I'm only going off my own experience in actual Cata heroics. I'm always avoiding fire/etc, interrupting, etc, but if others in my group aren't playing right too, we wipe. You can't tell me we didn't wipe, because we did. Often. In many heroic groups over the last month or so. There have been times where the random team comp made things particularly hard (only 1 real CC'er, or 1 real interrupter) in which case even the slightest mistake of the responsible player would make the dungeon completely impossible for the rest of us.
As for having time. Sure, everyone has time. But almost everyone prefers to spend their time doing fun stuff instead of boring stuff.
As for no group quests in the game world, that's just not where WOW's group content is. If you want groups, you run dungeons. If you want community, you join one (guild).
Your describing LOL that way convinces me that you really don't understand skill in games at all. The difference between a skilled/unskilled player for any given class is rather huge in that game.
okay so you lost the wow example...
time- yes because getting an achievement for exploring the world is AWESOME!?!!! raise my epeen higher please... i could care less about getting an achievement... you should WANT to explore the world of a mmorpg because its supposed to be massive... not because you looked up where the next quest hub was on wowwiki...
group quest- really? thats yor arguement? WoW claims to be a mmorpg... its supposed to be ALL about the group content... your supposed to want to group with others in a Massive MULTIPLAYER Online Roleplaying Game... you dont go on to call of duty to shoot npc's online by yourself do you?
LOL- please... i understand what takes skill and what doesnt... i never said the classes in that game didnt function in different ways and take different strats... i know... ive played a tank- rammus-sion- amumu ive played dps-warwick-zen tsao or whatever his name is ive played sins too - evelynn- shen- shaco... they all play a different way even in those class breakups so please dont try to come at me by saying i dont know what skill is... go back to wow where your buffs and debuffs are all the same... need some examples? rend on warrs and druids are the same, MoTW and kings are now the same buff, battle shout horn of winer and str of earth totem are the same... wow basically took the same class, gave it 8 different names and made kids run with the rusty knife thats is called boredom and tasteless...
it's Xin Chao. I think lol. I know its at least Xin.
I have become numb with WoW. Not only is it the same *** diff day of PvP or Raid. Their constant "balanceing" act has become sour. Crafting in WoW is alright, but with every friggen thing being BoE there is no economy outside crafting. WoW's world would be nicely sized if it wasn't for flight paths and mounts. Could you imagin having to travel from, say, WesterPL to Strangelthorn Vale with no mount assist. Even now its still rather annoying, It would be a big feat and you would feel accomplished for having just made it there, yet alone the reason you went there.
But I understand that is all in the past, and I do agree with the reason. It's still rather saddening though. Maybe one day...
time- yes because getting an achievement for exploring the world is AWESOME!?!!! raise my epeen higher please... i could care less about getting an achievement... you should WANT to explore the world of a mmorpg because its supposed to be massive... not because you looked up where the next quest hub was on wowwiki...
group quest- really? thats yor arguement? WoW claims to be a mmorpg... its supposed to be ALL about the group content... your supposed to want to group with others in a Massive MULTIPLAYER Online Roleplaying Game... you dont go on to call of duty to shoot npc's online by yourself do you?
LOL- please... i understand what takes skill and what doesnt... i never said the classes in that game didnt function in different ways and take different strats... i know... ive played a tank- rammus-sion- amumu ive played dps-warwick-zen tsao or whatever his name is ive played sins too - evelynn- shen- shaco... they all play a different way even in those class breakups so please dont try to come at me by saying i dont know what skill is... go back to wow where your buffs and debuffs are all the same... need some examples? rend on warrs and druids are the same, MoTW and kings are now the same buff, battle shout horn of winer and str of earth totem are the same... wow basically took the same class, gave it 8 different names and made kids run with the rusty knife thats is called boredom and tasteless...
Was this post an excercise in denying reality?
1. The WOW example was pretty clear. Not sure how you think I "lost" it. Current WOW heroics provide a challenge. End of story.
2. No clue what you're going on about with achievements. That's unrelated to the fact that players don't want to AFK when they play a game; they want to play a game when they play a game.
