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Jazerus posted:ffxi wasn't my very first mmo (that was ragnarok online because the english servers were free for a long time as a "beta" and then a thousand private servers went up as soon as it went paid lol) but it was definitely the first one that made me feel like i was in a different world. sometimes i still think about my first journey to bastok from windhurst...making a mad dash through level 15-20 mobs to get to the intercontinental boat, cowering belowdecks as powerful players slaughtered monsters that made it onto the top deck, pulling into selbina at night as that fuckin rad sea shanty music started up, trying to sneak through a tiny tunnel outside selbina filled with goblins (at least two, which would have left me dead as hell)...trekking across the vast rocky highlands and sighing in relief at finally, after hours of tense exploration, arriving in a level-appropriate area. running down the streets of bastok, marveling that it was so different from windhurst The noob rite of passage of soldiering through Jugner+Batallia, Pashhow+Rolanberry or Meriphataud+Sauromugue on foot so you could get to Jeuno at lv20 and get your chocobo license and level up in Qufim  Walking into busy-rear end Jeuno and seeing the big crowd of high level players chilling and bullshitting and the white mages running teleport taxis and whatnot.Then you got to lv25, farmed your Kazham keys, and realized you didn't actually install RotZ and had to back out and spend another day reinstalling FFXI to keep leveling up
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Jun 10, 2021 02:00
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gently caress i miss old school UO. i was like 12 when it came out and i was playing, made friends with some blacksmith dude that lived outside britain. im sure i was annoying as gently caress being 12 but man it was such a good time.
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Jun 10, 2021 02:02
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Zaphod42 posted:That's a false dichotomy. There's many more in-between possibilities. You can have a system where you don't pre-screen every player, but where you can set preferences so the system matches you up with the types of players you'd want to see. I think we may just fundamentally disagree on what makes an MMO. Any system for being "matched up" to me implies that the game is setting up little objective-driven group tasks, which in turn suggests a "theme park" style of game where the world is nothing but a lobby to occupy between missions. I don't like that type of game and don't think of it as a proper MMO experience, though of course I agree it's at least better with better matchmaking. If you do like that type of game, great; I hope you're able to find it and have a blast, but I have no interest in playing it myself regardless of how well calibrated the groupfinder may be. The idea of creating what amounts to custom, (semi-?)private servers for friends and friends of friends could indeed be cool, but then we're talking about something akin to a conventional, small-scale multiplayer RPG with a player (or core group of players) functioning sort of like a DM and GM in one. And that might be really fun, and I might play it and have a great time, but I wouldn't in any sense call it a massively multiplayer game with a world that feels like it exists independently from my character's participation in it. To the extent that I want an MMO to screen the people I encounter, I want it to do so in a generalized baseline sort of way: act like an aggressive shithead who's trying to ruin other people's experiences and you're gone. Otherwise, interacting with strangers inhabiting the same virtual world ought to be a regular, essential part of the game.
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Jun 10, 2021 02:05
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Another part of the reason UO was so great was because you could choose between all these things. I spent a lot of time standing in front of the Britian mages guild advertising spell scrolls I was making on demand. Met friends I still have today. But I also went out and broke into keeps, PvPd, spent a ton of time with friends hunting in dungeons, fishing, hosed with people in town and stole from them, helped hunt PKs and was also one of those scary red PKs. I had several characters, all for something different. UO wasn't one specific thing, and the choice was amazing. As far as the pvp vs carebear thing, it was so much more tolerable in UO. In UO there was more weight to death, so people were more careful, but equipment wasn't generally so rare you lost days of work. In WoW people just killed you and camped your corpse just to ruin your day. Near level people rarely engaged, it was mostly higher level people just coming in to destroy you without you being able to do anything. And when it was an awesome battle of near level people someone would just bring in a guild buddy way higher level to wreck everyone. A big part of this was because in WoW time spent in pvp, or corpse running meant you were leveling slower, so for efficiency meant you were losing. In UO, even getting your rear end kicked you were still gaining skills. I had so many encounters in UO where someone killed me and we ended up talking and in some cases playing together after. You fuckers got me thinking of UO so much I loving dreamed about it last night. Dinurth fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 02:19
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Shower thought: modern wow kinda feels like how private fun servers or hyperspeed servers felt in like 2008 or 9 ~
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Jun 10, 2021 02:24
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Jazerus posted:living in star wars This was the hook for me. I remember reading an EGM magazine about the game right before I started playing it. The article mentioned how you could become a Droid Engineer and create droids to use for combat, or to sell to other players. I remember thinking that was the coolest thing I've ever heard of doing in a video game. And you could actually do that in game, it wasn't just advertising. There were people who picked up the DE profession and just made droids to sell in their shop. Some didn't even bother with combat, they just lived in a player city and logged in every day to advertise their droid shop. Players would then drive down to your city and purchase stuff from you. It was a wild experience.
