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30.5 Days posted:One guy full time, his wife does programming but she has a day job at an actual game studio I believe. He also hires various contractors from time to time. As for performance, gorgon runs at like 15 FPS in serbule for me. I wish he could afford enough contractors to replace the whole Sexy Elves thing.
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Nov 23, 2021 03:01
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Third World Reagan posted:This was our strategy in age of wushu since aoes had a cap of like 8 people. We threw newbie goon after newbie goon into a blender just so the higher levels could kill people. That’s fun for the newbies, too! Enough fun that they encourage other newbie goons to play unfun games in droves. Even stupid-rear end text based browser games are still fun with a bunch of clueless zombies being led by a few really good-to-genius spreadsheet min/maxers. Some multiplayer games seem to just “click” in certain games, and while we can’t invade furry forums anymore, we can vomit on pubbies and suicide-bomb Titans and start a religion in a 2d-sprite chat room. I’ve never led an mmo guild or New World company, but I’ve played online games of all types with goons for almost 20 years now, and it’s worth it all just by being part of a gang-type culture, with less drive-bys and more “forcing serious minded folks to watch their serious avatars get bombarded with floppy dicks during a news conference or dance during their serious ceremony because they lose control and freak the gently caress out when Duke Nukem joins their serious ERP voice chat.” It’s a shell of the numbers we used to could throw at a game before, but that goon originality towards a communal shared sense-of-humor (pants making GBS threads stories) about “too serious about stupid poo poo online” is still there in every thread.
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Nov 23, 2021 05:57
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The main thing I think most of the survival crafter type games do better then MMO's is that the time period from going from "naked newbie" to "well equipped veteran" is far, far, far, far less of a time sink and is mostly a knowledge barrier instead of a "punched 50,000 enemies and made 10,000 ingots to make a bar go up" barrier. That and if you have friends already established in the game they can immediately catch you up with their resources, where as if you play with your brand new friend in a MMO you are probably making between 0% and 1% progress on your game to do things you've already done with them and miss out on the various end-game stuff the game wants you to do with your time with the actual rewards being only there. Traditional MMO's in my mind would be far better off if they did away with experience and levels as time gates to do anything and put that into making your own equipment and learning the best ways to do things the most efficiently as your power spikes and didn't punish long time players for playing with new players, which probably hurts the games player retention over time.
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Nov 23, 2021 06:28
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:and didn't punish long time players for playing with new players, which probably hurts the games player retention over time. More MMOs would benefit from adopting City of Heroes' system where you can up-level or down-level to play with your friends.
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Nov 23, 2021 10:52
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I miss that so much. I play the free shard maybe once a year and it is so loving nice taking friends and new people around or coming down to help someone. That and being able to pump the mission difficulty up or down as well as the number of enemies really is fun. A shame that the character creator is the most fun.
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Nov 23, 2021 11:19
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Another genre that does leveling up better then MMO's (judging by popularity too) are Moba's I think, you play for 15-45 minutes and only play around with that max gear/level power spike for maybe the final 10-30% of the game, or you get to be one of the strongest players out of 10 in the game for awhile and then you either win or lose and start back at level 1 for the next game. Survival crafters are similar where if you "lose" you are naked again, sent back to "level 1" as it were, but if your base and supplies are safe you can re-equip and go right back out, maybe you lost your very best stuff and can't get it back right away, but you also probably won't be starting from scratch in your home base. In MMO's people will bash over people over the head with their time spent playing and win because bigger numbers and that time to power investment and there is little to do to catch up besides play more then them. And those that played the most always find a way to bash others over the head with that timesink power, be it in PvP MMO's or in PvE MMO's furiously watching the DPS meters and kicking people not satisfying them, and all of that just makes it really hard to get fresh blood into old MMO's.
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Nov 23, 2021 11:58
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I feel like the type of people that played mmos around 2000 just split based on what they liked most. Mobas, block building games, and a few others just took someones favorite aspect of an mmo and made it better.