3. What MMORPGs (and all games) are "supposed" to be about is fun. Players have spoken pretty loudly (with their wallets) about what they consider acceptable world content.
4. Duplicate class abilities has no bearing on whether or not skillful play is needed to succeed in WOW. Every WOW heroic group where players didn't play skillfully wiped. Often, multiple times. Often, they could not complete the instance until we replaced those players (and sometimes the party simply disbanded.) Skill is needed in WOW; duplicate class abilities doesn't change that fact. If your rotation is shit; if you stand in fire; if you don't interrupt/dispel/CC/etc; if you don't avoid (los or location) AOEs, if you don't obey unique boss mechanics -- you wipe. That's what actually happens in real Cata heroics currently.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lemmings these days don't like having to go more than 30 sec without coming across a new quest, so developers make the worlds more compact to get Quantity over quality...
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Ah yes. I my rose colored goggles too! They protect my eyes from seeing how it really was!
It's hard to post anything in this thread, since people have made up their minds that working in a game = fun. Or something. And anyone else is "a lemming", or worse.
I would like to see bigger worlds too, but I don't want to see a bunch of giant fields with nothing going on, over and over again, if I wanted that I would get in a car and drive around my state. It seems most MMO's like to do either super compact or super empty...really is it that hard to make an inbetween?
Lemmings these days don't like having to go more than 30 sec without coming across a new quest, so developers make the worlds more compact to get Quantity over quality...
And do you feel traveling 10-20 mins to endlessly grind against some mobs was "quality"?
I think most people consider the varied activities done during questing (and the fact that your actions leave permanent marks on the game world) to be higher quality. Especially as games get further away from wall-of-text questing and start infusing the story directly into how the quests play out.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lemmings these days don't like having to go more than 30 sec without coming across a new quest, so developers make the worlds more compact to get Quantity over quality...
Can you explain what the perceived benefit is, for the player or developer, of repeat periods of nothing but travel?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Man, I remember spending an entire day in real life getting from Faydwer to the Erudite Capital. Zones were obsurdly large. Zone times didn't help either. And the boat rides. Riding a boat for 20 minutes just to get to a barge to get on another 20 minute boat rid, not including waiting for the boats haha. As annoying as it was, that was srsly the best MMO expierence ever.
Quoted for Truth.
I have said it many times; modern MMOs lack immersion, but abound with accessibility.
Unfortunately, that old saying is true... You can never really go home again.
I'm going to drift off for a bit. For me, part of the proper feel of a game world are actually seeing other players outside towns and such. IMO, the game worlds right now are decently large. However, the amount of fast travel negates them, no matter how beautifully and well designed the worlds are.
Once you travel from Village A to Town B and both have quick travel / horse stables or what not, then you no longer need to travel down the same road. You instantly or very, very quickly can pop up back and forth between the two. Then there's mounts.
That's why, IMO, you'll find less people in the wilds or on the roads.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Lemmings these days don't like having to go more than 30 sec without coming across a new quest, so developers make the worlds more compact to get Quantity over quality...
Can you explain what the perceived benefit is, for the player or developer, of repeat periods of nothing but travel?
Immersion, adding weight to what you're doing, improving pacing, immersion, giving exploration a purpose, and it's not "nothing but travel". Many things usually happen while you're running somewhere. You're interacting with people and the world, as it should be.
Can you explain what the perceived benefit is, for the player or developer, of repeat periods of nothing but travel?
There are 2 extremes. In one of them the player spend most of his time travelling and rarely even meet monsters.
In the other everything is in the same small place and you cant walk a step without a mob being there.
Frankly do both of those extremes suck.
Some walking around in a large forest that isn't full with monsters every 10 feet or so adds to the mood of the game, particularly if the forest is well done with dark shadows and eerie background music.
But you don't want to spend more time walking in the forest to the dungeon than you spend in the dungeon. I can promise you that a 5 minutes walk in a spooky wood with few or no mobs will get on edge when you reach the dungeon, it works better than any cinematics would.
