What makes an MMO?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2009-11-15 09:48 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Yes and infact you can earn a 'Domination' on a player that you kill frequently while they get no kills in return, however this marks you as their 'Nemesis' and the player earns more personal points (doesn't actually affect the team achieving anything) if they get revenge on a nemesis. | Again, I don't know how well it holds up, but it's probably not a viable strategy to _make_ an individual person lose so frequently they get frustrated. I'm not sure how you'd even do that in TF2. Are names displayed? |
Also I used my 'displayed name' as an Anti-Spy tool. My name is 'Spy Here!' which breed as a certain amount of healthy paranoia amongst my friendly team-mates so when a Spy using my name does appear they know they're in for a bad time (plus it's even more hilarious now they can see whose name they get when they disguise themselves).
Plus I love playing Pyro...nothing like the cold sweat of terror a Pyro brings to a disguised or cloaked spy.
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Oh yeah, the flame wars over horribly unbalanced alternative weapons like the Sandman were nothing compared to the flame wars over cosmetic items.|
Originally Posted by GlaziusF
And you have to do it with some sort of persistence. TF2 has individual achievements, and I am told there are also fancy hats to be had. But the Internets exploded about the hats.
They're just fancy hats! They don't even DO anything! But even that tiny bit of persistence was like striking a spark in a fuel tanker. |
If you're interested, here's the long version. When Valve introduced the hats they made it so that you could have one randomly awarded to you while playing the game, you didn't have to do anything (this caused flame wars). The natural result was that people would create "idle servers" where you could go AFK and still have a chance for hats (this also caused flame wars). After a bit someone figured out that you could make a simple program that would convince Valve you were connected to a server without the game running, allowing you to get hats without using up your computers processing power (oh, the flame wars THIS caused). Valve never made any official comment on whether using the idle program was legit or not and then one day announced that no, it was not legit any items you'd gotten through it had been deleted, and if you hadn't used it you got a Golden Halo hat as a reward (and the internet exploded).
EDIT: Oh yes, I forgot. Recently if you pre-ordered L4D2 you got a TF2 Hat (based on Bill's hat in L4D). Guess what happened?
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At some point, you're going to have to expect from people to just do better. You can't let players play as poorly, as sloppily and as stupidly as they choose and still expect success. At some point, the game has to say "OK, you failed. Try this again and DO BETTER!" It doesn't have to be via a "game over" screen, but you're going to have to go there eventually.|
Originally Posted by GlaziusF
Okay, one more step then: you have to make a game where you're entertained even if you lose, for a sizable or even majority fraction of the people playing the game who habitually lose.
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Granted, I draw the line on "unwinnable" situations, where you fail not because you did badly, but because of something you did prior to your last save point, which you cannot go back and fix. Few games let this happen these days, but all too often you'll find yourself hitting an auto-save point low on health and with little ammo left even in contemporary games. This extends to builds in MMOs. There's nothing worse than encounters expecting you to have a power you don't have, or worse - CAN'T have.
But when it comes to performance that is within the player's hands in real time irrespective of past events... Yeah, we can expect the player to be on the ball, at least. And, frankly, I'm getting a little sick of our playerbase's aversion to any map more complicated than straight, wide corridors. I mean come on!
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Las Vegas seems to be full of them. Although technically speaking many of them are very expensive puzzles.
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Originally Posted by GlaziusF
Okay, one more step then: you have to make a game where you're entertained even if you lose, for a sizable or even majority fraction of the people playing the game who habitually lose.
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Quoted for truth.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
At some point, you're going to have to expect from people to just do better. You can't let players play as poorly, as sloppily and as stupidly as they choose and still expect success. At some point, the game has to say "OK, you failed. Try this again and DO BETTER!" It doesn't have to be via a "game over" screen, but you're going to have to go there eventually.
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Back in the days when my gaming group used to host regular LAN parties and tournaments, we'd get all kinds of gamers coming. From the uber clans of guys who literally lived to game, to the casual guys who were just wanting to see what it was all about. And even with the uber guys dominating and my guys mostly just barely holding their own, I can't remember a time when anyone just up and quit because they were losing a lot. We all had a blast because we were having fun playing games that we all found to be fun.
If a game company has to hide behind 'can't lose' mechanics to mask the fact that their game is only ever fun when you're winning, then they generally have a bad game.
TF2 is just generally fun. Even with a sniper getting 7 kills off me in a row and me only getting revenge once, its fun. Valve didn't 'use a trick' to get people to play, they poured their heart and soul into making a game that is easy to pick up and play, easy to see what your objectives are but requires real skill to master. And the skill part plays a big role. Yeah they totally cheated the system and should do something else next time.
