Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

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gogojira_sl

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Because every 7 pages someone steps in, says "GUYS THIS THREAD IS!!! THE MMO," everyone slaps five for the original comment, and then people scream at each other about what MMO should actually be made.

Meanwhile the reality of MMOs dire situation continues forward stronger than ever.

Also, Soy's dollar.
 
Utnayan

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gogojira_sl said:
Meanwhile the reality of MMOs dire situation continues forward stronger than ever..
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Exactly. Because rather than think of new ways to deliver an experience which is different, it's either theme park or some has-been con-artist taking us back 15 years to shit that isn't applicable now in which the game doesn't matter, it's chasing the buck while trying to capitalize on the good ol' days. And as Billy Joel says, "Because the good old days weren't always good and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems"

Good post.
 
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gogojira_sl

shitlord
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I want to feel that love again but it seems like a waste of time and energy. Sticking to Woolly World (HARDCORE!) and I'll probably pick up Fallout 4 for the holidays.

Surprise you like David Cage honestly. I figured he'd be on your hate list.
 
Utnayan

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gogojira_sl said:
I want to feel that love again but it seems like a waste of time and energy. Sticking to Woolly World (HARDCORE!) and I'll probably pick up Fallout 4 for the holidays.

Surprise you like David Cage honestly. I figured he'd be on your hate list.
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I love his games and his ideas. Mostly I like that he is trying new things and isn't afraid to go against the grain - and still makes a good living.

Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain, and Indigo were, what I thought, fantastic games with very solid writing.
 
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gogojira_sl

shitlord
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Beyond Two Souls interested me until I started seeing gameplay. Maybe I should check it out? I think they're remastering it on PS4.

I loved Ex Machina, doesn't BTS deal with AI?
 
popsicledeath

popsicledeath

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gogojira_sl said:
Meanwhile the reality of MMOs dire situation continues forward stronger than ever.
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Has the genre ever been in a situation other than dire?

At least discussing the genre on forums? People harken back to the EQ days of yore, but, nope, it was a buggy mess with shitty customer service from a company that sold unfinished products refused to listen to the playerbase, etc. UO was either ruined by carebears or PKs depending on if you have a vagina or not. Other games of the first few generations were buggy, crashed, imbalanced, etc. Vanguard. Then WoW comes along, produces a fairly polished product with more features than every, but it's too easy and leads you by the nose is filled with gold farmers and ruins the genre with its success. Every game since is a WoW clone or free-to-pay ripoff model without enough content, or beaten into something boring in an attempt to appease everyone, or debated furiously whether it's an mmo or not. Etc.

Basically, the genre has always been shit? Maybe the best part of it even all the back to EZBoards has been the social aspect and talking about the game as much or more than actually playing it?

Is there any other genre more talked about by people who play less?
 
Utnayan

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popsicledeath_sl said:
Has the genre ever been in a situation other than dire?
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Looks like you missed the boat on when Brad said the market was capped at 500k in the genre and would be fighting within the market for those subscribers, only to see WoW come in with 10 million because all people wanted was a fucking game that worked.

Is there any other genre more talked about by people who play less?
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All of them? Hell you could start with MOBA's and work your way down the line...

Games - The Something Awful Forums

Jesus come back to 2015 Marty.

Have you been isolated to this particular forum for your internet life? Times have changed since fire was invented.
 
Utnayan

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gogojira_sl said:
Beyond Two Souls interested me until I started seeing gameplay. Maybe I should check it out? I think they're remastering it on PS4.

I loved Ex Machina, doesn't BTS deal with AI?
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Not really. Beyond Two Souls is about a girl that has an "Imaginary friend" named Aiden that is more than her imaginary friend. It deals with the Paranormal. You control both the girl and Aiden during the game and switch between the two. Aiden is your protector, and you never really know why Aiden is there or where Aiden came from until later.

I won't say anything more because there are some twists. You will like it if you like heavily centric / atmospheric story based games. The gameplay is a mix of puzzles and QTE. A lot of folks do not like QTE's and decision making processes like that - but for me, I was always engaged in the story. The main protagonist reminded me quite a bit of Drew Barrymore in Firestarter. William DaFoe did an awesome job in it as well.
 
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Rescorla_sl

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I've read the back and forth between Utnayan and Popsicledeath. Both of you are making valid points and neither of you are wrong. As a Day 1 player of EQ, there a lot of things about that game that were a lot of fun (to the point I wanted to spend as much of my free time playing EQ as possible) while there were a lot of things about it that were annoying and I did not like which caused me to abandon the game for WoW the day that game was released.

Regardless of whether it was intentional or not, there were some aspects of EQ gameplay that I haven't seen in any MMO since that IMO made EQ more fun.

1. Server drama. I was always a casual player but I always enjoyed going to my server's EZboard forums and reading the drama surrounding guild competition for raid bosses, who ninja looted something valuable from a raid boss, etc.

