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I sometimes think I'm just no longer in the right mental "zone" for an MMO, at least not of the current Role Trinity/Themepark philosophy. I don't really know what I want, is probably the problem, like I'm sure that FFXIV and Elder Scrolls Online actually are "good MMOs" and I just can't give a poo poo. FFXIV held me for a little bit, but it really drags in places where you have to see the main story through to the end, and I fell off ESO within like a month, too. The closest thing we get to innovation in the field are games that really aren't technically MMOs, like Elite Dangerous. And Elite Dangerous would be boring as gently caress, too, if the spaceship flying didn't look and feel so good. Or maybe I just have depression 
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Mar 18, 2019 15:46
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same on depression, but MMOs are definitely stale as gently caress, so if that kind of gameplay is not exactly what you're looking for, eh. i've also been kinda slow on ff14 lately been playing other poo poo with friends like path of exile or warframe. they scratch a similar itch, and are free to try out.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:28
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I’m depressed because MMOs are stale as gently caress, but it’d be easy to confuse it as being the other way around.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:16
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I think this is the first time we are seeing nothing new or interesting on the horizon from the big developers in the MMO space, and that is where all this dread is coming from. When I played WoW for over a decade, there was always a thought in the back of my mind that a newer, better, grander MMO was just around the corner, and all I needed to do was wait a few more years and it would be released. But it never happened. And now I'm 30. gently caress.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:41
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Kak posted:I think Pantheon and Camelot Unchained might turn out to be good if niche games. I'm sorry but I really don't see Camelot Unchained being anything other than Star Citizen. A friend of mine was so stoked on that game like 6 years ago but man its still not there. At least the guy running the thing is putting his own money in and isn't a total crook like CRoberts though. But yeah, best case scenario is it becomes something like EVE Online. Which honestly a fantasy EVE would satisfy me pretty well right now.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:56
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deadly_pudding posted:I sometimes think I'm just no longer in the right mental "zone" for an MMO, at least not of the current Role Trinity/Themepark philosophy. I don't really know what I want, is probably the problem, like I'm sure that FFXIV and Elder Scrolls Online actually are "good MMOs" and I just can't give a poo poo. FFXIV held me for a little bit, but it really drags in places where you have to see the main story through to the end, and I fell off ESO within like a month, too. No, the 13 pages of this thread and the millions of people asking Blizzard to bring back vanilla WoW, and all the dumb people who play Project 1999 with me, proves there's something there. Modern theme park mmos aren't really mmos. They just aren't. You don't try to meet and work with other players, you try to avoid other players. And you can't really pvp or grief in any significant ways anymore. Its just trolling and time wasting at most. Destiny/Division/Anthem/Whatever could be the thing we want, but they all hosed it up super hardcore. We'll see when somebody tries to make an actual multiplayer game again. Game design and development of new ideas is expensive. So the industry, as risk-averse as it is, mostly focuses on things they can reliably crank out on a schedule.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:58
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People who are begging for vanilla WoW honestly don't remember what a poo poo show it was. At the same time I kinda doubt anything would beat what WoW was. I think all of the success was really to due to timing. It's a shame that there isn't something so vast and just the right entertaining as WoW. After you are done leveling and gearing every class a few times it does get boring. After finding myself cycling through all my characters when logging in, I kinda quit playing.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:49
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ragedx posted:People who are begging for vanilla WoW honestly don't remember what a poo poo show it was. This is one of those really popular opinions that is demonstrably incorrect. I’m sure there’s one person begging that will think it’s a shitshow, but many of in the community remember specifically what it was and are stoked for it. Whether or not Blizzard will get them to pay for it over going to free private servers is another question entirely.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:41
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Zaphod42 posted:No, the 13 pages of this thread and the millions of people asking Blizzard to bring back vanilla WoW, and all the dumb people who play Project 1999 with me, proves there's something there. The first real MMO I played was FFXI at the American launch and the best part about it was how you had to form a community/exist in this virtual world as opposed to modern theme park MMOs that are just a bunch of levels to run through. At the same time there's no way I'm going back to that kind of game now that I'm not a 14 year old. When I play games now I just want to have fun without dealing with anyone else's bullshit.
