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(The Problem of Sandbox Design) THE LACK OF SERIOUS EPIC PVE! (PvP focused MMO are a Niche group!)
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
I want to detail why I believe Sandbox concept doesnt hold up well in modern day MMORPG Community.
I believe its due to the Dull PvE elements.
Lets be real here.
PvE in most Sandbox MMORPG consist mainly of Crafting(Collecting and Crafting)
Usually the NPC lack any form of major scripting, due to the the fact that most Sandbox MMORPGs dont have Class System, which means they also dont have any form of Trinity. This means, PvE combat becomes nothing more than a DPS Zergfest of out-numbers.
Seriously,,,, combat NPC in Most sandbox designed MMORPG, are so spaced out and scarce, that you would think that these creature was on an Endangered Species List, somewhere.
Where is the seriousness of PvE Combat in Sandbox design MMORPG?
Most Themepark designed MMO, as we call them, focus their endgame on some format of Serious Endgame PvE elements, such as Raid Dungeon progression, and normal dungeons.
But in Sandbox, what do we get as a player of PvE?
Its time that developers realize this once and for all.
PvP Focused MMORPG are a Niche Group, no matter if they are Sandbox or not. (Just look at Warhammer if you want an example of this. PvP focused MMO, without great PvE to go along with it, will flop nowadays)
Most Sandbox MMORPG are PvP Focused, for some unknown reason developers choose to do so.
But another key fact.
PvE Focused MMORPG are also a Niche group.
There has to be a Balance of both.
Sandbox MMORPG developers keep trying to take the easy road out of the problem, by developing these PvP Focused MMO in my opinion, but they always flop because they have no serious PvE, which leaves it open for things such as Harsh Death Penalty, which scares off the few remaining PvE players and smaller guild player base.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
Xsyon has some of the elements you describe and has plans to implement more.
I think thats what you meant.
To me sandbox MMO's are more focused on player created content. For myself and others this is the part we enjoy. We dont log in and say ok what does the game want me to do next some quests, dungeons, dailys. I log in and see what the clan, guild is doing, maybe its harvesting mats, crafting, farming npcs, or PVP its all on the table, but epic loot isnt the daily goal.
The main problem, for me, is that you need to invest a lot, and I mean a lot, of time into building player relationships in sandboxes to enjoy them.
And I (and most other people) don't have that time.
If you don't have that time, there is nothing those games can offer you that online FPS do not do better.
Thus Sandbox is destined to be extremely niche games without big successes - simply because the number of people who can invest their time into them is small.
Not really. Eve Online doesnt require time played to be decent. It also is a very sucessfull game with 20-50k players on at any givein time and has 2 xpacs year. Eve simply supplies the tools and the players make what they want of it. Now Eve is the exception to the norm in the last few years. Yes sandbox games need to be more creative.
Its all about choices and freedom for players to do whatever it is they want.
Where to begin...
-Sandbox MMOs don't have anything equivalent to raiding since they usually have emphasis on crafting. That means that most, if not all, the items in the game can be crafted. One does not need to go killing bosses when little bit of grinding for materials and a minigame can do.
-PvP is endgame. If it is not some lame raid treadmill, it is this. Good PvP really prolongs the lifespan of a game. Other is replayability. But PvP also offers a money/gaer sink which actually promotes crafting. You get killed, you lose your stuff, you go buy stuff from a crafter, get back into game. The economy rests on this cycle - on PvP.
-PvE focused MMOs are a niche? Umm... No they're not. Great majority of MMO players do it for the PvE. GW1 was a PvP focused game and yet they had to start shifting more towards PvE in the following expansions since something like 90% of the people playing that game hadn't played PvP and didn't care for it. That amount is staggering. It surprised the devs aswell. Even Eve has huge portion of their players in running just PvE in high sec.
Warhammer was a decent game for the first 3 weeks after which it had absolutely nothing to offer. RvR was lame (scenarios were good however), and there was very little to do in the PvE front. I had rolled 2 characters to tier 4 in that time.
