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Developer Retrospective on the MMORPGs of 2004
An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."
Actually, I'm pretty "in" to FFXI.
:) :)
Challenge? Good luck getting past level 12 (or so) solo without grouping. It -can- be done, but it's going to take you almost four times as long to get to 20 as it will if you party (the lone exception being them bastard BSTs).
I've already seen several people come -back- to FFXI from EQ2 (and don't get me started on the folks -running- back from WoW), so I -do- have to question even it's level of challenge (or challenge vs. frustration) against FFXI. That said, -any- MMORPG that allows you to hit max level in under a month of playtime (and -definately- under a month of calendar time) isn't worth playing, IMO. It'd have to have an -immense- amount of endgame content to keep people interested for very long. And yes - even FFXI has a problem here. You can only farm the Gods so many times before they start getting boring (from what I hear - I'm but a lowly WHM44).
Eh. We all have different tastes, and FFXI also gives me an environment where I can learn/practice romanji Japanese
If you a comparatively easy game - feel free to play WoW. You want a challenge with pretty eye candy (and EQ2 is fucking -gorgeous- if you have a beefy enough system) play EQ2. You want bleeding from your eyeballs challenge (and frustration), play FFXI.
And above all - pick the game that you have the most fun playing, and don't flame those that disagree with you
Bah, WoW is an awesome game. The cartoon graphics are perfect for this game, nice to have a game with reasonable system requirements.
/played time or played for 3 days straight. Be honest, if you can.
I did 20 levels in 3 days
Seriously, how many hours did it take you to get to level 20? "days" is a useless unit of time unless you mean your
Having said that, I do agree you level too fast in WoW. There's a simple solution to that - put less focus on trying to level, and work on your tradeskills and help support the in-game economy instead. If grinding is your preference, go create a char on a PvP server which makes questing significantly harder and frustrating.
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If you want a game that's about having fun and playing the game, play WoW. There's significant challenge and it takes those of us who play 3 hours a day about 2-3 months to level up, which is perfect. If you want endless tedium, mindless reptition and to give up all hopes of living a real life, there's EQ1/2. The win argument is null. These games are meant to be "won" (where that's defined as beating the highest end content in game, in EQ this also means farming it 100 times so that everyone gets phat lewt), no one has yet "beat" WoW or EQ2. Getting level 60 is not "winning" in either game, it's a precondition for starting the real game. Games are intended to be fun, EQ is not fun. I've beaten it through time and I have no desire to go further. It's just not enjoyable past level 8. I'm level 40 in WoW and I've enjoyed every minute of it. Want to wait 1 hour for a group? Want to wait 3 hours for raids? Want to watch your hard work get dissolved when your 70 person guild gets fed up with bad management and leaves to different games? Want to make the startling discovery that your character really is no good on his own? Want to be slaves to a group of horny hormonal teenage boys so that you can have a group on demad? Play the EQ series. Also seek therapy.
WoW content is easy if you consider levelling up to 60 to be the only goal (which it isn't in EQ1/2 either).
Most people who say WoW is easy are also those who enter elite instances 10 levels above that which is intended, and proceed to slaughter all the greys (mobs that are 8 levels below you) with ease. They storm through mini-bosses and maybe only have a slight amount of trouble on the final boss. Sure, that's easy.
My wife and I play as a pair and take instances on at their intended level. That's very hard, and sometimes just not possible. I'd love to see anyone who can take on gnomeregan at level 32 with just 2 and call it easy.
The EQ line of games was designed by masochists, for masochists. The biggest mistake was marketing: they tried to hit a wider audience by exaggerating the focus. In fact EQ needs a hardcore team of 30-50 people who both play a lot and play at the same time.
WoW is for the rest of us.
Although I haven't played EQ2, I have played DAOC and (while I'm waiting for a new HD, f*ing Fedex!!!) I'm watching my wife play (and helping when she leaves the room!!!) WoW.
Here's what I really like about WoW.
1. Just like the previous poster wrote, Dying doesn't ruin your life. In other MMORPG's the death penalties are such that people don't take risks. They won't explore an area until they are reasonably sure they can drop everything in that given realm with ease because if they die, they know they'll have to pay 100 silver and lose a pile of experience. When I played DAOC, all that did was frustrate the hell out of me. It was a game of shoots and ladders... two steps forward, 1 step back, etc. I like that in WoW, live or die, I'm progressing.
2. As for the original posters bitch about leveling too easily, that's just bunk. I think the other games have it the wrong way around. The experience ramp in WoW is right where it should be. Starts off easy and gets progressively harder. Nobody wants to spend 3 hours getting from first level to second. However, people do expect it to take them three hours to get from 8 to 9th. Likewise, when your 20th level, The expectation is that getting to 21 is going to twice as hard as it was to getting to 20. Putting this in the context of the dying aspect, when you combine excessively step experience curves with terrible death penalites, it makes the game only accessible to those people who are willing to spend 10 hours a day pointlessly grinding...
3. WoW is actually quest based. I HATE GRINDING and wandering around without purpose. Even when I'm off going to get some dudes claw so I can make some malajusted Troll feel better about his lack of wear withall as a warrior, I'm doing something. I'm not off in the woods killing bunnies for the sake of killing bunnies. Also the quests force you to actually go out and explore and tackle creatures that will challenge you. Which is exciting since, if you end up dying, you just go back, try a different tactic, etc.
