items with great backstories and quests associated with them, perfectly tailored to each character's history and goals -- not possible in an MMORPG.
Why do you need to prevent a lvl 1 from having a vorpal blade +5? Because he would be overpowered? Then don't make vorpal blades +5...or if you do, and they are that powerful and valuable and sought after and RARE...then...make them valuable and sought after. A little AI goes a long way. Better watch your back noob, because there are lots of people - NPCs and non that would steal and or kill you for that weapon.
There are several other ways this can be accomplished. If he truly is a great friend of the elves (high faction) or has a friend who is an accomplished smith (crafting) then he has a connection to someone who can craft a high quality weapon. Awesome.
In WoW and every other crafting system i've played, it also follows the "grind" method of leveling. Make so many items of one level before you can make an item of a higher level. Rinse repeat. Somehow, making another sword from iron doesn't help me perfect my trade. Tell that to the folks who discovered folding steel blades. Anyway, this is another whole rant.
A true elven relic of value discovered by an adventurer could cause him to gain fame...wich in turn leads to the elves finding that he has one of their relics. There is only ONE of these in the world, and they want it back. Gain faction/fame for returning it or lose faction/gain infamy by keeping it anyway and earn their wrath.
ANYWAY. Lots of ways to keep vorpal blades from a noob, If thats needed, without having a "souldbind" and "level restriction"
These games were born of noble parents. Mind expanding games where fantasy was the rule and heros were in your midst...even then, a giant bat wouldn't drop or possess a wand of blazing fury.
Hah! You weren't around for the good ol' days or true Gygaxian/Hargravian high weirdness, it seems, where far stranger things than that happened on a regular basis.
A magical bat that can turn into a person, hence a hidden stash of items when kill the vampire Whatevers. You lose me at the "toast Golem".
Even a GM on crack wouldn't do such a thing...
I guess we had something better than crack back in my High School days (actually, crack didn't exist then, I don't think...), 'cause we did it all the time. Dude, you're talking about an era when BURNT TOAST GOLEMS were par for the course.
and yet, here we are with the bastardized, adulterated version of those games...and its par for the course!
Because, quite oddly, something that works for 1 DM and 4-6 players at a table doesn't scale to a server farm and 13 million people. How very, very, strange. Who would have imagined it?
They've followed a path of evolution that could have gone in any direction. Occam's razor (if correct) states that we're here at this point because its the most obvious answer. A dumbed down, simplified RPG-esque game that appeals to all and none that can draw them in for hours and years but never truly satisfy.
You've stated you played since 78 which is the year i was born. So your experience may trump mine. But ONLINE the progression goes like this.
1) P&P games - ultimate flexibility and real-time quest alteration/customization - yeah, its not online, but it is the starting point.
2) text based RPGs - Small and Large communities could level text based characters. No quest customization (unless a DM was on...which I did DM MUDs and did as much custom stuff as i could - was fun).
3) UO - Ultima is not a game I played, but it is a 2d game that started the MMO genre with graphics.
4) Everquest - started 3D graphics to the level where we almost were satisfied with the visual effects...enter a lot of complaining about grind, leveling etc.
4a) Neverwinter nights - virtual 3d and some GM type abilities.
4b) Diablo/Diablo 2 - virtual 3d and NO GM
5) WOW - some say "perfects" the MMORPG and the cartoon visual style ages well. Now that the visual graphics are very good, players crave more. AI in other games tells us we could have much smarter MOBS!
So in step 2 we lose the creativity, interactivity with the GM. Of course it was too hard at the time to program that in and we were just darn happy that we could role play on a pc and not have to get a group together. IT WAS ONLINE in the age of dial-up modems. But we still craved the group dynamic and a DM/GM. With the numbers game, levels, etc firmly entrenched in the online RPG genre, all the following generations have the same paradigm, built on the idea of previous generations and carefully crafted with the latest technology. Those who diverged, usually failed. Hence, we end up where we are now.
OFFLINE progression
1) Pen and Paper
2) ASCII dungeon crawlers - See ANGBAND (a lot of fun for the day). A step up in graphics from the pure text, but a step down in story and creativity of the world.
3) simple graphics - replace the symbols in ANGBAND with simple images.
4) Baldur's Gate/ Diablo single player - yummy graphics (for the time) and some story depending on the game. Little to no variation when replayed. No GM interaction.
5) Oblivion - still no GM but a well thought out story, nice graphics and customizable. "sandbox" style play allowing for adventure to any realm at any level and in essentially any order you wanted to. All the mobs are your level no matter what level you are. Gear = cool looks and more damage.
In this scenario there is more story - because it doesn't have the "repeatable" need of MMOs.
The point of this illustration is that in all cases, each level is built upon the successes of previous generations. We simply need more generations and technology...then we can return to the GM interaction...and I think it WILL happen.
It costs 50-150 million to make a modern MMORPG. To recoup that, you need people to play for months or years. To get people to play for months or years, you need to keep them on the treadmill chasing that +5 carrot. (Upgraded to a +6 carrot next level, of course.)
You think this isn't how it has to be? Put 50 million of your OWN dollars on the table and prove you're right. Or, hell, just describe to me a model which will keep me coming back, week after week, month after month, that isn't one form of grind or another -- and that hasn't been tried and failed.
I think I've been pretty descriptive in my answers.
1) I think the answer is less massive (as in no MMO, drop the massive part) so as to be more personal. This doesn't mean less players overall...it simply means less people in a realm.
2)either GM's who can alter events or a smart World AI that can generate random but meaningful events based on what players have done/are doing. Thats what a DM did anyway. With variation and personalization, they'll keep coming back. Even if its just to run on another server and roll a new toon to try another GM's storyline or see where that server's AI has taken them. The variation and feeling that what they have done has ACTUALLY altered events for them or their server will keep people there.
I also think that sites like wowhead ruin games. *sigh*
Currently not playing any MMOrpg -- Lvl 80 paladin WoW
Get rid of Leveling as we understand it today. How about levels that mean new skills and/or higher crits but not more overall health and damage output. This means that on day one i could play along side, and be useful in, a group of veterans. Their levels up means they have attacks/skills I don't....thats it.
This is a very good idea. After all, I enjoy leveling for the new skills which I can use - expanding the gameplay options and complexity, not to have my HP or mana go up.
It's only a partial fix, of course, as the skills you are lacking might well be required by the party, so you would still be left out, but it would be a big step in the right direction.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
The answer is simple - games aren't made to be fun anymore ; they are milking cows.
Why this is happening ? Because of mass consumption and how limited most of the population is. Most gamers don't want things to be fun ; they don't really now what fun is actually in terms of games.
I have almost 15 years of gaming behind me and I can say that the only thing that caught my attention in the last 5-6 years was the Warcraft 3 mod DotA. Why is that ? Because I had tremendous fun playing it with my friends.
Fun !
www.snotr.com/video/3355 ( I hope this isn't seen as advertisement - you can see this vid on almost every decent vids site )
This guy has a rather valid point and although not all his points are well suited for the discussion, the last part of the vid fits right in.
This is what I want from a game - fun. It is so simple.
I believe he's talking about flash games. There's no other way around it. First 10 minutes you have to captivate the player, you can't install a game. You can't download the client. That's flash right there buddy. In my game design 300 class. Our teacher had us using flash to make rapid prototypes of our game designs. It made perfect sense to me, flash was easy to use, really easy to make your design into reality. He said a flash game should try to stay under 1mb. And SHOULD NEVER be above 3. So there you go, you can get your entire game in your hands ready to go in the first ten minutes. Also most flash games seem to just "give you" everything in the first ten minutes also. Most of them barely last 20min. And you can keep going. Find a game, start playing move on. Very fast and very effecient.
it should've been titled "why is that i have to install game before i play it." It's not like other pc games do that. Is it? What about console games. I'm sure as hell that i don't have to get the game and let it load. Oh god no, that's completely impossible. Also you're talking about the first 10minutes of a box sales person. Oh really? You're telling me that when you drove to the store it took you less time than it normally takes to download a client. We're not talking about wow here. That thing's a beast of it's own. When you go to the store, it takes you how long to get the game you want? I know it normally takes me almost 1.5hrs to drive to the nearest electronics store and back. So i'm putting in a good solid 1.5-2hrs into driving to get the game. Then i have to install it. Oh god we have to install a game? Tell me when were mmos never required to be installed? Hell even runescape takes time to load. A good 5-10minutes if i'm not mistaken. Also you have to INSTALL jre to use it.
