EQ Never

Well I was essentially joining the conversation from the 38S thread with this one and you gave me the perfect chance to kind of do it. Had really nothing to do with you personally.

Convo_sl said:

I personally don't care to to get that into it from a designer side. I'm not a designer hah! I understand why some enjoy it. I enjoy reading those posts as well. An idea may not fit perfectly into a particular design of a game but it may spark another idea that does.

Are you in the industry Denaut?

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Gotcha, that is fine, personal taste is personal taste. I tend to get way to curious about things I like, I've watched my Simpsons DVDs with the commentary on probably 3 times more than with it off.

Yea, for about 8 years now. I worked on Vanguard and a couple of other AAA MMOs. I work on smaller projects now.

Convo_sl said:

Makes total sense. well not the Simpsons thing..=P

I'm tempted to ask you about VG but I don't want to derail lol.. Mainly if you think a game built in the spirit of VG is still viable today or too risky to make?

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More scandalous things than I'd be willing say are already public, so it wouldn't be very interesting.

Do I think a game in the "spirit" of Vanguard is still viable? Absolutely. It would probably take a form radically different than what either of us would expect though.

Also.. I have a question for everyone in regards to combat, If you had to pick a combat system from any game currently released, what game would you go with and why? Just curious to see how much it varies heh

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Well, this is pretty contextual, and I haven't played a lot of newer MMOs, but if you held a gun to my head I would say Global Agenda.

To avoid a wall of text about the game I will just say that I thought they mixed MMORPG/Twitch elements incredibly well and I like the way they compartmentalized horizontal and vertical progression. The game is pretty fast paced in PvP, but was built in such a way that you could pace yourself organically in PvE within reasonable limits.

Tera combat can be really fun, but it is the most susceptible to latency.

Wow combat feels really responsive, but quickly turns into a hot mess of cooldown rotations.

GW2 has a handle on keeping runaway skill sets in check. But tends to become a spam fest while in groups with lots of effects going off ie. visually messy.

Each of those systems has good points and bad points. Personally, I like systems that not only reward coordination but actually require it. Also, having combat that rewards tactical decisions and gives you a chance to "set up" a fight before you initiate combat is great.

I hope EQN is great too. There really hasn't been a game since SWG that tickled me because of its world and social dynamics. Sure that game was a buggy mess, but I had ridiculous amounts of fun playing it in-spite of that. Goes to show how good it could have been.

Pancreas_sl said:

Tera combat can be really fun, but it is the most susceptible to latency.

Wow combat feels really responsive, but quickly turns into a hot mess of cooldown rotations.

GW2 has a handle on keeping runaway skill sets in check. But tends to become a spam fest while in groups with lots of effects going off ie. visually messy.

Each of those systems has good points and bad points. Personally, I like systems that not only reward coordination but actually require it. Also, having combat that rewards tactical decisions and gives you a chance to "set up" a fight before you initiate combat is great.

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You are totally right, everything is a trade-off at some level. I also really enjoy the type of system you are describing where there are "setup" and "execution" phases. What is nice about that is you can have them interact in a variety of ways, even to the point where the "setup" phase is a game unto itself. As always there are trade-offs, but it was part of what I really liked about the aforementioned SWG.

Your excellent post on healing covered this as well. There it is reverse a bit, you have the "execution" phase and then the "recovery" phase. And because these are separated they can cater to different types of players. If MMOs are to be social experiences then that hinges on bringing different types of players together in ways that they all enjoy. It is incredibly difficult and can get really expensive, but that is the core strength of a persistent online game.

Draegan_sl said:

That's called a dynamic ecosystem. It would be an interesting game.

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UO tried it in beta. Players broke its back over their collective knee then shit on the corpse.

Why there hasn't been a modern day UO is beyond me. Is the switch from 2d to 3d really that hard on resources for persistent worlds/housing/etc?

The only game I can think of that maybe tried it, and failed terribly, was Shadowbane but then again I never played it so I don't know.

R.A. Salvatore reminisces Everquest; talks MMO design and the future of the MMO industry:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...game-industry/

"When I was working at 38 Studios my argument was that there were things that we've lost in video gaming since EverQuest that have been big losses that people don't understand as losses," he tells me. "For example, in EverQuest if you lost a fight to a monster it was painful. You had to go on a corpse run, you had to get your body back, you lost experience, it was brutal. And everyone's like "Yeah nobody would do that anymore" and that's a shame. When you take the cost of losing out, you take away much of the sense of accomplishment of winning."

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Have you ever read one of his books? I thought that was obvious.

Their game was going to be a disaster from the start. They were all EQ neckbeards and purists that wanted to make a modern MMORPG. They never understood what made EQ good, and what made a game like WOW good.

Wuyley_sl said:

Why there hasn't been a modern day UO is beyond me. Is the switch from 2d to 3d really that hard on resources for persistent worlds/housing/etc?

The only game I can think of that maybe tried it, and failed terribly, was Shadowbane but then again I never played it so I don't know.

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A few games have. Shadowbane, SWG, and Vanguard had non-instanced housing.

Besides the obvious cost consideration (which comes into play for any feature), player housing is more of a design problem than a technical one.

First you have to establish what it is for beyond just being a marketing feature. If you just want a glorified bank then it isn't so hard, you just instance it. But that is kind of boring. After that it becomes a question of social/community significance which could take the form of PvP and territory control, or a more benign social aspect like it was in galaxies.

The major issue is where to put it, non-instanced housing has to contend with space for other kinds of content. You could shove it off to some corner, but it might impact what player housing is or represents. But if you put it with ocntent it increases importance, but then could affect the flow of other kinds of content.

Basically it is hard and risky, we know how often big MMOs do difficult things.

mkopec_sl said:

Wow, at least someone gets it, too bad hes just a writer with shit all to do with mmorpgs.

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Great! Ok, now this is what I am talking about. Here is actually a perfect example of someone not getting it.

"For example, in EverQuest if you lost a fight to a monster it was painful. You had to go on a corpse run, you had to get your body back, you lost experience, it was brutal."

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Experience loss and corpse runs were mechanisms that elicited an emotional response. The direct emotion they bring forth is sadness and loss. People are extremely loss averse, so this is why harsh death penalties went the way of the dodo. But, there is something positive about this mechanic that people loved, which is thesuspense and tensionthat loss brought to a fight beforehand.

Now that we understand the underlying nature of the mechanic, we might be able to come up with a different one that grants you the positive emotion without the negative one that eventually leads to its downfall.

I am not saying I have the answer, or that there is necessary even a good alternate mechanic to be had. But at least if we understand and define the goal, not just mimic the action, we might just be able to come up with something unique and novel.

That sense of tension comes from the uncertainty of an outcome of a situation you are emotionally invested in. Causing pain or loss in the event of a negative outcome isoneway to illicit that emotional investment, but it may not be theonlyway to do it.

You might be right, there might be no other way. In fact seeing as no one has come up with one I'd say if such a solution exists it isn't an obvious one. But giving up without even trying to come up with something new doesn't move the genre forward.

Smedley just tweeted"We like permadeath for EQN"

Not sure how I feel about that.