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Mar 19, 2019 23:42
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I think multiplayer games just become more and more streamlined. People don't want to spend months to level their characters so they can enjoy raiding, PVP or whatever. You can just play Pillars, Divinity or Witcher if you enjoy quests, leveling etc. and games like Path of Exile or Divinity have multiplayer. MOBAs took place of RTS games, because people just want to fight other players instead of spending time ordering your peons to cut trees and build more houses for other peons. Imagine not being able to change your class in Overwatch mid-game when you find out your tank or healers are incompetent, but you have to stick with your role during the duty in FFXIV. And I can't think of a new MMORPG in recent years that wasn't either a kickstarter scam promising 'revolutionary totally not clone of WoW' whatever, korean P2W grindfest or just another classic theme park MMORPG, so people just became tired of a genre and seek something else. And well, when you only want to fight other people, either solo or with a team, BRs are popular and they probably cost far less to develop than large MMOs.
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Mar 20, 2019 11:51
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Dwesa posted:I think multiplayer games just become more and more streamlined. People don't want to spend months to level their characters so they can enjoy raiding, PVP or whatever. You can just play Pillars, Divinity or Witcher if you enjoy quests, leveling etc. and games like Path of Exile or Divinity have multiplayer. MOBAs took place of RTS games, because people just want to fight other players instead of spending time ordering your peons to cut trees and build more houses for other peons. Imagine not being able to change your class in Overwatch mid-game when you find out your tank or healers are incompetent, but you have to stick with your role during the duty in FFXIV. And I can't think of a new MMORPG in recent years that wasn't either a kickstarter scam promising 'revolutionary totally not clone of WoW' whatever, korean P2W grindfest or just another classic theme park MMORPG, so people just became tired of a genre and seek something else. And well, when you only want to fight other people, either solo or with a team, BRs are popular and they probably cost far less to develop than large MMOs. this can't be said any better. as much as i do enjoy leveling to some degree, an mmo with the tedious level grind is a breath of fresh air. (though i'm not even sure if any mmo did the leveless play right). that and giving an actual incentive to socialize with people.
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Mar 20, 2019 14:44
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MMOs need to be micro-transaction infested cause no one's willing to pay a monthly subscription anymore, ruining MMOs forever.
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Mar 20, 2019 14:51
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Perry Mason Jar posted:MMOs need to be micro-transaction infested cause no one's willing to pay a monthly subscription anymore, ruining MMOs forever. Except for ff14 and wow... People arn't willing to pay monthly subs for games that have as much content as most lovely "live service" games. (aka none) and even less likely when most of them want to do monthly fee on top of lovely cash shops that removed all the stuff you'd try to earn in game.
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Mar 20, 2019 15:27
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ragedx posted:People who are begging for vanilla WoW honestly don't remember what a poo poo show it was. You realize many of us still play everquest, right? Welcome to the thread, please read a few pages.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:23
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Fruity20 posted:this can't be said any better. as much as i do enjoy leveling to some degree, an mmo with the tedious level grind is a breath of fresh air. (though i'm not even sure if any mmo did the leveless play right). that and giving an actual incentive to socialize with people. I think you meant to say "without"? It makes it hard to parse this.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:24
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every single discussion of vanilla wow seems to be 75% people insisting nobody actually ever liked it or will enjoy it, and 25% of people who played nostalrius recently and still enjoyed it
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Mar 20, 2019 21:39
