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EverQuest Sequel Shows Complexity, Ditches PvP
Thanks to GameSpy for its hands-on preview of Sony Online's forthcoming PC MMO EverQuest II, as the author discusses the graphics ("EverQuest II is one of the most beautiful games in development... Every square inch begs to be explored"), the play style ("EQ2 has a smaller, more intimate feel, more like tabletop roleplaying games centered on small parties"), and the complexity ("Everyone starts on the same island, then has to choose allegiance to one of two main cities (and belief systems!) From there, more and more options open up, sort of like an inverted gameplay pyramid.") Elsewhere, over at EQ2 Stratics there's further confirmation from devs that: "There are no plans for a PvP [Player vs. Player] server at release. There is no ETA on when or if we will ever have one."
I see a lot of naysaying in the comments so far.
Naysay all you like - I regularly play the EQ2 internal beta build and it is not just EQ with new graphics, nor is it a levelling treadmill. There is tons of content, plenty of balanced questing, and dynamic encounters. Naysay all you like; you'll all be proven to be nothing more than mere armchair critics, while EQ2 goes on to win customers and awards. The game is shaping into something truly incredible, and the rest of you will see that when it is released.
You'll need much larger teams and much more robust content-generation tools to be able to even remotely continue to add enough content for the masses to consume. Look at a single-player game's (say, any RPG) development cycle. Those games have what, 40? 60? hours of game play? Maybe more. Lets be generous and say 100 hours of game-play. Lets be generous, again, and say that takes 2 months to get through.
Your general population would burn through that content much too quickly for your MMO to have any legs at all.
This is why repetative content is a must in MMOGs. I'm not saying EQ did it right; not saying EQ2 is going to do it right. But some sort of reusable content is absolutely necessary for these games to be able to survive without thousands of people working on them, or some very very sophisticated development tools. CoH, WoW are getting closer, but their mission 'types' are pretty few and far between. Plus their story arc is pretty short.
Personally, I think having no PvP is a very wise move. Since December, I've been a pretty heavy FFXI player and my experiences of PvP there have been quite amusing.
When I took up FFXI, there was no PvP, but everybody wanted it. For the first few months, every linkshell I joined was full of people demanding PvP, whining about needing PvP, moaning that they were going to give up the game if they didn't get PvP and saying "just wait until they bring in PvP" to everybody they didn't get along with. Even at the time, I could spot the obvious flaws in this, although I seemed to be in a pretty small minority.
Square-Enix seemed to take quite a lot of time develop PvP. Whether this was because it was a complex task, or because they had other priorities, I can't say. I suspect it was a bit of both.
Eventualy, PvP was introduced. It was fairly limited in scope... you had to go to specific areas and participate in special events to take part in it. "Never mind", thought the PvP crowd, "we can still kill all those people who've been annoying us". Then they found out that they couldn't. The outcome of PvP combat in a MMORPG is heavily dependant on the class and level of the participants. If you wanted to kill somebody and were able to, there was no way they'd let you get close enough to try. Of course, you couldn't spend all your time chasing them, as you had to watch out for all the people who wanted to kill *you*.
The result is that, on the server I play on at least, PvP is essentially dead in the water a couple of months after its launch. I'm glad they introduced it; it stopped a lot of moaning from the kiddies. Howver, I can see that Square-Enix wasted a lot of time and effort implementing a major feature which just doesn't get used now. It's not rocket-science for Sony to want to avoid making the same mistake.
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
The reason for this is simple, when you buy a book or watch a movie the company gets all your money up front. They don't get any more money whether you go through all their content in a day, week, or a year. In fact, they get the same money even if you never go through their content. All they need to do is sell you the book. TV series on the other hand need to keep you watching in order to make money. They trickle out just enough 'content' (storyarc episodes) to keep you watching and then pad out the rest with filler.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive. The majority of their money is made in their subscription (though they make far less than most people realize). Because of this they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game. MMOs are expensive to make. Because of the client/server code that has to be written, a world that has to be built that is significantly larger than the world of a stand alone game, the much tighter balancing that need to be done and the customer support that has to be provided MMOs are an order of magnitude more complex than stand alone games, with budgets to match.
Currently the cost to produce an MMO is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. If you spent that much designing a game that sold 400,000 units (which is a lot) and most players completed it during their first free month the end retail price of the product would be around $200 (manufacturers typically see around 1/4 of the retail cost of a game after it passes through manufacturing, distribution, and retail), and that will only break even. That won't turn a profit or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled.
This isn't, of course, to say that grinding is the only way to keep people interested. There are other ways to slow the consumption of content. What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO.
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Certainly you can complain about the amount of content but my point wasn't that EQ was content rich. It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. There may be some instances such as when you enter the zone containing a dungeon then move into the dungeon, but the overall design is that characters can go whichever direction they please.
Certainly the two are not identical, but I think they are analogous. You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss. One could even make a claim that the areas that you have to transverse where there is either no puzzle to solve or else the puzzles are of a type the player has solved previously constitute 'grinding' and are simply there to pad out the game. I would not make such an argument however and would point out that just like any story has to have peaks and valleys a game has to have easier areas to help bring you back down a bit before the next big thing.
Actually I have played plenty of stand alone games where you are sometimes forced to go out and beat up on the random monsters just to level up a bit so you can undertake the next challenge. It is usually not to the degree that it's done in EQ however, so I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
Again, I think we are really somewhat on the same page here. It equates to balance. You would not be against the fact that leveling occurs or is even occasionally required. Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought.
Yes, if the journey is good then it is the reward in and of itself. However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline. Look at the movies and see how many of them are about reaching and winning some objective (getting the girl, winning the race, defeating the Empire) and how many are simply about the journey (such as i