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My Ideal MMO - Similar to Old EQ - Here Is Why
deadline527
Member Posts: 38
No item levels - This made it so people who worked harder got better gear. If you and some friends are only level 30, but take the risk and go to a level 35 place and kill the mob, you can actually wear the gear. This lets people not be so pressured into leveling constantly and instead just enjoy the game.
Twinking - The solution to a group based game play for solo players. As the population gets better gear, the old gear gets filtered down through the system to the lower players. This allows them over time to ease the content without changing it since the players will be better equipped. This allows a solo person to kill what may have taken 3 people a few months ago. As the game population reaches higher levels, this would allow new players to come in and still be able to play without being pressured so much to find a full group, and instead can get by with a few less people.
Death penalty - If you're doing something to get a better item that you can use, there has to be risk. The risk is necessary. If you're one of the people who complains about it, TAKE LESS RISK! Its there to reward people who take chances, but by no means is hindering your game play. It forces you to make intelligent decisions about what you do, as well as to make sure you're group is doing the same. Good players are rewarded not only through items, but by word of mouth and future groups knowing they are a good player.
Role Based Classes - Not able to do everything. This is what we need. Who wants to play a game where every character can do everything? That totally defeats the purpose of having classes, unless of course its a classless game like UO. By giving people individual roles, you MUST rely on your group members and the community to help you out. No getting around it. It creates the kind of atmosphere the MMOs are lacking these days. Remember the whole server knowing you could CC 5+ mobs no problem? It was HARD, and people recognized the skill it took since they rely on you to do your job.
No instances - Instances create an overabundance of gear so that everybody and their kids can have it without trying. When you put effort into getting something, it makes it a lot more worth it. Finally finding a mob spawned that you havent seen in two weeks was an amazing feeling. Being able to be grouped deep in a dungeon, get into trouble, and have another group bail you out was something that also encouraged community. Also, the reason they had to help is because the mobs were not soloable, hence it took TEAMWORK!
No "elite" mobs - ALL mobs should be one kind! The kind you can solo, but definitely cannot duo. Ones where if its equal to your level, you have to worry about dying if you screw up, get resisted too much, or just plain have bad luck. Plenty of people were able to solo fine in everquest, nobody every complained. Sure some classes were horrible at it, but thats how it SHOULD be. Not everybody should be able to do everything.
//
I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more and will be adding a bunch later, but for now this is some of the things I think games these days should be trying to achieve. A game that has community effort, friendships, and risk. A game that you dont have to worry about getting a certain level just to wear an item - if you can get it, you can use it. This allows people to take more risk, when their is risk, aka death penalty. Hopefully one day we will get a game that replicates some of this stuff, but until then, we're stuck in the solofest MMO world, where everybody wants everything with no risk.
Comments
Original post definitely seems to word his features oddly (in terms of stating a feature and claiming it solves something unrelated.) Also he understandably focuses on the advantages without covering the substantial disadvantages behind some of these decisions (many of which are the reason games commonly differ from his proposal.)
Bear in mind none of these are insurmountable issues, but the net result of them would keep such a game firmly in the "niche" realm.
Friends Required. Many of these suggestions basically say "you're screwed" to anyone who casually tries to enjoy the game. Basically you let the Socially Connected twink the crap out of their characters with non-soulbinding non-level-restricted gear, and leave the casual players with nothing (even a less casual player who invests equal time, effort, and skill into the game won't have a hope of competing with the guy who got a full set of gear from his friends and farmed a badass sword from a max-level mob in his friends' group.)
A secondary result of this is a lot more begging. When gameplay revolves around hand-me-downs, a lot more begging for hand-me-downs will happen.
Death Penalty. Existing death penalties already discourage me from grouping with bad players. The lack of progression and wasted time is penalty enough. Since you avoid specifics regarding death penalty, I'll pretend you approve of the typical death penalty most games have.