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I liked classic WoW because I had never played anything like it. I also liked eating at Taco Bell back then. It's ok if things get stale and tastes change. Maybe a VR MMO like someone mentioned would have a sense of novelty. But that will get old one day too.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:10
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Frog Act posted:every single discussion of vanilla wow seems to be 75% people insisting nobody actually ever liked it or will enjoy it, and 25% of people who played nostalrius recently and still enjoyed it Well somehow, dunno how, wow is a very enjoyable game to play. The gameplay is eerily satisfying even after all these years, albeit being outdated as gently caress, and I myself can't say I've ever played any other mmo that even came close. Even now, in 8.1.5 when they have actually killed AB and WSG, destroyed world pvp, deprived people who like to raid from all motivation, and made the game a soul crushing repetition in the form of elitistic m+ poo poo dungeons, the game STILL remains fun and satisfying to play. Vanilla had much much more to offer than current wow does. In theory, wow is a poo poo game and nobody should play it, but it's gameplay is so satisfying we still play it 
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Mar 21, 2019 13:39
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some stupid friends of mine are trying to get me to buy division 2 they are total tools I hate them, I hope they get hit by a train they made me pay for a monthly sub on origin to "check out" anthem, then they decided anthem is poo poo and we shouldn't buy it (it was quite fun tbh, but had 0 content), and now they wanna dump 60€ on division. I explicitly told them Destiny 2 is the only looter shooter anyone should play in tyool2019, but they are so fkin stupid and bad it feels like I'm talking to a tank of goldfish instead of 30yo human gamers. Mr. Pickles fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 21, 2019 14:22
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Ossipago posted:I liked classic WoW because I had never played anything like it. I also liked eating at Taco Bell back then. It's ok if things get stale and tastes change. Maybe a VR MMO like someone mentioned would have a sense of novelty. But that will get old one day too. We're going in circles now because people just dump hottakes in the thread and leave without really reading for context. Yes, its fine if tastes change. But if millions of people are asking for a thing that doesn't currently exist, maybe tastes haven't actually changed?? Maybe there's a gap in the market? Hmm? poo poo didn't get old if we're still playing project1999 and nostralius. Y'all are ignoring reality so you can dunk on a strawman you created from jumping to conclusions.
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Mar 21, 2019 16:46
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Zaphod42 posted:We're going in circles now because people just dump hottakes in the thread and leave without really reading for context. There is definitely a gap in the market for a community focused MMO with a slower overall pace. The question that Classic WoW will answer this year is how many players are there really that want this type of game? I have no doubt over a million will return, but how many will still be playing passed the first 6 months? Classic WoW has the ability to show Blizzard that old school MMO design isn't dead, but that will only happen if a very large number of players continue to participate. 50K active players may be great for project1999, but a billion dollar corporation needs active players in the millions. I realize that you can have a well designed MMO made be a smaller studio that focuses on a smaller subscriber base, but so far I haven't found one that is competent. Ashes of Creation, Pantheon Online, and Shroud of the Whatever are all examples of inexperienced developers chasing that smaller player base, but never having the resources to make the game they are imagining in their heads. On the other hand, a larger studio will want a player base in the millions, because game development cost has risen to the point of insanity, and no AAA publisher will risk another TOR or Warhammer Online. IF classic WoW is able to maintain a solid 1 million subscribers, I think this can kickstart a second wave of next-generation MMOs made by developers that have real experience and expectations.
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Mar 21, 2019 18:51
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People don't want another hotbar MMO. You may be able to cannablize current WoW players but I doubt you'd get any sort of new players.
