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ESO seems good from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0IPpNhrIjw
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Jun 28, 2021 23:09
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Might be my nostalgia talking but I feel like Runescape has my gold star for quest design. None of them are generic outside of really basic intro quests, most have pretty decent writing, many lead to adventure.
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Jun 29, 2021 00:57
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Is old school RuneScape worth getting into if I never played it back in the day? Craving the grind
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Jun 29, 2021 00:58
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No harm in trying it out. It's a pretty satisfying grind game.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:04
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Back in the day I would wish to myself "man I wish I could play a JRPG by myself, but then do dungeons, bosses, and post-game content with other people" Like, you're playing FFV and it's single player and you're the hero or whatever but basically every dungeon is a multiplayer experience, and I pick MY job and MY equipment and so do they. That's what FF14 is and it does it well. It's a good JRPG with good group content on the periphery. I got the game I wanted! MMOs, or what we all wish were MMOs, are about being Just A Dude in a living, truly massive, dangerous world and you go on adventures or do whatever you want and other people are also in the same gigantic fishbowl as you. That experience is best represented with EQ/FFXI-- FFXI has a more "tailored" experience with quests and characters, EQ is more "make your own memories and fun" and both are great. Not WoW, because WoW (retail and classic) is very much a powergamer experience with a bunch of loving numbers and optimizations and discord servers. Nobody adventures in MMOs, not really. But you can still, to this day, go on fun adventures in FFXI/EQ. People don't, and that's sad!
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Jun 29, 2021 01:07
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As someone who lived in the 04 era of RS I honestly prefer modern RS a lot more than OSRS but that's mostly because I ain't regrinding all this poo poo.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:23
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sailormoon posted:Is old school RuneScape worth getting into if I never played it back in the day? Craving the grind I tried to get into OSRS two months ago but got bored after 40 hours. It's basically a single player game with a bunch of people running around as most quests don't require multiple people. You will also be two thirds way through an interesting quest just to find out that you need level 25 of a random stat to get through it for some reason. The game is basically an online version of Kenshi but with actual quests and even more grindy. jokes posted:Back in the day I would wish to myself "man I wish I could play a JRPG by myself, but then do dungeons, bosses, and post-game content with other people" FFXIV has more multiplayer aspects than that. Sure if you only look through the lens of the MSQ that's true, but the MSQ is just one aspect of the game.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:27
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Modern RS looks like it's better in a lot of ways but it also has literal paytowin lootboxes so I'll never touch it. I actually liked running around and doing the huge variety of quests in OSRS but I don't have the soul of a grinder. When I got to the 50s-60s in levels and it was like 2 to 5 hours of continuously doing the same thing to get a noticeable amount of progress in a skill I unsubbed.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:28
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Ibblebibble posted:As someone who lived in the 04 era of RS I honestly prefer modern RS a lot more than OSRS but that's mostly because I ain't regrinding all this poo poo. Yeah, as someone who cut their teeth on the OG classic runescape, I prefer Modern over Old School myself at this point. The combat overhaul is kinda hit or miss but I like it, and the new skills and stuff are cool.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:29
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah but even then, FFXI has quests, like even at level like 10 you have that one quest in san'doria to go meet the prince in the graveyard, things like that. yeah i mean what was great about ffxi's quests was that they were totally tangential to leveling up. want a higher rank with your nation? do a quest. want to go to kazham? do some quests for the passport. you're absolutely not going to get meaningful exp from those experiences, but that's not the point. you're taking on the quest for the actual rewards. felt much more real that way
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Jun 29, 2021 01:32
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It's hard to absorb the idea that not only do people put up with ffxiv's narrative poo poo but that they consider it vital to the mmo experience
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Jun 29, 2021 02:54
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30.5 Days posted:It's hard to absorb the idea that not only do people put up with ffxiv's narrative poo poo but that they consider it vital to the mmo experience It's vital to that MMO's experience, but yeah I agree it's hosed up to think that's what MMOs are now.
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Jun 29, 2021 03:00
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How would you guys feel about an MMO that locked you to first person camera? Sometimes I feel like the common third person camera disassociates us from the character, making it harder to feel like you're a part of the world.
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Jun 29, 2021 06:08
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cmdrk posted:How would you guys feel about an MMO that locked you to first person camera? First person mode makes it impossible to see ground effects/markers in ESO. It's nice for wandering around the overworld I guess.
