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Where's the Massive in MMOGs?
Grimwell writes "Like MMOG's? Concerned about their future? You should read Darniaq's article questioning the general approach to these games. From the article: 'I expect invention from Blizzard as I much as I would from the local Top 40 radio station. I'd hate to think that the entire breadth of MMOs is measured by the playing of a few of the hot selling titles. It's great what WoW has done for the genre, but man I hope people don't give up on the genre just because they hit 60 and realized they didn't want to spend 3 hours a night in Molten Core.'"
I think you misunderstand when mentioning other high level instances as alternatives to Molten Core, the issue is high level instances in general, so the only alternative is PVP, that makes two options. And thats just not enough. The Burning Crusade will add another 10 levels of content and some extra content to the current gameplay, but dosn't solve the issue of only having two options after hitting the level cap. and the level cap will be reached... fast. Or will be a grind, not good either.
There isn't much in the sence of lets say, factional politics as in EVE, just to name a thing that might keep a game interesting and compelling besides its core gameplay and content.
Hey I would agree with the author on this "hit 60, nowhere to go except spend 3 hours in MC"
I got into WoW during the first christmas it was out.. I'm quite a casual player, basically took me 8months to hit 60.. I then started getting into the high end content spending hours and hours in ZG, MC, UBRS, LRBS, etc, etc..
My bro who played on another server was apart of the most powerful/organized guild I've ever seen! Every single player had tier 2 armor/weaps pretty much all of the best.. One day my bro snapped and sharded all of his items and quit the game. So I asked him "wtf you do that for? you had the best shit, were uber strong" . His answer was the following
"you know what, why the hell am I wasting my life getting fat while running BwL and all these other instances to get good gear and items when all I can do is just stand in orgimmar like a complete moron with nothing to do but go back into these instances and waste more time"
So I thought, damn.. your right.. After spending hours, if not days worth of playing time the only thing I can look forward to is gear.. And I seemed to have the worst luck with instancing, i literally walked away with nothing but shitty blues and maybe one purple ring that was a complete waste. Big fakin deal.. once you hit 60 there really is nothing to do except running instances over and over again.. Sure there were BG's, but even then that become boring as hell..
I quit WoW, but I'm hoping burning crusade will bring back that spark in the game.. Until then, I'm going to spend my WoW time doing other things.
MrJynxx
Er, I think the emphasis was on "3 hours a night", not on "Molten Core". Most of the end-game content in WoW requires a pretty serious time committment, well beyond that which is required to reach level 60 in the first place.
Great ideas for the future of MMORPG are plentiful. I played WoW through to the end, got Level 60, beat the game. I know the ins and outs. I can do better. Why, I just thought up half a dozen great ideas in the minute before I posted this comment. So it's just an implementation problem. Well, I have that solved to. Or I will. It'll just take some time to write. I'm going into stealth mode and living in my mom's basement to keep my burn rate down, but when I come out in a year or two I'll have the most awesome technically advanced MMORPG ever! Give away the demo, bittorrent out the client, sell subscriptions, profit! I wonder why more indie game developers aren't doing this already? I mean, it's so obvious!
Start Running Better Polls
Endgame in WoW is ALL about doing the same thing, again and again, every single night until you can't bear to log in again. EVERY weekend, while I played, was spent in MC and ZG. Then they added the resets so every single night of the week was scheduled by Blizzard.
No thanks, I don't want to do Scholo for the three hundredth time. Seen enough of Strat, live and dead. UBRS is a Uber Bore. I play a holy spec priestess because my guild demanded I switch from shadow - faction grinding or farming gold for repairs is therefore incredibly slow and anything but fun.
I made alts, but the realization I'd have to subject myself to nights and nights more of Scholo, Strat and UBRS just to get geared enough to torture myself with more MC and ZG made me hang up my WoW account.
Guild after guild on my server imploded when they got to the endgame; and after awhile, so did the one I was in. Too many people left or restarted on other servers or returned to previous servers.
I read the article. He's spot on about the lack of imagination in current MMOs. One thing about EQ1 - leveling was so slow that many stopped worrying about getting a level a day (or week) and started doing the social things - the buff days, races, arena battles, role playing in Plane of Hate - the kinds of things you end up doing when levels and loot are fairly hard to come by.
Nobody would stand for that now. WoW, EQ2 and the others (including EQ1 since Luclin) have conditioned people to thinking that if they aren't making levels and not getting uber loot, that there is no fun to be had in the game.
The author of the article says sandbox PvP is the answer. I'm not sure about that - griefers live to ruin those kinds of things - but heck, it's about time for a game that can see beyond the grind.