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Mar 21, 2019 19:37
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Glenn Quebec posted:People don't want another hotbar MMO. You may be able to cannablize current WoW players but I doubt you'd get any sort of new players. Yeah I agree. I think with good social environment you could do a SWG style mmo as an indie and do well. But the "next wow" will be whoever does a game like destiny or anthem that isn't poo poo. Cooldowns were basically a way to obscure turn based combat as realtime combat. It was a conceit made because of the limitations of the early hardware and software and don't need to be there. Gimme the dark souls mmo damnit 
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Mar 21, 2019 20:47
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Zaphod42 posted:Gimme the dark souls mmo damnit This idea is silly. The thing that makes Dark Souls good and interesting is the developers sitting down and designing every encounter you're going to have on your linear treck through a linear area. Then they make it interesting and challenging by adjusting from which direction enemies attack, scripting how they ambush you, setting up archers that distract you or draw you into a different ambush, combine enemy types, et cetera. You can't design encounters or areas like this with hundreds of players running around. All you end up with if you want a Dark Souls MMO is the infinite dragon butts of Izalith. Tons of enemies carelessly placed around an environment so that everyone has something to fight and it's "technically" a challenging encounter. Yet everyone skips this part for a reason and it's very obviously a bad part of an otherwise decent game. Like, Dragons Dogma or stuff like Phantasy Star Online 2, Black Desert or whatever are more realistic when it comes to the MMO formula (and actually exist in that mold), but Dark Souls doesn't work with tons of people running around.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:43
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Yeah. Totes. Letting players invade each other inside those pre-crafted environments just doesn't make sense!! Waaaait a minute...  Dude wtf? No. Everquest levels are hand crafted. Destiny levels are hand crafted. Nothing about having multiplayer means you have to have procedurally generated levels. You're being weird. I guess you're assuming a structure exactly like wow, but that's really closed minded. Mmo doesn't have to be built that way, and there's a lot of reasons its a dumb thing to even attempt. The dark souls mmo would work like guild wars 1. You have 10,000 players in town, but go outside and its just you or you and 3 people vs 4 other people. I've talked about this earlier in the thread but I guess we gotta keep repeating ourselves. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 21, 2019 21:52
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Zwiebel posted:This idea is silly. Just quoting this bad post to announce loudly that it is bad and full of nothing.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:56
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How many times do I have to say "like destiny or anthem but not poo poo" Those games are on the right path to making the new big mmo. You have lots of players in a big server but only ever see around 10 players at once. That's a good thing. Destiny also has shooting and not hotbars. They have loot and permanent progression. But the social options suuuuuuuuck, meeting people is impossible, activities are super grindy and unrewarding, all the content built was the wrong type, etc. If someone could just deliver what destiny was supposed to be, that'd be the wow-killer. That's why we have 4 companies all spending millions on the idea. It could be great. But so far implementations have been massively lacking. If Bungie would just hire some diablo 3 and wow devs it could seriously be the GOAT. But they hosed it up for years and years.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:59
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Imo I miss the vast tracts of land and real adventuring in MMOs. LOTRO was the last one to do that. My friends and I IRL played the pants off of that. It could be the same graphics and I'd play it if the combat wasnt hotbar.
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Mar 21, 2019 22:13
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I suppose I came off a bit too strong? Sorry about that.Zaphod42 posted:The dark souls mmo would work like guild wars 1. You have 10,000 players in town, but go outside and its just you or you and 3 people vs 4 other people.´ Eh, I guess we're having different viewpoints of what is expected from a MMO. I was thinking the expectation was more along the lines of wide open area sandbox MMOs with, well, the "massively multiplayer" part actually being a thing. Although in retrospect I shouldn't have mentioned Phantasy Star Online, because that's exactly how that game works. With the instanced grouping content and whatever. Basically destroyed my own argument there. Still don't see the appeal of dragging down Dark Souls with focusing on big team multi-player. It's a pretty well designed and focused single player game and while invasions and summoning help are a fine gimmick, the game isn't really as fun or interesting and not really designed to properly compensate for these things. It's a good way in those games to trivialize content that just isn't suited for multiple players. It helps people getting past sections where they could get stuck. I'd welcome better support for a better co-op experience in those games, but that's all vastly different from designing a "MMO", a game that is supposed to be focused around group gameplay. And again, there already is action combat fantasy co-op MMOs around? It's just that the market and player base have decided they aren't good enough? Saying that a Dark Souls MMO would be ideal just seems silly to me because you would have to change the entirety of the game to accomodate the design demands of a multiplayer service game. I guess you could keep the stamina bar and general combat system, but gear, levelling, encounter design, area design, boss fights (most Dark Souls bosses really don't deal well with multiple targets) would have to be vastly different to the point where there just isn't much left of what makes Dark Souls the game it is.
