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FFXIV is barely less of a traditional WoW-esque MMO than WoW.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:49
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fwiu it's not so much that the ffxiv team doesn't believe it's an MMO as that they want to future-proof as much casual content as possible by making it soloable, so that when the game's finally on maintenance mode in the distant future people can still play through the whole thing as if it were an ordinary numbered final fantasy even if the playerbase is nonexistent
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Sep 7, 2022 00:59
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:fwiu it's not so much that the ffxiv team doesn't believe it's an MMO as that they want to future-proof as much casual content as possible by making it soloable, so that when the game's finally on maintenance mode in the distant future people can still play through the whole thing as if it were an ordinary numbered final fantasy even if the playerbase is nonexistent I think it looks weird from the outside if you think of FFXIV as being "just" an MMO, but it's easy to forget that it's a mainline numbered Final Fantasy title, and they take the brand's ongoing integrity very seriously at SE. Not being able to play through a numbered FF game even a decade down the line won't fly, so they're doing the work now of ensuring that it'll always be accessible, even if the lights go off at some nebulous point in the future.
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Sep 7, 2022 01:07
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I also literally know people who want to play FFXIV, but won't because they'd have to play with other people to progress the story. Is that the platonic ideal of an MMO experience? Probably not. Is it somehow objectively wrong? Hell nah.
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Sep 7, 2022 01:11
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genovefa fedelmid posted:ff14 isn't an mmo its a final fantasy game you play with other people sometimes weird because it's just like every other mmo except better at catgirl dressup and jrpg storytelling
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Sep 7, 2022 01:19
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Siri, what is an “emm emm oh?”
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Sep 7, 2022 01:27
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FFXIV isn't what I'd like MMOs to be but it's certainly what some of them are. I think Old Republic does the main plot with cutscenes thing that turned me off hard too.
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Sep 7, 2022 01:43
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Groovelord Neato posted:I think Old Republic does the main plot with cutscenes thing that turned me off hard too. super same. tried to do that one with friends and we all ended up playing a single player game where we saw each other sometimes.
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Sep 7, 2022 02:23
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LLSix posted:FF14 is the #1 MMO: https://in.ign.com/final-fantasy-xiv-online-shadowbringers/160109/news/final-fantasy-14-vs-world-of-warcraft-most-played-mmorpg sigh, of course I have to go and get technically correct. Yes, of course it's an MMO. But the things people associate with an MMO like grinds, like forced social grouping (and I don't mean 'group with people temporarily for 20 minutes to complete an objective' I mean fully functioning guilds, friend groups being absolutely required to complete things like raids etc), like dedicating vast swathes of your free time to keep up, and like loads of open world content are all missing from ff14 and any attempt to shoehorn it into that category does it no favours it leaves people wondering where all those things are because "it's an MMO" but it's really in its own category of game where you can socialise a LOT but its mostly stuff that has very little to do with combat related gameplay, and where the central focus is a set storyline and not you and your friends doing stuff together, it's hours of cutscenes you play with your wol and a group of npcs. There's just no other MMO that does that, maybe swtor to some extent but it's also mostly a single player game at this point Catgirl Al Capone posted:fwiu it's not so much that the ffxiv team doesn't believe it's an MMO as that they want to future-proof as much casual content as possible by making it soloable, so that when the game's finally on maintenance mode in the distant future people can still play through the whole thing as if it were an ordinary numbered final fantasy even if the playerbase is nonexistent they literally said in a live letter that they know ff players who are put off by forced grouping and they want to make those players feel comfortable in the game, especially in Japan genovefa fedelmid fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Sep 7, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2022 06:22
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I'm not sure if it's a good idea to insist that any game that doesn't have a forced grind couldn't possibly be a MMO. It'd be like defining MOBAs as games with bad communities, or FPSes as games with horrible voice chat.
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Sep 7, 2022 07:13
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Hra Mormo posted:I also literally know people who want to play FFXIV, but won't because they'd have to play with other people to progress the story. Is that the platonic ideal of an MMO experience? Probably not. Is it somehow objectively wrong? Hell nah. That's my thing, honestly. I like the part of MMOs where I'm exploring a big shared world that lots of people inhabit. I'm not so keen on the part where I have to group up with other people and am partly responsible for the group's success or failure. I never liked the pressure. That said, FFXIV does make it pretty painless so the Duty Support is just a bonus.
