Rift was boring, now it is fun

lectrocuda · April 2011

I think this has more to do with play style, than with rift, which is why I placed it in the pub.

When I started playing Rift during the closed betas, I got bored really quick, and it was not long after release that the client on my desktop went the way of my other long list of MMO's.

Again I was left scouring you tube, and reviews attempting to find the fleeting illusion that is fun in mmos.

However, I realized something. My first MMO was wow when BC came out. Up until then all I had played was typical rpg's. When I played wow, I was in awe, the stories were interesting, and I had fun killing x # of whatevers. However the difference between then and now. The stroy. When I was awed, I was eager to learn everything, and even the stories were interesting, somewhere along the line, I lost that, and things became nothing more than moving pixels, like an open world tetris game.

So, what did I do. I plugged rift back in, and began my long journey of reading text. Now I have a reason to kill these cultists, and infiltrate the village to find out whats going on. The fun has increased exponentially, however this reveals the main issue that I have with mmo's...reading.

I love to read books, but I read books, I could never get into reading text on a computer screen. I think this is the main thing that needs to evolve in order to truly foster a next gen experience. We need voice overs and quality voice acting. I think it is essential for immersion, and thus essential to creating a more fun experience (funner?)

Yes, obviously there are other things that could use a tweaking, but this is my experience of why I was not having fun, and how I began to have fun, and how it applies to my perspective on future titles. Any thoughts?

Xasapis · April 2011

Well, this is one of the reason hate threads will appear about SW:TOR and how Bioware will lore-snore us. Some people don't really like reading and play the whole experience as an action MMO. Considering that most MMO worlds are static, there isn't anything to notice in the world that would create an adventure for the player that is not given by quest givers.

lectrocuda · April 2011

I like what you are implying, if I got it correctly, and it really takes my post to the next level. Instead of being told a story, have it unfold in a dynamic game world.

I do believe there is a developer workng on a title like that, however I cannot elaborate due to a NDA, but it is an indy developer as of now, and I know they are planning on sticking to the typical voice over one liner standard, with pages of quest text.

What you implied I believe would be much more immersive than even voice overs. GW2 seems to be going that way, and hopefully their technology will help push the genre to the point where we get living breathing worlds, and I actually feel guilty for pointless killings of mobs....

lectrocuda · April 2011

Originally posted by ReallyNow10

Originally posted by Xasapis

Well, this is one of the reason hate threads will appear about SW:TOR and how Bioware will lore-snore us. Some people don't really like reading and play the whole experience as an action MMO. Considering that most MMO worlds are static, there isn't anything to notice in the world that would create an adventure for the player that is not given by quest givers.

I don't think folks who dislike quest reading are action-oriented players, necessarily, at all. I think there are many folks who dislike being force-fed a stale story. I mean, being told you are the special hero out to save the world from the dark lord is interesting only once.

The best MMORPG gameplay, I have found, is that in which the world is a simulation almost and the players are free to bond, form friendships and set out together in pursuit of freely chosen goals. So in a sense, the best story is no story at all, but the memorable experiences formed from sharing dynamic gameplay.

Yes, I must admit, it does annoy me when I am called The worlds only hope, only to suddenly be swarmed by 5 others who are also the worlds only hope. It makes me feel as though I am being fed propaganda because the quest giver is to lazy.

My wife and I were laughing at some of the freemarch quests. The npc are all laying around and telling me they are to busy to handle things. In real life, Id tell them to get off their asses and get to work :-)

Kyleran · April 2011

I'm not much for in game lore, I prefer lore made by the players of the MMO.

So its understandable that right now, I'm the opposite, Rift started out fun, but now its starting to bore me however I won't blame that much on lore.

But when it comes to SWTOR I am going to try very hard to enjoy the story, since Bioware is putting so much effort into it. Time will tell whether or not that makes it more enjoyable than recent titles, but I'm game to try anything new.

rokrow · April 2011

There are 2 kinds of Rift quests. The 'Story' quests that are more interesting are highlighted for the player with a brown background while the run of the mill quests have a blue background.

I read the quests with the brown backgrounds. It's somewhat interesting.

But signaling the interesting quests is proof that Rift knows most of their quests are uninteresting, kill ten spell weavers, bring me their kidneys, etc.

Rekindle · April 2011

Originally posted by rokrow
There are 2 kinds of Rift quests. The 'Story' quests that are more interesting are highlighted for the player with a brown background while the run of the mill quests have a blue background.

I read the quests with the brown backgrounds. It's somewhat interesting.

But signaling the interesting quests is proof that Rift knows most of their quests are uninteresting, kill ten spell weavers, bring me their kidneys, etc.

I was in the Rift beta. I went through the process of downloading the game and the character creation. I then logged on and the first thing I saw was some NPC ass hat telling me to go kill 5 of something. I ended task on the app and never looked back.

