Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Gravel said:

So is their gameplay cycle even more downtime between kills?

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How else r u gonna toast marshmallows n sing koombaya around the fire man

MNM goldenage is already over. Its basically just a jew daycare for middle aged men now.

Gravel said:

So is their gameplay cycle even more downtime between kills?

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Won't know until we see what these "burst damage" changes look like. I figure after Monk and Rogue reworks it would shape up. Since those are 2 "white-damage" based classes in alpha testing so far, they will be getting some type of combat abilities more in line with the new vision.

If they don't do this, and just add burst on top of current TTK, with no other changes-- it will be accused of being a WoW clone. Which is anathema to the community.

The community will slurp up whatever change they make because this game will be even more perfect

When EQ was new, the player base was so small (and with mostly no other frame of reference) timed mobs, etc, worked. Not because it was a good system, but because the game never exploded in terms of popularity so to speak. When WoW launched, it became popular quite fast, but the only fix they had to do was mostly hardware. We all remember the opening months, where lag was so bad that when you did the animation to bend down to loot something, you kept moving in a floaty bent down position. It took months to fix that. But adding millions of players to the game didn't really impact peoples enjoyment of the game other than login queues and in game possibly crowded quest locations. But an increase in player count never limited your ability to do X content.

So, while I am not a game dev, that is the way I would look at any base system of a game. "What if the game exploded like wow?" Say suddenly a new, not thought of market, started playing for whatever reason. Suddenly your servers are chocked, it is a luxury problem for a dev, as they need to invest in hardware/servers, but they're being paid for by a massive customer base. However, once they get in, how do the number of players affect the players themselves? If a limited beta of two to three guilds can create such ridiculous drama thing as the one a few pages back in terms of world/raid spawns, then that is not a good system.

I am not saying you need to make a game that tries to cater to everyone (that would probably end up catering to noone). You can have lots of old school systems like slower leveling, no/limited maps, more focus on group play, slower group play where you sit around a camp and don't constantly move, corpse runs, trains (and not have mobs tethered). All of these are EQ like, and while for sure limiting the amount of players interested in it, the game still works so to speak no matter how many players you add to it.

There are many things EQ did that I miss from MMOs today, but a PvE world where everything is contested? That's not good design imo. You can absolutely have some things contested, and I love larger zones/dungeons where you do camp checks and see other people playing. Especially some high level areas mixed with low level areas where you suddenly get mega buffed by a 30 level higher player that runs by on the way to some dark corner of the zone. But to have all content required to "progress" contested? No. That's not something that would not cause problems if your game became a success. Unless the idea is to have very small servers, but again... 2-3 guilds are enough to cause such issues, it would be the death for any "casual" raiding guild. So they would never form, why would they?

Droigan said:

You can have lots of old school systems like slower leveling, no/limited maps, more focus on group play, slower group play where you sit around a camp and don't constantly move, corpse runs, trains (and not have mobs tethered). All of these are EQ like, and while for sure limiting the amount of players interested in it, the game still works so to speak no matter how many players you add to it.

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Exactly this.

Lately the standard talking point has moved away from the nonsensical 'maybe this game isn't for you/this is a niche game', to 'you say you want old-school systems, but then you don't want xyz'. It's now turned into 'unless you agree with us implementing every dated system from a 30 year old game, then you don't really want to play a classic era inspired MMORPG'.

You can preserve so much about a classic-feel MMO, and still remove a ton of the old warts.

Quaid said:

Exactly this.

Lately the standard talking point has moved away from the nonsensical 'maybe this game isn't for you/this is a niche game', to 'you say you want old-school systems, but then you don't want xyz'. It's now turned into 'unless you agree with us implementing every dated system from a 30 year old game, then you don't really want to play a classic era inspired MMORPG'.

You can preserve so much about a classic-feel MMO, and still remove a ton of the old warts.

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I always find it weird when self proclaimed classic MMO grognards hate on people wanting things like instances and first to engage/combat lock when those things pre-date EQ by a few years. Brad should have copied less Diku and instead studied what Sierra was doing with The Realm.