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Mar 21, 2019 22:42
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Zwiebel posted:Eh, I guess we're having different viewpoints of what is expected from a MMO. I was thinking the expectation was more along the lines of wide open area sandbox MMOs with, well, the "massively multiplayer" part actually being a thing. But dark souls already is one of the best co-op and pvp games ever, really fantastic, and simply adding better tools for matchmaking and meeting other people to co-op with them wouldn't "bring it down" Where are you getting big teams? Again, I'm comparing this to Destiny, and Division, and Anthem. Those games are not big team. Those games are RPGs with like 4-5 people on a party. Thats' all you really want. Having wide open areas is fine. Sharing those wide open areas with EVERY player on the server is not, and leads to really bland and vast content to spread people out. It also leads to really weird mechanics with fast respawning enemies and people camping and farming and just... its a mistake. You get all the same advantages with none of the disadvantages if you do the destiny thing, but just do it right. You wander around a big vast area, and the game loads in 4 enemy players. As you wander around, those 4 players despawn from your world and get seamlessly dropped into somebody else's world, while you have 4 other enemy players appear in your world. Because this is all happening off-camera, you're oblivious to it, and you get the experience of being in a vast open world where you could run into any group of any players at any time. See how that works?? That's the experience Destiny promised, and it was a great one. They just really hosed it up and didn't live up to it, because the matchmaking sucks and the game's structure is way too formal and rigid and not conductive to actually having players meet each other and have cool experiences with each other. There's a few rare times where Destiny does actually facilitate 10 strangers meeting up somewhere in a big open world and hanging out for awhile fighting monsters together, and its great. The whole game should be that, and if it was, it'd be huge. You're just continuing to misunderstand what I mean when I say dark souls mmo. Stop jumping to conclusions, and go back and read the earlier part of the thread where we had a big conversation and detailed all this. Everquest and FFXI were great because you had to form a party, and then you'd hang out with your group of 5 people for a long time, and then bump into other parties, and fight them or make peace with them. That's all you need. The idea of having a field of 5000 players is a mistake. All you really need is the POTENTIAL to meet up with 5,000 other players, you don't actually need them all to be in the same 1:1 space always. You can have a city space that allows that for meeting up with people, doing trade, etc. but then the actual game spaces can be instanced and dynamically drop-in drop-out co-op / pvp'd. In WoW, other players are mostly a nuisance. You only hang out with your friends, and if you see other people you avoid them because they'll just be killing things and slowing down your ability to level up or get quests. And zones have to be big and empty in order to allow you to spread out. Instead you can have really specific zones, dark souls style, but have thousands of players in those zones and they dynamically see other players around as they move. Then you can better control the social experience. You could make it a variable that some zones match you with more players, while others match you with fewer, in order to make some areas feel intentionally isolated. My ideal mmo would have one big shared city space that functions like Star Wars Galaxies with player buildings and economy, but then have a world around it that's all instanced dark souls zones. You'd have to form parties in town and then set out trying to fight through a level and survive to fulfill a quest or get some loot. You could even take the idea FFXIV had but go further and make it more social, having merchant players who can't fight and have to be escorted outside of town to go find some rare resource that the combat players don't have the skills to obtain, or whatever. All kinds of stuff to make people actually PLAY ROLES, which is so rare in RPGs. The way everquest had wizards and druids able to teleport and other players dependent on them, you could have all kinds of skills that allow different benefits. "Oh, lets take this ranger in our party, he enables shortcuts through the forest. Oooh, lets take the barbarian who can prepare extra potions" that kinda stuff. Then you curate a friends' list of people you know already have good useful skills, like happens in everquest, and... yeah. MMO. That's what people want from it. That feeling of making connections and relations and depending on each other. Player guilds, not just as a collection of friends but as organizations and businesses. E: I really need to install a VPN or whatever and play dragon's dogma online, which looks like the closest we're gonna get. If only it was in the US! Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 22, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2019 00:09
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Zaphod42 posted:
Stop pretending player interaction alone can't make a good game. Ever played counterstrike or call of duty? You literally get put into a room with other players and interacting with them is the only thing you can do. Player interaction is a requirement for me to determine a game is good. I don't play any single player stuff really.
