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Originally posted by Eronakis
LOL I agree with lilly here. The guy had some nice ideas but still stuck in the wow realm, should of stayed in the eq man! lol Man I remember class leaders and their own class channel =D. And I when we was doing runs for probation members I would always mess up a heal rotation lol. jk
I draw a lot of my inspiration for everything I think up from the MMOs (and other games, and books, and movies) that I've experienced before. But the fact that I chose the number 10 is hardly going to convince me that I'm in "WoW mode." 10 is a number. It existed before WoW decided to use it as a raid size. I picked it because it sounded pretty nice for the example I thought up.
Frankly, an army of 80 players trying to go single file along a 3 foot wide path on a sheer cliff leading to a lich's tower sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Rockslide, anyone? That'll teach you to try to zerg content just because there isn't an artificial limit on how many people can be in the area at one time! |
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Originally posted by GreenChaos
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Originally posted by rewindgamers
Maybe this is because it isn't at all feasible for an MMO to be a success (aka more than break-even) if such effort is put into content development that there is enough that the players can enjoy themselves and be content without relying on hundreds of instances of the same content.
Maybe the stockholders are forcing too much focus on the bottom line. Maybe no one has tried yet.
I don't know. But what I do know is that a game with enough content that you don't clear the exact same 3 instances full of the exact same encounters every week for 6 months straight would be... well... INFINITELY more entertaining than what we are used to. |
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Originally posted by Raston
I don't want to come across as judgmental, but I can't help but look down a little bit at people who would rather, for example, clear Naxx, OS, and EoE in a total of 5-6 hours, every week for 6 months straight instead of explore a vast, living world and discover relatively untouched content that they can enjoy and then forget about looking for again because they'll find it again eventually anyway... but (probably) not until they've stumbled across a couple dozen other different "raids" that are relatively unique and equally entertaining.
Take what I put in my first post as an example of what I think raiding should be and imagine that is one size of an encounter in a spectrum. Look both directions and you would see "raids" that would have the amount of playtime that you'd see in an instance or raid in WoW for anyone from a lone player up to a huge army hungering for blood.
Yeah... that's a hell of a lot of content, and it would take a lot of man-hours to develop it all. Maybe I'm just being unrealistic. I just can't help but feel like dozens of developers who are paid to develop content for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, should be able to come up with more than a dozen bosses in one raid every 6 months.
Dungeon/Game masters do develop that much content on a weekly basis for their PnP groups. Sure it lacks the polish and the replay and the fine-tuning... but if one person can do that with a few hours a week, shouldn't a professional staff of developers working 40 hours a week be able to do more? |
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Sorry for my spam of posts. I'm trying to get caught up on the thread after being gone for a few hours.
Maybe I'm just looking for something different than 99% of people are. Maybe I'm looking for a fun ride (the content) while everyone else is looking for a destination (the kills - the gear). In my example I try to take the emphasis off of the destination and turn it back to the trip. |
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Z3R01
Novice Member
Joined: 9/09/08
------------------------------ Waiting on:ER |
Originally posted by fischsemmel
Nahh, you want what most of us want. We want a living breathing Expansive non-instanced gameworld in which to live out our characters lives. Explore, Adventure, kill and all that jazz. I feel the same way and it drives me nuts that devs are giving us Static worlds.
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Originally posted by Z3R01
Nahh, you want what most of us want. We want a living breathing Expansive non-instanced gameworld in which to live out our characters lives. Explore, Adventure, kill and all that jazz. I feel the same way and it drives me nuts that devs are giving us Static worlds.
Oh well. I've started to whip together a Magic: The Gathering-esque card game as an outlet for my creativity. Thinking is good |
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Originally posted by fischsemmel
MMO designers atm seem to be of the mindset that "we need to spend a long time on new content and get it just right and only include the dozen absolute best ideas for encounters that we have right now." The result is they only release a new batch of content every several months, and consequently players play through the same batch of content for several months... though the stuff DOES stay pretty fun for a good while because it was so well balanced and polished and such before it was released.
But doesn't it seem like players would be just as content with a bunch of content released more frequently that isn't 100% polished and composed of only the best 2% of ideas the development can come up with? After all, the players wouldn't be in any one place for so long that they notice all the little things that could be done a little better... and even if they did notice little things that could be done better, they'd be gone before those little things really started to get on their nerves. |
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fucking epic, mind if i base one of my short stories on this? and maybe design it out on a sheet of paper?
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Originally posted by fischsemmel
I don't want to come across as judgmental, but I can't help but look down a little bit at people who would rather, for example, clear Naxx, OS, and EoE in a total of 5-6 hours, every week for 6 months straight instead of explore a vast, living world and discover relatively untouched content that they can enjoy and then forget about looking for again because they'll find it again eventually anyway... but (probably) not until they've stumbled across a couple dozen other different "raids" that are relatively unique and equally entertaining.
Take what I put in my first post as an example of what I think raiding should be and imagine that is one size of an encounter in a spectrum. Look both directions and you would see "raids" that would have the amount of playtime that you'd see in an instance or raid in WoW for anyone from a lone player up to a huge army hungering for blood.
Yeah... that's a hell of a lot of content, and it would take a lot of man-hours to develop it all. Maybe I'm just being unrealistic. I just can't help but feel like dozens of developers who are paid to develop content for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, should be able to come up with more than a dozen bosses in one raid every 6 months.