4. Their GUI is great. I'm suspecting that Blizzard put out an email to all their employees that read "If you play an MMORPG, please come to the starcraft conference room at 1pm..." sat them all down and said "What do you HATE about the games your playing and if you had the chance would design better in an MMORPG. They then took all these ideas wrote them down and worked them into the spec for the game. Just stuff like you goto a vendor and if you hover over a weapon in their inventory it'll pop up a little window next to it containing your currently equipped weapon so you can easily compare them.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Disclaimer: I am a former Blizzard "fanboi". I quit that position with the ill-fated release of Diablo 2, where I had a scratched CD and Battle.net was down for the first month of gameplay.
What is so great about PvP in games other than WoW is that you have an impact and can make a name for yourself. You *are* the school bully, if even for only a few months. Everyone knows you, and some may even fear you. Others might have bested you, and gloat in their accomplishments.
In WoW PvP, you've got about 300 school bullies, none of them are unique, and no one really fears any of them. Since they are all pretty much nameless, you can't tell the one that turns tail and runs back to the guards from the one that stands up to fight. As time goes on, you realize that those that stay and fight become less and less active, simply because the game is *so* balanced and there is absolutely no reward for PvP, that it is ridiculously lame.
Blizzard is notorious for killing "powergamers". Unfortunately, these people are what make MMORPGs fun. You get rid of the powergamer, and you get rid of the idea that someone can make a name for themself in a virtual world. And, IMHO, making a name for yourself in a virtual world is what MMORPGs are all about.
"But the type of missions that you go on gets to be a bit of a treadmill (kill x y's, Stop x from destroying y before timer z runs out, Click x buttons before y timer runs out). And as you get into the higher levels the amount of time required to change the dynamic of the game (gain an ability or attack) grows."
How does this differ from any other MMORPG? They all generally boil down to Kill X, kill Y number of X's, or take this item to NPC A etc. WOW is certainly no different, although its questing system is superb, and they have tried to maximize the variety I admit.
I do think that the new skills arriving further and further apart at higher levels is a bit of a weakness because players see those skills as mini-goals. In the intervening levels you do get to add slots to your current skills, so its not like you don't gain anything, but fewer people are probably excited about that I admit. It undoubtedly seems like much less of a reward. Now admittedly, on some of my characters I find I am waiting for the slots not the next skill, because I am highly aware of where I can improve things.
"Also in the end, the city setting was nothing more than pretty graphics. There was little interaction with the world, and the story line quests and arcs were nice, but the game got old after a while."
I personally think the city setting is pretty well done, but I can see how it might seem like a lack of variety. I agree that it would be great if we could interact with the local environment a bit more - and they have talked of making improvements along those lines I believe.
As for the game getting old, that is a matter of personal experience of course. I admit that when WOW was released, I was overjoyed to switch from COH to WOW. A new game is always exciting, but I found the experience of playing WOW was less than stellar for me. It does everything very well, but its just a highly polished version of what I have done before in previous games. COH is much more dynamic and fast-paced, and its combat system puts all other current games to shame. Collision detection makes a massive difference.
"I got to around lvl 35 before I quit to play WOW. And the main reason I did this was that I wanted a change in the game dynamics. Had they introduced new concepts, or given me places to explore (the indoor maps were just tile based) I would have stayed around. But as it was, it had turned into a treadmill, more work than fun."
Ah, I have Dewclaw - alevel 39 Claws/Invulnerability Scrapper, Doctor Tomorrow - a level 25 ForceField/Energy Blast Defender, Silver Spirit - a level 22 Illusion/Radiation Controller, Master Li - level 20 Katana/Super Reflexes Scrapper, Captain Canuck - a level 18 Ice/Ice blaster (whom I may reroll to Ice/Energy),
and Odin All-Father - a 14 Invulnerability/BattleAxe Tanker. When I get bored or frustrated with a character, I load up an alt and play the same game from a different perspective, which can help a lot.
In the end it boils down to personal preference of course. Play what you enjoy playing. I am enjoying COH immensely, and while I may renew my WOW again, I am not sure I am going to do so. City of Heroes is a very strong, and well designed game and I think that Cryptic has a bunch of very clever developers and programmers. As such I think we can continue to look forward to new and innovative game design from them.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
" But I will say this: a game should not take "effort" beyond the effort required to have fun. "
I think the thing that is lost on people in all this "my game is better than your game" flame throwing is that different people are looking for different things in their games. Its cognitive dissonance, the kind of brain lock you see in Republicans, when people start lecturing other people that what I like in games is RIGHT and what you like in games is WRONG.
The challenge for successful game developers, especially successful online game developers, is that they design a game that finds an audience, enough of an audience to be successful and that they keep that audience satisfied. You could easily have two huge audiences, who will have nothing to do with each other, one who wants fun and fluffy games they can play in an hour and everything is obvious, and the other which wants their game to be bone crushing hard and time consuming.
The trick is there is more than one equation to reaching the goal of successful online game.
@de_machina
Parent is moderated as troll and flamebait. Only reason I find is that parent embraces EQ2 over WoW. Similar posts which embrace WoW over EQ2 are moderated as +5 Insightful. More over, I think that the parent poster has a point.
This is no WoW forum, so I think we should accept people who think that WoW is not perfect. Hell, some people might really think that WoW is boring compared to other more challenging MMOs.
Moderators, in arguments regarding preferences there is no right or wrong. Therefore, please, moderate the way how the opinion is argued not the opinion itself. That way we will have more fruitful discussions and people won't be afraid to put forward opinions that disagree with the majority's opinion.
So, I guess those people who spend hours of their time just don't understand "potential for fun factor" in the same way that you do. Is is possible that they just have a different concept of fun than you do?
I really enjoy cryptic crosswords, all of you who don't obviously don't know the "potential for fun" associated with them and are wasting your time in lesser pursuits like PC games should learn. So there.