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The "Why do I care about this?" factor.
MindTrigger
Member Posts: 2,596
I want to be clear here and state that while I am using Rift as an example, most of the other games out there today suffer the same problem. This is not a bash on Rift specifically. I really want to like Rift, but I can't get involved in the world they are presenting.
When I look at a polished and sexy game like Rift and similar games coming down the line, I wonder why I soon become bored with it after playing for a month or two. There are many reasons, because these games are very superficial as we all have discussed ad nauseum, but one that really gets me is the "Why do I care about this?" factor.
Let's face it. These modern MMO's do not inspire much passion. I have no reason at all to care about my faction, or to hate the other faction other than some vague story of a war that doesn't manifest in the game enough to matter. In the case of Rift, I'm supposed to be inspired to kill mindless rift spawns that are sent to my land by some (who cares) evil NPC.
There is nothing that brings the characters together in strong opposition to each other; not even world PvP or world battles. I guess this also goes back to the point that these new MMOs motivate people to solo play, which also makes them boring in my opinion. If I wanted to run around and solo quest, without caring about anyone else in the game, I would play a standard RPG.
One of the cool things about Star Wars Galaxies was having both Rebels and Imperials playing in the same space all the time and having the war in your face everywhere you went. The Galactic Civil War was probably the most broken part of SWG, but SOE still managed to put enough of it throughout the planets that I truly felt like I had chosen a side, and cared about it it. There were clear lines about which faction to be a part of, and why you didn't like the other side. World PvP helped here too, because it allowed for groups of players to attack other groups of players, and this brought factions together whether you were the attackers or the defenders of any given confrontation. I know not everyone has such a magnificent intellectual property to base their MMO on, but then again, I don't believe SWTOR is going to make me care about my faction either. It suffers from the same sterile gameplay as Rift.
Look at a game like Rift. Sure, if you want you can look at the 'war' that is going on there, but good luck getting emotionally invested in it. The game itself does very little to make you feel like you are a part of anything worth caring about. When I play Rift for any length of time, I notice that I end up watching videos and stuff on my other computer while I am playing, which brings up another interesting point. Why is the content so damned easy? Seriously the worst thing I have to worry about is maybe pulling more than 4-5 mobs at a time, and having them slowly wear me down. Most of the time, I recover from these battles very easily anyway with my easybutton DPS and Heals.
So what is going on here? When I read what people say about Rift, they have the same response I do: "Nice looking polished game but Meh". Every iteration of these games is becoming more sterile, shallow and emotionless. It's no wonder so many people are bored. As someone who is looking forward to Guild Wars 2, I am concerned about experiencing the same issue there after I play a while.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Comments
I'll be honest and say I didnt read the whole thread, but I will comment on faction alligeance. When I played Vanilla WoW I really got the feel that I was a Horde and the Alliance were pond scum and my purpose was to destroy them. I felt like I was always competing with them and looking over my shoulder for a chance to kill one. And it was fun! In Rift it hardly feels like that. I would be doing an invasion in the second zone and you would fight the big boss along side the enemy faction and then once he was dead everyone would just walk off like we were all on speaking terms. It was absurd and really destroyed the feeling that you were at war (which is what the lore tries to say).
Even though you didn't read the whole post (which was only equal to about one page in a book - which scares the hell out of me for the future of humanity), I thank you for your reply. That's the issue in a nutshell. The war is not really in the game, at least not to a degree that makes anyone care about it. I feel like I am running around these magical looking lands just killing stupid/easy mobs and the war is some vague background noise that doesn't matter.
I was playing last night and I had a chance to kill some Guardian player who was about five levels below my character. He was picking up some resource or something. I could have killed the guy in a few seconds, but instead I realized that I didn't care. At all. I stood there looking at him until he realized I was standing there and ran away, and I just /waved. In Star Wars Galaxies, had I seen anyone from my opposing faction flagged for PvP, I would have chased them over half the planet if I had to.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
The Galactic Civil War was probably the least important part of SWG for me. As far as my guild and I were concerned it did nto even exist. I think we were technically a Rebel guild but it had absolutely no effect on us. Both factions felt the same and there was no real reason to prefer one or the other.
What I really cared about was my guild and the people in it. SWG gave us player cities which meant we could progress as a guild and work as a team on projects.
Frankly I could never get passionate about arbitrary fictional factions in video games. There really is no real reason to choose one faction over another so you usually just pick based on aesthetics or stat differences. It really does not make difference if it is Rebel vs Empire, Alliance vs Horde or Red vs Blue.
