General Discussion

Originally posted by bamwalla

Well,  most games these days spoon feed you all the information that you might need.  Heck you don't even have to look for NPCs anymore -- there is a giant flashing symbol over their heads if they need to tell you something.  I will use AC as an example, because I was there in the beginning.  When that game started out you had no idea what you were doing.  This of course led to many mistakes on character development and rerolling to fix what you thought might be broken.  Heck, they didn't even tell you how to cast War magic.  You had to figure out the spell-comps on your own and test fire them until you got it right.  Asherons Call has since turned to the spoon fed style of play and it is far-far easier than it once was.  It also has 8 Years of development under its belt.  I still play it from time to time.  It isn't nearly as intelligent in design anymore, but still entertaining.

Absolutely graphics are better, technology is better, not the game itself.   Look at a computer from 10 years ago, back when a 1mb video card was nice.  Or before that when 8 bit video cards were the size of a shoe box top.  So the turd games keep getting prettier, woot -- now we have pretty turds.

There is a LOT of money in gaming these days, billions of dollars.  Slapping together a game and selling it for a profit is more the objective than building something that will stand for 10 or more years.

That's my 2 cents (before taxes)

OMG, remember lagging f'n Arwic? I loved that game, but it was because it was so new, and so different. The freedom that game gave you was unrivaled by anything I've seen since. Rerolls? Oh yeah. I played my first char to level 31 with no magic at all. I never went to any websights about the game, I didn't have a patron, and the only time I grouped was to do weapon quests. I just wandered the world. Sneaking through areas that were too high of a level for me as best as I could, just to get to a place where I could hunt for that illusive hide, or whatever the drop of the month was at the time. I collected whatever random armor pieces that dropped, and built a decent set, only to die in the middle of the obsidian plains and lose it all. If it was really good I would try to remember landmarks and sneak my way back, but most of the time I just dropped to killing lower level mobs and building up my armor until I could try the run again. My GOD was that a fun game! WoW is a lot like it, but way playschooled out. It's just too tame and too easy. I wouldn't mind if a game had less than ideal graphics, as long as it had depth, size, and freedom.

Aye, quit now and you may be bored, play, and you may have fun ... at least a for while. And one day collecting wolf hides, many times over and over again, would you be willing to trade ALL the gold, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our game developers that they may take our player run economy, they may take our housing, they may even take our crafting, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

we had a great game that was ahead of it's time.

that game was made by a man who is the guru of mmo's and even told ea what they did wrong with uo.

that game is star wars galaxies.

and it was stolen from us vets by sony online. it was stolen and held hostage by two systems one a so called combat upgrade that nerfed the combat system. and then soe started to give into the whiners and nerf jedi ever month. and jedi was one of the best things about swg, but soe caved in to people who wanted to a i win button.

and then in winter of 2005 the game was held hostage by a system called the nge.

the nge turned what was once the greatest mmo made into a shell. it's so bad tiggs who ran the swg forums got fired for defending the players and telling soe to roll the game back. the game went from 250k players down to under 10k as today.

if you want a game that was fun and great then help us the swg vets reclaim the pre-cu system.

Originally posted by iwantmyswg

we had a great game that was ahead of it's time.

that game was made by a man who is the guru of mmo's and even told ea what they did wrong with uo.

that game is star wars galaxies.

and it was stolen from us vets by sony online. it was stolen and held hostage by two systems one a so called combat upgrade that nerfed the combat system. and then soe started to give into the whiners and nerf jedi ever month. and jedi was one of the best things about swg, but soe caved in to people who wanted to a i win button.

and then in winter of 2005 the game was held hostage by a system called the nge.

the nge turned what was once the greatest mmo made into a shell. it's so bad tiggs who ran the swg forums got fired for defending the players and telling soe to roll the game back. the game went from 250k players down to under 10k as today.

if you want a game that was fun and great then help us the swg vets reclaim the pre-cu system.

They took away your freedom to basically dumb the game down and they destroyed it. I wish other game companies would learn from this lesson, rather than trying to be too easy like a WoW clone. Not knowing what to do is an adventure. Following glowing exclamation points around is dull.

Ultima Online was an unplayable fiasco largely driven to obscurity by player killers, and WoW is a smooth-running game with much more content and far better rules and mechanics.  EQ1 was far better than UO, and WoW is far better than EQ1. 

Also, now we have innovative games like CoX.  MMO's have come a very long way since their fringe beginnings.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Ok, I am going to hold the dissenting idea here.

I started with a pre-MMORPG with Kingdom of Drakkar, a TELNET game with minimal icon graphics and 50 people online were a lot. I have also played MUDs (mostly Diku). I beta tested UO and EQ and played EQ for quite a while before I quited the scene. Now I am playing WOW and tried out almost every single MMORPG.

Here is my take. There are TWO schools of thoughts. One is that the game should be a sandbox (UO, Eve Online) and you rely on interaction, evolution of the world to entertain. The other one is a fixed set of content (EQ, WOW, ...) and the social aspect is to help the players to enjoy the fixed, sometime linear content.

The formal is very very hard to do. I know many here loves UO but I hated it. It is a PK-heaven (or hell depending on which side you are on) during beta. In fact, that is the reason I went to EQ instead. A sandbox game can decent into chaos if behavior of players are not restricted within some bounds.

