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signalnoise posted:I disagree. I do not think grind is ever fun. I define grind by its lack of fun. You seem to define grind as repetitive actions necessary to progress within a game. I define grind as things the game forces you to do to progress that are not fun. Games are currently designed where the fun either comes from something that is unrelated such as better graphics when you level up, cooler monsters, cooler weapons, cooler skills, things that do nothing at all pretty much other than help you reach the next level of it. So you spend a long time doing some grinding, and then all your get as a reward is more grind with slightly cooler skills, monsters, environments, etc. As far as game development goes this seems like it would be flawed from the start. I try to keep this in mind now when I play new MMOs, and I never last past level 20 or so in any of them due to it. signalnoise posted:Questing is a good example of this, because you aren't necessarily doing the same things over and over, but you might as well sometimes because sometimes the quests are boring as poo poo and your character is boring and you just want to loving level up already because it sucks spamming 1 because it's the only ability you have. That's a grind. signalnoise posted:Crafting systems are often a grind, because all you have to do in order to get better is repeat the same poo poo over and over and over, and it's just annoying as poo poo to go do that. signalnoise posted:Crafting in Puzzle Pirates, on the other hand, is not a grind, because the crafting itself is fun. I would often do things in Puzzle Pirates that would not result in the production of an item, because the game itself is just fun. In fighting games, you would say you have to grind the same combo over and over to hammer it into your muscle memory so you can use it on the fly. But it's not. signalnoise posted:The difference here is that when a game is fun, what you might call grinding is called practice instead. Grinding is bad. Make your game interesting enough that I want to experiment, and make my personal skill matter. When I am challenged by the game, and the game is fun enough that I will actually practice it, grinding is not essential. DFO - However it can be grindy at points (There's a few levels), and of course after you know the game, having to make another character bad, realistically depending on your playstyle these repetitive tasks are more practice than they are grinding. The +ing on weapons can also be very annoying. I believe PvP had some sort of level balancing? Not sure if that was optional or not. Vindictus - Played in beta, haven't touched PvP or anything. Was very grindy once you hit that cap in beta, fatigue systems are terrible, I heard that was removed, but haven't checked. Not so grindy because it's very aciton packed, as long as you can keep going on in levels it's fine, and some of the challenges were very fun and mixed it up despite being the same levels. Dragon Nest - Very grindy early on, however it depends on how you play, if you were spamming Astral Coven masters, very grindy. If you were just leveling while attempting to get yourself to be able to solo any of those maps and improve your skill, not grindy, more practice. The problem still with any of these (one I hear Eden Eternal fixed, but I haven't played it yet, couldn't find a group of people), is that whenever you want to play a new character no matter how similar to the first, you need to grind, and now this grind that could be seen as something else, is just grind, plain and simple. Syphilis Fish posted:Characters should get HUNGRY or thirsty, or require energy cells or grass blades or blood or whatever. -Run low and you take penalties on everything until you PERMADIE. You don't permadie when you get PKed, but they can take all your food etc. Automatic farming is very interesting, I'm for it with some interface and NPCs doing it, and possibility of NPCs dying if attacked. However I believe that would go more into the whole idea of guilds developing into their own villages/cities, and the way war would work between them. Syphilis Fish posted:
However in this case resurrections should be limited, and all items should be lost upon dying. A way to permanently kill someone should take both preparation and time, quite some time, so that you won't waste it on just anyone. Syphilis Fish posted:gently caress leveling. Thats where the grind comes from. Its useful to see how powerful someone is, but maybe that's BS. It makes PKing easier (turning it more into 'ganking', as there is no danger in killing guys ten levels lower than you) Syphilis Fish posted:if you play pen & paper, think GURPS. or maybe Morrowind; Characters have skills that they develop through use, but again, in an MMO people will grind the gently caress out of that to get their wood chopping skill to 100 so it takes 9 seconds instead of 11 to chop down a tree... The idea that I can just chop 1,000 trees and suddenly I now chop trees faster/better is very silly to me, but I'm assuming it came around because they couldn't measure learning prowess meaningfully, so the only way to assume someone would learn is "Well if you cut 100,000 trees SURELY you now know how to cut them slightly better/faster!". Not a good idea, especially in an MMO, but was probably the last thing they had to default on at the time without getting overly complicated. Syphilis Fish posted:With semi organically raised skills, there would be no ENDGAME. the whole word in itself is horse poo poo. END GAME. it suggests that the only fun happens at the very end of the game. You do this and you end/win the game only to start over again! How ridiculous. Since all the players are much closer in power due to the lack of levels, let's say there is a place called the 'orc fortress'. It occasionally sends out groups of orcs to any nearby settlements. These orcs are armed appropriately. Now, beating back some orcs from your guild's farm is fine, but somehow theyre spawning more orcs. (maybe a timer, or they succeeded in killing X players, or stealing X food, or killing X NPC guards, whatever). 'Skills' in this sort of openended game shouldn't be a thing either, at least not in a traditional MMO style. In games like these that are more Sandbox but retain MMORPG, there should be no "Double Attack!" that does 360% damage, and is learned at Lvl 5 and takes 20 SP. Techniques that you have to learn yourself would be a lot more interesting, but I wonder how hard it would be to implement. Maybe you're surrounded by Orcs and need to spin around or flail wildly, how would you learn that? Would everyone know that? I'm not sure. I'm not a large fan of the Haven and Hearth way of learning and then having to just say "Oh hey I bought this skill, so now I know how to Chop with an axe!", that's boring, that's silly, just as silly is the "I've attacked 20 people with my axe, now I know Chop! 200 more? now I know Cleave!" I think what you're describing here is very different from the Korean MMO though, I'm not even sure if these types of games should be defined as different genres, maybe they won't be yet. So far it seems ArcheAge is all of this and more, but I'll have to keep waiting and hoping it doesn't flop like every MMO I put all my hope into.
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Aug 16, 2011 01:29
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DatOneGuy posted:Just like in Haven and Hearth I wouldn't call it permadeath if you can be resurrected, but I don't like the idea of being killed forever because of a mistake on anyone's end (sometimes not even yours, could be the server, client, who knows). I really have no interest in playing a Massively Multiplayer Roguelike, which it seems like this line of development is leading towards. I'm sure there'd be a market for that kind of thing, but I think you'd have trouble getting any kind of large playerbase for it.
