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knox posted:Hmm I'm having the desire to play this on PS4. Should I wait until this previously mentioned patch to pick it up at all, and is the console version as good as PC? It is the exact same, it's cross-platform and I personally exclusively play on PC with a controller and have never been hamstrung by it. It rules. I'll tell you what I tell everyone, set aside 2-3 hours to watch ARR story/recap videos, maybe dick around on the wikipedia to understand the world lore or whatever, who some of the major players are (Minfilia, Alisaie/Alphinaud, Louisoix, Thancred, Yshtola), don't dig too deep and spoil things. Then go ahead and buy the skip for $20 or whatever. You just saved yourself, I think, 250 hours of bad video game. Heavensward, the first expansion, is great and I would never recommend skipping that. If you really wanna experience ARR despite the warnings that the jobs don't come into their own until at the VERY least 50 (and even then aren't that fun until 60+, imho) that's on you man. I'd wait for the streamline and then re-do it later (they let you re-do entire expansions once completed via New Game+, and they're re-jiggering ARR before allowing it to be re-done in the same fashion). jokes fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 04:41
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knox posted:Hmm I'm having the desire to play this on PS4. Should I wait until this previously mentioned patch to pick it up at all, and is the console version as good as PC? Console is exactly as good as PC for ffxiv It really is the best mmo right now but its also really dull for the first 60 hours. Its a tutorial for people who have never played an rpg and that is ROUGH if you have. They sell quest/level skips but they're too expensive and then you miss out on some story... It is a good game but if you're starting now you better have a ton of free time and be okay with playing in lower pop zones until like... a solid year from now maybe you'll be caught up.
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Jan 17, 2020 07:35
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I feel bad not reading the last 33 pages since there's clearly some really interesting discussion in here, but I only have so much time in the day One big thing which has pissed me off with most MMOs is how static they are I'm certain this is a side effect of being ancestors of older MMOs where it was a bitch to have to: a. sync the world to many clients b. provide regular content updates However it's 2020 and you can play MMOs over 3/4/5G So that said, what the hell am I on about? I want to see more MMO worlds where stuff happens, if it's player stuff or story/event stuff (or both) I'd like to see dynamic mob spawns, NPCs that don't stand on one spot 365 days of the year, world events that raze towns/cities or build a new one... Yeah, sure, it'd be a poo poo load of work, but I think it would be worth it Some of you might be thinking "if the NPCs and the mob spawns move, that'll be a total pain in the rear end" I think if you provide the player with really good map tools, and move the "important" stuff off NPCs to either static locations or menus, that way you'll have minimal running around I've got a GDoc called "Kaffo's stupid MMO ideas" which has butt loads more, but I don't want to write an essay here What's folks thoughts on this? Have there been any games which have done stuff like this that I've missed that have done it well/badly?