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Sep 7, 2022 08:43
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Good Dumplings posted:"suffering builds character" but for social structures, I can't believe this poo poo I wonder what would be a good way to combine the convenience of modern systems with the community aspects that arised (in my experience) more naturally in the janky old games. There are tools available to stay in touch with people, but the jump from 'randomly assigned to the same 15 minute dungeon once' to 'in a discord, raiding together' is a chasm. In modern MMOs, you have friends and strangers. No casual acquiaintances, people you recognize from running in to them repeatedly. Maybe a system where after a run, you can rightclick on someone's name and select 'A+, would play with again' , and then in future the game tries to match people who liked eachother. Or just having the dungeon finder prioritize people from the same realm, I'm not sure how much it does so now, in any game.
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Sep 7, 2022 14:24
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Philonius posted:I wonder what would be a good way to combine the convenience of modern systems with the community aspects that arised (in my experience) more naturally in the janky old games. There are tools available to stay in touch with people, but the jump from 'randomly assigned to the same 15 minute dungeon once' to 'in a discord, raiding together' is a chasm. In modern MMOs, you have friends and strangers. No casual acquiaintances, people you recognize from running in to them repeatedly. I dont think you really can force that unless you make the content way harder or make more mandatory group activities. I believe FFXIV tries to match you with people that you gave commendations to at the end of instances, but people aren't remembering any of the times when the dungeon ran smoothly because it's all just autopilot. Ultimately a large part of the issue is that most modern MMOs are designed to be played solo, so there isn't much of a reason to socialize other than minor increases in questing speed. Really the big draw has to be something that is voluntary. Guild housing is a big one, special events, perks like XP boost, things like that. And the events especially need to be put in that encourages people to actually log on. You need people leaving discord to go socialize in the game, so you need to give them actual things to do as a group. But since organizing that stuff is a pain in the rear end, and since powerlevelers balk at having to wait a week to play more, it doesn't gel with the current way that we approach MMOs.
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Sep 7, 2022 15:21
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CuddleCryptid posted:I dont think you really can force that unless you make the content way harder or make more mandatory group activities. I believe FFXIV tries to match you with people that you gave commendations to at the end of instances, but people aren't remembering any of the times when the dungeon ran smoothly because it's all just autopilot. Ultimately a large part of the issue is that most modern MMOs are designed to be played solo, so there isn't much of a reason to socialize other than minor increases in questing speed. The speed of gameplay is an issue too, I think. In EQ, combat was so glacial and people had so few abilities to use, there was all the time in the world for people to chat, and they did. Now, you're too busy doing your rotation, and the only way to be social is over voice chat, which requires you to already know eachother.
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Sep 7, 2022 15:49
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The real change in the social structure was making your average group content or dungeon short enough that no one had to break to piss, leaving the rest of the group free to chat. I haven't seen "brb bio" in like a decade and it's a shame.
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Sep 7, 2022 16:56
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Philonius posted:The speed of gameplay is an issue too, I think. In EQ, combat was so glacial and people had so few abilities to use, there was all the time in the world for people to chat, and they did. Now, you're too busy doing your rotation, and the only way to be social is over voice chat, which requires you to already know eachother. I have a kind of morbid curiosity for what an MMO would be that was based more on an FF12-style gambit system, where you just effectively program and automate your character rather than using every ability by hand. Could be the dullest thing ever made, could be a resurgence of the chatroom MMO.
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Sep 7, 2022 16:56
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Hra Mormo posted:I have a kind of morbid curiosity for what an MMO would be that was based more on an FF12-style gambit system, where you just effectively program and automate your character rather than using every ability by hand. Could be the dullest thing ever made, could be a resurgence of the chatroom MMO. I really like this idea. It lends itself to boxing as well, for better or worse.
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Sep 7, 2022 18:40
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Another MMORPG bites the dust, Elyon, is shutting down next month.
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Sep 7, 2022 18:43
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Not even a year. Is that a new record?
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Sep 7, 2022 18:51
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Mr. Neutron posted:Not even a year. Is that a new record? No, but it's very short regardless.
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Sep 7, 2022 18:54
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I wonder if you could disincentivize speeding through instances. An immediate thought is reward time spent in an instance but then that leads to AFKing. I wonder if you could do something like EQ where you're waiting on respawns. Have a boss respawn X time after it's killed, but also Y time after it last respawned so there's no incentive to kill it as fast as possible. Maybe something similar for instances where you can't join an instance faster than Z time after starting one so again there's no real way to chain zerg the down. Or maybe have instances like Blackrock Depths, with multiple bosses and points of interest in a large non-linear place. Then have events/bosses activate/respawn across the zone randomly over time so there's reasons to discuss which thing you want to do and potentially wait around for new things. So an instance becomes more about inhabiting a place over time than in running through a place.
