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Gort posted:This is kinda where I'm at. Your dev team will never be able to make content fast enough for your players to not get bored, so the only way to give your MMO any longevity is by making the players the content. Eve manages this by letting you put a flag down somewhere, make gear, and blow up vast quantities of game (and real) money fighting other players. Holy poo poo. This was the same idea building in my head too. Let me or my guild build a crazy base, hire guards and place them, give me some restrictions on level or cost or something so I can create content based on gear or level or something. Give me a reason for my content to be cleared successfully (this is a must). Force all stuff to stay online always (perhaps not the toon your playing). Huge skill trees that train like both EvE and ESO at the same time to prevent players from getting stuck. You could even steal EvEs idea for high mid and null sec. High has restrictions in size and level ranges, null has nothing. But seriously, you need a benefit to the builder to build content that gets cleared so that the crazy dungeon of doom actually gets seen. Perhaps more build points to go deeper etc.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:13
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Zaphod42 posted:
Your kinda spot on. If you look at the Hugo awards or other thing, Hard Sci Fi is about changing 1 or 2 elements of a modern world and exploring the what if scenario that results from those changes. The parallels between the 3 laws of robotics and today's self driving cars choosing to save the passenger or the car its about to hit is a problem that's coming up right now. You could say that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be a fairly good hard sci fi game (But not an MMO of course) as its dealing with a world where you can change anything about your body that you want, a world where male and female are lost to a range of options that we lack vocabulary for today. Also this world is not magic, we have all the elements today, they are just not quite like in Cyberpunk 2077. Transpose this to Warhammer 40k, an obvious fantasy world that just happens to have space ships. This world is not trying to explore human culture in the far off future, its simply trying to make a dark setting that could never exist.
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Sep 7, 2019 18:07
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Chomp8645 posted:This describes many game communities. I was around when learning skills got removed, Most of EVE felt it was a good idea since all new toons were useless for the first 4 months since the skills would reduce training by years at the time. For a newer game to take this model I'd add a catch up mechanism from launch such that a new player can catch up to the pack in so many months before slowing down. The elite guys who spend money on +5 implants and the like would still get their rewards, but the new guy would not be sitting in a frig while the entire universe is fighting in battleships, at least for not very long.
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Sep 11, 2019 18:31
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Toshimo posted:I think you've accurately identified why I read a lot of takes that don't care for tab targeting. I mean, if your going to use hit detection, I can actully put my tanks in front, healers and dps in back, open up flanking etc. I would be even more open if you use hit detection + stop at first hit (using a ray system I guess). If I fire 3 arrows it should hit 3 targets with tab targeting only giving me the direction of the center. Use the same rules for casters, give me defensive moves for rain like effects (shields up?). Ultimately this would give us the opportunity for a lot more tactics and better PVP encounters since you could use a range of hard and soft counters to what the other guy is doing.
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Sep 16, 2019 16:49
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Jazerus posted:i feel like sandboxes have a hell of a time reaching the critical mass that they need to not feel empty. eve is far and away the most successful sandbox in history and it still struggles to balance the "you've got empty space to do your own thing in" and "there are actually people around to interact with" ratio constantly. I am kinda shocked no one else has gone the EvE route. Lots of interconnected smaller zones, easy to travel but not to easy as roadblocks can be setup, and your class is based on the ship your flying. Empire zones have cops and some level of safety, outlands are lawless. This model would be great to expand on, setting up an outland could give you the ability to build strongholds, NPCs could be loyal to your faction, different regions have vastly different resources and bad guys could be a much larger range vs EvE as it could steal from fantasy. Even ideas like wormholes could be done via magical gateways, secret passages, or other planes of existence. Far as I can tell no one is willing to build a game in this style other then Everquest with its huge open world and zone lines.
