The Sad, sad, state of MMORPG in this brave new era...

Mahes · Oct 23, 2018

Of all the PvP oriented play in online games, I feel Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot came as close to a perfectly based format as you can get.

Ultima Online had safe areas that were no longer safe when you ventured out to explore. There were many ways to get out of a town and so a person could often sneak out without to much of an issue. When your character died all the loot was available to anybody who was nearby and wanted it. This negated corpse camping because most players knew not to bother returning to the corpse. It also created a lively crafting system that a person often needed to purchase more gear.

Dark Ages of Camelot tried to mix PvE with PvP with pretty good success. Only one expansion is heralded as the fuck up of the system and later they fixed that problem. This game showed how expansion could be made without increasing player levels. The expansions really did add content beyond more higher numbers. There is a crowd funded sequel but it has promised very little to no player verse environment content and so will be half the game the original was with larger PvP battles.

If these two systems could be used as a baseline for a new game with better animation and more player capability, then maybe the "Next" game would indeed be something that many people could enjoy.

mkopec · Oct 23, 2018

Shadowbane was not bad PvP wise. Good ideas with the city buiding and sieges full on world PvP with full looting, plenty of class/race cobos coupled with farmed runes to upgrade the character. Too bad the game ran like dog shit.

Kriptini · Oct 23, 2018

Ukerric said:
Do they?

I'd argue that, with less massive worlds, you get more and more instancing/phasing/mega-servering that basically destroys community, since every player is irrelevant to your playing experience except the ones that the game randomly associated with you when you clicked on "join queue" from your game lobby (Boralus).

My fervent wish for a truly MMO would be a real massive MMO: Half a million players in a single non-instanced world served by a next-gen procedural generation. You do need to embrace the end of ultra-curated experiences, allow for imbalanced content, the end of the "you are the savior of the world (like everyone else)" questline on-rail content.

I meant in terms of expected population, not in terms of geographic scale. I also hate the current trend of instanced-everything, but I think it's a byproduct of technical limitations preventing games from packing hundreds of people into a single map while still maintaining any graphical fidelity whatsoever. If you have a smaller population, it's easier to keep them interacting with each other because the technical need for instances is no longer a concern.

a c i d.f l y · Oct 23, 2018

Mahes said:
Of all the PvP oriented play in online games, I feel Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot came as close to a perfectly based format as you can get.

Ultima Online had safe areas that were no longer safe when you ventured out to explore. There were many ways to get out of a town and so a person could often sneak out without to much of an issue. When your character died all the loot was available to anybody who was nearby and wanted it. This negated corpse camping because most players knew not to bother returning to the corpse. It also created a lively crafting system that a person often needed to purchase more gear.

In UO, you needed to be resurrected by a player or find a resurrection stone, or you were stuck as a ghost. "OOooOooOOooo" But you definitely tried to make it back to your corpse, depending on what you were carrying, to salvage anything that might've been left by the PK'er, unless they were just killing you to kill you, or they were already over-encumbered and couldn't loot anything, or didn't want anything you were wearing. Also, even though there were multiple ways out of cities, you could still camp the crossroads and legitimately expect people to pass by. People still idiotically took the roads, lol.

Araxen · Oct 23, 2018

DAOC pre-TOA was on the only MMO I enjoyed PVPing in. The three-faction system is the gold standard for MMO PVP, imho. I could go on about what DAOC did right, but it's been gone over a million times before on this forum.

Byr · Oct 25, 2018

mkopec said:
Shadowbane was not bad PvP wise. Good ideas with the city buiding and sieges full on world PvP with full looting, plenty of class/race cobos coupled with farmed runes to upgrade the character. Too bad the game ran like dog shit.

Full looting includes equipped gear. Shadowbane was not full loot.

Morrow · Oct 25, 2018

Araxen said:
DAOC pre-TOA was on the only MMO I enjoyed PVPing in. The three-faction system is the gold standard for MMO PVP, imho. I could go on about what DAOC did right, but it's been gone over a million times before on this forum.

Yeah, same. And the way DAOC did PvP was so good, that you didn't even feel like you were "going to PVP". It was just another fun thing to do in this grand adventure. Now it's like, you either choose to go PvE or you go to PvP. And so I now say I am someone that doesn't do PvP. But in DAOC, the reason I went out into the frontiers for the first time in beta or early release, when nobody knew shit, wasn't to test pvp content or to specifically do pvp... it was to adventure and explore, just for the sake of it.

DAOC did pvp perfectly, and it saddens me that Camelot Unchained is doing 0 pve, because while I loved DAOC's frontiers and pvp, I still want some pve.