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Jun 29, 2021 06:09
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jokes posted:It's vital to that MMO's experience, but yeah I agree it's hosed up to think that's what MMOs are now. i don't think that's what mmos are now. that's what ff14 is now, because ff14 has the idea behind it that it's a ff game first and a mmo after you finish the ff game. what mmos "are" is hard to define because some people think destiny and warframe aren't mmos. for me, gently caress it. tf2 is mmo, dota is mmo, vrchat is mmo. most online games are mmo because they have teeming weird community and subculture aspects
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Jun 29, 2021 06:25
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I've been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey again lately and it occurs to me that if only the NPC mercenaries running around the game world (which do make it feel alive) were actually other players, it'd be the best MMO ever. It has a huge MMO style open world with zones that are each based on certain level ranges. This island is for level 10 to 15, this other island is for level 14 to 18, this part of this peninsula is level 16 to 20, etc. You have lots of quests starting from town areas that send you off to do things, much like an MMO. But each quest has voice acting and compelling writing. I guess Elder Scrolls Online wouldn't be too different if it just had serious real-time melee combat and assassinating instead of button pushing hotbars combat. Jazerus posted:yeah i mean what was great about ffxi's quests was that they were totally tangential to leveling up. want a higher rank with your nation? do a quest. want to go to kazham? do some quests for the passport. you're absolutely not going to get meaningful exp from those experiences, but that's not the point. you're taking on the quest for the actual rewards. felt much more real that way Right, same with EQ for the most part, with a few exceptions (Crushbone belts, other orc belts, bone chips)
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Jun 29, 2021 06:29
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Mister Olympus posted:i don't think that's what mmos are now. that's what ff14 is now, because ff14 has the idea behind it that it's a ff game first and a mmo after you finish the ff game. I personally don't consider TF2 an MMO, but Destiny and Warframe are basically MMOs. We do really need some industry term for what Guild Wars, Destiny, Division and Warframe are. LMOs? Large Multiplayer Online? (Not quite massive?  )
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Jun 29, 2021 06:31
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Part of it is that there's a couple overlapping definitions for "MMO". Like, Destiny 2's definitely an MMO in the sense that it has towns and public zones that form a shared, persistent world where you can meet and interact with other players freely. But it's also an "MMO" in the sense that it has raids and item levels and an endless hellgrind that gets extended ever upwards with every content patch. And the line between MMOs and other multiplayer games has been becoming very blurry lately, because a happy medium of "open world lobby, with all content in private instances" has been found and is a really successful model. Because it mitigates the MMO problem of needing to scale the world to fit the player population, without throwing away the shared world entirely. And it makes multiplayer games feel bigger by giving a space where you can run into other players in between activities, while still being "in" the game.
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Jun 29, 2021 07:13
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cmdrk posted:How would you guys feel about an MMO that locked you to first person camera? If the game is designed around it then I'm fine with it. Telarra posted:Part of it is that there's a couple overlapping definitions for "MMO". Like, Destiny 2's definitely an MMO in the sense that it has towns and public zones that form a shared, persistent world where you can meet and interact with other players freely. But it's also an "MMO" in the sense that it has raids and item levels and an endless hellgrind that gets extended ever upwards with every content patch. As time goes on what specific genre a game falls in because more and more difficult. The original Phantasy Star Online was seen as revolutionary 20 years ago, but today isn't that out of the ordinary. RPG mechanics are in everything these days. Like WTF is an "action-RPG"? Ys used to be the premiere series for that, but one could easily argue that the Devil May Cry are as action-RPG as Ys. GTA defined the sandbox genre. But these days with everything being open-world, could you count any game where you can kill almost anyone as "sandbox"?
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Jun 29, 2021 07:52
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Zaphod42 posted:I personally don't consider TF2 an MMO, but Destiny and Warframe are basically MMOs. TF2 less mmo than Warframe? In Warframe you play with max 4 people at once ever whereas in TF2 it maxed out at ~32, potentially with a lot of consistent returning players in a community server (are any of those still alive?). Neither's really 'massively multiplayer' though. I'm pretty skeptical of like "lobby-based multiplayer" games like Warframe or PSO2 being mmos because in the end playing with 4 buddies there isn't much different from playing with 4 buddies in Left 4 Dead, except that there's a global chat channel somewhere and a clan system. Then again, you could almost say the same thing about Wow and FFXIV dungeons, once players get to a high enough level that they spend all their time running those and not exploring and questing around the continent. So I don't really know where my cutoff is.