Guild Wars took a more innovative approach, but it's still static, infinitely repeatable content. The author's points, I think, were:
- it would be way, way more fun if the actions of the player community as a whole were to drive a continuous evolution of game content, as opposed to the current paradigm of seting up a rat's maze of static content that is destined to run out sooner or later (or become boring if it's repeatable)
- removing the experience treadmill and level segragation would put players on more even ground, allwing for more realistic, less frustrating interaction between players
- it would be way more fun to eliminate the focus on grinding for experience and items and instead make a game where the players play to affect the larger happenings of the world itself
The problem as I see it is that this would be a lot more work for developers, and would be potentially less profitable as a result.
The end result, though, would be a 50,000 pen-and-paper RPG that is played graphically over the Internet. A great idea on paper, but really really hard to pull off successfully.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I think saying that the endgame of dungeon running and PvP is the "real" game is BS. Plenty of people hit the level cap in a game and quit soon after... or sit around and bitch that there is nothing to do.
Slackware
There is a wonderful one out there, Eve online. There aren't levels perse, just new ships and skills you can add to your charecter to make things different. There are so many things you can do in that game it's staggering. PvP- be a bounty hunter or a pirate, be a trader, be a miner, scientist, you can make EVERY item in the game. It's truely a fun experence. As you get more skills, alot of time goes into skill development, but it happens when you are offline. you set a skill to train, and it'll take two weeks, but that's two weeks if you are playing or not. If anyone is interested, pm me and we'll go do some rat hunting :)
I am full of goo... black evil goo
What exactly is a MMORPG about anyway. A game like tetris is easy. Highscore. Chess is easy. Beat the opponent. Quake is easy, beat the other players.
Well that is what WoW does. The highscore is your level, the opponent is the AI and the other players are the horde or non-horde.
If you look at how most players talk about WoW you get the distinct impression that it is all about loot and levels.
Has anyone ever held a fishing competition in WoW? Or just organized a tour of nice looking spots? A beauty contest? Anything not related to getting loot or XP?
To some players it is this that makes an MMORPG. To have fun. This is to me what made SWG at a time such a nice game. To do stuff that was just fun to do without worrying about how many levels it would give you. IRC with pretty pictures.
An example, SWG, the tour of endor. For all its faults SWG could look pretty nice and it was clear at least some of the artists had spend some time looking at the source material and getting it. Endor was one of those. It was kinda fun to find the stuff from the ewok movies there (yes I liked them, bite me). So with a group of newer players we organized a tour. Just to drive around and see all the spots. It was sorta popular. Plenty of people wanted to join and had fun but we also got some almost violent reactions from players who just couldn't see the point of doing something that did not give XP. There were two ewok villages and visiting just one of them gave you a Point of Intrest badge. So when we set off to visit the other one member became enraged at the waste of time. Never mind that the villages were nicely done, he wanted XP and he wanted it now.
Same with Everquest 2. We were in a small group fighting red conning enemies and not doing to well. Death still carried an XP debt and it even carried over to your party members. Then again our motto was, if you ain't dying you ain't trying. It was simply more fun to defeat an enemy with a sliver off live remaining (and promply get killed by the next spawn) then fighting critters at optimum level wich were from a tactical viewpoint yawnville.
Yet again this led to almost violent confrotations with other players who just couldn't get that we were wasting our time on this. How dare we fight reds when they were having trouble finding people our level for the blue/green areas.
The point is that for us the battles were not a grind. They really required you to think about what you were doing rather then just hit the same special over and over. All those people who complain about repetitive fighting just ain't putting themselves to the challenge.
There is plenty of stuff to do and challenges to be had in EQ2 and SWG (well before both were WoWed anyway) but most people rushed by on the quest to get maximum XP. Just check how few players ever went into the deeper dungeons in EQ2 or how deserted the middle planets were in SWG.
I think I call it the Midnight Club vs Grand Prix Legends Syndrome.
In Midnight Club your enemy is always slighty better then you. If you got a D class car, they have C class, if you have level 1 upgrades, they got level 2. If you got 1 nitrious boost, they got 2. Improving don't matter, you will still be raising enemies slightly better then you. It is an endless grind to the top where your reward is a super car that is no fun to drive because now you still will get knocked out the race by being rear ended by the AI.
Grand Prix Legends on the other hand puts you in a car that is impossible to control but is the same car everyone else drives. If you tune it to just a little bit better performance the other drivers stay the same. So you do gain real benefits by becoming better and better. You don't so much "win" as slowly climb up higher in the rankings, first races you are lucky to finish but there is no price to pay. You can simply advance to the next race and finish a season on 10th place and still have improved. MC you don't improve unless you win.