Elidroth · Nov 5, 2018

The problem with the MMO genre is there is no discovery anymore. 99% of the players don't have to learn anything on their own. They watch youtube videos on someone else's strategy on beating a raid. They read Icy Veins to build the best version of their class/spec. They don't have to figure anything out for themselves at all. It's unfortunate, and I don't see a way back from this.

Agraza · Nov 5, 2018

Muligan said:
In all fairness to PvP, I don't think we have seen a game yet go "all in" with a PvP game. Also, they either didn't deliver a finished product or they constantly changed their game in attempt to appease typically the wrong groups of people.

I think it can be done and be something that could be enjoyable to everyone but I believe others are right... the moment it becomes a proclaimed PvP centric experience, many will just look on to something else.

It occurs to me that PvP done right is a similar argument to Communism done right.

I don't think an MMO can be focused on PvP and be a good PvP game. It has to have a good game already for there to be an attractive PvP element. The trick then is integrating those two societies of players so they share the same world of experiences. EVE came the closest to persistent world PvP, and WoW to instanced PvP. Both remained healthy PvP games for so long because they had other strong(er) game elements that allowed PvP to consistently be fresh and relevant. For games like EQ and WoW to have good PvP it had to be segregated because the devs were unwilling to spend the design effort to balance it in the open world. EVE spent incredible effort to do that, but they still ended up with blue and red areas of space with very little blending between the two. PvP doesn't have the same market appeal as PvE, and most PKs don't want to play in a world only inhabited by PKs, so getting PvP right requires that devs spend the majority of their effort making the world worth fighting in and for even by those that don't PvP.

Ukerric · Nov 5, 2018

Elidroth said:
The problem with the MMO genre is there is no discovery anymore. 99% of the players don't have to learn anything on their own. They watch youtube videos on someone else's strategy on beating a raid. They read Icy Veins to build the best version of their class/spec. They don't have to figure anything out for themselves at all. It's unfortunate, and I don't see a way back from this.

Massive procedural generation.

Instead of making a 2 square mile terrain replicated on demand, make a single server 80 times the current size of WoW. With 6000 dungeons. Maybe the dungeon you're visiting today is spoiled, but it's probably better to find someone who has been in it and can guide you. Or figure it out.

It requires you to let go of the crafted narrative and curated experience. Embrace the trivial dungeon and the hard-as-fuck unbalanced dungeon. Embrace the weird areas and the plain looking ones. We're starting to get enough technologies that you can probably do that.

Fight · Nov 5, 2018

Yeah, but that all sounds like a bore and a chore. It is Diablo in the MMO space. Either everything is too easy or everything is too hard... but none of it really matters because you can just back out and reset if it is not to your liking.

It is not gong to feel like a real (fantasy) world with unique items, that came from a unique boss, in their own unique dungeon/castle. When you lose those things, you lose the essence of what makes an MMO great. Narrative, story, cohesion, and the sense of accomplishment all go right out the window and you are just smashing loot pinata's on a never-ending treadmill that leads to nowhere.

Ukerric · Nov 5, 2018

Fight said:
Narrative, story, cohesion, and the sense of accomplishment all go right out the window and you are just smashing loot pinata's on a never-ending treadmill that leads to nowhere.

The big problems with this are also well known:

1) Story and everything else is fully and completely spoilered three months before you even encounter it
2) The main challenge is watching the video showcasing the fight, and doing it correctly enough when it's your turn
3) and lastly, all that narrative, story and whatnot cost a LOT to make. I mean, it takes a company the size of Blizzard to make an expansion that is consumed in 4 weeks by the hardcore (due to timegating) and 6 by the casual. After those weeks, it's the never-ending treadmill as well.

Just like there's no "perfect game", there's no perfect solution to making a MMO. The truth is, nobody is willing (or funded enough) to explore the MMO design space anymore. As I was highlighting in the original post, today, you have cheap crowdfunded copies of old games, PVP MMOs (crowdfunded) and 32 korean clones of the same base game. And that's it.

