2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era

Cybsled · May 4, 2019

Which makes sense, but it also dilutes how much input any one individual has. Which is fine, but you also want to balance that between the player's ego as well. So for example:

Month one of MMO: Town of Derp is attacked by orcs. They are hiring mercs to help defend the town. You are part of a nameless band of mercs to go defend it.
Month two of MMO or whatever: You've helped build up defenses, orcs aren't attacking as much but there is still a risk
Month three of MMO or whatever: You've saved the town and ensured the orcs won't attack again
Month ? of the MMO: You get a quest from a person who remembers you from the town defense. Maybe one of the sub quests is you had to save someone and it's that guy and he will always remember what you did. Quest brings you back to the town where some thankful people whose lives you changed/saved let you know they'll always remember what you did, etc.

Stuff like that which can build upon itself. Now the trick is balancing that with newcomers. Games new blood or they die, so the real trick is balancing your character's feats/etc and a storied history in the game, but also making it possible for newer players to achieve something similar given enough time. You don't want new people to feel like that because they missed so much, they'll never get the same thing you have. But on the flipside, as the game gets older, those original players become less and less, so what do the devs focus on? Creating more content for a slowly diminishing playerbase, or focus on retaining and attracting new folks?

Meech · May 4, 2019

Ukerric · May 5, 2019

Randin said:
When it comes to quests, I'd say the problem is less about exp and loot, and more about the ... I guess we can say the narrative aspects of them. Quests nowadays are just busy work that exist to give a little more context to growing your numbers than a simple grindfest does. And that was a nice change of pace back when WoW and EQ2 were coming out. But now, developers need to grow MMO quest design beyond that.

And that's why I'm mostly against quests as a main mechanic for leveling/gearing. Fact is, it costs a lot to make interesting quests, so the quests become disguised mob grinding. Except you have a very specific amount to grind, not one more, not one less (ok, slightly variable when it's "bring me bear asses"). But, by shifting rewards from the mobs to the quest, you eliminate choices. I have zero reason to kill the wolves at all, UNLESS a quest gives me one. Because wolves don't give me lots of XP, the quest does. Or, rather, I am expected to replace at least four items every level, and if I grind on the wolves (and get some skins for leatherworking) I do not get gear at all.

So, having quests that reward XP and gear robs the player of choices. There's a limited set of quests you can do, and you will do them, because nothing else matters. That's why invasions were so popular on WoW. They broke the rail by offering a comparable (or even faster) way of getting XP and gear.

But the main problem is that, if you rely on quests, then your game is doomed. It IS the WoW formula, and we've seen how costly it has become to execute well. Because quest do not scale. If I want to double the number of quests, then I HAVE to double the number of man-hours devoted to making them.

Cybsled said:
at which point the devs would ask what the hell is the point in investing resources into something people aren't going to use.

And the same argument comes back. At one point, you have enough quests to lead the players to the max level, so what the hell is the point in investing resources into making more? And thus, you end up with the linear rails of WoW and every single game. Because making quests cost a lot than making a world.

Which brings me back to innovation. We know innovation is going to come from indy MMOs, because every AAA MMO (if any, LOL) is playing safe with quests, and end up with the same problem. A 50-hour narrative that has cost 40 people 1 year to write, at which point the producer says "enough" and the game ship. And indy devs don't have the manpower to do that as well as WoW does. So a new MMO needs to get away from the quest-to-level paradigm, or they're doomed.

Or we can wait for 15 years until we have AI that writes a new questline for every player.

jayrebb · May 5, 2019

I forgot about ArchAge. Doesn't really get the shine it deserves.

Last real open world game?

Cybsled · May 5, 2019

Archeage is probably the closest we came to what Shadowbane tried to do, but unlike Shadowbane, it has a lot more content than "95% of our gameworld is empty fields".

TJT · May 5, 2019

It really pains me how much WOW has hurt MMO design in the long run.

Even moreso now that I read some various novels that capture the best part of the MMO. Being thrust into the unknown where you're nobody. But can be whatever you want! Yeah yeah sounds dumb I know but beyond the unavoidable video game aspects (mechanic wise) of it the point of the MMO is to capture that old DND feeling.

Ukerric · May 5, 2019

TJT said:
It really pains me how much WOW has hurt MMO design in the long run.

WoW succeeded (commercially) by applying a single player RPG over the MMO part. It still had to fill the parts beyond the RPG (when you've finished leveling and exhausted your quests), which it did more or less adequately.

The big problem is that it applied a game paradigm to a different game genre, and locked the entire genre into that old paradigm. Every MMO that has come out in the recent year has tried to copy the winning formula, but failed. Almost no one managed to make a different game.

The only different games are asian grinders, but the grinding is "polluted" by the F2P/Microtransaction model that prevent them from doing good rewards in-game since they need you to go to their store.

Even moreso now that I read soem various novels that capture the best part of the MMO. Being thrust into the unknown where you're nobody. But can be whatever you want! Yeah yeah sounds dumb I know but beyond the unavoidable video game aspects (mechanic wise) of it the point of the MMO is to capture that old DND feeling.

LitRPG imagines the ideal MMO. But every litRPG novel knows that you need a massive procedural/AI system to generate the content, because no human designer team is ever going to be able to produce content faster than it is consumed.

Which is why I repeatedly advocate that the next era in MMO is going to come from procedural content generation. The current formula has mostly reached its limits, even if you have the former Blizzard budgets (since Activision is slowly strangling the innovation out of Blizzard for "production discipline")

Chris · May 5, 2019

Sadre Spinegnawer said:
persistent world mmo's used to be able to thrive just because they were absolutely new -- as if D&D turned into a 24/7 online comunity.

IMO, given how used to such a world so many are now, a real question arises how to throttle content. EQ2 introduced the need for item repair, for example; some classes had to foot very pricey repairs aftaer every raid, hence the guild needs to earn plat, and so forth.

mmo question 1: friction, how?

I play a mobile game called Final Fantasy Record Keeper and it's kept my attention for 4 years. Their solution is having no friction at all which is unlike any other mobile game I've played that has you grinding shit constantly.

They have one event every week and 1-2 event every month which is equivalent to your regular zones, then 1-2 event every month which are equivalent to your endgame raids. The regular events have 75% reused content from old events with new rewards and are time limited, the endgame events are permenent but extremely difficult. The regular content can be beaten once and not done again, the endgame stuff some of it has an incentive to beat it more than once but you wouldn't really do most of the bosses into double digit clears.

So here's what you could do:

Each zone has regular levelling content like MMOs do now, perhaps a story driven single player experience like FF14 and WoW have now.
There are weekly updates where one zone had new content. Mostly time limited endgame stuff but you leave a few mobs behind afterwards, that'll funnel all of the players into the same zone for easy grouping and community building.
Have endgame updates build into alternate advancement so there's reason to do the weekly content in zones.

I don't know why WoW for example can't just phase out everything in an old zone for a week and put a load of max level enemies there with great crafting drops.

Like Hinterlands (remember that zone?) has been invaded by Zul'Amam trolls so all the troll settlements are now max level elites and drop troll crafting mats and there's roaming raid boss war parties patrolling which drop recipes for max level troll themed gear.

The zone is already designed. Phasing out zones is tech they have (see Darkshore). Making mobs max level is just database numbers. The art for the mobs and gear was already done when they made Zul'Aman years ago. The new itemisation is just text strings. Copy/paste old raid bosses to spice things up.

People are running old raids for transmog and doing shitty copy/paste world quests for catchup gear, so at least funnel people into doing the same stuff together and having variety with different themed weeks.

Bonus points for adding new content along with it and leaving behind improvements to the zone. How about troll regeneration as a new stat (The old HP/5 thing from vanilla) and enemies which punish you for not being at max health and have a degeneration aura? So the new stat helps with the new enemies.

Then have raids only give mostly Heart of Azeroth stuff so players need to be out in the world getting geared up.

Neranja · May 5, 2019

Ravishing said:
Hah, what the fuck? Of course there's nothing tangible, this is a gaming forum. Where did you think you were? Which is why all your drivel about design docs and funding has been so absurd. Welcome to a discussion forum, not Arm Chair Games Inc.

So you don't want to discuss, just mentally masturbate how great ideas you have and lament the fact that no publisher is funding those "great" ideas. Got it.

Neranja · May 5, 2019

Randin said:
Well, when I say that quests need a degree of permanence, I don't mean that they need to be one-offs, just that the results need to stick for a reasonable amount of time.

The bigger problem is "repeatability" and "access" to content, because if you make content only available to a select few (the first to discover and actually accomplish said permanent change in the world) you breed resentment from other players, especially those that don't have as much free time to invest into the game. They will just leave if they have the feeling they can never catch up. One example is the Ahn'Qiraj opening event in WoW, where you needed to be up to the quest/rep and bang the gong.

Honestly, the phasing system WoW introduced could implement such mechanics where you see the results of your actions in the world (think Dragonblight questline up to Wrathgate), but the negative impact is you .. well, have phasing, where your playerbase segregates into haves and have-nots, which is basically the antithesis of classic MMO design. The WoW classic crowd is so adamant about no sharding, but I guess they do have a point.

Neranja · May 5, 2019

Chris said:
I don't know why WoW for example can't just phase out everything in an old zone for a week and put a load of max level enemies there with great crafting drops.

Because their content creation pipeline is currently hard at work to create the next expansion to sell to you, especially the story, quest, itemization and scripting people, which you would need for something like that. At this point the rough draft of the new zones is most likely already finished and the art&assets people are doing detail work on it. This is also the reason why they said "classes are stuck until the next expansion."

WoW never really had the differentiation between a "live" team and and "next expansion" team. Having both needs good producers so both teams can communicate and scale well. If you don't have access to that many talented people the corporation will focus on what brings in the most money.

Its like in software development: throwing double the amount of developers on a problem doesn't magically make the work finish in half the time.

Locnar · May 5, 2019

No theory crafting needed, the ideal formula has already been created and now just needs to be replicated: 1999 to 2001 era EQ.

But you can't fuk with the components, the medicine only works as a full and complete dose. No pussy moves like getting rid of boats because "too tedious" or hell levels. All those things, every single one of them, played a part that made the whole so perfect.

Chris · May 5, 2019

Neranja said:
Because their content creation pipeline is currently hard at work to create the next expansion to sell to you, especially the story, quest, itemization and scripting people, which you would need for something like that. At this point the rough draft of the new zones is most likely already finished and the art&assets people are doing detail work on it. This is also the reason why they said "classes are stuck until the next expansion."

WoW never really had the differentiation between a "live" team and and "next expansion" team. Having both needs good producers so both teams can communicate and scale well. If you don't have access to that many talented people the corporation will focus on what brings in the most money.

Its like in software development: throwing double the amount of developers on a problem doesn't magically make the work finish in half the time.

Yeah their leadership is shocking. If they actually had a live team surely they would need expansions less often and would retain more customers? It would save money. They publically doubled their staff but are putting out less content it seems.

Ukerric · May 5, 2019

Neranja said:
Because their content creation pipeline is currently hard at work to create the next expansion to sell to you, especially the story, quest, itemization and scripting people, which you would need for something like that. At this point the rough draft of the new zones is most likely already finished and the art&assets people are doing detail work on it.

And they have about six months to have a mostly showable demo for Blizzcon where they'll announce it.

Producing episodic content is hard unless you have specifically organized your production pipeline around it. Asheron's Call did it, but they had a world designed for it. By now, retrofitting WoW for episodic content would probably be very hard.

Cybsled · May 5, 2019

Locnar said:
No theory crafting needed, the ideal formula has already been created and now just needs to be replicated: 1999 to 2001 era EQ.

But you can't fuk with the components, the medicine only works as a full and complete dose. No pussy moves like getting rid of boats because "too tedious" or hell levels. All those things, every single one of them, played a part that made the whole so perfect.

That formula -WAS- replicated back in the day. People forget that pre-WoW, EQ1 was used as the model. FFXI? Hell levels, long voyages/travel times, virtually no soloing. Even shit like Camelot or AO or whatever. The Korean MMOs more or less ran with the same base design back then (and still lingers to this day). Hell, even FFXIV pre-ARR borrowed heavily from FFXI/EQ1. The usage of such archaic mechanics actually played a large part in FFXIV pre-ARR FLOPPING. It took them literally gutting the entire game and rebuilding it almost totally from scratch to make it something the market actually wanted to play and now it is considered one of the best MMOs on the market.

EQ1 was never perfect. It was a lot of fun back in the day because there had never been anything like it on that scale and created in that way. But trying to say it was "perfect" and game devs should just recreate it whole cloth? That is the gamer equivalent of a fucking hipster. "Modern TV is garbage, we should go back to the 80s era when there was no story arcs and no continuity and everything was a bottle episode where the good guys always won each week! YEAAA!!!!"

Pharone · May 6, 2019

Cybsled said:
That formula -WAS- replicated back in the day. People forget that pre-WoW, EQ1 was used as the model. FFXI? Hell levels, long voyages/travel times, virtually no soloing. Even shit like Camelot or AO or whatever. The Korean MMOs more or less ran with the same base design back then (and still lingers to this day). Hell, even FFXIV pre-ARR borrowed heavily from FFXI/EQ1. The usage of such archaic mechanics actually played a large part in FFXIV pre-ARR FLOPPING. It took them literally gutting the entire game and rebuilding it almost totally from scratch to make it something the market actually wanted to play and now it is considered one of the best MMOs on the market.

EQ1 was never perfect. It was a lot of fun back in the day because there had never been anything like it on that scale and created in that way. But trying to say it was "perfect" and game devs should just recreate it whole cloth? That is the gamer equivalent of a fucking hipster. "Modern TV is garbage, we should go back to the 80s era when there was no story arcs and no continuity and everything was a bottle episode where the good guys always won each week! YEAAA!!!!"

I couldn't disagree more with you on this if I tried, and here's the reason why... I still play the God damned game 20 years after it came out.

Just like all of you, I've played damn near every tripple A MMORPG that has come out of the past two decades, and THE ONLY ONE that keeps bringing me back is EverQuest.

And, let me clarify something on that. It is NOT modern EverQuest that keeps bringing me back. I hate modern EverQuest. I always play on the TLP servers when they come around. When I am not doing that, I create new characters on Live servers, and just play through the first 70ish levels.

I have played through the first 70ish levels on more characters over the past two decades than I can even remember. It's insane how many times I have played through the same exact content in EverQuest. I don't know why I do it. I just do. It's the ONLY MMORPG that does it for me.

If that makes me a hipster, then so be it, but I know what I like, and EverQuest level 1 to 70 is what I like. I just want another one of that same shit. Give me new lore, new content, updated graphics, and updated UI. Keep the classes and game mechanics the same. That's all I ask.

Cybsled · May 6, 2019

Well I’m glad you like it still. I got sick of it after we broke into the elemental planes in PoP. Good luck finding a developer willing to spend millions to update the graphics / engine of a 20 year old MMO for a small, but dedicated, group.

Neranja · May 7, 2019

Pharone said:
It's insane how many times I have played through the same exact content in EverQuest. I don't know why I do it. I just do. It's the ONLY MMORPG that does it for me.

Because it fits you like a worn old glove, and you compare everything to your first love. She may had ugly tits (four polygons), but she took your virginity!

Pharone said:
I just want another one of that same shit. Give me new lore, new content, updated graphics, and updated UI. Keep the classes and game mechanics the same. That's all I ask.

... and here is where I am not sold on that. Because a lot of "I replay the shit out of old video games, why doesn't anyone make such great games anymore" crowd has aversion to change. You feel at home in the old world. You know what there is to know and on each playthrough you discover only minutiae. Your path to 70 is already set in your mind when you start at level 1.

On Bartle's Player Taxonomy such people score really low in exploration, so a new world to explore is never a boon to them. Updated graphics? That would only make the zones and pathing different, making pulling more complicated. You'd have to learn new things!

Gaming companies try to ignore these kinds of gamers because their number are really low, but they are really vocal about any and all changes. When remaking old games they try to focus to bring these old games to a new audience instead of selling it to a small nostalgia crowd of very difficult customers.

mkopec · May 7, 2019

Let see how popular the new World of Warcraft prog servers are. This will be really interesting to see if they end up being popular. Granted, its WoW and not EQ, but still WoW circa 2004 is like night and day from the WoW we have today.

I have a feeling they will make a killing.

Pharone · May 7, 2019

I like the idea of the WoW Classic servers, and I will definitely give it a shot to get some old school WoW nostalgia out of my system.

The only problem I find with the idea of TLP/Classic servers in EverQuest and now World of Warcraft is that I feel that the companies fail to capitalize on what is driving the desire for these servers in the first place.

To fully realize the potential of these servers, IF they are successful, the developers should be creating an alternate branch of the game that continues on with new expansions based on the game mechanics that made people want to come back and play on these servers in the first place rather than continuing their progression beyond the point where people stopped liking these games in the first place.

For instance, with EverQuest, it is arguable that many people liked EverQuest up through Planes of Power if not through Omens of War. It was some time after that for which the game's design greatly changed a little here, there, and so on. People like EverQuest circa 2000-2002ish. DBG, or who ever ends up owning EverQuest when DBG goes under eventually, should capitalize on the desire of old school EverQuest fans by creating NEW expansions for TLP servers only that picks up right after Shadows of Luclin and continues the story in an alternate reality that does not match that of Live EverQuest.

The lore would be easy for it because they can say that the Gods realized their errors in the Planes of Power era. They worked together to go back in time and alter what happened after the Luclin era which caused reality to branch in a new direction. The Plane of Knowledge would end up not being opened to Norrathians in order to keep them out of the Planes.

There would be no Plane of Knowledge which would greatly alter the way the game is played in and of itself. Since there would be none of the old expansions beyond Shadows of Luclin, they could revert Freeport back to it's old version (yes it's available. you can play it today on emulated servers. The files still exist on your client). They could make the game more designed around your capital cities like the old days rather than a central meeting place like PoK.

In order to remove The Nexus as being the one place that everybody goes instead of the Plane of Knowledge, they can say that the effects of the altered time line ended up causing the moon of Luclin to phase out of existence in this altered reality. It exists in the old time line, and phases between the two once a year. Then they could turn the zones of Luclin in to a yearly anniversary event where it is only available during the anniversary events every year.

Anyway... just my two cents.

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2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era

Cybsled

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Meech

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Ukerric

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jayrebb

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Cybsled

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TJT

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Ukerric

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Chris

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Neranja

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Locnar

Chris

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Ukerric

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Cybsled

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Pharone

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Cybsled

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Neranja

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Pharone

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