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Dec 27, 2019 03:34
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Ossipago posted:
He still gives quarterly reports last I checked. I met him in Iceland some years back and he was rather cool to talk to. One of the best aspects of EvE was that expensive builds most of the time did not drive up the tier of what a ship could do. At the same time you had some level of rock paper scissors spock going on where most ships fitted weapons for their mirror Tier. Frigates could easily fight Frigates and harass Cruisers. Battleships could hit Cruisers but there weapons had a hard time tracking Frigates much less getting a direct hit. Some people might mount lower tier weapons and a few special classes of ships could fit much higher tier weapons (Stealth Bombers come to mind) in general you could not "Stomp" noobs and fight your own tier at the same time in a fair fight. In a Fantasy game you could do this with armor types (leather armor fast weapons might poke a knight to death while the knight can never land a blow using a big heavy claymore). The only real question I have is how to deal with the Zerg. Games like this fail because 300 on 300 fights slow down to a crawl and in general are not a lot of fun. Instance combat means "fair" combat but that breaks so much of what we're trying to do with a game like this.
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Jan 3, 2020 04:56
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I was there for the great BOB war. One of the best things we did in that war was break the fighting over a large area since BOB had a huge amount of space to cover and still used Zerg doctrine. Turned into a trail of tears as BOB players made for low sec. My small part was shutting down a few outposts with stealth bombers, which was a ton of fun back then. I can think of a few anti Zerg mechanics for a fantasy style game: Make some/most attacks AE type - This forces both sides to spread out since interlocking fields of fire will bring down a zerg fairly easily. Friendly fire - Ranged attacks and spells are not as good when hitting the backs of your melee. (Same for AE healing). Require simultaneous objectives - Fairly easy way to ensure teams are somewhat split up instead of standing on each other. DOTA style assistance on front lines - Each team gets NPC soldiers who make raiding parties and push forward into the other sides area (Only during wars of course) Theft of resources - Mining should take time and be done by NPCs (and player miners). Allow for theft of resources, NPC guards can and should have a fairly robust programmable AI system for guarding resources as well.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:22
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Eox posted:Pathfinder Online pitched hiring player mercenaries to escort your cart from town-to-town if you played an Expert or Commoner. You know, the joke classes in 3.5. That game had a lot of ideas that sound good on paper but collapse immediately under any form of scrutiny. NPC "Guards" have to be fairly strong else they become worthless vs real players. You have to make sure they cant be kited away, they have to be strong enough to fight back but not so strong that huge raids become the only way to fight them. Basically I have not found a good way to make them work unless the Expert or Commoner class are a pet class yelling at his troops (which would be funny).
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Jan 24, 2020 15:57
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Groovelord Neato posted:It's weird EverQuest had a superior questing system to the MMOs that came after it. And yes to all of that. Everquest had both ends of the questing system. Crushbone Belts and other quests like that were just dumb. They also got nerfed hard for some reason even though all they helped with was the 1-20 game. The Epic quests I think will forever be remembered, They were hard, required doing all the current content, and really ranged in difficulty like no ones business. I also recall the story of planes of power being just as crazy, as you toured the planes and killed most of the gods (of course once you kill your god, what do you have to fear after that?). That said, its really hard for game studios to make epic level quests. Its easy to do fetch and bear rear end quests. So we're going to get more of one and less of the other.
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Feb 5, 2020 18:41
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Ruggan posted:P much. PvP is only fun for most people as gank squads or if they win. Losing at PvP isn’t fun for almost anyone. "Open" PVP needs a risk reward system thats good enough to get your sheep to go into the wilds and away from guards, but the sheep also need lots of reasons to stay around the guards. Ultimately you need a robust and fairly large flock of sheep in the game for the game to continue working. Point is that when the wolf population gets to big, the wolves eat their own and the sheep stop playing. Alternative systems could exist, like wolves have to do sheep activities as well but even then I've seen groups game this system so they can hide with the guards, attack from NPC lands, and when the big alliance wants to stomp them they run away again.