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Sep 7, 2022 19:15
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Phigs posted:I wonder if you could disincentivize speeding through instances. An immediate thought is reward time spent in an instance but then that leads to AFKing. Alternatively, embrace that people speed through things and design content around it. There's no reason to deliberately waste players' time.
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Sep 7, 2022 19:22
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yeah it used to be if you tried to pull more than you could chew your tank would struggle to keep aggro, die, or both, and a single mob could tip that scale depending on their gear everyone's "leeroy jenkins" now
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Sep 7, 2022 19:25
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:yeah it used to be if you tried to pull more than you could chew your tank would struggle to keep aggro, die, or both, and a single mob could tip that scale depending on their gear I really hope FF14 experimenting with a heroic/mythic system isn't just a one-off occurance, I'd love if the expert roulette in 7.0 made you respect the content
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Sep 7, 2022 19:33
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I doubt they'll ever make mandatory content hard tbh. But I do hope Criterion Dungeon and stuff remain as a side activity for those of us who want to be challenged.
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Sep 7, 2022 19:41
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Make large amounts of the game revolve around open world dungeons and other "elite" zones that require 2-6 players to team up, and give tons of incentive and make it very easy and painless to do so. Condition the players to it, so when you're going to a zone the first thing you do is find a party with an open slot, and give good rewards for helping your teammates complete their objectives. Maybe throw in some pvp objectives if you want to make it spicy, or competitive pve objectives where the group scoring more gets bigger rewards. Cool events firing, generous rewards, super rare drops to grind out, just make up whatever reasons to spend time in the world and hang out, chat and team up with other people.
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Sep 7, 2022 19:43
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Hra Mormo posted:I have a kind of morbid curiosity for what an MMO would be that was based more on an FF12-style gambit system, where you just effectively program and automate your character rather than using every ability by hand. Could be the dullest thing ever made, could be a resurgence of the chatroom MMO. I imagine this could be rather fun if executed well, although I'll admit I've never played FF12. I'd give it a shot at least.
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Sep 7, 2022 20:00
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junan_paalla posted:Make large amounts of the game revolve around open world dungeons and other "elite" zones that require 2-6 players to team up, and give tons of incentive and make it very easy and painless to do so. Condition the players to it, so when you're going to a zone the first thing you do is find a party with an open slot, and give good rewards for helping your teammates complete their objectives. Maybe throw in some pvp objectives if you want to make it spicy, or competitive pve objectives where the group scoring more gets bigger rewards. Cool events firing, generous rewards, super rare drops to grind out, just make up whatever reasons to spend time in the world and hang out, chat and team up with other people. As someone who looks back mostly fondly on my days no-instance full loot open world pvp with a distinct lack of flashy gamification, which was Ultima Online and a bit of Eve Online for me, you have just described the exact opposite of what I'd look for in a MMO. All the systems you described are what I'd say caused the death of the old school MMOs that I miss. To each their own though.
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Sep 7, 2022 20:20
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Imo Destiny has a pretty good instance running system. The easier instances have group finder and the harder modes with all the cool poo poo don't, but they aren't raids where you have to get 50 people together to do them. You can just get a normal instance group together, and it's encouraged by the fact that they are the best content so you want to get a group.
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Sep 7, 2022 20:33
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Philonius posted:I wonder what would be a good way to combine the convenience of modern systems with the community aspects that arised (in my experience) more naturally in the janky old games. There are tools available to stay in touch with people, but the jump from 'randomly assigned to the same 15 minute dungeon once' to 'in a discord, raiding together' is a chasm. In modern MMOs, you have friends and strangers. No casual acquiaintances, people you recognize from running in to them repeatedly. Honestly I don't think it was just janky old game systems forcing communities to get together, but also an altogether different type of community or mindset. Back in the beginning days of MMO it was a whole new type of game and most of those were players 'first' MMO experiences. In my experience people came into them from backgrounds in single player RPGs, pen and paper RPGs, or just as general fans of the lore/setting. For a time I was in one of the more advanced raiding guilds on my EQ server in the Kunark days and even then I would say the majority of friends and guildies identified with their character in some way and had an attachment to their online avatar. People played a class and race because they thought it was cool, not because a website said it had the best DPS. The game(s) hadn't really been 'solved' yet by the majority of people and most of the player base was generally lost and feeling their way around in the dark but still having fun in the sense of adventure that came with exploring an unknown game world. Now players are far more educated and before even creating a character you can easily already know which class and spec does the most dps in raids, what the rotations are like, what the 'tier list' is in PvP, etc etc. Now your communities are full of former or current MMO players that have already seen variants of the standard 'wow' theme park and can dissect and conquer them in no time at all. Other people are often there just to help advance and make your numbers go up because the only real reason you need them is to heal, DPS, or tank group content for you. You don't need them to show you the direction to the bank, show you a good leveling spot, cast an important buff on you, teleport you across the continent, cast buffs on you so you can put on better equipment, etc anymore. So I guess my pointless rambling leads me to believe that if MMOs want more communities they should probably come up with more reasons for people to socialize than forced grouping for fighting. As an example I think star wars galaxies tried to solve this by requiring rest from entertainers and medics. Damn Dirty Ape fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Sep 7, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2022 21:26
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more games should have SWG-esque entertaininer/musician stuff, along with building actual camps out in the woods. I have fond memories of running around on Dathomir with a sweet field base setup where wookies in hot pants danced the night away.