Unfortunately I'm in the minority as I did not support another attempt at recreating something thats already been done which was woefully uninnovative and sub par to begin with.

nero_usr · April 2011

i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

Neiko · April 2011

I remember, one of my favorite things to do when playing Diablo/Diablo 2, was to listen to the npc give me speeches about the quest I was about to embark on. The main reason that worked was, 1. It's a mostly single player RPG, but 2. There aren't tons of quests. There were what? 6? 8? Actual quests throughout each chapter. The incentive for my to go in the the "Mosh pit" or "Dark Cave" wasn't because a quest giver told me to, but because i wanted to explore in hopes of a good fight and good loots.

I feel that is missing from a lot of RPGs today, and I'd love to see MMOs do it more. I want an incentive to explore other than the quest giver told me to. I think MMOs should give less quests, but the quests are in a larger scheme of things. In Diablo 2, you weren't told to go explore a graveyard, run back, kill a few skeletons, run back, kill a few zombies, run back, talk to a bunch of people running around, finally go kill blood raven. You were just told to go kill blood raven, and you ended up doing everything else on the way there.

Maybe that won't really work in MMOs like it does in Single player RPGs, maybe it will. Either way that's off my original point =/.

One of the main things I enjoyed a lot about some older games is the full fledged voice acting. In Diablo 2, I would stay a while and listen to Cain talk about what's going on, and and extra info he could give me on my quest. Granted after hearing it the first couple of times it does lose it's touch, but that first time listening to everyone really immersed me and it was tons of fun just to learn about the lore from the npcs.

I'm not sure what point I was making, but I think MMOs put too much emphasis on spoon feeding you tons of quests, instead of giving you a few objectives and letting you figure out the rest. And voice acting gives great immersion if done right.

xKingdomx · April 2011

Not sure if this is mentioned, the problem with mmo story is that, even tho the story is progressing, you aren't actually changing anything ingame, it takes a role-playing player to actually play the changes out in their head, kill 5 wolves to stop their invasion? as if they will stop?

Thats why devs are trying out dynamic events, to help players feel that there efforts are not wasted, that their actions have consequences, if I want to read text, I would much rather read a book, since it is SO much better written. Games is a visual experience, therefore I think it suits much better to have a visual and graphical conversation of information instead of reading quest text. Call it an excuse or what not, older games used quest text was simply because texhnology didn't allow them to advance that far, nowadays this should be easy pie, excepting cost and man-power.

cukimunga · April 2011

This made me realize why I haven't really stuck with a MMO as long as I did with FFXI. It totally has to do with reading.. I'm not a big reader, always been more of the Movie type. In FFXI their quests had a cut scene as long as with some text to read I guess the silent movie made reading tolerable. Pretty much every other MMO ive played just had the text pop up and you had to read it. I usually do read the quests for a few levels then I just kill stuff cuz I hate to read.

I'm really looking forward to SWTOR mostly because of the game if fully voiced over . I hope more games start going that way, reading is too old school for me.,lol j/k. Its amazing all this time I thought I was just bored of Themepark type games, and then when I was still bored with a few sandbox games as well I should have figured it out.

Deadalon · April 2011

Originally posted by nero_usr
i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

I dont think it has anything to do with ppl beeing lazy or whatever. Games have moved on in most departments for the last 10 years. Including sound and voiceover quality. Saying that ppl are just lazy is like saying we should still be playing mud games.

Offer players what they are looking for. If they want pages of readable text then fine... But most would then prefer a book instead of sitting infront of computer. Thats at least what I prefer.

Quest texts are dumbed down boring - liveless and in most cases pointless. Quests in RITF are even worse to a degree cause the devs were not even trying to bring any diversity into it. There are exactly same sort of quests in all zones... including destroying X amount of altars that for some strange reasons are planted in middle of nowhere hillsides with roaming mobs around them.

It doesn't matter what the questtext says about it - You always know that the devs just needed X amount of quests in an area and didn't bother to actually make them intresting and diffrent.

My RIFT sub runs out tomorrow - I have played both factions to 50. I can't see my enjoying this game over next 1-2 years since there are quite few issues - including gameplay and lagging issues that I can not accept in my MMO experince in 2011. Then the World event took out any doubts in my mind. It was just not good enough.

SOme voice overs would have made many of the quests more intresting. But its cheap to put together a text of 200 words max and sell it in a MMO.. so why should devs even try ?

Axehilt · April 2011

Originally posted by Rekindle

Originally posted by rokrow

There are 2 kinds of Rift quests. The 'Story' quests that are more interesting are highlighted for the player with a brown background while the run of the mill quests have a blue background.

I read the quests with the brown backgrounds. It's somewhat interesting.

