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Will we ever have proper large scale in pvp?
FredomSekerZ
Member Posts: 1,156
Devs seem to talk alot about large scale pvp, which usually ties into the famous rvr style pvp created by DAOC. I never played it myself, but i asked in another thread how big it was compared to GW2's WVW (for obvious reasons) and was told the vanilla version alone was 3 times the size. That wvw is the size of a single fronter. (If this is incorrect, i apologize. However, i feel my point remains)
I've already been disapointed with the so called "large scale" in today's mmo, but this put it all into greater perspective.
Now, keep in mind that i'm not drawing comparasions to DAOC's overall systems or mechanics, or anything to do with open world pvp. This thread is simply about the size of the landmass in the pvp maps of today.
Look at some recent examples: Illum in SWTOR, Fusang in TSW, Conquest in Rift. The best of all is, IMO, GW2's wvw, but, here's the thing. Looking at the full map, the Boarderlands, seem to be abit bigger than the Eternal Battleground (the center map). However, since the 3 BLs are copy pasted, if you cut them off, you lose more than, or atleast as much as, 50% of the entire map.
Now, i'm not hating this games at all (read my post history, i really like TSW and GW2 even), but it's just to use examples. Personally, when i look and put these pvp areas into perspective, they don't feel big scale at all.
To even go further, i looked at that new dungeon in wvw which is suppose to be inspired by Darkness Falls, but when i saw it, it looked far more like a small room than an actuall dungeon. And just watched videos and maps of DF, and the comparision is ridiculous.
To conclude my post, i'm not trying to say that we need every single mmo to be the size of DAOC. I'm simply trying to say that, when i imagine large scale pvp, i imagine a huge area where you can feel it goes far, far beyong what the eyes can see and that you're just a small point in the whole thing. But in reality, what we have is BG's streched to be bigger and, because it takes more than 10 minutes to go from map edge to map edge, it can have said name.
Am i the only one that wants proper big scale pvp?
*Note- i know about Planetside 2
Comments
Faction based PvP WILL NEVER be LARGE SCALE as the devs tell it to be. Players need an other reason to participate (and organize) in large scale PvP other than 'they're the other faction'.
I've always thought that Lineage II had one of the best reasons for large scale combat - FINANCE! When owning a castle, the clan can raise tax and get income from the villages around it. Of course, the bigger clans want to have the castle and there you have the reason for large scale PvP.
In the time I've played Lineage II, I've participated with dozens of castle sieges (both attacking and defending) and have seen amounts of players on the battlefield that most other MMORPG's (and thus their developers) could only dream of. At times the amount of players was even *THAT* bit that my FPS dropped to 5-10 (having 50-60 normally) with the engine having trouble to show 300+ players in the current field (even when set to low resolution). The biggest siege I've seen was one in Aden long ago where really over 1000 players were out to kick the long-term owner from the castle.
Having large scale means the software/hardware will have to scale as much.
It is easier to have smaller Faction based PvP than really large scale PvP.
Lineage 2 was the most awesome PvP game i played it for 4+ years. Castle seiges were so much fun at the height of L2 there would be hundreds of people on each side fighting over castles. the grind in that game was terrible but i kept playing because the PvP was so much fun. It is still the most fun i have had in PvP in an MMO and i dont understand why more companies havent given PvPers something to fight over, the gear grind is lame having actual PvP objectives to fight over is awesome.
Yeah, Lineage 2 had amazing large scale pvp. Four of my top 5 best mmo pvp moments were in Lineage 2.
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Lineage 1 is the most played MMO in korea, followed by Aion and Lineage 2 in thrid and these games are p2p there. It's because Koreans know that Lineage 1 is the last true MMO live in the world, 100% focused in open world mass pvp-pk-clan war-player driven economy/politics. These "pseudo-MMOs" mainly in west are just single player campaigns where players reach level cap in 3 days following quests and after level cap, they just go multiplayer in intanced rooms over and over. If koreans wanted to play something like this, they just play Call of Duty instead of a single player campaing/multiplayer room game disguised as MMO.
One angle to this is that large scale lands for PVP require significant numbers of players to achieve population density.
I don't know for certain, but it seems that trend is for smaller battleground populations so that players don't have to wait so long in queue for the battles to start. That sort of works opposite to having large PVP zones.
Darkfall had great large scale pvp battles, haven't played in years though.
Up and coming I'm hoping on Planetside 2, we'll see if it can live up to the claims of battles of up to 2000 players.
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There's a difference between 'able to' and 'actually have' 2.000 players participating in PvP. I really hope that PS2 will gat those numbers, but I fear for the worst though...
Lineage 2's castle seiges were in the game world not instanced not seperated. If there was a castle seige going on and you weren't part of it you knew to stay away from that area of the map. the problem with PvP imo is that it is instanced battlegrounds with nothing to fight over. Castles in Lineage 2 earned you money and in that game with money being so difficult to make you wanted a castle. It was an objective that every other week you fought over no instances no battlegrounds no seperation from the rest of the game world. There were a lot of benifits to owning a castle. Battlegrounds while an instant action type thing are lame there is nothing to fight over when the match ends you get some points for gear. When a castle seige ended whoever scribed the stone last owned the castle for 2 weeks and reaped the benifits of that.
We can't have battles that scale that large until things change.
1. Technology. We need a new gap jump in how things are done. You can't be immersed in PvP when it's not smooth. Turning graphic quality down and visual distance down are not the answers we need.
2. Reason to fight. We need real reasons to do things. Otherwise, it feels like an unrewarding job. You can say factions are at war, but that's not a reason without a backstory you can get behind. You need to feel like your choice makes a difference and have an attachment to your faction/side. We need goals other than capturing a flag or controlling X resources that have no impact on the game.