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Jun 10, 2021 02:35
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Hic Sunt Dracones posted:I think we may just fundamentally disagree on what makes an MMO. Any system for being "matched up" to me implies that the game is setting up little objective-driven group tasks, which in turn suggests a "theme park" style of game where the world is nothing but a lobby to occupy between missions. I don't like that type of game and don't think of it as a proper MMO experience, though of course I agree it's at least better with better matchmaking. If you do like that type of game, great; I hope you're able to find it and have a blast, but I have no interest in playing it myself regardless of how well calibrated the groupfinder may be. Nah nah nah, you should ask rather than jumping to conclusions like this if you don't understand what I'm saying. WoW has dynamic servers that can get spun up and down as needed, and players can move across servers based on what the network says (who they invite from a friends list or whatever) Then they can see tons of people on that server. WoW is a proper MMO, yes? That means the technology and architecture is already such that they could dynamically spin up a server for "30 year olds" and "20 year olds" and so on, and dynamically move people to different instances accordingly. You can take the same concept further. This is completely, 100% independent of the actual gameplay. This doesn't require any particular style of game design.
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Jun 10, 2021 03:17
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I almost forgot about SWG. It was basically next gen UO but 3D and Star Wars. I was bummed I couldn’t be a Jedi, but I ended up training rifleman and creature handling. Plunked down a house and set up some kind of moisture farm devices and made credits selling stuff. So much fun.
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Jun 10, 2021 03:45
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Zaphod42 posted:Nah nah nah, you should ask rather than jumping to conclusions like this if you don't understand what I'm saying. Ah, so what you're talking about is more like phasing than LFG matchmaking? That sounds less bad, but I'm not a fan of phasing either. I don't like the ephemeral quality it lends to the world. It's good from the standpoint of making the world feel more consistently populated, but I find it makes other players seem more like the translucent phantom images of Dark Souls. If the population shifting were kept to a minimum and designed around keeping a high a level of consistency (in terms of the players one regularly encounters) so as to mimic the experience of a server with a knowable population, I might be OK with it. I still don't see the need for customized populations like the demographic groups you mention; just ban the dregs and let everyone else self-sort into communities from the people they meet in the wild rather than trying to phase pseudo-servers based on who's algorithmically expected to get along. Is WoW a proper MMO? Eh, I'd say it's borderline. It started out with a proper MMO at its core, albeit one surrounded by a few too many so-called "quality of life" features and a world that rarely felt truly lived in. Over time it's seemingly become even more of a lobby/theme park experience. I never played a ton of WoW and haven't touched it at all since 2013, so it's possible it's swung back toward its MMO roots and predecessors, but I doubt it. I recognize that I'm very much so in the minority in wanting something like what "MMO" meant circa 1997-2003 (but with modern gameplay and technology) rather than what it typically means today.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:03
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Hic Sunt Dracones posted:I never played a ton of WoW and haven't touched it at all since 2013, so it's possible it's swung back toward its MMO roots and predecessors, but I doubt it. It's so, so much worse.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:44
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jiffynuts posted:I almost forgot about SWG. It was basically next gen UO but 3D and Star Wars. I was bummed I couldn’t be a Jedi, but I ended up training rifleman and creature handling. Plunked down a house and set up some kind of moisture farm devices and made credits selling stuff. So much fun. Did they really make it so that only certain accounts could roll Jedi or did I just hallucinate that extremely weird business decision?