The problem is just finding the right size of a zone, particularly if it is sparcely populated with mobs. Too large sucks but so do too small. And it seems to me that most people here advocates one of 2 extremes, neither who works fine for me.
I played old large games like M59 and Lineage. I played really small games like AoC as well.
OP is right, MMOs needs to be larger again, it makes the game feel less like a game and more like a real world. But it doesn't have to be too large. I am not spending a day IRL to travel from Q to GF, it is a huge waste of my time.
Mounts ruined it IMO. I much prefered relying on Mages to teleport or a movement speed buff from a another class. That also helped create an economy outside a Auction House.
Even if mounts are involved they could still make a zone massive, and not all zones would have to be this way of course...
if you have a world - a contonent, perhaps the dock on the far left of this contonant was enormous, and traveling inland you were led to choose between say, traveling through a high level mountanous small zone, or perhaps a much larger less dangerous zone. Or you can sit back at town across the ocean (in theory where you came from) and wait to pay for a port. So now, this simple quest of "kill 10 mobs" to help a far away faction suddenly became a in depth feel of "I really am helping this far away faction". (Prolly a bad made-up example but the point is there).
I remember a Zone back in EQ1, a forest, getting to Highland Keep (I think thats what it was called). At night really high level zombies would come out, and if u were travelling to HK from this direction you had to wait for day, or risk it. I think if WoW had something like that, how fast it would get nerfed because people would complain. I didn't complain, I took it as the enviroment of the game, that did suck, but was enjoyable and it made getting to HK that much more accomplishing. I made sure I suited up with lots of food and water and anything else that I would need before I left town, such a cool "in game" feel.
"That's because newer MMOs aren't trying to be immersive virtual worlds. They're just games."
I would argue that point. To me a game is something you can lose at. Can you really “lose” in a game like RIFT or WoW? In Everquest1 you could definitely lose. You could lose XP, you could lose your corpse, you could lose levels..hell you could even lose your girlfriend or wife.
Would you watch football if you knew both teams were going to win every time? No, it would be pretty boring.
Sadly, I don’t think we will ever see a return to EQ style immersion. I blame dev’s without “vision” and casual players.
There is a difference between it taking 30 mins to get to where you need to get to with nothing but travel between them and it taking 30 mins to get to your location with many things to do along the way if you decide to divert from your mission for awhile.
Darkfall is a perfect example of a world that is slightly too large for the amount of content they have. Unfortunately to solve that they have decided to bring everything closer together instead of creating new content to fill the gaps.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Travelling through dangerous places should be in but waiting for boats should be out as well as zip zapping across continents.
Unfourtunately devs seem to think: Hmmm, if I make our game even more casual friendly than WoW then they will play my game instead.
My favorite travel time in a game was Morrowind for one of the quests which restricted my progress until I completed it. Hard to find location, far away, and plenty to do on the way. (I am not a fan of restrictions but in this case it was fun times)
good times that game did so many things right,.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
"That's because newer MMOs aren't trying to be immersive virtual worlds. They're just games."
I would argue that point. To me a game is something you can lose at. Can you really “lose” in a game like RIFT or WoW? In Everquest1 you could definitely lose. You could lose XP, you could lose your corpse, you could lose levels..hell you could even lose your girlfriend or wife.
Would you watch football if you knew both teams were going to win every time? No, it would be pretty boring.
Sadly, I don’t think we will ever see a return to EQ style immersion. I blame dev’s without “vision” and casual players.
Very well put!
MMORPGs have gone from building virtual worlds to be "just games". A sad evolution really but apparently that is where the most players are.
But if you think about it, the MMORPG crowd has not really grown that much. It is rather the devs that have expanded their single/multiplayer games to an MMORPG setting and with them brought all these players that have no interest in living in a virtual world and just want to play games. In other words, our precious genre has been hijacked by Suits who wants to make more money.
I wouldn't want a bigger world just for the sake of a bigger world. In Rift (for instance) everyone runs slower and the world is packed with regular mobs and rift mobs. This makes it easier for people to come together for the rifts. It also makes it look crowded. There are also no real safe zones, so running down the road isn't a free pass to get from point A to point B. You will take time to travel, even if the distances are shorter.