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Aug 16, 2011 02:07
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Syphilis Fish posted:what is the point of any MMO? This is the problem I have. If you're not expected to lose your character, it shouldn't be a possibility. It's like storytelling- If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, it must be fired by the end of the second. Now, I don't have a problem with permadeath. I just think that if it's a possibility, it should be an inevitability. It's something that takes very special care to implement without completely alienating a huge huge portion of your audience. As it is with all MMO commodities, anything that you can permanently lose should not be of utmost importance. I would make the game such that death is expected, and you might even go through several deaths while learning the game. I would also make the game such that when you die, that's not reeeally the end. You could make it so that instead of making a character, you make an estate. When you lose your character, it gets replaced by a relative, and they inherit your stuff. Your bank account gets transferred, all that. The character is NOT the same character, and there is a permanent loss involved there, but it's not as though that character doesn't live on through their gear. Take a step further and you can make it so specific pieces of particularly good poo poo get labeled as like "The Truesteel Blade of Duncan" when they get handed down, so you create your own artifacts through this process. I am a firm believer that you can take pretty much any supposedly negative aspect of roguelikes, shine it up and add a good system to it, and make it palatable for the general marker. I definitely agree with players making their own goals. I like the idea of some players taking over a raider camp for the safehouse location, and rolling over an NPC (or PC if your game is into that) village to take control of their farms. One of the things I thought would be great a long time ago was to actually create a system of extortion wherein I charge players protection money so my organization does not ruin their poo poo. That would be a great PvP goal. I also think it would get me banned from most MMOs, but a guy can dream I guess. DatOneGuy posted:Puzzle Pirates is one of the few games I've never played, mostly because I had heard so many bad things about it that it wasn't worth my time, I'll have to look into it. If you like puzzle games, Puzzle Pirates is the MMO you want. Bar brawls are Puzzle Bobble, and sword fighting is Puzzle Fighter, and these games can be played with huge armies fighting each other. Loading cannons is essentially Chu Chu Rocket. Manning sails is Dr. Mario. The list is huge, and there are a good number of original games in there too. You can also play poker for pieces of eight, or trade commodities with an interface that is seriously just like many brokerage interfaces (which is a great way to make money if you're good at it). I would seriously play the rum distilling puzzle just because it was a fun game to play. The best part about the puzzles is that when you're out sailing, the better you play, the better your position performs. Cannons load faster when you're doing the cannon game better, your ship gains more speed as you play the sail manning game better. Your captain has a puzzle game to play when directing the ship, and you can even take part in blockades and huge faction fights (PVP!). The game is a lot bigger than it looks, and there is a lot to do. People will tell you the game is bad and it's not worth your time because it is literally nothing but puzzle games, but if that is what you like, it's fun. It's not going to be what most people want, and that's understandable, but for its audience it's very, very well done. signalnoise fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 02:26
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I've done a lot of game design at varying levels, and my favorite classless levelless system ever was a treed system of skills/abilities/schools. Basically the abilities would be broken up into a few dozen base abilities, like "Melee Weapons", "Shields" "Armor Adept" "Fire Magic" "Holy Magic" "Lumberjacking" "Cooking" etc. For every school, there'd be a slew of NPCs that offered quests and ways to get additional points in that school. Training yards with castle guards, cutting down trees for a logger company, being an apprentice to a fire mage, etc. Every quest(questline, etc) you completed would get you a skill point in that tree, and each tree had branches, that had branches, that had branches, etc. So for instance you want to be a fire mage, so you go to a mage guild somewhere and start at the bottom rung, doing fetch quests, identifying weird artifacts with your nose in a book, lighting candles on fire, etc. And work yourself up 6 points of skills, hoorah. It'd look something like this: http://i.imgur.com/AC2k3.png You'd unlock more branches as you went until you were highly specialized in one aspect of the school. There'd be a stat called "discipline" that determines how many skill points you can gain and how quickly, you'd also use your max discipline to determine how many skills you could have "turned on". Basically at any time you'd undo everything and spend your discipline in different trees as you saw fit (with unlimited slots for saved builds of course). Naturally the number of builds is endless, and there were going to be checks and balances designed into every tree, like how the fire tree has huge fire suppression defense built into it, so that if for instance, a warrior is getting harried by a fire mage, he can draw upon his experience in that school to negate large swaths of that person's damage (of course, using discipline to do it, so weakening himself elsewhere), they'd then have to think up a new plan of attack, maybe switch to frost magic, or astral magic, or even some kind of ranged weapon attack. The more obscure/unique/unpredictable your build, the better, there'd be no "best skill to use for everything" type stuff.
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Aug 16, 2011 04:15
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signalnoise posted:This is the problem I have. If you're not expected to lose your character, it shouldn't be a possibility. It's like storytelling- If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, it must be fired by the end of the second. Now, I don't have a problem with permadeath. I just think that if it's a possibility, it should be an inevitability. It's something that takes very special care to implement without completely alienating a huge huge portion of your audience. I really like the family idea. And I do agree; you shouldn't lose *everything* due to permadeath. Family + some inheritance would be great yeah. Maybe tie in 'age' which should be related to skills - maybe if you max out skills or piety or some stat, you 'die' or go to nirvana or whatever and thus get reincarnated as a family member. If you do it this way you get stat bonuses.. if you get killed & sacrificed or whatever, you don't get the stat bonuses. So there's an incentive to survive to 'the end' but then you 'start anew' with a slightly souped up new character, because otherwise you don't get the cool bonuses of being the reincarnation of your previous character? I think that extortion idea is loving awesome and you should totally be able to do it. Those other players would just have to man up and shank you, or pay you. Or hire other players to assassinate you. I would make crafting relatively easy too; chop down a tree and you have wood. With enough wood you can make all kinds of things, from an axe to a house, but you don't need to saw them down into planks, and then click 1000 times to get enough of the planks transfered from your inventory to the build site. Too many steps of clicking IMO. Your skill level determines what you can make, and you just need an amount of wood in your vicinity that isnt tagged by others or smt and your guy will start constructing. click. Click. Go make a sandwhich, come back house is done. also, wolves ate your sister.
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Aug 16, 2011 10:34
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I don't have a clue about specific design elements, I just want MMOs to abandon the stupid and really loving bizarre protestant work ethic attitude that no other game genre has where you have to earn the right to have fun by doing not fun things. When I load up Starcraft 2 or Dirt 3 or Arkham Asylum the game is instantly fun from start to finish, I don't have to pay my dues before I get to enjoy myself. MMOs should be like that too.
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Aug 16, 2011 14:13
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Read through this thread: A few things stuck with me here. Demon's Souls and Monster hunter, to be exact. I believe that these types of game have the basic part of 'RPG' down, which is the main part of fun. Action is fun, and these games deliver. If you've ever played any of these games, you basically walked into it knowing nothing, learned the controls, the gameplay, and a bit of what to expect, then get thrown to the wolves. Knowledge is a big part of the game -- Many complaints earlier was about weapons having 50 or so stats attached to them, while not knowing what to do (Bigger numbers are better!) without looking up some sort of crazy guide. While Demons SoulsMonster Hunter/God Eater took this approach (Bigger is better!), I still prefer the gameplay to any point/click that you had. These kind of games (MH, God Eater) are very small in the amount of skills, but require alot of positioning, dodging, blocking, parrying, and actual -player skill- rather than actual levels or the like. Gear was the 'carrot' here; you had no level. You killed monsters to get better gear to kill better monsters and so on and so forth. Occasionally you had gathering nodes to get resources from. You brought the gear to npcs, and they crafted you better gear. So on and so forth. Asides from better gear being your carrot, there were also bigger and badder monsters with bigger and badder challenges. Each weapon had it's own way of style, so while some people prefered the Longsword or the Lance, some people prefered the Bow or the Sword and Shield. If I had to create an MMO, I would base the concept off of real-time fighting(If you swing with your weapon and hit, you hit, if you miss, you miss) rather than RNG hit/miss rolls, as this eliminates alot of needless stats you see on games such as WoW/Rift. --------- After action(RPG element) is solid, I believe the MMO part needs to be worked on, socialization and player interaction. In order for a person to be a 'person', and therefore have a 'personality' and a 'role' and be 'unique' to emulate real-life; I believe customization is key here. If you ever were in a supergroup in the CoH/CoV games, you -knew- people just by looking at them. The character creation in that game was -amazing-, and you barely saw the same look twice (Generally because of set armors (All samurai) or comic book hero ripoffs (wolverine)). When people knew you by name and look, they attached your personality to you, and most people want to have a positive personality attached to them. Having the capability of being unique, and taking advantage of it; made it so you were just that -- Unique. I can't tell you how many Super Strength/Willpower Brutes I've seen. I can't tell you how many huge beefy guys I've seen in that game. You could go a step further because I cannot tell you how many huge beefy SS/WP brutes I've seen. But despite fitting all of those criteria amongst a ton of other people, I was still unique. What made me stand out? Mostly the costume. White hair, demon ears, toting a shirt and some jeans with some rear end kicking combat boots. Some SS/WP were robots, others dainty females. But when I rolled around Atlas Park, my own guild could pick me out of a crowd. Even past visual customization, CoH/CoV offered 'Power Pools', which offered your travel power (Akin to mounts), as well as many other abilities. Many people took Super Leap or Super Speed for their travel powers. I took flight. Some people took Fighting. I took Leadership. Even in your own Primary/Secondary trees, people were different. Many people skipped the self-rez, I picked it up. I skipped taunt, many other players took it. So at the end of the day, when I stood amongst the dozens of heroes in the Hamidon raid/Arch-Villain Missions/Non-instanced "Raid bosses", and gazed around at the heroes around me, I felt that I was the only SS/WP/Flying/Leadership/8' Demon. What am I getting at? I attribute this feeling of uniqueness to the server's relatively 'good' community. People know you, you know them. Like a small town or something. It seemed like the game actually encouraged people to team together, although nearly everything was solo-able. Not too many assholes; mostly everyone was friendly, and all in all, a very fun game to play. If the graphics weren't so dated, and the gameplay wasn't so grindy, I would go back to playing it. --- In discussion, by going back to what I've just gone over, if I had to create an MMO, I would start with a very customizable 'character', followed by a very action-oriented game like Demon Souls/Monster Hunter in a persistant world. I'll post more when I'm back, but I'd like some information on what everyone thinks so far.