I apologize.
I let myself rant self-indulgently and went off on a wild argumentative tangent that didn't help anyone, let alone myself.
So, back to what I was saying in the first place.
An MMO is a shared social space where people can explore/defeat the world/other players.
That two-by-two matrix comes from Richard Bartle's observations on the behaviors of players in his MUD. He called the archetypes he observed Explorers, Achievers, Socializers, and Killers. (actually they were types of behavior and should be gerunds, but people have a real problem with abstract concepts having their own motivations. And not without reason. What would the world be like if blue got restless?)
Explorers explore the world. They learn. Whether it's what's over that mountain or how that thing called "defense" actually works, they acquire knowledge for themselves. An MMO makes explorers happy to the extent that it has interesting things to see and consistent patterns to discover, and can frustrate them if the world is empty and bland or seems to operate under arbitrary rules.
Achievers defeat the world. They set goals and take actions to accomplish them. An MMO makes achievers happy to the extent that it suggests implicit or overt goals and provides a means to accomplish them and a record of accomplishments, and can frustrate them if they can't set a goal or work out how to accomplish one.
Socializers explore other players. They talk and listen, give help and take it, entertain and are entertained, sympathize and seek sympathy. An MMO makes socializers happy to the extent that they can meet and talk to people and enjoy it, and frustrates them if communication isn't expressive or is otherwise limited.
Killers defeat other players. I think this is where the idea of "conflict-games" would have fit in before I fell in love with the sound of my own voice. Killers don't want to destroy, they want to compete. An MMO makes them happy to the extent that it provides enough variety in competitions or competitors that they feel they can make themselves a chance to win, and frustrates them to the extent that they can't find good competition.
But the people playing the game want to do all four of these things. At different times, in different amounts, sometimes together, sometimes not.
So where does "gear" in the sense of "possessions" come into all this? You can find it while exploring, or discover how to create it. You can set goals to obtain it, or get it to mark an accomplishment. You can give it to or receive it from other people. You can compete to acquire it, or receive it when you win a competition.
And you can use it to explore or research, to find goals or accomplish them, to communicate or entertain, to compete or to win.
And best of all, since you want to do all four of those things, at different times, in different amounts, you can use a possession you got from doing one thing to help you do something else, or get a possession that helps with one thing by doing something else.
This is especially true if you can convert these possessions to and from some sort of universal currency.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
To me, it all boils down to MMO investors choosing to aim low and be pleasantly suprised when they get more, than to aim for the moon and feel burned when they fall short.
Put a large investment into a niche game and you have a better chance of having a better game that may expand beyond the niche because of its quality, because the money is being focused on appealing to the niche market.
Put a large investment into a 'lowest common denominator' game and you will have a mediocre game that does what everyone else is already doing, because the you are basically spending the same money that they spent on the same things they spent it on. You are seeling a red car that is funtionally identical to thei blue one.
You can replace the word 'game' with the word movie, tv show, music, whatever.
The delusion that investors cling to that it is possible to mitigate their risk is a fallacy that hurts everything. It's not possible because creating popular media is more of an art than a science. The quality of an entertainment product really has little to do with whether or not it will be popular.
For proof, I refer you to any list of highest grossing movies, songs, or whatever.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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Okay, now I think I've got my mindset straight and my vocabulary down.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
At some point, you're going to have to expect from people to just do better. You can't let players play as poorly, as sloppily and as stupidly as they choose and still expect success. At some point, the game has to say "OK, you failed. Try this again and DO BETTER!" It doesn't have to be via a "game over" screen, but you're going to have to go there eventually.
Granted, I draw the line on "unwinnable" situations, where you fail not because you did badly, but because of something you did prior to your last save point, which you cannot go back and fix. Few games let this happen these days, but all too often you'll find yourself hitting an auto-save point low on health and with little ammo left even in contemporary games. This extends to builds in MMOs. There's nothing worse than encounters expecting you to have a power you don't have, or worse - CAN'T have. But when it comes to performance that is within the player's hands in real time irrespective of past events... Yeah, we can expect the player to be on the ball, at least. And, frankly, I'm getting a little sick of our playerbase's aversion to any map more complicated than straight, wide corridors. I mean come on! |
Games where you're entertained even if you lose are like the Street Fighter you talked about busting out with your friend. You never won but you still had fun playing. That's Killer thinking.