I do think larger worlds are cool, but the game has to fit it. If Rift had a larger world, but the same mob density people would get incredibly tired of never reaching their destination.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Problem is the games were being made, vanguard had everything that everyone wants, or seems to, no one supported it, they too away the actual transport, polished it up then left it to rot, it wouldnt have been left to rot if people stopped moaning and actually played it.
I think there is games around for people who want this type of game, darkfall, mortal online (super unpolished mess), fallen earth (sort of) and ofcourse vanguard, its you the players that let the good games dwindle away.
Ex. myth of soma, legend of mir, mu online and eudemons online player.
Current game : Runescape (until pc build is complete)
Players want their time to be efficient and useful. Wasting it with repetitive travel (in excess of the first, fun exploration) is inherently unpopular.
Unless a game directly addresses travel's boring repetition past the first exploration, long travel times are a cripplingly terrible design.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agreeeth. Even WOW used to have considerable traveling times back in the days compared to some of the past releases.
I recall jogging my silly gnome ass through the Wetlands for the first time and it felt just huuuge. From there I swam north and discovered Southshore and Hillsbrad and the world felt even bigger. I must have swam for tens of hours in WOW, just discovering new zones 'the safe way'. And for skillbooks: getting to Booty Bay at a very low level without being ganked by players and mobs.
I agree with having bigger worlds. From what I saw of Rift that was way too small. After having the world size and seamlessness of Vanguard I found it hard to image a game world that I'd enjoy unless it was comparible in size.
As for travel time, I'm OK with having to spend 10mins to up to an hour getting to a far off place...the first time. If I'm to travel to somewhere I've been before I'd rather have other faster travel options(mount, bard, or warp) even if they can be very expensive. But cheap instant travel to anywhere isn't cool. No wonder the nostalgiaist are grumbling.
Immersion is not only about size and travel time, but it does matter.
I think what Immersion boils down to is, if it is a beleivable world, and within its rules I can roam freely.
Do I beleive a npc has set up a camp in eye sight of the voilent tribe of gnolls ? No that doesnt make sense.
Do I beleive that the gnolls who are camped far out in the wilds, are attacking caravans and a npc in town ask me to protect a caravan carrying his goods ? Yes I do.
Do I beleive dark things secretly roam the sewers as a part of a greater scheme ? That is plausible aswell.
Do I beleive a strange world with magic and dragons has christmas and valentines day ? Not very likely.
Do I beleive I can turn in these 20 badges and a guy give me a super magic sword ? Only if there was a good explanation to why badges were so important to him.
For example WoW vanilla had some immersion, it was cartoonish but mostly I beleived in the world though it werent huge - WoW nowadays you click a questgiver, turn around and shoot then turn around again and turn in quest. I dont know if it is the story driven thing that caused this, but it certainly doesnt help.
Vanguard had no travelling shortcuts at first, and then a gate network was introduced. Many were strongly against this and argued it messed with Immersion. I thought it needed a gate network because the playability was too low for my taste, however the way it was just there without any reasons I didnt like (Everquest had ancient druid rings as an explanation and that I could beleive). So as always, different taste and how tight the world has to fit with its ideas vs playability.
Vanguard is vast as you well know having played the game. For thoses that have not played it then trying to explain how vast it is is hard. Yes druid rings helped in EQ1 but i had plenty of gate spells because i was a wizard erudite, hehe.
I don't see what the problem was with rifts in vanguard because unlike many mmorpg you don't have to use them,it's not forced travel,that's the difference. I can take a rift and still have travel time because the rift only takes me to a certain area of that chunk.
I can choose to take the long way by flying or land mount or in my case supersonic bard speed with levi and drum of speration reaching 390% run speed and with wood elf racial and shammy sow hitting 500%+.
The only game i have played that out does Vanguard is Dark&Light and perhaps EQ1. The OP ask for bigger world yet there is one already their and it is vast.
