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You need to qualify what you consider modern sandbox MMOs, because when I think about the term "Sandbox MMO", I'm thinking ridiculously old school Everquest 1 / Final Fantasy 11 / Ultima Online, and not the modern niche asian titles. Development moved away from those originally because people by and large hated them back then and abandoned it for World of Warcraft when it came along and revolutionized how MMOs were made. I'll talk a spot about EQ1 since it's the one I'm most familiar with and for whom I have the biggest love/hate relationship with. This is mostly pre-luclin mind you. Despite the name, early EQ1 had surprisingly few quests in it pre-Planes of Power/rise of WoW dominance. EQ1 was a punishing, hateful game to play. Hell, when you made a new character you were dropped naked in the middle of your city's capital with nothing but a rusty dagger/short sword/club and a note that said "Maybe go check out your guild master, c'ya" and you were expected to figure everything else out from there. No maps, no quest markers, no hand holding. You stepped out into the newbie garden and you poked a rat with that rusty dagger until it fell over and you took it's whiskers and sold it for 7 copper because there were no quests to give you better weapons or armor, pretty much all low end gear was crafted by mid tier blacksmiths. Banded armor cost 1pp per armor class (anywhere between 5-15platinum per piece) and bronze plate was 3pp per AC, both of which were priced out of most starting player's range, and neither of which actually had stats besides the armor class. After level 10 there wasn't any solo content anymore. Anything that would give you exp would kick your rear end so hard you didn't have time to turn tail and run (not that it would matter, because every single enemy ran faster than you and would follow you to the ends of the earth in order to murder you. You had to group in order to make progress and even then I hope you like sitting 20 feet away from an orc encampment waiting for respawns. If you were a spellcaster, I hope you liked sitting around doing nothing because mana regenerated so slowly it could take you upwards of 10 minutes to recover a full mana bar if you had no mana regen buffs. That being said, it did have selling points. Because you spent so much time grouping from such a low level, there was a social aspect to the game that I hadn't seen since. You regularly communicated with people outside of your guild and got to know people. Because leveling took so long and you grouped with so many people while you did so, your reputation as a player mattered and shitheads found themselves blackballed from guilds and even grouping. I was way more socially connected to my guild there than I ever was to any guild I had in WoW/EQ2/Vanguard/ect. The game had this charm because you really felt like you were in a world that was bigger than yourself and you really weren't the chosen one who'll fix everyone's problem. I think we're starting to reach a point where people are getting tired of WoW, but going back to a game like EQ1 with modern graphics isn't what people are going to be reaching for. I feel like Guild Wars 2 would of been the closest thing we would of had to a paradigm shift in MMOs had there been a proper raiding endgame. It's still kind of a theme park, but it's a lot more free form and organic compared to talking to a generic NPC that wants you to gather exactly 15 bear asses and repeated ad nauseum. I think at this point rather than looking for a new MMO drug, a lot of them are just going to walk away from MMOs. Ever since WoW came out, most MMOs to come out since then have been trying to be a better WoW and they are failing because of it. When WoW came out, it wasn't trying to be EQ, or FFXI, or DAoC. It did it's own thing while being mindful of the mistakes of it's predecessors and launched a product that was in demand. Who knows, SOE seems to be putting a lot of time and focus on EQNext. Hopefully they learn the lessions of why Wildstar, Star Wars The Old Republic, and The Elder Scrolls Online are failing and learn from it because the MMO market is way too saturated for another WoW me-too game DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 19:07
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I feel like, if any MMO deserves the Final Fantasy 14 treatment of "Shut it down for a year or two to retool gameplay and graphics and re-release it", it is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It released absolutely dismally but had some really neat ideas for crafting and diplomacy and got significantly better post release after everyone stopped paying attention to it. You had a sprawling open world and enough landmass for non-instanced player housing. It had unique classes and class mechanics that made large differences in how you played your class vs others in the archetype. The Disciple was hands down the most fun time I've ever had with a healer in any MMO ever, simply because the game wanted you to wade in there and punch poo poo in the face so hard you healed your allies, and that's not to mention the combo system the class had where you string together your basic attacks to give yourself and your group buffs. It was possible to level to max just playing solo, but there were so many opportunities to run group content for amazing upgrades to leveling gear that it was highly incentivized to do so. I feel like the big problem with that game came primarily from mismanagement in it's development stages because most of what changed in that game post Brad McQuaid was generally for the better. It just so happened that everyone had forgotten about it by then and SOE didn't give them the support staff after that to accomplish the things they wanted to get done (Alternate Advancement, more raid content, ect).