Success and failure is Achiever thinking. And if you want people to succeed, people have to get more out of failure than this or this.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
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One of my proudest and lowest (personally) Fallout 3 moments come from a situation like this.| Granted, I draw the line on "unwinnable" situations, where you fail not because you did badly, but because of something you did prior to your last save point, which you cannot go back and fix. Few games let this happen these days, but all too often you'll find yourself hitting an auto-save point low on health and with little ammo left even in contemporary games. This extends to builds in MMOs. There's nothing worse than encounters expecting you to have a power you don't have, or worse - CAN'T have. |
Without realising it I had used up all my gun ammo and was left with just Frag mines, Frag Grenades and a SuperSledge while on low enough health that a couple of shots would kill me and there was no way to reload an earlier save (I tend to constantly save over rather than save in different files). I was stuck in the first part of Vault 87 so there were Super Mutants everywhere.
I would lure the first couple Super Mutants into a collection of Frag Mines to disable their legs and bombard them with Frag Grenades, scopping up any ammo they had on them but it was never enough to be meaningful, I gradually made my way deeper until I came upon the holy grail of what I had been seeking...
...A radioactive toilet...it meant there was water and drinking water, even that disgusting, would give me health...so I just stuck my head in the bowel and drank as deeply as I could. Yes I have never been so glad to see a Radioactive toilet before or after that moment.
In all circumstances the fights were nearly unwinnable, two or three shots would have killed me but I thought, I planned and I made use of everything I had and I came out ontop (if you can call drinking out of a radioactive toilet being 'on top'). I had triumphed against adversity. This situation wasn't really unwinnable since I had triumphed but there is a great sense of satisfaction from coming back from the brink of such a dire situation...
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Conversely, the popularity (and therefore profitability) of an entertainment product really has little to do with whether or not it is any good.|
Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
The quality of an entertainment product really has little to do with whether or not it will be popular.
For proof, I refer you to any list of highest grossing movies, songs, or whatever. |
From an investor's standpoint, potential profitability is what they're going to be focused on.
50 Fire/Dev | 50 AR/Dev | 50 Ninjas/FF MM | 50 Bots/Dark | 50 Kin/Rad |
44 EM/Regen | 39 BS/Regen | 38 Kin/Elec | 27 Thugs/Pain
"Rare is the man so noble that he will always give thanks for that which is freely given." -Jock_Tamson
So long as its fun and interesting I could care less about the "deeper aspects" of the game as a whole. It's here for my entertainment and that's about it.
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This is one of the reasons I loved Planetside. When I started playing my defeat/kill counter tended to be something like 60/20 at the end of every night, but by the time I left the game it was 20/60 on an average night more often than not. There was no gear, not much vertical progression (but tons of horizontal progression - i.e. instead of advancing levels giving you more power, they gave you more flexibility and tactical options), but as a player you always felt like you were learning something.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
At some point, you're going to have to expect from people to just do better. You can't let players play as poorly, as sloppily and as stupidly as they choose and still expect success. At some point, the game has to say "OK, you failed. Try this again and DO BETTER!" It doesn't have to be via a "game over" screen, but you're going to have to go there eventually.
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Also, even when you died 60 times a night, you didn't feel too bad - it was a war! You could die running across a courtyard to a bomb dropped by a player in a liberator bomber 500 feet above you who couldn't even see you. You could get run over by a buggy driven by someone on your team driving around the corner, with no chance to dodge or even see them before they hit you. You could get caught in the blast zone of a grenade that bounced the wrong way and missed its intended target. It was war and unfortunate deaths just happened... and often. And often it was hilarious.
But in time you learnt how to minimise the silly/unlucky deaths (they still happened, just not so often) and if you teamed with the same players regularly, especially in an Outfit (i.e. clan), you could focus your disciplined tactics to the point where 20 of you could easily defeat three times your number of solo players who were just zerging with the herd.
But many of those soloers didn't care - it was epic just to be there - and often it was worth being killed 20 times in an hour - even being continuously mowed down in a "charge of the light brigade" style advance - just for those moments when you managed to sneak up on someone and stab them in the back of the head, or fired a plasma grenade into a corridor full of injured enemy soldiers and got several kills and turned the tide of an assault on your own, or you and a pal in a buggy managed to take out some tanks by firing rockets into their rear armour "hit & run" style before they could target you.
Battlefield 2142 gave me some of those thrills, but it just lacked Planetside's scale - I'm still waiting for an MMOFPS that will replicate it - I just hope SOE do a good job with Planetside 2 - it's perhaps the only franchise that will make me break my vow never to play an SOE MMO again.
