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The Modern MMORPG Blues (a.k.a Another Old Guy's Rant About The Glory Days)
Roadtrip
Member UncommonPosts: 4
I’ve been playing MMORPGs for over 20 year now:
Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest II, World of Warcraft, Ryzom, Vanguard, City of Heroes, Star Wars the Old Republic, Rift and many others over the years. Now I play Wizard101 with the next generation MMORPG gamer (my 7 year old son.)
Sadly, I continue to pine for the original Everquest days and still miss the occasional yells of, “TRAIN TO ZONE!”
Modern MMORPGs provide much better user interfaces, graphics, and play mechanics than Everquest was ever capable of, but here are a few things I really miss:
#1 – Community Dependent Play.
If you wanted to travel quickly you needed to ask a druid or wizard to “port” you, otherwise you were hoofing it! Time to upgrade your gear? You’d either buy or trade gear with other players in Eastern Commons, not NPC vendors. If you were a weapon smith and needed armor crafted, you would find an armorer player and either pay them or tip them to combine (craft) your materials for a tip. Basically it was the player community that provided the mechanism for commerce.
#2 – Reward AND risk
Modern MMORPGs are quick to offer rewards for game progression, however most have no risk or downside to character deaths anymore. In Everquest, if a player’s character died you’d actually lose experience points and everything you were carrying, including the gear you were wearing, would remain on the character’s corpse located where you died and you would have to retrieve it. This was often frustrating and perhaps too Draconian, but a middle ground would be welcome.
#3 – Unique character traits and abilities.
It seems player character types in most modern MMORPGs are no longer designed for a specific role. If you decided to play a warrior in Everquest, you absorbed damage and maintained threat. That’s it. So, I could DPS for a group right? No. I still get a heal at a higher level right? No. You are a tank. Resign yourself to it and be the best tank you can be. There were hybrid character types in Everquest but if you chose to play a druid or paladin, you could not do as well a job in either role as a pure character type.
#4 - Factions
If you decided to kill a Dwarf NPC on the road for phat lewt, don’t expect to be able to just walk into a dwarf player town without the NPCs attacking you on sight! Everything you killed (except animals) would affect some faction and you would need to balance who you were friendly or unfriendly with.
HERE’S MY QUESTION:
Are there any MMORPGs with the above mentioned elements that anyone could recommend I try?
Thanks for reading!
Comments
I've played Asheron's Call and so I checked out the Hiveleader's (whom I love) video on Project Gorgon. It's got my attention.
I played EVE Online for years but no longer have the time to log into any game on any consistent basis.
Never heard of Project 1999 and I think I'll give it a shot too.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
They say you can never go back. Project 1999 would definitely hit my nostalgia button but I am sure I'd be hit with all the small idiosyncrasies I've completely forgotten about that used to drive me crazy about EQ.
I checked out Project Gordon on Steam and I like what I see so far. Looks like I am giving it a go.
-Go to EverQuest forums on this site.
-Find the topic:
Read and follow the main OP and all replies.
You can play totally free,
-free account
-free to get the 5 disc set.
The game is populated. Unfortunately Vanilla EQ1 is far out dated for me. HOWEVER for someone with EQ1 experience, theirs a lot of fun to be had
I tend to use guilds rather than games to give me that old school feel, but some of the up and coming indies are a possibility when it comes to redressing the balance between old and new school.
SecondLife hits most of those points if you play it as a creation/market PvP game. Though again without NPCs, and further without RPG mechanics.
Runescape is good for getting the feeling of old MMOs. With its real questing, possible item loss on death, old grind mechanics, and similar. This also one of few that still does NPCs.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Otherwise do I agree.
So factions became a problem, the player might decide that the faction he had chosen was the wrong one. Some MMOs (stretching memory here) even went down the line of allowing you to develop an alliance with every faction! Most just binned the idea.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I also recommend Project Gorgon.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Sure, it sucked in the old days when the devs made a huge nerf on your specc and you were stuck with it, or when a new expansion left you behind others as well. That was an issue because MMO class mechanics change so much with each expansion and even a lot between them.
But they solved that rather early, with you being able to pay (usually a rather large sum) to respecc. I wish they kept that part, people put more thought into their specc that way without destroying a character if you made the wrong choice at level 5.
The thing with factions though is that it easily becomes boring since you usually had to do tons of quests and grind loads of mobs to get anywhere. I never felt as motivated grinding that as I did grinding XP and gear. As I remember it was actually possible to grind up a bad reputation with a faction to a good one, it was just a very painful grind to do it.
Pretty straight forward if it wasn't for my firewall and anti-virus protection software going "code red" and treating the install like the PC version of H1N1. Had to create a number of firewall exceptions and convince my anti-virus software that Project 1999's dsetup.dll file wasn't sent from Russia and aimed at the Pentagon.
Finally back in Norath... and it's much more blocky looking than I remember - LOL!
In short, if I'm going to grind these days, I'd rather do it in a dynamic world that changes in response to player grinding said rep.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
In a PvP game it is easier, then you do stuff for your faction and that faction controls areas due to your actions. It is logical that the heroes of a faction would be popular and have access to certain things regular soldiers don't have.
In PvE it usually is just a grind to be able to buy some stuff and maybe that some races are hostile or friendly due to your severe grinding or lack thereoff. In RvR it is more or less the point of the game but in a regular PvE MMO it is usually just a silly afterthought.
You could of course make a PvE game as well where the factions is one of the main point of the game but to my knowledge has no game done that so far, but I could accept that if the game made it good enough.
For instance could you have a PvE game where the followers of different Gods spend their time futhering their own Gods factions. The evil Gods followers doing bad stuff, the God of justice followers solving crime and punish criminals and so on. If that would affect the entire server it could be really fun.
But PvE games tend to be only about you and possibly (but rarely) your guild. Factions in games like that are just a boring grind.
The problem with the genre today as I see it is a lack of imagination. The old MMOs had imagination but I am not sure that remaking old MMOs is the way to go either.
It was the imagination and willingless to try new and different things that made games like M59, UO, EQ, DaoC and AC (among others) so great from the beginning. It was even what made Wow a good game in the beginning, not so much anymore. Today few games try to be very different.
They fixed the wrong thing, instead of making the combat more interesting and dynamic they killed grouping and made everything easier.