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Jun 10, 2021 04:54
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Hic Sunt Dracones posted:I recognize that I'm very much so in the minority in wanting something like what "MMO" meant circa 1997-2003 (but with modern gameplay and technology) rather than what it typically means today. I guess you're new to the thread, lol. That attitude is shared by almost every goon posting here, and is the reason for this thread. Hic Sunt Dracones posted:Is WoW a proper MMO? Eh, I'd say it's borderline. It started out with a proper MMO at its core, albeit one surrounded by a few too many so-called "quality of life" features and a world that rarely felt truly lived in. Over time it's seemingly become even more of a lobby/theme park experience. I never played a ton of WoW and haven't touched it at all since 2013, so it's possible it's swung back toward its MMO roots and predecessors, but I doubt it. No it didn't, hence the whole reason for WoW Classic existing. But the point is that the tech that supports WoW is enough to build a "full MMO" and there's no technical reason why what I described can't work for other gameplay designs, like I said before. Kinda missing the point here. I didn't want to nitpick over whether WoW was or wasn't a true scotsman, but instead to just prove to you that any kind of MMO can do what I'm describing. Yeah?
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Jun 10, 2021 04:55
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CuddleCryptid posted:Did they really make it so that only certain accounts could roll Jedi or did I just hallucinate that extremely weird business decision? IIRC that was the original idea, I don't think that was how it was implemented at any point though.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:55
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CuddleCryptid posted:Did they really make it so that only certain accounts could roll Jedi or did I just hallucinate that extremely weird business decision? Ibram Gaunt posted:IIRC that was the original idea, I don't think that was how it was implemented at any point though. Its much much much more complicated than that. The way it worked in OG SWG is that when your character was created, invisible random dice rolls were made to determine your requirements to become jedi. These were NOT communicated to the player in any way. This included some classes you would have to master (level to max and get all skills) in order to unlock jedi. Again, which classes were not told to you. As a result, some players would only max out a few classes and do a couple long quests and stumble into becoming jedi, while other players would basically end up doing 100% of the game's content and still not become jedi and never know why.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:57
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Zaphod42 posted:I guess you're new to the thread, lol. That attitude is shared by almost every goon posting here, and is the reason for this thread. I don't post often, but I have read most if not all of this thread. There are clearly a decent number of people who share my understanding of what "MMO" means (or ought to). Though I do remember discussions about, for example, whether scripted solo stories with cutscenes have any place in an MMO, with many people on the "yes" side, which tells me there also are plenty of commenters who have a very different understanding than I do. (Which of course is fine. I don't want to take anyone's cutscene- and story-heavy "MMOs" away. I just don't want to play them.) Zaphod42 posted:No it didn't, hence the whole reason for WoW Classic existing. But the point is that the tech that supports WoW is enough to build a "full MMO" and there's no technical reason why what I described can't work for other gameplay designs, like I said before. Kinda missing the point here. I didn't want to nitpick over whether WoW was or wasn't a true scotsman, but instead to just prove to you that any kind of MMO can do what I'm describing. Yeah? I believe I understand what you're saying about dynamic server design, but it's not a design I like or desire from an MMO. I care much less about the specific way in which the servers operate than I do about the experience of being a player within the game world. To the extent that the server design question does matter to me (whereas the "is WoW a proper MMO?" question does not), it's that I believe consistency in the population is an important and meaningful component of world design. If I meet Bob the barbarian warrior in the plains west of Townsville, I want it to be the case that Bob's existence is "real" with respect to the world in which I am playing, such that I will encounter him in the future if we're both playing at the same time and in-game location. I don't want it to be that I will encounter Bob if and only if the game decides I need to see more people in a particular area and/or that Bob and I would tick the same boxes on a personality test. This is true whether Bob is awesome, forgettable, or idiotic, because a world can and should contain all sorts. The exception is if he's a raging bigot or griefer, in which case he shouldn't be allowed to play at all, not just hidden from my view.