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Originally Posted by Bookkeeper_Jay
So long as its fun and interesting I could care less about the "deeper aspects" of the game as a whole. It's here for my entertainment and that's about it.
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Games don't need to make everything easy, or protect players from defeat due to their own ineptitude/ignorance/newness - what games need to do is make the core gameplay so fun and epic that even if you are being defeated a lot you are still enjoying the game and feel driven to keep coming back and improve your own personal performance.
And grindy timesink-heavy MMOs just won't do that for me, nor will the unfinished dull bugged disasters that so many dev teams release these days and wonder why they have a bad launch.
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*nods in heavy agreement*| Battlefield 2142 gave me some of those thrills, but it just lacked Planetside's scale - I'm still waiting for an MMOFPS that will replicate it - I just hope SOE do a good job with Planetside 2 - it's perhaps the only franchise that will make me break my vow never to play an SOE MMO again. |
What, the actual topic of this thread? I got nothing to say. I'm not even sure what you're all talking about anymore.
An SOE MMO? After the SWG disaster I literally swore never ot touch anything they make, as the rule of thumb suggests they'll end up killing it because they'll feel inferior to WoW in some way (and why the hell does that matter? A larger subscriber base than yours doesn't mean you've gotta cry about it and try to copy aspects of the other game entirely).
Until they fix SWG to a greater extent than I've witnessed I'll consider anything with SOE on it the plague.
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Maybe I'm fortunate in that I disliked SWG pre-CU, disliked it post-CU/Pre-NGE and never deigned to try it again afterwards - I do think what SOE did there was terrible (I have friends who loved SWG pre-CU/NGE who like to tell me how much SOE suck far beyond my own bad experiences) and I did witness SOE mismanaging game design almost as badly when I was playing EQ, EQ2 and Planetside (hence my vow not to play SOE MMOs again) - ultimately I just lost faith that any SOE game I liked would be the same game the next time I logged in - iteration needs to be done with surgical changes, not SOE's sledgehammer replacements.|
Originally Posted by Bookkeeper_Jay
An SOE MMO? After the SWG disaster I literally swore never ot touch anything they make, as the rule of thumb suggests they'll end up killing it because they'll feel inferior to WoW in some way (and why the hell does that matter? A larger subscriber base than yours doesn't mean you've gotta cry about it and try to copy aspects of the other game entirely).
Until they fix SWG to a greater extent than I've witnessed I'll consider anything with SOE on it the plague. |
I also don't agree with the subs+RMT shenanigans they've pulled with EQ & EQ2 either (RMT of the worst kind - you can buy items - something that doesn't belong in a P2P MMO and should stay in F2P MMOs, imho), though funnily enough I do hope that Planetside 2 is F2P with either a Guild Wars model (buy box & expansions, no sub, minor RMT for character slots and the like) or some kind of "cosmetic items only" item shop, otherwise I fear smaller scale MMOFPSs like APB and Global Agenda will steal all its thunder (although I am looking forward to APB too, I just don't think it will have Planetside's epic-ness).
As the years have gone by my feelings towards SOE have mellowed - I've seen so many other MMO companies mismanage things, I still have fond nostalgia for EverQuest, during Pirates of the Burning Sea beta I ended up under SOE auspices again (and things ran smoothly, as all their beta tests do - better than most post-release MMOs I've played - I can't fault SOE for their technical management of their MMOs), and then SOE announced Planetside 2 which softened my view of them considerably. So yeah, I'll give them another chance, is PS2 appeals to me - especially if they remain the only "true MMOFPS" purveyor on the block (and yes, I'm bitter at how small scale the combat in Huxley and Global Agenda sounds, when I originally had high hopes for them).
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I have two things to say about this. Maybe three, I'll let you know when I say them |
Originally Posted by GlaziusF
So where does "gear" in the sense of "possessions" come into all this? You can find it while exploring, or discover how to create it. You can set goals to obtain it, or get it to mark an accomplishment. You can give it to or receive it from other people. You can compete to acquire it, or receive it when you win a competition.
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Firstly, my own opinion on gear is "I don't like it." Gear, as it has been implemented in almost every RPG, is a source of randomness and chaos. I can't just have THE Fire Sword, I have a random Deadly Sword of the Stars, which may have good stats or bad stats, depending on what the RNG gave me. Granted, most MMOs seem to give "the" epic loot attainable from specific raids, but I've never played high enough to know how that works. The point is, when I play a game, I don't want to have gear that is "just better" or even "the best." I like to have a FINITE selection of gear, all of which has some purpose. If gear upgrades, I like to have a linear progression of upgrades. Sword II is everything Sword I was and more.
