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I just don't understand why no game has done this since DAOC... I understand that devolpers want to model their game after the World of Warcraft one for the simple reasons of the income they've generated.. But when you look back to or hear now what people miss most about DAOC it was the kindred spirit they had in their faction and the hatred or dislike of the other factions..
I won't bash World of Warcraft because I did enjoy it from Alpha to BC but it got old and when they came out with their second expansion I was sure they were going to do something like a new faction or something that would add more flavor.. But that was not the case, wish it were.. I understand their reasons for not changing it too much but another faction just isn't that much of a change...
Am I the only one who thinks that a three faction MMO is the best way to go...?
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Actually, I would prefer something more in line with what EVE offers or even along the lines of what SWG offered. I do not want to be stuck with a certain faction just because I rolled a particular race nor have to roll a particular faction because I want to roll a certain race.
I never played DAoC, but three factions did not work out that well in AO - most people played one of the two major factions as opposed to the "neutral" faction.
Imagine putting the SWG tint on WoW. Instead of being forced to be either Horde or Alliance, you could play along helping the factions you wanted as long as your rep with that particular faction dropped below the point they would not talk to your or try to kill you. You could openly declare yourself as Horde or Alliance...or you could work secretly for one. OR...even have nothing to do with either - just working for one of the myriad of other factions there in the game. The funny thing about it is how WoW even included such things with some of the smaller factions - the more you helped one, the more the other hated you.
Imagine if you could go beyond just Horde or Alliance. Imagine declaring your primary faction as Cenarion, eh? All the various pseudo neutral factions in the game that you could declare your affiliation with...
That is just an example.
So no, I do not want a Three Faction Game any more than I want a Two Faction Game. I want something more along the lines of how SWG was or how EVE is.
That being said, I can see why a game like WH40K went with two factions - it is a specific scenario, and much like the tabletop rules...there you go. It is not meant to be an open game, even to the extent that WoW is.
Yep, I want ARACAF...
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
Believe me, I would LOVE for their to be no faction.. Ultima Online being my first MMO I wish all games were like UO. But in todays care bear world people NEED to be told what side they are on and who they are suppose to hate... That is the reason I want three factions because atleast then their would be more conflict in an MMO...
I'd imagine it's unnecessary complication for game development. You have to create more areas, lore, probably races too and so on. Creating a third faction, that feels distinctive and interesting can mean a lot of work. Big problem is also balance of the factions, and how much players there can be per server and faction. Some faction coud easily get unpopular or vise versa. Stuff like this is better kept simpler, and leave the complexity for other areas of character creation and advancement. Looking from the theme park perspective I mean.
It is quite simple. With two sides you know who is you enemy. With three sides you do not. Modern MMOs are all about well defined goals and well definined obstacles. And if you want richer system, three sides is just too simplistic and easily reduced to two in practise.
I also imagine this is the reason why companies aren't attempting it. It's much more work than "one more faction" and the chances are it might turn into a mess rather than work as it was intented...risky waters I say. I only know one MMO that is gonna have 3 factions and that is TSW (Templas, Illuminati, Dragons), I do hope it turns out well.
Let's just talk about the "New Areas" in WoWs recent expansion pack they remade the whole world, proof that it could be done.
Balancing factions also isn't much of a problem, the more hardcore player base pretty much always rolls the faction that is the underdog.. The top tier guilds in Vanilla WoW were Horde even though generally on every server Alliance had much more numbers which resulted in good World PVP.. Same with DAOC, Midgard was the less populated faction yet was considered by the other factions as the real enemy based on skill alone..
The people who want challanges are usually the ones who are better at the game and the biggest challenge is being on the losing side.. The people who just want to play and be safe will follow the flock and choose the side which has more people..
Please note that DAoC not only had three factions but also did not have factions along the good/neutral/evil line.
Factions in DAoC were just different, there was no bias to any faction in any way. Personally I believe that the success of DAoC's RvR can be as much attributed to this no-bias-policy as to the 3-faction setup.
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This is kind of funny, all things considered.