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Jun 10, 2021 05:20
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Zaphod42 posted:As a result, some players would only max out a few classes and do a couple long quests and stumble into becoming jedi, while other players would basically end up doing 100% of the game's content and still not become jedi and never know why. Well, in theory. If I recall correctly, nobody became a jedi before holocrons were released (world items that revealed one of your requirements), so ultimately it was "you cannot be a jedi" followed by "collect holocrons to become jedi".
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Jun 10, 2021 05:57
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30.5 Days posted:Well, in theory. If I recall correctly, nobody became a jedi before holocrons were released (world items that revealed one of your requirements), so ultimately it was "you cannot be a jedi" followed by "collect holocrons to become jedi". Yeah that's true, although at that point it was "nobody can do this" rather than just a few specific accounts being screwed over.
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Jun 10, 2021 06:01
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30.5 Days posted:Well, in theory. If I recall correctly, nobody became a jedi before holocrons were released (world items that revealed one of your requirements), so ultimately it was "you cannot be a jedi" followed by "collect holocrons to become jedi". I was under the impression that the "first" Jedi unlocked went unnoticed for some period of time. It wasn't until that player misclicked on the login screen and noticed a new character slot had opened up. Those years were strange so I may be remembering things wrong.
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Jun 10, 2021 13:37
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CuddleCryptid posted:Did they really make it so that only certain accounts could roll Jedi or did I just hallucinate that extremely weird business decision? That was sorta the main designer's original idea and was much better than what actually got put in - which is what other posters described. In the original design you got a Jedi slot that had permadeath (everyone got one I think) and as you showed yourself off in public (igniting your lightsaber, using Force powers, etc) more and more you'd get hunted down by progressively more difficult NPCs like what happens in the new Fallouts when you piss off a faction and would eventually end with Darth Vader hunting you down. And nobody beats Darth Vader. Galaxies might have been the last great sandbox MMO which likely increases the fondness people remember it with. As boring and MMOish as the combat was everything else was pretty much a dream MMO and it was set during the best time to set a Star Wars property. Something like Matrix Online couldn't get away with having the kinda boring MMO combat because you need a Matrix game to have frenetic combat as a central point. Man what a bummer logging into that game was. ASAPI posted:I was under the impression that the "first" Jedi unlocked went unnoticed for some period of time. It wasn't until that player misclicked on the login screen and noticed a new character slot had opened up. Those years were strange so I may be remembering things wrong. If I'm remembering right (a long write up by the main guy was posted by me awhile back) because nobody knew how to unlock a Jedi it wasn't happening fast enough and marketing had them drop hints via holocrons so people would know 3/4 of the classes they had to max or something because Sony wanted a Jedi by Christmas. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 13:38
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I see “boring combat” mentioned a lot with old MMOs and I don’t really agree that it was boring. More skills doesn’t make combat interesting. FFXIV has boring combat to me. It’s flashy but it feels slow and janky with OCDs breaking animations. What makes combat interesting is a challenge, which a lot of current MMOs lack outside of like, trying to solo group content. Action MMOs are cool because they require you to pay attention and interact with your enemy. I still find Asheron’s Call combat to be one of the most interesting combat systems and it boils down to literally auto attacking on a melee. But you manage combat in the sense that enemies are dangerous, you have to be on top of your healing, managing debuffs, using the right equipment for your enemy, focusing a priority target, etc. Even in solo content. It’s unfortunate so many games followed the EQ style combat of “massive bloated ability bars makes things fun” rather than making actual combat fun. Not saying EQ wasn’t difficult combat, but the skill bloat has been a mainstay of games in this genre.