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Jan 17, 2020 17:01
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Moving NPCs with routines and schedules sounds cool, but I play enough Elder Scrolls games to know it's mostly a pain in the rear end. I need to talk to a guy for a quest. It's the middle of the day. Is he at work, and if so, where? Is he at his home eating lunch, or at the inn / tavern. Maybe he's just going for a walk collecting bear asses in the forest. It's cool for a while and helps with immersion or whatever, but in the end I just throw on that quest marker and blindly follow it until I find him, negating the point. It'd be one thing if I can ask other townspeople where he was though, like in Morrowind (even if they stay static in that game). If I could just talk to a dude and ask where Bob is and get pointed to the right direction, but it's still probably just busy work when the player just wants to hand in his animal parts and get a reward.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:08
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Moving NPCs with routines and schedules sounds cool, but I play enough Elder Scrolls games to know it's mostly a pain in the rear end. Make quest NPCs static Give the player HUD/map tools to find the guy (direct marker, path on the ground, audio hints, sign on the guys door "OUT GETTING BEAR ASSES BRB") Multiple hand in locations "rear end in a top hat isn't in, he can have his bear asses on his door step" Locally move that NPC for that player to a static location for hand-in then put him back on loop afterwards That's just poo poo off the top of my head, I think if it's cool enough and it brings immersion it's worth trying to find a solution to make it work
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Jan 17, 2020 17:19
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kaffo posted:Yeah and I totally agree, but I think there are modern techniques and/or workarounds to make it less suicidal If they could think of a solution that wasn't a map marker I'd be all in. It's admittedly tedious, but in the end I like those features and it makes me chill out when I play games, rather than full haul-rear end efficiency mode.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:26
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kaffo posted:One big thing which has pissed me off with most MMOs is how static they are Its not A. Trust me, its not technical. The reason why most content is static is to provide a balanced game and provide content for different people. If everything is dynamic, its a whole other game. Where do newbies go to level up? Where are starting quests? In a dynamic world, you can't easily answer those types of questions. It makes everything messy without actually adding anything significant to the experience. That only really works if you go full EVE online. EVE, SWG and a few other mmos like Shadowbane had very dynamic worlds, since they were player driven. But still had static npcs to give the game some backbone structure. I guess Warhammer and Rifts had some dynamic spawns but not really. And your suggestion of "just provide really good map tools" isn't really feasible. That's like adding a whole new game you have to build, just to make the game work. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 17:27
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Modernizing MMOs is the most important thing. Having quests, combat and "all of the above" bring essentially the same as something like anarchy online, daoc, or uo completely sucks. I tried legends of aria and it's just uo all over again. Barely any modernization and it sucks for it.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:56
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Glenn Quebec posted:Modernizing MMOs is the most important thing. Having quests, combat and "all of the above" bring essentially the same as something like anarchy online, daoc, or uo completely sucks. What do you mean by modernizing exactly? That could mean a lot of things.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:59
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It does mean a lot of things and is super loaded. I think my main point is that mimicking yesteryears blockbuster MMO's mechanics is not working.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:01
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The good parts of MMOs has always been the shell. The big world, the social experience, long-term progress and significant, tangible gains on character growth. The moment-to-moment gameplay, the core, that has always been the weak part. I think if you made an MMO that was exactly like World of Warcraft but it had FPS elements for ranged classes and had real-time dark souls like combat for melee classes, that it would take off like nobody's business. Even if it was still "go kill 10 bears and bring me 10 bear asses", if killing the bears was fun as poo poo, you'd be fine with that. Lots of people want that. Which again, is why games like Destiny and The Division and Anthem exist, they're all trying to be that, but they all hosed up in pretty big ways. We need Dragon's Dogma Online in English already.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:06
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I agree with you. It seems like they can never get both of those things working in tandem. The good gameplay turns into, well, Destiny 2, but even then the combat is pretty poo poo/samey. If FFXIV had more engaging combat, it'd be Best Video Game Ever instead of Best Video Game Right Now. That being said, I do like the hotbar-style MMO gameplay I just think video games have gotten to the point where we should expect more than a slightly better version of WotLK.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:37
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A WoW clone with a proper action combat system has always been my dream.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:44
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That but EQ clone.
