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Challenging MMOs
Gabby-air
Member UncommonPosts: 3,440
So I was reading a thread where someone mentioned wow players growing up and playing "hard" games and it had me thinking which games I actually found hard and besides EVE there is literally none and I personally have played pretty much every MMO free or p2p. A lot of people say EQ2 is for grow ups while wow is for kids but to tell you the truth, EQ2 isn't really that hard at all or any game for that matter. When I play games like ninja gaiden or say demons souls, then I realize just how easy MMOs are yet people complain about wow being easy when there isn't that big of a difference between all the games at all. Does anyone else feel that MMOs as a whole really aren't "hard" at all, and people confuse features of other games like character building as hard?
Comments
WoW has HC 25 LK
does that count?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Well, for what it's worth, I found Darkfall to be hard. With that being said, I'm not great at manual aiming andI was playing mostly with a 360 controller while laying in bed.
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Like you, I think only Eve stands out as a complex, intricate game at this time. Other MMOs aren't even remotely difficult, though some of them fool the noobs into thinking mindless grinding of mobs = challenge. MMOs are made simple because a vast amount of players simply want to look cool and uber five minutes after character creation, and they'll happily pay through the nose to do it.
"Let the levels come easy and you have a happy customer who'll stay subscribed" is the motto for MMO companies.
Games on the first place are supposed to be fun, hard ? That's depends how imparied are your skills to operate mouse and keyboard. In 99 % of MMos you don't need to be precise about it either.
I always laugh when people say that a game is hard, because it requires from you "dedication" and "a lot of hard work".
The only MMOs I would call challenging are games which are FFA and full loot, the most challenging on the market are probably EVE and Darkfall. First one requires a bit more brain, the second one mad FPS skills.
Some have harsh death penalty and people like to call that hard.
Something takes a long time, people can call that hard too.
Some games while not hard, have few certain aspect which are hard. For example have 2500 arena ratting in Wow. It basically means you are the top 1 percentile of all the arena combat in wow.
Hard is a relative term. Is anything in a mmo truly challenging? Not usually. Is it easy to keep playing when it will take you a year to reach level 99 and another year to become an acceptable crafter, and one more year to max out your combat and crafting? Well, it's not challenging, but it's certainly not easy and requires dedication. That basically makes it "hard" to achieve all that you want to achieve.
So to sum up, mmos aren't hard because they're challenging, they're hard because it takes a lot of time and dedication to succeed and conquer the game.
Hmm that's a good point and I guess true, most people do confuse time with difficulty. In my opinion a boss that takes a lot of careful planning and very careful attacks dropping a good weapon 100% of the time is better than other games where you have to just keep killing a fairly easy boss millions of time hoping that he would drop your gear.
EQ1 was challenging. The death penalty, the pulls, entire dungeons coming down on you, the travel time, the faction aggro, super roaming 1 hit monsters, having to look at your spell book and see nothing to know when something was going to attack you, no hp regen, night time was actually dark, gear was was actually tough to aquire, leveling took forever, debuffs that could leave you crippled, charming monsters that would then cause you to lose control of your character and get pulled deep into a dungeon. Plenty of challenge heh
A game is only as challenging as the player makes it.
EVE is ridiculously easy if you never try any of the harder stuff. In turn WoW can be incredibly hard if you try to challenge yourself. If you are just lazy then any game will be incredibly easy since you only do the easiest content and don;t put any efort into it.
Guild Wars has hard mode. It was quite hard back in the day but they eased it up when people didn't like it. Now you can do PvE in either easy or hard mode.
DDO had some challenging dungeons aswell when u ramped up the difficulty.
EDIT: Both forces you to start over if you fail.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
What is hard in Eve, if I may ask?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Yes, these things and many others. Nowadays people want easy games. But for ego's sake they want to believe that their easy games are just as challenging as the old ones. It's funny to those of us who actually played the older ones. Also, watch them scream with indignation if you suggest a newer game should have some of the features that made the old games hard.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Eve is hardly challenging, it's just time intensive. With enough time you can amass a stupid amount of wealth to replace anything you lose be it through pvp or otherwise. Doesn't sound very challenging. I don't think that MMORPGs are made to be challenging, they're made to be "fun" so that you'll keep playing and not rage. Games like Zelda are more challenging but most people resort to looking up guides rendering the challenge pointless.
Are we in a "catch 22" now? Newer gamers wanted easier to conquer games in connect the dots fashion. Now they are seeing that they are bored with it and looking for something different. But will they ever accept greater difficulties of this nature?
Once upon a time....
Out of the mouth of babes..... Sorry Eve is far too complex for you to understand it, so you have to come here to show your ignorance.
