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LLSix posted:The last time I tried it, players were speed-running content so fast that I never got a chance to understand either the plot or mechanics of boss encounters before pubbies had finished them and started the next one. This was the case with WoW prior to the most recent expansion as well (and it's probably the case again since folks have had long enough to poopsock their way through all the new content). I recall running one dungeon where some guy playing a demon hunter blazed through it so quickly that all the rest of us just ran behind looting stuff. I could hardly get a hit in on a mob before it evaporated. I suppose that's "fun" if all you care about is grinding out new gear as quickly as possible, but jesus does it make the game boring. It feels a lot like a junkie selling their mom's TV to get their fix – why slow down and actually enjoy the content and a little companionship when you can just snag that new piece of gear and the associated dopamine rush as quickly as possible? So many modern MMORPGs aren't really RPGs anymore, they're action games with RPG window dressing.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:16
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kedo posted:This was the case with WoW prior to the most recent expansion as well (and it's probably the case again since folks have had long enough to poopsock their way through all the new content). I recall running one dungeon where some guy playing a demon hunter blazed through it so quickly that all the rest of us just ran behind looting stuff. I could hardly get a hit in on a mob before it evaporated. I suppose that's "fun" if all you care about is grinding out new gear as quickly as possible, but jesus does it make the game boring. It feels a lot like a junkie selling their mom's TV to get their fix – why slow down and actually enjoy the content and a little companionship when you can just snag that new piece of gear and the associated dopamine rush as quickly as possible? Whereas I can't help but get a little into character in FFXIV at all times. Game does some things right.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:56
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apostateCourier posted:Whereas I can't help but get a little into character in FFXIV at all times. Game does some things right. This absolutely still happens in FFXIV as well. They've made a ton of useful efforts toward matching new and experienced players for "older" content which is admirable, but the motivation is still the same for the veteran player. Finish quickly so I can move on to the next thing, whether or not the Sprout wants to see the cutscenes.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:21
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apostateCourier posted:Whereas I can't help but get a little into character in FFXIV at all times. Game does some things right. Making things not absurdly fast, like in WoW, made it way better for me and my sensibilities. WoW makes my eyes hurt because I inadvertently keep my eyes open more while playing it because there are so many split-second reactions.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:22
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jokes posted:Making things not absurdly fast, like in WoW, made it way better for me and my sensibilities. WoW makes my eyes hurt because I inadvertently keep my eyes open more while playing it because there are so many split-second reactions. Yeah, I feel that way about Star Trek Online. When games are too fast, I spend too much time looking more at the ability toolbar than what's on the screen.
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Jan 8, 2021 21:44
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Pandaal posted:This absolutely still happens in FFXIV as well. They've made a ton of useful efforts toward matching new and experienced players for "older" content which is admirable, but the motivation is still the same for the veteran player. Finish quickly so I can move on to the next thing, whether or not the Sprout wants to see the cutscenes. This is absolutely a problem in the 24 man content, true.
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Jan 9, 2021 11:02
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kedo posted:So many modern MMORPGs aren't really RPGs anymore, they're action games with RPG window dressing. I would argue the same is true of RPGs in general. Look at Final Fantasy XV or FF7R.
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Jan 9, 2021 11:23
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Eox posted:I've been getting emails for Mortal Online 2 for months now and I only just looked it up, man "THE MOST HARDCORE MMORPG" is not a great selling point Gotta get my 13.8 years of $15/mo sub payments out of the way up front. Its cheaper that way
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Jan 9, 2021 14:30
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CuddleCryptid posted:Gotta get my 13.8 years of $15/mo sub payments out of the way up front. Its cheaper that way It’s funny because, truly, it’s not if you factor in inflation.
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Jan 10, 2021 00:16
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With FFXIV, there's a couple of raids in the core content which are part of the story that have I wanna say ~45 minutes of cutscenes that used to be skippable. The skipping basically ruined the entire story climax for new players, so they ended up making them unskippable + jacking the rewards waaay up so people still queued for them, and they haven't made that particular design error again.
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Jan 10, 2021 00:56
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is that the poo poo they called y outube roulette and i never even got to watch them properly as a new player because people would *log off and on to reset the cutscene and complete the entire roulette*
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Jan 10, 2021 01:56
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mmo dungeons designed for more than one person should quite simply never contain significant story content of any kind apart from bosses and maybe an NPC or two yelling occasionally. maybe a few in-engine cutscenes that are short but unskippable. it's a huge limitation on the story but the alternative is making stories that will only be fully appreciated by people soloing everything years later after the level cap has gone up a couple of times. there is simply no other halfway-acceptable answer under any paradigm where the primary goal of doing dungeons is to make Number Go Up
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Jan 10, 2021 04:40
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Biowarfare posted:is that the poo poo they called y outube roulette and i never even got to watch them properly as a new player because people would *log off and on to reset the cutscene and complete the entire roulette* Yeah, in my experience, folks actually like them nowadays, because it's a real juicy reward for doing nothing more than watching Netflix and occasionally moving their character. The cutscenes can still technically be hard skipped by relogging/quitting the client, but the mods are real proactive about suspending anybody who does.