Role-based Classes. Er, so what does WOW have if not role-based classes where you rely on the healer to heal, the tank to tank, and the DPS to DPS? I've run more dungeons in the last few days than anything, and nothing makes a run fall apart faster than a few weak players failing to play their role.
It seems like you're after deep Class Design, which I'd agree is important. Optimal class design is accessible, yet with a depth that allows skilled players to truly be impressive. You very often see accessibility and sometimes see depth, but it's rare for a game to have both (it's rare enough for a MMORPG to have depth to it's class/combat design.)
Elite Mobs. The quote "The kind you can solo, but definitely cannot duo," is backwards or something.
As long as boss mobs exist, I'd agree with the idea that even-level mobs should generally be fairly challenging -- although I'd lean towards them being fairly challenging for the average player (meaning they would be easy for the skilled player.) Constantly reminding bad players that they suck (by killing them unless they fight lower-level mobs) isn't really necessary. These players are already struggling to do well without the game being a jerk to them.
The real trick is to make it worthwhile to fight higher level stuff, and not make the mistake of some games where the "sweet spot" for optimal rewards means you have to fight dull, unchallenging mobs.
Instances. You assume instances are responsible for creating an overabundance of gear, but it's entirely up to creature design really. If a non-instanced game world is blanketed in fast-spawning bosses which drop gear, players will have an overabundance of gear. If an instanced 60-min dungeon has 1 boss which drops 1 item and the dungeon has a 1-week cooldown, there will be a huge shortage of gear. So it has nothing to do with instancing vs. non-instancing.
A shortage of gear might cripple a game's Accomplishment vs. Reward structure, if there isn't some other type of reward being dished out with similar regularity.
The statement "kids can have it without trying" should always be true of something in a game. It makes no sense to design a game where a subsection of your audience cannot have fun -- providing fun is the purpose of games. So if you have a WOW-like system where only the skilled players get the best gear, that's great. But if you're talking about a system where there's no (or very limited) progression for players who aren't skilled, then you're talking about crippling your game's fun factor for a great deal of people.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
As someone who played EQ from around the time of Kunark to around the time of Luclin, I agree with many of the OP's points, particularly the death penalty (assuming you're asking for a harsher, xp loss kind of death penalty instead of a minimal gold penalty via repair bill and slight time loss via running back to your corpse while invisible to other mobs with increased run speed with the corpse clearly marked on your mini-map; although honestly I could do without the corpse runs. I stopped playing a couple characters altogether back in EQ because I died in a place I couldn't make it back to my body and didn't want to make my friends take 3 hours to run over there and get it for me. An xp penalty and a return to a "bind point" in a city is enough. Maybe an xp penalty and a repair bill.)
I would disagree with your point about instances though. Sure, it felt amazing to get that item from the named mob that you'd been camping / tracking for two weeks... but that's because it felt so unbelievably horrible to sit there and camp it for so damn long. It feels amazing to eat ramen noodles after having nothing whatsoever to eat for 3 days straight, but you can be damn sure I won't be purposely missing meals just for that feeling. And I think Axehilt has a very good point about twinking being unfair if you are casual or not socially connected within the game.
"In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[2]" (Wikipedia.org, 8-24-09)
The best way to deal with trolls:
http://www.angelfire.com/space/usenet/ [IGNORE THEM, THEY JUST WANT ATTENTION!]
While I definitely agree with the fact it would make it sort of a "niche" game as you say, but wouldn't you rather have a game that does the things MMORPGs are built around well? Instead of adding so much fluff and trivial cookie cutter content and quests its too watered down to enjoy.
If WoW would have instituted a tougher death penalty, got rid of "elite" mobs and just made them all tough, and made the classes a bit deeper I bet it would have appealed to both sides. This would have created situations where you really, really do not want to die, while also having that risk in more then just boss encounters. So much of the world you can just run through no matter if the mobs are the same level since they are so weak. There is no risk most of the time. If all the level 80 mobs were harder, it would make many aspects of the game much more challenging and rewarding.
Risk vs Reward needs to be brought back. It was the reason we played, the accomplishments and just general feeling of kicking ass after a tough fight.