Procedural generation of a massive world tries a middle point between the over-curated experience of the WoW clones that is now an abyssal black hole of failure for everyone that can't put down a 150M$ budget to try to woo WoW fans, and the random lobby game with random stuff. With procedural generation, you can (attempt) to make a world that is knowable (The Fissure of the Burning Desolation is well known, enough to have a map on the wiki; but your favorite dungeon The Deadman's Hideout hasn't attracted much attention these days, because no one is willing to admit its last boss drops a Legendary Staff with a click self-heal effect, and you want to farm it as long as you can) , but hard to be spoilable ("The wiki has now 1000 articles in the Dungeon category! That's almost 20% of them!").

a c i d.f l y · Nov 5, 2018

Ukerric said:
The big problems with this are also well known:

1) Story and everything else is fully and completely spoilered three months before you even encounter it
2) The main challenge is watching the video showcasing the fight, and doing it correctly enough when it's your turn
3) and lastly, all that narrative, story and whatnot cost a LOT to make. I mean, it takes a company the size of Blizzard to make an expansion that is consumed in 4 weeks by the hardcore (due to timegating) and 6 by the casual. After those weeks, it's the never-ending treadmill as well.

Just like there's no "perfect game", there's no perfect solution to making a MMO. The truth is, nobody is willing (or funded enough) to explore the MMO design space anymore. As I was highlighting in the original post, today, you have cheap crowdfunded copies of old games, PVP MMOs (crowdfunded) and 32 korean clones of the same base game. And that's it.

Procedural generation of a massive world tries a middle point between the over-curated experience of the WoW clones that is now an abyssal black hole of failure for everyone that can't put down a 150M$ budget to try to woo WoW fans, and the random lobby game with random stuff. With procedural generation, you can (attempt) to make a world that is knowable (The Fissure of the Burning Desolation is well known, enough to have a map on the wiki; but your favorite dungeon The Deadman's Hideout hasn't attracted much attention these days, because no one is willing to admit its last boss drops a Legendary Staff with a click self-heal effect, and you want to farm it as long as you can) , but hard to be spoilable ("The wiki has now 1000 articles in the Dungeon category! That's almost 20% of them!").

If each server was differently randomized... but a lot of the story in a procedural game tends to get lost in the midst of the gameplay, and you end up with Diablo 2.

It would be nice if everything wasn't spoiled before it came out, but folks want to be able to plan their attack before it's available instead of being wowed by the experience itself. Would be nice if the files were encrypted and couldn't be datamined. But that's really a minor thing.

Ukerric · Nov 5, 2018

a c i d.f l y said:
If each server was differently randomized...

Which is why I was talking about a world 80 times the size of WoW. Because at that point, you don't need a lot of servers. One is probably enough.

I did the math a year or so ago; a game with 80 times the size of current day WoW can have a 300-400k player base which translates into 100K concurrent prime-time players without too many problems. You need a good balance of levels, a flatter power curve - a level 30 dungeon boss is absolutely not trivial to a level 50 character - and lots of stuff to make sure there's variety. And if you do not have a 38Studio-sized staff to fund, because you don't need 800 man-year of level design and quest writing, it's completely profitable.

but a lot of the story in a procedural game tends to get lost in the midst of the gameplay, and you end up with Diablo 2.

Do not think story. Think background. EQ didn't have a story in game; it had a lot of background, and people filled the story in their mind (and various forums). People are very gifted with creating motivations and stories when presented a content that seems to be consistent with itself.

Fight · Nov 5, 2018

I am sure you have this all worked out in your own mind, but what you are saying does not translate to reality.

A game 80 times the size of WoW... ok. See you in 80 years. You literally would have developers live an entire lifetime producing content for a game that they would never see come out before they were in the grave. If what WoW has done is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it or been able to iterate on it and do it better? You can't just say, "Make WoW but 80x bigger and all your problems are solved!"

Are you just talking about instances? Just replicating your content to scale with the size of your playerbase? Well, join the club of what everyone else is already doing. Nothing new there.

What you seem to be keen on is a MMO that focuses solely and totally on the player's incremental advancement. If that is all you care about, then you already have hundreds of games to choose from. Destiny, countless pay to win mobile games, the entire AZN online game market, and of course Diablo. The Diablo games were never about seeing which boss was sitting at the end of the procedurally generated instance you ran for the 686th time. Nobody gave a fuck about that boss or the dungeon he was in. It was about seeing if he dropped the .08% chance of an upgrade you wanted.

A massive world of procedurally generated content is going to be a shallow, shallow grind-fest that appeals to the mentally ill predisposed to addictive tendencies.

popsicledeath · Nov 6, 2018

Elidroth said:
The problem with the MMO genre is there is no discovery anymore. 99% of the players don't have to learn anything on their own. They watch youtube videos on someone else's strategy on beating a raid. They read Icy Veins to build the best version of their class/spec. They don't have to figure anything out for themselves at all. It's unfortunate, and I don't see a way back from this.

