|
Pierson posted:What I generally remember about RIFT is that everything about it was WoW but not quite. The world wasn't quite as compelling as WoW's, the combat wasn't quite as immediate as WoW's and the abilities didn't feel as fun to use as WoW's. The graphics also went for realism (or as much as they could manage) over a more stylised aesthetic so the art design wasn't even that notable. It's other features (housing and the rift system) were good but also easily adaptable into other MMOs which leaves basically only the soul system as the one major unique feature it had. Then the F2P bullshit got heaped on. I thought a lot of it felt like "WoW, but better" at the time but WoW continued evolving (I assume) and it didn't. It also didn't have nearly the staying power, unsurprisingly.
|
#
?
May 24, 2017 23:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:57 |
|
|
My general perception of Rift from playing it when it came out was that it was TBC-era WoW when WoW had already evolved further via WotLk and Cataclysm.
Oh Snapple! fucked around with this message at 23:52 on May 24, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 24, 2017 23:49
|
|
|
Pierson posted:I will fully admit to not having played RIFT in seven or so years but every MMO except WoW I've ever played has suffered from a small gap between pressing a button and things happening which is jarring as hell. It could be lag because I'm a UK player but it's super noticable even in other triple-A MMOs. WoW is very, very good at the feeling of connection between button and action. Other MMOs do pretty well now, but nothing does it as well as WoW. (I think in large part because it handles a lot of that stuff client-side? Or at least I've read that.) John Dyne posted:Man I may be in the minority but WoW's abilities were loving drab since it was basically the same animations for everything, so this is a serious accusation. WoW has improved a lot in that regard. Especially in their most recent expansion, even a lot of melee attacks have unique animations, with better acceleration/hit-pause for impact and even particle effects and cool swing trails.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 00:29
|
|
|
Yeah, historically WoW has offloaded a lot of things to the client for the sake of responsiveness, though they've slowly dialed it back a bit over the years. It made for a relatively snappy and responsive interface, but it was also a big reason there was so many teleport hacks and similar things early on in the game's life since the servers trusted the client too much for positioning and such.Harrow posted:This is basically the general MMO thread right now, right? So I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by continuing to post about games that are not Wildstar? 
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 00:33
|
|
|
Harrow posted:WoW has improved a lot in that regard. Especially in their most recent expansion, even a lot of melee attacks have unique animations, with better acceleration/hit-pause for impact and even particle effects and cool swing trails. Good on them. Melee is always lackluster compared to spells in most games when it comes to their visuals. Dark Age of Camelot had it the worse back in the day with like 3 melee animations per weapon type and it always irked me. I kind of liked how EQ handled spell progression with you just making GBS threads out particle effects the further you went up in level.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 08:17
|
|
|
Schubalts posted:Devilian. Trion taking a new class that was originally unlocked by getting to max level with any other class, and making it cash shop only. Oh, Devilian is theirs too? I played that with a friend for a bit but didn't really like it. Also lol.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 12:39
|
|
|
Mayor McCheese posted:Good on them. Melee is always lackluster compared to spells in most games when it comes to their visuals. Yeah, I didn't like playing melee in WoW for a long time, but when I came back for Legion, melee was a lot more fun. I really like the way DPS Monk works in Legion, it flows really well and feels snappy and responsive.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 14:38
|
|
|
CoffeeBooze posted:This was my experince when I tried the game a second time too. The amount of poo poo the UI throws up on the screen when you log in as a returning player is absolutely obnoxious. It felt like I spent the first 20 minutes of my time after logging in clicking through an ever ending stream of unignorable pop ups for the in game help, quests, and all kinds of other garbage. All I wanted to do was check out my gear and try to remember what my skills did so I could go try to kill something and it took nearly 30 minutes to cut through all the poo poo and get outside the faction capital, and even then it felt like I was constantly having to stop doing my thing to click through a never ending stream of quest pop ups and challenges. Yeah - I didn't make it past level 15 or so because of this. Even back when it first came out, the whole UI was a mess. Your character moved glacially slowly (with a sprint button IIRC? That lasted a couple of seconds?). You'd drag your slow-rear end character over to the quest location and your screen would be flooded with a mess of new, timed, quest challenges. I remember failing things I didn't even know I was supposed to do. The UI was basically Korean grind-MMO-level.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 16:22
|
|
|
Thursday Next posted:Your character moved glacially slowly (with a sprint button IIRC? That lasted a couple of seconds?).