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Jun 29, 2021 08:11
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:TF2 less mmo than Warframe? In Warframe you play with max 4 people at once ever whereas in TF2 it maxed out at ~32, potentially with a lot of consistent returning players in a community server (are any of those still alive?). Neither's really 'massively multiplayer' though. My general divisor is per-server vs single-server type worlds. If it's like Minecraft or Ark, it is not a MMO. P2P or player hosted is never a MMO. If the game company runs the only worlds and everyone has to coexist on them, then it is. Impotence fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 08:39
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warframe server is run by one of the 4 players tho, which then communicates back to main server what drops people got etc this lead to some amount of bans when people started spoofing rare drops iirc lol
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Jun 29, 2021 12:31
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If you turn to literature for help, both Bartle and Koster's definitions for what they call virtual worlds come down to the same three criteria, that they can host multiple users shown as avatars, in a spatially defined world, and that that world has some measure of persistence, ie changes made to the world by players will continue to exist for some time even when players aren't around. Persistence of the player avatar (appearance or inventory) don't qualify as changes to the world. So TF2 would fail the persistence criterion because maps only exist while players are there. Some weird thing like Sea of Thieves would qualify because dropped stuff and rowboats persist for a couple hours on each server, and that it's only 24 players per world doesn't matter because player count isn't a criterion (both Koster and Bartle have a mud background and think of numbers being the only thing MMOs bring to the table so pick a number if you need a definition specific to MMOs and not just virtual worlds, I guess UO would be the turning point historically). I dont know enough about Destiny and the like but it'd basically depend on what persists or not for them. Minecraft servers would qualify as virtual worlds as long as they're kept online. Chev fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 12:35
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cmdrk posted:How would you guys feel about an MMO that locked you to first person camera? It's how I played EQ (I only went third person to take screenshots of my guy I think) and it is something I would like.
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Jun 29, 2021 13:40
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first person severely limits player field of vision, preventing them from seeing what's in their far flank and back, so the user interface and the gameplay would both have to be built with that in mind for the experience not to be frustrating
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Jun 29, 2021 13:50
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yeah i prefer first person games, but you need to have the mechanics work in 1st person then
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Jun 29, 2021 14:02
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punk rebel ecks posted:ESO seems good from this video: ESO seems very good until you start fighting things. I didn’t want to believe it but after playing it myself I’ve found that the combat is *so* bad and they basically will never fix it because their core playerbase is just used to it now. Also the crafting is kinda whack and purposefully made more difficult if you don’t subscribe to ESO Premium. However if you like the game, Premium is a good deal imo so I don’t take as much issue with that as I do the floaty, faceroll combat. Besides those things the game is pretty great.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:12
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ESO has the worst goddamn combat of any mmo ive played, Ive tried so many times to get into it but it just feels awful fighting stuff.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:20
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Chev posted:If you turn to literature for help, both Bartle and Koster's definitions for what they call virtual worlds come down to the same three criteria, that they can host multiple users shown as avatars So anything more than single player is massive is the implication here. I get that mmo is just shorthand to describe a category of games but I feel like the genre has mostly lost its essence, with any innovation being limited to new versions of lobby based gameplay. The whole point from the get go was to emulate the lived social experience of constantly existing among many people
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Jun 29, 2021 15:23
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Zaphod42 posted:I legit prefer the EQ model of only having a few quests but they feel really world-spanning and significant compared to the wow model where kills basically get you 0 exp and you have to do quests to level up but you're tripping in quests everywhere you go.  Especially for playing with other people. I tried doing retail WoW leveling with someone else at one point and they still got so many things wrong like not sharing quest progress, making you run all over the place (so it's hard to stay together) and so on. Whereas with EQ you can very easily duo and just go around killing things together, or holding down a camp, and it's way more straightforward and fun.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:41
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:So anything more than single player is massive is the implication here No, if you read the whole sentence instead of stopping after the first criterion, it has to offer spatiality and world persistence, and even then it's a virtual world. As mentioned, both Bartle and Koster are concerned with the notion of virtual worlds, which are the true underlying genre or category of genres, and consider "massive" to be a descriptor of player count at best and marketing buzzword at worst. This is because the same gameplay, design and social mechanics are observed in small muds or big MMOs. Above a certain player count, which is a lower threshold say, a couple dozen) than the one used to say something is a mmo (a thousand, in keeping with the idea that UO coined the MMO term as), only the scale of the patterns changes and even all of Eve's shenanigans are things that could be observed in muds, only with less people.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:54