-I don't know what scripting has to do with this but having no classes doesn't mean that there is no Trinity, and therefore there is no DPS zergfest. I think people who claim that are too entrenched to the archaic mold of combat - the Trinity combat. There can be plenty of group dynamics without a healer or a tank. And who says there has to be only three roles?
Why aren't sandbox MMOs more popular then? I bet there are many reasons, but I don't agree with these.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Oh, come on. I've played EVE for many years. Not sure about right now, but you spend your first two weeks just getting into a cruiser. You can get proper agent-running with a battleship, and it takes a month, minimum. It takes at least couple of months to get into pvp. As for being competitive in manufacturing, or, gods forbid, inventing and t2 production, you need how much time?
Admittedly, you don't need to grind if you don't want to, selling plexes you can get enough isk to just have fun anytime you want, and you can play for 3-4 hours a week and not get behind those playing whole day in skills department, but that relies on the real life $ you are ready to spend.
Yeah, you can get into salvaging (ninja-salvaging) or exploration nearly immediately, and get decent isks from it, but it's not as if it's easy. Lots of competition.
That said, EVE is a great game, the best sandbox out there, hands down, but it took it many years to get to that point. Many years of extremely clever and pointed development. And STILL it's a niche game.
As for 50k accounts online, well, I always tripple-boxed in EVE (liked to run lvl5 missions solo, with 3 ships
), and most people I knew at least dual-boxed, except for pvp times, so the real number of players is a bit lower.
My point was, say it takes 30 days to get into a BS. If you play 100 hrs a week or 1 hr a week it still takes 30 days. If it takes 200 days to fit it with all top mods if you play 1hr a month or 400 hrs it still takes 200 days. It caters to both the casaul and hardcore player. Leveling is taken out of the equation and your free to do whatever else you want to.
Even if everybody 2-3 boxed in the game which is unlikely, I dont. It is still 5-10 times the pop of any other single server in any other mmo.
You got that right. PvP focused MMOs are a niche market.
Sandbox games promote PvP only. So the majority of people, including me
, won't play sandbox games. I don't wanna craft all day for what? For money? Why would I need that? To craft some more? I don't care if my items are viable, crafting is boring and kinda pointless if there is nothing else to do.
=>>> Sandbox MMOs are not for PvE players. =>>> Sandbox games will never get big numbers. If I wanted to play "PvP" only I would play an shooter or a competitive strategy like SC.....
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Indeed it does, but, again, it took EVE many years to get to that point. And still, if you want to truly experience EVE at its best as a sandbox, you need to get into sandboxy part: 0.0 alliances or serious manufacturing.
And that needs lots of time for develoment of in-game connections with players, even though EVE done everything it could to ease that.
As for the population, I never understood that idiotic decision to separate communities BY SERVER, as other mmorpgs do. What the hell? Create a single universe with AREAS separated by server, as EvE did! That allows for single, united community within the world, and it just solves so many MMORPG's inherent problems that I can't imagine why nobody copies Eve's ideas here.
First of all. Sandbox and Themepark are not the only two options. It's not you have to be White OR Black. There's a huge line of Gray color shade in between.
Extreme Black or Extreme White (Sandbox or Theme Park) is BAD. Even though extreme Sandbox is more bearable to me than extreme Themepark.
Secondly, please stop saying Trinity. It is NOT trinity. World of Warcraft trivilized the Class Roles to Tank, Healer and DPS. This is the extreme simplified system of Class Roles. Where did the Pullers go? Where's Crowd Control? Where's Debuffers? There are many roles that you can be turned into a necesseity based on the encounters difficulty. Encounters should require more than just these 3 roles to overcome. But the PvE content now a days are too easy to even require something like "Pulling" from EQ. These roles shouldn't be as obvious as the current game design, for instance when you rolled a Monk in EQ it didn't say "This class is good for pulling monster to your group" you as a player would discover that. Give every class options to fulfill multiple roles.