Secondly, I just don't like random drops for what they mean. On the one hand, once you get a really good drop, getting another, better drop is exceedingly rare, which leads to a lot of "vendor crap" that you just sift through looking for that one holy grail. On the other hand, what you use is largely a product of luck and chance. Will my sword have health stolen per hit and poison damage, or will it have fire damage and extra mana? I don't know. It's not up to me. It's whatever drops, or whatever my recipe says my weapon should be. In fact, City of Heroes Inventions are a lit like that, and this is why I don't use them. Unlike SOs and Commons, what a Set enhancement does is a crapshot, subject to the whims of whoever it was that designed the set. If I want an enhancement that's Damage/Endurance, I could probably fin one. But if I wanted one that's Stun/Hold? I don't know. I DO know there isn't one of every combination available at every level, so my build is even then controlled by circumstance as much as by me.
Lastly, here's something I thought might be cool. Let's look at a classic item-driven RPG, let's say something like Fallout, because that sort of fits the "modern" theme. Suppose you had a perk called "Favourite Weapon." When you pick it, you are given a weapon of your choice that you made yourself. It's pretty strong, but from this point forward, it is the ONLY weapon you are ever going to be able to use. You can upgrade and enhance your weapon as the game progresses, but you will never be able to fire another weapon at all. This still gives some sense of gear progression (and of the kind I like) but removes the randomness of it (which is a progression I dislike). I'm not sure if this hasn't been done by a game already, but that's usually how I treat my weapons in an RPG, and it's actually what I did with Torchlight - infinitely upgrading the weapons I have instead of replacing them with new ones.
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Okay, now I think I've got my mindset straight and my vocabulary down. Games where you're entertained even if you lose are like the Street Fighter you talked about busting out with your friend. You never won but you still had fun playing. That's Killer thinking. Success and failure is Achiever thinking. And if you want people to succeed, people have to get more out of failure than this or this. |
I play games for the visual flair. If I can put on a good show, I can handle dying. I played my friend in Marvel vs. Capcom, constantly trying to find cooler and flashier ways to fight. Instead of reducing myself to a Street Fighter II mentality and winning by just hitting him with a heavy kick 20 times, I'd always rush in for combos, abuse my supers and try to make use of ALL my special moves, no matter how impractical. Because pressing the attack with a seemingly slow but deceptively fast Jin Saotome just looked so damn cool (and annoyed the hell out of my friend, but that's the name of the game
). He looks so slow, but if you think on your feet and keep him moving, he can be evil. And he's one of the flashiest characters there is, as well, shooting fire even on his regular attacks.The point is to make the game, in its in-game gameplay, look cool. To my mind, NOTHING can come before that. Not min/maxing, not stats, not gear, NOT EVEN PLOT! It's much easier for me to play a dumb game with cool gameplay and flashy fights than it is for me to play a game with an Oscar-winning script but gameplay which makes me pull out my hair. And that's one big problem with MMOs in general - it's very hard to make them look cool, AND NO-ONE REALLY TRIES any more. City of Heroes is a bit of an exception, because almost every one of our animations is cool, and most of our effects are impressive. Something like WoW, on the other hand, has short, spastic attacks, animations which are basically one set of waving your hands with different colours or the same repeated auto-attack, and effects that are barely even there.
One of these days, it'd be cool to see an MMO that's designed from the ground up to be just cool. Yeah, items. Yeah, stats. Yeah, levels. But holy hell! Did you just see that?!? Oh, many, I wanna' do it again! I actually have a few things to do in City of Heroes to achieve that, but so far this is largely something you can only find in action games.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Ah, this takes me back |
Originally Posted by Lord Mayhem
But in time you learnt how to minimise the silly/unlucky deaths (they still happened, just not so often) and if you teamed with the same players regularly, especially in an Outfit (i.e. clan), you could focus your disciplined tactics to the point where 20 of you could easily defeat three times your number of solo players who were just zerging with the herd.