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Aug 26, 2014 15:31
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pertinent posted:Well UO had a few things working against it on that part, namely that a single person with his horse could clear a forest in an afternoon. Now I don't mean to sound like I know it all, but have you ever seen a tree in real life? Not your average sidewalk or avenue trees, but trees that belong in an actual forest. They're huge! A guy with a horse chopping down and carrying off a fully grown oak tree, let alone doing it in an afternoon? Forget it. Absolutely not. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not preaching that you'd need the combined troops of a big guild to cut down a tree to get wood for tools and whatnot, but perhaps the better option is somewhere in between the two. A lumberjack spending an hour or two on cutting down a single tree, trimming it, strapping it to a horse and transporting it back to town isn't completely farfetched in my opinion. The better a lumberjack you are, the faster you can do all this, naturally. All that effort would of course have to be compensated in the sense that a log of wood actually contains a log's worth of wood when processed. The whole 1 log = 1 plank deal is just completely farfetched and doesn't fit very well in a game world with a destructable ecosystem. Now combine that with actual territory control and you'll have people fiercely defending their bit of forest, because I'd be damned angry if some muppet came and cut down my trees. In your example, what in the blue gently caress are you, the person, suppose to do in this hour that your avatar is loving around with this tree? Because waiting an hour on getting this log processed and moved sounds like the worst kind of bullshit tedious makework possible. Even if you made it a minigame I just straight up would not have the patience for a process even a quarter of that length. There's a reason why MMO harvesting is just a thing you click on to make magic wood appear in your bags; if it takes an hour to gather one tree's worth of wood only autists would ever bother with crafting.
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Aug 26, 2014 18:34
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pertinent posted:So hire an NPC to do it for you. Or an autist. So then you've literally just made an activity that only botnets would do and you don't see a problem with this? Here's the thing: I would love to have a more challenging MMO to play, but don't expect players to do that sort of bullshit, because as soon as you tell people that you could clear a dungeon in the time it takes to chop this tree down you've just guaranteed that you've lost that audience. Why not at that point just take harvesting completely out of the player's hands and just have a Neverwinter style hireling to magic logs out of a tree dimension every hour and a half and then not worry about players realistically chopping down trees in real time and its effect on the ecology of the world?
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Aug 26, 2014 19:02
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I think your problem is that you're conflating "Themepark" with "Bad Thing That I Don't Like Therefore No One Else Should Either". When I'm reading your post in my mind's eye I'm reading the word "themepark" with the same level of derision that hardcore WoW/Wildstar/ect players say the phrase "Welfare Epics" Second Life isn't an MMO at all, it's multiplayer Maya and the only funny thing about it is seeing a swarm of flying dicks whenever it shows up in the media. EQ, FF11, UO, and DAOC in their hayday were all very much sandbox experiences in that when you made a character it dropped you in a colossal uncaring world that gave you no objectives save for ones you gave yourself. All these games either are or are approaching 15 years old and expansions and patches have changed the games fundamentally from how they were at launch in order to keep up with the demands of consumers. City of Heroes/Villains is its own beast because the majority of the content you do when leveling up is running though procedurally generated missions, there really wasn't much of an overworld quest presence with people with ! over their heads, and when they were they were completely ignorable for the most part. It was only the very beginning and the very end of the game when you were getting quests from NPCs standing around waiting for you to show up. I get that you have this weird hard on for EVE, but I seriously doubt that you could get lightning to strike twice for that particular style of game. Just making EVE-But-With-Elves-And-Swords edition will bring in a dedicated hardcore PVP crowd, but as we are seeing with Wildstar, doing nothing but appealing to the hardcore is a surefire way to kill your game. You have to make the game as accessible as possible for the largest amount of people. In terms of subs/active players right now, the best non-WoW MMO is Final Fantasy 14 and it makes sense from a numbers perspective. It's incredibly accessible and easy to get into. It's a known brand and has name recognition vs some upstart new IP. After level 15 or so on a character you can put quests away and level pretty much solely on the duty finder and FATEs and hunting logs. It is also legitimately the best single player Final Fantasy experience in the last decade. Those things alone will guarantee that they have subs for a good long time to come. Right now the biggest thing hurting MMOs as a genre is oversaturation of the market. There is just too many MMOs out there and the majority of them are either striving to steal WoW's thunder and failing, or appealing to a niche market/nostalgia and treading water. We're also at this weird point where most of the big name MMOs that were coming out (ESO, SWTOR, Wildstar) are post release and the only big named MMO still on the development deck is EQ Next, and for all we know and have about the world with Landmark (creating a living breathing destructible world using the power of voxels is still kind of a weird sell for an MMO, but unique) we still really don't know what the finished game is going to play like and only have a conceptual idea of the class and combat systems are going to be (insofar as it seems like a weird blend of Final Fantasy's "switch between every class on one player" and Guild Wars' "You have 8 skill slots and have to switch between active abilities to fit the situation" sort of character customization.
