|
EverCraft Online, an indie MMO with old-school roots, is having an open alpha this weekend, and I highly encourage you all to jump in and have fun for at least a few hours. I've been following them for 6 months or so and have played in a few open alpha testing sessions they've hosted, and I've had a blast each time. It's very EQ-esque, so if you enjoyed EQ back in 1999, or you are or have been a P99 player, you should definitely check it out. I made a thread about it here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4018831
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2022 05:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 14:31 |
|
|
Looking for an MMO to sink my teeth into for a few days/weeks. Interested in PVE questing and dungeons mostly, satisfying combat where I can play a 2 hander. Doesn't have to be action combat, tab target works too. Don't want to do FFXIV, GW2, or WoW, and would also prefer something with modern sensibilities. Any recommendations? BDO, ArcheAge, Elyon, Bless Unleashed maybe?
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2022 19:39
|
|
|
Seems like ESO would be perfect.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2022 19:41
|
|
|
BDO is mostly PvP IIRC and I thought Elyon shut down tbh. I'll second TESO, it ticks all those boxes and isn't GW2, FFXIV, or WoW.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2022 20:01
|
|
|
FrostyPox posted:BDO is mostly PvP IIRC This isn't true- there's open world pvp but there's basically no consequences for death beyond durability loss and there's a karma system that can be pretty cruel to aggressors, so people mostly just duel over grind spots from time to time unless you are participating in structure GvG. You could argue that there's no end game beyond structure GvG but the game is mainly about grinding PvE endlessly, so... that's the end game.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2022 20:52
|
|
|
Did they finally end up reworking ESO's combat? Last time I played it years ago it was very much some of the worst feeling combat I've ever tried, just completely weightless and impactless
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 02:34
|
|
|
They rebalanced some stuff but it's fundamentally the same and I don't see that changing ever
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 04:26
|
|
|
Kevin Bacon posted:just completely weightless and impactless No, it's the same as it was at launch in terms of how it feels.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 15:22
|
|
|
LuckyCat posted:Looking for an MMO to sink my teeth into for a few days/weeks. Interested in PVE questing and dungeons mostly, satisfying combat where I can play a 2 hander. Doesn't have to be action combat, tab target works too. Don't want to do FFXIV, GW2, or WoW, and would also prefer something with modern sensibilities. Any recommendations? BDO, ArcheAge, Elyon, Bless Unleashed maybe? Don’t see any mention of New World here, so unless that’s because you’ve tried it already, give it a shot.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 15:40
|
|
|
I downloaded and made characters on a lot of different MMOs this weekend. BDO Neverwinter Lost Ark Albion Bless Unleashed ArcheAge Rift ESO Surprisingly, Rift is the one I've had the most fun with, followed by ArcheAge. Neither game seems to have much of a population anymore but the single player questing is good enough. Neverwinter is not bad either but I always have the same problem when I try to play that game, which is finding a fun/satisfying class to play. Along with Lost Ark, I'm also not a fan of the combat abilities being bound to WASD etc, and not a fan of mouse movement. I wish I could change Lost Ark to play like a traditional MMO with mouse look/WASD to move. Downloading New World to see how things have changed and if it grips me at all.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 18:47
|
|
|
How far have you gotten into Rift? All the launch stuff fuckin ruled. I didn't like anything after that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:15
|
|
|
How is that game even online still
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:23
|
|
|
Mr. Neutron posted:How is that game even online still gamigo did what it always does, bought it and hollowed it out to be a maintenance mode money generator
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:32
|
|
|
Vinestalk posted:How far have you gotten into Rift? All the launch stuff fuckin ruled. I didn't like anything after that. I appreciated Rift for not being afraid to drop a portals to hell that will absolutely annihilate low level characters right in the middle of the starter zone. You would wander into one of them and then go screaming out the other side, if you were lucky. More mmos need to let their players die horribly to learn the stakes of actually leveling up.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:35
|
|
|
LuckyCat posted:Along with Lost Ark, I'm also not a fan of the combat abilities being bound to WASD etc, and not a fan of mouse movement. I wish I could change Lost Ark to play like a traditional MMO with mouse look/WASD to move. Lost Ark plays reasonably well with a controller. I can't remember if I ever even tried to play with a keyboard.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:46
|
|
|
Vinestalk posted:How far have you gotten into Rift? All the launch stuff fuckin ruled. I didn't like anything after that. Last night I think I got to 12 playing a melee shaman/cleric type. I loved Rift launch and honestly would still be a game worth playing if the population were higher. That being said, I do see people running around and in chat, just not enough to support the game they built which is so dependent on group content.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 21:58
|
|
|
I played Rift at launch and all I can remember is: 1) The titular Rift system was actually pretty fun when leveling and in general, the game was pretty good with herding players into huge cooperative quests and events. 2) I literally don't remember a single thing about story and lore, only that I was quite underwhelmed for the little while I payed attention to it. 3) The class system was pretty fun and I really liked that you had classes that actively went against their archetypes (Rogue Tank that relied on dodging, Mage Healer that healed by doing damage and did damage by healing) 4) The Mage Healer (Chloromancer iirc?) was easily the most fun and interesting healer I ever played in MMORPG and roughly 90% of my playtime in the game can be traced to how incredibly fun playing Choloromancer was in dungeons and raids. Overall, Rift is probably in Top 3 of my MMORPG experiences, can recommend (playing it at launch, not now  ).