Problem is the games were being made, vanguard had everything that everyone wants, or seems to, no one supported it, they too away the actual transport, polished it up then left it to rot, it wouldnt have been left to rot if people stopped moaning and actually played it.
I think there is games around for people who want this type of game, darkfall, mortal online (super unpolished mess), fallen earth (sort of) and ofcourse vanguard, its you the players that let the good games dwindle away.
I agree, WE the players have let down the worlds we have grown to love the most. Sure Vanguard had a crappy launch, but then, so did all the other games. I still love Vanguard, even though SOE has decided not to do anything with it.
Its us the players that let those games fall along the wayside. We need to take a step back, and realize that if we want big immersive worlds, then were going to have to support those worlds, and give them time to grow and mature, not jump in and then back out when we hit a few hitches and bugs.
Comments
okay so you lost the wow example...
time- yes because getting an achievement for exploring the world is AWESOME!?!!! raise my epeen higher please... i could care less about getting an achievement... you should WANT to explore the world of a mmorpg because its supposed to be massive... not because you looked up where the next quest hub was on wowwiki...
group quest- really? thats yor arguement? WoW claims to be a mmorpg... its supposed to be ALL about the group content... your supposed to want to group with others in a Massive MULTIPLAYER Online Roleplaying Game... you dont go on to call of duty to shoot npc's online by yourself do you?
LOL- please... i understand what takes skill and what doesnt... i never said the classes in that game didnt function in different ways and take different strats... i know... ive played a tank- rammus-sion- amumu ive played dps-warwick-zen tsao or whatever his name is ive played sins too - evelynn- shen- shaco... they all play a different way even in those class breakups so please dont try to come at me by saying i dont know what skill is... go back to wow where your buffs and debuffs are all the same... need some examples? rend on warrs and druids are the same, MoTW and kings are now the same buff, battle shout horn of winer and str of earth totem are the same... wow basically took the same class, gave it 8 different names and made kids run with the rusty knife thats is called boredom and tasteless...
it's Xin Chao. I think lol. I know its at least Xin.
I have become numb with WoW. Not only is it the same *** diff day of PvP or Raid. Their constant "balanceing" act has become sour. Crafting in WoW is alright, but with every friggen thing being BoE there is no economy outside crafting. WoW's world would be nicely sized if it wasn't for flight paths and mounts. Could you imagin having to travel from, say, WesterPL to Strangelthorn Vale with no mount assist. Even now its still rather annoying, It would be a big feat and you would feel accomplished for having just made it there, yet alone the reason you went there.
But I understand that is all in the past, and I do agree with the reason. It's still rather saddening though. Maybe one day...
Was this post an excercise in denying reality?
1. The WOW example was pretty clear. Not sure how you think I "lost" it. Current WOW heroics provide a challenge. End of story.
2. No clue what you're going on about with achievements. That's unrelated to the fact that players don't want to AFK when they play a game; they want to play a game when they play a game.
3. What MMORPGs (and all games) are "supposed" to be about is fun. Players have spoken pretty loudly (with their wallets) about what they consider acceptable world content.
4. Duplicate class abilities has no bearing on whether or not skillful play is needed to succeed in WOW. Every WOW heroic group where players didn't play skillfully wiped. Often, multiple times. Often, they could not complete the instance until we replaced those players (and sometimes the party simply disbanded.) Skill is needed in WOW; duplicate class abilities doesn't change that fact. If your rotation is shit; if you stand in fire; if you don't interrupt/dispel/CC/etc; if you don't avoid (los or location) AOEs, if you don't obey unique boss mechanics -- you wipe. That's what actually happens in real Cata heroics currently.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lemmings these days don't like having to go more than 30 sec without coming across a new quest, so developers make the worlds more compact to get Quantity over quality...
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Ah yes. I
my rose colored goggles too! They protect my eyes from seeing how it really was!
It's hard to post anything in this thread, since people have made up their minds that working in a game = fun. Or something. And anyone else is "a lemming", or worse.
I would like to see bigger worlds too, but I don't want to see a bunch of giant fields with nothing going on, over and over again, if I wanted that I would get in a car and drive around my state. It seems most MMO's like to do either super compact or super empty...really is it that hard to make an inbetween?