Sandbox doesn't lack serious PvE content. It is the mindset of segregating Sandbox and Themepark concepts when you clearly can always have the merits of both world in one game. Once you join the positive points of both worlds you're going to get a monster of a game.
If you can add meaningful PvE to a sandbox MMO without turning it into a treadmill, go for it.
Most themepark games have dull pve, oh wait running the same endgame raid ad nauseam is 'fun' now is it?
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Common misconception is that a sandbox can't have epic PVE. Wrong. Sandboxes can have as many themepark rides as devs want to put in. A sandbox just ALSO has other tools for the persistent world.
Eve is about space. It's easy. Just space (read "nothing"), a star, maybe planets, maybe moons, maybe asteroid belts and maybe stations. Add some gates and your new portion of territory is done. And how about MMORPGs that isn't about space? You can't just do it all like Barrens in WoW: "Nothing, nothing, mob, nothing, nothing, tree, nothing, nothing, bush...". So to make that ammount of locations will take so much time and efforts that no one in their minds will do it.
Absolutely true. There is no actual barrier between sandbox and themepark. It all is just the tools, all of it, sandboxy parts, themepark parts, it's just the set of tools. For example, EVE now adding a lot of themepark tools into their model.
The only limit is time and resources to develop, balance and polish those tools.
You misunderstood. You don't need that many locations, you just need all those servers to be in one universe. The only limit is overloading, but if, say, there are 1000 players in one small location (which overpopulates it), you instance that location into 2, 3, 10 on different servers, but all those instances are still in the same world, so people can connect, trade, etc with each other, and if players group or otherwise unite they all end up in one instance with each other, etc.
Lotro does that, as far as I remember. But trade instruments kind of suck big times in Lotro, which is a big no-no.
I miss static PVE grinding.
EQ did not invent the holy trinity. The holy trinity has been around long before WoW/EQ, long before this genre was even born. It goes back to the "oldschool hardcore" RPGs which are the base for all MMOs that why they were called massive RPGs back then.
Holy trinity - damage dealer, healer and tank. These three roles are required for you to succeed. You have other roles but they are not required. You don't need to have a specialised puller or CC. That's why they are not part of the holy trinity. The holy trinity does not mean that there are only 3 roles in a game. It means that there are only 3 required roles. Of course, you have action RPGs which do not have the holy trinity as they boil down to having damage dealers only.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
If you are looking for a sandbox that has good PvE then there is only one choice - Darkfall.
The AI in Darkfall is simply amazing and the NPCs even level up. I have not played a better PvE game than Darkfall and the AI really makes you unable tp play shity static NPC game like WOW with the agro shite.
Darkfall is also getting and occationaly has roaming NPCs.
Mortal Online AI is not great.
Xyson AI is not great.
All other MMOs use the old style groups of mobs just doing nothing until you get near. You can even kill the NPC next to them.
Fallen Earth NPC are really really bad though.
Go Darkfall if you want proper NPC AI. There are epics like dragons and stuff as well.
There are MMOs where enemies wander around and patrol instead of just standing still
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I really wish more MMOs would implement Saga of Ryzom's mob AI. You have migrating species moving over the zones as seasons change, real predator cycle that works on its own (carnivores eating herbivores), animals coming close to you and sniffing you as you approach them or becoming weary and backing away, etc. Damn shame.
I agree with the general sentiment of this thread, I also think that PvE is given short thrift in sandbox games.
This is what attracts me to Archeage, which is a sandbox heavy game apparently... it seems to be putting as much emphasis on PvE/ non hostile activity as it is on PvP (unlike something like Darkfall did at launch) and I think thats the way to go for the future.
Open malleable worlds with persistant player impact please.
PvE players ttend to form the social backbone of any game they are in, and they tend to be less fickle and more loyal to it in general in my experience, it has never made sense to me for Devs to ignore the dynamic in their games. In the interests of longevity if nothing else.
Incoming: Long post with my sandbox idea. It probably sucks and you don't have to read it, but for those interested here it is.