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Aug 16, 2011 18:51
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People have been talking about crafting systems, and so I figure I might as well throw in how I'd like to see a crafting system work. Again, this is taken from my big MMORPG concept. For the sake of interest, let's say we wanted to craft a sandwich. First, we would need to find a Sandwich blueprint. Pretty standard for MMORPG crafting systems. Since it's just a sandwich, it would probably be a pretty common blueprint to purchase from NPC vendors. Assuming we're a freshly-rolled character, the blueprint would come to us with a simple but specific recipe. 1x Bread Roll 1x Ham Combining the Bread Roll and Ham, we create a "Simple Ham Sandwich." It's a pretty weak healing item, but the ingredients are quite common, so we make a few more. Each time we make a Simple Ham Sandwich, we gain a little mastery of the Sandwich blueprint. Eventually, we level our mastery, and at this point the recipe on the blueprint changes. 1x Bread Roll 1x Meat (any) Now we've got options. We now have the ability to use any type of meat to create a "Simple [Meat] Sandwich." We can add beef, fish, dragon livers or what have you, and each type of sandwich has different stats. No spreadsheets required, though, because the way the stats are decided is simply. (Base Stats of Bread Roll + Base Stats of Meat) x Sandwich Modifier A bread roll on its own heals 15 HP and a Ham Hock heals 20. Multiply by our 1.2 Sandwich Modifier (which goes up as we gain more Sandwich Mastery) and our Simple Ham Sandwiches heal 42 HP. Other meats may have additional effects, such as raising attack power temporarily or giving temporary hit points. These effects are also added into the final effects of the sandwich and may or may not be multiplied by the modifier depending on whether or not it would horribly break anything. So let's fast forward, and we've leveled up our sandwich mastery several times. Our blueprint now looks like this Base 1x Bread (any) 1x Meat (any) Optional Up to 2x Meat (any) Up to 2x Cheese (same) Up to 2x Vegetable (any) Up to 1x Condiment (any) This means that to make a sandwich, we must use one of any Bread-category item and one of any meat-category item, but we can optionally choose to put more stuff on. Items with the (any) tag mean you can mix and match, while items with the (same) tag cannot be mixed (so two cheddars or two goat cheeses, but not one of each). Our sandwich modifier has gone up to x2.4, as well, so if we can get some high-quality ingredients we can make something truly incredible, like a "Colossal Radiant Dragon Tongue and Caveshroom Sandwich" (names are generated by the game based on your ingredients). Another note, though! In addition to our mastery of that specific blueprint, we have an overall Cooking crafting skill which we can grow by putting skill points into it (earned by level up). A higher cooking skill causes you to gain mastery of food-type blueprints faster as well as allowing you to skip the first few levels of food-type blueprints (skipping past the parts where you have no options). And this is the same basic system by which all crafting would work. Basically every ingredient has stats, crafting them adds the stats, mastery multiplies. Rocketlex fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Aug 17, 2011 05:34
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That would be a cool system because it allows you to make custom armor.
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Aug 17, 2011 06:24
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Some things i would prefer in an MMO, or rather, an MMORPG: 1) No splitting the world in two factions that can't cooperate, e.g. Horde and Alliance. It would perfectly possible to retain the strong feeling of belonging (I love Alliance and dwarves for example), yet still allowing people to group up. It's just silly to make 50% of your server's population useless for anything other than annoying you through world PvP. 2) No need to reroll, ever. Either the ability to switch class or the ability to simply pick one of all possible skill sets or specializations. I hate the fact that I can't play my paladin in WoW anymore because they hosed up the class, but I need to abandon all his achievements and reputations when going to another class. 3) A sort of "10/20/70" proportion to all grinds in the game. What I mean by this is: The first 10% of a grind should be easily completable, and most people will go through it (wow example: Reaching Neutral with Timbermaw so you could pass through the tunnel to Winterspring). The next 20% should be there for people who want to explore for a few hours more (wow example: Reaching Exalted with Therazane so you can buy the shoulder enchants). And the last 70% should be there for insane people like me who enjoy grinding for hours and watching numbers go up by 1. In other words, there should be quirkly, pointless stuff in an MMORPG, like the whole Insane achievement from WoW, if you know what I mean. 1% mount drops, faction grinds, achievements, etc. It's simple and cheap to implement, yet creates an aura of mystery and depth because it's so far out for most players. Those of us crazy enough can take the time to fully exploit it. 4) PvP should not influence the PvE game world. Heck, no pvp in the game at all if it were up to me. By not having pvp on the table, you can allow players to have abilities and spells that would be overpowered in pvp, but in pve perhaps just create utility or are balanced against bosses. The more class-specific utility spells, the better, because it makes your class (or chosen skill/archetype) make feel more special and interesting. 5) Ability to solo throughout the game, but greatly increased experience and quicker gear gains possible through grouping. Yet, the same gear should be available at a much slower pace when going solo. 6) Deeply complex dungeons and factions in terms of quests and things to do. A good example was Blackrock Depths in WoW before Cata ruined it - it was huge, complex, and had a billion quests and weird things to do in it. Coffer keys, the bar, class quests, Molten Core attunement, black forge/anvil, Onyxia attunement, etc. It creates a lasting impression on the players. 7) Never remove any old content or make items inaccessible. I'm a nostalgic when it comes to games and hate when they "clean up" old zones or make items unobtainable. Merely add content. Overall I guess I'm not very imaginative, but I also see right through many of the wishes people have in their pipe dream MMO, as they simply wouldn't be balanced nor fun. Remember the golden rule: People will swiftly flock to the class/spell/dungeon/whatever that rewards the most or is the most powerful. And thus ends your fun of being a stealthy pirate picking pockets, because 99% of players picked the stealth detection talent or equipped the "immunity to pickpocketing" item. Oh, and the other golden rule: People suck. WoW in Wrath before Cata was pretty much my dream MMO is many aspects. Nelson Mandingo posted:I'm going to be probably the odd man out in this entire thread. Let me be clear, I'm a core gamer. I am very good at video games, but I think MMO's should be more accessible and easier. There is a lot of numbers to crunch and too much poo poo for new players to learn. People complain WoW for instance is too easy, but I think it's way too hard. Being effective in the game requires you to visit out of game websites and research, and get mods. That's actually really poor development. It's fun, but only for us hard core players. We're also an extremely vocal minority. I disagree. Games on an iPhone are and should be like that; the basics are mastered within an hour, if not 10 minutes. I do certainly not want to be fully trained in an MMORPG within an hour. I'll say this: gently caress those figurative "new, confused players to whom MMOs are too complex" that are brought up on the forums now and then, go play Angry Birds instead.  There are thousands of games out there and dozens of genres for you to play instead, don't ruin the MMORPGs with massive depth and complexity that I enjoy so much, just so the most game-illitterate people out there can play too. *Games today have gone so far in terms of having tutorials and in-game instructions that it barely feels like a game when you load them up. You have a constant barrage of help boxes, flashes and text on the screen telling you what to do. Whatever happened to the enjoyment of figuring out that you've learned something on your own? Quests in RIFT don't even explain in which geographical direction your quest objectives are, they rely on you to open your map and just look at the dot and arrow. I'm also saddened that WoW is constantly simplified to the point of losing its charm in many areas. A game is not a piece of business software that should be simplified and cleaned up just for the heck of it. I play simple iPhone games too and enjoy them for what they are, and I think it's good that they introduce you to the simple gameplay with some tutorials and gentle introduction levels. But, I also play WoW as my MMO and enjoy grinding for hours and flipping through my spellbook and setting talents for hours in order to figure out how I should best tackle an encounter. The last thing I want is a game where you feel like you've learned it all within an hour. * Alas, I know I'm talking to deaf ears because there's money to be made selling games to those people. 