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Feb 17, 2020 23:40
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Ruggan posted:The fix is to pay or imprison people to play your game as sheep Not as hard as you might think. Take a game of all wolves, but require sheep activities. Allow sheep activities to be automated via NPCs with a semi advanced scripting system. (if attacked, fire back, run away, dump cargo and run etc). In addition all attacks on your sheep get reported so you can deal with whomever is attacking your sheep. You could have real time (like EvE online) or in a more open world game think of building your squad of resource movers and give them a runner, a defender, and 2 guys with backpacks. It's even reasonable that the NPCs are worth more than the goods they are moving. In the event they do not show up you know someone is attacking your stuff and about where, if your runner shows up you know where the fight is, and if you have a mage he could open a portal to the convoy and you and your guild can come running out to fight. Now you have a game that is built around the fact that for every wolf there is 5-10 minions running around working for him and are prime targets for the wolves. I would assume that some players could ignore combat skills and become better builders or something, being able to work better then the NPCs doing the same work, but those guys would need to be members of guilds and keep out of the spot light. Still a crafting wizard could do something in combat if needed.
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Feb 18, 2020 04:37
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:Having territories change hands and companies setting tax rates and stuff sounds completely unworkable. It's the kind of thing that you might get in a weekend-long larp event, but that kind of things works there specifically because a) you have a guaranteed time and place where a bunch of players will definitely be gathered and playing the game, and b) people are actually present to talk and interact, which counts for a lot when you need some kind of structure and order to emerge from the giant mob of people you've assembled. You can do larger battles by making it almost required to break up into smaller groups. This can be as a matter of fact by making action combat with FFA and AOE being the default. Or by adding so many objectives that have to break your force into smaller groups. Only the "last stand" should come close to having everyone in the same small area and that can be programmed out by requiring cap points in various towers or the like.
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Feb 20, 2020 16:06
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yikes! posted:There was an MMO on heat.net I could think of a few ways to make this doable and fun. Guild's could own "Guarded" areas that protect your NPCs as they go about their business, guarded areas could be built around resources such that you equip your guards and a majority of your guards must be eliminated before your town becomes truly attackable. Each player could be asked to give 1-3 NPCs to guard duty to keep the area safer then the wilds. Towns castles and keeps could require siege engines to assault successfully which take time to setup and build, putting your workers at risk in both directions. For a more personal game you could kinda do it like kingdom under fire 2 but instead of squads you have individuals whom follow you around and as Fallout games have shown, people like dressing up their followers. The fun part is both types could be the same game.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:59
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that had players owning little plots of land (and they could own multiple plots with no limit) with automated resource extractors. The land was open to attack 24/7, except for their capital plot, and their guild would be notified and expected to defend it. The gameplay was like Battlezone where you ran around in third person with a gun but also commanded a squad of units to attack enemy defenses and units. My favorite part was that while all plots had the same amount of resources, their distribution varied as did the terrain of the plot. Plots with most of the resources clustered were rare and valuable - even more so if they were on defensible terrain too.
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Mursupitsku posted:I think the next popular MMO/MMO-like game will be first created as a heavily customized private server for an existing MMO. Much like literally every popular multiplayer game atm is a derivative of a mod for another game. Mobas, battleroyales, CS:GO and the list goes on. Runescape also had its popular iron man modes first adapted by players and later made into a proper game mode. There is an actully interesting alternative here. A game company could go through the cost and expense of making a tool kit like the one that shipped with Warcraft III for MMOs. Bethesda almost did that with how they made Fallout 4, they just keep the kit in house for the most part. A purpose built engine designed from the ground up to allow a huge amount of shared artwork and styles, painters for the world map, class editors, monster editors and a whole lot more. Point is if you could make it super easy to make an MMO, remove the backend tech for it and make it a pure "what do you want to design" aspect then hundreds of people could play with it, a few companies could barrow the engine and redo most aspects, and top partners could work with the Devs to create additional features all while allowing new core features to be added to the engine over time. Anyone who wants to launch would only then get hit with a fee, like a lot of modern engines do today. We could then get a wide range of MMO games that could range from cheap / free games done as POCs to full scale new games that could even easily purchase and integrate smaller projects into their own games.