I'd personally love to see a Sandbox MMO with a few of the following features:
Top end crafting materials come from PvE raiding. Dragons don't drop epic armor, they drop dragonscales. Dragonscales are used by crafters to craft the best armors in the game. Demon lords drop Infernal Essences which are used by crafters for the best enchantments in the game. Ancient Elemental Gods drop rare elemental ores which are used by crafters for the best weapons in the game etc.
Fealty system in which small casual guilds can swear fealty to large territory holding guilds. The small guilds automatically become friendly to the large guilds but become hostile to all the large guild's enemies. They can use the player cities constructed by the large guild. Large guilds can not reject fealty, if a small guild wants to join there's nothing the large guild can do about it. And friendly really means friendly, impossible to attack. Basically player created factions, nobody can prevent you from joining the WoW Horde, you can't attack other Horde players etc. If large guilds don't want small guilds allying then they can't take over territory. Taking territory means you'll have people living there, whether you want or not. Large guilds can decide what the taxes and such are though, so putting taxes really high they could hope to scare smaller guilds away.
No Full Loot but Item Decay. Full Loot means you that a casual player loses weeks of playing when dying whereas a hardcore player loses only a few days. Even if the hours invested are the same there's still a large timeframe difference before both players reach the same point again. Item Decay means you level the playing field. There's still item loss to keep the player run economy going but it's no longer so casual-unfriendly.
Horizontal Advancement instead of Vertical. Veteran players have more options but aren't stronger then new players. EvE does this in a way. After a few months of playing it's possible to max out frigates Both a 5 year vet and a 5 month newbie can be nearly equal in a Rifter. The only problem is that most EvE gameplay centers on BS. For a fantasy MMO I'd like to see a player being able to max out one style in 1-2 months ( Heavy Armor + Sword + Shield fighting for example ) and as soon as that style is maxed out they can participate in every combat aspect of the game. They can raid, they can PvP, everything. Veteran players will have many more maxed out styles but due to limited equipment slots ( players can only carry 2 weapon sets and 1 armor set at a time, no more. Weapons/Armor in bags can not be equipped unless you're in town. ) So a veteran will have tons of options while equipping his character but once equipped he's the equal of everyone playing for 2 months or longer.
Maximum amount of crafting recipes learned. Every crafter has a maximum of recipes they can remember. No crafter can craft everything. A 5 year vet may know more recipes then a 5 month newbie but even he can't do it all. You could start out with 5 recipes max and max out at 25 recipes. It takes serious time to learn recipes. You start with a recipe at horrible efficiency and crafting speed. Based on real-time learning system you can set your character to study certain items which will improve the efficiency and crafting speed of the matching recipe. So if you have an empty crafting recipe slot then you select an item from your inventory, you select to study it and a week of real-life offline time later that recipe is at 50% in efficiency and crafting speed. After a month of real-life offline time the efficiency and speed are maxed. No matter if your character is 1 month or 10 years old. Guild crafters need to organise with each other so they don't double up on recipes while casual crafters can study the market a bit to decide which items are in demand and learn the associated recipes. Whatever advancement system is used for crafting it only increases the amount of recipes you can learn, not the actual recipes themselves.
Casual-friendly building system. Guilds, not individual players though you could create 1-man guilds, can build guild halls in the game world. Each guild is limited to one hall. The hall requires weekly materials or it collapses. Halls can be deconstructed with no material loss if the guild doesn't want to pay the weekly cost, the hall disappears and other guilds can build in the spot again. The hall can not in any way be destroyed except for failing to supply the weekly materials. The hall can hold trophies, furniture and some basic services ( merchant, bank, crafting stations etc. ). Guild members can not be attacked while inside their hall.
Hardcore territory holding system. In order to claim an area hardcore guilds can build a totem/whatever to claim an area. These can only be build if there's no other totem in that area. The hardcore guild can then build a player city around the totem and any guilds that have a hall within the totem range automatically sweat fealty to the hardcore guild ( losing their previous fealty. If they don't like that guild then they need to move their hall. ) Once a totem is build they're automatically at war with any other totem-holding guild unless both guilds agree on a treaty. The totem and entire guild city can be destroyed at any time, though this does take a lot of siege to do. You need lots of casual fealty guilds to protect your city at all times.