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Aug 17, 2011 16:51
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I'm also completely tired of the two faction thing.
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Aug 17, 2011 17:01
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(@Rocketlex)This is an interesting idea; more so that I thought of nearly the same thing when trying to devise a better crafting system. My ideas were set up closer to having each other profession work with each other, as I'll explain in a bit. Crafting is broken down into two main abilities -- Creation and Destruction. Creation is further broken down into Simple creation and Advanced creation, but I'll get to that into a bit. Crafting was done by gathering materials for the item, and merging them together into one bit. The better the materials, the better the item. Also, the better your skill, the better you could make the item, regardless of what materials are used. Instead of having things such as 'Wolf rear end sword' or 'Bear rear end sword' with specific recipies, there would just be '1-Handed sword' and '2-Handed sword' where one could fill in the items they wanted to make the sword. Destruction was a secondary resource gaining tool (Destroying metal weapons would give you metal pieces, for example). It's primary form was to complete your 'blueprints' for the items. By destroying an item, you would be able to gather materials and learn something from it -- For example, a breaking down a sword yields 3 results to learn from it: The blade, the hilt, the Enchanting Grid(Explained later). The blade and the hilt are mostly cosmetic, the Enchanting Grid is where the most important deconstruction piece is. Because you can only get one result + mats per deconstruction, you'll need to take apart multiple items of the same kind before you can build them. The Blade/Hilt, for the sword example are not completely useless however; because the amount of items you know applies directly to your maximum skill level. Crafting, as normal, raises your skill level, but the skill cap is based off of how many items you know how to make. Therefore, it behooves crafters to gain as many blade/hilt/Enchanting Grids as possible to continue leveling their profession. Materials can be mixed and matched to taste. Each item, such as a sword, has a minimum requirement for items needed, but there is also an upper limit to how much you can include. Going back to the sword example: Minimum Requirements: 5 Bars of metal Maximum Capabilities: 5 Bars of Metal Handgrip (Leather, Cloth, or otherwise) (Generally made from other professions) 3 Gems (Made from other professions) Charm (Made from other professions) 3 Runes (Made from other professions) Possible Spell-tech (Thing engineering) additions. Additionally, we toyed with the idea that where you forged the sword might impart different effects, such as a forge in a volcano might make your weapon fire-imbued, or the like. All materials provdided a certain number of 'points' that the final values of the sword could be altered with; Each weapon (1her sword, 1her mace, scythe) started off with a base value of their attack speed and how much damage they dealt. Additionally, materials could also provide a unique effect (Gems could increase the Enchanting Grid, for example). Making the weapon slower or lowering the damage would give you back a certain number of points, up to the caps. You could also spend points on adding in stats, as well as expanding the enchanting grid, or changing the damage type (Blunt swords, sharp maces, etc). Additionally, you would recieve points based on your current skill level; as a more expierienced smithy can make better items with the same materials than a lesser expierenced one. In addition to spending points, a hilt/blade would have be chosen and colored. This is a cosmetic effect and has no bearing on the weapons actual stats. The only limitation is that it cannot go outside its class for looks -- 1H-swords will look like 1h-swords, not scythes or maces. -- Now; lets say we have an individual; Adam, who has a quest to make ten swords for the local guard. Because these swords arn't very important to him, He'll be using the 'Simple Crafting' method. Simple crafting is well, simple. Adam will select a blade, a hilt, and an enchanting grid, and what materials he'll use to make it. Afterwards, he'll save the blueprint; which can be shared with other people or linked; or even written down and given to other players so they can save the blueprint (Although they won't be able to build it if they lack the knowledge). After his blueprint is saved, he'll hit 10 copies, and press craft, and proceed to craft. After this, he can go get a beer or whatever while his character mindlessly hammers away. Simple crafting is good for grinding skill, or mass producing weapons. Simple crafting uses the minimal amount of materials needed, and auto-fills in points and stats. For weapons that you'll actually be using (I.E, you care about), you'll be using advanced crafting. Advanced crafting is simple crafting, but with more options. If Adam, for example, is making a sword for his barbarain friend, who prefers slow two-handers, he might move points away from the attack speed and put them into damage, or strength stats. If Adam had another friend, Benny, who was a wizard, he could move damage and attackspeed away for in favor of a bigger enchanting grid. Asides from customizing the weapon, they could also hit up other professions to help pitch in for the weapon. A Spell-tech engineer could make the sword also double as a fishing pole, or shoot missles out, or make it be used as a mount. A prospector/jewelcrafter could throw in a few gems to increase the enchanting grid as well as boosting the point count. A scribe could imbue runes onto it, allowing it to increase self-healing and the like. Finally, when all the pieces are together, Adam will craft the item. Crafting will take place as normal, but there was a small discussion about mini-games to improve the item. Once the item is complete, they'll have a pretty solid weapon -- Now to get it enchanting. -- Enchanting is much like any other crafting profession -- Rather than deconstructing the items, however, they strip enchantments, leaving the item intact(And able to be deconstructed by any other individual), but removing all of the enchantments. They can choose what to learn from the item, and also get materials from the transfer. Enchanting is done on an 'Enchanting grid.' Enchanting grids are made up of a number of hexagons that form a shape (Mostly whatever the weapon is). The bigger the grid, the more enchantments, the more you can enchant. Each enchantment is a certain size and configuration of Hexes that allow players to 'fit' the enchantments together into the grid, in order to maximize how much they can enchant. Because the grid is based off of the item; player made items are generally superior to anything that drops off of NPCs, as they are better tailored to the players that use them. Therefore, raids and dungeons done are for materials and new pieces, rather than the item themselves. Enchantments, by nature, are non-visual, but there is a seperate, 1 hex grid that allows players to customize and place down a weapon glow or effect for visual effect. Enchantments generally do anything from simple stat boosts to procs to on-use effects. The better the enchantment, the larger the size. Rarer enchantments may be smaller in size than what they should, but these are usually hard to come by. Enchanters generally want to fill their entire grid, so that no hex is wasted. Once they fill the grid, they can also apply an additional bonus, based off of their enchanting level, of their choosing, much like how blacksmiths or other item crafters get additional points for being a higher skill level. Once the enchanting is completed, the piece of equipment is done and is ready for use. TalonDemonKing fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Aug 17, 2011 17:10
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Double posting; because my previous post is gently caress-off large and this is a different idea all together. For a MMO, as most pointed out, its really focused around combat. Does anyone remember the card game from FF8 or the entire Golden Saucer from FF7? These quirky little mini games were fun, and many people enjoyed playing them as a break from the standard combat/grind. WoW had ADdons which sort of mitigated this; you could play Tic-tac-toe with another player or played Bejewled while waiting for a raid. Why can't we have this in game, like a deck of cards or a 'battle chess' or any other sort of mini-game that players could play while waiting? Simple additions like that would be interesting, because it'd make the world feel more fleshed out than just combat all day every day. Also; Custom powers. While this is seriously open to abuse, allowing players to make their own attack powers/passives/oh-poo poo buttons would be a huge leap in customizing characters. Balancing this would be a bitch, but it would be something that you could boast that no other MMO has.