3. We need real synnergy of classes and tools instead of just "zerg him down! 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2"
4. Numbers. I think new infrastructures are on the right path for making one big seemless world.
I am definitely looking forward to Planetside 2 hoping that it does well. I really want to have those massive battles over objectives that have benifits. With the real time map and objectives changing hands i am hoping the battle never stops.
The bigger the fights you want to occur the less often they will occur. Games and specific servers can only have so many players at a time. If the map is too big that players have to spend more time traveling then fighting or they never run into each other then some will stop playing. Size of fights drop and people who wanted bigger fights quit because their needs are not met.... population death spiral.
As others have said... able to have 2000 player fights and actually having that many are two different things.
Yes, the mass pvp-sieges in L1/L2(mainly in L1) are not instanced, everything happens in the persistent world, people go sieges because owning a castle makes the winner alliance dominate the economy of that region, people do clan wars all over the world because they fight over the best spots, open dungeons and open world bosses. People that grew with WoW will never understand that, they just think that it can be solved creating a huge battleground for 2k people to fight over nothing, just points to farm gear. As I've just said before, a single player campaing game with multiplayer rooms.
EVE had over 3000 players in one battle two years ago, if I remember correctly.
My guess is that (like Lineage II's castle sieges), it was over territory/economic properties?
Amazing number BTW... 3K in PvP... OMFG! I thought that ~1K in that Aden siege was big already
possibly but that only speaks to the type of pvp where "roving gangs fight each other".
If there are proper goals in the game, whether those are points one needs to hold/take or bases one needs to hold or take then one can plan accordingly.
if anything large land masses can play into pvp. Having to force march (so to speak) in order to get to the fighting in time can be worked into pvp.
But then again, that speaks to whether or not people are just looking for large battles or a world where battles take place. Perhaps they are two separage demographics of people?
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Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I think you should try EvE. Some of the PvP that goes down absolutely dwarfs the size of anything that happened in DAOC.
Thanks for responding guys, but i'm not refering to having tons of people on screen at the same time.
Using GW2 as an example again (remember, i'm not hating on it), the land of Tyria, the pve side, is more than 10x the size of wvw.
IMO, true large scale pvp is more than possible. It's just that devs keep making 90% of the game dedicated to pve, then slap some tiny-medium scale maps and call it big scale. I think i'd be pretty cool if we could have a game that's the opposite. Again with GW2, imagine if most of Tyria was the actuall pvp, with 3 hub cities for each faction and 2 or maybe 3 other zones for quests and a couple of dungeons.
If more mmorpgs did something like this, we could finally have huge open world pvp with all the qualities of RVR. But instead, we end up with what we have today. I'm not hating on pve btw, since i like all elements of mmorpgs, but Planetside 2 seems to be the only one doing it in the visible future. Maybe TESO will succed in this, but i don't have many hopes for it.
I think that WvW the land is big enough. Any bigger and your just wasting too much time travelling. I was spending last BWE exploring some of the nooks and crannies of the home map and was amazed how many hidden caves, passageways and areas there are if you stray away from the path. It's really quite huge, immensely bigger then areas like wintergrasp, Fusang and Illum. Yet not big enough that you need a mount or portals everywhere to avoid being frustrated. It strikes a perfect balance in my opinion.
Bigger is not always better. For example in my opinion Tier 1 in Warhammer was the best PVP region because the battle was concentrated on these few areas that as a result always had battle 24/7 while some of the larger later tiers had many deserted areas.
I believe the reason is that many players in themeparks do not want large areas for PvP. They want to get to the action fast, without travelling and having to search for fights.
A small map allows that, perhaps even with markers on the map where to find "enemies".
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1. Technology:
Should be doable now. I remember playing Day Of Defeat 1.x over a 56k modem. Up to 20 players on the map it was smooth enough. That was 10 years ago, in the time of 1GHz single core CPUs and rather puny graphics cards (IIRC I had a Matrox G400 with 32 MByte, that was considered pretty good at the time).
With the improvements since that time, I think 200 players per map should be doable
. And I guess Planetside2 will show what is possible.
2. Reason to fight:
Agreed, that is more tricky to get right. Or at least the industry has more trouble getting it right. But it works for EVE Online with its system for occupying territory. Not every day, but there is the occasional megabattle with a few hundred ships. So it is possible to get the players on board.
3. Synergy of classes:
Would be nice, but even the zergfst can work. See EVE...
4. Numbers and big seamless worlds:
Limited partly by technology (again, see EVE for an example that works) and partly by content creation. Designing such a huge world is a lot of effort. But even so, I could see some of the "bigger" MMOs get there, especially after a few expansions.
Overall, I think the technology is there today, the game design needs to catch up.and the players will come when the gane design is right.
How do you talk about large scale pvp without even mentioning EVE Online?
I agree large scale hasn't been nailed in a long long time, EVE still sports some of the best. I also think GW2 WvW is a huge step in the right direction. The first time our massive zerg got into a battle I thought it was just going to be a full on laggy bull rush, but it wasn't. Pockets developed, people were dropping left and right- it felt like an actual battle and thats something that few games I've played can capture.
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For me the old frontier in DAoC was a great setup.
But nowadays people will prolly want something smaller with more frequent battles.
unfortunately technology does not work that way. People want decent looking graphics and smooth gameplay and you can't have both AND still have a game for the mass market. Most PC cannot handle render that much people and still run at a sufficient fps which removes the incentives for companies that want to target the masses.
to conclude games are designed for the masses, the masses do not have the latest and greatest pc and so game design need to reflect that reality unfortunately.