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I remember a couple of games that I just laughed my *** off back in the day:Wages of Sin: I think me and three of my friends must have spent hundreds of hours playing the same bank map (at least I think it was a bank) that had a bank building, a couple of streets, a couple of rooftops and a sewer. I have laughed so, so much over the stupid things we've done in that game. Like walking through a door and into an explosion. Wages of Sin had this big weapon that made a HUGE explosion. So I'd walk into a set of automatic double doors and DIE. As my camera moves back, it shows a wall of fire from the big weapon entering the buildings. Apparently, someone had shot it outside and I opened the door just in time to let the flame wave in. Oops! Or the time I saved myself from a hoverbike through the ingenious manoeuvre of DICKING IN A CORNER! Apparently, the bike's front was too wide to fit inside the corner from this angle, leaving just enough time for me to stand safe. Not that I could shoot the rider over the windshield, and we were eventually both blown up, but the point remains. Or, hell, panicking, jumping backwards off a rooftop and landing IN AN OPEN MANHOLE. Bonus points for being laughed at by my friend who was chasing me at the time, saying "I dropped down to chase you, but you were gone. Did you fall in the sewer? Ha!" Fun times, and I didn't even win all that much
Wrestle Mania: A buggier game I have not seen, but it was just these bugs that made it so damn fun. When you attacked, you could NEVER be sure who you were actually going to hit. And whenever I swung, I usually hit my team-mate. I played Doink the Clown and he the Bam Bam Bigalo, who had fire powers for some reason. I smashed him with that oversized hammer so many times a friend of mine joked that it must be heat seeking. On the flip side, because the Bigalow's throw had such priority, he'd often toss me clear out of the ring completely by accident. I've seen Yokozuna jump off the ropes butt-first and be intercepted by an uppercut from the Undertaker. I've done a combo on someone when my team-mate just ran in mid-way and I finished the combo on him, laughing too hard to stop punching him in the gut. And even my favourite - my friend just came back inside the ring and got grabbed and tossed by Razor Ramon on the OTHER end of the ring. His response? "Where did he get me from?" like the guy pulled him out of his pocket
Win or lose, when the game is fun enough or, alternatively, just downright funny enough, losing can be as much fun as winning. And maybe I grew up in a time when no-one was really any good at video games, so my basic knowledge of them put me on top, but back in the day games were not serious business. You played them to have fun, kill some stuff, have a few laughs and go home. This... Professional style of gaming is what ruined competitive video games for me, and it first started with Counter Strike. With everyone playing to win, goofing off was just no longer as fun. I'd just die, die, die and accomplish nothing. And MMOs are a big step in the WRONG direction on this one. Instead of constantly playing to win, you're constantly playing to GRIND. Where's the fun gameplay gone? Why is there only work for a reward? And challenge... That's the buzz word around here. All "challenge" means in an MMO is "you must be prepared." The actual encounter counts for very little. Flying by the seat of your pants is probably the MOST counter-MMO thing in today's MMO market.
I just fear games are growing less and less fun and more and more work.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Diablo is not "almost every RPG". There are giant piles of Japan out there which all have fixed-stat equipment. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I have two things to say about this. Maybe three, I'll let you know when I say them
Firstly, my own opinion on gear is "I don't like it." Gear, as it has been implemented in almost every RPG, is a source of randomness and chaos. |
The Atelier series, which arguably started the whole crafting thing in the first place, featured giant chains of craftable items, but all of them were fixed-stat as well, at least in the earlier games.
Now, I'm not saying there isn't anybody out there who likes the whole Loot Roulette aspect of Diablo. But you're right. It doesn't play very well with long-term persistence.
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| Do I REALLY want to complete a game by pressing the same button a couple thousand times and end up with gaming footage that looks like crap? |
And admittedly that last one's a bit of a crapshoot for the dev team.
Now, while I'm not knocking the power of cool as a general palate sweetener (google "cool cam" for a particularly telling example) if you'd just started this whole thing saying you wanted more cool out of your upcoming MMOs and less "yes here are the same cardboard cutouts of features that all our competitors offer" I would have been a lot quicker to come in line behind you.
I mean, cool isn't even a matter of features or engine or anything. It's visual and to some extent visceral. And far too often that's the first thing to go when the game has to get out the door.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
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Right, right. Never having had a console, I keep forgetting about all the Japanese games that were never launched for the PC and I never saw. Personally, I prefer fixed-stat items and fixed item progression simply because I like to feel I'm in control of my own fate. Raids, counter-intuitively, are a step closer to that than just random drops, because you know what you're getting out of a raid.|
Originally Posted by GlaziusF
Diablo is not "almost every RPG". There are giant piles of Japan out there which all have fixed-stat equipment.