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Aug 17, 2011 17:18
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Pilsner posted:Games today have gone so far in terms of having tutorials and in-game instructions that it barely feels like a game when you load them up. You have a constant barrage of help boxes, flashes and text on the screen telling you what to do. Whatever happened to the enjoyment of figuring out that you've learned something on your own? Quests in RIFT don't even explain in which geographical direction your quest objectives are, they rely on you to open your map and just look at the dot and arrow. I'm also saddened that WoW is constantly simplified to the point of losing its charm in many areas. A game is not a piece of business software that should be simplified and cleaned up just for the heck of it. The problem many of my friends have had recently is similar to this -- many of us started WoW without any knowledge of anything, Thottbot was in its infancy and Wowhead didn't exist. Nowadays, the game itself tells you the right way to do many things, there's an addon to tell you how to do everything else, and that's the way most people seem to want it. I think that if the game doesn't have all that handholding, people will just find it from external sources, whether that be addons or webpages with raid strategies / optimal builds / etc. And if most of the playerbase buys into that belief system, it becomes even harder to play without all that reference material. Most pick-up instance groups I've seen would much rather get the boss strategy off of some website rather than wipe to the boss's Murder Bomb and then try again after discovering that you can avoid it by standing inside the Bomb Shelter or casting Anti-Bomb Shield or whatever. I'm not sure how to address the problem of "many players just want to read the FAQ and win the game".
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Aug 17, 2011 18:42
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I'd love an MMO that somehow couldn't be datamined for everything that existed in the game.
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Aug 17, 2011 19:11
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DarkJC posted:I'd love an MMO that somehow couldn't be datamined for everything that existed in the game. People scrape the game data files for the info mostly, no? Why not have most of the items exist server-side until you loot it, then download the art/files to the client PC? Man that'd be kinda awesome.
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Aug 17, 2011 19:13
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Taran posted:I'm not sure how to address the problem of "many players just want to read the FAQ and win the game". Monster Hunter/Demon Souls had a pretty solid approach to this: Games like WoW have little tricks or things you have to do that may not always be intiutitve when you first play, such as blocking Line of Sight for the Arcane Spellbom in the Ocolus, or stop attacking the final boss in Pits of Sauron whenever you're cursed. Monster Hunter/Demon souls was easy to figure out: Don't stand in the fires, don't get physically hit. When you did, you lost HP. There wasn't every any 'confusion' about why you died, you knew you just messed up. I think in a combat oriented game, this would be easier to pick up on. Granted, tutorials would still need to exist (Crafting, how to level, maybe some basic controls), rather than a target/click MMO like WoW where hunter arrows will curve around corners or frost bolts will home in on you.
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Aug 17, 2011 19:42
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I know a lot of people are trying to scrap the current MMO format, and rework it entirely, which kind of makes me feel a little silly when I add ideas that are improving the current style, but here goes anyway: Rest Exp. I think Rest Exp is an amazing idea, but implemented poorly. Why are you rewarded for staying away from the game, but not rewarded for staying in the game. My idea is to revamp rest exp in such a way that you actually accrue your rest exp at 2x+ if you are IN GAME while at a tavern or city area, AND not afk. I would then add in mini-games, like a poster above me said about Golden Saucer, or an in-game card game, or Gems, and put crafting stations everywhere. Hanging out with your friends for a little bit, or waiting for a friend to log on to go questing or dungeoning? Well, here's an exp buff relative to your time you waited around in game doing other things. Hate that you waste hours grinding crafting, when you coulda just been killing and coulda easily outleveled the gear you just crafted? Well, here's some exp buff to make up for time lost. I think this would increase the community feel of the game, and make it more lively. Suddenly taverns actually turn into chat rooms where you can drink and talk to other people waiting around, and get rewarded for it. Instead, right now I just see it as a place to go log out for the night.
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Aug 17, 2011 22:18
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Noah posted:I know a lot of people are trying to scrap the current MMO format, and rework it entirely, which kind of makes me feel a little silly when I add ideas that are improving the current style, but here goes anyway: Rest XP is so people who don't poopsock 24 hours a day can keep up with their friends. Your plan is exactly the opposite.
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Aug 17, 2011 22:30
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Then put a cap on it, like every other rest exp ever. Edit: I think I also misinterpreted what you meant too. I didn't mean to get rid of rest exp for offline completely, but to also reward those who are actually in game, doing various whatevers in town, like crafting or hanging out. Poopsockers are gonna poopsock no matter what, I don't think rest exp will ever fix that. The system is to keep those who want to craft and do other things in their spare time from falling behind. Noah fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Aug 17, 2011 22:41
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I wanted to also go off on an unrelated idea too. What ever happened to multiple starter cities? I feel like diversifying where your character starts can add to replay value of your alts. Fully flesh out multiple starter zones and quests, and you wildly expand everyone's playing experience. I've never seen far flung cities also stop people from making their way to other towns either. Bring back 6+ starting cities, and break linear progression through the game world.
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Aug 17, 2011 22:59
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In WoW (and presumably others) you gain rest xp for being in town, not being offline. So what you're asking for is already there, except you want to give people an incentive to stick one of those birdies on their spacebar while they're out. Your problem is the same as the problem with a lot of the ideas in this thread: you're trying to create an enviorenment first and force players to adapt to it, by making people do things they don't really want to do. All that does is make people hate your game and quit or do wierd things in order to circumvent your systems. You have to design games around how people actually behave, first and foremost. Bobfromsales fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Aug 17, 2011 23:05
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The idea behind the current implementation of rest exp is you do have to be in town, but you also maintain that while logged out. You have a point that it is creating an environment, and not really promoting doing fun things. If crafting were a fun hobby, then there wouldn't need to be any incentive to do it.
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Aug 17, 2011 23:21
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Hey ROCKETLEX: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3431787 quote:What makes Wildstar different from every other MMO?
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Aug 18, 2011 02:57
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signalnoise posted:Hey ROCKETLEX:  I will actually get to see how hard people reject my ideas first hand. That said, what I'm interested in is how the different paths will be able to interact and help each other. This was a core element of the "paths" system as I wanted to see it. The way that different paths allow you to access different areas is awesome and all, but the point is that different paths can open areas to other players.
