The reason why old school games were hard , at least AC, was because when you died, you were dead. Does anyone remember the Virindi quest ?
2 groups, 2 dungeons. One low, one high, had to open doors for each other until they reached the boss. It could take up to 2 hours and being part of the low level group meant pretty much you are a one hit kill. So 2 hours of play through a not easy dungeon(npcs ignored your armor) and then one spell and you are out. No loot, nothing. but not only that, you also lost half your inventory.
That was the last game without the ressurect mechanic iirc. Everything after made diing a part of the game. Die-> chat: RESS!!!! -> "cast ressurect" -> fight again = Easy mode
I'm not sure if possessing a resurrection skill is really the issue. While I agree that death should have its penalties, and they should be severe. You could do something where you could only rez once per hour. Where you really needed to make the rez count. That and be damned sure that you won't be hit by any MOB while you are casting it.
The issue is not so much the ability to resurrect a person as much as with many MMOs now they give this ability to everyone. WoW has it so as long as your guild is high enough everyone has unlimited rez now, Rift made is an Ascended racial so everyone has it, but it has a high cooldown at least and I am sure there is more. Death has not been a penalty for a long long time.
Thank you for the article! This dicussion is a long time coming.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
The reason why old school games were hard , at least AC, was because when you died, you were dead. Does anyone remember the Virindi quest ?
2 groups, 2 dungeons. One low, one high, had to open doors for each other until they reached the boss. It could take up to 2 hours and being part of the low level group meant pretty much you are a one hit kill. So 2 hours of play through a not easy dungeon(npcs ignored your armor) and then one spell and you are out. No loot, nothing. but not only that, you also lost half your inventory.
That was the last game without the ressurect mechanic iirc. Everything after made diing a part of the game. Die-> chat: RESS!!!! -> "cast ressurect" -> fight again = Easy mode
I'm not sure if possessing a resurrection skill is really the issue. While I agree that death should have its penalties, and they should be severe. You could do something where you could only rez once per hour. Where you really needed to make the rez count. That and be damned sure that you won't be hit by any MOB while you are casting it.
The issue is not so much the ability to resurrect a person as much as with many MMOs now they give this ability to everyone. WoW has it so as long as your guild is high enough everyone has unlimited rez now, Rift made is an Ascended racial so everyone has it, but it has a high cooldown at least and I am sure there is more. Death has not been a penalty for a long long time.
Yes, totally agree with this stance, apologies if I came across as confrontational. MMO developers should not be afraid of the holy trinity, or having only 1 healing archetype. Making everyone special means that nobody is.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Originally posted by sindur Play Darkfall Unholy Wars, its a game where you dont get hand held, you have to figure things out on your own or ask other people who is playing how to improve you skills.
I totally agree. I bought and played Darkfall for one month and loved it. I think when I get home tonight I'm going to re-up for it. It's the most fun I've had in a game in a long time.
just want to point out that you know its bad when this many people from this forum agree on it lol...Seriously I have never seen a more cohesive thread on this site.
There are times when one must ask themselves is it my passion that truly frightens you? Or your own?
MMOS were never tough or difficult. They were just too time consuming. Unless people equate time sinks with challenge?
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.' -Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid." -Luke McKinney
There are game still out there that are anything BUT easy like EVE. AoC wasn't a trivial matter either granted one did not hve overleveled peeps in their dungeon runs.
There are still plenty of challenging paths in WoW, HEROIC RAIDS ring a bell? But most chose the easy route with raid finders n such. It's not the company's fault that players choose the easy route.
It is the nature if the beast for ANY game to make old content trivilized and efforts are made to speed things up to get players past that. Rare exceptions are sandbox games like EVE.
You want a game about the journey and not the end game? Here's a hint.... MAKE A SANDBOX GAME! When you have a themepark game on rails, of fucking course players are going to be focused on the endgame aspect mostly of the game.
Yes, Mark. Absolutely! It's all your fault for making WoW so easy and Blizzard's fault for continuing to dumb it down.
To add insult to serious injury we now have a section of the community clammoring for MMO's to be made for consoles. As if things weren't bad enough as it is. Lets make them even dumber to fit on a console, what a great idea! NOT!