2. Player reputation. Since EQ was very unfriendly to alt characters, a lot of people focused on playing just their main character which meant there was a good chance of you interacting with the same player over and over. Your reputation as a player mattered since it affected your ability to join groups and guilds.

3. Acquiring loot was memorable. One of my biggest dislike with WoW and all its clones was how loot upgrades dropped like candy from a pi?ata. Every level you got inundated with green, blue and the occasional purple item that provided only a small, incremental increase in your character's power. I much prefer acquiring loot upgrades to be a rare event and when you do get an upgrade, it's significant and noticeable.

If Pantheon is ever released and its design promotes those three things above, I will definitely give it a chance.
 
popsicledeath

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Utnayan_sl said:
Looks like you missed the boat on when Brad said the market was capped at 500k in the genre and would be fighting within the market for those subscribers, only to see WoW come in with 10 million because all people wanted was a fucking game that worked.
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And with WoW people still ranted and raved and acted like the mmo genre was evil incarnate. As I further explained in the paragraph after the one sentence you read. The MMO genre has always been one of a tears and angst, and I would argue by far the most of any gaming genre. Which segues into the fact most forums discussing games and genres are filled with people actually playing the game or games in those genres. MMO forums/threads are filled with people talking shit about games they refuse to play or more likely arguing EQ-basics because there just isn't anything worth playing. So, yeah, you linked a forum with a ton of video game discussion instead of trying to make a point in a rational discussion. You're not even responding to what I'm saying at this point. Just quote and fire blindly assured you're hitting something because you're so fucking awesome! You win, though, I'll be the one to fuck off.
 
Utnayan

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Rescorla_sl said:
I've read the back and forth between Utnayan and Popsicledeath. Both of you are making valid points and neither of you are wrong. As a Day 1 player of EQ, there a lot of things about that game that were a lot of fun (to the point I wanted to spend as much of my free time playing EQ as possible) while there were a lot of things about it that were annoying and I did not like which caused me to abandon the game for WoW the day that game was released.

Regardless of whether it was intentional or not, there were some aspects of EQ gameplay that I haven't seen in any MMO since that IMO made EQ more fun.

1. Server drama. I was always a casual player but I always enjoyed going to my server's EZboard forums and reading the drama surrounding guild competition for raid bosses, who ninja looted something valuable from a raid boss, etc.

2. Player reputation. Since EQ was very unfriendly to alt characters, a lot of people focused on playing just their main character which meant there was a good chance of you interacting with the same player over and over. Your reputation as a player mattered since it affected your ability to join groups and guilds.

3. Acquiring loot was memorable. One of my biggest dislike with WoW and all its clones was how loot upgrades dropped like candy from a pi?ata. Every level you got inundated with green, blue and the occasional purple item that provided only a small, incremental increase in your character's power. I much prefer acquiring loot upgrades to be a rare event and when you do get an upgrade, it's significant and noticeable.

If Pantheon is ever released and its design promotes those three things above, I will definitely give it a chance.
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Good Post Rescorla. Except I disagree with the game being unfriendly to alts. Twinking was huge and entirely fun/easy.
 
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Rescorla_sl

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Utnayan_sl said:
Good Post Rescorla. Except I disagree with the game being unfriendly to alts. Twinking was huge and entirely fun/easy.
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The unfriendly to alts comment was based on the premise that you typically had a LOT more AA points on your main character and any time spent on your alt meant no AA accumulation on your main.
 
popsicledeath

popsicledeath

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Rescorla_sl said:
The unfriendly to alts comment was based on the premise that you typically had a LOT more AA points on your main character and any time spent on your alt meant no AA accumulation on your main.
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There was definitely more of a push for having a 'main' than most games since. I remember a few guilds early on that refused to let you have alts guilded because they didn't want you to divide your time. Silly shit in retrospect, but something I kinda liked. As opposed to now when you don't know who half the guild is or which character they're on without a flow-chart or a username system where all your alts are listed for everyone to see (which I don't like, because I'm really unsocial and spend half my time online gaming wanting to hide from friends/guildies).
 
Rezz

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Most real guilds didn't care if you had alts, because outside of raids there was minimal/nothing to do between them. Leveling guilds don't count. EQ, especially during the "golden years," had a very finite number of ways to progress your character. Like, once you hit raid level equipment (Planar gear for vanilla/Kunark (outside the class BPs from trak)) and Coldain+ gear in Velious, there was literally nothing that didn't require a raid to get that would be an upgrade. So unless you were raiding, or working on the (super buggy) prayer shawl questline or Yael's shoulders(both requiring raids), you were done. Combine this with the non-instanced spawning content, and you end up with a -lot- of downtime even as a top-end guild. Mid-tier or higher guilds were put on the "when it pops" list for content pretty quickly, especially as time went on during the expacs. AAs remedied this to a large degree, but then again there was only so many useful AAs in the lists for most classes.