-I want a Platformer MMO
And do you feel traveling 10-20 mins to endlessly grind against some mobs was "quality"?
I think most people consider the varied activities done during questing (and the fact that your actions leave permanent marks on the game world) to be higher quality. Especially as games get further away from wall-of-text questing and start infusing the story directly into how the quests play out.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Can you explain what the perceived benefit is, for the player or developer, of repeat periods of nothing but travel?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I'm going to drift off for a bit. For me, part of the proper feel of a game world are actually seeing other players outside towns and such. IMO, the game worlds right now are decently large. However, the amount of fast travel negates them, no matter how beautifully and well designed the worlds are.
Once you travel from Village A to Town B and both have quick travel / horse stables or what not, then you no longer need to travel down the same road. You instantly or very, very quickly can pop up back and forth between the two. Then there's mounts.
That's why, IMO, you'll find less people in the wilds or on the roads.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Immersion, adding weight to what you're doing, improving pacing, immersion, giving exploration a purpose, and it's not "nothing but travel". Many things usually happen while you're running somewhere. You're interacting with people and the world, as it should be.
There are 2 extremes. In one of them the player spend most of his time travelling and rarely even meet monsters.
In the other everything is in the same small place and you cant walk a step without a mob being there.
Frankly do both of those extremes suck.
Some walking around in a large forest that isn't full with monsters every 10 feet or so adds to the mood of the game, particularly if the forest is well done with dark shadows and eerie background music.
But you don't want to spend more time walking in the forest to the dungeon than you spend in the dungeon. I can promise you that a 5 minutes walk in a spooky wood with few or no mobs will get on edge when you reach the dungeon, it works better than any cinematics would.
The problem is just finding the right size of a zone, particularly if it is sparcely populated with mobs. Too large sucks but so do too small. And it seems to me that most people here advocates one of 2 extremes, neither who works fine for me.
I played old large games like M59 and Lineage. I played really small games like AoC as well.
OP is right, MMOs needs to be larger again, it makes the game feel less like a game and more like a real world. But it doesn't have to be too large. I am not spending a day IRL to travel from Q to GF, it is a huge waste of my time.
Mounts ruined it IMO. I much prefered relying on Mages to teleport or a movement speed buff from a another class. That also helped create an economy outside a Auction House.
Even if mounts are involved they could still make a zone massive, and not all zones would have to be this way of course...
if you have a world - a contonent, perhaps the dock on the far left of this contonant was enormous, and traveling inland you were led to choose between say, traveling through a high level mountanous small zone, or perhaps a much larger less dangerous zone. Or you can sit back at town across the ocean (in theory where you came from) and wait to pay for a port. So now, this simple quest of "kill 10 mobs" to help a far away faction suddenly became a in depth feel of "I really am helping this far away faction". (Prolly a bad made-up example but the point is there).
I remember a Zone back in EQ1, a forest, getting to Highland Keep (I think thats what it was called). At night really high level zombies would come out, and if u were travelling to HK from this direction you had to wait for day, or risk it. I think if WoW had something like that, how fast it would get nerfed because people would complain. I didn't complain, I took it as the enviroment of the game, that did suck, but was enjoyable and it made getting to HK that much more accomplishing. I made sure I suited up with lots of food and water and anything else that I would need before I left town, such a cool "in game" feel.
"That's because newer MMOs aren't trying to be immersive virtual worlds. They're just games."
I would argue that point. To me a game is something you can lose at. Can you really “lose” in a game like RIFT or WoW? In Everquest1 you could definitely lose. You could lose XP, you could lose your corpse, you could lose levels..hell you could even lose your girlfriend or wife.
Would you watch football if you knew both teams were going to win every time? No, it would be pretty boring.
Sadly, I don’t think we will ever see a return to EQ style immersion. I blame dev’s without “vision” and casual players.
I wish Rift's world was bigger, im loving it so far...but it seems like it is going to be rather small in the end
There is a difference between it taking 30 mins to get to where you need to get to with nothing but travel between them and it taking 30 mins to get to your location with many things to do along the way if you decide to divert from your mission for awhile.