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 18:04
|
|
|
To Wildstar's slight credit they did eventually just make sprinting the base non-combat speed and then the Sprint bar stuff was only during combat. But there's a lot of small fixes they made like that which should have just been done right the first time.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2017 18:11
|
|
|
Wow has a multi stage ability triggering system that ensures your character starts animating immediately for a more responsive feeling, and includes its perception of things like server ping in its ability queueing system. It's shockingly intricate and the assumptions if people who work on MMOs without a few hundred hours of wow is it ought to be simple, which is why most MMOs feel like rear end.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 19:58
|
|
Kelp Plankton posted:To Wildstar's slight credit they did eventually just make sprinting the base non-combat speed and then the Sprint bar stuff was only during combat. Yeah, there were a million things like this that would have been fixed if the lead devs weren't completely stupid. Like, why does my motorcycle have a sprint speed?
|
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 21:31
|
|
|
LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Yeah, there were a million things like this that would have been fixed if the lead devs weren't completely stupid. Turbo boost duh
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 21:50
|
|
|
I got on Rift back when it was in open beta, and while the whole events thing really piqued my interest, the lore dropped the ball hard. If I remember right, one side was supposed to be all technomagic and the other was supposed to be classical fantasy, but in practice both sides were completely identical. I started some caster class on the techno side that had a summon, and I expected it to be a freaky golem or something appropriate, and instead it just summoned a random animal. My interest pretty much died at that point. All I wanted were some clear graphical differences between the factions, lightsabers vs. magic swords sort of differences, but I never even got that much.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 05:18
|
|
|
Part of the Storm Legion expansion for Rift when it went F2P was a quest line that explicitly made both factions homogeneous bland friends and tossed out all the factional rivalry. Of course all the old world/launch era content is still about Blue vs Red because they didn't update any of the old zones. Because Trion. Anyway Rift is bleeding active players like a roadside crash victim so it's bit of a moot point. Probably still makes bank off whales too far committed to ever turn away.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 08:56
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Turbo boost duh Turbo boosts are when you hit a button and you hang on for dear life for a set amount of time, not this weak rear end hold down a button for an extra 5 mph bullshit.
|
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 08:58
|
|
|
DancingShade posted:Part of the Storm Legion expansion for Rift when it went F2P was a quest line that explicitly made both factions homogeneous bland friends and tossed out all the factional rivalry. Splitting the player base in a themepark MMO is garbage design in 100% of cases, too bad that Trion didn't got rid of it from the start. Apart from many other things that Trion should've done differently.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 12:48
|
|
|
poo poo, even at launch you were essentially doing the same missions in the same zones past level 35.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 14:26
|
|
|
RottenK posted:Splitting the player base in a themepark MMO is garbage design in 100% of cases, too bad that Trion didn't got rid of it from the start. Apart from many other things that Trion should've done differently. Faction split is essentially the only thing that wow hasn't shed from that era of MMO design, and even they've dialed it back quite a bit
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 19:02
|
|
|
I wonder if factions only truly worked for WoW because of the massive playerbase and the holdover of people who still did care about Warcraft lore. Even then in classic WoW had horrible PVP systems and huge grinding requirements for people who really loved player-vs-player. Every other game with a faction split just seems to leave one side massively undermanned as people flock to the cooler one or the one with higher numbers to ensure they have people to play with. Pierson fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 29, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 19:57
|
|
|
spoilers: that's also wow now and has been for a very long time. almost every server is population-imbalanced (i play alliance on a horde server and i always get the 'your faction is undermanned' bonus). the pvp server i used to play on had nearly a 1:5 alliance:horde ratio. there are a few servers that seem to maintain a balance, but they're practically all low-pop and them being balanced seems to be mostly through happenstance and is definitely not the rule.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 20:06
|
|
|
Valatar posted:I got on Rift back when it was in open beta, and while the whole events thing really piqued my interest, the lore dropped the ball hard. If I remember right, one side was supposed to be all technomagic and the other was supposed to be classical fantasy, but in practice both sides were completely identical. I started some caster class on the techno side that had a summon, and I expected it to be a freaky golem or something appropriate, and instead it just summoned a random animal. My interest pretty much died at that point. All I wanted were some clear graphical differences between the factions, lightsabers vs. magic swords sort of differences, but I never even got that much. I miss that part of RF Online. One faction was Elves (humans who modified themselves into magical Elves), one was "normal" humans, and one was humans who implanted their brains into robot bodies. They had different classes and abilities, like only the Elves having summons and the cyborgs being unable to magic.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 02:25
|
|
|