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Jan 10, 2021 15:09
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Syenite posted:Yeah, in my experience, folks actually like them nowadays, because it's a real juicy reward for doing nothing more than watching Netflix and occasionally moving their character. my first time was honestly hilarious, nearly everyone relogged to skip and i was just standing there by myself trying to figure out where to go and repeatedly being pounded by giant robots into the ground while randomly getting a popup saying to move into the boss fight and then the second one (castrum?) people were erotic roleplaying in duty/alliance chat
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Jan 10, 2021 15:30
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My favorite thing about MMORPGs, is seeing a piece of content for one that I am interested in, and then looking into what is required to actually do that content. It's the best way to instantly be turned off an MMO before you even play it.
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Jan 10, 2021 20:45
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I used to think about what would make a better mmo and the only conclusion I could come to is the grind/making number go up needs to stop at some point and transition into something more abstract, like rvr or some sort of community building activity. Make the number reach the top so that a different kind of goal can be achieved. But designers sucks rear end and don't believe in anything that isn't about making a number go up.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:07
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The worst things about MMOs are the MMO players and only FF14 is at near-zero levels of toxicity since everyone is chill and it's illegal to be a dick about numbers. It's probably because the point of the game is to have fun and see/slay cool fights and enjoy the really great story. If your game is all about numbers and then the setting/story is a secondary concern, your game is probably poo poo. Also, MMOs that don't respect your time make you irritable as poo poo while playing it because you feel pressured to out-perform or optimize all the time, and are also directly pressured by other people to optimize and out-perform. I could never smoke weed and do new group content in WoW. I could get high as poo poo and do new group content in FF14 though, and have a great time doing it.
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Jan 11, 2021 05:27
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Players want numbers to go up, it's not just developers that are not creative. That's simplifying the problem too much. I personally am not playing an MMORPG where I eventually hit a dead end in progression, and the vast majority of players feel the same. The trick, and the thing that a lot of developers fail really bad at, is having an enjoyable gameplay loop and not being too restrictive in how the player approaches it.
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Jan 11, 2021 05:39
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I said come in! posted:Players want numbers to go up, it's not just developers that are not creative. That's simplifying the problem too much. I personally am not playing an MMORPG where I eventually hit a dead end in progression, and the vast majority of players feel the same. GW2 tackled this particular issue by offloading most of the endgame numbers go up onto optional but still extremely rad and fairly useful stuff like legendaries. Actually running out of ways to progress is pretty hard at this point, and you'll never be left with an inventory of completely obsolete junk if you get bored and take a break (also no sub fees with genuinely good gameplay helps).
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Jan 11, 2021 07:53
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I said come in! posted:My favorite thing about MMORPGs, is seeing a piece of content for one that I am interested in, and then looking into what is required to actually do that content. It's the best way to instantly be turned off an MMO before you even play it. I used to genuinely wonder why WoW didn’t just start at max level because of everything that was locked behind it
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Jan 11, 2021 10:32
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When it comes to an MMO becoming successful, I'm wondering how often this has to do with an already established world being made into an MMO. For me, I am willing to push through boring content in Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Elder Scrolls because I am familiar with the setting, characters, and themes. I give those games a lot more slack. I was looking at the new Pantheon stream and could not understand why anyone would play a game that is so uninspired. But do I not like it because I'm not familiar with the world, or do I think it's trying to poorly imitate something that is already established?