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Jan 17, 2020 19:31
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I had to wait to get home to Effort PostZaphod42 posted:Its not A. Trust me, its not technical. Zaphod42 posted:The good parts of MMOs has always been the shell. The big world, the social experience, long-term progress and significant, tangible gains on character growth. So I agree with you, for the most part. When I played BDO I just couldn't get over how much better the combat in that was over hot bar MMOs and it's part of the inspiration for my insanity There 100% is a real drive for that style of endorphine driven gameplay, look at Diablo etc as singleplayer games What I'm proposing here, although I was more hinting at it rather than being explicit, is a real shake up of the genre. Because it is such a formula based genre right now. Just a formula from 1999 Obviously the real bastard here is it's very, very time consuming (and therefore expensive) to test a whole new formula in a genre where publishers have found a way to make money I think a lot of stuff like fetch quests, old school classes, the tank/healer/DPS triangle and (to an extent) logarithmic experience are all pretty out dated If you consider the evolution of the Elder Scrolls games, how many of the MMORPG elements are still stuck back in like Daggerfall/Morrowind? (not to say that Morrowind isn't the best game in the series, but it is drat out of date) You've now got dynamic questlines, skills been thrown out, perk trees, no classes, dragons that drop out the sky when you're just looking for some Nirnroot and burn your rear end off... And yeah, I realise there is stuff that doesn't work across the genres, like log XP is there so you always have more levels. But god drat, there's other ways than me grinding for level 99 fishing to catch swordfish TLDR; There's nothing "wrong" with the MMO formula as-is. But holy poo poo I want to see a 2020 MMO and I'd make it myself if I wasn't one guy
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Jan 17, 2020 19:49
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IDK Elder Scrolls mechanics suck really bad in my opinion, the huge amount of content and the mods are the only reason anybody cares about Skyrim as far as I'm concerned. But now we're getting to something this thread has hit on a few times which is that different people want different things out of MMOs. And that's a good thing. That means we can have variety and competition. One of the things some people want is just a classic EQ/WOW MMO but with action combat. But another thing people want is a more open dynamic world, like Star Wars Galaxies. (Your "real shakeup of the genre") Those two designs are probably at odds with each other and one game shouldn't try to be both things for both audiences. Doing something new and innovative can be cool! (But is difficult and expensive) Also, doing something everybody knows about but doing it really well and better than anybody else has before is also very cool! Both of those things could be popular MMOs. The real problem is we're all just talking out our asses here and when it comes to games, the concept is basically nothing and the implementation is everything. And worse, MMOs inherently cost insane budgets to produce, even more than most polished video games do. Which means all the ills of the game industry kick in, you need a publisher and they're gonna be risk averse. So TLDR: Will there ever be a good MMO ever again? Maybe but unlikely any time soon 
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Jan 17, 2020 19:56
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Zaphod42 posted:The good parts of MMOs has always been the shell. The big world, the social experience, long-term progress and significant, tangible gains on character growth. You touch on some pretty key points here, main one being progress and character growth. It really boils down to a players ability to set goals for their progression then the amount of options available to meet those goals. Playing archeage unchained with my fiancee is a great example of this. When we were thinking of buying it she was most excited about owning land, crafting cool items and farming. She has no experience with standard MMO tab targeting controls and the first day playing was spent breaking down the first wall to her goals, an archaic lovely control scheme. Once she gets the hang of it we look up how to get our farms. Turns out getting your farms is literally gated by hours and hours of bear rear end collecting to hit level 30 and 50. She powers through and gets her first farm and we end up placing it (unknowingly) in a place that is constantly at war. Now her farming goals are completely poo poo on by gankers and she's completely over it. You have a player that wants to grow potatoes so bad that they fight lovely controls, unclear objectives, and 30 levels of bear rear end to do it. Admittedly placing the farm in a PVP zone is user error but the game let it happen, and it let it happen after a torrent of other barriers. The real question is, if she could place her farm at level 1 and immediately start progressing towards a goal she was interested in, would she then go out and farm bear asses with lovely controls to defend it from gankers?
