I agree; the problem though isn't that every shit errand is fully voiced. The problem is that there are shit errands to begin with. And you're somehow the unique little snowflake that is the hero of the world. Your special delivery of bear asses to the incompetent outpost guard is just the thing that is needed to save the world. Again. Apparently.
The Elder Scrolls Online
- Thread starter Anomander Rake
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nuday
Golden Squire
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I never understood why developers feel like every single gamer wants to be the "hero destined to save the planet!". I'm perfectly okay just playing a regular joe who just happens to take part in some big stuff.
Im getting a really bad vibe from their idea of PvP. Sounds less like DAoC and too much like GW2.
GW2 WvW had little purpose, it was just something you did. No character progression to be achieved from it. DAoC has realm ranks for e-peen and realm abilitles for character progression. This is why it still has a strong player base, 12 years after its release. Where will GW2 be 12 years from now..?
Didn't they learn anything from DAoC or even GW2? People dont like circle-jerking around keeps. Its fun for a little while, then it just becomes a laggy zerg-fest. People want an open-world to roam and pvp in, fuck centering everything around your stupid keeps.
Furthermore, they said something about allowing people to participate in RvR even at level 1. On paper it works, in practice, if its anything like it was in GW2, your going to be a free kill for anyone geared/capped. Fun? Not sure about that. Do it like DAoC did, battlegrounds are fun.
My 2cp.
GW2 WvW had little purpose, it was just something you did. No character progression to be achieved from it. DAoC has realm ranks for e-peen and realm abilitles for character progression. This is why it still has a strong player base, 12 years after its release. Where will GW2 be 12 years from now..?
Didn't they learn anything from DAoC or even GW2? People dont like circle-jerking around keeps. Its fun for a little while, then it just becomes a laggy zerg-fest. People want an open-world to roam and pvp in, fuck centering everything around your stupid keeps.
Furthermore, they said something about allowing people to participate in RvR even at level 1. On paper it works, in practice, if its anything like it was in GW2, your going to be a free kill for anyone geared/capped. Fun? Not sure about that. Do it like DAoC did, battlegrounds are fun.
My 2cp.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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That's the 'classic RPG, only with 100 people" mentality. You're the hero because in a single-player RPG, you are the hero. Just don't pay attention to the thousand heroes around you.
That's a good point. If I want to roll my uber savior of the world, then an alt that is the model of mediocrity I should be able to. One reason why I'm intrigued by ArcheAge I suppose.Nuday_sl said:
I'm not sure where the conclusion of full voice acting = eminent failure, is coming from. Ok... maybe swtor. It's not the fact that they used voice acting, Skyrim did just fine with it. EA/Bioware mismanaged their resources during development. As it's already been stated, the Hero engine is notthereason swtor failed. The engine seems fine, I think it was a poor decision to use it for their desired purpose. If a developer wants to even whisper that they're the new big kid on the block/wow-killer, they need a Mac client. I'm not team Apple myself, but Blizz has estimated around 6-8% of the WoW player base is. If those numbers are accurate that's alienating your product from a player base that could easily place your MMO in the top 5 for active subscribers. Even if that number is inflated, it just makes sense to compete with your competitor on an even playing field. SWOTOR didn't do that, because EA or Bioware wanted to licence an engine, focus heavily on a very good leveling story (my opinion), and not finish what keeps players in an MMO raids/pvp/events.
You've mentioned some big Zenimax/HeroEngine conspiracy a few times now, and I'm failing to get the logic behind it. Even if they were using the HeroEngine, who cares? The HeroEngine only recently began to support Mac clients. Seeing how TESO is about to hit beta, I see it unlikely that they magically slapped an mmo together that is Mac/PC in that short amount of time. Did you ever stop to think their statement may have been a backhanded compliment? Saying that they are using the HeroEngine on their whiteboard could be their template on how not to do things(Bioware). There are certain things that werealrightduring swtor. Being able to watch my friend's cutscenes while in-party was new/cool to me. HeroEngine is not the antichrist of software, despite what Bioware would have you believe.AlekseiFL_sl said:
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Yea. And Skyrim is a huge MMO, right?
