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General: Fighting Talk: New vs Old MMOs
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The lines have been drawn and MMORPG.com's Adam Tingle is ready to sound the battle cry in his latest Fighting Words column. This time, Adam pits old MMORPGs against new MMORPGs. How much do shiny sparkly graphics matter when compared to huge expansive worlds and massive factional battles? Find out what Adam think and then, as always, give us your thoughts!
If you are a long-standing veteran of the MMORPG genre, chances are you have a story like mine. For years I have pined for something to take my attention like EverQuest did in 1999; friends would tell me to move on, show me newer and more attractive MMORPGs. It didn’t work. Oh sure I have had a few flings here and there: a short-term relationship with World of Warcraft and a close call with Eve Online, but nothing has really come close to Norrath and its charms.
Read more Fighting Talk: Old vs New MMOs.
Comments
Please stop with these... why do you always provide equal weight to the categories?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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Looking good so far, except for the last portion of the new player experience.
While yes, it was more difficult in many of the old games as a newbie, and a lot of them didn't offer much help in the ways of a tutorial, not all of the oldschool MMOs suffered from this.
Ultima Online had a 'newbie trial' area that taught players how the basics of the game worked. Furthermore, the general setup of the advancement system itself did not inherently penalize you from making mistakes in character creation, because you always had the potenntial to drop skills and stats in favor of others, with a little work of course.
And then on the other side, with newer games... not all of them offer much in the ways of a tutorial, and the ones that do, often leave the player just as, if not more, confused as when they started. Part of this issue is due to certain newer games have very un-intuative game mechanics that are simply inherently a PITA to understand.
IMO it should be 4/10 for old games and 8/10 for new games for the new player experience.
It's not a matter of old vs new so much as a matter of your first game vs games that follow it. The first game you really get into colors a lot of your ideas and attitudes about later games and lets be honest, when something is fresh and new its more interesting and exciting, I think i'm sitting around ~40-50 mmo games since legends of kesmai and the newness is gone... lok was a great game in its time, eq1 was a great game in its time, starting in either compared to what came before was innovative and fresh... realistically there hasn't been a ton of innovation since eq1... just a lot of polish.
Shadus
Being a new player in older MMOs wasnt really that hard. It probably wasnt someting an 8 year old could do, but if youre average teenager couldnt figure out the controls and how to do things then that person was probably taking special-ed classes anyway. Old MMOs were brutal, to be true. But such brutality lent newer players the experience of gathering together a bunch of tough guys to fight on your behalf, and through them getting quite a bit more than the pile of logs you lost previously. :-)
As an aside, I think I have found the last 2003 MMO gem, and its still valid today. The potentially expensive, but ridiculously deep game of Entropia Universe is my latest MMO love. Of all the games Ive played, including Darkfall, this one comes the closest to old UO or Asheron's Call. Surprised? I was.
To get an idea of what Im talking about check out the latest release of Entropia Times, a player created online publication dedicated to this game.
Laudanum - Romance. Revenge. Revolution.
Crappy, petty people breed and raise crappy, petty kids.
Good overall, I disagree with the last area though. Back in the day, you had to be half masochistic (sp?) to play MMOs. The newbie expirience of the old games didn't hold your hand and thus, unlike today, once you get 20 or so, you don't feel lost. I can distinctly remember in WoW, after I finished the Barrens at 28, the rest of the game was rather bland and boring. Alot of the same type of quests, just different monsters to kill, items to retrieve. In DAoC, however, I played all the way to 41-42 and thought, "This is tough leveling, Thank you Sir! May I have another!"
I guess that's why I had 10 or so servers on WoW full of level 1-30 characters. If based on fun factor, the newer games win like you have have it. As for setting you up for whats ahead, they fail miserably.
You hit the nail on the head on character creation. The newer MMOs are all crappy at this (i'd give them a lower number personally). There might be more options for looks and what not, but with only 4-10 classes, you're stuck in a role you might not want. I liked DAoC and EQ for the 50 million different classes, and UO for the infinite number of classes you could be. I hate the cookie cutter feel of today's games, it's got to be my number 1 gripe.
This is a total biased comparison. Most of the things you say aren't even true. For example.
"Linear is the word that comes to mind when describing the worlds of newer games."
Ok just because you don't get that same feeling you had with your first game doesnt make any other game linear and have no immersion.