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Jan 17, 2020 19:59
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Jimlit posted:You touch on some pretty key points here, main one being progress and character growth. It really boils down to a players ability to set goals for their progression then the amount of options available to meet those goals. I really like that FFXIV lets you play a tradesman from the start and you can just level as a tradesman if that's what you wanna do. I see lots of people expressing a desire to play a "tavern keeper" in an MMO instead of the actual hero / adventurer, and that's one of the things Star Wars Galaxies totally delivered on and lots of people are nostalgic for. Thing is even FFXIV or SWG trade jobs still involved a lot of farming for ore or dancing in a tavern for hours to grind xp to unlock your next dance or whatever. But that's one thing I've posted about ITT before. I'd love to see an MMO focus on trade skills and importantly tie that even more into the core experience. In FFXIV if you're a tradesman you go out into the leveling zones to get your ore/fish/herbs but you don't really have a reason to party up with normal hero classes, and in fact it'd be bad to do so. I really want a game where a fisherman has to hire a team of mercenary heroes in order to escort him to some river so he can catch a rare fish, and they have to fight off goblins while he's doing his fishing minigame or whatever. That's some real role-playing. And it also breaks up the classic Trinity. Instead of just Tank/Heals/Damage, now you have Fighters/Merchants too. What if your fiance could focus entirely on farming, and even hire people who want to fight to do the fighting for her so she could still place her farm in that pvp zone if she felt like it? And then that would generate content for other players, that they have a reason to fight, to help your fiance defend her farm, instead of just collecting bear asses for some NPC.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:03
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I think if survival games could scale larger and be more permanent they could really be the next "MMO". Conan Exiles but with 1000s of players on a few single unified server? Hmmm
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Jan 17, 2020 20:14
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Glenn Quebec posted:I think if survival games could scale larger and be more permanent they could really be the next "MMO". They could be, but the problem is 90% of "survival games" are low-content indie affairs where they crank out the bare minimum engine to let you walk around and throw poop at other players and then call it a day and depend upon player interaction to drive everything. So we'd need someone to spend actual money on a survival mmo. The closest we've come to a AAA survival was Fallout 76 and... they decided not to actually spend money on it either. People just see those as a cheap game to crank out :/
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Jan 17, 2020 20:21
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Zaphod42 posted:What if your fiance could focus entirely on farming, and even hire people who want to fight to do the fighting for her so she could still place her farm in that pvp zone if she felt like it? And then that would generate content for other players, that they have a reason to fight, to help your fiance defend her farm, instead of just collecting bear asses for some NPC. I think that scenario would fall apart as soon as you had to rely on people showing up on time, and my fiance actually paying them. User collection quests could work if they had clearly defined systems beyond just "x items for x gold". Like having experience or contribution rewards on top of the gold the issuer puts up.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:27
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Zaphod42 posted:IDK Elder Scrolls mechanics suck really bad in my opinion, the huge amount of content and the mods are the only reason anybody cares about Skyrim as far as I'm concerned. Regarding the party mix with hiring mercs etc. It'd be really hard to pull off without it being baked into a guild structure or something. And I'm willing to bet most folk would just go "well I'll just grab a sword, kill the goblins, mine for fish a bit, then kill them again myself" rather than give up the part profit to pay the other dudes It's a super neat idea, I'm certain there's a way to tie it in I was thinking about user generated quests the other day, as in guilds or players can create proper structured quests in-game for other's to do and the game would provide the reward For example, say a guild wanted to build a huge rear end shed and they needed 10,000 bear asses to complete it. Rather than just post on the board "yo, get us some asses", they could generate an actual quest for their members to accept and each bear rear end they deliver gets them... I dunno gold or xp or something, but enough that it's worth it I was kinda hoping with a system like that you could get more players to sign up to the quest by mocking it as a "game quest" that they didn't need to go to some fourm or in-game bounty board or something to accept Just throwing poo poo around here, maybe something like that could help your situation, where a party accept a quest and have no idea it's a real player until they show up. And the pay for the quest is actual "free" from the game too, not out the poor fisherman's pocket
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Jan 17, 2020 20:46