Things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
Ignorance is bliss?
Consoles are the future, deal with it and it's NOT dumbing games down. Consoles are damn powerful and will put the majority of people's PCs to shame and have as much capability as any PC.
Your statement reflects the general mob mentality when the world is round was first advocated.
I couldn't agree more with the author. I haven't played an MMO for any length of time in years. I still come to sites like this hoping to find a living world with real challenge.
Yes its obvious they have all become simple and easy - But it is unfair to judge them by EQ1's standards ,
MMORPG's have to adapt and the modern audience wants simple and quick - thats the live people lead or want to lead nowadays - quick simple easy gratification .
Modern players need raids that have a set formulae to complete and no grind or penalty for failure ( and by grind Im talking about EQ1 standard) .
Designers have to play to the common majority and they want simple - easy - quick gratifiaction . We al know thats a pity and they wont ever get the satisfaction we did from the early good games
Originally posted by Doogiehowser MMOS were never tough or difficult. They were just too time consuming. Unless people equate time sinks with challenge?
^^^ This person deserves a cookie. MMOs were never difficult only time consuming.
Originally posted by Doogiehowser MMOS were never tough or difficult. They were just too time consuming. Unless people equate time sinks with challenge?
no i equate it in terms of gettin 20-40 people together in the same time working cohesively to a goal....there was a point that farming and crafting was a guild effort for the betterment of the entire guild....now its like having a bunch of people who only work for themselves and usually leave once they get their gear or whine and leave because they didn't....Its a team sport and if you play it as a team you succeed a lot faster and with better results....the difficulty of the game was lost when they reduced the dependence of the games community on one another...
There are times when one must ask themselves is it my passion that truly frightens you? Or your own?
Originally posted by Bossalinie Most of you have been playing MMOs for +10 years...I would say that you are just too Pro at MMOs...
No, but when I rejoined some friends for a classic version of an older game, after expressing my displeasure with the recent MMO offerings one said "you are probably too intelligent to play these newer games"
Of course I had to agree with his analysis.
"I don't always play MMORPG's, but when I do, I play those that challenge the player......"
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
Great article, Mark. Coming from a developer, I don't feel as jaded or conspiratorial as I did before reading
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The spread of players across different age groups is increasing.
The amount of people who don't really have the time to play "classic" MMORPG's is increasing, but they still demand that MMO's should change to suit their needs.
The skill level, gaming experience, patience and dedication of MMO players is decreasing on average. It has to, as the pool gets bigger and bigger...
MMORPG were never hard, they were simply time sponges designed to suck the lives of people that did not have any real responsibilities. Is there a reason to why achieving X should take a certain amount that involves doing the same repetitive action continously?
A game can be hard without being designed to suck your time. I mean look at all those hard single player games, there is no reason for them to be time suckers and they are not. The offer just enough challenge w/o having to go through hoops.
BTW I find this topic ironic considering that firefall isn't that difficult either, the PvE is mindlessly easy. Actually the game has or had no real PvE and the PvP isn't hard except that the class balance is shit. All firefall is just a game is design to suck the time out of the player.
Well said,I agree.games are aimed at 5 year olds upwards now to 'appeal' to everyone.good business sense but terrible games for people that want some kind of challenge.Totally and utterly sick of it.Endless treadmill of shit has been released since 2004
Originally posted by Kezzadrix damn, I fell for it. I believed this was an article regarding one of the biggest problems plaguing current MMOs but it was really a clever way of misleading me into an advertisement for Firefall.
Heck, that's nothing new. The columns by Genese Davis almost always bring her books and idea for an MMORPG into every article she writes. I don't even read her columns anymore. I see her columns as ads and that is all. She does not even post on here except for her columns.
I just skipped the "Firefall be great!" parts (I am not a PvPer, so no interest there) and read the good stuff, ie: "MMOs have become too easy."
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
I haven't been playing MMOs as long as most, but even I have noticed how they have become easier and more casual. Games like GW2 is easy for me to breeze through before I could even fully grasp the controls, and I am far from being the most adept player.
