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I want to get lost again...
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
What happened to huge zones where you could get lost and try to find your way for hours...
Most of the time a mapping system comes in handy, but i really miss this part of older MMO's....
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
EQ2 was really the best one for that in my opinion.
I would love a game with a world generated like the EVE universe, like something ridiculously huge never meant to be fully explored alone let alone be traveled in 5 minutes.
I know, it's like living in a big house. Only the walls have been replaced with cliffs.
I completely disagree. Small zones, and a small number of zones, plus they were somewhat linear and easily navigated. EQ1 yes, EQ2 no.
Walls, water, planets, either way you have to teleport somewhere or run through a door that you then have to wait on a loading screen in order to get somewhere. EQ2 is as zone based as every other game.
Asheron's Call had almost no zones. You want to go West? Face West and start running. Decide to go South? Go South. There might be a mountain you have to run around but not a whole chain until you find that one 'pass' that will let you into the area. Even then you might be able to climb the mountain but the trip down might kill you when you jumped off.
AC eventually had 3 small zones mostly because they released the main area as one huge island that filled 85% of the map. In order to add new stuff they had to 'discover' smaller islands off the coast.
Asheron's Call 2 though was as bad as the others, if not worse. It's land mass was smaller than the land you would see in a FPS and it was as linear as one.
Mortal Online is like that, but I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone at this time.
OK first off, I never get lost as my wife is always telling me where to go.
I like a nice open area with plenty of content. I also like the fog of war approach....where once you visit areas, then it is mapped out for ya.
I dont miss the early days of EQ where you had to memorize the zone.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I wouldn't mind it either... I always navigated by landmarks anyways so most of the time the in game maps are of little use to me.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
people got bored of them.
try fallen earth or lotro.. lots of empty space. if you want to get lost, don't look at maps.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
Since the invention of minimaps, it's been tough to get lost.
Did EQ1 have a minimap? I can't remember anymore.
I agree that getting lost is fun, but only if the getting lost part doesn't cause you to feel frustration and bordom. If I was playing a game that had no minimap/map I would also probably think initially that it was just a really poorly designed game, unless the game was made around the fact that people will get lost and that there is still fun to be had if you do.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Um, no. There are smaller zones nowadays mainly due to technological limitations of the game engine. It would be too expensive (money and resource wise) to create huge, open vistas. Asheron's Call 1 was particularly known for this, you could climb a mountain and see the landscape below for miles and miles, and it was all navigable. Yeah, you could actually climb up hills. It's really a shame that many MMOs don't permit the same freedom.
As much Mortal Online is substantially an early paid beta, I know people who got lost for DAYS in some regions ( like jungle )
. There is no map or minimap, they plan to implement a cartography skill later on.
So back at Pax West, I think a year or two ago (or so), I had the opportunity to speak with Jeffrey Steefel of Turbine.
One of the things that we touched upon was the "old" Old Forest.
Thing about the "old" old forest was that one could get lost. This was in closed beta. It was very confusing and it took time to find one's way out.
I loved it.
He had told me that "getting lost" was not fun. That the person who designed the "old" old forest was more of an old school gamer and that he had asked him to make it more manageable. I think they went through sevreral iterations until we have what is in game today:
A set of tree painted theater flats that essentially mark off a winding corridor that is the old forest.
I want my "old" old forest back. But, I think there are players who don't want to get lost.
Another story,
When Lineage 2 was launched you had to use a map which could be dropped.
I was out exploring and was attacked by some much higher mobs. I died and my map dropped.
so I hit "back to town" only to discover i was in a town called gludio. At the time I was still low level and had never been to gludio. I didn't know I could buy a new map in this town so I headed toward a direction that I thought was the right way. My entire time back was trying to avoid mobs that were much higher than me or that were clustered so that could easily aggro me and take me down en masse. All the while making my way back to where I "thought" the dark elf city was.
was one of the best times I've ever had in an mmo.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It's because this genre of gaming is now overrun by people who think MMOs should be just like any other game. Beginning, start, end. All of the world builders that started this genre with that mindset (AC1, EQ1) are dead and gone. Those pioneers that played the initial CRPGs and thought "What if I could recreate the entire world that X game is set in make it so I can explore all corners of it and where anyone could play any role they liked" are no longer with us.
Now it's:
Dev1: "Hey, I want to create an MMO".
CEO/Shareholders: "Sure thing pal. Here's your $50million and here's a list of all the things you can/can't do. have fun!"
Most of the "I want to get lost again" types are pulling out their old school table-top RPG pencil and paper games and rolling up new characters. Had this discussion on a few other MMO sites I've been leaning toward more lately as well as the handfull of table-top gaming sites I go to.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
It's the technology limitation like someone already said. It just take too much money and resource to make large worlds nowadays.
Unless your game worlds look like a black screen of nothing, or cheap 2d graphic.
It probably takes more work to make the small world Wow, Aion, or championonline have than the entire Eve Universe. And it most likely do consider the 3 game I listed use alot of graphical painting.
Consider this. The game world of Eve looks like the Sky of a typical MMORPG with landscape. So you know Eve have alot of work cut off for them.
Wormhole space in EVE. Just saying.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Uh, have you seen any screenshots of EVE dated later than 2004? I'm guessing not.
Hint: it's not really that much easier to render 20-30-50-100+ships against a ringed planet with a nebula background than it is to render a couple of dozen elves against some turf and rock textures.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
in the expansions I'd agree...but when EQ2 came out, I remember getting completely lost in Nek & TS...After KOS came out, there really was none of that. But I agree, hardly the best.
I'd actually have to say UO, DAOC, and even Horizons (did anyone else play that? lol)
This is along one of the things that I feel would have made WoW a better game (in my opinion - knowing it would not be the case for all)... instead of the game world feeling so tiny, if it actually felt like you were exploring continents.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
I actually think it has more to do with the advent of dedicated websites that tell you how to do every quest and exact locations of encounters and quest locations
Nope, didn't have a mini map.
They did add a weird 'drawn as you moved' type of map a few years back.
I like how AO did the whole mini map thing. You had to buy maps for each zone as well as put in the points required for each map in the Map Nav skill.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Oh yeah, good point. There was a time not that long ago when the information just wasn't as readily available as it is now. Now that info has become so amazingly available, to the point that there are massive, accurate and accessible databases, that the exploration and the feeling that you are doing something new or original has been lost.
And games have shifted and changed based on this readily available information as well, adding quest helpers and markers on the map to make it so that people don't have to alt- tab or whatever.
Yeah, that's a good point. The internet and accessibility to information has greatly changed the MMORPG scene. And it seems to be impossible to go back exactly because of this reason.
If you want to get lost then you have to kill the internet wikis, wowhead and the likes. Those websites destroyed the unknown. It used to be full of lost players asking where was this, how to do that. You know, peoples that communicated and socialized because they were in need. Now everyone alt tabs and goes to the target, the gameplay feels like a job. It doesn't have the mystery and the satisfaction you get when you find the way by yourself. The old gamers didn't had these websites I guess.
So yeah you can make the world as large as you want but if you have all the information one alt tab away you will never get lost.
I never said Eve's graphic is bad. How their graphic engine works. Or the difficulty of the graphic design.
I'm talking about the amount of time to creat the game world.
The Nebula background and ships do look really nice. But like you said it's just Nebula background and a bunch of ship models. They probably don't actually need alot of "workload" to make.
That's just my opinion. And if you dont' agree with me, you don't agree with me.
Forums are there to express people's opinion, and I expressed my opinion. I'm not here to force people to agree with me.