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Jimlit posted:I think that scenario would fall apart as soon as you had to rely on people showing up on time, and my fiance actually paying them. User collection quests could work if they had clearly defined systems beyond just "x items for x gold". Like having experience or contribution rewards on top of the gold the issuer puts up. All you'd need is a LFG tool / matchmaking so "showing up on time" would just be it matching you with the next available party looking for your quest or to accept your party invite or whatever, same as normal MMO dungeon runs. I agree you'd need it to be formalized so the game pays the mercenaries and not the tradesman or it'd be too easy to lure people in and cheat them and then nobody would accept the quest. But it wouldn't be too hard to put some automatic calculations on it, "help for 30 minutes, earn default payout, earn bonus +10% for every X minutes after that" or whatever. Or just a bonus, like "while on a quest you get more XP per kill" or something IDK. Tons of ways to approach that. Make posting the quest cost money which gets put in escrow by the game to pay out on mission completion and then they can't reneg on the deal. kaffo posted:Regarding the party mix with hiring mercs etc. It'd be really hard to pull off without it being baked into a guild structure or something. And I'm willing to bet most folk would just go "well I'll just grab a sword, kill the goblins, mine for fish a bit, then kill them again myself" rather than give up the part profit to pay the other dudes Well, what if you literally can't do that? What if in order to do the mining/fishing you had to switch to a tradesman class that has no ability to fight at all? Or you could do like guild wars and let you build your own skill bar, but you'd only have like 6 skill slots and if you spend 3 of them on fighting moves you only have 3 left for fishing moves or whatever. But I do like the idea of opening it up, so you could have like one dude who is all fisherman and then 4 people who are all fighters with them, or you could have 5 people who are all fighter/fishermen hybrids... stuff like that. But you'd need to balance it so you couldn't do everything by yourself, yeah. IMO that's key to a good MMO like Everquest, make people dependent on each other. Force collaboration. kaffo posted:Just throwing poo poo around here, maybe something like that could help your situation, where a party accept a quest and have no idea it's a real player until they show up. And the pay for the quest is actual "free" from the game too, not out the poor fisherman's pocket Well, the idea is that the fisherman is making an extremely handsome profit on this rare fish that's deep in some dangerous terrain, and the payout for the quest is a mere fraction of their profit. Cost of doing business! The thing is, you have to consider what the actual impact on the experience is. Speaking of Skyrim, they have randomly generated quests in Skyrim. Most players never realize this. They don't add much and they're not particularly memorable quests. So... would you even notice if they removed them? I would argue no. The game's already got too many quests anyways, and the better ones are all the hand-crafted ones. If a guild can post a quest and its basically identical to an NPC quest, why does that even matter? Its virtually no different from just buying the bear asses they need on the AH. The whole reason I'm proposing this is because it forces player interaction and roleplaying. If the mercenaries have to actually escort the tradesman and party with them, that creates a reason for teamwork. Then you get to know each other and socialize while you're on this quest together, and then next time you're looking for a quest you check your friends' list and see that the same tradesman who did a good job yesterday is online, so maybe you'll skip the LFG and message that fisherman directly and see if they wanna do another quest today? That's what EQ was all about, and what WoW has increasingly gone away from. Making friends. Meeting people. Running into some guy you partied with 5 levels later and seeing he's got better equipment than last time.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:58
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Moving NPCs with routines and schedules sounds cool, but I play enough Elder Scrolls games to know it's mostly a pain in the rear end.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:03
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Jackard posted:This has been done in a few mmos before, but why do you need to talk to the guy to do the quest? Could be various reasons. My MMO experience is mostly WoW and FFXIV so that biases my view on what MMO quests are, but it could be: 1) Get the quest initially from him. 2) Finish the quest by handing something in to him. 3) Some interstitial quest where the goal is to literally talk to him, be it for information, plot, item exchanges, etc.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:07