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Mar 30, 2020 20:31
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:MMO engines run on hacks, hope, and prayers. Making them modular and easy to customize would be a trainwreck. Having seen the WoW code base, I can tell you that most modern WoW is modular and easy to design for. Boss scripting is only easier on FFXIV and most of the world design including layers and such are very robust. New code post firing most of the QA team is however ugly and rushed, the lords that be are demanding every dollar be tracked and fail to understand that releasing buggy messes is a bad thing for the long tail of the game. But WoW world files, and a lot of other stuff is often still stuck in the design system from classic, just layers of graphics on top of layers of older stuff with no good way to paint a landscape. You can best see this in any kind of cliff face where the textures sorta just stretch down instead of meshing well with the world. So ya, Someone needs to build RPG maker - MMO edition and remove the hacks.
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Mar 30, 2020 23:23
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Goast posted:was there ever any Wrath of the Lich King era of WOW
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Apr 2, 2020 04:12
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ESO was one of the games that suffered from loot cave spam. I just love the idea of setting a macro and ignoring my game for 5 hours while my skills level up. O wait the skills are also capped by player level and loot caves won't work well till I'm done leveling? Sigh. I could just go back to everquest for this abuse.
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Apr 15, 2020 05:43
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I think your describing the leveling question, Guild Wars 1 sorta attacked that by making leveling fairly short, and end game most of the game. So you can respond to this by: *No leveling or minimal leveling (tutorial more or less) *Skill usage based leveling (Skyrim / Elder Scrolls MMO) *Time based skills (EvE online) *Money based leveling (AKA you should be matched up with people of your same rank / wallet size) I think survival games currently fill most of the gaps in MMO games with the above issues, but as solidly pointed out, those games do not have zone creep going on where old content is devalued. In order to make an MMO today work the leveling system first needs to be flat or almost flat, such that a level 1 and 50 could reasonably run across each other in the world. Next is the issue with instance content vs open worlds. Instance content systems allow for fine control over clearing the content, you know the team has 5 or 6 members, can be expected to do x dps and x healing. You can even adjust NPC levels up or down on the fly to ensure it still takes 10 to 15 seconds to kill an NPC. Open world systems need A) a reason to keep to only a small group and B) enough space in the world that the players can spread out. Ultimately there is no simple choice here. Picking and choosing the systems to make a strong MMO is hard, impacted by server technology, and who knows what else.
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May 10, 2020 18:27
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blatman posted:I never played it but I remember someone telling me that for some reason in between the end of public testing and release the difficulty got pumped up through the roof, so all of the people who tested it and said it was fun were suddenly dumped into an entirely untuned game world when they bought a copy lol OMG at launch everything was such a bullet sponge, my only memory was "Always" running out of ammo. This totally explains why, Lets jack up HP, but we forgot to increase your ammo counts for the new HP.
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Nov 8, 2021 15:26
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Elendil004 posted:How is Myth of Empires? Translation problems for sure, needs polish as well, coming along and looks fun when its not beta.
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Nov 21, 2021 19:15
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Frog Act posted:same I've never found one I actually enjoyed outside of the early ones like The Forest which had an actual overriding singleplayer gameplay goal. I think they might be tolerable in the context of a really good setting with lots of lore and worldbuilding like the Conan game but that's like $120 and still has all the same problems every other game in the genre has. I just want a normal MMO that isn't WoW or FFXIV, it's a drat shame there aren't any other options and there probably won't be for the forseeable future. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - (Cough Cough) But your right, no one is going to make Everquest, Crafting games are like taking the big "see a living world" but we don't have the budget for a story. The tech behind New World is kinda exciting. The actual game was meh but they built that game with no vision at all. We are hitting the Era where you can have a massive on demand CPU handling an MMO world, a 2nd CPU for combat, 3rd (Or more) for NPC behavior to the point you could put very different concepts together just by tweaking what you want your game to be. Like take New World, but each time you hit the edge of the world your just moving to a new CPU and put all players on the same uber map. Some visionary could build this back end on today's tech, like a version of Unreal for MMOs where the map can generate out forever like Minecraft, NPCs could actully have brains and access to the same stuff as players etc. But of course most of the market just likes to tell the boss "It's like WOW!" so we never get anything cool.