I honestly don't understand how you can not install an mmo and get everything you need from it. Sure some games make it alot easier on the player. One game that's really small and probably wont' ever get that much bigger is Regnum. They had a sort of GW ideology with their download client. You downloaded the very basic core items. Then as you were going into the world when you choose your character it started downloading all the assets from the starter area for that character. Then when you got into the game world, it slowly started downloading new things as you were doing your starter quests. It was downloading the next area and so on and so forth. But still that was a good 700MB download. If wow did this that'd be great for the download peopel that is. You only want to make a human. Well when you download the client since your disks are dead to the world it only downloads what you need as you need it.
All in all, this weeks article saddens me. I have never had to not install a program from a cd/download the client to play an mmo. Or for that matter any game.
Why aren't MMOGs more fun? Well in my opinion it is mostly because of the WoW effect.
It turned, almost, all MMORPGs into casual, linear, themepark MMORPGs which is accessible for everyone and where everyone can be at top. Ofcourse if everyone is at the top then really noone is at the top because top is relative to something lower.
Anyway, that mentality, to make everything easy and casual (which leads to linear themeparks) has sucked out all the fun of MMORPGs where as almost all of them were originally sandbox type. Heck the whole idea was that MMORPGs are sandbox by definition since you are supposed to live in a virtual world.
However Blizzard squashed that idea and now all MMORPGs are basically single player games with thousands of people running their own single player line along each other. Grinding quests, grinding mobs and grinding gear. No need to interact with other people unless for special purposes.
Blizzard turned caviar into a fast food burger and in the process destroyed the unique taste of caviar.
Its simple MMOS are not fun or exciting because there is no risk. Think of all the things the human race does for kicks, run with the bulls, sky diving, bungie jumping, ect ect. What happens if it goes wrong good chance you going to die or be F*cked for life. Why do people do these things cause they are exciting and subconciously are risky. So then how as a race are we expected to be excited by mmos when if you die you respawn as you were with a minor pissy negative to xp or stats that regens over a short time anyways. You get killed in pvp you dont even lose you gear anymore, its all super safe for the lil tard burgers that use mum and dads money to buy subscriptions. In my opinion until we go the way of perma death or death with a big penalty, and pvp where you actually lose something of importance to you, its going to be the same old grind die rinse repeat. THINK about it people we live for risk/reward make it risky hard and reward us the same we will come and bring our cash too.
I agree with you in principle but it needs to be balanced. If Bungy Jumping lead to you having a substantial risk of dying then 99.9% of people who does it now would not be anymore.
Likewise a death penalty, or other penalties, needs to be balanced and reasonable. Somewhere inbetween the virtual zero penalty of WoW and the massive penalty of Eve/Darkfall. It is a game after all and it should be fun, not frustrating.
3) UO - Ultima is not a game I played, but it is a 2d game that started the MMO genre
Sorry to inform you.. You are s bit incorrect here. There are two games that were the grandfather of almost all online games. LoK (Legends of Kesmai and the KOD (Kingdom of Drakkar) both of which you can still play. These games started as ascii games only on BBS and than ported over to the the very FIRST graphic games online. Thanks these two games for creating the idea of MMO online that Ultima Online than followed upon.
And KoD is the one I mentioned in my post above. If you want to know what started the MMO craze online than go play Drakkar though I hear it's been made easier than it used to be it's still one of the forefathers of all online games! It's popularity in the BBS days is what created the drive to put games online.
No one that was not gaming at this time knew the fun of playing online games.. talking to the creators directly in meetings.. in game and out of game! Giving opinions and finding out why something was not feasible and working out a compromise that would work! The day and age when the developers cared and you knew them by name personally! They even met at conventions if you had the money to go. Drakkar can be said to be one of the GREAT FOUNDERS of online games going way back to the unix days. An excerpt from the creator of Drakkar.
KoD Creator Posts: 956 Location: Joined Date: July 4 2002, 15:46 Brad Member of Administrators Replying to Topic 'Past Lives' was posted on: 09-13-03 23:02:24
Bah, rumors. Just to clear things up completely:
I am the sole creator of Realm which became Drakkar. Others have written scenarios, and helped maintain the game, but its my insanity.
I wrote the game in college, it was a center screen side scroller MMRPG like rogue. Then a friend turned me onto iok and i adopted the same symbol set as them (close), and moved the display window to the upper right.
The game was developed on a PDP11, and later ported to unix (still called REALM at the time).. There are still a couple original players online ( won't give names ) who played on the DISK BBS (where it ran)
I never worked for kesmai corp, or had even heard of the game until a friend turned me onto it while i was in college. Drakkar is not IOK, never was, never even took a similar development path other than the superficial stuff (think about the game styles, they are light years apart) (though i was heavily influenced by rogue, moria and IOK) (And LUVED iok by the way)
In college, I was contacted by MPGN to license the game, which they did, and produced a graphical frontend for it. There was no internet then.
I accepted, and we made a graphical frontend, put it up on MPGN, and I took a cut of the profits. "ben" was an employee of mpgn at the time, but was working on ANOTHER game mpgn was writing.
MPGN eventually dropped development of their game, and switched to mine. It grew and grew, etc.
MPGN then got a very, very early access line to what was then a newly broken off portion of milinet, called the internet. It was through C$S believe it or not.. So we grabbed it, and got a CLASS B internet address (if you can believe it).. And put drakkar up on it.. (hence it was the original, first, and only graphical MMRPG on the internet).
One day, Ben ("mirror") offered to "RUN" the game for me, and I accepted. He ran it for a couple years, until an unfortunate incident caused a breakup of that relationship.
About 10 years ago, MPGN purchased complete rights to drakkar from me, and took over management. I was a consultant (and programmer on other projects)
Many years later, MPGN merged with IEN, i left the company, drakkar died on the vine, and I swooped in a couple years ago and bought it back.
I sure hope that clears up all the rumors about where this all started
Hopefully this gives you some respect for great creators like this that imagined games online and I feel sad to say what has become of online games with there dumbed down cookie cutter mold play.
3) UO - Ultima is not a game I played, but it is a 2d game that started the MMO genre
Sorry to inform you.. You are s bit incorrect here. There are two games that were the grandfather of almost all online games. LoK (Legends of Kesmai and the KOD (Kingdom of Drakkar) both of which you can still play. These games started as ascii games only on BBS and than ported over to the the very FIRST graphic games online. Thanks these two games for creating the idea of MMO online that Ultima Online than followed upon.
And KoD is the one I mentioned in my post above. If you want to know what started the MMO craze online than go play Drakkar though I hear it's been made easier than it used to be it's still one of the forefathers of all online games! It's popularity in the BBS days is what created the drive to put games online.
Ultima Online was the second of the generally known graphical MMORPGs (Meridian was the first). Those you mention I have never heard of and I bet thats the same for 99% of the MMORPG player base.
And online game is not the same as a massively multiplayer online game. There have been online games long before MMORPGs were thought of.
"Why Aren't MMOOG's more fun?" Because everything is handed to you with minimal effort. Just think about a zo6 corvette, its going to be fun if your daddy buys it for you. However for the guy who busts his rear at work and saves for it makes plans to get one, and finally the day comes where he gets his zo6, its going to mean a hell of alot more to him as oposed to the dude who had his daddy buy him one. The dude who had his daddy buy it will be tired of it and want something new and different in a short period of time as where the one who worked for it for awhile will be in love with the car for years to come.
