Ok, I assume it must sound weird, but playing WAR atm and having taking part in some keep raids, both attacking and defending I felt like something was lacking for my taste. I have always been a great fan of the Dynasty Warriors series, and I prolly own almost all installations and spin-offs. Especially the keep conquest/defense in the lastest PS3 version is really thriliing. Thats how I always imagined keep sieging should be. Attacking the castle alongside hundreds of attackers and hundreds of defenders. You are not a "number", a small, very vulnerable no-body, all to easily wiped out, no you are a battle decisive hero tossing around people by the dozen. And that awesome feeling of REAL mass battles... sigh... I never experienced anything similar in a MMO, alas.

Compared to those giantic battles the 24 VS 24 PVP battles are all miniature battles. I dont understand why no MMO has yet come up with a more heroic battle system, where the players are like heroes among really VAST armies. Thats something I really would like to see. So far even the WAR keeps are more like small houses defended and attacked by a handfull. Not to bash WAR, its nice and fun, but I miss that epic scales, like from the LOTR movies when Helms Deep or Minas Tirith was under siege, really MASS battles, where players are super strong heroes with masses of soldiers at both sides, battles that really last long, and not die after 5 secs and run back, rince and repeat, and usually that side looses which gets bored first.

You know, its one of those things I found sucktastic in MMOs, is the principle of inverted heroism. It works like this: when you start your MMO character in most games you have it relatively easy, up to the first levels you feel quite rising in power. But at some point the mobs grow much stronger in relation to you, so essentially you feel growing weaker not stronger as you level, and the mob VS player ratio gets worse. Where early off you can usually easily find several mobs, later on its usually a full group versus one monster. It feels so unheroic to have your 6 men bash one wolf or orc or what in that 6:1 ratio, and it usually ends in the raids with 24 or more bashing one heroic monsters. So essentially you became a number, a nobody and the mobs became the hero. Why cant it be the other way around, that you are able to kill ever more mobs at the same time the higher you get? They could compensate it by just distributing the XP and health among more. The result in XP and combat would be the same, but the players would feel much more like heroes and not like nobodies, and the fights would be really epic and not tedious "one more boar" grind grind, oh yeah and another boar "grind grind.

And with characters with COSTUMES and rich looking gear, really individual not that copy cat "I am a nobody" style so many western MMOs have, to give you that feeling you are someone special, unique and a hero, not soldier number XYZ. Any game like that, with western style quest system I would buy a lifetime subscription in. ^^

Its one of those reasons why MMORPGs for me feel fundamentally flawed, and will never replace my esteem for single player games. The only reason I end of playing MMOs now and then is there arent enough single player games. Good ones are rare and only a few every year are published. So its back to grind a boar and another and another. One of the few MMOs to succeed in that was City of Heroes, but the gameplay itself is very limited. I loved to enter some cave or house with a few and mow through hordes of enemies with our really individual chars. But alas the quest and places were very limited.

Just my personal dream. ;)

a few mmorpg of the past tried that road, Mythica was supposed to have you, a asgardian demigod, fight with and against hundreds of enemies. Gods and Heroes, the mythic roman/greek based game was supposed to have squads for each character...

Unfortunatly, both were scrapped.

I believe the problem lies in the "thousands of people at once on screen" thing here. It is possible when we are talking single player games where the computer already know where all of them will be at any given time, but in a mmorpg? Imagine if each hero would have, say, 100 soldiers with him. those 24 Vs 24 battles becomes 2400 vs 2400.... each 100 soldiers can be directed at any time to do a variety of orders.

That require a lot of processor power, so I suppose that is the reason.

Originally posted by Volkmar

a few mmorpg of the past tried that road, Mythica was supposed to have you, a asgardian demigod, fight with and against hundreds of enemies. Gods and Heroes, the mythic roman/greek based game was supposed to have squads for each character...

Unfortunatly, both were scrapped.

I believe the problem lies in the "thousands of people at once on screen" thing here. It is possible when we are talking single player games where the computer already know where all of them will be at any given time, but in a mmorpg? Imagine if each hero would have, say, 100 soldiers with him. those 24 Vs 24 battles becomes 2400 vs 2400.... each 100 soldiers can be directed at any time to do a variety of orders.

That require a lot of processor power, so I suppose that is the reason.

 

Well I dont know about tech, admitted. But I could imagine this: the players are the few heroes, and only they are individuals. The keeps could be instanced, like a battlefiield, so you have more ressources. And the mass soldiers are all looking equal like units, as in Dynasty Warriors. When those many hundreds are distributed over vast landscape you dont see everyone at the same time.

I dunno how it could work, but its what I miss in MMOs, the feeling of massiveness, of heroism.

I didn't read the entire post.

But dude, finally. Finally someone else uses Dynasty Warriors to show how combat can be totally fun and exciting. Certainly, it's a button masher, but so what? It's terrific fun!