I still think EverQuest, for all its gaping flaws, handled factions better than pretty much everything that's come since. Are you an ogre? Well the dwarves hate you. Unless you kill a fuckton of spiders plaguing their countryside and generally prove that you're on their team. It was enough of a pain in the rear end that few people undertook the project, but nothing was actually set in stone.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 08:32
|
|
|
Valatar posted:I still think EverQuest, for all its gaping flaws, handled factions better than pretty much everything that's come since. Are you an ogre? Well the dwarves hate you. Unless you kill a fuckton of spiders plaguing their countryside and generally prove that you're on their team. It was enough of a pain in the rear end that few people undertook the project, but nothing was actually set in stone. I did always like the idea that, if you wanted to put in the effort, you could be that one dark elf chillin' in Qeynos. The downside was that it was still trapped in the old, grindy MMO days where adjusting those alignments that much required collecting 70-million spider dicks or whatever, and you had no guarantee that it carried over to any other future locations.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 19:02
|
|
|
Not to mention that you still had to avoid certain areas of town because some of the more obscure factions (Class Trainers in particular) aren't influenced by conventional quests.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 19:20
|
|
|
I love how WoW gave the horde blood elves to try combat the pop imbalance, but then threw that out the window again by giving alliance werewolves and draenai.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 19:28
|
|
|
I would have happily subscribed to play a goblin, but the first thing I heard the last time I went into Orgrimmar was some asshat talking about 'human being Alliance'. Allied chat was bad enough, but that was a bridge I was unwilling to cross.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 19:36
|
|
|
Blasphemeral posted:I did always like the idea that, if you wanted to put in the effort, you could be that one dark elf chillin' in Qeynos. The downside was that it was still trapped in the old, grindy MMO days where adjusting those alignments that much required collecting 70-million spider dicks or whatever, and you had no guarantee that it carried over to any other future locations. That's something I always wished a newer MMO would revisit in a less-gindy way. I liked the idea that faction relationships weren't completely black-and-white or just two sides constantly at war, but instead something more complex. And you could decide how much you really wanted to delve into that complexity based on what race you play. I know why it never came back--the idea of some races or starting cultures just being inherently harder to play as because most of the world hates you is a tough sell when your game benefits from getting the largest number of people possible to play it--but I still wanted to see that idea revisited.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 21:31
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I would have happily subscribed to play a goblin, but the first thing I heard the last time I went into Orgrimmar was some asshat talking about 'human being Alliance'. Allied chat was bad enough, but that was a bridge I was unwilling to cross. Only reason to play wow friendo 
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 05:42
|
|
|
PS all of y'all getting rose colored glasses over the EQ reputation poo poo are going to create another Wildstar situation.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 05:44
|
|
|
The only thing worse than "bring back grinds" is "bring back grinds, but toned down to minor inconvenience"
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 11:32
|
|
|
Bring back Vex Thal key and Plane of Time attunement grinds.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 12:36
|
|
|
Rhymenoserous posted:Only reason to play wow friendo He's got what I need.  Toward the end of its life, City of Heroes had functionality for shifting from heroism to villainy and vice versa, or just going partway to (lovable) rogue. It was more time gate than grind, since the instanced missions you needed to run were short, but you could only run so many in a day and i took a few days' worth (a week?) to get from one moral extreme to neutrality, and then to make your way to the other end. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Jun 1, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 12:51
|
|
|
I cant believe BBG died before wildstar
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 13:57
|
|
|
30.5 Days posted:The only thing worse than "bring back grinds" is "bring back grinds, but toned down to minor inconvenience" That's not really what I mean, though. I don't think it's impossible to make reputation stuff actually interesting to do and not just "repeat X thing over and over to make a number go up." Admittedly I'm talking in the realm of the impossible here because it's not like there are a lot of new, promising MMOs in development or something. I mostly just think the basic idea behind "you can play as one of the bad guys and the rest of the world will treat you as such" is cool. No MMO has ever, ever implemented it in a way that was any fun, but the idea is still promising.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 14:13
|
|
|
One of the original big ideas for MMOs was that they would be these giant, living digital worlds that players could live in and explore. The big problem with that of course is that they are almost always static in order to cope with the thousands of players that are crammed into each server. Factions were actually a pretty decent concept to make the worlds a little less static. I think changing the way NPCs react to the player based on stuff they have actually done in the world was a good concept. Of course attaching it to a massive grind understandably soured everyone to the idea going forward. If someone could come up with a better method of having faction reputation go up and down and actually balance factions so its not practically mandatory to max faction with one or two I think it could be a good thing. Oh, and of course Wildstar had factions too! Doing a mind bendingly tedious grind to max reputation with a faction was a requirement for keying when the game launched!