A game like EQ2 is like Midnight
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The poster you react to would point out that at level 1 it is sewer rats, at level 10 it is dire rats and level 100 it is were rats.
The difference is minor BUT nontheless it is a huge culture shock to try to understand the other person mindset.
To them another high level dungeon is a complete new challenge with an AI that uses different spells and rewards that give different benefits. To you it is just another dump AI wich you can learn with a few tries and dumps yet more loot that gives a few stat boosts so you can do it all over again.
Some people want more of the same, some people want a change now and then.
I fall in the latter group BUT not because I think it is better or something. It is just my taste.
Yes you can ask yourselve what the point is about adding a whole range of Y zombies who are exactly like X zombies except with higher points but the simple fact is that it works for a large group of players. It is also easier.
Adding a new type of play to any game is HARD. The Sims is about the only one to do it. Most other games expand by offering you yet more of the same.
SWG was game with lots of "extra" gameplay. But think of it like this. Wich satisfied more people. Adding another high level dungeon OR a whole new range of clothes and hairstyles? Wich is "easier" to implement?
WoW caters mostly to the more of the same crowd and it seems it is the way to market success. No it doesn't appeal to everyone but to other companies the message seems clear. SWG was WoWed and so was EQ2.
Vanguard is getting heat for not being WoW and so are lots of other games.
You say you need more gameplay elements to keep the game compelling. That might be true for you. Not to the parent. He likes extra dungeons with new enemies and new loot. It keeps the game intresting for him.
Oh and EVE may be the bees knees but they really should get their head out of their ass for their payment system. I can play SOE (GlobalCollect) and I can play WoW (prepaid cards) but EVE does not seem intrested in my money.
Lambast the bigger games all you want but at least they learned rule 1. Never refuse a paying customer.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The article author's views on WoW are fairly spot on, in my mind. It fails because of its total staticity in all areas. Dieing does nothing. Killing someone respawns them 200m away. Clearing a town just gives you a clear town for 20 seconds. Battlegrounds and Raids only have the effect of giving you minute advantages in ... battlegrounds and raids.
His solution, however, is a tad too drastic. Removing leveling all together, and its associated goals is not necessary. The next step MMORPG wise is adding some dynamism. The internet isn't ready for a fully player driven world, not with current anonimity and maturity. Perhaps when the stigma to adults of playing these games is cleared there will be interesting opportunities for this.
The compromise, something that would provide a lot of self-sustaining play, would be to add structured social aspects. I know these have been done to a certain degree in MUD's and planned in some MMO's currently in development, but this needs to be done completely and well to succeed at all. Add a certain number of factions, not all known as playable to the player. Kingdom A, Kingdom B, OtherFormOfGovt C, MysteriousFactionFromFarAway D, WizardsGroup E, ReligiousOrg F, RebelliousGroup G, etc etc. Allow the player to start in the world, introduce them to it, then allow them to join one, get a 'job', a role in the world, and give it meaning. Governing a town, a city-guard, mercenary, thief, shopkeeper, the possibilities are endless and obvious. These roles would have to have world impact and a possibility for progression. Guards would defend their town from opposing factions, real players come to raid/invade, and possibly get promoted to captain etc.
Players would get known for more than being level 60, but for their choices socially, and their effect on the events. This would have to mean that existing towns, and all manner of similar places would have to be able to be taken over. Not easily, nothing should be easy in that way, but it needs to be possible. Of course these are really fine grained examples that hopefully illustrate the necessary dynamism.
I just finished playing Oblivion. It's a perfect example of the enemies always being a level above you. You can literally go anywhere in the game, even into "Oblivion", as a second level character with a wood club and beat the game. But *every* bandit in the game has $30k in armor later in the game, even when they ask for the same $100 bribe. If they fell upon one of their own, they'd be rich for life, but instead they extort the peasantry for pennies. Sucks. Ass.
Luckily, as soon as it came out many modders changed the loot progression, the leveling world, the way skills and levels work, etc. Now, with the right collection of mods, the world is a scary place. Walk into the wrong areas and bandits will gut you for lunch money. Come back with better skills and kill three with a single spell.
Anyways, one way to make this work is to make defense easier. There are a lot of good ways to keep people away. Polearms, caltrops, a doorway. Another was is to make "hit points" not change much as you get more powerful. Like in real life. One bullet can stop Rambo. What keeps you alive is building defensive skills, armor, well-chosen weapons, tactical advantage, stealth, etc. This way combat becomes more guerilla in nature, instead of standing around trading sword blows like a Final Fantasy game.