I want a playground of choices, where developers load the world with anomalies for me to find.
While at the coffee bar with my first brew in the morning, I want to say to self, I think I'll get more and go to the logging camp. But when I get that group they may redirect us to fight the menace Orc that has been on a rampage in Holland Vally.
Later that afternoon I'll fill my wish and get another group. Now will spend a few hours deep in the camp, maybe push our limits and make a memorable adventure out of it.
It's evening now, work in the morning. I gained a few levels and added a few abilities throughout the day, I think I'll test my character and redesign my play style.
I know I'm alone in what I want...All others here want F2P easy and scripted.
Just saying.
Comments
The best MMO anyone could make would take a mixture of both types of MMO. You would have to separate the areas where they take place. So a central theme park set of nations, surrounded by a sand box wilderness is one way to do that.
I am not sure what future there could be for purely sandbox MMOs now, the survival genre seems to have supplanted them. There is sandbox elements in those games of course, so if you want to try out sandbox the likes of Conan Exiles may be for you. But they are a pale imitation of what sandbox could be.
I played fortnite and starcraft 2 today. When i have time to play games now, i have an option to play more than one. Then i stream and it is fun to talk to people.
Today sucked cuz i got a ton of phone calls and had to work a 16 hour day, but it is fun nonetheless.
Just enough with these, "everything is crap now due to bad business people, blah, blah, blah"
I love F2P games and im glad they have come out, almost every game i play now is F2P and i love it.
In summary, "stop bitching and adapt, that is what video game companies have done"
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
-I tried like crazy to make Legends of Aria work. The game is just crude in most all aspects dealing with the controls UI, targeting and chat. The game idea is great.
-P1999 same as above, but I can't knock it since it was made back in 1999.
-Project Gorgon, worst controls ever.... Do you still get turned into a cow ?
-Survival games, I'll not pick up sticks to turn them into an axe for two hours. Three weeks later your trying to make a clay firepit.
-PvP games are popular, but in the end their just Battle Royals.
-Vanilla WoW, burnt out from playing for more than 6 years.
City of Heros, maybe but not a comic book fan.
You will never know if all your free time is spent here bitching,
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
Meaningful being the loaded phrase. It's not what you might call "a trivial problem"; if a choice really has broad consequences, then reality, or at least narrative, has been forked. This has the potential to double the amount of work in order to produce the same duration of play for every meaningful choice. Because of a choice a player made eight missions ago, I may then have to design sixteen missions rather than eight due to the branching nature of reality.
Sometimes there are convergences, but without careful accounting the amount of work can quickly become an exponential problem.
Then there is the economic consideration of the path not taken; if a player never interacts with certain branches of the tree, never even knows they exist or even that a meaningful choice has been made, what is the value of building these meaningful choices into the design? Perhaps a player will go back and try something different with an alt, or interact with another player who has been on a different path, thereby realizing the world is much larger than s/he first imagined. Perhaps there are callbacks to the meaningful choice, altering the player to the fact that his or her actions have real consequence.
There are many considerations to such design with it being a high effort / middling or uncertain payout. Obviously I am an advocate, but I don't think you see it very often because it really takes a lot of work.
An alternative is to create the illusion of choice: making the player feel as though a meaningful choice had been made with the results really being the same in either case. The danger here is that two or more players (or the same player with an alt) may discover that what they had thought was a meaningful choice was really just an illusion.
I didn't intend to write an essay on this but it's a topic near and dear to my heart.
Also, Bandersnatch is an alright Netflix show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror:_Bandersnatch
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
After the starting little Intro, the world is open to you. You never have to touch the story again. You can wader the world, do Dynamic Events, maybe chase world bosses, work on making a legendary weapon.. or whatever.
It's a nice mix of offering you a Theme Park ride with their Personal & Living Story but you don't have to do it.
As Such Guild Wars 2, sounds like what you want.. you make your own choices on where you want to go, and what you want to do.
Sorry my friend, but you have zero imagination whatsoever. You have to be led by the hand and directed what to do. You don't want choices, you want a script. You want a list of things to do because without them, you'd have nothing to do.
All MMORPGs can be played however you want to. Everyone chooses to play them basically the same damn way.
MMOs are on rails? That's because you choose to keep the training wheels on.
Look at Gorgon, all the depth and complexity anyone could ever ask for in an MMO, its exactly what people on this site are asking for but no one will play it because it looks like Wolfenstein 3d.
Dude, your memory has failed you, as there are no "Quest Hubs" in GW2.
I am never that keen on going back to an old favourite though as they often change everything so much they become different games. Lotros new combat system was a case in point, when it came in I was on a 3 month break from MMOs, on returning everything seemed up in the air and the new system was below par which did not help.
But you do need to give a new MMO time, I would say a week to see if you will find your feet and like it.
Finally I don't understand why some posters feel the need to bash the OP so much, he may not know what he wants or pursue finding a new MMO in the best way, but many of us are in the same boat.
I think I have a better methodology for making sure a MMO is for me and a better idea of what I want from a MMORPG than Delete. But I have still not made a decision, so I am not sure I am that far ahead of him.
Here is what happens.
One MMO will do a thing really good, and I'll think it is that think that I enjoy, but if that MMO does other things bad, I will eventually move, and so I will look another MMO that will also have this Thing that I thought I enjoyed, but the new MMO will do "Other Things" better, but not do that Thing, as good as my previous MMO, and I'll enjoy the the Other Things more this time around.
So, we may have an idea of what we think we want, but it needs to be more than a check box feature thing, it needs to be more a question of how it's done, not what is done.
I think Guild Wars 2 somewhat attempted this, You would do real time quests and depending on whether they were a success or failure it would open up something new that would take you off the beaten path. Also this was suppose to be taken to the next level with Everquest Next aka Landmark. I vaguely remember them bragging about the organic nature of quests and the AI of mobs that would sack citys on their own and all this organic content.
ESO introducing One Tamriel is also suppose to simulate what delete is talking about with their level scaling world and do what you want approach.
Aloha Mr Hand !
I suppose there were some Meta's like in the SW, DT, and the Expansions like HoT, that were liner, but those were zone wide events, which again the player could participate or not and could be starting at any point along them with no need to follow any kind of previous progression and they were free to leave at any time with no obligations.
I suppose he could be confusing Hearts, which actually get bestowed and progress is charted till completed, but again, nothing liner in those either. You can start as many as you like, complete them in any order you want, or not bother with them at all, and simply ignore them if you so wished. Some are part of collections and such, so, there is that, but then again, collections are purely something done for fun and personal enjoyment and do not need to be done in order either.
So, Outside Living Story, there is nothing even remotely like that in GW2. Nothing at all like Quests in other MMO's that are bestowed, sit in your log till you are done, and require you complete them in order.
Most of activity in GW2 is Open World Group Events.
I can't even fathom how someone could confuse that with the liner kinds of quests in other games, especially since they are Public Events.
But ya know.. some people just want to complain.