New World

Kirun said:

This right here. This is why I constantly bitch on these forums about the EQers of old being a bunch of luddites and boomers stuck in their ways.

There are PLENTY of good MMOs or MMO-lite games out there. Problem is, technology moved on and they're still stuck chasing the dragon, yelling about "back in my day!". They're completely ignoring how fucking compartmentalized EQ was back in the day. Who gives a fuck that you have 800 Facebook friends. How many of those people do you actually interact with on a daily basis? 10, maybe? That was EQ. Sure, I had an entire server of 1000-3000 people online and you know how many I interacted with on a daily basis? Around 40-50, at most. Most were just faceless spammers in /ooc, /shout, etc. EQ was absolutely a series of "mini-games", as Lithose describes it. You had the South Karana mini-game, the LGuk mini-game, the Old Sebilis mini-game, etc. We were all off in our own little, compartmentalized "adventures".

Pretending that games like EQ were some grandiose, server-wide world of interaction is some serious fucking rose-colored glasses and revisionist history. UO was FAR closer to that spectrum than EQ ever was and even UO had its share of compartmentalization.

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If the mini-game aspect is what you got out of my posts, you missed the forest through the trees. The difference in how you approach people when you're forced to interact vs when its automated is night and day (Not only automated, but when those relationships have real consequence because said people can see you again in a world that has consequence). If MMO designers keep listening to people who say " I only have 30 minutes, snap snap, serve me your best content quickly!"--this industry will die.

Its as simple as that. Because however mind blowing of a game the MMO can serve up--it will not be better than any number of small, single player or small network style games. Simply by the nature of the beast. Which is why...most kids play those games.

When its all about the game, MMO's lose. Again, social media understands MMOs better than game designers do.

Cybsled said:

Honestly this just sounds like old men yelling at kids to get off their lawn

1) I am going to guess that younger people are going to be more social in average because they have more free time. A lot of the QoL comes from complaints from people with jobs/responsibilities. When I finish work, I want to play the game. Not spend 1 hour trying to put together a group or try to coordinate with other people with their own jobs/responsibilities. Does that sometimes align and I can? Sure. Keep in mind a large chunk of us in the EQ era were in high school or in college and had a lot more free time

2) smaller scale games replicate the mmo experience on a small scale. A generation of kids growing up on stuff like Minecraft and similar games are used to more curated content experiences on a smaller scale. Like my nephew used to play on some Minecraft server kids at his school would all join and play on. The appeal of being a face in a sea of thousands is less appealing than being a person in a smaller community

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Yeah, no one wants to spend the time. Forming relationships is hard. I don't want to do it either. But a business shouldn't be concerned with what you want; it should be concerned with what you need. Those aren't the same (Fuck in people, they almost never are). Its listening to the old men yelling that is killing off the industry, honestly--because the overwhelming majority of ex-EQ/WoW players say this same thing (Including me. I certainly can't play a game where I sit for more than a couple hours without some serious planning; which means almost never on a week knight).

But the problem is, when the game can serve you up its content like that--you'll be done it within a couple months, without forming any real relationships. No hooks to keep you going, only a game that's inferior to that 'curated' content. So why not just play the curated content?

Which is what most people today do. And why the genre is dying.

Mist said:

I think the problem is less bad than you're making it out to be. WoW is not a significantly worse version of a stand-alone game, the combat remains top-notch, at least as far as this style of RPG combat.

The number one problem for me is exactly what TJT just said, that all the sense of discovery is gone. Every bit of content is mapped out and mathematically solved on the PTR before the patch ever goes live. The testing cycles are too transparent and open.

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Doesn't matter if its a little, or a lot. As long as the game is worse, why would you play it? There are so many games. I'm not going to play an inferior one for no reason.

Kirun said:

I don't know if that game can exist in a world where no snowflake can melt. You see it in the Ashes of Creation thread. Very few people want the possibility of ever being "griefed" and let's face it, the forced interaction in EQ 100% had the potential for "griefing". When you allow for interaction like that, it allows the possibility for hardship, "cliques", tribes, ostracization, etc. Now, with that obviously comes the ability to feel an immense sense of joy, overcoming obstacles, teamwork, reliance, etc. - you take the good with the bad, but having failure and hardship is what makes success so much more fulfilling, especially if those success are relatively rare.

Games nowadays don't even allow for a fucking chat box in many cases, because of the potential "toxic" environment it creates. And I disagree that social media understands MMOs better - social media doesn't understand this either, because now it just censors "inappropriate" content.

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Well, that's true on social media--I should have said they used to understand better but are now falling into the trap most MMOs are. But there is a reason MOBAs and Survival games, despite being some of the most toxic communities ever, also become some of the fastest growing. People will endlessly bitch about toxicity, but humans thrive off of that drama. For all the reasons you mentioned (Navigating relationships and achieving difficult goals is like crack for social mammals).

Dosage is the poison though--it can't be TOO bad, or yeah, people will leave. But if your game tries to save all the snowflakes, it will fail--which as you pointed out, is something a lot try to do. It does not surprise me at all that they fail when they become too aggressive with shielding people from other people. Meanwhile, games that tended to allow some of that toxicity to fuck with people, explode (League for the first few years).