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Jackard posted:This has been done in a few mmos before, but why do you need to talk to the guy to do the quest? If you don't, it doesn't feel like a quest. Its just a task. Bungie tried things like that in Destiny and honestly, it feels bad. That's another thing about mmo design I'd like to reverse: In EQ, you leveled mostly by killing in camps. This was very grindy, true. But what few quests there were, were highly memorable and significant. In WOW, there are ironically a power of 100x more quests than in the game "ever-quest". Killing gives such a trivial amount of xp now it may as well not give any. Your entire leveling experience is running from quest to quest doing the same repetitive activities in different places. As quests mostly can't be repeated, this keeps you moving around and isn't as grindy. And yet, in practice, I find clearing all these one-time quests is massively tedious. I'd rather camp spawns with my buddies. Getting too much xp from killing means players just grind. But too much focus on quests is weird too. Need to find a better way to balance progression.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:12
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Could be various reasons. My MMO experience is mostly WoW and FFXIV so that biases my view on what MMO quests are, but it could be: Jackard fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 21:16
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Glenn Quebec posted:I think if survival games could scale larger and be more permanent they could really be the next "MMO". Atlas lol
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Jan 17, 2020 21:34
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Zaphod42 posted:The whole reason I'm proposing this is because it forces player interaction and roleplaying. If the mercenaries have to actually escort the tradesman and party with them, that creates a reason for teamwork. Then you get to know each other and socialize while you're on this quest together, and then next time you're looking for a quest you check your friends' list and see that the same tradesman who did a good job yesterday is online, so maybe you'll skip the LFG and message that fisherman directly and see if they wanna do another quest today? From what I understand this is literally how my brother met all of his guildmates and clients in SWG. The fact that it created stable relationships that weren't just the normal "effectively full trust" of guild relationships tells me there's a lot of unexplored space here - I don't think there's anything like this in modern games, but it enabled huge swathes of PvE and PvP that wouldn't have occurred in a standard guilds/guildless system. Zaphod42 posted:If a guild can post a quest and its basically identical to an NPC quest, why does that even matter? Its virtually no different from just buying the bear asses they need on the AH. In practice it'd probably be more like a guild-private market board like in EVE, except the listings would be for specific objectives like "build this structure" or "conquer this region" (which would have "get this many whatevers" as an objective). Which would be extremely useful for line members since it'd be an in-game integrated system rather than an entry on a message board someone could miss, and it'd open up the Slicer gameplay SWG had but never implemented - you could hack into another guild and find what they're working on, or at least what things they're trying to gather. Good Dumplings fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 21:39
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The social aspect thing is a huge change over the last 15 years in my experience too, and it's not just me getting older I think matchmaking and fast turn over of team mates really is ruining the social side of gaming (not just MMOS) Specifically MMOS though, what do you think could be done it increase the interactions between "random" players, while not making the same mistakes as match making? I think a huge reason that my personal Internet friendships of ye olde past worked so well was because I sought them out (because you had to find your own nerds to play games with) Joining random gmod servers and talking to people was my jam, but that wouldn't fly now I don't think Would temporary guild outsourced guild work be one? "help us do blah and you are a member for a day"
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Jan 17, 2020 21:58
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kaffo posted:Specifically MMOS though, what do you think could be done it increase the interactions between "random" players, while not making the same mistakes as match making? The players have to depend on each other more. Everquest does this across the board and it forces you to party with people. If you're playing a wizard you simply can't do some things that a necromancer or enchanter or cleric can. And vise versa. FFXI was the same way. Past level 10 you were loving useless solo. It was annoying to have to form a party to do anything, but forced you to meet people and gave you a reason to remember cool people so you could quickly form parties in the future. Like WoW, FFXIV has abandoned this; you can play the whole game solo other than dungeons/trials. And as a result, you do. In WoW every class can do everything, can solo everything. And the fun flavorful class abilities were all removed because of "bloat". Outside of dungeons there's no need to party up with other people. Gamers are lazy and will self-optimize to whatever earns them xp the fastest, even if it isn't fun. Its the game designer's job to make sure the critical xp path is also the main gameplay loop that's fun, and also involves playing with other people. The way to get the most XP has to be playing with others. There can't be a choice. If you go solo, you have to be punished by really slow XP or just not being able to do anything at all. (Ideally done through encounter balance so it feels natural and isn't just the game telling you "no!" but instead a soft-limit where you just get your rear end