To be honest everybody's first MMO is more than likely be their best experience ever.
I have been playing MMOs for ages and while I'd like to say that the older one's were generally better, I wonder how much nostalgia effects my judgement.
Steam: Neph
A few things I have noted from "old school" to new.
The community is not what it was. By that the new generation of gamers seem ask what is in it for me?
I cannot count the number of time we camped Rage Fire (I think that was her name) for the priest epic drop. As a non=priest why did I spent countless nights waiting for that turd to spawn and drop the bit that was needed? Because my friends needed me there. It doesn't seem to me people will go out of their way to help people even guildies if there is nothing "in it" for them.
Makes me feel like the old man yelling at the kids to get of my lawn...
Interesting and it's hard for me to comment on the points made because by the articles breakdown I came in at the tail of the old school, and I didn't go backwards. SwG was my first mmo and from there everyother one I played was released atleast a year later, but I can attest SWG newbie system fit that archaic description given by the writer, it was pretty brutal as I remember it. And I think it maybe did add some to the immersion but what the problem is now I think I don't have the patience for many of the "old school" design practices. I really don't want to have to find things on my own, and that's not to say that I don't explore I just do it when I want to and feel I have the time to.
Gaming for me is like my wife with her books I'm a highly story driven individual so I prefer some story designed around the world I'm playing in and much like her and a good book sometimes I want to get on with it as fast as possible, sometimes she reads her favorite books over and over again like I sometimes play my favorite games over and over again.
Maybe one day when I'm getting ready to retire I'd feel I have the time to invest in alot of what people consider to be "sandbox" which is an old school rallying call where devs provide you with a world with boundaries character rules and leave you on your own but that's just not my style right now as I have too many other things to do.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Well at least the new MMOs are improved over old ones. Imagine if the score was reversed. All those MMO investors would be pulling the hair out of their heads. We spend millions of dollars and we can't even improve upon decade old games??
I think it all comes down to whatever game got you into MMORPGs in the first place. The first one we become addicted to is usually always the one that no game can compare to ever again. For me, it was Ultima Online. I played that game for over 4 years and I had more fun in it than I did in any game since. I have never been able to find another MMO that I enjoyed to that extent...
I think we all have distorted memories of our first MMOs because they were new and exciting to us then. They had a feeling of immersion and depth that no other games had ever provided before. But they were not necessarily better games. We just remember them that way.
No.
If anyone wants to really know about the comparison of new to old games... do this:
(1) Load up and play something like starcraft 3 or Dragon Age. Play it through.
(2) Load up and play something like Wizardry, or Might and Magic (The RPG not the Turn Based game)
Now I loved many of the titles from before. However, after playing modern games, there is no way that I want to go back to many of the titles that came before. Old School MMOs were very typically grind fests which had you WASTE, yes I mean WASTE your time doing very trivial things. While it might be more realistic, it's also not the hallmark of an enjoyable game. There is a reason that the population of the genre is growing. It's that the games are more enjoyable and less like work.
40 minute travel times? Why?
Originally it was to mask spartan content so that people could not blow through it too quickly. The developers wanted you to prolong your subs. It wasn't immersion or any other romantic ideals. Simply a way to slow people down from finishing the limited things to do.
Progress has been phenominal in game design and MMOs are no exception. I would not want to go back at all. I'll just sit and look back with rose colored glasses thank you very much.
This is a bogus argument. Asheron's Call had long travel times. Why? Because it was a virtual world, with content all over the place. Ultima Online had long travel times. Why? In order to provide the player with random content, both from other players and monsters. Again it was a virtual world.
I think MMO's today have lost the entire virtual world concept which is relatively open ended and instead embraced the game scope concept where there is a start and a finish. Yes the genre is growing because of it, but I think what people are getting at here is that the genre is growing away from the concepts that originally made it appealing in the first place.
It is no longer virtual reality that is being sought by many games. This is what old farts like me who were around at the beginning wanted, and the next game to improve on the virtual reality aspect will be the game we play.
Laudanum - Romance. Revenge. Revolution.
Crappy, petty people breed and raise crappy, petty kids.