cmdrk fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Sep 7, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2022 21:58
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cmdrk posted:more games should have SWG-esque entertaininer/musician stuff, along with building actual camps out in the woods. I have fond memories of running around on Dathomir with a sweet field base setup where wookies in hot pants danced the night away. How is it not obvious for a developer to make a open world sandbox crafting/survival RPG based on Star Wars? This seems like an instant money printing machine with how popular that genre is right now.
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Sep 7, 2022 22:01
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I said come in! posted:How is it not obvious for a developer to make a open world sandbox crafting/survival RPG based on Star Wars? This seems like an instant money printing machine with how popular that genre is right now. What developer in their right mind would want to fight the House of Mouse over that license Two years in and you haven't seen your family in days because the Mouse is demanding that you put their new OC Koks Smacko in bunch of quests to push his cereal line.
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Sep 7, 2022 22:04
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drat Dirty Ape posted:So I guess my pointless rambling leads me to believe that if MMOs want more communities they should probably come up with more reasons for people to socialize than forced grouping for fighting. As an example I think star wars galaxies tried to solve this by requiring rest from entertainers and medics. this reminds me of the classic Richard Bartle article about "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds and Spades". essentially breaking down MUD players into one of four groups: Hearts -> Socializers Clubs -> Killers (maybe PvPers today) Spades -> Explorers Diamonds -> Treasure-seekers (I like to think of this as raiders in modern MMOs) and Bartle talks about how to promote balance between the groups. e: link https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
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Sep 7, 2022 22:06
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CuddleCryptid posted:What developer in their right mind would want to fight the House of Mouse over that license Raph Koster talks about how it was even hard in the pre-Disney days in the SWG GDC post-mortem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU9TPL2uCC8 I recall one thing being the execs pulling them several directions at once over stuff like Jedi. Like, make them super special and awesome and anyone can play one. And also they have to be super rare because it's after A New Hope and we won't budge on the setting.
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Sep 7, 2022 22:10
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Honestly I don't think it was just janky old game systems forcing communities to get together, but also an altogether different type of community or mindset. Back in the beginning days of MMO it was a whole new type of game and most of those were players 'first' MMO experiences. In my experience people came into them from backgrounds in single player RPGs, pen and paper RPGs, or just as general fans of the lore/setting. For a time I was in one of the more advanced raiding guilds on my EQ server in the Kunark days and even then I would say the majority of friends and guildies identified with their character in some way and had an attachment to their online avatar. People played a class and race because they thought it was cool, not because a website said it had the best DPS. The game(s) hadn't really been 'solved' yet by the majority of people and most of the player base was generally lost and feeling their way around in the dark but still having fun in the sense of adventure that came with exploring an unknown game world. Yeah, good points. Another thing that played into this was the spirit of the times, for lack of a better term. Online connectivity was a new experience for a lot of people, so the very ability to suddenly socialize and communicate with people from all over the world was an attraction in and of itself. Hell, even Napster used to have an integrated chat room at the time, and people used it. cmdrk posted:more games should have SWG-esque entertaininer/musician stuff, along with building actual camps out in the woods. I have fond memories of running around on Dathomir with a sweet field base setup where wookies in hot pants danced the night away. FFXIV lets bards play custom music, there's usually people playing at the Aetherites in the main cities.
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Sep 7, 2022 22:18
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Hell, there are entire bands with matching outfits that rove from server to server.