EQ was "alt" friendly because it was horribly designed. It was nice to be able to put a Soulfire on your level 4 paladin, but the reason why someone would do that is the absolute lack of content in the game, even for the toppest of top end raiders. That's not alt-friendly; that's character progression unfriendly.

Also, the hilarity of people claming EQ had real competition during the Vanilla-Velious years is still lolworthy after all this time. I wasn't aware that Tad10 had returned to the forums!

The people claiming that Verant/SOE shitting the bed on patches or design decisions on the regular kept the game interesting clearly didn't play the classes that were literally broken for a year plus. This type of commentary hearkens back to the wonder years of Merlin and his teleportation beliefs. It's nice to see all the old songs still being sung on the EQ radio as they pine for a time that only existed within their incredibly small microcosm/delusions.
 
Miele

Miele

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I played cleric and bard in EQ, the possibility to multibox easily (EQ Windows!) made the game a lot more interesting, even if I never felt the need for driving more than two characters, I remember some crazy with 6 toons dungeoning on his own after raids.
EQ had a nice exploration feeling, because going around alone was dangerous and it put in a 3D world what I used to play with pen and paper, those are the main reasons I remember the game in a positive light. If you ask me tho, 2005 was my favourite year for MMO gaming, WoW gave me an experience that is simply unforgettable and vanilla was amazing in my opinion, coeherent world, amazing dungeons, fun gameplay, etc.

At the time I thought the MMO genre was moving forward and we'd have played incredible games in 2015, but someone/something dictated that people are too dumb to enjoy complex games (except it's not true) and we all got lobby games where there is no point in having a persistant open world, except that you can market the game as MMO and feel entitled to ask for monthly payments or cash shop unlocks of basic features.

Going back 15 years is not going to save the genre, it's doomed, because of expectations: LFD is expected, so is LFR, so are raids, so is instanced PvP, so are exclamation marks and breadcrumb questlines that carry you around the world in a perfectly linear fashion. Meh.
 
Quaid

Quaid

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Miele_sl said:
Going back 15 years is not going to save the genre, it's doomed, because of expectations: LFD is expected, so is LFR, so are raids, so is instanced PvP, so are exclamation marks and breadcrumb questlines that carry you around the world in a perfectly linear fashion. Meh.
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Honestly... have some of you people even played an MMORPG in the last 5 years? The frequent comments like this make me believe otherwise. This is just a general rant, and I'm not picking on you personally Miele.

There are MMORPGs where LFR does not exist. Some of these MMORPGs have a dungeon finder, and guest what? Even if they do exist not everybody uses them. There are still people standing around camp fires manually LFG. I know because I do it every day. In fact, it is the agreed upon MOST EFFECTIVE means of finding a decent group in the games I frequent. Guilds still form and plan raid schedules. People still form deep and meaningful online relationships in many many many games. There are MMORPGs that have uninstanced PVP. There are MMORPGs with public dungeons, that have respawning boss MOBs with specific loot tables. There are MMORPGs with robust local player driven economies that exist outside of global auction houses. Yeah, quests have markers. Big fucking deal. Everyone who completed their epic without checking out castersrealm/allakhazam please raise your hand. *crickets*

Seriously. You haven't played an MMORPG in years. Give it up. Those of us that have, don't believe you if you say otherwise. Stop lying to yourselves and everyone around you. It's fucking weird.

MMORPGs have always been, and will always be, exactly what you make of them.

/rant off
 
Flipmode

Flipmode

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Quaid_sl said:
Honestly... have some of you people even played an MMORPG in the last 5 years? The frequent comments like this make me believe otherwise. This is just a general rant, and I'm not picking on you personally Miele.

There are MMORPGs where LFR does not exist. Some of these MMORPGs have a dungeon finder, and guest what? Even if they do exist not everybody uses them. There are still people standing around camp fires manually LFG. I know because I do it every day. In fact, it is the agreed upon MOST EFFECTIVE means of finding a decent group in the games I frequent. Guilds still form and plan raid schedules. People still form deep and meaningful online relationships in many many many games. There are MMORPGs that have uninstanced PVP. There are MMORPGs with public dungeons, that have respawning boss MOBs with specific loot tables. There are MMORPGs with robust local player driven economies that exist outside of global auction houses. Yeah, quests have markers. Big fucking deal. Everyone who completed their epic without checking out castersrealm/allakhazam please raise your hand. *crickets*

Seriously. You haven't played an MMORPG in years. Give it up. Those of us that have, don't believe you if you say otherwise. Stop lying to yourselves and everyone around you. It's fucking weird.

MMORPGs have always been, and will always be, exactly what you make of them.

/rant off
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