"Full voice acting" is a feature of single-player RPGs. In a MMO, it's about the feature equivalent of "realistic graphics": something that's useful for the marketing, but should disappear from your mind once you play. Because, realistically, if you play for 300 or 500 hours... how are those hours filled with voice-acted speeches? Answer: they aren't.
So, yes, many of us consider full voice acting bad on two counts: One, it's a major waste of resources. Two, it signals yet another "on-the-rail-quest-story-driven" RPG game, only with 1000 heroes running around. Well, I'm the hero of Azeroth, it's good enough for me; I don't need to be the hero of every world.
nuday
Golden Squire
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I'm sure I'm alone on this, but I kind of miss the days when you had to read every line of dialogue. I'm pretty sure reading everything in Final Fantasy is the reason I love to read now. I think it helps with immersion in the game world if I can put my own voice to a character, rather than listen to the sometimes ridiculous voices they choose for certain characters. Further, in some MMO's I would much rather skim a "go bring me seven rat spleens" quest than listen to some poor voice actor try to make that sound interesting.
Caeden
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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To me an MMO is about class mechanics, resulting synergies, teamwork, exploration, conquering unique and challenging instanced and uninstanced content, a dab of pvp or a lot of pvp, and socializing. Nowhere does voice fit in. Blizz does a good job of conveying a lot of quest and cinematic level interaction with minimal voice (they've gotten more superfluous with it but they're also Scrooge McDucking in the office relative to any other MMO dev).
You and you're friends are the "voice" of the MMO.
Also, I realize that WoW does the special snowflake syndrome even in Vanilla but it feels significantly muted compared to swtor, lotro, etc but maybe its because I dont always read quest text.
You and you're friends are the "voice" of the MMO.
Also, I realize that WoW does the special snowflake syndrome even in Vanilla but it feels significantly muted compared to swtor, lotro, etc but maybe its because I dont always read quest text.
nuday
Golden Squire
- 203
- 8
I think the difference between the rest and WoW doing special snowflake is that WoW will at least, sometimes, say "You and the rest of the heroes!" rather than just acting like they don't exist.
The best part about skyrim voice overs are the NPCs saying funny shit to you as you walk by and the npcs talking to each other cause atleast for me that kinda stuff pulls me into the game. The voiceover for most of the actual quests is pretty meaningless to me, you could do that through text just as easily, with the exception of a few really well done encounters like parthanax. It can also give character to truly unique NPCs, that jester assassin dude in Skyrim would not be the same crazy MFer if his dialog was text.
Biowares problem was in project management. At some point someone should have realized that they had X amount of resources and needed Y amount to make a good endgame with some enduring allure. I don't think anyone thinks voiceover makes things worse, its just that when you make decisions like Bioware and decide that they are more important than the actual game that you see problems come up.
If you do all the things that Caeden mentions well you will have a good mmo, if you do all those things and some voiceover you will have a slightly better mmo.
Biowares problem was in project management. At some point someone should have realized that they had X amount of resources and needed Y amount to make a good endgame with some enduring allure. I don't think anyone thinks voiceover makes things worse, its just that when you make decisions like Bioware and decide that they are more important than the actual game that you see problems come up.
If you do all the things that Caeden mentions well you will have a good mmo, if you do all those things and some voiceover you will have a slightly better mmo.
How can I put this without sounding as douchey as you came off? No shit. I was speaking about the developer and their past experience delivering quality content that had the feature. Who gives a shit if it's an MMO or not? It's still an RPG, right? I personally liked the ambient dialogue that Creslin mentioned. It's more immersive than hearing recorded wildlife for hours on loop.Ukerric_sl said:
I don't see voice acting in games equivalent to photo realism, sorry. I don't spend the majority of my time in any game chatting it up with the quest giver. If there's an option to skip it like swtor, or even better tick a checkbox to disable cutscenes, then everyone wins.Ukerric_sl said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think just about every MMO... in ever... has a "rail" to their questing system. Every player in an MMO is going to reach a certain goal (endgame) that they must accomplish together. Unless Skynet has something in the works all of these quests are written and programmed into the final product. You're trying to justify voice acting with narrowing a developers scope. When the same developer released a game that offered many directions your character could go. There was the central, "I can speak like a dragon" storyline, or you could go off and do your own thing.