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Aug 18, 2011 03:28
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The issue of death and player persistance was raised before and I think the original P&P D&D system of losing one constitution on every death has some merit for balancing consequence verses character longevity. In P&P D&D there were expensive limited and rare ways to recover lost constitution and temporary ways to overcome some of the consequences including gear. I recently quit WoW in order of importance because: 1/The player base is terrible and there is no sense of community. 2/Every patch Blizzard breaks something or takes something away, either by deletion or drastic rebalancing. 3/There was no path for taking a seperate approach to anything. Even races/factions/classes were becoming more and more homogenous. How to fix 1/ is the biggest poser and I have no idea. I have since tried a bunch of other MMOs and DDO seems to overcome many of the solo verses group issues and other mechanics (being discussed in this thread) but having no PvP (and being terrible in other ways - skills alocation  ) means it wasn't for me.2/ Is partly a cultural thing with Blizzard but every bit of fun you take away from anyone diminishes the fun available in the game overall. Connected to my major rant about 3/ was the removal of the quest where you poisoned a dog by the Cataclysm expansion. Item 3/ is where I'm going to sermonise. When I started playing WoW I took my usual read nothing and dive in approach. I made an undead warlock on the (turns out false) assumption that undead warlocks would be hated and in a minority. This would provide me with a suitable challenge and allow me to play a bad arsed demon summonner. After screwing around in Tirisfal, the Barrens (Faction dominated starter areas) I wound up in the Stonetalon Mountains and some loving cow druid told me I had go plant some loving seeds around a lake to restore the balance. Where was the option to: Kill loving annoying cow druid? Take the seeds and sell them to some evil bastards? Summon a demon to piss in the lake? I deliberately chose to play the bad guys and here I was sucking up to a loving druid and planting trees (and not for the last time). Upon reflection I should have probably quit WoW that day. Only the developers from Black Isles seem to have ever grasped this part of a fantasy RPG. The best example of the implementation being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate_II:_Shadows_of_Amn had some decent moments too. It is also one of my major problems with DDO as they basically made their alignment system pointless by not allowing players to choose to be evil. Being evil and doing evil should have consequences, as should being good and doing good. Give players moral dilemas. This should be driving fantasy drama not some poorly manufactured narrative based around fetch and carry. If any games have a decent shot at this I'd love to try them. OK moving on. Encrypting game data client side would be one way to slow down data mining. Things would only be unlocked as the server demanded the client to load them. Eventually all secrets would be exposed by it might have some stuff make it out of beta without being spoilered. Having massive story/alignment multipathing and encryption would also slow down the ability of even a large community to find all the secrets out quickly.
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Aug 18, 2011 03:34
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Rocketlex posted:I think both of these problems can be solved with the proper use of procedurally-generated content. Both of these issues spring from a player's desiring... Been out for a few days. I think all these things you mentioned are nice, neat things that could be done to improve an MMO. Sort of. We'll go in reverse order: 4) Not all people want to roleplay. And people that want to roleplay don't really need anything more than a chat client. I think "Involvement within the world in a meaningful way" is more what you're getting at. And people have talked about that. 3) There's lots of stuff that makes you think and react in MMOs. That's what the boss fights and the various monsters are based around. They have a guided script of what they do, and you have to come up with a strategy on how to beat that script. Yes, dodging void zones, and uber healing the tank when boss_01 uses his super damage move gets old. That's why the most vanguard players are typically the only ones that ever have to go blindly into a fight and think and react, but the fact of the matter is there is only a finite number of stimuli you can introduce to a player. 2) It's sort of hard to get the "unique" experience in a game with roughly ~5 million people playing the same as you. 1) Lack of repetition. Good luck on that. I liked your commentary on procedural generation. It's one way to keep games fresh (sort of), keep installation sizes down, to keep people on their toes. It's a hot research topic in games/CS as well. Diablo 3 is largely taking advantage of this in the exact way you described. Unfortunately, there's a bad side to procedural generation. Even though procedural generation would create a "unique" world with every generation, it's not actually unique. Humans see patterns, even when they aren't apparent, and after so long, you could break down the generated dungeons into their component parts. You could reverse engineering the generation algorithm, the rng, or whatever, to glean information about dungeons before they were generated. There's also the possibility of the totally asinine generated dungeon from a bad string of rng calls. Ever played Anarchy Online? Every single mission is procedurally generated. People have been playing and mining long enough to know you run along the left wall and you'll find the objective faster than the right wall. People know how many floors each team mission has based on level. And after 10 years, the dungeons are loving boring and stagnant. Don't get me wrong, I think procedural generation could do a lot for MMOs. It has to be done correctly, though, with a mind for scalability and long term use. I'm really interested to see what Diablo 3 does with it. Fake Edit: Interesting aside, a colleague of mine is doing research on using procedurally generated environments/maps in story-driven video games. Very interesting stuff.
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Aug 18, 2011 04:04
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signalnoise posted:Honestly, I think this is a simple one that's just hard in execution. Functionally speaking, the idea is to do two things- 1-This was a major debating topic in UO vs. EQ a long time ago. Half my friends played UO because they loved the thrill of almost losing everything, or making someone else lose everything. Half of my friends played EQ because they didn't like the idea of someone that had been playing 10x as long as them swooping in and taking all their stuff. It's a tough line to draw in PvP, and anyway you cut it, you're losing customers. 2-Completely resonates my thoughts on APB. Except I guess I have a little more patience, because the bs hasn't outweighed the fun yet. As an aside though, both you and Rocketlex talked about #4, but only at the surface. I mentioned a Dread Lord killing my Miner, but who says it has to be a bad experience revolving around some kind of PvP / player interaction activity? What about the WoW player that can't finish his/her quest because Varian Stormwind is dead? What about the EQ player who dies in some hosed up spot, can't get his corpse, and loses all his stuff? What about the low level dealing with the level 60 grinding lowbie mobs so he can get some random achievement? These sorts of issues pushed a lot of players away in the old days. We've combatted the problem nowadays by hand holding and homogenizing experiences so that there are no bad experiences in a game. Ugh.
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Aug 18, 2011 04:16
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DisgracelandUSA posted:Unfortunately, there's a bad side to procedural generation. Even though procedural generation would create a "unique" world with every generation, it's not actually unique. Humans see patterns, even when they aren't apparent, and after so long, you could break down the generated dungeons into their component parts. You could reverse engineering the generation algorithm, the rng, or whatever, to glean information about dungeons before they were generated. There's also the possibility of the totally asinine generated dungeon from a bad string of rng calls. Very true. I guess my general line of reasoning was even if people start to see behind the curtain after long enough, a little variation each time you enter an instance is still better than none at all. My inspiration (strangely enough, since I mentioned disliking them earlier) was roguelikes. People will keep throwing themselves into roguelikes long after they've "seen" everything in it. Even when they know that there's always a hub room on level 4 and the door on the left takes you to the exit, or that one fountain will always be trapped if two spawn in the same room, there still remains that slight element of mystery and unpredictability which keeps people interested in just how the next run would play out. Also, I consider the adding and refining of content to be a big part of a successful MMO. If you haven't changed up the dungeon generation script in ten years, something's wrong.
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Aug 18, 2011 04:21
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DisgracelandUSA posted:2-Completely resonates my thoughts on APB. Except I guess I have a little more patience, because the bs hasn't outweighed the fun yet. quote:As an aside though, both you and Rocketlex talked about #4, but only at the surface. I mentioned a Dread Lord killing my Miner, but who says it has to be a bad experience revolving around some kind of PvP / player interaction activity? It's not so much that you're trying to eliminate all bad experiences. It's about eliminating unnecessarily bad experiences. Failing to complete a mission due to your own incompetence is a bad experience. Dying and having to deal with running back or whatever is a bad experience. Piling additional punishment on top of those situations is just a terrible way to make that bad experience feel worse. The better way, in my opinion, is to make the reward for success more satisfying. That way, you make failure have a bigger impact while also making success have a bigger impact, instead of just the other way around. I feel that too often, players are not rewarded for the punishments they face. Hand holding and homogenization should not be the end result here. You should not go out with the idea that you're stamping out all bad experiences. You will never succeed. However, bad experiences often ruin fun, and the goal should really be to make the game more fun. You've heard the idea before that there wouldn't be good times without bad times, I'm sure. Turn that around, and consider there wouldn't be bad times without good times. All you need is that comparison. If your game is fun as hell 99% of the time, simply not having fun that 1% of the time will be a huge disappointment and punishment enough on its own. Rocketlex posted:My inspiration (strangely enough, since I mentioned disliking them earlier) was roguelikes. People will keep throwing themselves into roguelikes long after they've "seen" everything in it. This is generally because the games themselves have good combat models, they are based on replayability instead of using the same character for a full month /played, and they are an incredible challenge. I myself have played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup a shitload and I have still never come close to beating it. signalnoise fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Aug 18, 2011 |
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Aug 18, 2011 06:40
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My favorite times were in UO and SWG running around killing people and stealing their poo poo. I always wondered why people try to recreate past mmos. Pretty much all those who have tried have failed and I predict future mmos that try to do this will also fail because the internet ruined mmos. The anonymous nature of the internet will always give griefers the edge which makes really poor gameplay. In the current mmos they have it set up that people cant run around being super bastards, so the times of yore are dead and gone my brothers. And to this I ask why are we wishing and trying to recreate these halcyon days? The days of uo, eq, daoc are gone. Daoc is not the only mmo to play anymore and thank god that truely was the darkest period in mmos.