In WoW...if you are Alliance, who is your enemy? If you say Horde, you would be wrong. Both the Alliance and Horde are fighting against the same common enemy in most cases. They do not work directly together, but either for their main faction or for some third party faction...they are always working against their actual enemies.
Where it gets better is how often you will see Horde and Alliance NPCs working together.
Yeah, this is no reason not to have three or more factions in a game.
Many times, you will have factions that do not make sense. They do not make sense in WoW. They do not make sense in RIFT. They do not make sense in WH40K, since I mentioned that earlier. They are really pushing it there.
ARACAF would not mean that there could not be an obvious path for those that want to follow it. There could even be warnings if those people were about to do something that would stray from that path, etc...
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
I currently read the Bioware Austin SWTOR forums a lot. Many people there ask if there is a third faction.
I wouldnt compare this idea to WoW. The uniqueness of DAoC was that the factions had different classes, too.
We're attemping FOUR factions.
We have a way to help balance the lack of populations in multi-realm conflicts.
It's a new strategy involving one major feature of the game. It's not instancing RvR / PvP, (unless we decide to have zones instead of a seamless world, but zones or seamless is irrelevant) but it is a method of balancing population size not by limiting the amount of players...but by UNlimiting NPC's (yes I realize that isn't a real word, lol).
For every player, there are [x] less NPC's. When that player leaves, the [x] NPC's return.
Of course, a 100 vs 10 battle will probably end up with the 100 winning, as players are highly intelligent and powerful compared to NPC's...BUT...it will be nothing like most MMORPG"s which is a hands-down instant-win zerg. Instead, it will actually be a fight where the 10 can kill off a few (or even possibly win, if they're good enough and strong characters) because both sides are supported by NPC's.
So while in essence it might be 100 players vs 10 players, the actual battle would be 100 players vs 10 players + 90 players worth of NPC's. MUCH more balanced.
This makes up for the fact that some realms tend to be more popular than others, and there is a chance that one realm might be unpopular compared to the other three.
RvR is about strategy, player skill, and character skill--- far more than it is about player numbers.
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
I'm not sure about the wisdom of having Good, Evil and Neutral (or unaffiliated) factions, but I think "shades of grey" factions can work quite well. I like the way Fallen Earth has a "wheel" in which the factions are interrelated in subtle ways, such that you really have to think hard about what you (or your character!) would naturally be affiliated to. Each faction has good points and bad points.
I've been getting more interested in The Secret World recently. The factions in there seem to be less "White Hat Black Hat", and more "shades of grey".
I get the argument that a bipolar system is the easiest for people to "get", but it's just not very realistic in terms of a real-feeling virtual world. Real world conflicts are often shades of grey, and it sometimes (though of course not always) requires some thought to find where the preponderance of black and white are, relative to your own preferences; or failing that, to affiliate with the least-worst option.
Meh, as with so many of these questions, I guess it boils down to "worldy" vs. "gamey".
Why not entirely player-created factions?
I think out of all the three-faction systems, good/neutral/evil is one of the worst ways to do it if you're planning on doing a fight between the three factions.
That was the nice thing about DAoC. There was no good, there was no evil... there was your side, and you wanted to beat up the other sides over resources. Easy.
One of the great things about a 3 faction system is that imbalance can be a good thing. If one realm begins to take control of that world (server) then the other two can resolve to have a truce of sorts and band together in a sense to concentrate on the primary faction. In a freeform system it can devolve into one large guild ruling everything while outlying guilds are slowly absorbed or crushed. The structure of a 3 part system has some dynamic effects on the battlefield without being overly constrictive.
Working within the underdog realm can bring some nice gameplay. The ruleset should allow for meaningful shifts in political allegiances and establishment of primary rule. By which I mean that a particular server may actually be 'ruled' by a particular faction in terms of the expanded world rather than just a battleground.
Yeah, rambling again
In factionless games those are called guilds.
But I'm talking about much more than a guild, why don't developers give the players tools to create and control their own worlds how they want to see it?
For some reason I can't see why World of Warcraft has 12 million subscriptions yet my ideas are left to single-player simulations. It just doesn't make sense to me.