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That's one side of the coin. The other side is completeness of sets. One of my BIGGEST problems with items in general is that they come with a bazillion stats, and if I decide to upgrade weapons, I have to take another weapon, warts and all. I had it up to HERE with that in Torchlight, most recently. OK, this new gun is twice as strong, but it gives me less dexterity and doesn't have health steal or armour degradation and... Well, I guess I might as well. See, there's never a clear upgrade into a BETTER item. In a sense, there's very little upwards progression, only what feels like sideways progression and spinning my wheels. In City of Heroes, it'd be like juggling slotting. Instead of one accuracy, three damage, I could go with two accuracy, two damage and I might have better DPS against +3 and above enemies. But that's not progression. Progression would be another slot.
But that's all generally sideways of the topic.
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| Well, no. But that's the game's problem. If there's one combination that's really superior to everything else you can't just expect players not to use it -- whether it's absolutely superior or if it just suits their playstyle much better than anything else. |
But then on the other hand, it's a bit of a player problem, as well. I don't know where this comes from, maybe from the old days of arcades and limited lives, where your only outstanding goal was to get to the end no matter the cost. But in today's games, and especially in MMOs, I feel that's not the biggest thing to do. I mean, yeah, you get to the end, and then... What, exactly? You could start over, but if it wasn't cool enough the first time around, why bother going at it again. My point is that it's at least a little bit of the player's responsibility to look after his own fun and not delve into mindless exploitation, because there IS no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.
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Now, while I'm not knocking the power of cool as a general palate sweetener (google "cool cam" for a particularly telling example) if you'd just started this whole thing saying you wanted more cool out of your upcoming MMOs and less "yes here are the same cardboard cutouts of features that all our competitors offer" I would have been a lot quicker to come in line behind you. I mean, cool isn't even a matter of features or engine or anything. It's visual and to some extent visceral. And far too often that's the first thing to go when the game has to get out the door. |
Basically, yes, it is ultimately coolness that I miss in recent games, because none seem to have been made with that in mind. But I see the root cause of the problem of missing coolness as being deeper than just the execution stage. When your design stage calls for an MMO that's the virtual equivalent of a tourist trap, you can bust your *** and you still won't end up with anything more than a mediocre game. And unless you're Blizzard, the champion of making mediocre games sell for millions, you're not going to do well. Not outside of Korea, anyway. As long as MMOs are designed as MMO first, we'll think about what to put in the MMO framework afterwards, that's how it's going to go.
And that's actually why I don't think this is going to last. We're already seeing a serious decline in MMO quality and a declining interest in new titles offering the same old same old. If anything, Jack and Cryptic had a good initial idea of making an MMO that was different and would give people something they couldn't have in Age of EqCraft II. Their execution is... Suspect, but the idea is actually exactly what I had in mind. Do something new and different, something I can look at and think "Wow, I haven't seen that before. Could be interesting." rather than something I look at and think "Oh, another paint-by-numbers MMO. Thanks, but no thanks."
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Sam, why do Blizzard games sell millions of copies?|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And unless you're Blizzard, the champion of making mediocre games sell for millions, you're not going to do well. Not outside of Korea, anyway.
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If your answer is "their fanbase", where did they GET that fanbase?
Let me analogize here - Microsoft dominates the software market not because they've somehow mind-controlled people into using their stuff and thereby acquired a giant userbase, but because they were one company among many competing for market share and everyone else screwed up. Digital Research charged an order of magnitude more for their operating system, IBM decided to re-establish market leadership with a new operating system that had no app support, MicroPro kneecapped its own leading word-processing package with a soundalike competitor and a failed printer revamp (which also doomed IBM's new OS), Ashton-Tate flipped off its giant third-party development community, and both Netscape and Lotus decided to stop development on new editions for a long period of time -- ostensibly to improve the performance of the existing code, but by the time they were done Moore's Law had already done the work for them.
Blizzard makes hard things look easy. And to the extent that other companies are trying to copy them and failing, it's because they just can't produce workable code in a reasonable length of time.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
I think that as the future rolls toward us, we are going to see more and more inventive niche MMOs, as more and more developers give up on sinking a bunch of money into a WoW clone in the idiotic hope that everyone who likes WoW is going to migrate to an identical game.
However, in order for these niche games to get noticed, purchased and survive, they have to advertise in a way that draws in an audience.
Part of that advertisement will necessarily be about in what ways they are similar to and different from existing games.
The 'holy trinity' of healer/tanker/dps is going to get mentioned due to sheer familiarity among MMO players, and most games are going to claim that they have some analog unless they are really wierd and have no 'classes' that can possibly conform to those rolls.
This is in large part due to a big puzzle in game design:
- If you design a game where a 'trinity' can be constructed and used, players will use it and complain that it is derivative.