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Nov 23, 2021 14:41
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I think there's definitely something to that, but I also think that there's a big untapped market of people who either used to play MMOs and yearn for a return to the golden age, and a big contingent of younger gamers who have never been introduced to the genre but would probably go bonkers and spend the ten thousand hours they'd have otherwise spent in LoL or something playing Everquest 3. The formulas aren't timeless exactly but I really think with proper marketing and some good luck a game like Pantheon (but not Pantheon lol) could be a major success or at least a flavor of the week that tops steam charts and gets tons of annoying facecam twitch freaks to stream it. I remember a few years ago some big name person streamed FFXI Nasomi while I was playing and the server population literally quintupled overnight, it went from taking ~20 minutes to get a Dunes group together to the Dunes being too full to play and people spilling over into the adjacent zones where nobody had levelled since retail launch. If a single big streamer streaming one of the most punishing and counterintuitive old MMOs could achieve that level of hype I feel confident it could be done for something more modern but with similar design principals regarding mandated socializing, slower paced play, etc
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Nov 23, 2021 15:06
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That hope leads to madness Honestly, the worst/saddest thing about MMOs as a genre dying is that people don’t get to experience that built-in community that we all took for granted in the early/mid 2000s. Where people remembered your (character’s) name and you had a reputation to uphold. When you have pick-up-and-play games with short sessions, small (by comparison) lobbies, and randomized participants you really miss out. A young coworker of mine didn’t understand what I was talking about when I mentioned the cooler/better server communities (especially in shooters), because he played games only on console and on PC games he pretty much only plays via matchmaking. In FFXI if you were a poo poo to everyone, eventually your reputation would precede you and it would be very awkward for you to group later on. Early WoW too. If you’re a poo poo in battlefield or CoD or Fortnite there’s a minimal chance anyone will remember. I blame WoW. Some people blame the LFD tool but I don’t buy it. WoW broke everything down to where players were just numbers and you needed a certain amount of numbers to cross a numbered threshold to increase your numbers, and toxicity became commonplace because the toxic people were validated by the game: we shouldn’t waste time and we should increase our numbers even if it meant bullying or kicking under performers. It all became very inhuman which is (was?) good for business.
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Nov 23, 2021 15:19
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Nov 23, 2021 15:27
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lol also: https://massivelyop.com/2021/11/18/kakaos-overhauling-archeage-unchaineds-business-model-again-and-yes-it-has-a-sub/ Archeage is going un free to play and back to a sub
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Nov 23, 2021 15:37
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jokes posted:That hope leads to madness You’re probably right and I think that the inexorable tendency of capitalist business practices and a short term emphasis on juicing games as a service as much as possible precludes the reintroduction of that lost “human” element on any large scale. That being said we’re also in a moment where niche media things that previously wouldn’t have been considered worth pursuing by even smaller companies can be successful enough - things like Elite Dangerous might never have mass appeal but can exist in their own genre space in a self sustaining way. My hope is that in the same way streaming audiences have fractured but sustained a ridiculous growth despite that might be mirrored in the revival of dead genres like MMOs and RTS games Maybe I just can’t face the bleak future of nothing but soulless GAAS poo poo like Destiny or COD or <survival game of the week> or whatever being the only extant genre of high population multiplayer game because it seems so absurdly lame, like, the tech is there, more people are online than ever before, gaming is big business, etc. though really the last point is probably why there won’t be a good MMO again, the cost of entry is super high and the returns are unlikely or too risky next to just churning out a MOBA. I hope that myths and monsters game up thread comes to fruition at least, I really like the look of it
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Nov 23, 2021 15:40
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:The main thing I think most of the survival crafter type games do better then MMO's is that the time period from going from "naked newbie" to "well equipped veteran" is far, far, far, far less of a time sink and is mostly a knowledge barrier instead of a "punched 50,000 enemies and made 10,000 ingots to make a bar go up" barrier. i've really been trying to find the moba/mmo sweet spot recently. i've played a bit of albion online and i really like the class design and advancement systems, but the whole game seems too much of a rehash with there only being a few dungeons in rotation. this might be because i'm too new of a player, though. i've been playing a ton of new world, which has a lot to like from several perspectives, but has a limited and broken endgame. in both of those games i really like the weapon and armor advancement that kind of drive power. new world really could have done away with the 1-60 progression, simply relied on equipment advancement and i think it would make the world feel way less grindy (everything has it's own leveling anyway!)