Yup.Azrayne_sl said:
What's funny is as far as I can recall, in games with heavy voice acting, all the shit quests are voiced right? But NPC's like vendors, etc? Given one repetitive line, if any at all. I'd much rather have a lot of "generalized" voice-acting.. salutations, conversational basics, ambient dialogue, etc applied to NPCs, rather than line after line of dreadful quest text.
That is how GW2 did it and I think it was a good trade off. The major plot quests were voice acted and had little scenes of you and the NPC talking, but the majority of the pissant stuff was just a random line or two and text.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Also, in GW2, when you're walking along city, you do overhear passerby commenting on various stuff (the weather, the market, etc).
The problem is that, either it's some quest dialog, and you hear it exactly once, even though they spend hundred thousands of $ to record those, plus hours of bandwidth to bring it to you. Or it's the wow-type greeting lines, which you're going to hear a thousand times until you no longer pay anymore attention than the wildlife loop. Which, being empty of meaning, your brain will not notice it's as repetitive as the "Ahhhh, I was expecting youuu" of every second Tauren in game.
It's only partially the same thing. The advantage of photo-realism is that your efforts scale. Each minute of voice-acted dialogue costs you the same as any other minutes. You get slight scale economies because you're bringing in your voice actors for a few days instead of a couple hours, and you rent the recording facility for cheaper by the hour. With highly realistic graphics, once your engine is ok, it's ok everywhere in the game. Once you've got good buildings, they're good everywhere (with minor touches here and there).
But in practice, after the first few hours in any given locale, you stop noticing it. Sure, you're ooohing and aaahing when you first see it. And, in a single-player RPG, that's mostly the only time you see it. But in a MMO, you're going to spend hundreds of hours in the same type of locales. You're going to stop noticing the graphics.
That's what we've mostly said: the graphics (and voice acting) matter for marketing. But to play long-term? They don't.
No. Every MODERN MMO is made that way. Old MMOs (or certain niches, like EVE) don't have a storied questing system, and thus, no rail.
This sounds like a lot of opinionated economics to me. Features that "matter for marketing" lend to the experience that keeps someone in a game. If Blizzard swapped out WoW's graphics with Minecraft, I think you'd see a subscription decline. Those features continue to pay dividends because I'm consistently enjoying my experience in your game and paying a monthly fee.Ukerric_sl said:
I think you misunderstood what I said. It grinds my gears when people cry, "zomg the game haz rails!!1!" Kind of why I made the Skynet reference. Every game is going to give you objectives, rules, and usually a narrative. The fact that EVE didn't provide a story to your objective is irrelevant. You have tasks, you complete them, and snatch your reward. When I played SWTOR, no matter how badly I wanted to blow up Alderaan, return to my ship, and give Mako some hot coffee - it wasn't going to happen. I didn't get upset over it because I'm playing through a story that the developers created. If you want to use your imagination and craft your own then you can certainly play a space sim like EVE. You're still going for a ride... on rails.Ukerric_sl said:
On-topic:
I'd like to see more updates on how this game is developing. Everything I've found lately has been fansites shooting their load for it already. I guess we will be seeing more once the beta opens. What are you guys following for TESO coverage for now?
Erronius
<WoW Guild Officer>
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I think people are trying to point out that while most/all features factor in to marketing to a greater or lesser degree (have to market the game as a whole), there are simply some features that exist almost solely for marketing and are by and large afterthoughts to the game's community. So instead of "features that matter for marketing" one might instead say "features that matteronlyormostlyfor marketing". People have named quite a few, such as voice acting. That shit gets turned off and skipped by 99% of the playerbase before long, I mean hell, most people don't even read the text from questgivers and just read it out of their questlog later. The pinnacle of this is stuff like SOEmote - dev time shouldn't have even been wasted on it. Ever. No one uses it, at most they try it once and then move on. But don't think that if it's a "feature" in a game that is approaching release that they won't use it as a selling point. 5 bajillion hours of voice acting!
Your example here is purposely pants on head retarded, not only because it would never happen, but also because amongst comparable products (similar MMOs) none really have Minecraft graphics.