I can understand that, and you helped illustrate my point. There is *nothing* to care about in these games. With all the solo play, you don't even really need a guild except for a few quests here and there, and then end-game if you care about that. In Rift, for example, my 'guild' is really just a chat room. I have tried several guilds, and it's the same. Cooperative play is all but dead now, leaving me less reason to care about other players at all, my guild included.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Only reason I didnt read the whole thing the first time around is because I'm waiting for my History class to start so my laptop is on battery (with a low backlight) so its a bit tough on my eyes. I did read the rest after I posted though.
Refering to you rexpirence in Rift, I agree, thats basically the expirences I had in the game. People need to stop thinking that world PvP and faction warfare is dead and instead start thinking of ways to make it better / bring it back.
It was implemented well in the past. Nowadays most devs have it as an afterthought, which is why it's not very good.
For me the "care" was lost as soon as I could alt-tab to AIM and chatting with three different people, stumbling websites, watching youtube videos and looking up how to beat the quest I didn't bother to read the text for while "playing the game". Hard to really care about some imaginary conflict between pixels when you surround yourself with things that make it seem insignificant and unimportant.
This is what it is for me, it might not be the same for you. But I find that games haven't changed a lot, but we have and we no longer commit time just for the games when we could be doing 10 other things at the same time, and so we care 1/10th of what we used to.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Thanks! It's good to know some people aren't in the 'tl;dr' crowd. It scares me that people can't be bothered to read a few paragraphs, yet they expect to communicate with one another.
I hear the same thing about sandbox and social game elements too. People assume they are dead, but the fact is that most of the current MMO player base has never experienced these features in the first place. Millions of people who came to the genre with WoW, have no idea what they are missing, and game developers are just creating WoW clones now. Look at Bioware and SWTOR. They don't even pretend they aren't making a WoW clone. They are basically saying to gamers: 'Yeah this is all about the money, so we copied that other game, and we know you idiots will buy it anyway.'
I miss the good old days when developers were interested in innovating and building virtual worlds. Now, like everything else in the world, MMO games have been poisoned by corporate greed. Most of these games now can safely be designed to fail after a year or so, because they can make their money back and then some on box sales, and initial subs. All they have to do is get everyone excited enough to buy it at release.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Which is why I expect so much from SWTOR and GW2.
For SWTOR I expect Bioware to truely capture the battle between the Empire and the Republic. If they dont, and you have less than a burning passion to destroy all the Sith (as Republic) then they have failed in capturing what Star Wars is.
For GW2, their Mists system leads me to expect for them to develop some sort of Realm pride. If you are rotating between a group of realms then you obviously want to be the best realm their is. Just like if you go to a college and even somewhat into sports, your likely going to want your Football team to beat every other team.
TSW is likely not going to have to much in the way of the "kill your enemies all the time" type of pride, but I think that players should still be proud to call themselves a Dragon, Templar, or Illuminati. But its Funcom, so the bar is low.
Edit: realized my post has nothing to do with the quote. Sorry!
I'm not expecting anything great from either in terms of "world" or "large/massively<-- scale" pvp. Combat might be fun, but it's the rules and mechanics that make open world pvp good, not flipping a switch on everyone to make them all flagged like in WoW/AoC/Anything with mediocre Open World PvP servers.
Every game has a lore reason for it, I'm talking about the actual mechanics and the in game reason for it. I don't want a sports reason "just because they aren't us we must beat them".
With TSW, however, the lore is so interesting that by just being on the forums, I'm already filled with pride for my faction.
For me, SWTORs not going to make it on my list out of the three. I need more "change" in my mmo nowadays and compared to the normal, GW2 and TSW (and I guess Archeage, but I'm probably not getting it) are what have my eye.
I don't know if SWTOR will bring the war/conflict to the surface unless World PvP is active. Telling me about the war in voiceover quests, and they throwing me back out into the world that is devoid of a war isn't going to cut it. I'm actually thinking about rolling RP-PvP because I think that crowd of people will be more likely to want to kill each other for various reasons. I've decided to give Bioware my $60, mostly because GW2 won't be out for months and because it is Star Wars. In fact, mostly because it is Star Wars. If it was any other IP or lore, I would pass.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I have been following and hoping for Secret World for years now. Since way back when they first announced it. I think they blew it when they decided to make the factions "buddies" in the game now. The three factions should be at war, and trying to come out on top, not cooperating. I think this was a cop out on the gameplay design, and I'm sick and tired of developers making instanced battlegrounds as tacked-on PvP. Hutball, for example, is a bad joke in my opionion.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I think it is mostly because I lose track of my motivation. In Rift for example, I picked the Defiant because the Guardians are these anti-technology religious fanatics, a concept I am very much against. However, when I played the game PvP became entirely about getting stuff, but I think fighting for stuff is pretty boring, fighting for an idea is far more interesting, past the intro cinematic though the ideas of the Defiant and the reason I am fighting the Guardians gets lost.