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 14:26
|
|
|
Having them work more like factions in single-player games like Fallout: New Vegas could work. It's not hard to get reputation--maybe each faction has a quest line or something--but many factions are mutually-exclusive. It's not that other factions necessarily become hostile (though some might), just that you can't be a "member" of mutually-exclusive factions. I can't think of any, but I know some MMOs do that last one, at least. WoW did a (grindy, not very fun) version of that in Burning Crusade with a couple factions in the main city, didn't they? Something like that, but actually interesting and not something you grind repeatable quests for. If there's ever a new crop of "theme park" MMOs again, I hope they take cues from some recent open-world single-player games like Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild. The way Witcher 3 handles its story would be a solid fit for an MMO, especially if they stripped out the "main" story and focused entirely on the self-contained short stories in side quests and monster hunts. In general I think a focus on story in MMOs doesn't make a ton of sense, but in many cases (like in Guild Wars 2) that's because every player has to be the ~*~hero who saved the world like eight times~*~. Focusing on smaller-scale, interesting stories instead? That could work.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2017 14:38
|
|
|
I don't think questing is the interesting part of MMOs. It's always been a means to an end: the actual conclusion to every MMORPG is you doing a dungeon or a raid or some other group content that concludes the story. Why not focus on that actual group content for the entire game? Playing with other people has always been the charm of Diablo, Monster Hunter, Phantasy Star Online, etc etc. And I think when people play MMORPGs, they're mostly playing them with friends, which again means dungeons, battlegrounds, whatever group content the game offers. Even Guild Wars 2 gave up on not offering end game group content with HoT being all about raids, as I hear it. Saying "hey guys let's make a multiplayer game, which is really popular these days, but bog it down with 40 hours of incredibly boring single player content" is just a recipe for disaster.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2017 02:37
|
|
|
I think factions are fun when they're NPC only. You can all talk to each other and play with each other, but NPCs react differently with different faction reps.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2017 06:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:57 |
|
|
Minrad posted:I don't think questing is the interesting part of MMOs. It's always been a means to an end: the actual conclusion to every MMORPG is you doing a dungeon or a raid or some other group content that concludes the story. Why not focus on that actual group content for the entire game? Playing with other people has always been the charm of Diablo, Monster Hunter, Phantasy Star Online, etc etc. And I think when people play MMORPGs, they're mostly playing them with friends, which again means dungeons, battlegrounds, whatever group content the game offers. Even Guild Wars 2 gave up on not offering end game group content with HoT being all about raids, as I hear it. Saying "hey guys let's make a multiplayer game, which is really popular these days, but bog it down with 40 hours of incredibly boring single player content" is just a recipe for disaster. Plenty of people play MMOs entirely solo. Even one of your examples, Diablo - all 3 games were more popular solo than multiplayer. I am not a solo kind of player, but I think it would be a mistake for a company to overlook that group. That star wars MMO pretty much carved a successful niche in the market by catering to solo players.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2017 13:00
|
|