Lt. Lizard fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Dec 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 22:34
|
|
|
Lt. Lizard posted:
Artifacts were the smartest addition to an MMO and it's loving insane that no one else copied them. I spent so much time just running around zones exploring because they tucked them away in so many locations. They even stuck them in weird out of bounds areas.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2022 22:42
|
|
|
I've heard Rift is incredibly P2W these days but I don't know. Back when it had a sub I somehow ended up with a lifetime subscription during its first expansion, I got to the level cap but the game never really clicked with me. But it does have quite a lot of PvE content to go through so I'm quite sure it would be a fun game to play for at least a few months
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 00:05
|
|
|
CuddleCryptid posted:More mmos need to let their players die horribly to learn the stakes of actually leveling up. THIS. Absolutely this. A thousand times this. I will never not reply "THIS" to a post in this thread making this argument. I absolutely loathe it when games flatten enemy difficulty in the overworld. ESO is the biggest, most recent offender. Half the fun of a MMO is watching your character progress, and when every mob scales to your level it ends up giving you nothing to measure yourself against. The starting zone is exactly as difficult as zones you hit in your 20s and 30s. Hurray, I'm level 10 now, but killing the mob I killed when I was level 1 takes the same amount of time! Now my character just throws more particle effects at it! FUN! Killing a bunny is exactly as difficulty as killing an ancient demon from an alternate dimension! This makes sense!  Please, drop incredibly difficult, very high level mobs on me as long as I have a way to avoid them so that I can come back later and curb-stomp them and feel good about myself in a vidyagaem.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 16:44
|
|
|
To a certain degree I don't mind level scaling so long as it only raises the floor and doesn't drop the ceiling. Going back and slaughtering level 1 monsters is fine but it's a very short lived fun and means that parts of the game just become pointless to you, and it's detrimental to other players in the zone if you go on bunny genocide. However, it's bad to scale *down* enemies to match with you, because then you have nothing to build towards. It sucks having progression locked behind levels, but a game that is well built will have you at the level you need to be at by the time you get to a new area. I liked Rift's high level zones forming kill zones where low level characters are afraid to enter til they are stronger, that builds a good amount of tension. But things like in WoW where you would go into a zone, get halways through, run a few instances with your friends, and then abandon that zone for the next one because it's too low of level for you now also isn't the best.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 16:57
|
|
|
Don’t show enemy levels, instead have enemies grade based on a general difficulty class (normal/elite/trash/whatever) Have enemies have a hidden level_value and if you are greater than X levels above it, maintain a X level difference between it and you. Enemies at a low hidden level_value have very few, if any, tricks up their sleeve. Enemies at a higher hidden level_value have more tricks up their sleeve. Games like FFXI explicitly did not give you enemy levels and it made things feel more dangerous. At best you were able to estimate level difference. It also let you absolutely flatten enemies once you leveled up and represented them as “too weak to be worthwhile”. It really made you feel a good sense of progression, but it also kinda sucked that only the enemies on-level with you were in any way a challenge or rewarding to fight. Conversely, ESO ruins the idea of progression by making everything on-level with you and destroying any sense that you’re actually getting stronger. Also their numbers are hosed. Still, what they were trying to do was kind of intriguing and was a good attempt at keeping the game world evergreen for you in terms of challenge. It’s extremely boring having every enemy immediately melt forever just because you outleveled them significantly, and it’s extremely boring having every enemy match your level. jokes fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Dec 6, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 17:06
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm in agreement with both of you I think. Mainly, I just want MMOs to have at least some difficulty outside of instances and elite mobs. Heck, even elite mobs aren't all that dangerous in most MMOs these days. Some of my most enjoyable and memorable experiences in older MMOs occurred when I was somewhere I really shouldn't have been and I was either able to defeat a mob that out leveled me, or I had to plot an elaborate escape so as to avoid a horribly painful death, or both. I can vividly recall a time when I followed a more experienced, vastly higher level player deep into an orc camp in UO only to have them log off due to some real life responsibilities. I had an epic fight with a single orc and used up all my arrows and then had to use every skill and spell at my disposal to escape the camp without dying. This event probably happened in 1999, but I still remember it vividly because it forced me to really think about the game and use all my skills (both character skill and player skill), and even though I received no tangible reward it felt incredibly rewarding. Contrast this with ESO where if I end up deep within a mob camp I can just toss a HOT on my character (or not), mount up (or not) and run in a straight line out of the camp with every single mob wailing on me from behind and I will still not die because overworld mobs hit like butterfly kisses.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 17:56
|
|
|
jokes posted:Don’t show enemy levels, instead have enemies grade based on a general difficulty class (normal/elite/trash/whatever) "What would you like your tombstone to say?"