Unfortunately I doubt a large percentage of the population would even understand your point much less agree with it.
To me, its all about making connections with people and using the game to express yourself. If you play primarily for any other reason, you are in the wrong genre in my opinion. In which case, of course you aren't going to find it "fun".
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Because the no-talent half-wit Frauds that pass themselves off as high priced "Game Designers" these days couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.
2010 Game Designer Motto:
Form over Function,
Style over Substance,
Better to Look Good than to Be Good,
Image is Everything
Forget about QUALITY things like Storyline, or Character Development, or Depth of Gameplay, or Immersion, or Suspension of Disbelief, or Dynamic Tension, or any of the other Thousand-Year-Old-Standards that made stoytelling great - no, no, just crank out any old shyt with massive polycounts and n-dimensional shading and a gigantic Marketing budget.
"Why Aren't MMOOG's more fun?" Because everything is handed to you with minimal effort. Just think about a zo6 corvette, its going to be fun if your daddy buys it for you. However for the guy who busts his rear at work and saves for it makes plans to get one, and finally the day comes where he gets his zo6, its going to mean a hell of alot more to him as oposed to the dude who had his daddy buy him one. The dude who had his daddy buy it will be tired of it and want something new and different in a short period of time as where the one who worked for it for awhile will be in love with the car for years to come.
Warning...here I go again...LOL.
What was the best fun I have ever had in MMOs? Yep...the first year after launch of EQ1.
You had to carry food. You had to carry ammo. You had to recover your corpse. Getting "lost" was frightening. The snow in Everfrost was often so thick you couldn't see 20 feet. Engaging a "white" - equal to my level - was almost always fatal solo. There were many fewer quests and they were tough to complete. Exploration was difficult. You lost xp for dying. There were zones, lots of zoning. By the admitted design of the developers, just surviving generally took a group. And I am talking about level 10...not the endgame (shudder). You had to recover mana by sitting, blind, looking at a book. Lots of downtime. Travel was perilous and time consuming. The interface wasn't anywhere near as good as today's MMOs.
And at the time, it just seemed great.
I remember the first time I saw the tundra in EF. A bunch of lvl 6-7 barbarians invited me to a group. What are we fighing?
Calves. Oh, ok. Some guy takes off into the gloom. He's pulling. Sometime later "INC". And some time later I saw him running towards us across the plateau. And suddenly there it was, HUGE, RED... unbelieveable. I think one guy died and gave up, we had to recruit another. I was stunned. Absolutely amazing. And soon I was pulling and getting lost and losing my corpse and feeling horrible and pulling myself together and finishing my set of patchwork leather armor and getting a fletching kit and...
Was it the newness of true 3D? The forced grouping that led to making so many friends? The downtime that led to so much conversation? The fact that it was tougher than today's MMOs? All?
Don't get me wrong here. LOTRO, WOW, etc, are much better games, better graphics, way more quests, better loot, etc.
But I don' t think I will ever have that EQ1 experience again, unless it is in a completely new genre (which EQ1 was, in my opinion). The other games are pastimes. At THE TIME, however, EQ1 was different. It wasn't just enjoyable, it was amazing and I could hardly wait to play every night. When I played I cared a lot every minute what was going on.
Figure out why, you will know where "fun" comes from in an MMO. Figure out why there are so many people that have a horrible case of nostalgia for that buggy old game, EQ1. And weave in, that none of them can go back now and have that experience again.
In summary, it's really tough to make a good game. It's damn near impossible to make a great game. In any creative endeavor, "great" is a rare accident of unanticipated circumstances. It's NOT surprizing that MMOs aren't more fun. It should be surprizing, IMHO, that any of them are enjoyable at all.
Oh, and by the way...the first 10 minutes of EQ1...you've got to be kidding. Hours just to get online a nd updated....
Warning...here I go again...LOL. What was the best fun I have ever had in MMOs? Yep...the first year after launch of EQ1. You had to carry food. You had to carry ammo. You had to recover your corpse. Getting "lost" was frightening. The snow in Everfrost was often so thick you couldn't see 20 feet. Engaging a "white" - equal to my level - was almost always fatal solo. There were many fewer quests and they were tough to complete. Exploration was difficult. You lost xp for dying. There were zones, lots of zoning. By the admitted design of the developers, just surviving generally took a group. And I am talking about level 10...not the endgame (shudder). You had to recover mana by sitting, blind, looking at a book. Lots of downtime. Travel was perilous and time consuming. The interface wasn't anywhere near as good as today's MMOs. And at the time, it just seemed great. I remember the first time I saw the tundra in EF. A bunch of lvl 6-7 barbarians invited me to a group. What are we fighing? Calves. Oh, ok. Some guy takes off into the gloom. He's pulling. Sometime later "INC". And some time later I saw him running towards us across the plateau. And suddenly there it was, HUGE, RED... unbelieveable. I think one guy died and gave up, we had to recruit another. I was stunned. Absolutely amazing. And soon I was pulling and getting lost and losing my corpse and feeling horrible and pulling myself together and finishing my set of patchwork leather armor and getting a fletching kit and... Was it the newness of true 3D? The forced grouping that led to making so many friends? The downtime that led to so much conversation? The fact that it was tougher than today's MMOs? All? Don't get me wrong here. LOTRO, WOW, etc, are much better games, better graphics, way more quests, better loot, etc. But I don' t think I will ever have that EQ1 experience again, unless it is in a completely new genre (which EQ1 was, in my opinion). The other games are pastimes. At THE TIME, however, EQ1 was different. It wasn't just enjoyable, it was amazing and I could hardly wait to play every night. When I played I cared a lot every minute what was going on. Figure out why, you will know where "fun" comes from in an MMO. Figure out why there are so many people that have a horrible case of nostalgia for that buggy old game, EQ1. And weave in, that none of them can go back now and have that experience again. In summary, it's really tough to make a good game. It's damn near impossible to make a great game. In any creative endeavor, "great" is a rare accident of unanticipated circumstances. It's NOT surprizing that MMOs aren't more fun. It should be surprizing, IMHO, that any of them are enjoyable at all. Oh, and by the way...the first 10 minutes of EQ1...you've got to be kidding. Hours just to get online a nd updated....
I too remember those days in EF. The first time I saw a mammoth I nearly died. Damn you for bringing back such a vivid image. Damn you.
Personally, I think that mmos benefit when the developers step back, look at the content they offer, and ask themselves the question from the movie BIG, "what's fun about that?"
As an example, there is an early quest in WoW to kill 10 kobolds. This is about as generic a quest as there can be. In most games it would be bland and boring. But on this one, the kobolds have little candles on their heads (from being in a mine) and yell "you no take candle!' It's pretty funny stuff when you see it. By adding a little something extra , a bland quest becomes something entertaining.
Unfortunately, 99% of the time quests and other content don't get that something extra. Most people don't even read the text anymore and just grind away.
I think a lot of what makes mmos successful could be even more fun if there was just more follow through on the content design and less paint by numbers.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Unfortunately, 99% of the time quests and other content don't get that something extra. Most people don't even read the text anymore and just grind away.
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). I loved the old days when a quest giver would not always be obvious and that a quest could be given. They didn't have glowing markers over their heads. The only clue that there could be a quest happened when you talked to them. you would see a word or two in brackets [ ] You could then work through a lot of conversations until the guy stopped talking to you. the you had to figure out what to do. If ya read it it made sense. If you just typed in the [ ] words you were lost. That is until spoiler sites came out. Anyway that was fun to a lot of people. Would love to see a game do that again. Anyone that doesn't think that's fun has a lot of other choices out there right now. As far as I know no game not even EQ1 has this anymore.