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Nov 22, 2021 15:50
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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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jokes posted:Fun games don’t make enough money they should be jobs, it should be arduous getting there, doing things, and difficult to stop And this is of course the problem, AAA games must be akin to gambling, one more hit, chase the rabbit, always have some minor upgrade down the line. Indy games are akin to smaller stuff that is fun, but fun only lasts so long. And due to lack of Casino logic, never last that long. And the market has nothing in the middle anymore, your a casino or Indy now a days.
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Dec 14, 2021 14:57
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Endorph posted:cool conceptually, impossible in execution, itd just be 'hey everyone who regged within the first week and played 20 hours a day wins' Unless your server supports maps that are stupidly big, or "unlimited". or resources respawn in such a way that unpopulated areas become richer over time, while populated areas do not respawn.
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Dec 14, 2021 19:18
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Jazerus posted:this question of "how do you keep persistent worlds from devolving into who can poopsock the most" can only be answered by copying some of eve's structures. but which ones are the key ones? i don't think anyone really knows why eve works as well as it does in preventing permanent domination by the people who can play constantly. my take on it is that tying skill development and industry jobs to timers instead of playing is a big part of the secret sauce but it can't be the whole picture EvE "Works" for lots of reasons: Geographic Isolation - There are natural bottlenecks around the sectors, you dont have to guard everything, just up to your boarder NPC Safety - High Sec plays a huge role in trade between the empires. Players ship stuff in and out of there empires It takes Numbers - Each system has a base number of players it takes to "hold" said system. Time based skills - After a few months you cap out of any real advantage your training gives, The LONG skills (30 + days) give very small benifit vs the cost over the short ones which have huge impact for the time involved. Timers - Your always given timers so that a big battle has to be at least half in your prime time. EvE also fails because of a lot of reasons: Insane Micromanagement: Fuel pellet's for towers was not implemented for years alone, up till that point you had to put exact ratios of goods in towers to power them Trying to be to big: Numbers win fights. Numbers are only risky in a few small situations where the other side is dropping bombs. Real wars require holding land, with people spread over many combat fronts, EvE you almost always run, "Big fleet, staying together" because nothing in the game causes problems (the real world, things like friendly fire, big guns, and non combat soft targets require guards (24/7). You cant reasonably put all your manpower in a single spot and be effective.
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Dec 14, 2021 19:35
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#SomeChange - You had stuff that more or less had to be changed. Not playing because your world buffs are going to expire is just silly. Bot cartel's owning all the high end mats, not good as well. In fact servers had 4 or 5 times the population but with no changes to spawn systems mean your just going to get owned. True classic my server had 2-3 raiding guilds who ran the same time as my guild, we got lagged out any time any team was doing Vael. If you think Vael is hard, try to do it when taunt can fail for no good reason and you have a window of about 4 seconds for the next tank to pick up the boss AND get heals moved to that tank because this is a 4 tank fight. Modern gamers vs Classic WOW is a true no win situation, bugs are just well known, information moves much faster, and modern tools mean people know what is going on and the effect of various interconnected systems. Then we get the bots, OMG the bots, you can figure them out in short order but no back end data guy is there hunting them in the logs at all. I mean here are a few I can come up with in short order... - Toon is in the same area for hours, days, longer then any human would ever stick around - Toon is in the game for more then 18 hours a day (days in a row, not on new xpac launch) - Toon is overusing the same action (pick pocket) longer then any normal account would need for acheav etc. Half of the above could even be made open ended to detect new attacks as soon as the community finds them. That poo poo where hunters were doing DM endlessly, or rogues where pickpocketing endlessly in an instance would all quickly climb to the top of one of the above lists and warrant a GM looking to see what's going on. Sure, super advanced AI systems that play almost like players like a PVP heal bot who follows someone around, heals them, nukes targets occasionally might be indistinguishable from a real player, but we're not really looking for that, we're looking for the dumb bots who gather on top of mining nodes, or camp low level mini dungeons for cash selling, and the stats really do not lie for stuff like that, but few games ever use stats like this.
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Dec 17, 2021 04:34
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blatman posted:does that mean that OG c'thun wasn't actually mathematically impossible to beat before the fixes? I remember that being a whole thing way back in the day By the time he was released connections and content was getting "better". Ultimately c'thun's RNG was punishingly bad as you needed several perfect things happen, healers never getting targeted for special effects, and even then your a few million damage in the last phase away from being successful.