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Jan 11, 2021 16:47
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There's brain-value to seeing things you've seen before in new situations. It's another reason MMOs are so poo poo, you kinda need to have already become familiar with the game/world/setting/characters to put up with MMO poo poo otherwise you're playing a not-fun game for dubious reasons. Also, this is why they release story snippets and character trailers and poo poo before games come out.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:03
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It's kinda awkward these days though really though imo. MMOs are in a catch-22. They either go ham on their own lore "oh we wrote 20 million lines of wiki pages and dialogue, there's so much lore" and 99% of players are like "gently caress that, I don't have time for that". Or they put in 12 lines lore "it's got dragons" and everyone is like "I guess it's OK, but I'd like to know where the space ships even come from"
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Jan 11, 2021 17:10
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Yeah, Dark Souls style writing being favorably received was a saving grace for bad video game writers but it's kind of a deal with the devil.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:15
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Freakazoid_ posted:I used to think about what would make a better mmo and the only conclusion I could come to is the grind/making number go up needs to stop at some point and transition into something more abstract, like rvr or some sort of community building activity. Make the number reach the top so that a different kind of goal can be achieved. Issue is that a lot of those lovely parts exist to counterbalance parts of the MMOs that are so integral that you took them out then the genre would change. Crafting has to be a pain in the rear end because the system is built on gear so if you could just make gear then you wouldn't feel compelled to engage in raids. Raids are a pain in the rear end because their difficulty makes groups extremely toxic very fast if it doesn't go well, so everyone had to have good gear to make it fun. Quests are a pain in the rear end because you have to make quests that can fill the space for people that poopsock for 200 hours in 8 days and then review bomb the game for running out of content. The issue is that if you then release a game that allows people to get things better, you're talking about a game where you can craft items and armor off of things you get just from doing difficult things regardless of prior investment, and allowing you to get by in raids if you are skilled enough even with lovely gear. Which is just Monster Hunter, which is not considered an MMO by most people.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:17
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The core problem is you need lots of content. You need way more content than you can reasonably create if players consume it at a typical single-player game rate. So you gotta stretch it out with grinds or barriers like gear requirements or attunements. And you need content that is easy to vomit out like quests to collect X from mob Y in area Z to serve those grinds and barriers. Either that or you need to get players to make your content through PVP or other social interactions.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:35
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Biowarfare posted:my first time was honestly hilarious, nearly everyone relogged to skip and i was just standing there by myself trying to figure out where to go and repeatedly being pounded by giant robots into the ground while randomly getting a popup saying to move into the boss fight Weird. Normally when I do either, anyone who does the dumb relog thing ends up only being one jackass who can't solo the boss and eats floor while everyone is still in the cutscene. I haven't really seen toxicity about cutscenes for a long time (probably when ARR was still recent.)
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Jan 11, 2021 18:38
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Phigs posted:The core problem is you need lots of content. You need way more content than you can reasonably create if players consume it at a typical single-player game rate. So you gotta stretch it out with grinds or barriers like gear requirements or attunements. And you need content that is easy to vomit out like quests to collect X from mob Y in area Z to serve those grinds and barriers. Or just go "Thanks for playing, please come back for the next patch"
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Jan 11, 2021 18:42
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Itzena posted:Or just go "Thanks for playing, please come back for the next patch" Yoshi P maintains this stance. If you don't want to do endgame raiding, if you're here for the plot alone: only subscribe for new content. It's a very refreshing attitude.
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Jan 11, 2021 19:38
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Cardboard Fox posted:When it comes to an MMO becoming successful, I'm wondering how often this has to do with an already established world being made into an MMO. For me, I am willing to push through boring content in Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Elder Scrolls because I am familiar with the setting, characters, and themes. I give those games a lot more slack. jokes posted:There's brain-value to seeing things you've seen before in new situations. It's another reason MMOs are so poo poo, you kinda need to have already become familiar with the game/world/setting/characters to put up with MMO poo poo otherwise you're playing a not-fun game for dubious reasons.  Everquest and EVE Online were both original IPs and are really popular and successful, so I don't know about this.I think existing IP is something that game businesses actually over-estimate. People are sick of seeing the same few things over and over and over. Everything is Star Wars this, Zombies that, Superheroes the other. People are DYING for fresh original universes.
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Jan 11, 2021 20:02
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CuddleCryptid posted:Crafting has to be a pain in the rear end because the system is built on gear so if you could just make gear then you wouldn't feel compelled to engage in raids. My solution to this is a Star Wars Galaxies style player economy combined with taking a note from WoW: Burning Crusade. In BC there were lots of crafting professions who could make really nice high-end gear (good enough to start raiding) but it required special material components that you could only craft in a specific place in the game world. You had to physically travel out to a certain zone and a certain place so you could use a magic moonwell or some font of demonic energy to do your crafting. Once you got there, they put a limit so you could only make like 1 per day so you had to keep making the trek out there. Which works for balance but is tedious. What I want is an MMORPG where you have full on combat classes and crafting classes like Final Fantasy XIV. But make it so the crafting classes cannot solo their way out to the fishing spots or whatever they need. Make it so that crafting classes have to "hire" a combat party to escort them to the location to do their crafting. Bam, now you've got players generating "quests" for each other, but its player-generated content and they can be social and stuff instead of just grinding out your crafting by yourself and then selling it to people playing a completely different videogame.
