Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Gravel said:

Wait til you die in a sandstorm and have to wait an hour for it to pass because you can't see 5 feet away from you. So your only option is to log off because otherwise you'll die of hunger/thirst as you search for your corpse unsuccessfully.

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Now THAT is fuckin’ podracing, mate

Gravel said:

Wait til you die in a sandstorm and have to wait an hour for it to pass because you can't see 5 feet away from you.

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imagine having 1.5 hours to play, a more than reasonable play session, and this absolute horse shit happens to you?

Immerse me harder, daddy.

Or you could place some money in your bank and have access to everything you need like a person with more than 2 brain cells to rub together would do.

Also dying of hunger and thirst isn't a thing. You just stop regenerating hp/mana.

Del said:

Or you could place some money in your bank and have access to everything you need like a person with more than 2 brain cells to rub together would do.

Also dying of hunger and thirst isn't a thing. You just stop regenerating hp/mana.

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I'm confused how having money in the bank helps you see through a sandstorm better?

Quaid said:

imagine having 1.5 hours to play

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Wow, ok. You sound like a little phone baby loser that should probably play WoW. You Gen Z fags have no clue what gaming was like 30 years ago and want everything just handed to you.

Gravel said:

I'm confused how having money in the bank helps you see through a sandstorm better?

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oh dude dude

you’re supposed to find a necro to pay 3 gold to summon your corpse in a vast empty world. He’s 3 zones over playing merchant arbitrage with beaver asses and salamander choda. He’s gonna be stoked to help for sure.

The irony is, in this situation I did have someone helping me. We couldn't find it. Turned out it was probably 20 feet from where I was searching.

I don't think people understand just how little visibility there is in those sandstorms.

Gravel said:

Wait til you die in a sandstorm and have to wait an hour for it to pass because you can't see 5 feet away from you. So your only option is to log off because otherwise you'll die of hunger/thirst as you search for your corpse unsuccessfully.

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This kind of happened last night. Some of my friends were all trying the game for the first time and we all made goblins together. Night Harbor was pretty laggy so we decided to go XP in Sungreet instead. We were there for maybe 5 minutes when the dust storm started. We stayed close together as we wandered around looking for mobs to kill.

We saw a guy named Ratsbitingme (another goblin) ask in shout chat if anyone had seen his corpse by the river. The dust storm was too thick for us to set up a proper camp and I knew the zone pretty well from playing my higher level characters so our group thought, why not go try to find this guy's corpse?

And so we set off on a grand adventure trying to find Ratsbitingme's body. We were all new characters so none of us were able to cast True North or Locate Corpse, but through sheer force of autism I was able to determine cardinal directions through the positions of the moon and stars, which were just about the only thing we could see during the storm. We figured out which way was east and managed to find the river, and after traveling up and down the bank for a bit, we actually managed to find Rats' corpse.

Then began the return journey of attempting to find the road back to the zone line to drag the corpse to. Luckily some helpful other players had set up campfires near the road, which were able to seen through the dust in the darkness somewhat. We saw the campfires, found the road, and managed to drag the corpse to his owner at the zone line - all while barely being able to see 10 feet in front of us.

I won't pretend like this is an experience that most people would enjoy, but for my group, this was more memorable than anything we had done in most other MMORPGs and we loved every moment of it.

Kriptini said:

I won't pretend like this is an experience that most people would enjoy, but for my group, this was more memorable than anything we had done in most other MMORPGs and we loved every moment of it.

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I'm glad that worked for you, but honestly, that sounds like a nightmare to me.

When I play an MMORPG, I want its systems to engage me, not bore me into inventing my own entertainment. If the highlight of the session is "we couldn't see, so we spent an hour pretending it was an adventure," that's not good design, that's just tedium masquerading as depth. I don't need an MMO to serve me a half-broken DnD session in 3D form; if that's the itch, I'd rather just play an actual tabletop game that’s built for it.

I want the core gameplay to be engaging, rewarding, and interactive. I don't want my most memorable moments to come from wrestling with visibility issues, clunky mechanics, or long stretches of downtime that could just as easily be replicated in a tabletop session. If what makes an MMO "special" is that it occasionally stumbles into an 8-hour DnD adventure, then the MMO isn't really doing its job as a game, first and foremost. It's outsourcing the fun to coincidence and player imagination.

And that's really the danger of nostalgia here. People mistake friction and inconvenience for "meaningful challenge," when in reality, the fun always came from the collaboration, not from staring through a dust storm or waiting for mechanics to get out of your way. If a game is relying on environmental annoyance to generate its best moments, it's already on shaky ground.

