Dune Awakening

Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
Cybsled said:
I saw that - he gets a lot of things wrong about the game, which to me says he didn't have a lot of personal experience with it and he also missed a lot of community complaints. I can tell you what killed the game population just from having played it for hundreds of hours

1) Unsatisfying endgame loop for both PVE and PVP
2) Survival game style tedium creep (needing to maintain/power bases constantly or you lose them, gear degredation)
3) Poor foresight on player behavior (aka griefing and PVE player tendency to solo play)
4) Balance decisions that completely broke certain playstyles or made them non-viable, or made certain builds so OP that if you don't run it you auto-lose (for example, some of the melee changes made melee almost completely non-viable in PVP and even made it less viable in PVE...IN A DUNE GAME)

To their credit they are trying to fix or have fixed a some of these issues, or at least mitigated the impact. For example, griefers would usually gank a solo in deep desert and then thumper their vehicle so a worm would eat it. That is a big loss for a solo player, since vehicles aren't cheap...especially if you're not that established from a resource perspective. Adding the ability to restore a lost vehicle for solari (the currency in the game, which isn't super hard to get) at least makes that sting less.

However, they still have a long way to go. Server merges and the base tool will help consolidate and stem player loss in the short to medium term, but they will need some really engaging content for both pve and pvp to get people to come back.
Click to expand...
Like I said I've never played the game and don't ever plan to, I was just surprised he was making a video about it so quick whereas a lot of his other content was older stuff but maybe he's hard up for cash / content.

Figured it was at least a valid video because it's just kind of cursory reading of the thread, that seems that the game kind of tanked off somewhere down the line.

I will say Funcom did make the secret world, and still one of my favorite MMOs to this day.
 
Gravel

Gravel

Mr. Poopybutthole
45,480
163,151
It's the end result for any game that tries to force PVP on the playerbase. Especially one that was PVE focused up until endgame. That's why you're seeing it for a "new" game.

PVP players never want an even footing. Ever. They want to shit on people they have an advantage over (grief). Game developers love putting PVP into games though because they think it's "content" that they don't actually have to develop. Just let the players do it! In practice though, no one actually likes PVP in these types of games. PVP should be relegated to games that entirely focus on PVP (think MOBA's, Battle Royales, BF/CoD type games, etc).
 
  • 2Like
Reactions: 1 users
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
Gravel said:
It's the end result for any game that tries to force PVP on the playerbase. Especially one that was PVE focused up until endgame. That's why you're seeing it for a "new" game.

PVP players never want an even footing. Ever. They want to shit on people they have an advantage over (grief). Game developers love putting PVP into games though because they think it's "content" that they don't actually have to develop. Just let the players do it! In practice though, no one actually likes PVP in these types of games. PVP should be relegated to games that entirely focus on PVP (think MOBA's, Battle Royales, BF/CoD type games, etc).
Click to expand...
Maybe that's the case nowadays but back in the day with UO, that was the gloriousness of open world PVP and full loot, and everybody loved it until MMOs started to catch on and you had people who didn't want to get killed while playing their games. That's how you got the trammel world BS.

Everybody could take the same damn skills or mix thereof, and loot was basically crafted or there were some tears of magical stuff with vanquishing being the strongest but it wasn't a huge deal. It was about mixing and matching your skills and your play style and who the hell you were running around with to go and tear it up.

There were some skills that were way more powerful than others but it took a hell of a lot more work to level it up to GM. If you had GM parry and couple that with GM magic resist, you were a god. GM animal taming, tame a dragon to either sell or used to crush people. Anybody could do whatever.

Original UO through the late 90s into the early 2000s was the Pinnacle of pure sandbox PVP that was about as balance as he could possibly get, because there were no classes, just whatever creative way you could mix and match skills, and gear really didn't matter that much, just a nice bonus.
 
Blitz

Blitz

<Bronze Donator>
6,146
6,860
The issue with this title is that there is no endgame, at all. A lot of people seemed to have played this game 60-200 hours, loved the game, but had no reason to continue. Even the PvP "endgame" was just a big giant, empty zone of nothingness. They practically launched a game with no endgame loop. It feels as if they needed to launch the game for financial reasons, and hoped they could fix it as they go.