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Jun 10, 2021 15:19
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Koster had a whole post mortem on SWG (and other stuff on UO too) that was a fascinating read when it came out; https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/15/star-wars-galaxies-tefs/ I honestly wish Koster was still making MMOs because I always felt like he could recapture that same spirit that SWG and UO had. This is the Jedi specific one; https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/ but the whole thing is interesting. dreffen fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 15:24
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I have dreams about a UO-like MMO set in the old west, and I can't get it out of my head. Please, someone make this game so I can stop dreaming about it.
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Jun 10, 2021 15:30
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Koster appears to be running a ~30 person team that are a couple years into working on some unannounced sandbox MMO. Looks like they were smart enough to throw 'cloud' and 'blockchain' around enough to get ~12m of VC funding thus far.
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Jun 10, 2021 15:47
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Ort posted:I see “boring combat” mentioned a lot with old MMOs and I don’t really agree that it was boring. More skills doesn’t make combat interesting. FFXIV has boring combat to me. It’s flashy but it feels slow and janky with OCDs breaking animations. What makes combat interesting is a challenge, which a lot of current MMOs lack outside of like, trying to solo group content. FFXIV still has the same kind of combat I was referencing it's not like it's real-time action combat. EQ wasn't really that bad compared to nowadays where 1/3 of your UI is filled with hotkeys. I liked how Guild Wars only allowed you to equip a set number of skills (which is how EQ worked). Asheron's Call was probably the most interesting of the post-UO MMOs. Shame what happened with the sequel. kedo posted:I have dreams about a UO-like MMO set in the old west, and I can't get it out of my head. Please, someone make this game so I can stop dreaming about it. I now want this as well.
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Jun 10, 2021 15:49
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dreffen posted:Koster had a whole post mortem on SWG (and other stuff on UO too) that was a fascinating read when it came out; https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/15/star-wars-galaxies-tefs/ These are great, thanks!
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Jun 10, 2021 16:53
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Groovelord Neato posted:That was sorta the main designer's original idea and was much better than what actually got put in - which is what other posters described. In the original design you got a Jedi slot that had permadeath (everyone got one I think) and as you showed yourself off in public (igniting your lightsaber, using Force powers, etc) more and more you'd get hunted down by progressively more difficult NPCs like what happens in the new Fallouts when you piss off a faction and would eventually end with Darth Vader hunting you down. And nobody beats Darth Vader. This is kind of a genius solution to an obvious problem, that jedi are very OP and very famous so everyone wants to be one. So you end up with SWTOR where approximately half the population is a jedi and they feel super weak compared to Canon. Solution? Just make a player a jedi for ten minutes and then hunt them down mercilessly until they're dead. Now it makes *sense* why you would want to be Trooper #5234, specializing in crafting armor, it's because being a jedi is *extraordinarily dangerous*. I do like the stuff with needing to level certain classes to become a jedi they replaced it with in the sense that in the movies the protagonists were just handed their jedi abilities by plot faries, because they collectively were just a series of bored desert bums. I want to see the movie where someone gets real good at cooking space drugs and develops jedi powers
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Jun 10, 2021 17:36
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Cross posting… Lost Ark to the west was just announced at Summer Games Fest. Fall 2021. Tester sign up: https://www.playlostark.com/en-us Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udwbd5X0zbg Ehud fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 19:34
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why does every "major" kmmo (excluding odd ones out like gunbound/maplestory/etc) look exactly the same
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Jun 10, 2021 19:48