Eve is without doubt the most complex MMO out there. You can spend years learning all the game has to offer. Yes you can play the game without learning all the intricacies but you will then be reliant on others to tell you how to do things all the time.
Don't be rude Ozmodan. You're not special for playing Eve nor is Eve all that special either.
In many ways Eve is complex for the sake of being complex: learning skills have nothing positive to offer the game, many modules and ships are hardly ever used etc... -You may see 10 different bullets you can load to your weapon, but I see only 2 that are actually usable.
Your illusion is further enhanced by the fact that the game is poorly documented, filled with bugs which players must learn to live with, has an insufficient tutorial and inefficient, unresponsive and uninformative user-interface. In other words, it is not user-friendly and it is hard to learn. That does not equal challenge - that's poor design.
As for real challenge. The amount of co-operation and teamwork is equal to any other PvP MMO out there: Where Eve wins in the amount of challenge in preparing for a fight, it loses in the actual combat which is simpler and quicker than in other games.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Depending on the definition of "Challenging"...
I remember enjoying how hard it was to level in Everquest 1 back in the day. Admittadly, I think the reason I enjoyed it was simply because groups would farm xp in popular locations (Karnors, I think that was a popular one?) and it really seemed to foster relationships. Necros and bards could solo, but for the most part the rest found grind groups and slowly made their way to 55 or whatever the cap was.
I don't think a pure grind is a good idea nowadays, but I wish there was a way to simulate that feeling.
EVE is the only game I'm playing now, and some residual UO. UO was pretty challenging and fun back in the day.
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FFXI is the only "hard" game left i'd say. The original EQ (pre luclin/PoP) was also pretty tough, probably the hardest mmo to have been made between dangerous and absurd travel times, extremely harsh dealth penalties, and pretty dangerous dungeons/mobs. The game is now incredibly easy now sadly.
Eve is for sure complex, but not hard. It's just a learning curve issue, once you know how the game works and what you want to do, it's just a matter of putting some time into your goals, which can be very simple goals if you want them to be., and even then you can play the game completely solo and relaxed-like if you want to. That's the great thing about a sandbox. :P
XI isn't anywhere near as complex obviously, but it's "hard" in that mobs will slaughter you in a heartbeat, and progression might as well be next to impossible without a group/friends.
The current batch of mmo's stated to be released are all easy-mode, very unlikely we'll ever see a mmo for players who enjoy a challenge anytime soon.
XIV seemed pretty close to what i consider a hard game, but it does support solo play, and while it is much slower than group play, you can still progress solo, thus it just takes time and not exactly what i consider effort. Course I will have to wait for the game to come out before my opinon on this is solid. :P
I'm finding Fallen Earth a bit difficult (though still quite fun). Maybe if my sub included a month's supply of ADD medication, I could figure out how to keep my inventory organized and things would go much smoother!
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A player who enjoys challenges will find them in any decently designed game. However, since the new MMOs support a wide range of playstyles, if you want a challenge that fits your playstyle, you will have to work at finding it. If you just want challenges spoon fed to you then you will be disappointed
Why does supporting soloing mean it's not "hard"? All these people are saying that the massive grind in EQ1 was "hard" but honestly that's just time consuming. Things that take a lot of time aren't necessarily hard and things that are fast aren't necessarily easy either. More to the point, my point that is, is that anyone can group up and go spawn camp monster X until even the code is thinking "Why o why o why" and your brain is a paste. It is however much harder to carefully pull a critter that's X levels above you and watch you respective health bars be whittled away. So... have your ranger huck an arrow at something that'll charge him thus allowing you all to zerg it and beat it to death, or a single warrior feinting, rushing and retreating, until he manages to grab the aggro of a single beast then trying his best to kill it before it kills him? When I play a game I don't want to be forced to type "LFG" and go grind for three days. I don't want to be penalized with groups and grinds for wanting to play the game. The point of a game isn't to absorb your life with grinding it's to give you a fun and memorable experience.
I'm not sure if I've been 100% coherent so just a little example of what I think of when I see people being anti solo: There are 7 people in a town. Six are in a group together while the seventh is by her onesies but they all just killed a troll. The group took it down in a few seconds while the soloer took a full two minutes and most of her pots. The group is mocking her because she didn't do it "the hard way" or "the right way." Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn't to me. I can understand where you're coming from in that it would be silly to have a game where any Tom, Dick, or Harry can walk into a cave and kill the boss but where's the fun in having all the creatures be so immensly hard to kill that it forces you into a set playstyle? Sure battles should be hard but they shouldn't ALL have to be something that you spend 10 minutes planning for.
EDIT: My spacebar is being sticky so I had to seperate some words. :P