The Ch. 3 update that's coming should help set a foundation for an endgame loop that's worth, at least occasionally, checking in on. Although anecdotal, I know quite a few people who enjoyed the "Hagga Basin" (first 100 hours) portion of the game enough that they would absolutely try it again.

As others have said this game was never going to sustain itself with meaningless air combat PvP. If this game was ever going to retain some form of consistency, it was going to come in the form of an endgame akin to Destiny or The Division etc.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Cybsled

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
18,197
14,720
Dr.Retarded said:
That's how you got the trammel world BS.
Click to expand...

Trammel saved UO - the population was on a downward spiral until they released Trammel. Even back then it was clear that when people play games, they don't enjoy the digital experience of walking in the bad part of town at 3am
 
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
Cybsled said:
Trammel saved UO - the population was on a downward spiral until they released Trammel. Even back then it was clear that when people play games, they don't enjoy the digital experience of walking in the bad part of town at 3am
Click to expand...
No it didn't. If you actually played UO you would know that if you attacked anybody in town the guards would instakill you. Accidentally look at somebody's inventory and try to move something, dead.

I don't know maybe they changed that at some point but town was the safest place you could ever be. There was one town and I don't remember the name that didn't have guards and that was a crazy place, but that's what made it fun. I think it was some sort of Pirate Island.
 
...

...

Goonsquad Officer
7,905
18,481
dune devs were retarded because they thought pvers would farm for dozens of hours to enjoy being a cat toy for exploiters and pvp griefers. then loose all their stuff. then get the joy of farming it all back again.

or lose everything just playing red-light green-light with the worm. or just losing everything to random bugs.
 
Last edited:
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Cybsled

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
18,197
14,720
Garriot himself mentioned that population in UO increases 60% after Trammel came out. Point is that people were more willing to play when you couldn't just get shanked out in the woods and lose all your shit
 
  • 3Like
Reactions: 2 users
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
Cybsled said:
Garriot himself mentioned that population in UO increases 60% after Trammel came out. Point is that people were more willing to play when you couldn't just get shanked out in the woods and lose all your shit
Click to expand...
Fair enough, but those people missed out on the greatest days of the game, and people like my friends and I ended up bailing.

Originally, it was the wild west, and you learned what gear you were going to run around in and willing to sacrifice if you got ganked, and you never ran around alone. There weren't uniques items or anything just stuff you could either craft or get off monsters. That's why you also made another character to be your crafting mule so you can make anything you needed.

You could also rob houses and store up plenty of gear. UO was my first MMO and I kind of set the bar with what you could do, and I guess it's probably the biggest reason I've always been a big fan of PVP. It really had one of the purest forms ever.
 
Cybsled

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
18,197
14,720
I don't doubt it was fun, but that fun is also relative. If everyone playing had the same mindset, sure. But they don't, which is why the past 20 years have shown if you take a fundamentally PVE-style game, but add PVP elements to it and the PVP element cannot be opted out of, then eventually you start to bleed players.

A few people in my guild in Dune had fun ganking PVEers or using that trick to drag a NPC to a base to destroy the subfief on unpowered bases and loot everything inside. But that wasn't very fun for the people on the receiving end and eventually even they got bored of effectively beating up on defenseless "carebears" who didn't even bother to fight back
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
... said:
lot of misery-economy there for a lot of players
Click to expand...
Maybe that would be something to consider nowadays but back in the fiery crucible of no one gives a shit because it was the first legitimate MMO, I'm not discounting NWN, but you lived by the sword and died by the sword.

It was so much fun even if you got ganked. I still don't think I've ever had the adrenaline rush like stealing somebody's bag with all of their runes and keys, and then scampering off because they were dumb enough to put all of it in one pouch. You'll learn pretty quick and never made a room that ported directly to your home, and you always kept your keys in the bank.

