Hero's Journey

Originally posted by gagaliya

After all those years of graphical mmorpg, i still havent found a single game that even comes close to what dragonrealms had to offer.

Currently, I don't think there is any mmorpg that closely resembles the DR experience.
I agree, though. DragonRealms is still my best gaming experience to date. I think if any game is going to bridge the gap between the freedom of text based games and the eye candy of mmorpgs, it will be Hero's Journey. That's the hope, anyway.

Originally posted by navarredr

Currently, I don't think there is any mmorpg that closely resembles the DR experience.
I agree, though. DragonRealms is still my best gaming experience to date. I think if any game is going to bridge the gap between the freedom of text based games and the eye candy of mmorpgs, it will be Hero's Journey. That's the hope, anyway.

It is a very complex mechanism to try to bind 3D and text and provide an equivalent gaming system. It is very difficult to code imagination. Dragonrealms is one of the most pleasant gaming experiences I have come accross and one of the reasons that it plays well is that to survive you have to be :-

• A member of the community
• And invest time in the game to contribute to that 
• Be able to cope with loss of time effort and uncomplete skill ranks  when you die

Currentl MMOs have such a variety of player types that to meet alll their needs it is difficult to emulate the above ... in sopme ways top acheive it you have to go back to basics and remove a lot of the fluff that makes most current MMORPGs no challenge at all.

• How many people would put up with questing for lives ... every now and again to ensure you don't die forever ..?
• How Many people really want to communicate and role play...?
• There were no gold sellers, no greed merchants, very limited walkthroughs on the Net so you had to communicate with the elders within the game..
• How many people would accept no auction houses reduced graphical investment ..because thats not what make a game its the mechanics bhind it.

Currently no game resembles this , but I would agree AC has come the closest,, but that was ruined once the bots arrived.

sad sad times ... But by some miracle and a lot of Game Masters and the community actually owning some of the intelectual property within HJ then my hope is that it will meety your requirements.

Funny enough I have spent the last week searching for an mpog that doesn't require me to grind stationary rats to lvl!  So far no luck. I have come to the conclusion that the mpog world is at the same stage as single player games in the 1990's. Remember Master of Orion II, privateer etc?  Poor graghics but I must have played days straight on those. Then company's started to develop great looking games but they all sucked.  2 dimensional story lines and no playability.  Finally now  gameplay has caught up with graghics in games like Total War etc. 

Right now I find Mpog's like Vanguard etc. Are really gorgeous on the right rig but at the expense of roleplaying and gameplay.  I for one are starting to question the time I play on these games as pretty scenary only goes so far.  However I am optimistic.  Looking at the so called next gen games coming out I can see developer posts that are at least addressing some semi original ideas. 

One thing is certain.  People in general will not sign up to these multi million projects just because of graghics anymore. If they do it will be the usual 3 months to check it out.  What we need is an in-depth mpog that at least removes grinding and the standard 'kill xxxx' to get 1000 xp points.  Even today I found myself killing 10 scorpions and 10 lions for missions....sigh......

The best thing about Dragonrealms (as has already been stated) is that you could do anything you wanted. A halfling barb, gor'tog moonie, dwarven thief... Whatever you wanted to do you could. Hell you could be a thief who used Two handed blunt weapons if you wanted. If you were willing to put in the work, you could make your character successful. I started playing DR very soon after the Beta ended way back in the day. Hell I was in 6th grade at the time I believe. I played for years and loved every second of it. I eventually quit just before college and have gone back twice since then for relatively decent stretches of time. I have spent all the time since DR trying to find a game that keeps me entertained as much as DR did.

I was thinking about this the other day... So much now you hear about people whining and complaining about the grind in games, but DR was one huge grind. But it was funner then hell. There is not a single other game in existence that would take the same amount of hours to reach the high end of the game like in DR. The highest of the high players have been playing for 10 years, and putting massive amounts of hours in and most aren't at max level. But the whole time it was fun.

I think it as the skill based advancement that made DR what it was personally. It was your typical, gain X experience points to level up. You weren't out grinding/killing the same critter over and over again fo xp points, you were doing it to gain skills. Whether you played for 1 hour for the day or 16 hours, you constantly saw your character advancing each and ever tme you logged into DR and you saw it in hard numbers by typeing "exp"

the freedom DR gave with it's skill based advancement is exactly what I have been looking for in a MMO and it will be a happy day if someone actually can make a graphical MMO which uses that system. Until then, I will continue to play games in short stints... There simply is not an MMO which could keep me paying a monthly fee for 7+ years like DR did.

I know what you mean about plability on simu's MUDs. I recently reactivated my Gemstone account just last week and have been addicted to it since. I played from probably the age of 13 through 20 or so then quit for a year or two, came back for a year, quit again for a few years now since I got into FFXI real heavy, and now I've gotten bored with LOTRO after playing for all of 6 weeks, and am back on Gemstone again.

This entire weekend I worked on Rogue Guild lockpick mastery, got 4 ranks, and loved every second of it. I just sat in the picking area of the main town (Landing) and talked to people. RPed my ass off. gave my lockpicks little pep talks when they didn't unlock something the first time. Watched lowbees blow themselves (and others) up (BTW my thanks go out to Kat... I needed my heart defibbed... I hadn't died all week... just remember: Disarm the box THEN pick the box... ::grumble grumbe::) Got a few regulars who would come to me to get their boxes unlocked without waiting in line just because I treated them with respect and unlocked their boxes with due haste and accuracy.

It felt good to be a part of a community again. Not just another faceless 'toon' that is trying to kill spiders all day. A game that takes 70 hours of straight playing to gain 1 single level (and with that level nets you a +3 AS bonus... and thats about it) with people that still play it and still come back to it is saying something. It takes the better part of a year of solid playing to hit level cap... What did they do right? Their projects never get completed... there are empty promices littered around the landscape of Gemstone... The game is decent but certainly not polished... so it's none of those... It's the community, it's the difficulty, it's the dynamic playing environment.

In LOTRO and FFXI he is just another toon that looks like everybody else in all the same armor killing all the same things... In Gemstone my character is who I want him to be, with a personality of his own. He likes to collect Myklian scale items, he talks to his lockpicks, he feels a lockpick has personally let him down when it breaks and refuses to work with it again, he is careful most of the time - but can be easily lured into hysterics if he can't unlock something he said he would, he doesn't like dark elfs and doesn't trust spell users, and he thinks the wizard "Dumblydore" needs an arrow in his eye (and might just get his wish later today - Dumblydore? really? seriously?)...