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Jan 11, 2021 20:06
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Zaphod42 posted:What I want is an MMORPG where you have full on combat classes and crafting classes like Final Fantasy XIV. But make it so the crafting classes cannot solo their way out to the fishing spots or whatever they need. look no further than Pathfinder Online, which wanted to do exactly this
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Jan 11, 2021 20:17
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Zaphod42 posted:My solution to this is a Star Wars Galaxies style player economy combined with taking a note from WoW: Burning Crusade. I’m hesitant to post about Albion Online because I’m not sure how often I talk about it here and I’m worried I’ll come off as shilling for the game, but besides the official “storefronts” of SWG this is basically how that game works. All the gear in the game is player crafted, and the good gear requires materials from the open-PvP zones and material that requires standing with different in-game factions, so even if you’re a total PvE pacifist you’ll need to coordinate with militant player groups to obtain materials to continue your crafting. This creates the mercenary market for the PvP groups, and demand for the stuff that’s produced by the Craftsmen because the conflict in these full-loot PvP zones is what drives the demand for crafted items. Also, there’s risk in moving these materials to and from zones so you have player-organized “convoys” to move valuables to and from these zones and players can and do attack these convoys bandit-style hoping to pinch valuables. You can even find good deals on valuable gear by waiting at the borders of PvP zones and fencing gear at a discounted price from players who don’t want to take the risk of traveling to a town to sell it. Ultimately the game fixes a lot of the “lack of socialization” complaints AND the gear treadmill rinse-repeat in modern theme park games with emergent content stemming from the player-run economy + the lawless PvP zones and the “opportunities” that naturally come and go around that. Pandaal fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 21:05
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Zaphod42 posted:
I see what you're saying but I feel like Everquest was a novel experience in every sense when it came out, and EVE is a game that's more about social interaction than any other MMO on the market. I don't think, when people talk about Everquest or EVE, they talk about anything but the emergent gameplay that was basically unheard of before EQ or they're talking about poo poo they were doing to other people.
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Jan 11, 2021 22:05
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Cardboard Fox posted:When it comes to an MMO becoming successful, I'm wondering how often this has to do with an already established world being made into an MMO. For me, I am willing to push through boring content in Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Elder Scrolls because I am familiar with the setting, characters, and themes. I give those games a lot more slack. Pantheon is just trying to be Vanguard which was just trying to be Everquest (not by accident considering Brad McQuaid was involved in all 3). It looks uninspired and dated because it is, even what it does it seems to do it not very well. At that point why would you even play it over Everquest 2 (EQ1 and EQ2 are apparently both good money makers for Daybreak still).
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Jan 11, 2021 22:43
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Zaphod42 posted:I would argue the same is true of RPGs in general. Look at Final Fantasy XV or FF7R. There really needs to be a different word for game that tracks things with stats than "role-playing game"
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Jan 12, 2021 07:35
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So apparently there was a Jane Austen style socialite MMO that's shutting down before I even knew about it.
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Jan 12, 2021 19:17
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Pandaal posted:I’m hesitant to post about Albion Online because I’m not sure how often I talk about it here and I’m worried I’ll come off as shilling for the game, but besides the official “storefronts” of SWG this is basically how that game works. drat that sounds good. I may have to try it. The Division flirted with the idea with the Dark Zone and loot you could only get there and would drop on pvp, but then the implementation sucked. And there was no trading or crafting. Defiance Industries posted:There really needs to be a different word for game that tracks things with stats than "role-playing game" Yeah game genre terms are pretty poo poo, there's so much overlap and misnomers that its hard to communicate
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Jan 12, 2021 21:25
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Defiance Industries posted:There really needs to be a different word for game that tracks things with stats than "role-playing game" NGUG, or Number Go Up Game
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Jan 13, 2021 08:33
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Zaphod42 posted:drat that sounds good. I may have to try it. LazyPeon's video on it is worth checking out for anyone interested, he covers the majority of it and even does some ganking and structured PvP like Hellgates and whatnot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ags4bJTjjnU However if you don't want to skim the 25 minute video:    On the Cons that aren't a matter of opinion: The game no longer has daily maintenance, the world dungeons *do* now immediately close when the boss is killed, and yeah the servers are in the US so if you're overseas you might be boned because your ping matters. On the Cons that are a matter of opinion: The combat is basically League of Legends but your abilities are based on your gear. To say they're not "fun" or "in-depth" depends on how much you find LoL combat to be those things. My opinion is that combat in this game is more fun moment-to-moment than any MMO I've played with the exception of BDO. Also, the towns being a "clusterfuck" is a feature, not a bug for most of us. Being in a social space with hundreds of other players is kinda the point of playing an MMO.
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Jan 13, 2021 14:26
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