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Ort posted:I see “boring combat” mentioned a lot with old MMOs and I don’t really agree that it was boring. More skills doesn’t make combat interesting. FFXIV has boring combat to me. It’s flashy but it feels slow and janky with OCDs breaking animations. What makes combat interesting is a challenge, which a lot of current MMOs lack outside of like, trying to solo group content. I mean, yeah, but that said when you look at a low level fighter in everquest, who just auto-attacks, there can't really be much challenge (beyond avoiding aggroing too many mobs) because there's just nothing to work with to build challenge. Compare that to like, a bunch of skills in wow or ffxiv, if you're having to maintain john madden levels of button presses, that's LOTS of choices you're constantly having to make and remember and chances to slip up, which builds challenge. Now, yeah, I agree if all you're doing is a rote rotation through your many skills, that isn't really adding significant depth. But that's still better than absolutely no skills at all, just auto-attacking, which is what a LOT of EQ and SWGalaxies was. You're right that in some cases having fewer abilities but making the player actually choose which to use more often may be better than just having a ton of skills. (And wow pruned a ton of skills for this very reason) I want more action real-time combat in MMOs personally, but yeah even if you're just doing skill bars, they can be more fun than current FFXIV but also more fun than old EQ/SWG. Both have flaws. Also, the thing about having lots of skills/spells in EQ, what I miss after pruning skills from WoW, is less that those skills were all needed for combat but more that you had a lot of minor abilities that added flavor. The ability to toss class-specific buffs on random passers-by is a big part of the social dynamic of EQ. Having only part-based aura buffs in WoW removes that social aspect where you can grant random boons to strangers. I want more class asymmetry and role playing please!
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Jun 10, 2021 19:58
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SOW is the greatest spell in video game history.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:03
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Magic casters should be able to make their fingers sparkle at will without needing an enemy target in view
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Jun 10, 2021 20:03
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I do agree that more skills can create depth, but the depth and challenge is then coming from your class design instead of your enemies, which I think just has less potential to be interesting. I like complex class rotations and stuff and always gravitated to them in WoW, but it always felt like completing a dance or something in a raid fight vs the challenge coming from the actual enemies you’re fighting. It’s like you’re playing the UI instead of an actual game. Again, I’m not totally discrediting it and have had plenty of fun with that type of game in the past, I just think modern games are missing the other side of what I’m talking about.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:10
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Biowarfare posted:why does every "major" kmmo (excluding odd ones out like gunbound/maplestory/etc) look exactly the same All non anime eMMOs go to Korea to get a deviated septum repaired before release
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Jun 10, 2021 20:29
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Finally got officially announced that Lost Ark is coming to America, and is being published by Amazon Games.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:41
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Is it a big P2W title? It seems and looks cool, but ya know..
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Jun 10, 2021 20:49
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I know it's not the same as if their in-house studio had developed it, but something about the game being brought to the west via Amazon Games gives me a bad feeling.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:55
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jokes posted:Is it a big P2W title? It seems and looks cool, but ya know.. It depends on region. The Russian server was super pay to win, but Amazon is saying they won't be doing this for their release.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:59
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jokes posted:Magic casters should be able to make their fingers sparkle at will without needing an enemy target in view Prestidigitation is an important rote in D&D for a reason!
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Jun 10, 2021 21:02
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Ort posted:I see “boring combat” mentioned a lot with old MMOs and I don’t really agree that it was boring. More skills doesn’t make combat interesting. FFXIV has boring combat to me. It’s flashy but it feels slow and janky with OCDs breaking animations. What makes combat interesting is a challenge, which a lot of current MMOs lack outside of like, trying to solo group content. yeah ff14 definitely doesn't have any difficult content at all
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Jun 10, 2021 22:05
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Anyone remember rusty hearts? Was one of the first f2p Korean mmolikes on steam in like 2011. It’s was pretty neat and fun. It was shut down in 2014 and may now be abandoned(unsure on current ip holder). Anyway there’s a private server https://www.rustyrevolution.org It’s good, has all the content from like 2012 and they’re trying to get the rest that was in by the time the game shut down. If there’s any interest I’ll make a thread I guess
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Jun 10, 2021 22:16
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