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Aug 18, 2011 17:32
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First of all, I would like to see a subscription model for an MMO like those of the book publishers. I.e. pay per content. This is apparently working for Guild Wars, so why not try and be cheap. I also would like to see more historically correct combat (not to detriment enjoyment from the game), the realistically depicted cities where you really meet people and nor some corridors with few named mobiles. If your story takes place in 2400 I doubt you have a separate Slums district, I don't think there would be any districts at all, really, of course. Amazingly huge worlds, spanning multiple seamless areas (planets, faerun + underdark or whatever), Acheron Call comes to mind; if it could be very well done, if some ultra-fast player-controlled (much unlike certain gryphons) vehicles would be implemented. You can argue that ultra-fast means of transportation ruin the hugeness of the world. That's true for me, to an extent. There's also a problem when the world only seems absolutely terrifyingly huge when you play the game for the first time, I don't think current technology can solve it. I don't really care if the colossally huge areas are hand-designed or a product of some intricate random generator. It wouldn't hurt story much if they fought for 1000x1000 miles instead of 3x3 in Ashenvale, I believe. I appreciate player impact on the story, but it can easily be ruined by the Internet part of MMO participation. You can have different servers with different branches of story and allow transition, however. It should also finally be possible to play a bad guy in a story that spans multiple realms or kingdoms with many people playing. Perhaps, being only a pawn for some unknown but utterly sinister and evil force would suffice many. At least 50,000 persons on a server; close to how many you meet during one week living in a 2-3 million town in real life. If it's technically impossible, there are examples of chat lobbies and seamless switching of servers that has already been done. Oh and Eve Online, but it only keeps 50,000 players connected, but doesn't make them able to interact with each other currently. It's kind of unrealistic, because I don't think it even works in general, but some kind of demand-supply closed economy with strict control and goods that don't lose in price with expansion packs or patches. If that means stupidly low drop-rates or month of camping this point is moot. I think tutorials or any guides should be absolutely unnecessary and the time spent reading would be better spent flying, running around the world of MMO. The game must be something you can pick up and play and within two weeks of 2 hours a day you are as good as most are. X360 joypad? Who cares, it works just as well as your touchpad (you will have to take time familiarizing yourself with touchpad, if you are a first-time user, of course). Many, but not millions of ways to customize your character. I look at you, the face-gen abusing games. Just click some 'randomize' button and with time and some math you could have your artists sit down and produce 10 by 10 by 10 non-eyegougingly ugly choices; which I think would be enough for anyone. I also think that level-up or some other method of 'played more on this character' should be employed in the game. It doesn't have to end or stop at level 60 or 85, even, but in UO we used to have important Dread Lords and so on. I am very sure there should be some resemblance to level systems in any game, and it seems most of current game producers acknowledge it. We will of course see how The Secret Worlds goes, however. Maybe that's a big chance for 'I am a commoner hero' crowd to be heroes. I don't mind WOW loot system, there are way to better it already pursued by TOR and Warhammer and Rift, but the gear-to-get-better-gear needs to go. The best gear I want, I am still kind of young, would be an unremovable tattoo on my character, that in five years I would be ashamed to have. Having said that, I'd love to see a system when with every expansion (or book) every player gets to start anew on even ground. Maybe a few weeks from the release. Imagine if Blizzard by New year 2011 made every character of everyone (opt-in of course) 85. All the dungeons or flashpoints or missions in such a game would then scale to the current "story" level, i.e. level 85 Molten Core. There needs to be a process to have player learn her newly acquired abilities, however. But it would not be an issue, if there was as much as possibility to play WOW on an X360 joystick. I like a little conflict myself, and I have to admit there needs to be a lot more war than whatever current MMOG feature. As much as it can be, in fact, without punishing the losing side. It would help if in any game were characters as sympathetic as Omni and Clan side of AO or a game where everyone is evil, not just the Horde (but they're not evil??). Speaking of crafting, I don't personally have any complaints about clicking 'Make' in whatever tradeskill window. But you could also look at the possibilities of player-generated content if you deeply look into the crafting systems of old. More 'crafted by somegoon' would be certainly appreciated; personalization and the fact that people are pretty much always willing to go any length to have a matching set of armor is a proof I don't need. I could also argue about being equipped by some Dwarvenguy the best crafter in the Undermountain that only logs in if you pray to him by donating through paypal a big gently caress off to the guys that have t3 I can't have. What wouldn't hurt MMOG is better player&party integration. I mean, we are usually working towards common goal, why should I not get quest credit for the slain boar. This is already being adressed in most games, though. But it stands reiterating. There should also not be any quests that are not a part of the big story. You can characterize characters only so much, but I want to know if it has any impact on the inevitable treat on our realm. No that, 'my kin is now avenged' or 'and they lived happily ever after until deathwing burned them to death'. The story in question, is perhaps of my character -- he went there and there and worked on the rat problem the innkeeper had, and what do you know, by killing the rats, a whole new darkness is on the horizon. Because the rats were chewing the cables powering the Dark Portal or whatever. Automatic PVP. That is of course a silly suggestion, but I think it'd be helpful. If I could have my skill and spell choices recognized by the server and my opponent had his upon meeting each other we would get a prompt and select an option to just receive the outcome. Whoever loses is phased out of the winner's existance for the length of the session or forever, and who wins gets to have the whatever spoils. Unless it is an active non-instanced battleground of some sort, but even there it could work. It looks like longer than I'd really speak on, but I appreciate the discussion. In the end I'd like to wish the huge risks for those trying to accomplish something new in MMOG genre to be overcome by their clever strategies and awesome ideas.
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Aug 18, 2011 23:27
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I just want to say that SWG had the best crafting system ever in any MMO I've played, at least for the first few years. I say that without even having had a single crafter. The best materials were spread throughout the galaxy, and changed or depleted every so often, so you needed a prospector to go out and find/harvest the best raw materials, knowledge of those spawns or even what the best materials currently WERE was extremely valuable information. The grind to become a master crafter was ridiculous (I don't really know how I feel about that one, but it kept them rare) if you didn't know about abusing factories (and not everyone did at all), so the master weaponsmiths or armorsmiths were as famous as anyone could expect to be in an MMO, and highly sought-after. If you were a competing master crafter, you had to work with suppliers to get the best materials, experiment on your different components to make blueprints for mass-production, and when one of the masters came out with a new line of weapons it was a big deal. This one might have the best handguns out there, this one might have the best rifles etc. I thought it was pretty drat impressive all the way through. There were downsides of course, you couldn't really be a very good combat/exploration/whatever character if you were a real crafter, and it took quite a bit of in-game time to stay on top, but they had the best houses and everyone wanted to be their friends.