I have played all of the main stream MMO's out since 2001 and I cant say I remember any of the themes of the quest lines that I finished beyon the first few levels when the game was new and exciting. I still remember quests in EQ1, even ones I never finished. I remember them because I had to learn them and spent weeks trying to get help to finish them in some cases. Anyone ever spent 2 or 3 weeks on a quest in the last 6 months? Hell any non-mentally challenged individual over the age of 6 could max out in levels in WoW or EQ2 faster then the time it took me to get to the end of my cleric epic in EQ. And I would say that that time on that one quest was far more fun then a speedy run to any games max level.
That kind of immersion would make MMO's fun again for me.
Unfortunately, 99% of the time quests and other content don't get that something extra. Most people don't even read the text anymore and just grind away.
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). (...)
I think that would be too harsh, especially for those who don't care or those who are levelling their 9th alt Just unchecking the "Instant Quest Text" option makes a world of difference.
Unfortunately, 99% of the time quests and other content don't get that something extra. Most people don't even read the text anymore and just grind away.
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). (...)
I think that would be too harsh, especially for those who don't care or those who are levelling their 9th alt Just unchecking the "Instant Quest Text" option makes a world of difference.
Right but what i am saying is that the harsh part is what makes it fun for some. It feels like you are really doing something. If you are on a 9th alt you have been playing long enough to know the quest well enough and dont need to read it most likely. My "fun" game would be like that. If its to harsh there are other games out now that someone could go to for the speed quest version that requires no reading except for the little hint in the corner of the screen keeping track of what you require to fill the quest.
Warning...here I go again...LOL. What was the best fun I have ever had in MMOs? Yep...the first year after launch of EQ1. ..
*Chuckles*
I think you just reminded a lot of us old timers about our earlier forays into MMO's. I remember the early days of Dark Age of Camelot. Me and my Minstrel had a blast once I got my drum and speed song. I actually ran my little butt from one end of the realm to other just to say I did it. Dieing the entire time.
I also remember spending time afterwards in the round table room singing (okay type singing) about my entire trip. I was actually hired like the roving minstrel I was by a new guild forming up. I ended up joining those fine folks and having a blast. Until game mechancis beat me out of the game and made it no longer fun. The role playing was fun, but the game itself wore on me.
To me that's the whole point. I play a game to have FUN. Now my deffinition is fun is different than other players' deffinitions and that's what developers have to figure out. Somewhere I guess there are people who love killing the 10 of every bloody beast in the forest to get some coin and some XP. Personally I had more fun mining asteroids in 0.0 space in Eve than any kill quest in WoW. Though I think the constant threat of being ganked had a lot to do with that.
Right now I see MMO's doing exactly what every other form of entertainment does. It does what everyone else that's making money does. WoW Clones, Maple Story clones, what have you we'll all just make the same bloody game because that's what "everyone" wants. Yet at the same time it's what everyone ALREADY HAS. The problem is figuring out what will be next. I've come up with a few game ideas myself and I'm sure you all have as well, the question is how do we get our ideas made? I mean we can't be any worse than anyone else?
Current Game: Asssasins Creed 2(PS3, Gamer Tag: Happy_Hubby) Current MMO: World of Warcraft and World of Tanks Former Subscribed MMO: Star Trek Online, Aion, WoW, Guild Wars, Eve Online, DAoC, City of Heroes, Shattered Galaxy, 10six. Tried: Too many to list
Comments
In general, if a game allows unlimited ability for one player to "affect" another, the majority will be controlled by the minority. While being constantly beaten, battered, and bruised is indeed fun for some people, such people would do better to just pay Mistress Cruella her 100.00/hour.
(125.00 an hour for the 'deluxe' treatment.)
This is true. However, there's two things to consider:
a)Even if you're not in a high-end raiding guild, you're only 'locked out' of a very small amount of content. Since Blizzard keeps 'downgrading' formerly high-end content as new, even-higher-end content comes out, people who have to rely on PUGs or small 'family' guilds can eventually go the raids, dungeons, etc, which you used to have to be uberleet to do.
b)Your ability to access, or not access, content in WoW is determined by developers who want to keep you as a customer (and thus do not wish to frustrate/limit you too much), not by other players who consider it "winning" if they make you quit or otherwise impede you. Basically, Blizzard (and most other MMORPGs) have performed a fairly complex calculation which boils down to "We need to have 'exclusive' content to attract the hard-core players who will be very long term subscribers, bring in huge guilds from other games, and provide a goal that all players can aspire to, the ultimate 'carrot'. How much of that can we have before the majority of players, who can't/won't see it, will feel ripped off and quit?" The success of WoW shows they've performed this calculation correctly. EQ1 catered too much to the high-end raiding guilds and basically locked out anyone who couldn't be part of a 70 person raid from the majority of content released in later expansions.
[qupte]Most games aren't wow. There will likely never be another wow. People forget that prior to wow games only needed a few hundred thousand to be wildly successful. Hell, WWII Online has been going for a decade on just 10k subscribers. EVE is a huge success. 300k subscribers and still growing. That population beats out UO, DAOC and AC. Comes close to EQ1 and EQ2 at their peaks. Not bad for only appealing to a very small percentage of the MMO market. Studios on multiple continents. A number of games in development, expanding into books, magazines, rumors of TV and Movies too. Successful indeed. You don't need to grab a huge market, just grab a small market and provide tons of content and keep growing(even at a slow pace) and you'll make money. Free expansions certainly help.[/quote]
EVE is an exceptional game in many, many, ways. It's something I'd probably be playing as my primary game if I had the time to commit to it, but, sadly, I don't. Also, much like WOW, I don't think there will be another EVE. The game market no longer allows "start small, grow slow".
Way back in Ye Olde Dawne Of Tyme, there were a good half-dozen competing home computer systems -- Apple, Commodore, Atari, TRS-80. You could introduce a new computer with a new OS and grab some decent market share. Over time, the market changed -- there's now Windows and *nix. (Mac OSX is a *nix variant, just to be clear I'm not forgetting it.) You can't introduce a new computer hardware platform with a custom OS now and hope to grab any market share. (You can turn the game around and do what Google is doing, however, which may be a major success and may be a hideous flop, I don't know.) Point is, as markets evolve, windows (no pun intended) close. And open. That's what makes things interesting. I could write two long essays, one arguing that WoW's dominance of the market has closed out competitors, one arguing that because WoW grew the market so much, grabbing even 1-5 percent of the now much larger market can still be profitable. Depending on what day you ask me, I'll argue one or the other.
This is true, but "We're not WoW!" isn't enough. There's reasons WoW is successful, and just being "not WoW" and ignoring those reasons is foolish. (About as foolish as not understand what makes WoW successful, and trying to copy it without understanding what you're copying.) EVE works in ways a more traditional MMORPG (i.e, elves, dwarves, orcs) couldn't. It is the only MMORPG I know of that is actually large enough that it's not really possible for any group of players, no matter how well organized, to control gameplay. (Compare to UO, when any halfway competent guild could basically lock the rest of the shard out of a dungeon by establishing themselves in the right place and exploiting server line bugs.) (EVE also has very large 'safe' zones and carefully gradiated levels of risk of exposure to PVP, something which people who want 'player driven content' tend to despise, because it means you can only gank n00bz by exploiting bugs and loopholes which are quickly fixed.)
Obviously, nothing lasts forever. I remember when Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase were the "standards" and Windows was a joke. (Hell, I remember Apple's "Welcome, IBM" ad!) There will be successful games beyond WoW, and eventually it will be running in maintenance mode on a few forgotten servers. However, just as WoW attained dominance by being, basically, a better Everquest than Everquest, I strongly suspect the "WoW killer" will be a better WoW than WoW -- not something radically different. I also believe that while there is a niche for games which promote a different style of gameplay, that will remain a small niche, and one where there is only room for one or two thriving games. Right now, EVE really has that niche sewn up and the competitors are also-rans, at best. UO is still tottering along, but it's radically different (so I'm told) from the "sandbox" it used to be. Shadowbane, I believe, has gone belly up. Darkfall has its fans, and claims to be growing, but I'm dubious. I can name a bunch of others, but that's like naming the dozen or so web browsers not called "Explorer", "Opera", or "Firefox". Sure, they exist and some people use them, but they're not really relevant.