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Mar 22, 2019 02:48
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nazca posted:Stop pretending player interaction alone can't make a good game. Ever played counterstrike or call of duty? You literally get put into a room with other players and interacting with them is the only thing you can do. Counterstrike has more rules and systems which drive players to interact with each other than DayZ or Rust do though. Counterstrike guarantees you're going to get a tense match. DayZ maybe you get lucky and have a tense day, maybe you spend hours wandering around in the field. Don't get me wrong, I think if you're making an MMO it should focus on player interaction; that's my big complaint about theme park mmos, that other players are obstacles and can be avoided. The old days of EQ and FFXI the world was so harsh, you were forced to interact with other players just to survive. Any MMO should have features that drive players to depend upon each other. That's the problem with DayZ/Ark/Rust though, all players are basically identical and only band together to form powerful alliances so you don't get your poo poo kicked in by some other alliance. Needs more role playing where different people each have their own skills and have to combine them, things like that.
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Mar 22, 2019 05:05
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nazca posted:Stop pretending player interaction alone can't make a good game. Ever played counterstrike or call of duty? You literally get put into a room with other players and interacting with them is the only thing you can do. That really isn't the kind of player interaction I think of in MMOs, though, you can't do anything out of tightly prescribed limits which are basically shoot them, talk in chat, or drop a weapon for them to pick up. in an MMO that has unique class roles (instead of just the holy trinity) like Everquest there are a huge number of possible options for interaction, even SOW and ports were more unique than anything most MMOs have these days just seems like a bit of a wide definition for player interaction Zaphod42 posted:Counterstrike has more rules and systems which drive players to interact with each other than DayZ or Rust do though. Counterstrike guarantees you're going to get a tense match. DayZ maybe you get lucky and have a tense day, maybe you spend hours wandering around in the field. that kind of stuff doesn't feel too interactive to me because, as you noted, the players are all identical and competing with one another. I guess what I really think is best is pve with discrete enough character roles that it feels like a big reciprocal thing with the environment, your party, and your enemies, like how you'd need to cloak and crouch to get to a camp where your puller would then have one task, mezzer another, and so on. surely this can be done in a way that isn't soul crushingly tedious
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Mar 22, 2019 21:35
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This has been an oddly good year for me so far for MMORPGs. I've gotten new characters to the level cap in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online. Although i'm not doing the end game content in any of these because end game content is a trap and the only way to win is to not play that foolishness.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:27
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IDK, the non end game content of WoW and FFXIV doesn't really engage me very much anymore. I tried the most recent expansions of both, but Wow was just more of the same its done before. FFXIV was okay, but the actual quests are really mindless and only the cutscenes have real creativity. End game is still cool if you have a chill guild to raid with, but I don't have the free time for that life style right now.Frog Act posted:that kind of stuff doesn't feel too interactive to me because, as you noted, the players are all identical and competing with one another. I guess what I really think is best is pve with discrete enough character roles that it feels like a big reciprocal thing with the environment, your party, and your enemies, like how you'd need to cloak and crouch to get to a camp where your puller would then have one task, mezzer another, and so on. surely this can be done in a way that isn't soul crushingly tedious Yeah, part of what keeps me from playing EVE is the PvE content is too mindless and boring. I feel like you need some PvE stuff to fall back to, in order to get you started and give you something to grind away at when you get tired of getting stomped in PvP and whatnot. And strong PvE content creates strong multiplayer, just co-op instead of pvp. But that's another type of social dynamic. In MMOs, people can interact in many ways, They can fight each other (pvp) They can fight as a team (pve) They can trade (economy) They can share abilities (buffs, SoW, teleports, heals, etc.) The more of those you have, the better. Having little PvE is a weakness, just as having no economy makes the game flatter. Early vanilla WoW lots of classes had buffs you could cast on people, and everquest has the same. I really liked those, because from a roleplaying standpoint you can go around casting buffs on other players, especially newbies, but also just random strangers you meet on the road. If they're not your class they don't have the same buff, and they really appreciate getting that extra benefit. But it costs you nothing more than some time / mana, so its easy to just freely give them out to other players. But that's the kind of thing that helps start off a positive mutualistic relationship in an mmo. "Hey dude, I'm gonna be fighting in this area for awhile, mind if I come back and get another SoW from you when this one wears off?" Modern WoW made buffs into passive auras so you didn't have to bother upkeep of clicking the spell to re-cast it every so often. But in doing so it made it so you couldn't grant it to strangers, only party members. It also wasn't a favor you manually did, but just something expected and automatic. Then now they've completely optimized out those buffs, so they don't even exist anymore, because they don't serve any meaningful function beyond buffing stat numbers in a flat way that's expected anyways. That's a good microcosm of what WoW lost in its attempt to be more wide appealing, right there. Optimizing away the things that made MMOs cool in the first place, out of convenience.