Maybe if a game put the ideas of your faction at the forefront and reminds you of the ideology of your enemy and why you oppose it, then you could make players more engrossed in the war, I would be at least. The allies fighting Nazis in WW2 is far more memorable and interesting to people than the Mexican American War.
All men think they're fascinating. In my case, it's justified
Open World PvP just doesn't make sense for TSW. Each of the factions would want to stay.... Secret? Open warfare in the streets obviously isn't in their best interest. I'm sorry, but instanced PvP makes perfect sense here.
That depends on your point of view. We have real factions all over the world who's battles spill out onto our streets and are covered up with BS spin. In a game where the supposed three most powerful factions are at play, I should have to watch my back at all times no matter my faction.
Imagine the dynamic if you were Dragon, and you came across a street battle between Illuminati and Templars. You would have many choices of action, and it would add a lot to combat for all the factions. Now we have these battlegrounds that are out of sight and out of mind for most players just like battlegrounds in every other game these days. Instanced battlegrounds and housing water down the gameplay in my opinion.
I hope they reconsider. I know some people prefer PvE, and that's fine. We really need some open PvP servers too though.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
It's simply rediculous to think that we can regularly have these epic "street battles", ganking left and right in public, and for the secret societies to remain a secret. It just doesn't work.
I'm all for open world PvP, I understand the appeal, but it just doesn't work here, it doesn't make sense for this IP.
I never bought Rift, but I played in all but the last Beta weekend, and for the last one, I just couldn't being myself to log in.
I agree with most of what you said OP, my problem was that I just did not care a whit about anything that happened in the world. I thought the lore was stodgy and bland, and just badly written. I can get lost in a game-world, but it takes more than pretty scenery and cool animations to make me feel that way about a game.
I had the two starting areas that mirror one another almost exactly issue with Aion and I did play it for a few months, but with Rift, I knew I was in for the same experience and I couldn't face it.
If you play a game, MMO or RPG that has a great story, that sucks you in, you'll forgive a LOT. Heck I played Fallen Earth for 2 years (and still think of it fondly) because they had whip-smart writers, an overarching storyline and quest text I actually wanted to read... I could let everything else slide. I realised when beta-ing Rift that it was the lack of care behind the quest text that really turned me off, the laziness of two start zones, the realization that rerolling would be exactly the same experience with different spell effects... it was just disheartening. I played all the starter towns in FE (back when there was a long list of them) multiple times and didn't care because I'd always end up grinning at certain missions, they were just plain fun to do.
And I quit playing FE because I got into testing for another story-focused game...which I can probably actually talk about sometime in late December.
Suffice it to say, for me, when it comes to games, story = soul, and Rift didn't have one pre-launch at least.
Why do I care?
I'm playing Medieval Total War and saying to myself, "damn this would kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing Civilization 2 and saying to myself, "Damn this would kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing World in Conflict free trial and saying to myself, "Damn this would kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing Panzer General 2 and saying to myself, "Damn this woudl kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing Warcraft3 and saying to myself, "Damn this would kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing Sim City 3 and saying to myself, "Damn this would kickass if it were somehow turned into a MMO."
I'm playing elder scrolls oblivion saying to myself, "this REAL shield block kicks ass, I wish it were used in a MMO."
I play WOW-clone and say, "DAMNIT!"
Not only did I not read the whole post, I didn't read anyone else's replies either. Not sure on how that bodes for society, but I thought I would share a small point.
Aion was my second immersion into open-world PvP. It was during the final beta and there was a massive attack on one of the cities. Seeing so many players fighting it out to defend/attack this supposed safe haven was absolutely fantastic and I was sold on buying the game. After playing the game for a while on release, and watching the game evolve to people mostly soloing and getting ganked by random mobs of the opposite faction, I really ended up disappointed. People still had a hatred for the opposing faction, but they were often too caught up in their quests to take interest. I blame the themepark mechanics for the problem, though I've yet to truly sink my teeth into a good sandbox.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
That idea is ridiculous but the idea of every conspiracy theory and mythological monster story ever told spilling out on the streets while three global super-factions join forces to fight them off with supernatural powers and machines guns isn't? Interesting point of view you have there...
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I just wanted to post and let the OP know that I feel the same way. The cookie cutter MMOs have been a really sad use of developer time and money, and the money should be going to games that immerse players better and give us the option to express ourselves creatively. SWG did this very well. SWTOR and Rift are prime examples of games that do not do this, and they are doomed to mediocrity.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Also I feel bad for players who have never found themselves immersed in the world and community of a dynamic virtual world like SWG was. They are truely missing out. I imagine that someday they will have an opportunity to express themselves in a virtual world and it will be an eye opening experience... Much like having a smart phone for the first time after using an older phone for most of your life.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Because within the conext you just laid it, it simply makes no sense. Get over it.