kicked most of the time solo) And with the way lots of quests work (they've gotten better about this but still) in WoW you're actively dis-incentivized to hang out with other people while leveling. You're faster solo and get more xp if you do it all yourself, so other people are a nuisance you wish you could be rid of. In old MMOs like EQ or FFXI, running into another player was a huge thing and meant now you could handle camping a group that otherwise would just be impossible for you. And made you much safer. kaffo posted:Would temporary guild outsourced guild work be one? "help us do blah and you are a member for a day" If done right maybe, but I don't know. Basically I just see this as being the same as grouping with people. If they're cool they'll invite you to their guild anyways. But you need a reason for that experience you have together to mean something. "Grind 10 bear asses to contribute to the guild war effort" is meaningless. You won't remember it and they won't remember your name. But if you die in a dungeon and a random necromancer offers to help you summon your corpse back to the entrance to save you from a risky corpse run, he's your best buddy. Classes need to be able to do things other classes can't. That forces you to play a role AND forces you to depend on other players. That's the core component of the old EQ style MMO, the online ren-fest experience. "Hello, mr wizard! I am a tough warrior but lacking in the mystic arts, could you help me...." <- that's what we need to happen, and in WoW there's zero reason to do that ever outside of dungeons and raids. WoW even tried doing things like this at launch but like I said, has walked most of them back. Like how some enemies drop locked boxes that only rogues can open? But those things virtually don't exist in MMOs today. There were seen as too much of a nuisance and were optimized away. But as a result, they lost the class flavor. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 22:09
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Zaphod42 posted:The players have to depend on each other more. Everquest does this across the board and it forces you to party with people. If you're playing a wizard you simply can't do some things that a necromancer or enchanter or cleric can. And vise versa. FFXI was the same way. Past level 10 you were loving useless solo. It was annoying to have to form a party to do anything, but forced you to meet people and gave you a reason to remember cool people so you could quickly form parties in the future. Like WoW, FFXIV has abandoned this; you can play the whole game solo other than dungeons/trials. And as a result, you do. That's a bit of a chin scratcher. I can honestly understand why the format veered away from niche thing for the most part, but there are many pros to that format I think it's a huge push in "recent" games, where publishers don't want players to miss a single second of content no matter what choices they make. I also believe it's one reason why games are cutting side quests down and/or telegraphing them so hard it hurts just so you don't miss the content Like, I'm all for "game plz, why didn't you tell me this important information, I don't want to have to play with a wiki open as I play" but I also miss talking to a friend afterwards and going "sorry you skipped the final boss? How?!"
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Jan 17, 2020 23:30
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Zaphod42 posted:...And the fun flavorful class abilities were all removed because of "bloat". Outside of dungeons there's no need to party up with other people. This right here? This is the big killer. Those "fun flavorful" abilities got removed because they're not fun in practice - but the main reason they're not fun is because they're not integrated into the rest of the game. Again this is where SWG was way ahead of the curve; Dancers and And this is in a nearly 20 years-old game! A pre-WoW game where designers still thought stat loss on death was an interesting mechanic. Games have a loving long, long way to go, the current state of MMOs/live games is a tiny niche compared to what's already possible.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:47
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Speaking of stat loss on death, it blows my mind that you still have corpse runs in modern WoW. They serve no purpose and I am 100% convinced that the only reason they haven't patched them out is because if you know what you're doing, you basically never die outside of dungeons anyways, and in dungeons there aren't corpse runs. I think the devs have forgotten corpse runs exist, but they do. In EQ it made sense because it made you afraid. Everything you did was a risk and if you died you could potentially lose all your gear permanently. That created a Dark Souls esque feeling where venturing into uncharted territory was actually terrifying, but often wasn't actually as bad as you were afraid it could be. But again, in EQ classes had jobs. Necromancers could locate and eventually summon corpses, and Clerics could rez your corpse so you didn't have to run back to it. If you had a Necro and a Cleric, you could summon and then rez the corpse from a safe spot, virtually removing the corpse run entirely. But only if you actually had a necromancer and cleric! Missing either would mean you'd have to do some work, missing both would mean you were entirely on your own. (Although you could still get say, a rogue to sneak in and pull your corpse out, etc. etc. Multiple ways around it, but some increasingly risky or