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Nov 23, 2021 16:19
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jokes posted:That hope leads to madness This definitely makes me sad. One of the best times as an MMO player 15-20 years ago was just finding random people on your server to group up with. There was an elite mob in WoW you couldn't kill yourself, but you notice a rogue also trying to kill it, so you guys group up and add each other to your friend's list. Today everything is so pre-constructed. You need to join the official discord and see 20000 people in general chat spamming memes. How do young people even find friends in that sea of text? It probably is just me getting old and not understanding. 
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Nov 23, 2021 16:45
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I think I've asked this before but what do you guys think it would take for a MMO to succeed in the mobile space? I've been researching a few. By and large they seem to have the usual trappings of mobile games - namely EvE Echoes is/was pretty cool exception to the usual dumpster fire of mobile games, but not enough to keep me grinding. I think that's largely since it started life as a PC game and I didn't altogether enjoy it there either. I've been sort of piddling around with gamedev (though I'm more of a server developer) and wondering if some of that olde timey MMO social magic could be recaptured in a small team passion project on mobile.
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Nov 23, 2021 17:40
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Cardboard Fox posted:This definitely makes me sad. One of the best times as an MMO player 15-20 years ago was just finding random people on your server to group up with. There was an elite mob in WoW you couldn't kill yourself, but you notice a rogue also trying to kill it, so you guys group up and add each other to your friend's list. I really don't see why 'this random person is doing the same thing I am so I will be friends with them' is any different from 'this random person joined when I asked for help to do this tough thing so I will be friends with them'.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:50
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Because when you stop doing Activity with them, there’s a good chance you’ll never see them ever again and that’s by design.
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Nov 23, 2021 19:50
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Hellioning posted:I really don't see why 'this random person is doing the same thing I am so I will be friends with them' is any different from 'this random person joined when I asked for help to do this tough thing so I will be friends with them'. In the first example, you are traveling around the in-game world when you come across a player on your server that happens to be in your level range and doing the same group content. In the second example, you have to hop onto a third party app and find that exact player. For me, the second is not as immersive.
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Nov 23, 2021 19:52
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jokes posted:Because when you stop doing Activity with them, there’s a good chance you’ll never see them ever again and that’s by design. I've 'met' hundreds of people the old fashioned way in MMOS that I've never seen again, I don't see how this is different. Cardboard Fox posted:In the first example, you are traveling around the in-game world when you come across a player on your server that happens to be in your level range and doing the same group content. In the second example, you have to hop onto a third party app and find that exact player. For me, the second is not as immersive. I suppose? But I don't think 'level ranges' or 'the same group content' are particularly immersive either.