Graphics (particularly on the highest of settings) is really only a big thing early on, post-release. I'd wager most people scale their graphics way back and rarely (if ever) crank it back up after they've had their fill. For most performance takes a front seat, and with any MMO that I've ever played before very long I really don't give 2 shits about the graphics performance that the Developers advertised when they were marketing a game. In fact I wouldn't have minded a "minecraft" graphics settings, particularly if I could get a performance boost such as on raids. I'm sure I wasn't alone with the original old-school EQ1 character models and I always crank my graphics way down for raids.
EVE is often a difficult example to shoehorn into a discussion, as it is here. Really, missions in EVE themselves remind me of camping mobs for drops in a fantasy MMO. You figure out what you want (say Angel Extravaganza and similar missions), find an agent, and you grind the shit out of it . I don't even think they bear anything but the most passing resemblance to quests in most Fantasy MMOs. Besides, a huge majority of people doing missions are either multiboxers grinding cash, ISK farmers, AFK bots, carebears, etc. The people actually playing the game are...well...not really doing missions imho.
As far as "on rails" go, most MMOs use quests as a way to funnel people through content. For example, having the last quest in a zone...send you to the next zone. That is part of the "on rails" issue, you treat the game as a themepark and you move from content to content like it really is rides in an amusement park. EVE doesn't really play like that, and that's actually been a long standing gripe from players. There really isn't much handholding and you aren't funneled well (if at all), they just throw it all out there and...GOOD LUCK!
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Isn't what we are discussing here opinions? Unless you have academic papers to point...
Actually, no. I make distinction between features that matter for marketing and features that matter for a game. Features that matter for marketing lead to people trying your game. Features that matter for playing lead to people staying in game. For most games that are finished within 10h, there's a lot of blur between those. But for games where people stay for thousand of hours over years? Those categories are distinct.
And yes, ultra-realistic graphics belong to the first category, like full voice acting.
Not if they did swap the gameplay as well. World of Minecraft by Blizzard? OMG
Note that I didn't say graphics were a marketing feature. I saidultra-realisticgraphics belong to the marketing realm.
I think you completely missed my point as my statement was intended to be preposterous. I'll do my best not to call you short bus. I'll explain things slowly this time around.Erronius_sl said:
Ukerric_sl said:
These statements come across as, "the graphics lure you in but don't keep you." You're right that single player and MMOs are different animals. But the features you get day 1 are even more important on day 100. The business of an MMO is to keep you coming back, not on the initial purchase. SWToR sold 2 million copies the first month, if memory serves me. It doesn't matter much now. My point was that features you deliver will always be important in an MMO, new players are jumping in all the time.Ukerric_sl said:
That's marketing jargon that's been used since the beginning. Everyone needs to look past those buzz words because that has never been delivered. You did mention that players would stop noticing the graphics. Which is why I made the WoW/Minecraft example.Ukerric_sl said:
I'm not arguing if Minecraft's graphics are good or not. I was making a point that if the consistency of the product changed people would jump ship. With an MMO, I think all of its features are important after the initial release. How many years did it take for WoW to reach its peak subscriber numbers? The initial push helps to grow a community, but to keep subscribers you have to consistently impress your players. Saying that features don't matter after some time doesn't make much sense to me.Erronius_sl said:
I'll agree with you there. That's why I called it a space sim. It's not a knock against it. I wish there were many different games to fill niches as well as this game has. Calling it a massively online space sim, I think, is more of a compliment than an insult.Erronius_sl said:
I'd like to discuss opinions. It just seems odd when I'm told that I'm wrong or retarded for mine. Then the only thing that's brought to back that up are diminishing returns of voice acting pulled out of ones ass or tired internet meme videos. Lobbing insults doesn't make you correct. Just kind of shows what you're bringing to the discussion is weak. I'm open to saying that TESO could completely fail, that's fine. They have to thread the needle for satisfying the hardcore RPG fans they have and make the game accessible to all of the WoW soccer moms. Or they don't, who the fuck knows? They mention one feature of full voice acting and everyone acts like that's a detriment to its success. Why, because EA/Bioware failed? I thought we would be used to that by now. EA has once again assimilated another talented developer. It doesn't mean that others can't succeed.Ukerric_sl said:
Cool video brah.Erronius_sl said:
Ugh... I'll have to disagree with you on that one. The way Activision/Blizzard are going, this wouldn't surprise me though.Ukerric_sl said: