Fellowship
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Kirun
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It's good. It's WoW dungeons without all the bullshit of farming, leveling, daily chores, etc. that MMOs are now.
The big issue for me is that they just don't have enough content. It's clear they are going for a "League of Legends" but with dungeons instead as their model. Basically, a game you log into after work for 30m-1hr before dinner, run a quick dungeon while your wife gets ready for date night, etc. It definitely is a niche that I think has some legs, but they need at LEAST another 10+ heroes and 10+ dungeons before I'd consider recommending it. They have a solid base, but I don't think they have much for at least another 6 months, depending on the speed of their development cycle.
That said, their community manager live streams and is VERY open with the questions chat asks, even responding to negative stuff. It's really refreshing on how transparent they are with a lot of things.
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GuardianX
Perpetually Pessimistic
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Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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This piece of shit game is starting to get review bombed. Not because of tranny bullshit (Which maybe there are a couple) but because the game sucks with little to no content and people are already in there playing the elitist card, dropping groups because someone new is playing and doesn't have the experience yet, typical MMO type shit.
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Kirun
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Yeah, gatekeeping in MMOs is a massive issue and it's only going to get worse as people get more entrenched in online social hierarchies. It's a social inevitability that bad systems only amplify.
If developers want to cut it down, they need to massively reward inclusion instead of punishing inefficiency. Give veterans real, tangible incentives to group with new or undergeared players - unique cosmetics, exclusive currency, achievements that can only be earned through mentor/mentee runs, whatever. If you don't make inclusion profitable, people will always default to self-preservation.
The other big piece is encounter design. Most MMOs rely on constant DPS checks (both hard and soft), which just reinforce the "gear = competence" mindset. That's how you get kicked before you even zone in. More fights should reward coordination and execution over raw stats. Mechanics that let organized, attentive players outperform those with better loot. You can make teamwork its own form of damage output if you design for it.
And yeah, the punishment systems need to evolve too. Players should fail fast, learn fast, and get back in immediately. The Soulsborne loop is the gold standard. You die, you get it, you try again. There's tension without tedium. That's what modern MMOs keep missing: challenge doesn't have to mean a 10-minute jog back to your corpse.
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GuardianX
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Thats the part that made me laugh, did people really love speed-running WoW mythic dungeons that much that they only logged in for speed runs and then logged out?
Sure, I won't say those people DIDN'T exist, but to create an entire game around that gameplay loop?
These things looked at WoW and said "I know what made WoW popular! The gameplay cycle that killed being social in dungeons!" in an unironic way.
100% gatekeeping used to be the "Who knows you" system back in EQ or if you had a visually identifying item like an epic that spoke to your dedication or luck playing the game, so there was a social aspect to the gatekeeping. Now it's a number, or an achievement.
The incentive concept is an interesting one alongside encounter design. A positive reinforcement system on mechanics being done instead of negative. Get hit with lava? Take damage and the boss doesn't take more damage. Successfully dodge mechanics? Boss takes more damage. Would be interesting to see more games accomplish the "Missing one arm" or "One arm tied behind my back" concept applied to players where it acknowledges your less than ideal situation and rewards you for sticking through it.
It isn't just a game design problem anymore though, people EXPECT to have things handed to them. After reading though the "Adrullan Online Adventure" / "Evercraft" discord for a while, there is a fairly large subset of players that looks at any walls or challenge as direct attack against them as a person. Pop MnM into that mix and you are hit even harder with that reality. Sure there is an argument to be had on tedium vs challenge but people really don't see the distinction and, generally, equate the two. So when they are hit with a wall of any kind, it's not somethign to figure out, it's a stopping point. It's kinda sad, they then rotate to games that "respect their time" even if the game is the game they have been talking shit about for years.
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Kirun
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I disagree on the idea that this is all some generational problem of "people wanting things handed to them." That's a lazy oversimplification that's been used for twenty years every time a game removes an unnecessary time sink. Players haven't changed but the context around them has. When you've got thousands of other options competing for your attention, you're not lazy for expecting your time to be respected. You're just living in 2025, not 1999.
And you're absolutely right about how "challenge" and "tedium" keep getting conflated, by both players and devs. That's why MMOs keep missing the mark. The problem isn't that people don't want challenge, it's that most games still equate challenge with delay. If dying or failing just means walking for ten minutes before trying again, that's not meaningful tension, it's just artificial scarcity of time.
The "who you knew" system worked in 1999 because there were fewer players, fewer games, and a lot more downtime. But it doesn't scale. It wasn't "community", it was necessity. You talked to people because you had to. That doesn't make it more authentic, just more forced. This has played out time and time again by how popular "soloing" mechanics are in MMOs, ARPGs, etc. nowadays.
So yeah, build systems that encourage mastery, connection, and positive reinforcement. But let's stop pretending that frustration equals depth or that expecting a well-paced experience makes you "soft." The only people who still believe that are the ones mistaking nostalgia for virtue.
Xevy
Log Wizard
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I'd definitely consider playing this if it had more content. Maybe I will when it does have more options if it lasts that long.