Most MMORPGS these days seem to focus on combat solely as the source of player interaction. At their foundation they are one-dimensional. Go here, kill that. Or, engage these other player characters in combat for some meaningful/meaningless bauble. The rest of the "game" just centers on gearing your character to rend flesh in a more efficient and fantastical manner.
But, there are so many other ways in which characters/players can interact that, in my opinion, haven't been accessed or addressed in the same way as SWG did in the days before the NGE. Entertainers spending their time to dance/play and buff you at the same time. Doctors setting up shop to cure battle fatigue. Pure genius! Professions that you could enjoy, and not once have to engage in combat if that were your choice. And professions that were both sought out and valuable to all other players combat and crafter alike. Want a house, you can have one, just go ask the architect to build you one...again, pure genius in design.
Until the dependence on combat as the main source of social interaction is broken, I fear that not much of the 'fun' will return to the genre anytime soon. Create a world where people have options to choose their method of social interaction both within and outside of crossing swords and let them create their own fun.
Ok I haven't really seen a fun game since the old days of games like Drakkar. It created a NEED to help others.. for example as a paladin you could get the best armor early in the game by the first boss but as a Paladin you were way too weak to even fight the Red Dragon that the other classes. So the other classes helped you the Paladin to obtain your best armor so you can help out with the other bosses. Next mob was a turtle that gave a cloak so you go help out to get the cloak that everyone can wear but is the only gear those like Barbarians and Monks could wear for defense. And the mobs went on.. it required 2 or 3 healers healing a barbarian that was truely berserk.. the barb would have to go offscreen from everyone.. pump up berserk until he could barely click where he wanted to go and run back on screen HOPING not to kill anyone in the process and run into the den for the creature under attack.. The barbarian hit point tripled and strength quadrupled.. but their defense dropped so everyone would run in to give support to the barb.. healers healing because the BARBARIAN was a human pin cushion.. the mentalist if they had shielding would shield and the others all helped hit on the boss.. and the Barb was keeping pumped up to keep the boss on him and not the others.. it was cooperative play at it's best.
Now the game was interesting from the start.. as soon as you logged on and joined the pub.. you saw tables with avatars representing the others and you could if they did not lock the table listen in on the plans of big hunts and strategies to defeat the next boss.. it was fun.. though grinding was at a premium to buy hit points especially with the Vamps because they drained hit points. Gone is game play like this where it took many working toward the next goal to the point that PvP was never an issue because the challenge was to defeat the next boss and obtain the next gear for the next class.. who in turn will help than to be able to defeat the next boss.. growth was exciting and productive if it wasn't for the grinding for hit points.
Than you had games that did some things right like EQ1 that had camouflage, levitation, free fall, swimming under water for dungeons.. to only remove all that was unique and fun to do a cookie cutter mold removing the unique game play aspects EQ1 had.. Innovation keeps dying not innovating.. if it was innovating we would be seeing features like these in all games..
Think if game companies kept innovation.. the cooperative game play with it's pub tables for chat rooms, the unique game play like levitation, free fall, jumping, resurrection, underwater cities and dungeons, mobs that are dangerous but give great rewards like the vamps, fast and furious fighting, little resting with bandages, fast leveling, more interactive combat like Asheron's Call 1 had. The innovation would be to take the best of the games and keep expanding not dropping them. Abilities that would let you actually control the weather.. imagine a powerful mage causing a blizzard that hindered everyones view and travel, or tornado that caused anyone in the area to possibly get sucked up and discarded who knows where hurt from the fall. Random weather in game that caused this to happen.. their would be excitement and fear in traveling not knowing if it is going to be safe or not. Travel forms and travel methods like Champions Online. Expand on what is current and not limit.. not remove.. but add.. Realms vs Realms and not player vs player but realms like WoW intended.
Guess you just have to take a long hard look at the reasons you play these games in the first place. Those elements are still there. They're just harder to find beneath all the muck.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Its simple MMOS are not fun or exciting because there is no risk. Think of all the things the human race does for kicks, run with the bulls, sky diving, bungie jumping, ect ect. What happens if it goes wrong good chance you going to die or be F*cked for life. Why do people do these things cause they are exciting and subconciously are risky. So then how as a race are we expected to be excited by mmos when if you die you respawn as you were with a minor pissy negative to xp or stats that regens over a short time anyways. You get killed in pvp you dont even lose you gear anymore, its all super safe for the lil tard burgers that use mum and dads money to buy subscriptions. In my opinion until we go the way of perma death or death with a big penalty, and pvp where you actually lose something of importance to you, its going to be the same old grind die rinse repeat. THINK about it people we live for risk/reward make it risky hard and reward us the same we will come and bring our cash too.
MMOs have declined in fun factor for me, because they try to be too many things. So many games try to do the solo/group/raid thing. Jack of all trades master of none. WAR was like this. Everything ended up being bland. EQ2 is like this. So many group things to do, but there are no groups.
What is the point in having group content when not enough people play the game? It ends up creating animosity for the poor guy trying to level. He sees so much he could be doing, but instead his only option is to grind out on mobs.
Games need to pick a playstyle, and master it. They shouldn't be delving into all types. Not to say that games shouldn't have options. Just use most of your resources for what makes your game fun. You can't point to a game nowadays, and say "This game really excels in this area." Why? Too much emphasis on being everything.
I'm just gonna agree with nicopherous here, sure there's alot more with a similiar view point but i can be bothered goin through every comment.
The way MMO's are is basically just the way its done- I'm a wow player myself and if you take wow as an example (specifically in how it has expanded so much that it actually enters the main stream).
Blizzard may well have done all starting areas they way in which they did the deathknight. It was amazing when we first got loaded into it, but you know after that... your still gonna have those daft "I need you to kill 100 boars for eyes, but not all boars have eyes.. P.S I'm gonna ask you to go back for their feet (which some, again, don't have) then I'm gonna need you to kill the king of the boars (you can't miss him he's that really hard boar you've killed 30 times already)...but only after I have the eyes".
Thankfully In wrath they have become a tad bit more creative in how they do quests and how they lead into each other, but you still get the odd "FFS YOU D*CK I killed that frickin thing five times now... you saw me I was just over there!".
Sure it would be amazing to have the DK starting experience all the way to 80, but if you think about it that wouldn't really be more fun. You will just expect the next thing to be even more mega... then the thing after that... and so on. You say that creating exciting content is just down to money (I'm sure you don't mean it as simplistically as that) but it really isn't, mean take a moment to think about what is required in ways of talent to carry that off.
What really needs to be done, bring a lot more focus on creating engaging environments to play in. I love warcraft, I've played City of heroes for a bit, but really after you've jumped the 3rd tall building its kinda boring. I played some other thing I cant remember... had like a orcy side and a human side, looked amazing but neither side interacted unless you went into a specific area... but can't remember what it was (maybe thats why). Star wars galaxies...just kind of ...meh...Lord of the Rings was good, computer couldn't handle it all that well though- I think it cried a little when i tried to run conan and warhammer. Unfortunately I really liked EvE but they updated the computer req's for it, just as I got going.
What Warcraft has is just a atmosphere to it (that is a personal view, I am entitled to that). At end-game, sure we itch for the next expansion and there is still the same old thing to do countless times, but its not usually a grind, maybe thats the guild chat or my prefrence for a pvp server- the threat of gettin annihilated just works for me. We have a continous storyline (ish) thats been going since my mate first shown me warcraft (original) and I was used to playing on an Atari (I imagine I'd feel the same about warhammer, and probably Conan- still think about that sex scene with that witch the got thrown on the fire..).
