Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
- Start date
FF 14 does the best job of making things fun and seperate "theme park attractions" as part of the game to build a whole world instead of just an endless gear treadmill of grind through leveling, hit max level, and then play the end game of raid log to chase marginially better numbers.
All the extra stuff like Gold Saucer, Crafting and Gathering Professions being their own mini games and having fun rewards beyond feeding the gear treadmill, and all the options for esoteric grindy stuff if you want, but arent pressured to do make it fun for a variety of experiences. It creates a fun and immersive world with tons of content thats easily accesable without punishing you into being a mindless time sync of plowing through your vegetables (leveling) to get to desert (end game raiding).
Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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Yeah, I agree. This is one of the hardest problems to solve in MMO design, and FFXIV is probably the gold standard for how to keep older content "alive". The way they funnel everyone through the same story, jobs on a single character, and a duty finder that backfills even ancient dungeons. It's all pretty deliberate systems work to keep the world feeling populated.
MNM doesn't really have any of those levers. Instead, they've gone with a very large, very open world that already feels bigger than its population can support. Without structural systems to recycle players back through older content, I don't see how twinking or alts do more than patch the issue at the margins.
You're right that density or vertical design could help, but that would require rethinking zone philosophy in a way that I don't think they've committed to. The "tomorrow problem" framing is what makes me concerned. Because if the playerbase calcifies early, you don't get a second chance to compress the experience. By the time they realize it's an issue, the community may already be too fragmented to recover.
That's what makes the "massive world" pitch ring hollow to me. You can't spread a thin population across a giant map and then shrug it off with "we'll deal with it later." That's not a plan. That's setting the stage for your world to feel empty from day one.
Oh I know, i played quite a lot of ff14. I think it does a bang up job to keep the audience both spread out over the content and "meaningfully" engaged with it. I bowed out because of time constraints, and the semi drama of the story being bad in the latest expac. I think FF14 is the most agreeable version of that type of MMO for me at this point in time. But I'm also less interested in that type of game, and M&M isn't that type of game.
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FF14 gives you lots of alternate activities but virtually none of those are reasons why higher level players replay older content much less interact at all with lower level players. They achieve that with 2 things:
Job system ie multiclassing, which is effectively the same as encouraging "alts" which many games do now but in a worse way (ie shared banks/share rep shared etc so you aren't "punished" for rolling an alt), and this is really just a minor cliff note on why higher "level" players go back to experience low level content
But for more importantly:
Level scaling, and making running random dungeon a daily. Many/most games do this, and some do it better than FF14. Give your players a daily carrot to run random dungeon queue and allow them to get queued with any random player lvl 15 running deadmines for the first time and you'll have high lvl people doing content with low levels.
Note that that only works for the OG dungeons which happen to be MSQ locked. I forget what ex pack it is but once you can have NPCs be your party to do the MSQ dungeons you pretty much stop seeing other players until you are at level cap and doing the dailies yourself, running with fresh new trial players stuck doing their MSQ bottlenecks themselves.
Many games have full level scaling not just in random dungeon queues but also in the open world, which keeps all content relevant but in a really cockamamie and often poorly implemented sort of way, but its entirely viable (thinking of ESO, where all content is always relevant to you since it's all level scaled to you and you can group with anyone at any time). All that to say, level scaling is really just a way to circumvent levels because levels are dumb, there's far superior less arbitrary methods of adding progressive difficulty and delineating players rather than levels.
And you've got entire genre's of MMOs that don't even have levels and 10 year vets can play right next to 3 day old players all day everyday.
Anyway, all that to say this game is going old school so all those work arounds, alternate solutions, and bandaids other games have added to address the ultimate problem that levels are dumb, none of that will work here, they are designing the game to be the opposite.
again if you expect to play this game without boxing your own entire party/raid pretty much from the get go, idk what to tell you. "but if they manage to get 10x as many people to pay for something that they won't touch when its free then there will be a population!....for about 2 weeks until the sheer size of the world, number of servers planned, time zones of players, and length of time to level scatters them all to the winds and you still have the same problem. But churn will be 0% and population will double every single week! by the time we're level capped and ready to raid there will be more players than grains of sand on earth it'll be fine!"
Job system ie multiclassing, which is effectively the same as encouraging "alts" which many games do now but in a worse way (ie shared banks/share rep shared etc so you aren't "punished" for rolling an alt), and this is really just a minor cliff note on why higher "level" players go back to experience low level content
But for more importantly:
Level scaling, and making running random dungeon a daily. Many/most games do this, and some do it better than FF14. Give your players a daily carrot to run random dungeon queue and allow them to get queued with any random player lvl 15 running deadmines for the first time and you'll have high lvl people doing content with low levels.
Note that that only works for the OG dungeons which happen to be MSQ locked. I forget what ex pack it is but once you can have NPCs be your party to do the MSQ dungeons you pretty much stop seeing other players until you are at level cap and doing the dailies yourself, running with fresh new trial players stuck doing their MSQ bottlenecks themselves.
Many games have full level scaling not just in random dungeon queues but also in the open world, which keeps all content relevant but in a really cockamamie and often poorly implemented sort of way, but its entirely viable (thinking of ESO, where all content is always relevant to you since it's all level scaled to you and you can group with anyone at any time). All that to say, level scaling is really just a way to circumvent levels because levels are dumb, there's far superior less arbitrary methods of adding progressive difficulty and delineating players rather than levels.
And you've got entire genre's of MMOs that don't even have levels and 10 year vets can play right next to 3 day old players all day everyday.
Anyway, all that to say this game is going old school so all those work arounds, alternate solutions, and bandaids other games have added to address the ultimate problem that levels are dumb, none of that will work here, they are designing the game to be the opposite.
again if you expect to play this game without boxing your own entire party/raid pretty much from the get go, idk what to tell you. "but if they manage to get 10x as many people to pay for something that they won't touch when its free then there will be a population!....for about 2 weeks until the sheer size of the world, number of servers planned, time zones of players, and length of time to level scatters them all to the winds and you still have the same problem. But churn will be 0% and population will double every single week! by the time we're level capped and ready to raid there will be more players than grains of sand on earth it'll be fine!"
ili
Blackwing Lair Raider
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and early EQ used to show exact active player count numbers on the server list, and then they didn't because it wasn't in their best interest
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Kriptini
Vyemm Raider
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Let's please not use FF14 as a standard for anything other than Stockholming mouthbreathers into repeating the same boring junk over and over and doing everything they can to take the "multiplayer" out of MMO. If you want to talk about games that did "level scaling" right, let's talk about games like EQ2, where mentoring down to play with lower levels actually let you keep your ability suite instead of people getting a "hell level" dungeon roulette in FF14 and immediately quitting the dungeon, because AFKing in town for 30 minutes is more fun than actually doing dungeons at those level.
FF14 took the most generic route possible when it came to gear and power scaling in general. Made it really hard to stay interested when most of the gear was +2% better with the same exact grinds every time. Their version of epics was basically grind for a cosmetic slot.
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