WoW had different timelines where different aspects were fun. I didn't fuck with M+ much, but the early Heroics with BC were fun and rewarding. WoW's raiding sucked ass past Wrath. WoW PVP died with everyone focusing Arena gear. There isn't much left to it. The most fun part was running dungeons, quickly, with a good group and grinding out that super rare item for the few times I played past Wrath (Cata and BFA). If you pugged dungeons of course people won't have fond memories. People are mostly bad and gaming retarded. But for people with strong statics or OP classes (DK on release was stupid as fuck) it was a nice thing to spend your time doing if you still had items to get.
There's apparently like 20k people just in QUEUE to get in right now, so it definitely has an audience. I will say the direct WoW assets are kind of lulzy. I don't know if they sold access to their assets or what, but that's 100% straight rips.
WoW had different timelines where different aspects were fun. I didn't fuck with M+ much, but the early Heroics with BC were fun and rewarding. WoW's raiding sucked ass past Wrath. WoW PVP died with everyone focusing Arena gear. There isn't much left to it. The most fun part was running dungeons, quickly, with a good group and grinding out that super rare item for the few times I played past Wrath (Cata and BFA). If you pugged dungeons of course people won't have fond memories. People are mostly bad and gaming retarded. But for people with strong statics or OP classes (DK on release was stupid as fuck) it was a nice thing to spend your time doing if you still had items to get.
There's apparently like 20k people just in QUEUE to get in right now, so it definitely has an audience. I will say the direct WoW assets are kind of lulzy. I don't know if they sold access to their assets or what, but that's 100% straight rips.
GuardianX
Perpetually Pessimistic
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It's not ALL some generational problem. I think people were always this way but, as you state, games have become a LOT more popular with a lot more options. The general consensus back in the day was always "Don't waste my time" but those people weren't playing games, now they are.
The "Community" part isn't dead, but falls into the line of the "Design" of the game, same as encounter design. You are just using psychology of people to understand how to create and culture a community. Blizzard and other major companies have entire departments that tried to curate their community to create the community they wanted, the main issue was that their companies became so brain-rotted by morons and liberals, they forgot the community they wanted to target and ended up alienating a bunch of people.
As for frustration, there IS a "Depth" to frustration but the ratio needs to be fine tuned. It all falls back to Risk vs Reward of the EQ days but it's not RVR in encounter design, it's RVR vs time investment and outcome. One of the major issues of game developers now is that they either don't know their market and make the game for themselves and..by proxy...nail their intended market (LOL)...OR they don't even play their own game and are totally out of the loop on both their game AND the market. So they, like you said, conflate tedium with challenge and just keep plodding along.
meStevo
I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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I like some of the encounter design, but I didn't pick it up because of some of the stuff mentioned here - I get in my own head about not wanting to be a bad player and it drives anxiety and I fail all sorts of things by simply not even trying to do them. If I had a group of friends who actually wanted to progress, learn the fights, etc. together, I think it'd be a good time.
This got fed to me on YT while mindlessly scrolling yesterday, I like a lot of what I see here:
This got fed to me on YT while mindlessly scrolling yesterday, I like a lot of what I see here:
BigDirty
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Kirun
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The decline in good community curation isn't just ideological (and I'd argue it's less that) - it's mostly economic. Once MMOs shifted from long-term subscription models to engagement-based revenue, community management became about retention metrics, not social fabric. You can't A/B test friendship, and that's why we lost those many of those authentic connective threads.
As for "depth through frustration," I agree in spirit, but only when frustration teaches, not just punishes. Classic EQ-style design treated frustration as a feature because there was nothing better to replace it. Today, the bar is higher. If you're going to make players suffer, that suffering has to serve a purpose beyond nostalgia. Otherwise, you're just forcing pain for the sake of purity tests.
And yeah, devs absolutely need to understand their markets, but "making the game you want to play" only works if you're self-aware enough to realize why you like the things you like - and whether that reason still applies to a 2025 player base with wildly different expectations, schedules, and cognitive load. And that's not "catering to casuals," it's adapting to reality.
It's fine to want risk and reward back in MMOs. I do too. But we need to stop confusing "risk" with "ritualized inconvenience" and "reward" with "other people suffering with me." There's a smarter way to build stakes that respects time and tension at the same time.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Yeah EQ had it nailed. If people were dicks, you knew they were a dick - it wasn't like they could easily just hop on a level 50 alt back in the early years if you were a dedicated player because it took so long to level and advance. If you were in a group, you were in that group for hours on end and it really was a social media chat experience getting to know folks. If you were a fuck up, word got out fast within specific level dungeon ranges. IE: Lower Guk, Seb, etc. Or even a guild tag would scream out sometimes, "This guy is a raging fucking retard if he or she is in that guild".
That is really the part, and timing of EQ, that will never be able to be replicated ever again. It was a game with clear addictive goals, but also a social media platform with specific people and their avatars and character names and reputation followed along with it.
I still to this day remember people on the Mith Marr server that I liked playing with and were super cool. I even became RL friends with one that I still play games with 26 years later.
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