Simple war system. Territory holding guilds can not declare war, they're automatically at war with all other territory holding guilds and those that have sworn fealty to them but can not declare more wars. They can only make peace treaties if both guilds agree. Guilds that have sworn fealty can not declare war, they're in the same boat as territory holding guilds and their war status is a carbon copy of the hardcore guild they're following. Only guilds that have no territory and no fealty can declare war, but only on guilds that own territory. This is to allow guilds without territory to contest other hardcore guilds to take territory. As soon as a guild without territory has declared war they become open to fealty and smaller guilds can join them. If the war ends and the guild does not have any territory then all fealty is dropped immediatly.
Probably needs some tweaking and extra features to balance it out but it's basically an idea to make a world that's politically controlled by the hardcore guilds but in which all players, no matter how casual, can allign themselves with these hardcores and help out in shaping the world.
TL;DR: idea for a more casual friendly sandbox MMO, go read the first sentence....
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Resistance is futile.
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Using EVE as an example, I'll detail the PVE activites. (though some of these could also be considered PVP of a sorts, but I figure if its not directly related to combat with other players, its not really PVP)
1) Industry
2) Exploration
3) Complex running
4) Mining
5) Market trading
6) Contract Hauling
7) Station seeding/selling of goods
8) Scamming
9) Living in Wormholes and Sleeper combat
10) Mission running/faction grinding
11) New since April - Incursions
12) Housing (Building/maintaining your own Player owned station (POS) or even a full station in 0.0
Now what it doesn't have is scripted raiding, the one missing element from the OP. And that makes perfect sense, because the only purpose behind scripted raiding is to run it ad naseum (I find it terribly boring btw) and get better loot. That's just not how a sandbox game normally is wired.
But EVE has been trying to improve on this front too, recently wormholes and incursions do require scripted raiding of a sorts, players do have to bring elements of the trinity (EVE has them btw) such as healing, DPS, Debuffing/crowd control to defeat the NPC's within.
They also have to perform the dance properly, doing things correctly by killing things in their proper order at the proper time in order to not be overwhelm.
It even scales, with higher level wormholes requiring successively bigger, more powerful ships (level 6's are typically run with Carriers) and of course, require more and more of them.
So all that's left is the scripted PVE encounters the OP spoke about, with end game gear as the final reward.
Thanks, but no thanks, I hope EVE never gets this, regardless how niche it keeps its market.
(and there are many more reasons for EVE being niche game, I doubt adding scripted PVE would significantly increase its player base, but just my opinion)
Remember, the actual "purpose" in EVE is not to play a game, its to create a life for your avatar in the EVE universe. You determine what sort of life that will be and what activities you will pursue to achieve "success", however you so define it.
Which probably is the biggest factor in EVE being a nichce game, most folks want the developers to set the succcess parameters for them.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
All plots will eventually be completed given enough time (and a lack of bugs). What then?
Random generation has no plot so gets dull fast. And even wide a large selection will become same old same old after a while.
If you leave it up to the players all you get is 99.9% waiting for other 0.01% to do something for them (and no doubt whining at them for not doing so fast enough).
You can replay a single player game a few times before it gets boring, and have spent maybe 100 hours on it total. Yet we expect to be continualy entertained with new things to do by a game we first started playing 6-10 years or more ago, and have spend 1,000's of hours in?
Maybe the problem is not with the game, but with us and our expectations of it?
The only other games that last anywhere near as long are FPS and flight sims where you do the same old same old day in day out, but have that as your expectaion (the occasional update or mod aside).
Are we expecting too much from the developers to keep us all entertained for all eternity? Especially when one day after the update they spent months making, you get the first posts saying 'done it - bored now - whats next?'.
Cheers
Stuntie.