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I dream of a World...
PerfectBlend
Member Posts: 49
.... where monsters can be wiped out into extinction... and new species can emerge at the developers whim..
Where a content update would be a new giant monster that it takes several cities to kill... and they happen weekly....
Where economy affects supply.... no wood no arrows kinda thing...
Where if you want to be a bandit you cant live in a town....
Where bandits carve their own niches into the world...
Mages study magic and priests gather at the church...
Where you can do stuff alone...
Where stuff gets done faster if you work together...
Weather changes, cycles are constant, and the world evolves..
Magic isnt learned in a day....
If you take an arrow in the knee you limp around...
For a while.
Comments
A monster take cities to kill? You will never get the group going. Trying to get a 25 man pug is hard enough.
No wood no arrow? Try to deal with angry players with no ammunication.
Heck, many games provides infinite ammunication so players dont have to deal with counting arrows. That is not fun for most of us.
then make it happen.
...or keep dreaming...
I see what your getting at kinda, I think... maybee?
Reading that it sounds like you want a game that is defined by the players, and each individual player has an effect on the game world, as well the game world needs to be able to 'evolve' ..? correct?
LFM "Multi-City Defense", need 1.7 million healers and 0.8 million more tanks, pst.
Sorry, the image just sort of made me smile.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I started making a game like this, then, you know, the whole arrow thingy. I try not to talk about it any more. My knee still bothers me before it snows.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
EQ DAOC UO had like 300k subscribers or 1mil or w/e. WoW had like 12million subs and you can't get 100 people together for a world boss? Whose fault is that?
AMEN!
They weren't all on on the same server... or on at the same time...
At any given time, there might be 1000 to 3000 players on a server on a VERY successful game. Of these...
How many are high enough level to help with the world boss?
How many are close enough to the world boss to get there in time?
How many are interested ("Nah, I killed the last four and got all the drops I need.")?
How many have enough uncommitted time to help with something like this? ("Sorry, it takes like four hours to down him and I have dinner in an hour. Why should I spend any time when I won't be there for the loot drop?") (And if it takes only a few minutes to bring him down, see above about the people who aren't in the area where he spawns and can't get there in time. Especially with those arrows in their knee.)
How much loot/XP/whatever can a boss drop so that it's worth it for 100+ people to participate, without it being so much that no one bothers playing EXCEPT when there's a world boss to kill? How many passes of balancing and rebalancing the loot tables will it take? (I remember WAR sieges, where you'd get 60+ players and most of them got bupkis for their "contribution".)
How many times can the world boss(es) spawn before it get dull, just one big tank-and-spank? Is the OP aware the designing high-level raids takes *months*, and, even so, there's always a few more passes of playtesting? And he wants a new, interesting, boss once a WEEK? Has the OP ever programmed anything more complex than "Hello, World" in Applesoft BASIC?
How many players will see the world boss as an annoyance? After all, if you want a living, active, world... then the LAST thing you want is crafters, etc, being unable to do their job because there's YET ANOTHER monster spawning in the city. YAWN. It was fun the first dozen times, but now...
If you want all that, you're better off playing a REAL RPG -- at a table, with human beings and odd-shaped dice. (Unless you use GURPS or HERO, then you can just use D6.)
The games I listed had 100 player raids on bosses. So don't give me that shit. They could do it, why can't WoW?
I have programmed something more complex that Hello World in Basic, so don't give me that shit either.
In any case if you don't like it you can always stick with WoW. People play the same raid dozens of times. In Diablo people killed Mephisto 3000 fucking times on one character, so don't tell me world bosses get boring killing one once a week.
Imagine that raid UI.
You're confusing "Our uber guild gets together at a mandatory time and place to kill this monster" with "Hey, there's a world spawn! Let's get 'im, guys!" The former provably works; the latter doesn't. Virtually all the problems I mention don't apply to raiding/instances, and DO apply to open world content. Now, I want you to sit down a little bit and mull this over. "A thing which is not the same as another thing may be different from that thing." I'm aware it's a complex concept. Let's keep going "Something that works for A might not work for B, because A is different than B." Let's go further and take a real world example -- Communism is founded on the idea that if people are willing to sacrifice and work without reward for their family, they'll do the same thing for perfect strangers. As it turns out, "strangers" are not the same as "family" and what works well for a family (everyone contributes what they can, and no one begrudges the fact some need more than they can give), doesn't work so well for the world (to the tune of, oh, a hundred million dead or so, but who's counting?). Likewise, "My guild can organize a raid!" is not the same as "A server can respond to a world boss!". They cannot be effectively compared.
Tell me you managed to organize a hundred random players to form a coordinated raid in EQ or WoW, a total PUG that effectively dealt with a monster. Tell me you got this organized in <1 hour. Then tell me about how you're the minister of finance of Nigeria, because I'm about as likely to believe that. I've been doing MMO games since Isle of Kesmai on CI$, and I know what works, and what doesn't. Your ideas fall cleanly into "doesn't". (Or is that "don't"? Not sure.)
You might want to consider that none of your ideas are original, revolutionary, or innovative. You might also want to consider that given how much money there is to be made in the MMO business, that these ideas will have been considered by developers as ways to create a new niche or diffrentiate themselves from the other games. That these ideas aren't adopted widely might give you a clue that they've been considered and found wanting. We remember the times that an overlooked idea proves to be workable simply because they're so rare. The vast majority of the time, the reason most people think an idea won't work is... because it won't work. Ideas that don't work are like planes that don't crash -- they're so common they're never reported on or mentioned. We remember only those rare outliers, the tiny, tiny, handful of ideas that actually DO work... but everyone's convinced they're among the special few unsung geniuses, and nothing can dissuade them, certainly not facts. ("You cannot reason someone out of what they were never reasoned into.")