difficult compared to others. The Necro is safe, the rogue is pretty safe but might get spotted. A warrior could charge in and grab your body, but is more likely to get spotted. A monk could run in and feign death if he gets spotted, it'd just mean taking longer..... and so on) Meanwhile WoW changed corpse runs to be less dangerous, and ended up making them a purely time consuming annoyance. Gone was any tension, if you die... no biggie. It costs you a repair bill? But it does mean you have to run as a ghost for like 2 minutes which... you're invincible but its just kinda boring? Making you do something boring is a bad punishment, and really doesn't change your behavior much at all. Death in WoW is pretty vestigial, they should just respawn you back at base if you die instead of having the ghost run. But like I said, nobody really dies in the overworld anyways so they don't care to put time in fixing it. But it shows how far WoW has drifted from its original game design. Good Dumplings posted:This right here? This is the big killer. Those "fun flavorful" abilities got removed because they're not fun in practice - but the main reason they're not fun is because they're not integrated into the rest of the game. True, but it was also a gradual slope of changes. WoW originally had lots of classes with passive buffs they could toss on others. Something I love in Everquest and vanilla WoW was just buffing random strangers. I cost you nothing but mana and time, but other people really appreciated it. With the right buffs, you could significantly improve their leveling for awhile. Its like a tiny act of charity, just going around buffing people. It feels good. It feels like you're actually playing the role of a healer or support wizard. WoW changed those from a buff you would occasionally re-cast into an aura automatically applied to your party. Now you couldn't accidentally forget to re-up the spell every so often, how convenient! Except, now you can't cast it on random passers-by, and as a result you entirely miss out on that tipping/charity mechanic which would make players more friendly towards each other. Then after it was a passive buff for awhile, players basically realized its just a permanent stat upgrade which you don't actually notice or feel because its always on. All it does is punish you for not having all classes around to give you all the buffs, a punishment for having 2 of the same class. So then they removed it. Things like Mages being able to Teleport, Rogues being able to unlock locked boxes, every class needs some utility stuff like that which both builds teamwork and also role playing.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:10
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I think your point about jobs w/ classes is an important one. Making a character in an mmo should mean something in regards to what it is that you can do and I don't mean the tank/fps/healer paradigm
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Jan 18, 2020 01:31
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EverQuest had so many cool and differing classes and it's a shame that isn't really a thing anymore.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:39
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We need a thread for Temtem!
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Jan 18, 2020 11:35
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As someone who's sunk a lot of time into CoH homecoming, I find all this waxing poetic about everquest's core ideas hilarious. Homecoming represents a near complete shedding of its original EQ-like model and it's a lot more fun because of it.
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Jan 18, 2020 21:33
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jokes posted:It is the exact same, it's cross-platform and I personally exclusively play on PC with a controller and have never been hamstrung by it. It rules. Shiet what you said sounds good to me, thanks. The game is still $60 on PS store from what I saw so about $80 & monthly fee to get going as you said? My younger brother still plays PS4 majority of time, and even though I'm into Witcher 3 I am constantly wanting to waste my time in a MMO and not a single player world even if it's decent game. I have in the past almost played FFXIV variety of times and recently vanilla WoW, but I still never got into playing stuff until more recently. I plan to buy a good laptop as well so I can play on there most of the time as well.
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Jan 20, 2020 23:27
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knox posted:Shiet what you said sounds good to me, thanks. The game is still $60 on PS store from what I saw so about $80 & monthly fee to get going as you said? Sounds like I'm in a similar boat. Never got around to playing, but had a MMO craving so am giving it a shot. I already had the starter edition(s) and got the expansion upgrades (physical, but I'm assuming it'll just be a code in a box, it hasn't arrived yet) pretty cheap on amazon (this is in the UK though, so may differ in US) and in total have it up and running on both PS4 and PC for a lot less than that. I prefer playing on the PC, due to inventory and menu management stuff, but PS4 is really good just for chilling out and grinding stuff... also remote play for if I'm really addicted. For my sins I am not skipping 250 hours of bad video game because I just can't bring myself to
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Jan 21, 2020 12:10
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