Some of my best memories of EQ were in Guk in my 20s. There was no focus on getting to end game. It was all about seeing whats the hardest thing you can kill to get the best loot and experience. From level 1 to Max was always a challenge. Not like the kid with 9 level 80 characters in WoW thinking he accomplished something.
mm after thinking about the instance thing and the issue you pointed out .
vanilla wow was nice!can it be done again if the amount of player is the size of wow one server!
the answer is no!let imagine that blizzard implement all i ve been hammering for a while now
imagine blizzard implement dx11 ,64 bit and yes event donnybrook at cataclysm with all those techno
do i believe wow can be played open world like it was in vanilla wow.
im sorry to say that probably not !the techno i talk about would raise wintergrasp number from 350 to probably 1000 or maybe 1500
it would probably raise arena from 5 to 50
etc but im honest in saying unless the game suck a lot there is no way to have full open world
that being said those techno are still needed because now the number are so low in those instance player are plainly bored
if mmo make did implement those techno i mentionned their instance number of player would be high enough to be very interesting as for the rest you mentionned it mostly small detail fairly easy to correct trough patch
but rise number of player in any instance ,map ,phaze or whatever naming scheme a mmo maker want to use
is very hard even with dx11,donnybrook and 64 bit it woul rise the total amount of player only in the first k maybe 2 k max
per map,phaze etc but at those number of player nobody would complain even if fight are still instanced
as long as the big epic fight are in the 1000 everybody will feel they have a massive multiplayer unlike now we feel
like we had massive in vanilla wow and now its only a multiplayer game.and thats a huge lost thats for sure
we just cant have open world anymore,but it doesnt mean mmo maker cant raise the amount of player in for exemple wintergrasp or other big pvp fight.yes they can the techno is there and by doing it multiserver very easy to fill those instance too
There are some great points here. The last few points, though, I dont know...but to be completely honest, I hardly read them--so its just as well! Good post!
I loved everything about old school evercrack.
*NO MAPS- made me feel like i knew the world, i was in it, and it was real!
*CAN USE EVERYTHING IF IT FITS- I like getting gear and crap and hooking my alts up.. how is it not fare? I earned all this stuff so i should be able to hook my alts up without level restrictions. But i can see how a gnome couldnt fit into a breastplate an ogre used haha. Last thing is there was alllways people to group with because everyone wanted to hook up and play with there alts!
*KILL anything, and everthing kills you- I just like the fact that you could run up and kill the banker and then all the guards would chace you around the city. Some didnt like this but whatever wait a couple few mins for the banker to respawn . Oh and tell new people to press A to talk to npc haha.
*LANGUAGE- that was great to have to learn another language lol. 2 races spamming random crap to learn the language...was fun to me.
Well i just liked the whole game really ,its about trash now.
I still play level 85 mage drinal server- Murduh
drbaltazar said: "it would probably raise arena from 5 to 50"
Spamming a larger player capacity doesn't automatically make a game better.
And you really don't understand the design behind Arenas if you think they'd ever increase player counts. 10-man is the highest you'd ever see, and I doubt they'd even do that.
deadline527 said: " but wouldn't you rather have a game that does the things MMORPGs are built around well?"
All I care about is if the game is fun. I don't get hung up on whether a game is "MMO" or not (although I definitely play MMOs more than any other genre.)
No MMORPG really achieves the potential of what MMOs do well imo. Only Planetside (MMOFPS) really took massive gameplay and implemented in a fun/enjoyable way.
But MMORPGs capitalize on strenghts other than massive gameplay -- they're still plenty fun, but (for good reasons) not because they're truly "massive" games.
deadline527: "This would have created situations where you really, really do not want to die, while also having that risk in more then just boss encounters."
The problem is players play games for fun, not to be threatened.
Challenge simply needs to be possible. Not mandated. When the optimal rate of XP involves fighting easy even-level mobs (WOW), challenge isn't feasible -- you could challenge yourself, but you'd actually be hurting your progression.
