Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It seems to me that the author of this article is less knowledgeable of the subject at hand than one should be before climbing to the top of the mountain and shouting your opinion to the unwashed masses below.
Game evolution comes incrimentally. Not only that, it is shaped by the interest of the public.
What the author seems to want is a many thousand player MOO or MUSH. I'm sorry to be the one to break it to him, but most people just have no interest in such an open-ended environment. MOOs and MUSHes were always more niche and less popular than their MUD brethren (though there were big ones out there, don't get me wrong.) But whereas anyone is capable of typing in a few lines of text and thus creating an object in a MOO, a modern game requires the ability to create 3D Models. And not only that to animate them. And not only that to do so well enough that it warrants repetitious viewing.
The bottom line being, what we got is what we got, and it's going to evolve from there. If he is really dedicated to his "revolutionary" idea (which is as much a rehash of the past as anything on the market today), then he should put his time and effort into creating it.
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
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
http://www.eve-online.com/>
Over 26000 in the same universe (single server, well, cluster of servers) last weekend. Player interaction makes up the end game. That is, pvp actually has a point beyond "points" and revolves around territory/resource conflict. Politics are far beyond anything else available too.
EVE Online is the best Massively Multiplayer Online Game in existence. When I say "massively" what I mean is that there aren't "shards" or "realms" or other divisions between groups of players. Everyone plays on the same "realm" which had 26,000 players online concurrently last weekend, out of a playerbase of about 110,000. How is that for massive?
There's also the in-game universe, which consists of a network of more than 4,000 solar systems. How many zones are there in other MMOGs like WoW, Everquest, Everquest2, and so on? 200? 300? Again, massive.
Oh, and you wanna talk massive? Check out the ships you can fly. You do of course start the game in a tiny (by comparison) ship, but through the training of skills you will be able to fly bigger and badder ships over time.
Skills are another area where EVE takes the term massive to the limit. Any player can learn any skill, of which there are literally hundreds. You aren't limited by your "class" because there are no classes. The skills you have determine the activities you can perform, period. There are certain types of spacecraft which are designed to be used by members of a particular race (there are four: Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar) but there is nothing preventing say, a Gallente pilot from learning the Amarr skills so that they can fly Amarr Battleships. One thing about skills that differs from other games is that you select a skill (one at a time) to train, and then it will train over a period of time, regardless of whether or not you're online. So if it will take you a few days to get the Caldari Cruiser skill from level 3 to 4, you can put the game down for a long weekend and come back to your new skill and the benefits it entails.
Everything (item-wise and ship-wise) in the game is produced in one of two ways: you take it as loot after killing an NPC pirate ("rat" in game terminology) or players make them. Most of the equipment and ships are player-produced. It is possible (although difficult) for a single player to mine her own ore, start her own production queue, and start producing her own ships, guns, ammunition, microwarp drives, armor plating, and so on. It's much easier to be part of a group.
That brings us to Corporations. Corporations of many types exist. Some corporations exist solely to mine the ores of the asteroid belts in the outer regions. Some corporations are pirates, who exist solely to kill other players and take their equipment. Some corporations are explorers, or escorts, or manufacturers. Corporations can be as small as 20 people or as large as 1,000 (or more). Multiple corporations can form Alliances, perhaps granting a Mining corporation the privelege of mining precious ore in an outer system controlled by a Pirate corporation in the alliance.
At the beginning I mentioned the 4,000 solar systems. These systems each have a sovereignity and a security level. The security level determines a player's safety in the system, ranging from 1.0 (secure) to 0.0 (insecure). At a security level less than 0.5, any player can attack any other player. At a security level less than 0.3, players can set up their own space stations (you read that right, you can deploy and operate your own space station) and claim sovereignity over that system, effectively making it "theirs." Alliances will claim sovereignity over vast networks of systems, as well. So of that massive 4,000 systems, perhaps half are at a security level of 0.5 or greater and are "protected" by The Federation. Outside of these systems though, anyone and anything is fair game, and the stakes can be quite high.
Outside of Federation Space, there is one thing that is more massive than any other game out there. If you have two alliances, each with 4,000 players or so, who both want to control a region of space because of, say, the extremely valuable minerals in the asteroid belts required to build a certain type of ship, th
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Lineage 1 I believe had no level cap. I remember one player (he was Korean) was like level 75 or so (with the next highest around 65), and was still going. Leveling at this point was insane. It would take multiple months of game play to advanced a single level. His goal was to solo one of the in game dragons. That game is still being developed, and has had a ton of new content added since I last played (4 years ago). I like that idea. If I want to keep grinding, and working it out, let me enhance my character (if it is only a few str or int point increase each level past 60 for WoW). Lineage 1 had a lot of cool things you could do that added to the game content. For example n-zels and ndais used to increase weapon/armor stats...and the fun of attempting to overzel/overdai an item, praying it wouldn't blow :) Plus you could sell a +9 b-kat for a shit load, and it wasn't soulbound to your character.
If Lineage 2 would have been based more closely to Lineage 1, I would have kept playing it. But Lineage 2 strayed way to far from what Lineage 1 was.
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.
I have since figured out that I would rather play a multiplayer (4-10 people) game than a MMORPG. The server tends to be more stable, the players more consistent, and the cost a LOT less. Even when I played Wow, I seldom got the feeling of the supposed millions of people who were playing, except when I walked into one of the major towns. Other than in town, I doubt I ever saw more than a dozen people at any one time, anyway, so what's the difference?
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
EQ2 has plenty of fun inside. Provided you allow yourselve to have fun. There is an option to switch of XP gaining. Since certain quests can't be completed when you reach beyond a certain level this allows you to remain stuck until you complete it.
And stuck you will be because it is very hard to find players willing to do quests that do not "pay out" enough.
Just ask yourselve. Have you ever done a quest that didn't pay out just for fun? Took on an enemy because it seemed right even if it was going to cost you by dying and lost xp/equipment?
No? Then your a grind monkey. Welcome to the rat race.
As for PvP being the answer. No it isn't. First off, cheating will be rife. just look at the halo story below.
Then there is the problem of balance. REAL PvP is about unbalance. You never want a fair war. Ask Captain Blackadder.
As for more orginized PvP well you would have to go to a system like the romans used for gladiators. But these people were very strictly regulated so that fights were as fair as possible.
The only real way is to just make two different games. WoW for the grinders and something else for people who want more. This is impossible. Just check how many people want to turn Linux into Windows. The idea that you would have WIndows for Windows people and Linux for Linux people is unaccetable to a lot of people. Everything must appeal to the largest possible group Elitism of the masses.
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.