But signaling the interesting quests is proof that Rift knows most of their quests are uninteresting, kill ten spell weavers, bring me their kidneys, etc.

I was in the Rift beta. I went through the process of downloading the game and the character creation. I then logged on and the first thing I saw was some NPC ass hat telling me to go kill 5 of something. I ended task on the app and never looked back.

Unfortunately I'm in the minority as I did not support another attempt at recreating something thats already been done which was woefully uninnovative and sub par to begin with.

Good luck finding a game (in any genre) that doesn't revolve around mini-tasks of killing something(s)!

I applaud your efforts to seek entirely non-violent games.

Personally I get a glimmer of what the OP has by reading/skimming some quests -- but of course the best quests are those which create the fiction as part of the world itself (NPC dialogs before you kill them.)

And in fact the most interesting of all is probably their use of primary story NPCs within the world itself. Little scripted bits of story are scattered throughout the world (and unlike WOW, it's not consrained to only happen in towns.) I'm still unsure of one story NPC, who's shown up multiple times hostile to me (she's normally friendly), cavorting with the enemy.

Venger · April 2011

I do not care about lore or story. I like growing my character which unfortunetly has almost been completely lost with everyone racing to end game to gear farm.

God I remember UO I had probably 50 different character spread across several shards. Each one was a little different depending on what I thought they should be and the little story I thought up for them. And several of them had no combat skills at all. God I miss those days.

Amaranthar · April 2011

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Rekindle

Originally posted by rokrow

There are 2 kinds of Rift quests. The 'Story' quests that are more interesting are highlighted for the player with a brown background while the run of the mill quests have a blue background.

I read the quests with the brown backgrounds. It's somewhat interesting.

But signaling the interesting quests is proof that Rift knows most of their quests are uninteresting, kill ten spell weavers, bring me their kidneys, etc.

I was in the Rift beta. I went through the process of downloading the game and the character creation. I then logged on and the first thing I saw was some NPC ass hat telling me to go kill 5 of something. I ended task on the app and never looked back.

Unfortunately I'm in the minority as I did not support another attempt at recreating something thats already been done which was woefully uninnovative and sub par to begin with.

Good luck finding a game (in any genre) that doesn't revolve around mini-tasks of killing something(s)!

I applaud your efforts to seek entirely non-violent games.

Personally I get a glimmer of what the OP has by reading/skimming some quests -- but of course the best quests are those which create the fiction as part of the world itself (NPC dialogs before you kill them.)

And in fact the most interesting of all is probably their use of primary story NPCs within the world itself. Little scripted bits of story are scattered throughout the world (and unlike WOW, it's not consrained to only happen in towns.) I'm still unsure of one story NPC, who's shown up multiple times hostile to me (she's normally friendly), cavorting with the enemy.

Where does the assumption that he's looking for "entirely non-violent games" come from?

Oh, that's right. You're a developer that seeks to promote yet more of the tired, boring crap you all have been trying to force feed us through lack of anything else. Now I understand where that comes from.

But thank you for the good wishes in seeking that which we want and you refuse to make.

By the way. There's 10 rats somewhere that I didn't kill. Sorry about that.

Elikal · April 2011

Originally posted by lectrocuda
I think this has more to do with play style, than with rift, which is why I placed it in the pub.

When I started playing Rift during the closed betas, I got bored really quick, and it was not long after release that the client on my desktop went the way of my other long list of MMO's.

Again I was left scouring you tube, and reviews attempting to find the fleeting illusion that is fun in mmos.

However, I realized something. My first MMO was wow when BC came out. Up until then all I had played was typical rpg's. When I played wow, I was in awe, the stories were interesting, and I had fun killing x # of whatevers. However the difference between then and now. The stroy. When I was awed, I was eager to learn everything, and even the stories were interesting, somewhere along the line, I lost that, and things became nothing more than moving pixels, like an open world tetris game.

So, what did I do. I plugged rift back in, and began my long journey of reading text. Now I have a reason to kill these cultists, and infiltrate the village to find out whats going on. The fun has increased exponentially, however this reveals the main issue that I have with mmo's...reading.

I love to read books, but I read books, I could never get into reading text on a computer screen. I think this is the main thing that needs to evolve in order to truly foster a next gen experience. We need voice overs and quality voice acting. I think it is essential for immersion, and thus essential to creating a more fun experience (funner?)

Yes, obviously there are other things that could use a tweaking, but this is my experience of why I was not having fun, and how I began to have fun, and how it applies to my perspective on future titles. Any thoughts?

Cool, I experienced much the same. Having great fun with Rift since I started to read whats going on.