The primary reason, i think, is that I am (and probably many are) looking for entertainment and an escape. If I want stress, real life is full of it. So I don't need extra stress and extra work in my games.

WOW filled the role PERFECTLY. Sure, you can make finding a NPC a chore but most people do NOT want the realism of taking hours to hunt for a person. WOW succeeded because it pushes MMORPG in the direction MOST (but not all) people wants. Easy, fun entertainment without the stress. Sure you will get tired of it after 70 levels and 20 raids. However, I am sure by that time, Blizzard will come up with their NEXT MMORPG. WOW did advance MMORPG gameplay, abate incrementally, though not in the direction which many wants here. Its highly polished gameplay, with little details  like quest events and things like that, make grinding/questing fun.

While it is not a true sandbox world, I am a happy customer. By the size of their subscription base, I would bet more people are like me than the hardcore MMORPGers.

Hmm, the problem with your point is equating sandbox games with lack of content and rampant freeform PKing. This was so in the beginning but things changed - EQ had harsh death penalties but no one will now complain that linear, quest-driven games suck because they must have harsh death penalties. For one, the sandbox games don't have to be like that (you can have freeform without PKing and with lots of dev-made content) and second, I believe that a true next-gen MMORPG won't be either truly "sandbox" or " linear" but something else... what exactly I don't know but I can speculate from the inherent technological qualities of the genre.

To make my point with an example - Second Life. The MOST sandbox game out there, extremely popular and no player killing at all. I'm not saying that Second Life is the way to go because it is not a proper RPG, I'm just pointing at a novel way at looking at computer game design - giving players the tools to create content instead of raw content itself.

Today it is almost unthinkable to publish a FPS or RTS or almost any of the top genres without giving the players tools to make their own maps, mods etc. Why this isn't so in MMORPGs which are the genre most liable to profit from this model - both because of their social aspect and the revenue model which works over time? It's been proven that giving the players means to actually tinker with the game goes a long way towards making the game a "hobby" instead of one-off entertainment as well as providing a flow of fresh content which is completely cost-free for the devs. This immensely increases the lifetime of a game - the main irony is that this is now a standard in non-online games and virtually unknown/unthinkable in MMORPGs whose revenue directly depends on longevity.

I know this sounds crazy to implement in a competetive environment such as your typical fantasy MMORPG but imho this is something to think about. Players usually go crazy over player housing for example, spending huge amounts of time working on it and it has no bearing on the game "proper" itself. I'm getting whimsical at this point but does anyone remember an ancient game "Dungeon Keeper", a great hit a loong time ago? Here you had your dungeon-crawler turned on it's head - this was a "dungeon management simulator". You were a fantasy bad guy digging out and managing your own dungeon to withstand attacks from various pesky heroes. Something like this may conceivably be implemented in a MMORPG environment - one player creates a dungeon using a limited set of resources and elements while the other players attempt to rob it.

The second interesting idea is introducing a world-simulator AI to provide the players with an ever-changing global context. Imagine a game of Civilization with players being individuals in a world with ever-changing borders, wars between nations, technological advances etc... This idea (although in a limited fashion atm) has been slowly making appearance in some new games - Tabula Rasa and future Aion which all feature an NPC faction which unpredictably influences the world-state. Another take on it is in Age of Conan where player owned cities will compete with aggressive AI-driven ones, giving you a constant stream of unpredictable (and thus more entertaining) game events.

There are many many similar and very interesting, non-standard and already existing concepts and ideas which might boost the genre immensely, both in terms of variety and longevity. However, it seems that for now we're stuck with "grind xp for levels in a static world and then do some end game until you're bored stiff" formula which is ported directly from single-player rpgs. Imo MMORPGs should finally move from this unnatural model.

MMOS 10 years before _  

                                              _     

                                                       _

                                                                _

                                                                         _

                                                                                  _

                                                                                           _  

                                                                                                 _

                                                                                                          _

                                                                                                                   _

                                                                                                                            _ MMOS today (Including "next gen")

Technically speaking MMO's have come a long way baby. In 10 years they basically went from little colored blobs to stunning animated art. UI's and stability have also improved for the most part a hundred times over.

Where many of us have the issue isn't the technical changes but the mechanical ones. Rule sets have gotten easier and level design is on the kindergarden level. Writer talent is almost non-existant for the mostpart making most content and lore a complete waste as its hardly integrated into the game at all.

So while MMOs are much prettier to look at today, they are much less challenging and have far less depth then the older ones. Its a trade off I guess.

As MMO companies continue to focus on grapics (this game genre is totally unsuited to be leading the way in the graphics dept anyway) something gets sacrificed and that ends up being the actual gameworlds and rulesets. At least everything looks awesome when you get sent out to kill 10 rats.

Looks - 10 years ago

Today

Its going to be fun to see where this genre goes in the next 10 years. Games like LotRs are not that bad to play and do create a level of visual immersion that frankly was not possible 10 years ago.

What everyone moans about (myself included) is it plays the same as most other recent releases. If this game had released 10 years ago as is, it would have stunned the world.

No doubt MMOs will continue to evolve and change.

Fresh ideas will eventually take root and the gameplay will catch up to the graphics.