WAR actually tried some of this, with massive city spawns during some events. What happened was that either a)There was no one in the city to kill it, and people were unable to trade, do quests, etc, because of it, or, b)A flood of people, usually in one or two well-organized guilds, would slaughter it in seconds, and people who were en-route because they heard a message about a chance to participate were left with nothing to do. (This was kind of a problem with WAR in general; if you didn't happen to be right where the action was, by the time you got there, it was over.) World bosses do exist in many games -- I've seen them wandering in City of Heroes/Villains, for example -- and they're a pretty minor part of the game. Either you have an organized team good to go and you take them down as part of your guild, or you just duck around them until they walk on. They do NOT inspire mass player activity; most of the time, people have a dozen other things to do.
If you want mass activity, you need to parcel it up into tiny little bits everyone can contribute to as part of their general play, like turning in orc ears or something, and the first server to get 10,000 orc ears turned in gets access to some new instance or event. This is every bit as exciting and immersive as it sounds, but it works.
And you're quite correct that endless runs of the same instances over and over are boring as hell, which is why I don't take part in them. As far as I'm concerned, the game ENDS at level cap, it doesn't START there.
(Gotta love "Well, go to WoW!" as the generic MMORPG.com term for "I don't feel like addressing your actual points.") I love this site; it's like the YouTube comments section of the MMO world. Anytime I feel my misanthropy start to wane, I just come here, and learn to despise the human race all over again. Bless you, MMORPG.com.
You are like all the kids today, even if you are an adult, you suffer from a misconception of scale.
it's the internet!!!!! it can happen:)
I like the idea of extinction events, but the problem is generating enough new names of creatures to replace all the ones that vanish. This was one of the things that had my imagination aflame with Spore as a template for next generation sandbox MMOs - players were generating the creatures/maps as well as depopulating them. I think the basic idea had a lot more promise than the game itself ended up realizing.
I think one of the problems of Spore is the graphical quality limitations of player generated creatures. And even then player creatures weren't really that different. I mean, aside from body shape all the addons were fixed. I can generate plenty of varied creatures and behaviors for a game programmatically, but problem is creating their appearance and rendering it for the 3d world. Graphics is always the bottleneck for games.
It is a GAME. Any requirement like that is just sily. Sure some SMALL % of players will get it done but it is no fun for most players. That is why WOW has 10M players, and EQ has 300k.
You make it sounds like a CHORE ... sounds like WORK.
You know why blizz makes LFR? It is too much WORK for most players to organize a 10 man or 25 man raid week after week. We are talking about making good GAMES here, not how to optimize a supply chain. So do not give me that 100 man is possible crap. Surely it is possible. I bet 1000 people are possible too .. just most players won't bother.
If 25 man is fun enough, why bother with 40 or 100?
Its only work if you make it work. I have fun organizing and doing difficult things. Where if you lose there are consequences. There were a lot of problems with EQ. I am just saying they had 100man raids. That game has many garbage features. You also have to remember that comparing WoW to EQ or UO is bullshit, the marketing hype was what powered WoW. Sure they changed some things, but not enough to explain MMORPGs going mainstream like that. That was money. It takes money to make money. Claiming that the subs from WoW were all about features is just silly.
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For those of you a few post up arguing about the city defence or whatever.
FFXI (yes the game that came out almost 10 years ago when dial-up was still used) Had "city defence" where NPC's would attack a certain city (and yes it was a fixed time/location) but it was real world, and anyone could do it. whether you were a lowly level like me (mid 30's) or fully tricked out on your 70..(maybe cap was 75..can't remember)
But it was a blast, I did it every chance I could, and most of the time I would die like 4 times...but it was still awesome, to see 150 players running around this city taking down anything they could, random people would join up for just a minute to take down a mob, then move on.
Seige?...maybe thats what it was called, bah blast my poor memory.
Please check out my channel. I do gaming reviews, gaming related reviews & lets plays. Thanks!
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So much irony in this statement.
MMOs were originally an attempt to bring the tabletop "playing in a living world with other players" to an online virtual setting... Which is what the original MMOs were much closer to.
Instead of building on the foundation of their predecessors and growing closer toward the intended goal, recent MMOs have taken a turn in the complete opposite direction. They've pushed toward for more solo, static, and one dimensional gameplay. Not because the original goal was impossible, but because it's more profitable to half-ass an MMO these days, because so many gamers continue to gobble up the same old uninspired crap that's been churned out over the last several years. Of course, so many of these same gamers continually hop from game to game every few months after they get bored, and they never seem to realize why.
Debbie Downer.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
I would be willing to bet that you could find 100 people to take down a world boss.
And such events were planned ahead of time.
Caer Sidi raids were usually planned a week in advance. These raids would get 50-100 people and the raid leader had a set time they left. If you did not make that departure time, you were on your own. either you caught up on your own, or you tried again next week.
Thats the nature of the beast. (cant please everyone)
Except today, everyone has to get a trophy.
You couldn't get the 100 ppl to take the world boss down? No problem, the boss just ransacked through the city and now all the vendors are dead (for a couple of days).
Better luck getting that group together next time.
Problem is, no one is willing to make such a hardcore game, since it wouldn't attract the masses.
I'd totally play it though if the excecution was done well.
Fallen earth requires you to make bullets... So its a feature in a working game currently and not out of the realm of possibility..
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