New MMO's have more of a problem with creating atmosphere than excitement, because lets be honest warcraft didn't get where it is today by attracting gamers. It attracted non-gamers, and then kept them playing. Even in the crawl that was vanilla WoW. I haven't played a free, or pay, MMO that has matched it.
Quit dictating that things have to take a long time.
This equation is definitely built on the premise that the max dollars to time spent on development ratio is to force players to take as much time as possible and still be enjoyable.
While it works pretty well for the first time seeing an area, it completely fails when leveling an alt. I don't mind spending time on quests if it means something and is interesting. The first time I had to kill piggies was memorable. I needed a pie to convince a little kid to fess up. The 500 times after that, i skipped those quests. It got to the point where I skipped every random drop quest...even while leveling the first time. Some were parts of important chains and I was forced to do them, if I wanted to progress.
Instead, how about quests that make a difference (impossible in the current 'persistent world' model). The world has to be persistent because it takes too much effort to write AI that tells quest givers to assign quests based on whats currently going on.
Take a game like call of duty. A lvl 1 private can duel and win a lvl 55 general. Just because hes level 55 doesn't make him untouchable. All content becames accessable at all levels if we drop the level gap paradigm and do something fresh.
Increasing spawn rate doesn't fix or return UO to the intent of the original idea. Increasing spawn rate only catered to the hoarding effect. They could have expired food products after a time rendering hoarding such things a complete waste. Where do they keep 100s of stacks of meat and what were the consequences. In a pen and paper game, they couldn't haul that around and they wouldn't! Not unless they wanted to set up shop as a butcher.
After you've killed 20 thieves in the forest, and you've tried and failed to carry 20 sets of leather and cloth armor and their weapons, you'll realize pretty quickly that its pointless to fill your pockets with crap you can't carry. Once again, if a game isn't loot driven then you wouldn't care to pick up 20 sets of gray quality crap...but if I wanted to disrobe them and carry what i could, and try to come back before they were looted by someone else (or de-spawned) then let me. Maybe I'm poor and stuff they're wearing is better than what I have. Perhaps everything is bloody and cut up. Fine. But at least I had to option to look.
Exactly my point. Such quests are truly POINTLESS no matter what iteration. Also, if i'm hunting boar, let me take what I want...skin, livers, meat...and leave the rest. My ability to do this could be part of the skinning skill or cooking or synergy of the two. Whatever. But killing 50 spiders to get 4 eyeballs is beyond stupid/ rediculous.
Solution? Quit doing lame quests like this. You want me to kill Spiders to cut down their numbers? Fine....but random drops for body parts is stupid. If one of those guys has the key, then a random drop for that is understandable. But if I've killed every darn orc in the instance and it hasn't dropped...and I have to wait for respawn, thats also very stupid.
Solution = remove the grind effect. I saw your post about various hobbies and how they could seem like a grind to someone else. I understand. Painting miniatures is a "grind" of sorts. While I find painting mini-s a bit tedious, I did collect and paint some. The satisfaction for me was seeing them go from a flat single tone devoid of life, to a vibrant fully colored one...seeing my imagination and creativity pay off with each stroke.
Remove the grind by removing the level gap scenario. Instead, have levels indicate a finite improvement in skills and learning of new skills. A high level mage has a greater variety of skills and talents...but low level mage could still catch the high level off guard and defeat him. This is not possible even in my sacred "old style paper and pen rpg" Leveling still has the appeal of learning new skills, but because your level gap is so narrow, any zone in the vast world become a viable place to adventure...i'm not forced to adventure in darkshire because I'm level 25...and i can play with my friend who just started without rolling a new toon or sucking up all his XP cause I'm so high leveled.
I disagree. I think that it would be possible to bring a much higher degree of the P&P ethos to MMORPGs.
Again, the mechanic here is to maximize the time spent playing for every dollar spent on development. To run a business, you have to make that kind of decision. Just because a game style hasn't been tried, or a winning combination of that style hasn't been successful, doesn't mean that it cannot be done. It just means there is more risk, and more genius needed.
First off, I think there is a general idea that it is too expensive to make dynamic content and that procedural content is yucky. GM driven events will cause jealousy between realms and anger by those who were unable to participate. Enter years of flame wars here.
I think the creative community out there has shown astounding talent and willingness to add to their favorite community when permitted. Indeed, there are illegal wow servers that have been customized...so it could be said that people will do it, even if told they cannot! This is a vast resource of content that could be gleaned for the gems that will arise...
With the advances in AI and programming, I believe that it is not a stretch to be able to allow a world to change and have NPC's intelligent enough to reflect that local change. I'm not talking about phasing like WotLK. I mean, its different for everyone all the time...because....we kicked those kobolds out of our mine and now we are getting wealth and ore out of them...until a band of thieves takes up residence...etc. Heck, a lot of these events could be triggered by the opposite faction. Undead would have a vested interest in gathering the skeletons south of Stormwind and getting them to follow them on a seige on SW. Player driven content triggering AI response from the NPC kings/nations sounds awesome to me.
Why do you need to prevent a lvl 1 from having a vorpal blade +5? Because he would be overpowered? Then don't make vorpal blades +5...or if you do, and they are that powerful and valuable and sought after and RARE...then...make them valuable and sought after. A little AI goes a long way. Better watch your back noob, because there are lots of people - NPCs and non that would steal and or kill you for that weapon.
There are several other ways this can be accomplished. If he truly is a great friend of the elves (high faction) or has a friend who is an accomplished smith (crafting) then he has a connection to someone who can craft a high quality weapon. Awesome.
In WoW and every other crafting system i've played, it also follows the "grind" method of leveling. Make so many items of one level before you can make an item of a higher level. Rinse repeat. Somehow, making another sword from iron doesn't help me perfect my trade. Tell that to the folks who discovered folding steel blades. Anyway, this is another whole rant.
A true elven relic of value discovered by an adventurer could cause him to gain fame...wich in turn leads to the elves finding that he has one of their relics. There is only ONE of these in the world, and they want it back. Gain faction/fame for returning it or lose faction/gain infamy by keeping it anyway and earn their wrath.
ANYWAY. Lots of ways to keep vorpal blades from a noob, If thats needed, without having a "souldbind" and "level restriction"
A magical bat that can turn into a person, hence a hidden stash of items when kill the vampire
Whatevers. You lose me at the "toast Golem".
They've followed a path of evolution that could have gone in any direction. Occam's razor (if correct) states that we're here at this point because its the most obvious answer. A dumbed down, simplified RPG-esque game that appeals to all and none that can draw them in for hours and years but never truly satisfy.
You've stated you played since 78 which is the year i was born. So your experience may trump mine. But ONLINE the progression goes like this.
1) P&P games - ultimate flexibility and real-time quest alteration/customization - yeah, its not online, but it is the starting point.
2) text based RPGs - Small and Large communities could level text based characters. No quest customization (unless a DM was on...which I did DM MUDs and did as much custom stuff as i could - was fun).
3) UO - Ultima is not a game I played, but it is a 2d game that started the MMO genre with graphics.
4) Everquest - started 3D graphics to the level where we almost were satisfied with the visual effects...enter a lot of complaining about grind, leveling etc.
4a) Neverwinter nights - virtual 3d and some GM type abilities.
4b) Diablo/Diablo 2 - virtual 3d and NO GM
5) WOW - some say "perfects" the MMORPG and the cartoon visual style ages well. Now that the visual graphics are very good, players crave more. AI in other games tells us we could have much smarter MOBS!
So in step 2 we lose the creativity, interactivity with the GM. Of course it was too hard at the time to program that in and we were just darn happy that we could role play on a pc and not have to get a group together. IT WAS ONLINE in the age of dial-up modems. But we still craved the group dynamic and a DM/GM. With the numbers game, levels, etc firmly entrenched in the online RPG genre, all the following generations have the same paradigm, built on the idea of previous generations and carefully crafted with the latest technology. Those who diverged, usually failed. Hence, we end up where we are now.