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Aug 29, 2014 15:10
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Stanos posted:"Themeparks" aren't even really a bad thing per se either. Sometimes you want direction, aim and don't really want to think too hard about what to do next in your video game. Basically also this. Don't get me wrong, you can certainly incorporate sandbox elements and have things off the beaten path that never gets pointed out. I feel like MMOs would benefit from having areas off the golden leveling path that serve little purpose; at least then it makes the world feel bigger than a world solely made up of interconnected outposts that you bounce between to murder bears. I feel like one of the big conceptual differences between the EQ/UO era of MMOs and the things that came after it is that EQ and UO (and even WoW to an extent) were games that crafted their world and their lore first and foremost and the game was built up around that. Since that point it feels like MMOs have started with the gameplay, and proceeded to build the world to suit the gameplay, rather than the other way around. That's not a complete failsafe though, I feel like Vanguard did very good with their worldbuilding, then completely hosed the dog on having a good functional game at their launch. It took them like 2 years to un-gently caress the gameplay but by that point nobody gave a poo poo. I know I beat on this drum in several other threads in this subforum, but I actually really loved post launch Vanguard but by that point nobody played it and it got choked out by SOE. I feel like they could drop the Vanguard class system wholesale into the next EQ game and it would probably be a fantastic fit, but alas it's probably not meant to be. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Aug 29, 2014 |
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Aug 29, 2014 18:12
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Stanos posted:I don't know much about UO because I barely played it but lol @ the idea that EQ had crafting worth a poo poo for the majority of it. Outside of a few bursts of usefulness (Deity armor for Rallos worshippers, jewelry if you were an enchanter or could pester some poor sap to enchant hundreds of stacks of bars, earring of solstice, food later on and fletching overpowered bows during PoP) it's been mostly poo poo. I mean now there's some armor you can make that has aug slots from raids that might compete with other parts but I wouldn't exactly call it a raving success. Not to mention tradeskills are still massive money sinks and without a decent investment of AAs even more difficult and costly to make stuff. Now it's basically some okay weapons for fresh 100s and the crafted armor which is a massive pain in the rear end to finish but theoretically can get really busted with raid crafted augs that are also painful to make. Also this. Velious and beyond there was generally one thing that was useful from crafting per expansion. Velious had the Coldain shawl, which, while a useful item, was a horrendously grindy tradeskill quest that required you basically maxing out every tradeskill and still was a crapshoot of loosing materials and poo poo shows like that. Planes of power had the mid-tier craftable armor, who's patterns dropped from high end 6 mans and low-mid end raids of the time. I remember a lot of those patterns getting DKPed to people to gear out their fresh level 65 alts. Grinding up blacksmithing was stupidly loving expensive too because there really was no consistent way to get ore in the time I played pre-LDON because nothing really dropped ore in any discernible quantities. The vast majority of the ore you needed was vendor bought and that poo poo got pricey so quick. The one thing I give that game on it's tradeskills; there was something very zen about fishing. There tended to be enough downtime (when you were waiting for boats, waiting for people to get to you, waiting for a mob to pop, waiting for mana, ect, ect) that you usually had time to drop your pole, drink a beer, and play /gems until you were ready to go. Edit: Fletching was also super useful too, especially for an aspiring ranger. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 03:57
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