Darkfall is a perfect example of a world that is slightly too large for the amount of content they have. Unfortunately to solve that they have decided to bring everything closer together instead of creating new content to fill the gaps.
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I think there should be a happy medium.
Travelling through dangerous places should be in but waiting for boats should be out as well as zip zapping across continents.
Unfourtunately devs seem to think: Hmmm, if I make our game even more casual friendly than WoW then they will play my game instead.
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My favorite travel time in a game was Morrowind for one of the quests which restricted my progress until I completed it. Hard to find location, far away, and plenty to do on the way. (I am not a fan of restrictions but in this case it was fun times)
good times that game did so many things right,.
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Very well put!
MMORPGs have gone from building virtual worlds to be "just games". A sad evolution really but apparently that is where the most players are.
But if you think about it, the MMORPG crowd has not really grown that much. It is rather the devs that have expanded their single/multiplayer games to an MMORPG setting and with them brought all these players that have no interest in living in a virtual world and just want to play games. In other words, our precious genre has been hijacked by Suits who wants to make more money.
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I wouldn't want a bigger world just for the sake of a bigger world. In Rift (for instance) everyone runs slower and the world is packed with regular mobs and rift mobs. This makes it easier for people to come together for the rifts. It also makes it look crowded. There are also no real safe zones, so running down the road isn't a free pass to get from point A to point B. You will take time to travel, even if the distances are shorter.
I do think larger worlds are cool, but the game has to fit it. If Rift had a larger world, but the same mob density people would get incredibly tired of never reaching their destination.
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Problem is the games were being made, vanguard had everything that everyone wants, or seems to, no one supported it, they too away the actual transport, polished it up then left it to rot, it wouldnt have been left to rot if people stopped moaning and actually played it.
I think there is games around for people who want this type of game, darkfall, mortal online (super unpolished mess), fallen earth (sort of) and ofcourse vanguard, its you the players that let the good games dwindle away.
Ex. myth of soma, legend of mir, mu online and eudemons online player.
Current game : Runescape (until pc build is complete)
Players want their time to be efficient and useful. Wasting it with repetitive travel (in excess of the first, fun exploration) is inherently unpopular.
Unless a game directly addresses travel's boring repetition past the first exploration, long travel times are a cripplingly terrible design.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agreeeth. Even WOW used to have considerable traveling times back in the days compared to some of the past releases.
I recall jogging my silly gnome ass through the Wetlands for the first time and it felt just huuuge. From there I swam north and discovered Southshore and Hillsbrad and the world felt even bigger. I must have swam for tens of hours in WOW, just discovering new zones 'the safe way'. And for skillbooks: getting to Booty Bay at a very low level without being ganked by players and mobs.
/nostalgia off
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I agree with having bigger worlds. From what I saw of Rift that was way too small. After having the world size and seamlessness of Vanguard I found it hard to image a game world that I'd enjoy unless it was comparible in size.
As for travel time, I'm OK with having to spend 10mins to up to an hour getting to a far off place...the first time. If I'm to travel to somewhere I've been before I'd rather have other faster travel options(mount, bard, or warp) even if they can be very expensive. But cheap instant travel to anywhere isn't cool. No wonder the nostalgiaist are grumbling.
Vanguard is vast as you well know having played the game. For thoses that have not played it then trying to explain how vast it is is hard. Yes druid rings helped in EQ1 but i had plenty of gate spells because i was a wizard erudite, hehe.
I don't see what the problem was with rifts in vanguard because unlike many mmorpg you don't have to use them,it's not forced travel,that's the difference. I can take a rift and still have travel time because the rift only takes me to a certain area of that chunk.
I can choose to take the long way by flying or land mount or in my case supersonic bard speed with levi and drum of speration reaching 390% run speed and with wood elf racial and shammy sow hitting 500%+.
The only game i have played that out does Vanguard is Dark&Light and perhaps EQ1. The OP ask for bigger world yet there is one already their and it is vast.
Vanguard...