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Mar 23, 2019 06:17
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Zaphod42 posted:E: I really need to install a VPN or whatever and play dragon's dogma online, which looks like the closest we're gonna get. If only it was in the US! The entire time I was reading your posts I was thinking "that's DDO" The VPN thing is extremely easy to set up if you follow the reddit guide. You download a simple program, click 4 times, and you're playing from Japan. Game itself felt a little overwhelming the first day I was playing but now that I've come to grips with it I'm having a great time.
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Mar 23, 2019 07:33
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PvE content needs a massive rework to make it engaging again. How many dungeons and raids can a game like WoW or FFXIV really release before you've seen it all? Oh look, this raid is pirate themed and the end boss has 6 phases instead of 5. At what point does the entire concept become redundant? I distinctly remember WoW Vanilla, BC, and WOTLK dungeons and raids down to the last boss, but even though I've played all of the recent expansions, I still have a hard time remembering each individual encounter from Cata, MOP, WoD, and Legion like I did from previous expansions. Just how many more mechanics and themes can a development team create in order to make the content engaging? I think there is a drop off point after expansion #3 in all MMOs that focus on PVE. SWG never had this problem because SWG barely had any fixed content. All content was centered around community and player driven activities. It had a giant sandbox world that you just did things in, and if you were getting bored, you'd just retrain all of your talents and become a Swordsman instead of a Pikeman.
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Mar 23, 2019 14:12
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Well everything you do in any game is just a permutation of available actions, which are pretty limited in MMOs. Despite the concept, or whatever, MMOs have severely limited gameplay so the content feels the same if you don't have a reason to enjoy the reskin of the permutation of actions, like nostalgia or the community or a story. Some games try to circumvent this with more/different gameplay or whatever, or trying to make the grind really appealing, but they're all doomed if they rely on that approach.
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Mar 23, 2019 14:55
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Cardboard Fox posted:SWG never had this problem because SWG barely had any fixed content. All content was centered around community and player driven activities. It had a giant sandbox world that you just did things in, and if you were getting bored, you'd just retrain all of your talents and become a Swordsman instead of a Pikeman. This is kinda where I'm at. Your dev team will never be able to make content fast enough for your players to not get bored, so the only way to give your MMO any longevity is by making the players the content. Eve manages this by letting you put a flag down somewhere, make gear, and blow up vast quantities of game (and real) money fighting other players. It's surprising that we've never seen a single-shard "fantasy Eve" MMO where players can: * Control land * Build and destroy player-owned castles * Make and sell equipment that is destroyed when a character dies You could have players hire NPC guards for their castles, sponsor monsters and bandits to invade other players lands, and so on. And make sure you have a map that colours in to show who owns what, they'll eat that poo poo up.
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Apr 1, 2019 23:33
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Gort posted:This is kinda where I'm at. Your dev team will never be able to make content fast enough for your players to not get bored, so the only way to give your MMO any longevity is by making the players the content. Eve manages this by letting you put a flag down somewhere, make gear, and blow up vast quantities of game (and real) money fighting other players. I was under the impression that there are a bunch of MMOs like this but there's only so much playerbase that actually wants that so none of them hit critical mass.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:11
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