CoX handles this much better, by offering substantially better rewards for killing mobs tougher than you: the optimal rate of progression is attained by kililng mobs much higher level than you with extremely challenging gameplay.
That's the optimal setup. Even-level mobs are rather easy, but it's the +5 (levels above you) or higher mobs that give you the really good rewards. This avoids making the game into the bully who says "You suck ass at this game" and then wonders why he has no friends (aka subscribers,) while simultaneously offering veteran players worthwhile challenges -- and actually rewarding them for it.
deadline527: "So much of the world you can just run through no matter if the mobs are the same level since they are so weak."
I think the main issue here is avoiding aggro radii isn't a particularly interesting game...so why make it a big point of failure?
deadline527: "Risk vs Reward needs to be brought back."
Agreed, but it doesn't necessitate being aforementioned game-bully. Instead, you leave the newbies their easy even-level mobs, and you reward the veterans for killing much higher-level mobs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
EQ was by far my favorite MMO and I played it for well over 5 years, but the OP seriously needs to come into this century.
No item levels - In most MMOs if you fight level 35 MOBs in the game when you are 5 or more levels lower you'll get resisted/do so little damage that you won't have a chance to kill it, no matter how good you are. This included EQ with most red conned MOBs. The only thing no item levels would promote is having a high level run you through a dungeon and you loot the boss monster. Imagine a level 1 running around with level 100 items. I'm guessing your game doesn't have any sort of PvP either, because that would make PvP really unfair.
Twinking - Mostly same complaints as above. You'll have a level 1 running around with level 100 items making PvP very unfair. Top it off with having nothing instanced and you'll have people rolling on rare boss spawn gear for their alts. Gear doesn't trickle down very fast, a new player is still not going to have enough gold to buy twink gear from a higher level player (especially since there are no instances and loot will likely be rare). There are much better solutions for dealing with a lack of people for new players to play with like a mentoring, level sync, or apprenticeship system.
Death Penalty - Maybe if it's somewhere in between EQ's where you could easily lose a day's worth of effort and the current standard set by games like AoC and Warhammer. I think death penalties haven't been harsh enough lately, there really is no risk in dying in new MMOs. Death should never be so light that it's actually beneficial to die (in WoW and AoC you could kill your character for some fast travel with barely any noticable penalty). I actually think EQ II's (current) and WoW's death penalty is a pretty fair medium.
Role Based Classes - I'd actually like to switch my role on occassion without having to reroll a new character. I'm personally in favor of skill based systems or an option to change jobs (like FFXI or DOMO). I don't see why you need to bog someone down into a single role. Give players options!
No Instances - God no. This just promotes spawn camping. It's not fun sitting in one spot all day hoping for rare spawns to spawn. It's also not fun not being able to do anything because all the content was taken. Do you remember the huge lists for certain spawn camps in EQ1? Having to wait 3 hours to get into a Guk Executioner group or Highpass Hold leveling group? I do think MMOs nowadays could do with little less instancing. Again I'd like to see a happy medium.
No "elite" MOBs - Well in EQ there were definitely elite MOBs. Raid bosses for instance. Every MOB each had it's own difficulty and the "con" was only a judge of how well you could actually hit the thing (higher conned MOBs dodged and took less damage as well as resisted more...). Just because they weren't specifically labeled elite doesn't mean there weren't. Why do you think the terms underconned and overconned were invented and some dungeons were prefered over others due to the sheer amount of underconned MOBs (Seb, Velk's, etc.). It would be pretty boring if ever MOB was the same difficulty. No raid content? No large group content?
Weight! lets not forget weight.
OP, you can still sub to EQ. Thousands are subbed to EQ right now.
Sure, it's dying. But it's a very slow death. EQ's subscription numbers are close to EQ2's
I'm afraid playing the current EQ is as close as you'll get.
The times have changed, adapt or find a new hobby.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Last time i checked it out for nostalgias sake, the world (except for level 50+) was empty.
All thats left is raiding. And thats no game at all.