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Dec 17, 2021 16:25
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Here is another short animation that sums up what happened to WoW This is perfect, the OG game was all about the journey, the end game was the start of new journeys (keying for raids, doing other stuff) This plays into the best part of D&D being when your low or mid level, access to level 9 spells casting doom and wish are end game events that signal time to start a new game.
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Dec 17, 2021 16:27
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Anno posted:STO/Neverwinter seem to be doing pretty well going by some of the investor material released this morning. I think PW just took a major blow with how hard Magic: Legends bombed. I played the Magic Beta, it was not worth anyone's time and the systems made no real sense. Diablo + card battler is not a game anyone asked for.
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Dec 21, 2021 21:26
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Harrow posted:I imagine it's just easier to make something like Destiny than to make a true shooter-MMO. Games like Destiny and The Division capture at least some of what a modern shooter-MMO would be while likely being cheaper and easier to develop because they don't need big MMO zones or actual massive multiplayer. And even then, the majority of those looter-shooter games crash and burn on arrival just like new MMOs seem to. Shooters are "Technically" Hard, bullet physics is not easy to get right at all for a whole list of reasons. Do bullets drop, are they hitscan, do people die in a few hits, few headshots, or a lot of hits. You can have hyper realistic, which makes the game do a LOT more calculations, or cartoony like a wow Hunter with tab targeting or anything between the two. Toss a server in the middle on a game that needs sub .15 sec ping and running a small battleground of 100 people is about the limit of todays tech with out solving even harder problems.
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Jan 4, 2022 21:00
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Vinestalk posted:...irrational bias against Unity Engine, though. Don't, its a poor engine for MMOs. None of the current market big name engines are really built for MMOs. Unity and Unreal are great at small / midsize maps. They have flaws with all the shortcuts they do around optimization, things outside the local area of the player are often simplified or not modeled at all, all of those things need to be reconfigured. Amazon needed a huge effort to make Lumberyard and they still could not make it work with all the bugs. Hell it was hit by Log4J in the chat box. In a digital generation or 2 someone might make an engine for MMOs, showing people how to run 100 people in a small area, 1000 people on a huge map, endless maps (aka Minecraft) and all the issues around it so you can make an MMO like you can make a shooter today. Till that day comes, we're stuck with reinventing the wheel and $50 mil minimum to get into the industry.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:50
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jokes posted:Here's my theory: I think players, especially online players, who grind things kind of value it based on a rewards / time) function. So even if the rewards are the same, then they'll optimize for efficiency of time. One of the systems I think would work here is a system that makes things people are not doing more productive over time. Today daily's are hot, tomorrow its PVP, the day after something else. Sliding scale that stuff so that people who only want to do one thing can still do it, but people can also go after different stuff since the value you get goes up over time. Cardboard Fox posted:Is it an issue with technology? We can make skin appear as real as our own, but can't explain to a computer how to create an interesting world? I've made "interesting" AIs in the past for mobs, they work better with EQ type games where fights last 2-3 min vs several people and mostly do not work at all in WOW type games where mobs are dead in 15 sec or less. Making an AI that can mess with the world you have a bit more hope for. The "Director" for Left 4 Dead is a really good example because it manages pace, gives you lulls and ramps up and down difficulty to ensure interesting play. You could create mini directors in a game like WoW that could manage spawn times in the area around you, create extra mobs if your having to easy of a time, throttle back damage if it spawns 8 dudes on top of you at once and do all kinds of other hidden effects. Join a party and your director adjusts to the party (or to the number of people in a semi defined area). WOW kind of does this because it adjusts HP to ensure some types of fights take about so much time based on how many people are in combat with the target and dynamically adjusts the HP pool to keep the fight long enough to see what the mob can do to a degree. An even better system could be a Zone Director. Think Rim World, Elwin forest has a ton of noobs today, lets spawn something level appropriate for the zone, or send a band of Horde on wolves through, or who knows what else could be on the zone table for mini events. This would be a layer on top of the static spawns of wolves and stuff normally found in the zone. Some games handle environmental effects so stuff like changing weather could be done (snow that actully piles up and you can walk through is found in Unreal for example). Finally, the zone stories need not all be combat or "Public Quest" style but could just be amusing. Elwin Forest could have merchants spawn and go to and from Stormwind, they could be flagged as attackable neutral because they are really from the Defias brotherhood. The key thing about a Zone director would be that it adjusts to the current in level players in the area and it cant be just a public quest system, it needs some level of just making theme appropriate things happen above and beyond the static quests going on. Ra Ra Rasputin posted:You'd probably need people to act like dungeon masters or GM's who can go on a server and say "I'm feeling like a undead army today, I'll control this lich boss and take over the village of Townshire and enable the undead_invasion_quest system" There is a game trying to do this. War of Dragnorox is about 2 years away but at least its trying. I cant tell if its calming internal GMs or public GMs (aka something close to never winter).