Fluff. Opposing faction is your enemy. The mobs are your enemy too. Just because I gank someone while he is figting mob does not make me allied with boar population, I will dispatch it too.
Edit: But you are onto something. Whoa! WoW does have three sides! Rift too! Case closed.
The one who manages to develop a good copy of EvE Online but with characters running around and shooting stuff in FPS-mode will win big time. Simple as that.
Darkfall, Mortal Online, Perpetuum and most recently Earthrise all failed in the attempt to do so as they all missed some keypoints of what makes EvE that good.
Remember, everyone is convinced that WAR would have been infinately better served under a three faction system and the lore of that IP would of suited such a design better as well. Planetside also has a 3 faction system and it works out just fine because as one faction grows too large incentives are given to the smaller factions such as exp boosts etc. that ultimately balance out the power struggle, not to mention as one faction begins to control too much territory the lesser two make combined efforts to take it away and thus the fall of Rome is relived when a factions power is stretched too thin. EVE and SWG were sandbox and while SWG did have empire vs rebellion you didn't really have to follow that and could remain covert the entirety of your existance if you chose or better yet, put on your stormtrooper gear which made you overt, get killed, then when you spawn you are covert again even though you are CLEARLY outfitted in the garb of the empire lol. I believe that EQ2 got around one of the pitfalls of the 2 faction system that you mentioned (being forced to an alliance based purely off race and/or class preference which could force you to not be able to play with friends) by allowing you to take up a quest chain that essentially defects you out of your current allignment of good or evil to a neutral one that sucks and from there you gain reputation with the opposite allignment and BAM you are now a welcome memeber of the opposing side while retaining your race and in some cases your class! (they recently patched this to become most cases your class) This is something i'd of loved if i could do in WoW. But in general i agree that things are WAY too copy pasta with the 2 faction system ENTIRELY cause executives see how much money WoW makes and figure that it can ONLY be the two factions as a cause.
have you ever heard of AIKA? its basically a korean clone of DAOC just with 5 nations instead of 3
go check it, its the most loopsided shit you'll ever see, one nation can basically wipe the floor with the other 4, and more often than not the second most powerful nation allies with them, furthering the gap.
you can make a game with 10 thousand factions and it will be the same. people will stack one for easy wins, and the second in power will rather band with the strong and pick on the weak, than helping the weak and facing the strong.
what made DAOC work wasnt the setting, it was the players. back then people wanted games to work, wanted competition, wanted fair game. they had realm pride, and the most asked question in the forums wasnt "what side is the strongest in this server?" nor "what class is the most OP?"
they were real MMORPG players.
nowadays MMOs became mainstream, it was like letting the door open for the scum of the earth. Mainstream gamers dont have nation pride, dont want competition, dont want fair game.
they just want zerg, easy mode, and they will do whatever it takes to get it.
when you cant control how many people joins a faction, or who the second most powerful allies with, 3 faction games are exactly as flawed as 2, 4 or 25
because of the players.
Anarchy Online has three factions. Unfortunately they didn't implement them right nor make changes to them over time. Clan and Omni could talk to each other, which I always thought was a mistake. It would have been nice and played even more into the playerbase's politics if the Neutrals had to act as mediators and whose loyalties could be bought and sold.
I agree with previous posters that more factions are better and letting the player decide what they want to be a part of rather than their race. At least in most cases.
The Matrix Online did this.
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I like the way things evolved, Omni players hate clanners and Clanners hates Omnis. Most Orgs don't accept players with Alts from the opposing side.
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One of those great lines from The Secret World
I truly do believe that in a NPC-run world, where players replace NPC's and vice versa, there isn't a problem with population balance.
The underdogs can have A LOT of fun, and can actually have a REAL chance.
What other system would allow for equally created players to have a 100 vs 1 fight and the 1 actually have a chance? Even if it's a small chance...the fact they have a 1% chance is better than 0% chance.
In fact, sometimes the sides ARE unbalanced for a reason. When 300 goblins invade against 100 humans, how much more fun it is to be that 1 human who singlehandedly (along with 95 NPC humans) drove off the massive hordes of goblins.
Get em gobbies!
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Secret Worlds is planning on a Three Faction RvR type end game.
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