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Nov 23, 2021 19:59
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Levels (and their ranges) suck
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Nov 23, 2021 21:46
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Hellioning posted:I've 'met' hundreds of people the old fashioned way in MMOS that I've never seen again, I don't see how this is different. For me, the immersion comes from being in the same world with players doing similar content and seeing them again as we both increase in strength, not necessarily some arbitrary "level range". Speaking of level range, has anyone played a EQ or WoW style game where everyone can play all of the content regardless of level? Guild Wars 2 comes kind of close, and FFXIV has a great system that keeps low level dungeons relevant even for higher level players.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:15
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Hellioning posted:I've 'met' hundreds of people the old fashioned way in MMOS that I've never seen again, I don't see how this is different. To some degree the MMO needs to recall its not 1999 anymore and I cant index the number of people I run into in my head anymore, I had over 200 names in my head from my EQ days from people I played with a lot, this continued up to WOTLK in wow. Entire guilds were not just guilds but friends and social structures, Leaving a guild was super emotional too. Those friends are all gone now, lost to time and old names never used anymore. But I can still never forget that one Chinese guy (pree great firewall of China), or joining an entire Japanese guild that helped me learn Japanese because I was living there at the time. The thing was, most of these people were normal people with normal lives. Husband and Wife healers, old and young, everyone existing to have a good time first. But the other side of the coin is going on too, the Visionaries are all gone, like them or hate them, Richard Garriott, Brad McQuaid, Chris Avellone and so many more names are dead or have stopped making games but instead turned to CEOs or lord knows what else. Brian Fargo and a few others of that era are still out there but we have a clear problem when Visionaries leave the space and we are left with a by the numbers Call of Duty 700 and no one is allowed to put there name on the new release as the official designer. And this of course sucks because the tech has finally caught up with what these people wanted to make as games. WOW showed us we could have absolutely massive worlds with minimal zone lines, Ultima showed us we could have NPCs who actully do stuff (sleep at night, bake bread, who knows what else). EvE showed us you can network lots of Servers together to have 500k players in the same game at the same time. So it really is time for a firm to pull all this tech together, give us a map the size of Daggerfall, Leveling like Guildwars (levels were mostly nothing), A Crafting system that is not Log Simulator 9000 (let me hire NPCs, plop down a lumber camp, and watch as NPCs chop wood up and turn it into boards). Let towns organically form because players are doing stuff in an area (your hirlings need homes). What I am trying to say is that lack of vision and design by a bunch of leads who only care about their subsection of a game is killing any grand vision in the industry and its really sad.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:26
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I've had a lot of great social experiences in FFXIV including partying with and meeting strangers in Eureka and Bozja and I always wonder whether people complaining that that sort of thing is dead are afraid to initiate or something.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:27
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CYBEReris posted:I've had a lot of great social experiences in FFXIV including partying with and meeting strangers in Eureka and Bozja and I always wonder whether people complaining that that sort of thing is dead are afraid to initiate or something. Sounds fun, but I'm still playing through the MSQ!
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Nov 23, 2021 22:42
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Grouping feels different now, it feels less organic. But to be fair, finding groups in classic was a chore too. So not only did the games / tools change, the people did too I think. During vanilla you just went with 3 dps a tank and a healer (sure sometimes if you already had 2 melees you would try to find a ranged to round it out). But in classic a lot of people only wanted to run spell- or melee cleave and if you didn't fit in either groups you were going to have a hard time to find groups. Basically a large group of people "solved" or "optimized" their gaming and don't want to compromise. And honestly while back in the day I was not a huge fan of LFD tools, while playing new world the whole orb system and having to stop playing to find groups and travel to the dungeon felt really dated and unfun. Especially since the end result was still the same, during the expedition barely a word was said and at the end we parted ways and I have never seen them again. So gently caress it, give me convenience and quality of life stuff like LFD. DaitoX fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 23:09
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CYBEReris posted:I've had a lot of great social experiences in FFXIV including partying with and meeting strangers in Eureka and Bozja and I always wonder whether people complaining that that sort of thing is dead are afraid to initiate or something. There are a surprising number of players worth getting to know in FFXIV, but it takes so looooong to catch up to current content that new players could go years without meeting any of them. I know that everyone I met in game was through actively seeking them out. It took a lot of work. Even with liberal use of social macros in fates and dungeons, I never met anyone “organically.” Not the way I used to make friends in early WoW by sending friend requests to people in dungeons who were chill or local LFG for group content. I also bailed while slogging through the transitional content after ARR, so never got to see current content where it sounds like things are better.
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Nov 24, 2021 05:36
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CYBEReris posted:I've had a lot of great social experiences in FFXIV including partying with and meeting strangers in Eureka and Bozja
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Nov 24, 2021 07:08
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This looks cool as an SWG spiritual successor: https://galaxiesofeden.com/, I hope it does better than The Repopulation did. Also a reminder for anyone pining for an EQ successor, this is worth checking out: https://evercraftonline.com/ -- Smaller scale/budget project compared to Pantheon and even M&M, but it's definitely trying to do a lot of things right and stick to the niche.