OFFLINE progression
1) Pen and Paper
2) ASCII dungeon crawlers - See ANGBAND (a lot of fun for the day). A step up in graphics from the pure text, but a step down in story and creativity of the world.
3) simple graphics - replace the symbols in ANGBAND with simple images.
4) Baldur's Gate/ Diablo single player - yummy graphics (for the time) and some story depending on the game. Little to no variation when replayed. No GM interaction.
5) Oblivion - still no GM but a well thought out story, nice graphics and customizable. "sandbox" style play allowing for adventure to any realm at any level and in essentially any order you wanted to. All the mobs are your level no matter what level you are. Gear = cool looks and more damage.
In this scenario there is more story - because it doesn't have the "repeatable" need of MMOs.
The point of this illustration is that in all cases, each level is built upon the successes of previous generations. We simply need more generations and technology...then we can return to the GM interaction...and I think it WILL happen.
I think I've been pretty descriptive in my answers.
1) I think the answer is less massive (as in no MMO, drop the massive part) so as to be more personal. This doesn't mean less players overall...it simply means less people in a realm.
2)either GM's who can alter events or a smart World AI that can generate random but meaningful events based on what players have done/are doing. Thats what a DM did anyway. With variation and personalization, they'll keep coming back. Even if its just to run on another server and roll a new toon to try another GM's storyline or see where that server's AI has taken them. The variation and feeling that what they have done has ACTUALLY altered events for them or their server will keep people there.
I also think that sites like wowhead ruin games. *sigh*
Currently not playing any MMOrpg --
Lvl 80 paladin WoW
This is a very good idea. After all, I enjoy leveling for the new skills which I can use - expanding the gameplay options and complexity, not to have my HP or mana go up.
It's only a partial fix, of course, as the skills you are lacking might well be required by the party, so you would still be left out, but it would be a big step in the right direction.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
The answer is simple - games aren't made to be fun anymore ; they are milking cows.
Why this is happening ? Because of mass consumption and how limited most of the population is. Most gamers don't want things to be fun ; they don't really now what fun is actually in terms of games.
I have almost 15 years of gaming behind me and I can say that the only thing that caught my attention in the last 5-6 years was the Warcraft 3 mod DotA. Why is that ? Because I had tremendous fun playing it with my friends.
Fun !
www.snotr.com/video/3355 ( I hope this isn't seen as advertisement - you can see this vid on almost every decent vids site )
This guy has a rather valid point and although not all his points are well suited for the discussion, the last part of the vid fits right in.
This is what I want from a game - fun. It is so simple.
I believe he's talking about flash games. There's no other way around it. First 10 minutes you have to captivate the player, you can't install a game. You can't download the client. That's flash right there buddy. In my game design 300 class. Our teacher had us using flash to make rapid prototypes of our game designs. It made perfect sense to me, flash was easy to use, really easy to make your design into reality. He said a flash game should try to stay under 1mb. And SHOULD NEVER be above 3. So there you go, you can get your entire game in your hands ready to go in the first ten minutes. Also most flash games seem to just "give you" everything in the first ten minutes also. Most of them barely last 20min. And you can keep going. Find a game, start playing move on. Very fast and very effecient.
it should've been titled "why is that i have to install game before i play it." It's not like other pc games do that. Is it? What about console games. I'm sure as hell that i don't have to get the game and let it load. Oh god no, that's completely impossible. Also you're talking about the first 10minutes of a box sales person. Oh really? You're telling me that when you drove to the store it took you less time than it normally takes to download a client. We're not talking about wow here. That thing's a beast of it's own. When you go to the store, it takes you how long to get the game you want? I know it normally takes me almost 1.5hrs to drive to the nearest electronics store and back. So i'm putting in a good solid 1.5-2hrs into driving to get the game. Then i have to install it. Oh god we have to install a game? Tell me when were mmos never required to be installed? Hell even runescape takes time to load. A good 5-10minutes if i'm not mistaken. Also you have to INSTALL jre to use it.
I honestly don't understand how you can not install an mmo and get everything you need from it. Sure some games make it alot easier on the player. One game that's really small and probably wont' ever get that much bigger is Regnum. They had a sort of GW ideology with their download client. You downloaded the very basic core items. Then as you were going into the world when you choose your character it started downloading all the assets from the starter area for that character. Then when you got into the game world, it slowly started downloading new things as you were doing your starter quests. It was downloading the next area and so on and so forth. But still that was a good 700MB download. If wow did this that'd be great for the download peopel that is. You only want to make a human. Well when you download the client since your disks are dead to the world it only downloads what you need as you need it.
All in all, this weeks article saddens me. I have never had to not install a program from a cd/download the client to play an mmo. Or for that matter any game.
Why aren't MMOGs more fun? Well in my opinion it is mostly because of the WoW effect.
It turned, almost, all MMORPGs into casual, linear, themepark MMORPGs which is accessible for everyone and where everyone can be at top. Ofcourse if everyone is at the top then really noone is at the top because top is relative to something lower.
Anyway, that mentality, to make everything easy and casual (which leads to linear themeparks) has sucked out all the fun of MMORPGs where as almost all of them were originally sandbox type. Heck the whole idea was that MMORPGs are sandbox by definition since you are supposed to live in a virtual world.
However Blizzard squashed that idea and now all MMORPGs are basically single player games with thousands of people running their own single player line along each other. Grinding quests, grinding mobs and grinding gear. No need to interact with other people unless for special purposes.
Blizzard turned caviar into a fast food burger and in the process destroyed the unique taste of caviar.
My gaming blog
I agree with you in principle but it needs to be balanced. If Bungy Jumping lead to you having a substantial risk of dying then 99.9% of people who does it now would not be anymore.
Likewise a death penalty, or other penalties, needs to be balanced and reasonable. Somewhere inbetween the virtual zero penalty of WoW and the massive penalty of Eve/Darkfall. It is a game after all and it should be fun, not frustrating.
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Sorry to inform you.. You are s bit incorrect here. There are two games that were the grandfather of almost all online games. LoK (Legends of Kesmai and the KOD (Kingdom of Drakkar) both of which you can still play. These games started as ascii games only on BBS and than ported over to the the very FIRST graphic games online. Thanks these two games for creating the idea of MMO online that Ultima Online than followed upon.
And KoD is the one I mentioned in my post above. If you want to know what started the MMO craze online than go play Drakkar though I hear it's been made easier than it used to be it's still one of the forefathers of all online games! It's popularity in the BBS days is what created the drive to put games online.
For some interesting game facts.
No one that was not gaming at this time knew the fun of playing online games.. talking to the creators directly in meetings.. in game and out of game! Giving opinions and finding out why something was not feasible and working out a compromise that would work! The day and age when the developers cared and you knew them by name personally! They even met at conventions if you had the money to go. Drakkar can be said to be one of the GREAT FOUNDERS of online games going way back to the unix days. An excerpt from the creator of Drakkar.
Hopefully this gives you some respect for great creators like this that imagined games online and I feel sad to say what has become of online games with there dumbed down cookie cutter mold play.
Sorry to inform you.. You are s bit incorrect here. There are two games that were the grandfather of almost all online games. LoK (Legends of Kesmai and the KOD (Kingdom of Drakkar) both of which you can still play. These games started as ascii games only on BBS and than ported over to the the very FIRST graphic games online. Thanks these two games for creating the idea of MMO online that Ultima Online than followed upon.
And KoD is the one I mentioned in my post above. If you want to know what started the MMO craze online than go play Drakkar though I hear it's been made easier than it used to be it's still one of the forefathers of all online games! It's popularity in the BBS days is what created the drive to put games online.
Ultima Online was the second of the generally known graphical MMORPGs (Meridian was the first). Those you mention I have never heard of and I bet thats the same for 99% of the MMORPG player base.
And online game is not the same as a massively multiplayer online game. There have been online games long before MMORPGs were thought of.