- If you design a game where all characters are self-sufficient (or where a trinity of teamed specialists are no more successful than anything else), the social aspect of the game will die because no one will bother to team.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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I remember a Blizzard interveiw where they tell the interviewer that they have no problem revealing how they work...because no one will ever really be able to copy what they do.|
Originally Posted by GlaziusF
Blizzard makes hard things look easy. And to the extent that other companies are trying to copy them and failing, it's because they just can't produce workable code in a reasonable length of time.
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Part of it is that there is no 'ego' in their methods. They will, and have, scrapped huge, finished parts of a game and started over from scratch when it doesn't feel 'just right'. They have no problems going over it time after time. Its why they take so long, but at the end they deliver something that no one else does. That's not entirely the case with WoW...but it's what got them their fanbase in the first place.
Other companies that are at least similar in their approach I'd have to say would be Valve and Bioware. Those companies consistently deliver great products mostly because they are free to do it right.
In terms of 'coolness' in games, one game that sprang to mind in recent times was Neverwinter Nights 2. I was extremely disappointed that they made combat in that game look so dull compared to the first by removing blocking, parrying and circling animations. All the 'cool' in combat was spell effects. If you were playing a monk or something similar...you looked like a half-crippled monkey when you were fighting. It made the game MUCH less fun IMHO.
The reason they took those out was apparently that some people were complaining that you could possibly miss an extra attack at high levels if your character moved or parried too much during a round. So they just cut the animations out and made fighting look bland as hell.
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Your last point would seem to indicate that CoX should have a dead community of people who don't team. Pretty much most characters can solo fairly well. And no one NEEDs to team to accomplish anything except those things which are group-only like TFs and Trials.|
Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
This is in large part due to a big puzzle in game design:
- If you design a game where a 'trinity' can be constructed and used, players will use it and complain that it is derivative. - If you design a game where all characters are self-sufficient (or where a trinity of teamed specialists are no more successful than anything else), the social aspect of the game will die because no one will bother to team. |
Blasters, scrappers, tankers, kheldians, defenders and controllers can all play this game solo. And of course pretty much every villain AT is self-sufficient. We even have difficulty levels.
City of X has mostly solved the puzzle. However, there are those who complain even nw that villains don't synergize well enough and that heroes are too interdependent.
It has taken them a lot of time and cost them a lot of customers to get to where they are. Many other companies will not take the time and pay the price to get it right.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
I write a lot and I've gotten pretty good at dealing with people expressly BECAUSE I'm very good at AVOIDING people and social interaction for the most part.
With emulators, it's very easy to forget what these games once meant, because you have unlimited credits. But I actually enjoy the sobering reality of seeing Game Over with NO WAY to continue from time to time. Games that do that rarely have a lot of "investment" to them, so getting a game over isn't that big a deal, but when you can't just cheese past the hard parts, that really makes you think.
Perhaps he will /broadcast "Victory! Victory! Immortal fame!" before he, too, quits for lack of things to do.
And I realise that I've talked a lot about how I like things easy and dislike a challenge, but that's largely based on the fact that the ACTION is, for the most part, out of my hands. I don't run from challenge in arcade games, and have in fact purposefully taken the harder approach to enemies I could cheese through. But even then, it's actually EASY for me, because I'm fast and clever enough to make it easy for myself. In an MMO where most of what matters is what powers I took and how I slotted them, difficulty is just cheese and nothing else.
I mean, just to use a personal example here, I had no idea you could put more than one of the same enhancement in a power when I started playing. The illustrations in the instruction booklet had all different ones, so that's what I went by.
And are you seriously going to ask how you tell people what they can and cannot do with items? Isn't it obvious? You TELL them! That's what manuals are for, that's what tutorials are for, that's what helps are for, that's what tooltips are for and, failing all that, that's what the Internet is for. Games don't need to be designed for empty heads. Sometimes, to play a game, you have to actually LEARN a thing or two about how it operates.
And, trust me, explaining to someone how implants work is FAR simpler than trying to give someone even a basic glimpse behind something like the D&D system. I've been playing computer games that use it for YEARS and I still don't know what the hell is going on, chiefly because I didn't want to read entire textbooks on it. But you don't have to ever reach that height of complexity. You CAN have unusual things that are still pretty simple. Sooner or later we're going to have to stop treating players like idiots and have them read a bit and think a bit.
Tell customer service when you quit the game, and PR when you don't want to play the new one they're hyping. Tell them why.
If a company pays any attention to that kind of thing at all, customer service and PR are more likely to be able to gather complaints from people and present them to decision-makers. Designers will just have a pile of anecdotal evidence.