The only exception I can think of to come out of the last few years has been TSW. The easier controls, UI, and etc. are the simplified systems we all have gotten used to since WoW, but there have been many times, and more to come, where all my careful planning still results in my character dying over and over again in the quests.
to the people saying mmo's were never hard, have you played every mmo? I mean, WoW might not have ever really been hard, but have you beaten end game content in earlier ones?
The thread seems to me to be a little schizophrenic - one flow is from the OP and subject (are MMOs too 'easy' - a word which clearly means different things to different people) the other flow is about a perceived decline of Group Content. Both are perennial subjects and are not going to go away; people have different expectations and hopes and that is fair enough. My only strong objection is to those who insist that the very words Massively Multiplayer somehow imply or demand a lot of group content; no-one has ever shown me why this should be so. Multiplayer can equally well mean a large number of people playing solo. I reiterate I am NOT criticising those who call for/prefer group content, just asserting there is no linguistic basis for this and it is absurd to pretend there is.
Much stronger in fact would be a linguistic argument which said that very few current MMO's are genuine Role Playing Games. How many players really think about this? I mean devise a persona for their character and speak and act accordingly? Precious few in my experience. But I wouldn't be sniffy about this - I am just reiterating the point about not falling back on linguistic rationales.
Many excellent points have been made about the difference between being 'hard' and being time-consuming. This seems a clear one to me on one level. Some games (and I suppose they may be ARPGs) are very hard for an ill-co-ordinated old man like me - Vindictus springs instantly to mind. To a young computer savvy kid it is easy. So where those kind of game mechanics are concerned one person's hard is another's easy. Time-consumption is another matter - I mean to achieve max levels in every skill in Runescape takes (unless you cheat or they have changed the game a lot in the last two years) a massive amount of time. But I am not sure whether it is hard in the sense people mean?
My point is that there should be MMOs for every sort of gamer; I am genuinely sorry if people can't find something they enjoy playing. Me I'm overrun but then I am probably easily satisfied!
Comments
"We created a massive number of quests to lead the player through the world, making sure that they never had to think about what to do next."
For me, this is the biggest problem with 'Theme park' MMOs today, and I now know who to blame directly.
Joking aside, I will agree that the majority of today's MMOs seem easy-mode when compared to an old dog like the original Everquest.
Can't get my pen to write in this space.
The issue is not so much the ability to resurrect a person as much as with many MMOs now they give this ability to everyone. WoW has it so as long as your guild is high enough everyone has unlimited rez now, Rift made is an Ascended racial so everyone has it, but it has a high cooldown at least and I am sure there is more. Death has not been a penalty for a long long time.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Yes, totally agree with this stance, apologies if I came across as confrontational. MMO developers should not be afraid of the holy trinity, or having only 1 healing archetype. Making everyone special means that nobody is.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I totally agree. I bought and played Darkfall for one month and loved it. I think when I get home tonight I'm going to re-up for it. It's the most fun I've had in a game in a long time.
There are times when one must ask themselves is it my passion that truly frightens you? Or your own?
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
------------
2025: 48 years on the Net.
There are game still out there that are anything BUT easy like EVE. AoC wasn't a trivial matter either granted one did not hve overleveled peeps in their dungeon runs.
There are still plenty of challenging paths in WoW, HEROIC RAIDS ring a bell? But most chose the easy route with raid finders n such. It's not the company's fault that players choose the easy route.
It is the nature if the beast for ANY game to make old content trivilized and efforts are made to speed things up to get players past that. Rare exceptions are sandbox games like EVE.
You want a game about the journey and not the end game? Here's a hint.... MAKE A SANDBOX GAME! When you have a themepark game on rails, of fucking course players are going to be focused on the endgame aspect mostly of the game.
Ignorance is bliss?
Consoles are the future, deal with it and it's NOT dumbing games down. Consoles are damn powerful and will put the majority of people's PCs to shame and have as much capability as any PC.
Your statement reflects the general mob mentality when the world is round was first advocated.
Yes its obvious they have all become simple and easy - But it is unfair to judge them by EQ1's standards ,
MMORPG's have to adapt and the modern audience wants simple and quick - thats the live people lead or want to lead nowadays - quick simple easy gratification .
Modern players need raids that have a set formulae to complete and no grind or penalty for failure ( and by grind Im talking about EQ1 standard) .