I also think lowering the insane respawn from beta was a good thing. It's not so hectic anymore. I am not sure how long it lasts, but for now I greatly enjoy Rift, much to my surprise. Sometimes it's love on second sight. I just loath the PVP, tbh, lol. XD

VooDoo_Papa · April 2011

I think one of the biggest reasons people dont read quest dialogue is theyre afraid of missing out on something. They see the person next to them take the quest and run off, possibly to kill the same mob and leave you with nothing! Or find a shiney on the ground or a rare named mob and get its loot. They see the next area, the next objective and see the bottom of the quest dialogue promising them with a new shiny.

MMO's make you feel rushed, and for some reason my experience in Rift has been just that. Im having a blast, but I do feel rushed maybe more so than most MMO's I've played.

anyway, when developers figure out how to make players focus on the adventure and not the progress then more players will actually start to learn more about what the game is actually about. Until then, its gogoggo

SpandexDroid · April 2011

GW2 needs to deliver.

darlok6666 · April 2011

Originally posted by SpandexDroid
GW2 needs to deliver.

^^^ This o/

But on the topic of reading quest dialogues. I played Rift Betas and one thing that got tiresome is the constant reading, it was repetiveness and lack of meaningful content in the quest that got me not the fact I had to read. The first zone I was reading all the quest text until the end then in the second zone I started realling skim the quest text besides the major storyline then the third zone I was immediately clicking on accept as soon as it popped.

The moral of the story is that reading the text needs to be engaging. While the the big storyline quests are intresting however they all were really repetitive and a hassle towrds the end. Especially since the story line quests were a looooong chain and was really getting fed up with go here go there thing that was an gruesome long chain of when I thought "SWEET this is the last one...ahhh crap...another follow up?" Really got on my nerves toward the end when was like "come OOONNNNN...HURRY UP ALREADY!!!!" for it to finish.

SWTOR and GW2 will be doing a personalized story which I think is really the way to go for qualiity lore quests.

lectrocuda · April 2011

Originally posted by nero_usr
i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

Your crazy...How do you figure that wanting voice overs is lazy? I didnt realize that fun was related to work. I read three books at a time. One in the morning, one for afternoons, and one for the nighttime, why should I read a video game, that clearly has the capability to have cinematic type voice overs? You call me lazy, but the truth is, it is the developers who are lazy.

Anyways, I would really enjoy the explanation to go along with your logic

Sovrath · April 2011

Originally posted by nero_usr
i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

Yeah I agree, hearing the sound of a voice is just so lazy.

Quite frankly the invention of the "talkies" which led to "The Jazz Singer" was simply the beginning of the end.

SuperXero89 · April 2011

Originally posted by lectrocuda

Originally posted by nero_usr

i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

Your crazy...How do you figure that wanting voice overs is lazy? I didnt realize that fun was related to work. I read three books at a time. One in the morning, one for afternoons, and one for the nighttime, why should I read a video game, that clearly has the capability to have cinematic type voice overs? You call me lazy, but the truth is, it is the developers who are lazy.

Anyways, I would really enjoy the explanation to go along with your logic

If that guy wants to label people as "lazy," it's the people who oppose voice overs who are lazy. One only needs to look at the launch of Everquest II for evidence of that. Can't tell you how many groups I pissed off because I wanted to listen to the NPCs talk before I clicked through to finish or to pick up a quest.

dmathewsfl · April 2011

I didnt read all the pages, but mainly just replying to you post about the reading of text on a computer screen.

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/the-secret-world/11084

If you go there and look at some of the GDC vids under the featured area, their missions seem to have a lot of cut scenes instead of actually reading it, you can of course skip them if you dont want to listen/watch. I like the idea a lot better than having to sit and read text all day.

Not saying that the game will be good or bad, but i just enjoyed the way they handled telling their story thru voice acting and not bland text

lectrocuda · April 2011

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by nero_usr

i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

Yeah I agree, hearing the sound of a voice is just so lazy.

Quite frankly the invention of the "talkies" which led to "The Jazz Singer" was simply the beginning of the end.

lol...lazy ass talkies.

Im hoping that the future of mmorpgs is more talkie, and less...textasaurus

marinrider · April 2011

Voice overs in game quests generally annoy me to death. On average the convorsation is long and boring as I speed read faster than they talk. In TOR I'll probably end up just reading the quest and skipping the voice if I can. (To me voice overs are a large waste of capitol that could be spent in other places).

rathalas22 · April 2011

Originally posted by nero_usr
i disagree. People seem to want voice overs, because they have become lazy, and simply want things to do the work for them. They use the "immersion" topic as an excuse.

This one made me laugh a little. How many times have all of us heard in a quest hub area, "where do I need to go for this quest." or something similar, and if they just opened the log or looked at the mini map it tells them and even shows them where to go. Those ones are the truly lazy.

Howdy, Stranger!

Rift was boring, now it is fun

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

Rift was boring, now it is fun

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV