Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
- 2,091
- 312
EQ2 did that as well but that is still instancing. You have these “No instancing” purists who flip out over this stuff. Makes practical sense to me though.
2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era
- Thread starter Ukerric
- Start date
EQ2 did that as well but that is still instancing. You have these “No instancing” purists who flip out over this stuff. Makes practical sense to me though.
- 25,425
- 37,545
There is gonna be purists of all sorts bitching about the decisions you make in your game. But its really up to you to design something that makes sense as a game dev.
For instance the purists that always bitched at the POK books, while I thought they were a great addition to the game at the time. Having to take 2 hours to traverse 75 zones hugging the outer walls of the zones not to get aggro to meet up with your buddy is not fun.
For instance the purists that always bitched at the POK books, while I thought they were a great addition to the game at the time. Having to take 2 hours to traverse 75 zones hugging the outer walls of the zones not to get aggro to meet up with your buddy is not fun.
- 4,107
- 4,043
At some point, too, the tastes of younger players start to impact the ideas of what is "good design."
I always felt the ability to get around the world, traveling from zone A to zone Z, was part of the skillz. Who ares if it took an hour to get to the raid zone or to a group?
But that is very old fashioned. Lots of younger players want fast and ez travel. There are many differences like this, based on when your best gaming years were.
These kinds of differences just multiply how hard it would be to make a popular mmo today. If we take eq1 as our baseline, we are talking 20 years of gamers. How to please enough people to merit a subscription??
The list of controversial design aspects would be pages long. I like having to play in a game where a wipe means a lengthy CR. But that is because of when I had the most fun was those days. Lots of younger players are like wtf, who needs these time sinks?
I always felt the ability to get around the world, traveling from zone A to zone Z, was part of the skillz. Who ares if it took an hour to get to the raid zone or to a group?
But that is very old fashioned. Lots of younger players want fast and ez travel. There are many differences like this, based on when your best gaming years were.
These kinds of differences just multiply how hard it would be to make a popular mmo today. If we take eq1 as our baseline, we are talking 20 years of gamers. How to please enough people to merit a subscription??
The list of controversial design aspects would be pages long. I like having to play in a game where a wipe means a lengthy CR. But that is because of when I had the most fun was those days. Lots of younger players are like wtf, who needs these time sinks?
- 4,107
- 4,043
I think one idea that was never fully explored was the ability to play an npc. It would be fun to be able to log on and be randomly assigned to be an npc. Most of the times you pop into the world as a drybone skellie in lavastorm, or a giant kodiak in commonlands. But every so often you maybe get to be a fire giant, or even nagafen. I could imagine really enjoying just spending a night being various npc's and causing some unexpected havoc. Imagine being a griffin in commonlands.or sgt slate. Sure, you *will* be killed, but it is fun to think about how to maybe cause some mischief before people catch on you are a player and not a true npc.
I could OWN as a bixie.
I could OWN as a bixie.
- 2,605
- 4,143
This wouldn't really work and would be received as an artificial timesink by the majority of the current playerbase - the very thing the current WoW playerbase resents Blizzard for.
WoW had too much of an impact on the scene and expectations. The first raiding guild accused of cheating in WoW retaliated by posting their strategies publicly, and this changed the expectations and landscape forever. We now have world first races streamed live on Twitch.
Not only do we live in a Post-Thottbot gaming culture, but the players have built tools to reverse engineer the game to datamine every little change that is pushed out of the CDN to the playerbase.
- 1
- 2,605
- 4,143
From what we have heard the original "Vision" for EverQuest designed those dungeons as places you crawl through. If you are lucky you find a rare with loot on your way. The mob levels differed greatly because at some point you were too low to venture further inward, so you planned to get stronger and come back later to fully explore the dungeon. Remember the mythical anti-camp radius for rare spawns?
Like the ring events in Shadows of Luclin? Yeah, players don't seem to have that much fond memories of those.
Camping isn't the pinnacle of MMORPG design, it is specifically the min/max solution poopsocking players came up with to maximize their gain (xp, money or loot) with minimum effort.
There is no real solution to the "content is consumed faster than it is created" problem. You can only alleviate it.
There are interesting examples like FFXIV where Yoshi-P once said that they are not aiming to make it into a "full-time, you can only exclusively play this one game because you won't have time for anything else" game out of it, and it's OK when people unsubscribe if they come back later.
The best solution is to streamline your content creation pipeline. This, however, requires a lot of investment into your tools. If it takes a whole day to build a new release to push out to testing you have already lost.
Ravishing
Uninspiring Title
- 8,452
- 3,577
I mean... this right here shows you don't read posts. I literally said this in the sentence right after.
You sound like a disgruntled game designer.
Streamlining content creation CAN be a decent solution but then you're looking at very formulaic content. It would be very difficult to create tools that can generate unique & fun content consistently.
The best solution is to figure out what "emergent gameplay" can be added to a PvE game.
Current types of Emergent Gameplay:
- PvP
- Building (structures/towns/cities/minecraft/fortnite)
- Politics
On the older version of these forums we had a large group of people playing the browser game eRepublik, it was heavily political, pretty fun at the time. Our group took over North Korea for like a year. There were elections, you had to campaign, kinda interesting imo. I would like to see elections in an MMO.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 7,962
- 9,657
Ring events break one of the basic game design lessons, which is that your players should be empowered to guide/control their experience.
Timed events are impossible to control. Thus, players hate them.
Same thing for raids. People like a lot more encounters in which you control when the boss change phases than bosses where the phase change is timed.
- 2
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
- 16,546
- 12,049
Ya, ring events were dogshit. One of the worst changes they made in Velious was when they made Vulak only spawn after a shitty ring event. Thankfully we were more or less done farming Vulak at that point, but it sucked for people who still wanted the odd off item or new recruits.
- 1
Kharzette
Watcher of Overs
- 4,987
- 3,651
I didn't enjoy rings either, but I think it can work for single group situations if done properly. I've been meaning to prototype this "take and hold" idea I mentioned here: What does your ideal modern MMO be like?
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 9,343
- 9,451
Why wouldnt you just craft port potions? It was only in the very beginning that they werent available. Fire Pots were available then, though. I mean farming diamonds, jboots etc. was just stupid easy with a necro that had mana stone. I was able to basically force feed my dumb ass wood elf warrior everything I wanted on him up until raiding. But by then, I was farming shit with my warrior and selling that stuff to get an occasional raid item being listed in EC.
- 1
- 2,605
- 4,143
No, you said "Like in Fellowship of the Ring when they are trapped and goblins / cave troll are all coming at them." in the next sentence. It seems you didn't read my post, because I clearly stated that players didn't like the ring events in Shadows of Luclin.
Wait, did you just read "ring" in my post and it triggered you because you already said "ring" in your post? Do you even know what the ring events in SoL were?
Depends on your toolset. The biggest roadblock for unique content is the art assets creation, which takes a fucking lot of time and talented people, including an art director so the art looks consistent and not like a jigsaw puzzle assembled with a hammer. However, if you can write interesting stories (and the lore with it) you will have players invested in it for a long time. This is the world building aspect.
People have fond memories of the FFXIV Heavensward main story quest. In hindsight it was mostly a bunch of characters - the same character models - on a road trip through the zones. But the bickering between the characters made it interesting, and one dies at the end, so it's memorable for the players, just like in the "Aeris dies" meme. In the end that is what makes people remember games: It gave them emotions.
No, we already have "pvp + building + politics" explored in Excel in Space EVE Online, complete with betrayals and backstabbing and all that comes with the territory: The largest alliance at the time (Band of Brothers) was dissolved over night because the one who responsible for paying the bill for it sold out.
It's not as fun as you think it is, especially for newbies, casuals and the losing side. The throne is only so wide for one ass to sit on it.
Because of the high stakes sometimes you get crazies who clearly can't differentiate between game and real life. When you have people plan to visit a titan pilot at home to cut the power line to his house, so his titan is a sitting duck and they can easily kill it without much of a fight, then you somewhere have crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed. And this was in an era before "doxxing" was a widely known term. No sane corporation wants to invest millions of dollars into something like that to have a potential PR disaster at their hands. Not with the current moral panic about how "video games train our youth to kill" whenever someone goes mental on a killing spree.
But if you like something like this you can look into Crowfall, which aims to be to do something like this. After my initial reaction of "this could be cool" I thought about it, and the biggest problem they have is world persistence. If you worked hard to be top dog, why would you have the game world reset at the end of it? MMOs are clearly time investment games, so players want to show off their previous moment of awesomeness.
This is also the reason players hate the hard gear resets in WoW for each expansion. When you go to the leveling dungeon in the Burning Crusade and a random blue drop from a 5man boss is better than the Naxxramas sword you worked so hard for, you feel somewhat reduced to scrub level, because you know that other random scrubs have access to the same level of awesome loot. Some players didn't get over that feeling and never logged back in.
The biggest problem in game design, be it professional or armchair, is to understand why people play games and keep playing them. They are different for different people. Interestingly enough, this will not clearly show up in any kind of metrics, and not even in player polls, because players may not be aware of it themselves. Ever heard of "Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types?"
- 2
- 1
- 2,605
- 4,143
I logged in as a skeleton on Project M. You couldn't communicate with other player controlled mobs, but it was cleary visible by the movement that there were other people playing as mobs with me, so we tried to gang up on newbies. Which we couldn't find, because no one wanted to play a newbie on a PvP server during that time. Shortly afterwards we were killed by some high level mob.
- 4,107
- 4,043
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 7,962
- 9,657
This is why I said at one time that the real next generation of PVE-based MMO will have to figure out tech for procedural generation of content. And if you want stories, this is the hardest part.
Outdoor worlds are probably done. Generating an interesting outdoor world is not that hard. The biggest problem is that you need to populate your outdoor world with interesting indoor locations, and that's where we are currently without tech. All the dungeon procedural generation we've done so far is tile-based, which is enough to make a couple dozen dungeons vary from play to play (when you replay the same RPG), but not enough to generate hundreds of different-feeling dungeons within the same world.
Right now, it's a mindset that's hard to break out, because you still have to invest so much into a dungeon type, you want/need your players to experience it. All the procedural dungeons in Diablo have to be visited, because they still cost so fucking much each to do, they have to be justified. But if your procedural designer can whip out a dungeon in 2 hours of computer time... then you can afford to generate hundreds of dungeons that only a handful of people visit in the end, and make a world where you will end up hearing about dungeons you never ever visited.
It's going to require an indy breakout, because AAA studios are now far too fearful to invest into technologies that will potentially break their finely tuned gaming experience. But if you can generate a world with X (with X > 500, say) fixed, static, explorable/mappable dungeons... then you win. You have content that people can show off ("ok, we want that boss? Come with me, this way is faster"), and you have content that satisfy the most bored players since they can explore a different dungeon every day, for years. But that require a massive progress in AI-driven procedural generation.
The point where you place stories in your procedural is the point where the tech doesn't even exist. We have lots of progress in AI, but generating reliably stories that make sense is not a solved problem. For every article about how an AI generated a Harry Potter story or stuff, and you laugh at the weird stupidity at times... you are offered the best example it produced, and the dozens/hundreds of failed stories that had to be read and discarded is... humongous. So you can't populate your game with generated stories (which would be cool, because everyone would experience a really different game). At the moment, you get at best to make background, inject said background in your game generation, and let the people make their own stories (kind of like EQ).
That's why the current crop of rewards in WoW is now xmog, mounts, pets and toys. Because that's where the permanence is. Back when I played, that's the only thing I cared about. The gear was a tool to raid (to satisfy the social itch that keeps you playing in reality), but the real game was to pursue slowly the checklist and consult regularly my ALLTHETHINGS addon for stuff I could get "now".
Last edited:
Ravishing
Uninspiring Title
- 8,452
- 3,577
I disagree that Art is the main issue here.
Reusing assets is normally not a problem at all. Big Worlds are easier to make than ever and procedural generation isn't out of the realm of possibility anymore, and it's been done to an extent.
Tuning & creating the content is going to be the largest bottleneck always. Its very difficult to procedurally generate content that will be fun & challenging. People don't really care about art assets as long as the content is good.
Look at so many games that have stayed relevant but the Art doesn't change much: MOBAs, Minecraft, BRs, Shooters, etc... The maps are played over and over and over for many years, nobody really cares. It's often the content that gets updates.
And creating big open worlds is so easy now (and mostly procedural if desired) that an MMO could create massive worlds very very quickly and easily, then just add POIs where relevant.
But populating with NPCs, Quests, Bosses, etc etc.. that all takes a lot of thought & time.
This is the most short-sighted & primitive post I've ever read.
"This game I don't like did it and it sucked, so nobody else should ever do it."
Open your mind, try to avoid using the word "No".
You're using a lot of words to rant about a lot of random & minor details.
Reusing assets is normally not a problem at all. Big Worlds are easier to make than ever and procedural generation isn't out of the realm of possibility anymore, and it's been done to an extent.
Tuning & creating the content is going to be the largest bottleneck always. Its very difficult to procedurally generate content that will be fun & challenging. People don't really care about art assets as long as the content is good.
Look at so many games that have stayed relevant but the Art doesn't change much: MOBAs, Minecraft, BRs, Shooters, etc... The maps are played over and over and over for many years, nobody really cares. It's often the content that gets updates.
And creating big open worlds is so easy now (and mostly procedural if desired) that an MMO could create massive worlds very very quickly and easily, then just add POIs where relevant.
But populating with NPCs, Quests, Bosses, etc etc.. that all takes a lot of thought & time.
This is the most short-sighted & primitive post I've ever read.
"This game I don't like did it and it sucked, so nobody else should ever do it."
Open your mind, try to avoid using the word "No".
You're using a lot of words to rant about a lot of random & minor details.
- 1