What made that story memorable wasn't the bad visibility, it was the cooperation. That's the piece designers should be leaning into with strong group incentives and interdependent systems. Romanticizing the frustrating parts only ensures most players will log out long before they ever stumble into one of those rare, serendipitous "memorable" moments.

That's the fine line I think Monsters & Memories needs to walk. Nostalgia makes it tempting to believe friction itself is fun, but in reality, it's only fun when the challenge is paired with meaningful engagement. Otherwise, I might as well roll dice at a tabletop, where that kind of emergent storytelling is the entire point of the medium.

Kirun said:

I'm glad that worked for you, but honestly, that sounds like a nightmare to me.

When I play an MMORPG, I want its systems to engage me, not bore me into inventing my own entertainment. If the highlight of the session is "we couldn't see, so we spent an hour pretending it was an adventure," that's not good design, that's just tedium masquerading as depth.

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Maybe I misrepresented the experience, but the adventure certainly wasn't "pretend." It was an organic engagement with the weather, corpse, and navigation systems. Sure, we could've logged onto our other characters and used True North and Locate Corpse to make job easier, but we were already having fun engaging with the systems at that level so we continued to do so. To us, this was "engaging, rewarding, and interactive," though this was outside of the core gameplay loop. I also think the experience was materially distinct from a TTRPG due to the immersion factor and how we are more limited in how we can engage with these systems.

What made that story memorable wasn't the bad visibility, it was the cooperation. That's the piece designers should be leaning into with strong group incentives and interdependent systems. Romanticizing the frustrating parts only ensures most players will log out long before they ever stumble into one of those rare, serendipitous "memorable" moments.

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To be clear, I'm not "romanticizing" a dust storm, I understand that if you actually want to engage in the "core gameplay," it's a massive annoyance, but when my group decided to run with it instead of against it, it facilitated that golden cooperation in a new way that makes these kinds of games memorable. It probably doesn't need to be so debilitating that it makes adventuring impossible, but I am not opposed to systems that through occasional wrenches in our plans and require us to adapt to the situation.

Where the ceiling pics at?

Ceiling or gtfo

Kriptini said:

Maybe I misrepresented the experience, but the adventure certainly wasn't "pretend." It was an organic engagement with the weather, corpse, and navigation systems. Sure, we could've logged onto our other characters and used True North and Locate Corpse to make job easier, but we were already having fun engaging with the systems at that level so we continued to do so. To us, this was "engaging, rewarding, and interactive," though this was outside of the core gameplay loop. I also think the experience was materially distinct from a TTRPG due to the immersion factor and how we are more limited in how we can engage with these systems.



To be clear, I'm not "romanticizing" a dust storm, I understand that if you actually want to engage in the "core gameplay," it's a massive annoyance, but when my group decided to run with it instead of against it, it facilitated that golden cooperation in a new way that makes these kinds of games memorable. It probably doesn't need to be so debilitating that it makes adventuring impossible, but I am not opposed to systems that through occasional wrenches in our plans and require us to adapt to the situation.

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I keep logging into this hoping something finally clicks, but if the type of gaming you're describing is their audience, and this is what you're actually looking for, I do think it's hopeless.

I've logged in a few times today, looked for a group for a bit, and logged off because you can't really accomplish anything solo. People have said it before, but this game will live and die on whether it can attract enough players to have a thriving community. During the middle of the day that doesn't seem to be the case. T Tide27 's post last night kind of nailed it. The Everquest model of spending an hour finding a group, another 15-30 minutes traveling to a dungeon together, and then setting up a camp where you sit there waiting for someone else to pull, and when they do you just press 2 hotkeys over and over isn't engaging in 2025. And so far that's been my experience.

But like I said, for some reason I keep logging in hoping maybe something finally clicks for me. Probably foolish of me.

Gravel said:

I keep logging into this hoping something finally clicks, but if the type of gaming you're describing is their audience, and this is what you're actually looking for, I do think it's hopeless.

I've logged in a few times today, looked for a group for a bit, and logged off because you can't really accomplish anything solo. People have said it before, but this game will live and die on whether it can attract enough players to have a thriving community. During the middle of the day that doesn't seem to be the case. T Tide27 's post last night kind of nailed it. The Everquest model of spending an hour finding a group, another 15-30 minutes traveling to a dungeon together, and then setting up a camp where you sit there waiting for someone else to pull, and when they do you just press 2 hotkeys over and over isn't engaging in 2025. And so far that's been my experience.