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Chev posted:No, if you read the whole sentence instead of stopping after the first criterion, it has to offer spatiality and world persistence, and even then it's a virtual world. As mentioned, both Bartle and Koster are concerned with the notion of virtual worlds, which are the true underlying genre or category of genres, and consider "massive" to be a descriptor of player count at best and marketing buzzword at worst. I read your whole post but didn't quote the entire thing in order to make it easier to read. I don't really dispute the the other two criteria. I cant just take your claim that there is no difference in 24 person worlds vs 10000 person worlds at face value especially when the RL mechanics of society change dramatically depending on the population, see Gemeinshaft vs Gesselshaft. With lobby based gameplay we get all of the detriments of being anonymous in a massive population with none of the benefits Jokerpilled Drudge fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 16:12
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Ibblebibble posted:Might be my nostalgia talking but I feel like Runescape has my gold star for quest design. None of them are generic outside of really basic intro quests, most have pretty decent writing, many lead to adventure. The Runescape quest model was great because they 1. Were limited enough in scope that you didn't see a lot of fluff 2. Tended to bring you to places you wouldn't normally go, rather than just being zone quests 3. Had pretty good rewards 4. Weren't just murder quests, they had side objectives and puzzles for bonuses Really Runescape got a lot of things right, like how they didn't just make the crafting skills "grind sixty hours for better jewelry", it allowed you access to new areas to greatly simplify the effort and see new content. Anyways that's why I spent my middle school summers mining rocks all day.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:12
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:TF2 less mmo than Warframe? In Warframe you play with max 4 people at once ever whereas in TF2 it maxed out at ~32, potentially with a lot of consistent returning players in a community server (are any of those still alive?). Neither's really 'massively multiplayer' though. Phantasy Star may only have the ability to partner up with four other people, but you can choose anyone in the map to partner up with.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:28
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:I cant just take your claim that there is no difference in 24 person worlds vs 10000 person worlds at face value especially when the RL mechanics of society change dramatically depending on the population, see Gemeinshaft vs Gesselshaft. With lobby based gameplay we get all of the detriments of being anonymous in a massive population with none of the benefits Not just lobbies but persistent lobbies. Like, in SoT (the world of which isn't a lobby, the lobby is a menu screen with 2-4 slots) there's Bartle considers almost all key design issues of the virtual world genre were learned in the first and second generations (36 players count for gen 1), with the notable exception of how to make money with them, and there's certainly something in it given that his book, although the specifics are sometimes disputed, still is a reference work for MMO designers (and GaaS to some exent), but also that designers of fondly remembered MMOs tend to have a mud background. For example people in this topic are recurringly gushing about UO and SWG and that's all on Raph Koster and his pals. Chev fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 17:49
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Chev posted:
you are severely overestimating the effectiveness of the mmo brain trust. See thread title
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Jun 29, 2021 17:56
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Yeah but it's not just this thread, a whole bunch of GDC MMO talks come back to the usual suspects too.
Chev fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 18:02
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Speaking of GDC MMO talks I just finished watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0 I never played Ultima Online, but this makes it seem like Medieval GTA meets chatroom with 4chan levels of moderation enforcement.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:21
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Medieval GTA is about right. 4chan style moderation is a messy analogy, but it's not far from the truth either. I'm gonna have to trawl through Lum's archives someday and pick out some of the juicier bits of UO lore.
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Jun 29, 2021 20:43
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:TF2 less mmo than Warframe? In Warframe you play with max 4 people at once ever whereas in TF2 it maxed out at ~32, potentially with a lot of consistent returning players in a community server (are any of those still alive?). Neither's really 'massively multiplayer' though. The difference is for games where you're playing with your 4 buddies, and then you run into 4 baddies (players), after you kill them you wander to another part of the map and find another 4 baddies, and then 4 more baddies ambush you and its a 3 way fight between 3 teams, etc. That's what's possible, and what Destiny and Division both sold themselves as in commercials and cinematics and trailers, however the reality is neither game really delivers on the above experience. The first game to actually pull that off will be the next major MMO. It doesn't matter if the player cap is 12 players, as long as your party of 4 players keeps seamlessly getting matched with different groups of other players while you run around without you having to do anything. If that works, the players will feel like they're in a zone of hundreds of players, even if at any moment there's only 12. Having other players in a part of the zone you can't see doesn't really matter. The full WoW MMO is more costly and ultimately unnecessary. (And also forces the zones to be designed to be massive to spread people out, which is bad for tight game design) Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 21:35
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