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Jan 15, 2022 05:42
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bewilderment posted:Yeah the Hunt Train system in FF14 is an example of this. Ahh swarming with numbers... some games give bosses more hp per added player. Others split the loot and xp over the number of players so you get very little swarming. EVE online numbers are still king as well. Every dang game needs to address the numbers problem and sometimes solutions are easy, other times they can be a pain and don't get solved. Early in WoWs life there were uber bosses who got stronger for each kill while also doing AE damage. Of course this ended with trolls mostly being the winners. Short term instances has been a solution here moving the fight out of the open world so it could be balanced. End of the day Rust shows the problem best, some groups love to swarm (Chinese invade servers in mass commonly) so games need tricks to split people up better or to make large groups not good for some reason.
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Jan 15, 2022 17:38
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30.5 Days posted:And player hoarding duplicate sets is kind of the expected/desired/correct behavior in a full-loot game. To be fair, they were learning that players HOARD everything in real time. This was the first of its kind so not as clear cut as it could have been.
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Jan 17, 2022 02:02
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knox posted:Can't be good. There was a reason the CEO had not been fired yet, Selling the firm to Microsoft is a great way to make an exit since everyone on the board gets a really nice bonus and can exit quietly over the next few months.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:59
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Hellioning posted:I can't wait for WoW players to start to be nostalgic about the pre-Microsoft era. Most of us still cant forget the pre- Activision era. Blizzard was a very special firm from a very special time with almost unlimited money to make good games and not release them till they were fun and done. Today we get god knows what, but internal people have spoken up saying, "Does this fit our monetization strategy?"
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Jan 18, 2022 18:47
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Groovelord Neato posted:Had to halve their clip size when they did the PC port because of how strong he was. Hmm having issues with sniper characters guess they're more alike than I thought. Seriously, snipers in RL are a poo poo job that have you climbing through trees and pissing your pants. The best snipers would have the other side dropping enough artillery fire to level a grid square on the map. But today you have equipment that tells you the direction of fire, smoke poppers to block line of sight, and god knows what else. Games can give us counter sniper skills, they choose not to.
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Jan 19, 2022 16:44
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Groovelord Neato posted:That's strange because there have been points where the game was strangled at the pro level by certain strats that grew out of the game's poor design. Yep, Funny stuff like all tanks forcing a 2x2x2 comp and god knows what else after I stopped watching this stuff.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:44
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CuddleCryptid posted:But how will I enjoy my videyo game if there isn't a microscopic chance that if I put in 100x more effort than is fun to play it then I might win the equivalent of a single day's income for a rich person. Then my mom might be right, it is just a waste of time and not a growth opportunity. The normal E-Sports players are earning $50k to $100k. Perhaps a bit more from Twitch etc. Any choice career should earn this kind of money AND last longer since players generally fall out at around 26.
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Jan 20, 2022 01:56
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:56 |
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Kevin Bacon posted:so who else here is excited to finally leave the real world and spend the rest of their days in a vr mmorpg? Got my full feedback suit and "microwave your brain if you die in game" headset ready to go!
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Jan 20, 2022 15:46
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