I am older gamer and I remember most all those games, and the old games do hold a special place in my gaming life, pre wow games had a magic to them that was lost, to me after wow and the market was overwhelmed with so many mmo's based on the same thing, after wow to me mmo's have lost that magic, became shollow and easy, thats not to say there are some good games out there, but the community is not the same,there is a level of rudeness we never had in the past, I read some research that says the average mmo player stays in one game for about 5 to 7 months, when I play I stay for years, if there is anything from the past that I long for is an mmo that can keep me for years.. I am still in contact with friends I made online years ago since 1997, met a few of them in rl. but times are changing and so is the face of the western mmo, we now have free to play subs with microtransactions, I have adapted to the new ways, but in some ways the new things are not really an improvement.. to me..
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I think the main thing old MMOs have over new MMOs is polish. The games that have been out for only a few months typically have a solid foundation, but the games that have been out for years have a solid foundation along with a lot of spitshine. They work more smoothly and flow better, because the developers have had that much longer to figure out what works, what doesn't work, and what needs to be tweaked.
Complete BS.
Well said.
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Game elements can be both good and bad.
One of the things an MMO needs is to feel alive. East Commons *felt* alive. Now obviously in almost all practical aspects an auction house is much better than an East Commons type wall of trade text *but* that feeling alive thing was a big deal.
Similarly quest guides, minimaps and big yellow arrows make the games much simpler to follow, is better in every practical way, and means people aren't constantly asking newb questions all the time in OOC...which helps to make the newer games feel dead even when they're full of players.
ditto
Give it a couple of years, then they can compare themepark to the new ‘bouncy castles’ MMO’s. We will be told we are being romantic about the old thempark MMO’s, the new ones may have less area and less choices but they are choc full of McMMO content.
Asheron's Call really didn't have a lot of content though. Most of the content involved going from specific hotspots to specific hotspots, leveling in generally generic dungeons by repeatedly bashing something's skull in (unless you were a mage...) and then going to a different spot when it was convenient.
The thing that drove asheron's call wasn't its use of content, but by just having a large, open, easy to traverse world unless you really wanted to go to a particularly far-reaching space (such as fort teth without a portal) and the like with many exploration opportunities for areas that generally were filled with some interesting architecture or dungeon but very little to no real explanation as to it's existence. This relatively hollow "content" was merely augmented by the dev's desire to actually have a story, something most MMO's these days generally miss, make completely static and reusable, and generally don't advance short of token patches every so often, maybe, that adds one dungeon you're expected to do 20 million times over because you have to.
Asheron's Call's content was purely driven by one's desire to explore, and it still fell down to exploring in areas designed for people around your level, else you got horribly murdered by a lugian or an olthoi or virindi or some other bastard that wanted to kill you. However, the game generally wasn't quest driven, it wasn't a sandbox in the sense of "build your own world" and hardly, by today's standards, constituted a lot of content.
It was an explorer's wet dream, but that's just because it had large, expansive spaces with a lot of lore-less dungeons with some lore-driven dungeons intersperced here and there. In general, however, it may as well have been a completely flat world with monster spawns at progressively higher levels with the occasional cave every so-often tailored to a specific level range (or level range for a group) of people.
But, again, the driving force of that game if you weren't into exploration like I was was to simply wait one month for the next wall of text story, the new handful of lore-driven (or simply random) dungeons, a new big-bad (or continuation as such with in-game events) and in general just more of the same. Running around, finding a new dungeon through exploration, and seeing what you can do.
It really didn't have a lot of content. It just happened to spark a person's imagination and make them believe it had a lot of content when it mostly was a barren world. To that end, it actually succeeded really well at the purpose of a video game, which is one of the reasons I still hold it so highly despite its obvious and apparent flaws by today's standards.
I have to disagree with your assesment of the game world. Everything looks bigger at 8 years of age. So the immersion you miss may have something to do with that. I have plenty of immersion in City of Heroes and LOTRO. Altough we may experience some funneling quest-wise, I am awestruck by the beauty of the worlds I play in and often take time just to stop and look around or explore. It's great that we have the choice of just hopping around or killing NPC's or doing missions. I'm for games of today.
The point about throwing players into a game without hand guiding should realy be bought back. Like you said "only the strong would remain" I see this as being the same like minded people would remain - which would lead to a closer tighly knit community. But lets face it what sane developer these days would aim for a niche market.
The old days of great adventuring days are sadly gone.
I do disagree with the scores for newbie experience, the comparison seeems to be the worst of the old compared tothe best of the new. not all new games would get a straight 10.
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