But like I said, for some reason I keep logging in hoping maybe something finally clicks for me. Probably foolish of me.

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Yeah man, based on your posts in this thread I can definitively say that, in its current state, this game is not for you. Check back in during full release in X years - maybe EA doesn't go well and they need to un-nichify their game, but as for me, I love the game and hope they keep this direction.

Gravel said:

I've logged in a few times today, looked for a group for a bit, and logged off because you can't really accomplish anything solo.

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Make a second box and start a shaman. Level up shaman to within 5 levels of warior via powerlevel (if you can figure out how xp tapping works) or with another new toon. Then go "duo" things.

Kriptini said:

Maybe I misrepresented the experience, but the adventure certainly wasn't "pretend." It was an organic engagement with the weather, corpse, and navigation systems. Sure, we could've logged onto our other characters and used True North and Locate Corpse to make job easier, but we were already having fun engaging with the systems at that level so we continued to do so. To us, this was "engaging, rewarding, and interactive," though this was outside of the core gameplay loop. I also think the experience was materially distinct from a TTRPG due to the immersion factor and how we are more limited in how we can engage with these systems.



To be clear, I'm not "romanticizing" a dust storm, I understand that if you actually want to engage in the "core gameplay," it's a massive annoyance, but when my group decided to run with it instead of against it, it facilitated that golden cooperation in a new way that makes these kinds of games memorable. It probably doesn't need to be so debilitating that it makes adventuring impossible, but I am not opposed to systems that through occasional wrenches in our plans and require us to adapt to the situation.

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I get that you found it memorable, but I still get the feeling that the dust storm wasn’t actually what facilitated the "fun." The fun was your group cooperating, problem-solving, and helping another player. That's what made it stick. The storm itself was just an obstacle you had to work around. And honestly, almost any random frustration can be spun into a story if you lean into it. That doesn't automatically make it good game design.

If the most memorable parts of a game are happening outside the core gameplay loop, that’s a red flag. It suggests the actual systems aren't pulling enough weight on their own. Saying "well, sometimes an environmental annoyance can produce cooperation" is true, but it's also rolling the dice. Most of the time, the same mechanic just frustrates players until they log off. That’s exactly how nostalgia ends up excusing bad mechanics.

I do think curveballs can absolutely add flavor, but there's a world of difference between genuine danger that forces adaptation and arbitrary obstruction that just drags things out. Saying "it made us cooperate, therefore it's good" is like saying broken pathing or lag is a feature because it forced us to improvise. If an MMO needs random environmental handicaps to generate its best stories, then the design isn't facilitating cooperation, it's leaving players to salvage fun out of frustration.

Locnar said:

THIS is immersion. Is there a desert dwelling race to choose from? Make a racial trait where they can see further in sandstorms than others. Just another opportunity to differentiate your pixel from another.

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i think...no racial vision things work. maybe races have no special traits right now? anyway the solution is torch. but not for sand. you're running on target names there heh

... said:

i think...no racial vision things work. maybe races have no special traits right now? anyway the solution is torch. but not for sand. you're running on target names there heh

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Infravision/Ultravision is working for night time right now, and with the integration of the gamma slider it makes a notable difference.

Kirun said:

I get that you found it memorable, but I still get the feeling that the dust storm wasn’t actually what facilitated the "fun." The fun was your group cooperating, problem-solving, and helping another player. That's what made it stick. The storm itself was just an obstacle you had to work around. And honestly, almost any random frustration can be spun into a story if you lean into it. That doesn't automatically make it good game design.

If the most memorable parts of a game are happening outside the core gameplay loop, that’s a red flag. It suggests the actual systems aren't pulling enough weight on their own. Saying "well, sometimes an environmental annoyance can produce cooperation" is true, but it's also rolling the dice. Most of the time, the same mechanic just frustrates players until they log off. That’s exactly how nostalgia ends up excusing bad mechanics.

I do think curveballs can absolutely add flavor, but there's a world of difference between genuine danger that forces adaptation and arbitrary obstruction that just drags things out. Saying "it made us cooperate, therefore it's good" is like saying broken pathing or lag is a feature because it forced us to improvise. If an MMO needs random environmental handicaps to generate its best stories, then the design isn't facilitating cooperation, it's leaving players to salvage fun out of frustration.

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I agree with your post, and I would categorize it as a neat curveball, though maybe it does need to be tuned down a little.