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Nov 24, 2021 07:35
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CYBEReris posted:I've had a lot of great social experiences in FFXIV including partying with and meeting strangers in Eureka and Bozja and I always wonder whether people complaining that that sort of thing is dead are afraid to initiate or something. my friend was going through the shadowbringers story a couple months ago and every time he hit a dungeon there was this dark knight watching the cutscene in front of the entrance so i just invited him and we did the dungeon together every time and now we're friends lol
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Nov 24, 2021 08:19
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FfXIV is pretty much little bits of all the good MMO stuff thrown together. I'm a big fan.
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Nov 24, 2021 08:24
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Jackard posted:Where the gently caress is that? Side zones more in the line of FFXI/"classic" MMO gameplay in the second and third expacs, respectfully. They're tied to the relic weapon questlines of those expacs and are pretty cool side content.
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Nov 24, 2021 08:58
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Eureka is probably a bit more involved than Bozja but both of them are pretty fun and have decent storylines.
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Nov 24, 2021 09:12
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I am digging the Bannerlord Online mod, still pretty basic but it has a lot of great elements to it. Goons are currently charging clans for peace and hunting in their territory.
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Nov 24, 2021 13:12
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FFXIV also has this thing where a player only some hours in to the game could also just open the Party Finder if they knew how, and find someone advertising their maid cafe, and go meet people there if you're actually looking to make friends and not just find a healer to skip 15 minutes of dungeon queue. Of course then you're making friends with people who hang out at a virtual maid cafe, but to each their own. But the structure of the game and it's MSQ progression doesn't really lend itself well to organic grouping. The progression-required content is not usually sped up in any way by being in a group, so it doesn't really have any kind of driving force.
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Nov 24, 2021 13:14
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Sachant posted:This looks cool as an SWG spiritual successor: https://galaxiesofeden.com/, I hope it does better than The Repopulation did. Both of these look dope, especially Galaxies of Eden, since SWG wasn't necessarily good because of the IP, it was just a major draw. the basic gameplay systems could be applied to any generic sci-fi game and be extremely fun and cool. that being said they were also exceptionally complicated and had lots of interrelated systems that, even though were poorly balanced in many ways, would be pretty hard for a small dev team to replicate. Anyway, the trailer looks great, if they manage to implement player housing with 1:1 decorating and objects from in-game like in SWG along with the basic politics, harvesting, and non-combat specialization systems I will subscribe to this game until the end of time
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Nov 24, 2021 17:48
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I think rpgs need both short term and long term progression and levels provide the former but then if it feels good then you leave new players behind. I think it would be cool if there was an mmo where you had a little wagon and you took it from map to map and there were like a few hundred players per map, and they were temporary like a few weeks and the map would be permanently affected by major things the players did, and the short term progression was for the whole map.
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Nov 24, 2021 22:21
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And then at the end you'd go to a new map and you could make a caravan with people you liked
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Nov 24, 2021 22:21
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I once thought about how a suikoden style mmo would play out and your idea isn't far off from mine. Basically meet people while you level or do group stuff, add them to your friends list, and any time you need to do content and you don't have enough live players to do something, you can call forth an npc version of the friend on your list. The final battle would require you have 107 friends. In this thought experiment there is also an insane amount of weapon options, rune magic and fashion that it's unlikely you'll see an exact copy of someone.
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Nov 25, 2021 04:20
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Granado Espada's 'family' thing always had me curious but I get the impression it didn't work out that well.
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Nov 25, 2021 08:20
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Truga posted:my friend was going through the shadowbringers story a couple months ago and every time he hit a dungeon there was this dark knight watching the cutscene in front of the entrance so i just invited him and we did the dungeon together every time and now we're friends lol I needed a feel-good story to brighten my day, thank you for this
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Nov 25, 2021 09:48
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