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

bytes

bytes

Molten Core Raider
957
638
MMOs could be great if datamining died today and if the devs would actually deliver on promises made 10 years ago. Remember Vanguard and the splitting paths (which obviously never existed) in dungeons, where you could track for monsters and depending on the track you chose to follow you would see different things, all of this in a contested, open dungeon? Yeah maybe that would be kinda cool instead of having the 15th iteration of "15 minute hallway, 3 stops for bosses, dances around the red circles, loot your token - bye and come back tomorrow!"
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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bytes said:
MMOs could be great if datamining died today
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Won't matter if datamining is dead. A dungeon will remain "unspoiled" for 3-4 days. Then you have video guides, wikis filled, and people can refer to it. So there's maybe 0,1% of the people who enjoy an unspoiled dungeon, and the rest have the full guide to follow.
Remember Vanguard and the splitting paths (which obviously never existed) in dungeons, where you could track for monsters and depending on the track you chose to follow you would see different things, all of this in a contested, open dungeon?
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Save for the contested part, this is straight out of GuildWars 2' dungeons.
Yeah maybe that would be kinda cool instead of having the 15th iteration of "15 minute hallway, 3 stops for bosses, dances around the red circles, loot your token - bye and come back tomorrow!"
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As I said a few posts before, what you really need is "the EVE of RPG". A massive world (with procedural generation because it's impossible otherwise); everyone in the same uninstanced universe.

If you have 6000 uninstanced dungeons, then they can't all be fully spoiled. You can have "guides", as people are familiar with it, but you won't have 6000 youtube videos showing them. The real trick is making a powerful enough procedural generation that can "design" varied dungeons that are enough different to be interesting, yet consistent enough not to feel like they simply got slapped together by a pair of dice. You have a lot of newer technologies, which (I hope), might be powerful enough to achieve that. You still need a team (and a company) that take that risk...
 
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rinthea

rinthea

Trakanon Raider
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119
Ukerric said:
If you have 6000 uninstanced dungeons, then they can't all be fully spoiled. You can have "guides", as people are familiar with it, but you won't have 6000 youtube videos showing them. The real trick is making a powerful enough procedural generation that can "design" varied dungeons that are enough different to be interesting, yet consistent enough not to feel like they simply got slapped together by a pair of dice. You have a lot of newer technologies, which (I hope), might be powerful enough to achieve that. You still need a team (and a company) that take that risk...
Click to expand...

The problem here is that Devs and publishers these days are pushed against procedural generation. Because the game play of most modern games is so fucking dull that it needs to be hidded by the individual, hand built, artistic & beautiful worlds that can only be created by manual labour and attention to detail. Without these elaborate worlds consumers start to realise how dull the game play is and can no longer tolerate the game.

Unfortunately the lesson here the publishers take is: Either make a beautiful, engaging world or make an addicting game with a backbone of gambling. Gameplay?! Don't worry about it.
Until some developer manages to release a game (via god knows what funding/publishing) that focuses on and raises the bar with gameplay and is a tremendous success, we are going to keep heading down this path of stupidity.
 
rinthea

rinthea

Trakanon Raider
82
119
Also if you are a developer and you are campaigning to add a feature because it's fun. It's 100 times harder than campaigning to add a feature that 'looks cool'. No one funding a game wants to hear or is capable of understanding about the long ranging effects of how something like "x% stat changes" combat for the better and how that affects player retention and income compared to, " check out this cool new sword! we can sell it right now for y amount of $!".
 
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