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 17:57
|
|
|
kedo posted:Yeah, I'm in agreement with both of you I think. Mainly, I just want MMOs to have at least some difficulty outside of instances and elite mobs. Heck, even elite mobs aren't all that dangerous in most MMOs these days. Yeah, it's really impossible to recapture that feeling of danger, it seems, because everyone (rightly) has pushed devs to not penalize deaths as much. Not complaining at all, dying and losing a level and being unable to equip all your poo poo was just the worst. But now dying isn't even necessarily an annoyance. Sometimes it's just the quickest way to do a thing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 18:34
|
|
|
I always liked the way EQ2 did mob difficulty. They broke it down by color (how high the level of the mob was to you), how many people it required to kill the mob(designated by how many arrows were above it), and the mob's status (Normal, Heroic, Epic). Once the player reached 10 levels above the mob, it would turn grey and never aggro you again. Some humanoid mobs even had a cower emote if you got close to them.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 18:43
|
|
|
Cardboard Fox posted:I always liked the way EQ2 did mob difficulty. They broke it down by color (how high the level of the mob was to you), how many people it required to kill the mob(designated by how many arrows were above it), and the mob's status (Normal, Heroic, Epic). But they also had trivial loot code in place. So if something was grey to you, you got nothing for the kill.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 18:54
|
|
|
jokes posted:Yeah, it's really impossible to recapture that feeling of danger, it seems, because everyone (rightly) has pushed devs to not penalize deaths as much. Yeah death penalties suck, but zero death penalties or slap on the wrist death penalties just break that part of the game. These days if you're trying to speed level through WoW Classic following a guide, you'll be told to kill yourself frequently to serve as a form of fast travel. That's dumb! But I'm also just plain talking about combat difficulty which I have complained about previously in this thread. Outside of PVP and Super Ultra Mythic+++ Deadly instances, combat in MMOs is just not challenging these days. It's a chore. If the core piece of gameplay isn't challenging and the only rewards it provides are loot and bars filling up, ultimately I don't find either of those all that satisfying in the long term.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 18:59
|
|
|
I think it comes back to what mmos are about now, which is facilitating moderately challenging gameplay for groups of friends. The advent of wikis and YouTube means that things get all messed up. I mean, what are the classic mmo player archetypes? Achiever, socializer, explorer, killer. With game guides it's much easier to efficiently achieve gear drops and challenges. There's nothing to explore that you won't see on Twitter in the next two days after launch. PvP is limited to battle arenas in games that even have it. So the whole thing has been upended to give people a chat room with moderate gameplay in order to service the thing that really keeps them going, the socialization.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:06
|
|
|
Zil posted:But they also had trivial loot code in place. So if something was grey to you, you got nothing for the kill. You could still get mob loot iirc, but you couldn't get chests. I think this was done on purpose to prevent higher levels from going into a dungeon like Stormhold and just soloing every named mob for masteries and selling them on the AH. They wanted you to go to the next tier of content and group with similar level players.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:07
|
|
|
Cardboard Fox posted:You could still get mob loot iirc, but you couldn't get chests. I think this was done on purpose to prevent higher levels from going into a dungeon like Stormhold and just soloing every named mob for masteries and selling them on the AH. They wanted you to go to the next tier of content and group with similar level players. Oh I know and it made sense at launch. But now it would be nice for that to be lifted. I know there is chrono stuff you can do, but sometimes you just want to blow through dungeon and not have to worry about going back to Freeport to level down.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:09
|
|
|
CuddleCryptid posted:So the whole thing has been upended to give people a chat room with moderate gameplay in order to service the thing that really keeps them going, the socialization. Is the chat room even considered a feature in MMOs these days? Any meaningful in-game discussion has been moved to Discord. All that remains in general chat is RMT spam, guild marketing, and the 10% of insane barrens chatters you put on your ignore list back in 2004. Even guild chat is pretty desolate. I remember asking myself last week why I even play MMOs anymore when I can just play Elden Ring while having my favorite Discord channel opened on my second monitor. Zil posted:Oh I know and it made sense at launch. But now it would be nice for that to be lifted. I know there is chrono stuff you can do, but sometimes you just want to blow through dungeon and not have to worry about going back to Freeport to level down. Oh yeah, EQ2 today is a mess of a game. They need a couple hundred developers just to rebuild basic systems for today's age. It's better to just make EQ3 at this point. Cardboard Fox fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Dec 6, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:26
|
|
|
still waiting for eq next
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:27
|
|
|
CuddleCryptid posted:I think it comes back to what mmos are about now, which is facilitating moderately challenging gameplay for groups of friends. The advent of wikis and YouTube means that things get all messed up. So perhaps this is yet another good example of why MMOs are a dying genre? If game designers bank on socialization keeping players engaged and neuter gameplay to such an extent that it becomes boring, you end up where we are today; two MMOs fighting over an ever-dwindling group of sweaty tryhards while the rest of the gaming community is socializing in almost exactly the same way (ie. they're playing games with friends), except they're using Discord and playing non-MMO games that are actually fun and can provide a challenge. Cardboard Fox posted:Even guild chat is pretty desolate. I remember asking myself last week why I even play MMOs anymore when I can just play Elden Ring while having my favorite Discord channel opened on my second monitor. Yes, exactly this.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:37
|
|
|
Strangely, MMOs are far more generous with player customization (especially wrt cosmetics) than other games so if you like making your own dude in a multiplayer game, you're hosed. $20 for a skin in Fortnite, a game that is also not good, or a mere pittance for entirely modular cosmetic stuff in WoW/FF14, except for cash shop poo poo. The vast majority of dressup is via in-game skins in WoW/FF14 that you can't even buy with real money, which I'm sure Blizzard and SE execs are loving pissed about. jokes fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 6, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:39
|
|
|
Cardboard Fox posted:Is the chat room even considered a feature in MMOs these days? Any meaningful in-game discussion has been moved to Discord. All that remains in general chat is RMT spam, guild marketing, and the 10% of insane barrens chatters you put on your ignore list back in 2004. I could post my "discord ruined mmos" rant again but you can probably find sixteen copies of it on my thread post history. Suffice it to say that if you make a game that revolves around being a landing place for people to socialize and then get an utility that allows the same for 1) free and 2) anywhere with an internet connection including your mobile phone then what is the point of even logging on?
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:43
|
|
|
eh. i don't think it's discord alone, I remember before discord was a thing everyone was on ventrilo or teamspeak instead doing basically the same thing they are now 4 str 4 stam leather belt is eternal
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
Before the advent of discord, the reason you used ventrilo/teamspeak was for voice chat. You were otherwise playing a game with chatboxes and poo poo-- the text chat was still very much an in-game affair. It was more common to be chatting in guild chat, speaking in vent/TS, and doing whatever bullshit task we thought was important to do. Now it's chatting and speaking in discord and the game component is totally secondary, as you can be chatting/speaking in discord while playing any game-- even games you're not playing together.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:53
|
|
|
You couldn't have TeamSpeak on your phone and use it at work, or on the couch with your kids while doing something else. Well, you could if you were a fairly negligent nerdlord. Vent and TS were replaced by Discord because it was easier to use, but also because it had easy text chat.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 19:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 14:31 |
|
|
Last couple pages definitely resonated with me seeing I bought the latest WoW expansion and already unsubbed. It's boring-as-hell speed leveling (that the remaining playerbase apparently loves) that goes into an endgame that is conceivably fun in groups but none of my friends play anymore and the organic socialization of the game is completely dead. Even Goon Squad guildchat is barely a shadow of what it once was. So I used my 4 free days of FF14 and realize I'm many hours of catching up in a game and story that I honestly don't think I like much. So I guess I'm a potential MMO player who tries again every couple years and then bounces off within the month due to the way things work nowadays. Back to single player games or mp games my already-existing friends play.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2022 20:40
|
|