Designers have to play to the common majority and they want simple - easy - quick gratifiaction . We al know thats a pity and they wont ever get the satisfaction we did from the early good games
^^^ This person deserves a cookie. MMOs were never difficult only time consuming.
no i equate it in terms of gettin 20-40 people together in the same time working cohesively to a goal....there was a point that farming and crafting was a guild effort for the betterment of the entire guild....now its like having a bunch of people who only work for themselves and usually leave once they get their gear or whine and leave because they didn't....Its a team sport and if you play it as a team you succeed a lot faster and with better results....the difficulty of the game was lost when they reduced the dependence of the games community on one another...
There are times when one must ask themselves is it my passion that truly frightens you? Or your own?
No, but when I rejoined some friends for a classic version of an older game, after expressing my displeasure with the recent MMO offerings one said "you are probably too intelligent to play these newer games"
Of course I had to agree with his analysis.
"I don't always play MMORPG's, but when I do, I play those that challenge the player......"
The most interesting gamer in the world.......
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
Yes.
Great article, Mark. Coming from a developer, I don't feel as jaded or conspiratorial as I did before reading
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Every year the MMO playerbase gets larger.
The spread of players across different age groups is increasing.
The amount of people who don't really have the time to play "classic" MMORPG's is increasing, but they still demand that MMO's should change to suit their needs.
The skill level, gaming experience, patience and dedication of MMO players is decreasing on average. It has to, as the pool gets bigger and bigger...
MMORPG were never hard, they were simply time sponges designed to suck the lives of people that did not have any real responsibilities. Is there a reason to why achieving X should take a certain amount that involves doing the same repetitive action continously?
A game can be hard without being designed to suck your time. I mean look at all those hard single player games, there is no reason for them to be time suckers and they are not. The offer just enough challenge w/o having to go through hoops.
BTW I find this topic ironic considering that firefall isn't that difficult either, the PvE is mindlessly easy. Actually the game has or had no real PvE and the PvP isn't hard except that the class balance is shit. All firefall is just a game is design to suck the time out of the player.
I just skipped the "Firefall be great!" parts (I am not a PvPer, so no interest there) and read the good stuff, ie: "MMOs have become too easy."
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I haven't been playing MMOs as long as most, but even I have noticed how they have become easier and more casual. Games like GW2 is easy for me to breeze through before I could even fully grasp the controls, and I am far from being the most adept player.
The only exception I can think of to come out of the last few years has been TSW. The easier controls, UI, and etc. are the simplified systems we all have gotten used to since WoW, but there have been many times, and more to come, where all my careful planning still results in my character dying over and over again in the quests.
The thread seems to me to be a little schizophrenic - one flow is from the OP and subject (are MMOs too 'easy' - a word which clearly means different things to different people) the other flow is about a perceived decline of Group Content. Both are perennial subjects and are not going to go away; people have different expectations and hopes and that is fair enough. My only strong objection is to those who insist that the very words Massively Multiplayer somehow imply or demand a lot of group content; no-one has ever shown me why this should be so. Multiplayer can equally well mean a large number of people playing solo. I reiterate I am NOT criticising those who call for/prefer group content, just asserting there is no linguistic basis for this and it is absurd to pretend there is.
Much stronger in fact would be a linguistic argument which said that very few current MMO's are genuine Role Playing Games. How many players really think about this? I mean devise a persona for their character and speak and act accordingly? Precious few in my experience. But I wouldn't be sniffy about this - I am just reiterating the point about not falling back on linguistic rationales.
Many excellent points have been made about the difference between being 'hard' and being time-consuming. This seems a clear one to me on one level. Some games (and I suppose they may be ARPGs) are very hard for an ill-co-ordinated old man like me - Vindictus springs instantly to mind. To a young computer savvy kid it is easy. So where those kind of game mechanics are concerned one person's hard is another's easy. Time-consumption is another matter - I mean to achieve max levels in every skill in Runescape takes (unless you cheat or they have changed the game a lot in the last two years) a massive amount of time. But I am not sure whether it is hard in the sense people mean?
My point is that there should be MMOs for every sort of gamer; I am genuinely sorry if people can't find something they enjoy playing. Me I'm overrun but then I am probably easily satisfied!