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Aug 19, 2011 04:24
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I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'm curious on how well an invisible progression system would go. That is to say, when a person levels up, they're not told about it and they don't actually see their stats, they just notice that they're doing slightly more damage/hitting more accurately/taking less/whatever. Such a system would either need to be classless or otherwise have no equipment restrictions. I have an idea for a Car Wars MMO-adapation that would work somewhat well with this, due to the fact that in the game there's very little in the way of stat growth and it's inherently random due to die rolls, as well as any given weapon being the same as all the other weapons of the type(so no +1 recoilless rifles). For stats, in that situation, one's XP would rise while being shot at, and get XP for shooting at NPCs/PCs, and so on. It would make the progression seem more natural and fluid and prevent the "ok, 30 more cars and I get +1 to gunnery" grindyness. Technically it would be somewhat grindy but people wouldn't care/think about it so much. It also prevents any concept end-game because nobody will know if they've hit the cap.
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Aug 20, 2011 19:13
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Victis posted:I just want to say that SWG had the best crafting system ever in any MMO I've played, at least for the first few years. I say that without even having had a single crafter. Overall SWG was pretty good, but there were some serious drawbacks to it as well. The random resource thing is where most of it starts and ends though. First off, a truly random resource generator sucks because it leads to something not spawning forever on a server. This happened early in SWG's life, one of the best rifles couldn't be made on one of the servers for at least a year after launch becuase of the random resource generator. Such a thing is easy enough to work around, but it leaves the problem of gimping anyone who wasn't playing when that resource spawned. They couldn't get the best resources and could never get to the top of the craft because of it. Oh well, they're killing the game in December, so whatever.
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Aug 22, 2011 03:26
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I want a goddamn World of Mana MMO, complete with the art style and everything. Just have it be an incredible world to explore, and include some dastardly magician's plot, some political bullshit, a haunted ships as an instanced dungeon, jailbreaks, all that kind of poo poo. Just make everything feel adventurey. Add in elemental affinities to elements that you can actually talk to. Since the Mana series is really abstract and the worlds aren't really in sequence or even in the same world, you could make the game be whatever the hell you want. Give me talking mountains and people made out of gems and all that crazy stuff.
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Aug 22, 2011 08:16
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Embrace the eSport attitude and do away with the "a trophy for everyone, you're all an hero" mentality. Not everyone is meant to be the best. I would very much like not to be shoehorned into an epic questline that sets me up for the fated meeting between me and the evil overlord. It's like everyone is just lining up and there's this speaker lady going "You are now number 4,869 in line to kill evil overlord. Please ensure that you have your party of 10 An Heroes with you as you proceed to the entrance of the dungeon, so as to speed up the process for everyone. Thank you." I could do with a world where there's no "greater plot", or if there is a greater plot, you're only part of it if you go looking for it, or if you accidentally land yourself in the middle of it one Saturday afternoon. EVE does this, so it shouldn't really be that impossible to accomplish. All in all, less theme park, more do-whatever-the-hell-I-want. I know this isn't a style everyone likes, but I do.
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Aug 22, 2011 08:45
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OneTwentySix posted:What I'd like to see in a MMO would be something like EVE, where there is player driven story and action, where groups of players are determining the economy and the story and so forth, and then add an actual game to it. This is not getting enough love. I don't want to limit people by going down "routes" though. everyone should be able to do everything. if I want to bolster my bank account I'll take the trade ship one day, and if I want to kill star whales I'll take my long distance cruicer the other. on the third day I might dock my interceptor with a captial ship and fly of to PvP. the important aspect is to remember to include credit sinks to avoid inflation. Players can build cities, space crafts, ground vehicles, space stations or what have you, but you need resources for it (I don't want too many different resources, a good mix between the luck of finding them and maintaining a hold of them is more interesting than having to find 800 million different parts) but just as they can be built so can they be destroyed. It will mostly be space crafts/ground vehicles that gets destroyed, but it should be possible to demo everything (just allow for a relatively painless (though not free) reconstruction) the game will be a FPS in a style not unlike U3 in style, you can enter planes or tanks etc or continue on foot, set in a seamless world (no instances). given time a community will split into factions and fight over resources, land, bases or technology making it less about go fetch x wombats for npc y and more about what do we as a group need to out-perform the other guilds. Grief is encouraged to ensure player conflict, and the game dynamics should be made so that the bigger a group gets the harder it will be for them. the more land they own the more time they'll have to spend patrolling it to keep of pirates to ensure no one faction gets to large (ie. the underdog will have it easier (this, of cause, will take a lot of finetuning. I don't have the recipe), making it more likely for them to catch-up or put themselves in a position where they can damage the top dog). an immense universe where flying from one end to the other will take days or weeks depending on ship, but with jump stations to ease transport. however, for large scale combat, taking the jump stations will mean that enemies can monitor when and where you're going. taking the long road around means you can sneak up on people and catch them unaware (smaller ships dock near larger ships, multiple persons can pilot the ship so player a can fly for 10 minutes and then ask for one of the other pilots docked at the ship to take over. he might fly for 2 hours and then a third will take over.) the quick route will give you more resistance, the slow route is more boring but will let you bypass defense grids or whatever. the alliances organize themselves, the leader decides how much power the members enjoy (the more decision power they have, the easier it is for enemies to infiltrate and backstab, the less power the more likely people are to leave for another alliance that gives them more influence). being evil should be a viable choice. the name of players shouldn't by default be visible. Also you should be able to provide a fake name. A player can be a respected member of society but have his own private pirate den on a far of planet. he has his pirate ship or whatever stashed there when he isn't using it, so getting there shouldn't be about doing a bee line, but will have to be by a stealthy route. once in his pirate ship he can terrorize the meek but if he gets caught his true identity might be be revealed or if lucky his fake name. Also illegal or underground markets should be a viable choice. if you want to be a slaver, you raid colonies for fresh meat putting them to work in your hidden/underground factories making cheap copies of other products or illegal substances which can be sold to shady types in large cities. people who want to be "good" can investigate settlments who have experienced raids where there might be a survivor left behind who can give you some basic info (but not necesarily) or a survailance video or a tracer who can indicate from where direction they came. Basically, this game would be EVE Online + X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter + U3/fallout + mech warrior + sim city. I'll stop now, cause I'm sure my mind has trailed off more than once making this completly unintelligible
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Aug 22, 2011 14:54
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pertinent posted:Embrace the eSport attitude and do away with the "a trophy for everyone, you're all an hero" mentality. Not everyone is meant to be the best. I agree with this. Quests to "save the world" in an MMO setting always feel forced unless it's some kind of massive community raid. Additionally, set it up such that once the evil overlord is dead, he's dead on that server. In a week or so, another overlord may rise to take his place, but he explicitly won't be the same one. Each once should be nigh-on unkillable, Final Fantasy XI-style, but when someone kills it they actually get to see the server-world go through a period of relative peace before the next overlord shows up. And also, in an effort to reduce "farming" the evil overlord, anything he drops should be purely a bragging-rights thing. No crazy stats, just an "I was there when [name of overlord] fell" t-shirt or something.
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Aug 22, 2011 19:45
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It's funny how much of the stuff in this thread is accomplished by AC, or the things hated not done by AC. I just started a trial account again and enjoy running around the open world, doing quests (or not), grinding (or not), crafting (or not), etc. Death is painful but recoverable; you can ignore the big epic quest line and just do your own thing, and so on. We laugh frequently about how games have regressed since this, especially in WoW. I remember playing that some time after AC, and then noticing I couldn't go anywhere I wanted in the world, I could only ever fight 3-5 monsters at once no matter what, no characters were infinitely self sustainable, I couldn't inscribe items, travel was horrific, ... For an ideal MMO for me, I'd like the best parts of AC, shadowbane and darkfall put together, and in a space setting. An above poster touched on it a bit, but I'd love Darkfall style naval combat in space. That is, a big space ship is piloted by one player. An unlimited number of other players are "crew" and can do what they want: repair the ship, heal people on the ship, be commanders, scouts, man turrets, ... Big ships would have a bank of fighters/bombers/whatever, so those crew members could opt to get into those ships and launch off the main ship, do things and redock later.
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Aug 22, 2011 21:01
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