This is one of the reasons I loved Vanguard. Unpopular enough that there was not a lot of spoiler or strat sites, nor a lot of gold sellers or obviously purchased characters, etc. So the community was smaller, so you actually knew people. Unpolished and unbalanced enough there were still plenty of surprises and janky shit that would happen, so things were never as predictable as other games where you'd read the strat and then just do your part. Hell, half the time you couldn't find the 'ideal' group so just had to make up your own strats anyhow.

Probably not possible to intentionally replicate that kind of environment, but for me it was a happy accident in Vanguard and why I kept going back to it from games far more polished that felt over-engineered and predictable. Vanguard was my second most memorable and favorite mmorpg second only to EQ, and I think both had similar qualities (even when strat sites got popular with EQ there was still a lot of unpredictability that would reward good or adventurous players).

Maybe there's hope for Pantheon, after-all, because if anyone can do everything wrong and somehow have it come out better than having done everything right it's Brad McQuaid!

Ukerric · Nov 6, 2018

Fight said:
A game 80 times the size of WoW... ok. See you in 80 years. You literally would have developers live an entire lifetime producing content for a game that they would never see come out before they were in the grave. If what WoW has done is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it or been able to iterate on it and do it better? You can't just say, "Make WoW but 80x bigger and all your problems are solved!"

Did you read that little word "procedural"? You can't scale WoW. It took devs 14 years to produce the content currently in WoW, and you can't do it faster while using the same method Blizzard uses to make WoW.

If you are making a procedural generation system, then you start with a test world that's the size of a zone. Then 5 zones. Then 25. Then 100. Then as much as the sub base you're expecting will need. The computer does it, not your designers. Your designers make the high-level mechanics, which are then scaled to the amount you need.

A very simple example of design. You're making a fantasy world, and you want realms. You don't have storywriters making 200-pages documents on realms. You make a Penril Noise map of "civilization" going between 0% and 100% with a distortion against the middle (so that extremes are more represented than the 50% area). At 0%, any road that is placed in the world is textured with a trail/game path type texture. At 100%, it's a regularly paved road with lampposts and signposts at the intersections. Your game world will "naturally" have civilized blobs, surrounded by more or less wild areas. When the players explore it, they'll naturally fall into "this is realm A, this is realm B" and so on. You haven't designed realms, they just came out of the procedural generation. Tiny kingdoms, massive empires even. And this scales to any world size you want to have.

Cabales · Nov 6, 2018

You know, I think the procedural thing might be exactly what the industry needs if it can be done well. A lot of the early games featuring procedural content really felt terrible, but I think the teams and tech are sophisticated enough now to make this work with a real budget. In fact, it could make the world feel more alive if implemented properly.

Regions could have their own tribes and villains. Beat back a tribe of kobolds in the region and see them become less common. Maybe their holdings could become guard outposts, and merchants could be available there. Other threats can emerge to replace the kobolds, which may result in those outposts changing hands again. Eventually the kobolds may make a comeback as they are mostly ignored while we combat other, more pressing threats. Entire towns could be razed or occupied. The hand crafted narrative could give way to an emerging, more organic story.

I think the key to making this work would be making sure the engine could spit out large numbers of unique feeling adventures (dungeons, tombs, villains, victims, changes in environment, etc.) for people to enjoy. The narrative just needs to feel polished enough to give you a reason to pursue your objectives. Ultimately what the dev team would need to spend time on would be engaging systems of combat and character progression, as well as creating monsters and factions.

Maybe this could produce something that combines an mmo with a rogue like or traditional MUD. Give me lots of loot, classes, prestige classes, spells, abilites, perks, talents, etc.. That would be enough reason to keep playing. Maybe bring in remorting (similar to what they did in DDO). Lots of unlockables. I could get into that, as long as every dungeon didn;t wind up feeling the same.

Fight · Nov 6, 2018

Maybe the closest thing to what you guys are talking about is No Man's Sky, the MMO? Massive, nearly unlimited world to discover and explore. Each planet has it's own look, feel, and indigenous wildlife? Yeah, it could work.

I don't know how you solve the problem of making things feel special or unique though. In EQ, you went to the bottom of L Guk and killed the Froglock King because you wanted a Crown of the Froglock Kings. Or you camped the Ghoul Assassin because he had the Guise of the Deceiver. It fit, it made sense. It wasn't just a +gooder stats type of game or world. How do you do that with procedural generation? It is just going to turn into Diablo or Destiny on an MMO scale. It feels like you are really losing the RPG elements by going this route.

Srathor · Nov 6, 2018

This is what Crowfall is trying to do. Except the world ends.

The Sad, sad, state of MMORPG in this brave new era...

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