Then you spent the next hour teleporting around and trying keys on every door of the homes in the area, find the right one, and rob them blind. You could also go into somebody's blacksmith shop and summon animal across the counter if you threw three boxes down on the other side. Once you summoned a horse, you could click on it and it would throw you on to the other side of the counter, and then you start throwing stuff over the counter to your buddy and moon gate everything to your joint.

Being a ghost and having somebody resurrect you standing in a doorway also worked for a while, and then you just had to unlock the door and haul everything off.

There was just so many hilariously fun things you could do in that game at least during the earlier years, and the joy of it was just figuring out what you could and couldn't do. I've never played in the MMO like it, and I probably never ever will again.
 
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
Cybsled said:
I don't doubt it was fun, but that fun is also relative. If everyone playing had the same mindset, sure. But they don't, which is why the past 20 years have shown if you take a fundamentally PVE-style game, but add PVP elements to it and the PVP element cannot be opted out of, then eventually you start to bleed players.

A few people in my guild in Dune had fun ganking PVEers or using that trick to drag a NPC to a base to destroy the subfief on unpowered bases and loot everything inside. But that wasn't very fun for the people on the receiving end and eventually even they got bored of effectively beating up on defenseless "carebears" who didn't even bother to fight back
Click to expand...
I see your point but I think maybe the younger generations have been conditioned to not deal with that type of stuff within a game. Then again games like Arc Raiders it's pretty popular and people PVP in there. I've just read about it from the thread and I'm never played an extraction shooter, but it sounds like UO type stuff except it's a much smaller world.

At the end of the day all of us that started doing MMOs back in the late 90s and early 00s, things were way different back then, and now everything is developed to where you no longer have that freedom of just running rampage if you want to.

I mean UO had a murderer system, and if you killed too many people, you have to wait out your flagged timer, or you could just get a murder hobo, and get the adrenaline rush of running around as a red. Again gear wasn't really that big of a thing, and you could easily replace it and everybody was pretty much on par except whether or not you were 700 on your skills, that's really the only thing that set people apart.
 
...

...

Goonsquad Officer
7,905
18,481
Dr.Retarded said:
I see your point but I think maybe the younger generations have been conditioned to not deal with that type of stuff
Click to expand...
even back in the day. around the time i first heard about EQ, i had a friend who played ultima online. he told me a story about an "old man in a diaper" who was naked, but could still murder him and his friends. who would chase them all over. i thought it sounded retarded and didn't play the game. Only like 1 out of about 16 friends i know who played games like EQ, would play a game with such PVP tomfoolery. that's what he's really saying. that full loot pvp is a niche of a niche of a niche.
 
  • 1Worf
Reactions: 1 user
Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

<Silver Donator>
18,076
39,939
... said:
even back in the day. around the time i first heard about EQ, i had a friend who played ultima online. he told me a story about an "old man in a diaper" who was naked, but could still murder him and his friends. who would chase them all over. i thought it sounded retarded and didn't play the game. Only like 1 out of about 16 friends i know who played games like EQ, would play a game with such PVP tomfoolery. that's what he's really saying. that full loot pvp is a niche of a niche of a niche.
Click to expand...
Your friend knew the true Spirit of the game! You hadn't experienced the good stuff if you weren't running around with nothing but a GM poisoned katana in your underwear stabbing people like a a Muslim cleric!

GM poisoning and poison weapons was a hot commodity, and katanas were at the time the best to apply poison for some reason. I think it was because they had a very fast attack speed compared to other weapons.

The crazy part of the game was you couldn't do everything with whatever character, so you're forced to level up crafting mules, or characters that were very specific for niche missions. Things like magic thieves, or animal tanning, etc. Fuck getting lumped into a stupid class, the sky was the limit.

If you ran around in plate or any sort of heavier armor within the game you actually ran slow. The trick was wear a robe, mobility was King, magic was always great, but if you really wanted to cut it up, that's why you had things like provocation or animal taming. I never cared if I got killed on my characters because half the time I wasn't wearing anything important other than whatever dyed robe I had put on.
 
Cybsled

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
18,197
14,720
Obligatory

1766287200650.png
 
You must log in or register to reply here.