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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."
I think these articles need to look at the more independent titles as well. While I have found them to be more buggy, I would like some pressure put on the bigger companies to lower prices and/or increase content. Currently i'm fumbling my way through Planshift, and (because i'm a glutton for punishment) Planetside.
i personally like the MMORPG maplestory, yes, it's a silly name. the site is here one thing i like about it, is that it is free, at least to play. at present, it's in public beta for the global version, but if you understand chinese, japanese, or korean, there is a release version of those languages already, which can be found here as i said, the game is free to play, but they have a creative idea on making money off it. in the game, there's something called the cash shop. there, you pay real world cash to be able to get unique items. go ahead and give it a try. you've got nothing to lose, except maybe time, as this game is addictive.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Ah, see...that's the point that Blizzard understands and Verant has lost sight of: games are *entertainment*. So, something that makes me, as you put it, "feel good about myself" is much better entertainment than something that feels like work. I do enough work already. When I hit a quest in WoW where I had to log out & look it up on a hint sight, it was very jarring, and very, very rare...I had to do that all the time in EQ.
Challenging is fine, and I am playing one of the more complex classes in WoW for the challenge (warlock). But, at its base, this is still entertainment...I don't want my entertainment to feel like work. It should be fun.
Walter Yarbrough: I'm also curious about the success of Vanguard's approach of "We're going to make this hard, and you'll like it!" Particularly when compared with the much more casual and penalty-free playstyle of WoW.
I can tell you about the success of that approach: Bollocks to that!
I abandoned EverQuest because the high-end game was a boring chore rather than an exciting challange. Camping for weeks or months on end for your mob to spawn is a "challange" only in respect of trying to hold your eyelids open. In reality, it's simply player hardship for its own sake.
It seems that because of the ambiguity of the word "hard", some designers can't tell the difference between the two things, and which is good and which is bad.
Your WoW comments are horrible. 20 levels in 3 days implies nothing more than you playing the game for the better part of those 3 days. It says nothing about the "challenge" of the game.
Cheap cartoony graphics? Well there are 1000's of adults who truly enjoy those "cheap" graphics. Tell that to the Blizzard artists while you're at it.
Richest backstory? EQ's story is nothing more than another rehashing of Tolkienesque characters and lore. At least WoW has its own back story which I remind you has existed a lot longer than EQ.
WoW is just as strategic as EQ, and you will die if tactics arent in order. You wouldnt know that cause you stopped at lvl 20, right when quests start to get a lot harder.
WoW is a great game that is literally saving the genre whilst you whine about returning to the glory days of EQ.
that's my word, holla...
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.
Those are some pretty short interviews considering the body of work those folks have done.
I have cancelled UO, SWG, EQ, and CoH for WoW...as an old fart of MMO I can tell you that WoW is where it is at - I think every person I know online has switched to it and have no plans of going back to any of the above games. Oh wait there is this one guy at the helpdesk playing EQ 2 and is a miserable whiner about it.
If you like MMO then just go buy the darn thing - play on a low population PVE or PVP server as per your fancy...if you pvp just remember there is a more uber player over that next hill so dont cry when you get ganked after picking on some n00bs.
Bladedawn on Blackhand
It was a interesting year. Horizons no long was vaporware yet has met little success. Several games came and went such as Rubies of Eventide as the eq knockoffs continue to meet difficulties garnering subscribers in the face of the MMO big 3 (EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars Galaxies)
We saw Asian gaming hit US shores with Final Fantasy and Lineage but as with the Asian MMO culture these games resemble 1st gen MMO's at best in many aspects.
Turbine continued to drag players along with it's failed Asheron's Call 2 release. With monthly content patches mostly rebalances every month since launch only to produce a few decent patches before announcing a move to patches every 2 months. Effectively doubling the price per content push (PPCP). Doubt remains wether they can produce viable MMO's that will succeed even with big names like Dungeons and Dragons online and Middle Earth Online. The forgotten realms series supports EQ's success as much as the game itself. Middle Earth Online is late and with no Hobbit movie forthcoming as of yet there's little out there to rekindle the Lord of the Rings fever to the point that this game may succeed. I also do not see where DND online can succeed where Neverwinter Nights did not.
We also saw many successes such as World of Warcraft which is undoubtedly the best game of the year. SOE continued their fame with SWG with the jump to light speed expansion and EverQuest 2 all three of which will continue to dominate the MMO landscape in the US for the forseeable future and beyond with no apparent contender in sight.
I just wanted to bring up City of Heroes here for discussion.
It's an MMORPG that I think has succeeded largely by finding a different niche than most of the other offerings in the market: It's set in modern-day cityscapes with superheroes, rather than a fantasy world.
Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it's simple and elegant: There's no equipment, what money exists is rarely useful, missions (quests) always tell you where to go with no ambiguity, and the GUI is top-notch.
After an old EQ addiction, City of Heroes is a breathe of fresh air-- I can meaningfully log on and accomplish something in half an hour, even at the high levels (I'm level 44 right now, with 50 being the cap).
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
No, what EQ2 and most other MMORPG's offer is not a challenge, but a timesink. You cannot solo past level 20 or so at any pace other than "unbelievably slow", so you are forced to spend perhaps hours seeking a group; you incur a penalty when *another person in your group* dies; simple things like crafting and travel take tons of time and resources; and so on and so forth. However, WoW, with its action-based gameplay, has been perhaps the most challenging MMO I've ever played, not in terms of the time needed to get anything done, but in terms of *real,* Contra-like challenge.
I won't address this poster's other points, since they're largely opinion. But I will say this: a game should not take "effort" beyond the effort required to have fun. I'm glad the WoW developers recognized this fact and made the game a *game,* rather than just another bunch of timesinks.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
FFXI is the worst game for people who have a life. I should know, I had a THF50/WAR37/DRK30 with all jobs unlocked, most leveled to lvl 10+.
A typical FFXI session would be : log on at 6:00pm, get my 2 friends into a party and frantically search for a WHM and 2 damage dealers. Any evening where getting WHM was easy, there was no good damage dealers available. Around 7-7:30 if we're lucky, we can set out to go camp. Around 8pm, we're in position, we start killing, it's good. Around 8:45 pm the whm has to leave for whatever reason, the whole evening is shot.
Then you've levelled a bit, let's get some equipment! Great news : that amazingly good dagger for lvl 50 thieves is dropped by a lvl 76 HNM. In other words high levels are making you pay trough the nose for it because there's no way in hell a lvl 50 can go get it for himself, even if there's 18 lvl 50 trying together. So we go farm. 10k gil an hour is the best you can hope to, so there goes THIRTY hours of farming items because that dagger is 300k. Wanna camp a high value item instead? Well, join the 10 other campers at Mee Deggi/Leaping Lizzy/Valkurm Emperor/etc. The monster appears every hour to 1.5 hour, so keep a clock near your computer. Oh, and you might get 4-5 kills and still get no drop, the drop is rare.
FFXI was an exercise in masochism. The nice part of EQ2 is I can group with my 2 RL friends, play 2-3 hours and make progress, then stop for the week. Very casual friendly in my experience.
Haven't played WoW, but I've seen a couple of people say it's "revolutionary". I might be a skeptic, but if it's "revolutionary" like Warcraft was to Command&Conquer and Dune 2, then I'll have to disagree.
Not quite sure I understand why Eve Online http://www.eve-online.com/ keeps getting overlooked. Maybe it's becuase the genre mostly aims toward cut and slash type games, or those that have huge sponsors (Sony, Lucas, etc.)? I think this one deserves a closer look by folks. Just the fact that the Eve universe is a single universe for all players, and not divided into servers or nodes, is very impressive (30,000 + solar systems for over 30,000 players). And another appealing point is the constant improvements and expansions to the game, the most recent being the Exodus expansion. I just feel that if the topic is going to be how creative and original the development process has been for a specific MMOG then Eve-Online deserves a look.
TheTiminator
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.
My wife and I have been playing WoW from the first day of retail. We play a few hours every night, and it's a blast. It's incredibly easy to play "casual", which is an important feature for all of us working professionals. I can't play 8 hours a day, I get a few hours after work, yet my character is progressing just fine.
It will take a few months to hit 60, then I can spend another month getting gear, then maybe I'll do some PvP. Who knows. I'm glad that I get to experience the whole game, rather than the first few levels as I would on many other MMORPGs.
As for the appeal of the game. My wife and I started, then mentioned we were playing to a friend who lives nearby. He bought the game. Over the last month or so, we've been mentioning the game to our old college friends, who have all gotten online. A couple of their wives have mentioned an interest in playing (these are women who have never played a computer game before).
My wife and I played DAoC a little, didn't get into it too much. Blizzard is very good at making very user friendly games, and I agree that it will probably do a lot for the entire field. All of these people who are playing these types of games for the first time are most likely now confident enough to try out new games in the same field.
As for complaints about the game. I'd say that most of the complaints I've heard about WoW is from the "hard core" gamers. They've complained about how easy it is to level, how much of the game is for "carebears", or those who want to play and cook dinner at the same time. I think Blizzard has hit their market pretty well. They may have sent away a few hard core gamers who will "beat" the game within a month, but in return they've caught the wives, parents, and children of those who normally wouldn't play.
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.
For some cool charts, check out this site.
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