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Unfortunately I doubt a large percentage of the population would even understand your point much less agree with it.
To me, its all about making connections with people and using the game to express yourself. If you play primarily for any other reason, you are in the wrong genre in my opinion. In which case, of course you aren't going to find it "fun".
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Why Aren't MMOGs More Fun?
Because the no-talent half-wit Frauds that pass themselves off as high priced "Game Designers" these days couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.
2010 Game Designer Motto:
Form over Function,
Style over Substance,
Better to Look Good than to Be Good,
Image is Everything
Forget about QUALITY things like Storyline, or Character Development, or Depth of Gameplay, or Immersion, or Suspension of Disbelief, or Dynamic Tension, or any of the other Thousand-Year-Old-Standards that made stoytelling great - no, no, just crank out any old shyt with massive polycounts and n-dimensional shading and a gigantic Marketing budget.
Warning...here I go again...LOL.
What was the best fun I have ever had in MMOs? Yep...the first year after launch of EQ1.
You had to carry food. You had to carry ammo. You had to recover your corpse. Getting "lost" was frightening. The snow in Everfrost was often so thick you couldn't see 20 feet. Engaging a "white" - equal to my level - was almost always fatal solo. There were many fewer quests and they were tough to complete. Exploration was difficult. You lost xp for dying. There were zones, lots of zoning. By the admitted design of the developers, just surviving generally took a group. And I am talking about level 10...not the endgame (shudder). You had to recover mana by sitting, blind, looking at a book. Lots of downtime. Travel was perilous and time consuming. The interface wasn't anywhere near as good as today's MMOs.
And at the time, it just seemed great.
I remember the first time I saw the tundra in EF. A bunch of lvl 6-7 barbarians invited me to a group. What are we fighing?
Calves. Oh, ok. Some guy takes off into the gloom. He's pulling. Sometime later "INC". And some time later I saw him running towards us across the plateau. And suddenly there it was, HUGE, RED... unbelieveable. I think one guy died and gave up, we had to recruit another. I was stunned. Absolutely amazing. And soon I was pulling and getting lost and losing my corpse and feeling horrible and pulling myself together and finishing my set of patchwork leather armor and getting a fletching kit and...
Was it the newness of true 3D? The forced grouping that led to making so many friends? The downtime that led to so much conversation? The fact that it was tougher than today's MMOs? All?
Don't get me wrong here. LOTRO, WOW, etc, are much better games, better graphics, way more quests, better loot, etc.
But I don' t think I will ever have that EQ1 experience again, unless it is in a completely new genre (which EQ1 was, in my opinion). The other games are pastimes. At THE TIME, however, EQ1 was different. It wasn't just enjoyable, it was amazing and I could hardly wait to play every night. When I played I cared a lot every minute what was going on.
Figure out why, you will know where "fun" comes from in an MMO. Figure out why there are so many people that have a horrible case of nostalgia for that buggy old game, EQ1. And weave in, that none of them can go back now and have that experience again.
In summary, it's really tough to make a good game. It's damn near impossible to make a great game. In any creative endeavor, "great" is a rare accident of unanticipated circumstances. It's NOT surprizing that MMOs aren't more fun. It should be surprizing, IMHO, that any of them are enjoyable at all.
Oh, and by the way...the first 10 minutes of EQ1...you've got to be kidding. Hours just to get online a nd updated....
---------------------------
Rose-lipped maidens,
Light-foot lads...
I too remember those days in EF. The first time I saw a mammoth I nearly died. Damn you for bringing back such a vivid image. Damn you.
Personally, I think that mmos benefit when the developers step back, look at the content they offer, and ask themselves the question from the movie BIG, "what's fun about that?"
As an example, there is an early quest in WoW to kill 10 kobolds. This is about as generic a quest as there can be. In most games it would be bland and boring. But on this one, the kobolds have little candles on their heads (from being in a mine) and yell "you no take candle!' It's pretty funny stuff when you see it. By adding a little something extra , a bland quest becomes something entertaining.
Unfortunately, 99% of the time quests and other content don't get that something extra. Most people don't even read the text anymore and just grind away.
I think a lot of what makes mmos successful could be even more fun if there was just more follow through on the content design and less paint by numbers.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). I loved the old days when a quest giver would not always be obvious and that a quest could be given. They didn't have glowing markers over their heads. The only clue that there could be a quest happened when you talked to them. you would see a word or two in brackets [ ] You could then work through a lot of conversations until the guy stopped talking to you. the you had to figure out what to do. If ya read it it made sense. If you just typed in the [ ] words you were lost. That is until spoiler sites came out. Anyway that was fun to a lot of people. Would love to see a game do that again. Anyone that doesn't think that's fun has a lot of other choices out there right now. As far as I know no game not even EQ1 has this anymore.
I have played all of the main stream MMO's out since 2001 and I cant say I remember any of the themes of the quest lines that I finished beyon the first few levels when the game was new and exciting. I still remember quests in EQ1, even ones I never finished. I remember them because I had to learn them and spent weeks trying to get help to finish them in some cases. Anyone ever spent 2 or 3 weeks on a quest in the last 6 months? Hell any non-mentally challenged individual over the age of 6 could max out in levels in WoW or EQ2 faster then the time it took me to get to the end of my cleric epic in EQ. And I would say that that time on that one quest was far more fun then a speedy run to any games max level.
That kind of immersion would make MMO's fun again for me.
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). (...)
I think that would be too harsh, especially for those who don't care or those who are levelling their 9th alt
Just unchecking the "Instant Quest Text" option makes a world of difference.
I think that one way to change that aspect of the game would be do eliminate quest journals. If you want to keep notes on a quest write it down yourself. That would make you read it and understand it (hopefully). (...)
I think that would be too harsh, especially for those who don't care or those who are levelling their 9th alt
Just unchecking the "Instant Quest Text" option makes a world of difference.
Right but what i am saying is that the harsh part is what makes it fun for some. It feels like you are really doing something. If you are on a 9th alt you have been playing long enough to know the quest well enough and dont need to read it most likely. My "fun" game would be like that. If its to harsh there are other games out now that someone could go to for the speed quest version that requires no reading except for the little hint in the corner of the screen keeping track of what you require to fill the quest.
*Chuckles*
I think you just reminded a lot of us old timers about our earlier forays into MMO's. I remember the early days of Dark Age of Camelot. Me and my Minstrel had a blast once I got my drum and speed song. I actually ran my little butt from one end of the realm to other just to say I did it. Dieing the entire time.
I also remember spending time afterwards in the round table room singing (okay type singing) about my entire trip. I was actually hired like the roving minstrel I was by a new guild forming up. I ended up joining those fine folks and having a blast. Until game mechancis beat me out of the game and made it no longer fun. The role playing was fun, but the game itself wore on me.
To me that's the whole point. I play a game to have FUN. Now my deffinition is fun is different than other players' deffinitions and that's what developers have to figure out. Somewhere I guess there are people who love killing the 10 of every bloody beast in the forest to get some coin and some XP. Personally I had more fun mining asteroids in 0.0 space in Eve than any kill quest in WoW. Though I think the constant threat of being ganked had a lot to do with that.
Right now I see MMO's doing exactly what every other form of entertainment does. It does what everyone else that's making money does. WoW Clones, Maple Story clones, what have you we'll all just make the same bloody game because that's what "everyone" wants. Yet at the same time it's what everyone ALREADY HAS. The problem is figuring out what will be next. I've come up with a few game ideas myself and I'm sure you all have as well, the question is how do we get our ideas made? I mean we can't be any worse than anyone else?
Current Game: Asssasins Creed 2(PS3, Gamer Tag: Happy_Hubby)
Current MMO: World of Warcraft and World of Tanks
Former Subscribed MMO: Star Trek Online, Aion, WoW, Guild Wars, Eve Online, DAoC, City of Heroes, Shattered Galaxy, 10six.
Tried: Too many to list