I'm not sure if a game like this can be made, you're right. But that's why I say part of the magic was killed intentionally--Developers are trying to give people what they say they want, rather than what people need to remain interested.

the problem is the only way you can force that is to add adversity

uninstanced content
Forced grouping to progress your character
Game mechanics that heavily discourage solo activities

While some of you might think that sounds like the perfect MMO, virtually every MMO in the past decade that has tried that has failed hard. FFXIV even tried that with Eureka as a throwback and the majority of the game’s population rejected it. Oh boy, i can barely solo a level 1 crab and have 5+ minutes downtime after. 1999 called, it wants its mmo design back.

The game community has moved beyond that, and if they do embrace it, it’s usually a much smaller number of people. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But expecting that from a product that costs 10s of millions to develop and put to market with an expectation of ROI? Good luck

Even EQ1 got that shit wrong because of penalties for grouping on top of racial and class penalties

End of the day, people will gravitate towards the easiest path. If grouping is easiest, people will group. But in turn, you need to make grouping easy.

If you make grouping the only realistic way to progress, and you don’t put in systems to make it easy, then people quit. Especially in a holy trinity system since you always have a glut of DPS.

Cybsled said:

the problem is the only way you can force that is to add adversity

uninstanced content
Forced grouping to progress your character
Game mechanics that heavily discourage solo activities

While some of you might think that sounds like the perfect MMO, virtually every MMO in the past decade that has tried that has failed hard. FFXIV even tried that with Eureka as a throwback and the majority of the game’s population rejected it. Oh boy, i can barely solo a level 1 crab and have 5+ minutes downtime after. 1999 called, it wants its mmo design back.

The game community has moved beyond that, and if they do embrace it, it’s usually a much smaller number of people. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But expecting that from a product that costs 10s of millions to develop and put to market with an expectation of ROI? Good luck

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FF had a ton of problems. You can't shit out a bad game, and think the social stuff will save it. The only thing the social stuff will do is make it so a game that's 90% as good as the single player version, will be able to offer a longer-term hook than a single player game. Its not going to turn a mediocre game into a good one.

This is what makes MMOs difficult to talk about though, there are so many variables. I think the social stuff is a huge one, but its certainly one of many. However, it is the one that I think ends up sinking otherwise promising games.

Cybsled said:

Even EQ1 got that shit wrong because of penalties for grouping on top of racial and class penalties

End of the day, people will gravitate towards the easiest path. If grouping is easiest, people will group. But in turn, you need to make grouping easy.

If you make grouping the only realistic way to progress, and you don’t put in systems to make it easy, then people quit. Especially in a holy trinity system since you always have a glut of DPS.

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EQ1's style of grouping would never survive today, yes. As said, the dosage is the poison. EQ is too difficult. WoW is too easy (And way too consequence free, cross server grouping is one of the worst ideas in an MMO IMO). There is a happy medium there.

The three weapon thing sounds like I'd want it, but playing with just the two has been okay. I think three has some definite upsides like having a situational weapon for everything (Support/Close/Far), but having 9 cooldowns that aren't shared is a fucking DDR of combos waiting to happen.

I think it's too late now, but I'd like them to have a "ranged" slot instead of a 3rd weapon so you could always be prepared without being fucked if you're saying sword/greataxe and start getting bowed from range. Three weapons would help that, but then you'll just have rapier/sword/axe people wrecking anyone who walks into medium range with stun combos and infinite stam generation etc. The way these synergies are so tight right now, adding more weapons into the mix could really knock shit out of alignment.

Definitely feels, not exaggerating, 10-20 moretimes like a release game than it was last summer. I think it could launch this month and be fine for a few weeks, but they will need to juice some more content in for the higher end game. That said, this studio has put out more content faster than anyone else so I think they can/will keep up to the content demand. The risk is if they push things too far one way or another and alienate a large population of their players (casuals/poopsockers/pvpers).

Lithose said:

FF had a ton of problems. You can't shit out a bad game, and think the social stuff will save it. The only thing the social stuff will do is make it so a game that's 90% as good as the single player version, will be able to offer a longer-term hook than a single player game. Its not going to turn a mediocre game into a good one.

This is what makes MMOs difficult to talk about though, there are so many variables. I think the social stuff is a huge one, but its certainly one of many. However, it is the one that I think ends up sinking otherwise promising games.




EQ1's style of grouping would never survive today, yes. As said, the dosage is the poison. EQ is too difficult. WoW is too easy (And way too consequence free, cross server grouping is one of the worst ideas in an MMO IMO). There is a happy medium there.

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Cross server grouping is basically a way to avoid server consolidation in an obvious sense and avoid “dead servers”.

It is a lesser evil than “sorry your home server isn’t sustainable, we’re merging you and 3 other servers into this other server and now you play on that server”

I'm a huge fan of the mega server that EVE and TESO uses, however I miss the small server numbers of EQ. Just can't have dead space in an MMO during 2021 imo though, I can log in during the day with ESO and my DPS queue is only 10 mins or less.