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Sep 7, 2022 23:49
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Couple of things about making dungeons more chill: I think it'd be hard to do with wow. One of the reasons EQ is chill is that "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". People want the most efficient leveling possible, and in EQ that means slowing down to avoid unwinnable fights. The thing about EQ is that for most classes the skill ceiling and floor are rather close together. Nobody likes saying it, but while wow isn't a difficult game, there's a big difference in effectiveness between the best and worst player of a class. That means that if you make the game more difficult, to the extent that the bottom half of players have to play carefully, there will still be a focus on rushing because the top half of players don't. If you make the game difficult enough that the top half of players have to play carefully, the bottom half can't win. You can see this somewhat in p99 where understanding of some classes have refined to a point that some groups will demand that enchanters play bizarre charm games, or want gear-dependent classes to have great gear, in order to make their leveling more efficient, undermining the chill game that people are talking about. It's not ubiquitous there by any means, but it will probably become more common as time goes on, understanding grows further, and the community goes through compaction cycles. The end-game was a loving mistake, and all wow content past 2005 was designed by people who considered EQ's endgame to be the "real" game. If you make the "real" game to be the handful of hours of gameplay you enjoy after 10-20 hours of chores + an additional 3-5 hours of chores every week, then of course people are going to be lovely about anyone slowing down their chores. Players will find the most optimal path and try to push other players towards it in the best of circumstances, but when you don't even want to be here today, things are intensified quite a bit. To have a chill game, the whole game has to be the game. If you want leveling and doing dungeons to be chill and don't want people to act like they have somewhere else to be, then they have to not have somewhere else to be, that has to be the game. EQ came from MUDs where the whole point was to level to a million and if players started to complete content they'd pull out notepad and write a bunch of new content. The end-game was created because you can't do that with 3D graphics. I don't have a solution but it probably has something to do with prestiging and finding ways of adding variety to the leveling process so people don't mind doing it a ton of times in a row, and not having anything to do at max level except big dicking around town. e: the entire gameplay of city of heroes was pretty much "leveling and big-dicking around town", right? 30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Sep 8, 2022 |
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Sep 8, 2022 04:23
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30.5 Days posted:The end-game was a loving mistake, and all wow content past 2005 was designed by people who considered EQ's endgame to be the "real" game. If you make the "real" game to be the handful of hours of gameplay you enjoy after 10-20 hours of chores + an additional 3-5 hours of chores every week, then of course people are going to be lovely about anyone slowing down their chores. Players will find the most optimal path and try to push other players towards it in the best of circumstances, but when you don't even want to be here today, things are intensified quite a bit. To have a chill game, the whole game has to be the game. If you want leveling and doing dungeons to be chill and don't want people to act like they have somewhere else to be, then they have to not have somewhere else to be, that has to be the game. EQ came from MUDs where the whole point was to level to a million and if players started to complete content they'd pull out notepad and write a bunch of new content. The end-game was created because you can't do that with 3D graphics. I don't have a solution but it probably has something to do with prestiging and finding ways of adding variety to the leveling process so people don't mind doing it a ton of times in a row, and not having anything to do at max level except big dicking around town. WoW leveling and end game are exactly this, 2 totally different games. At least with Onxy and MC the content was optional, but more so something you could do to "Win" the game. By BC the heroic dungeons they were slow, CC was really needed, and you really felt like it was a crawl like in EQ. Some of my best memories are crawling through with 5 man groups in some of the crazy things they built. You cant really have this feeling back sadly. But yes, the leveling game is 100% getting levels, your gear will replace as you level so meh about it. End game is a RPG looter. Just using less RNG as items are pre-made and boss specific. Given crafted gear cant really get better (a few times It did I think) and the lack of item decay, you cant really use any econ model other then making some stuff super rare or making twink gear.
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Sep 8, 2022 04:36
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drat Dirty Ape posted:So I guess my pointless rambling leads me to believe that if MMOs want more communities they should probably come up with more reasons for people to socialize than forced grouping for fighting. As an example I think star wars galaxies tried to solve this by requiring rest from entertainers and medics. Fundamentally, the problem is that most games don't really have a game loop outside of "kill thing -> get stuff -> use stuff to kill bigger thing", so in order to give people reasons beyond "help other person kill thing/fix broken stuff" you have to bring in some other goal that isn't just valuable because it participates in the kill/loot cycle. The most obvious one to me is trying to survive against the environment, since it's something that can be made insurmountable in scale - humans right now can't "beat" a hurricane - while being a goal you can still work to get better at and help others with (especially since it's a lot easier to survive in a group rather than solo). But if this was that easy a problem to solve, people would've made games that go beyond kill/loot by now.
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Sep 8, 2022 04:43
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