I'd love to see an action MMORPG, period.

not trying to be off topic or anything but ninja gaiden > dynasty warriors.  slightly different but dynasty warriors does not hold a candle against ninja gaiden or devil may cry series in terms of style and the depth of the combat engines.  warrior orochi 2 the most recent release was quite a let down, coincidently Koei is said to merge with Tecmo so i hope there will be good things to come. 

anyway i agree with op about mmo lackin the degree of depth that are in the games being discussed.  however you have to keep in mind they are quite twitch reliant and the scale of mmos generally don't help.  most mmos come down to spellcasting, melee, range etc so they don't really lend themselves a great deal of variety to work with. i think someone will eventually will make a break through but in the mean time i'll stick with my console games.  so many games coming out these next few months, it would be mmo (1 game) or console (several games).  i don't know if i will ever go back to mmos :( (ironic i'm posting on mmorpg.com :P)

Originally posted by sprites

not trying to be off topic or anything but ninja gaiden > dynasty warriors.  slightly different but dynasty warriors does not hold a candle against ninja gaiden or devil may cry series in terms of style and the depth of the combat engines.  warrior orochi 2 the most recent release was quite a let down, coincidently Koei is said to merge with Tecmo so i hope there will be good things to come. 

anyway i agree with op about mmo lackin the degree of depth that are in the games being discussed.  however you have to keep in mind they are quite twitch reliant and the scale of mmos generally don't help.  most mmos come down to spellcasting, melee, range etc so they don't really lend themselves a great deal of variety to work with. i think someone will eventually will make a break through but in the mean time i'll stick with my console games.  so many games coming out these next few months, it would be mmo (1 game) or console (several games).  i don't know if i will ever go back to mmos :( (ironic i'm posting on mmorpg.com :P)

I guess its a matter of taste. I didnt like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden so much, but I guess you get the idea; i meant a more action, heroic gameplay, where you feel less like a grinding, tedious worker, one boar hack hack hack 3 minutes, another boar hack hack hack 3 min. but some combat to rock you off your feet, like in some console games.

I loved Warriors Orochi 1 for PC, is part 2 the same or different?

Sidenote: I am kinda dissapointed there are so few titles coming for PS3. :(

Lineage, Ragnarok, and just about any Korean MMO with siege combat shows this is a possibility with a net-coded friendly combat system. You can literally have hundreds even thousands on a raid or in a castle siege in an mmo. When you factor in 4/5th are NPC allies, then thats even easier since the server doesn't have to send data to them, only about them.

However, we are atleast 5 years from realistically getting twitch combat to work in an mmo with success. The network infrastructure just isn't there in the US.

ya i can understand the idea of a sieg with hundreds of people around and ur a like a hero .... well i wish it applys in an mmo , it would be great ... in games like age of conan or warhammer ... well they say its a sieg with couple of players attacking but the feeling of the sieg is no where near a game like density warrior .

Originally posted by Yunbei

I guess its a matter of taste. I didnt like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden so much, but I guess you get the idea; i meant a more action, heroic gameplay, where you feel less like a grinding, tedious worker, one boar hack hack hack 3 minutes, another boar hack hack hack 3 min. but some combat to rock you off your feet, like in some console games.

I loved Warriors Orochi 1 for PC, is part 2 the same or different?

Sidenote: I am kinda dissapointed there are so few titles coming for PS3. :(

2 is exactly the same as one with a few added tweaks here and there and co-op.  that is as far as i know, i went from dynasty warriors 6 to orochi 2.  like i said i perfer NG series for the chanllenge, in NG2 i am still working my way through mentor difficulty , but its very rewarding and always forces you to learn. 

maybe you can trade in the ps3 for 360 ;) but many games are multiplatform so you won't be short of games this holiday season. 

Originally posted by sprites

Originally posted by Yunbei

I guess its a matter of taste. I didnt like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden so much, but I guess you get the idea; i meant a more action, heroic gameplay, where you feel less like a grinding, tedious worker, one boar hack hack hack 3 minutes, another boar hack hack hack 3 min. but some combat to rock you off your feet, like in some console games.

I loved Warriors Orochi 1 for PC, is part 2 the same or different?

Sidenote: I am kinda dissapointed there are so few titles coming for PS3. :(

2 is exactly the same as one with a few added tweaks here and there and co-op.  that is as far as i know, i went from dynasty warriors 6 to orochi 2.  like i said i perfer NG series for the chanllenge, in NG2 i am still working my way through mentor difficulty , but its very rewarding and always forces you to learn. 

maybe you can trade in the ps3 for 360 ;) but many games are multiplatform so you won't be short of games this holiday season. 

Lol, thats why I avoided NG2 so far, I heard its very difficult, and I am just not that nimble. I love DW exactly because mostly you can get through with button mashing. ^^()

I love DW6, its now 3 dimensional and looks very good on PS3. Aww, the vast sieges and battle fields...

This sort of thing comes up every so often.  An MMO that plays like Dynasty Warriors, or Ninja Gaiden, or Devil May Cry, would definitely be loads of fun to play.  The main reason given that this isn't possible to do is latency, or rather, the fact that most computers aren't powerful and don't have internet connections speedy enough to allow a great number of players to play a game of this magnitude.

A game like this would be great, and would likely put a dent in the WoW monolith if not surpass it altogether.  But the technology to make it work simply doesn't exist at this time.

Its really not that fun, Look at dynasty warriors reviews It never gets above a 6. why? Because its a big grind fest. There is very little depth and actual battle tactics in those games. Sword of the new world is alot like that, you fight 3-9 monsters at a time all coming at you non stop, And you usually kill them within 1 or 2 hits. The problem is that Greedy koreans make the grind so long (Sometimes years to max level) that people just give up of doing the same thing over and over.

Unless the npc mobs are there for graphic effect and do not have an actual AI or combat function then it would take considerable server resources to have thousands of extra npcs fighting at once.  If the designer made the npcs graphics only, without any outcome on the combat, then it could work easily enough.  Would be like a thousand trees with minimal movement animation, basically background graphics.  Then they could toss in a few  AI henchmen for each side that help determine the fight along with the player heroes.

A good example of this is City fighting in WoW.  Ever been around when the horde attacked Ironforge?  Or Alliance attack horde cities?  The npc ai's along with the large number of player characters would crash the servers that city was on.  And if it didn't crash, frame rates dropped one per 30 seconds at best as the lag was insane.