Dungeon/Game masters do develop that much content on a weekly basis for their PnP groups. Sure it lacks the polish and the replay and the fine-tuning... but if one person can do that with a few hours a week, shouldn't a professional staff of developers working 40 hours a week be able to do more?
this is more a reference to their mission generator system than anything else they did. You were talking about dynamic content and while the AO system had it's flaws, it showed it had some potential, especially when you consider that it had the ability to spawn NPCs into non instanced areas, not just instanced dungeons. |
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Sounds like fun.
If I didnt have a job, family, bills, so on, so forth. |
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so long a topic~ i even wanna you can finish the research paper for me |
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Originally posted by fischsemmel
I draw a lot of my inspiration for everything I think up from the MMOs (and other games, and books, and movies) that I've experienced before. But the fact that I chose the number 10 is hardly going to convince me that I'm in "WoW mode." 10 is a number. It existed before WoW decided to use it as a raid size. I picked it because it sounded pretty nice for the example I thought up.
Frankly, an army of 80 players trying to go single file along a 3 foot wide path on a sheer cliff leading to a lich's tower sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Rockslide, anyone? That'll teach you to try to zerg content just because there isn't an artificial limit on how many people can be in the area at one time!
I know, I hope you accept my apology. Everytime I see a WoW refrence I want to send a gnome battalion in and take em out lol. You did an fantastic job with the idea. I actually have some raid ideas my self. But this is a good direction and start to enhance the dungeon crawler raids! |
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Originally posted by Raston
You have just exampled a possible scarnario for one of my types of raids! I call them war/seige raids. The only difference here, is there would be seige equipment. As for raids with say 45+ I would like to see a front line of tanks, a flank of assassins, an ambush of wizards in one large battle on a hill somewhere with seige equipment and top notch AI. |
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Originally posted by ThePreventer
Heh. Go for it. I honestly just thought this up as I was typing this post, so I don't have any special attachment to the setting. |
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Originally posted by gnlLucid
If I designed an MMO (with free reign, of course), this example would just be an example of what you could find in the game. There would be content that can be done by people who don't have 10 hours straight to dedicate to playing a video game, as well as content for people who may, for example, play at odd hours for their server and thus have a difficult time putting together groups.
Though I do see where people come from when they say stuff like "You shouldn't make RAID content available to small groups or individuals because then it won't feel like a raid!"... they should stfu because they don't have to do the content by themselves if they don't want to - they can just try to parade around with their 99 buddies from EQ1 and zerg to their heart's content.
After all, as I hinted at in my first post, gear would not be such an essential element of an MMO I developed as it is in virtually every MMO out right now. Now you wouldn't want to be a typical warrior-type class running around naked and trying to punch baddies to death... but at the same time, you wouldn't need to have spent 80 hours /played at max level farming raid content just to have sufficient gear to not get roflstomped by every mob and player you run into. Abilities/spells and how the player uses those should be far more important, imo, than the gear a character wears or the consumables (potions and such) that he can afford.
Edit - oops. Got sidetracked and didn't get to the point. The point was that since gear won't be the primary goal of the game (or even the primary oomph that a character has), players won't be able to QQ like "Oh! That's not fair! We did that raid on the 50-man version but that guy who took 1/4 the time and didn't need to coordinate 49 friends did it too and got the same loot! NOOOOO!!!" Or at least not as much. |
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Originally posted by fischsemmel Gotta love armchair developing. People thingk that just because they come up with cool ideas that these ideas will develop themselves. Coming up with an idea for a raid is trivial. Teh real work is mapping out all the interaction between NPCs and PCs, figuring out how the geometry works, tying in all the animations, developing and testing all the encounter scripts and then doing massive amounts of testing to discover if you have dead-end states or leave yourself wide open to exploits. Running a PnP campaign is an exercise in improvisation. You sketch out an encounter and then you adjust it to what the players do. When you develop content for a computer RPG you have no room for improvisation. You have to map out all the posible scenarios that can occur in the encounter ahead of time and test each path. For a PnP GM to do that much work, it would take way more time then most would be willing to commit. Heck, I am not een talkign about the amount of work it takes to actually code stuff like this. You can't just come up with a cool idea and poof it develops itself for you. |
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Originally posted by Torik
Who is armchain developing? Me? I haven't tried to develop anything. People think ideas will develop themselves? I wouldn't be surprised. But I hope you aren't talking about me, because I certainly don't, certainly didnt' say anywhere in this thread that I do, and certainly wouldn't want you to look like a presumptuous fool for assuming that you know the inner workings of my mind. Coming up with ideas for raids might be trivial. Coming up with amazing ideas for raids probably is not. Don't be lecturing me about how the real work for a developer comes in the actual designing and testing. I know that. I posted an idea here, and I said that this is how raids should be. I didn't come out and say that developers are losers and suck and that I can do their job better than they can... although I don't deny that potentially that may be the case, just like I don't deny that I may be stark, raving mad. And of course PnP is about improvisation while MMOs are more about locking down all the possibilities. But I remain unconvinced that there are so many possibilities to lock down in linear content like what we see in modern MMOs that developers have to spend 6 months or more of time just to turn out a dozen boss fights in one setting.
And coding? Wtf does that have to do with what a raid should be?
And again. Show me where I indicated that I think that simply by making a thread about what a raid should be, my idea is going to come to life and blossom into a perfect MMO without further thought or effort.
GTFO imo.
Edit - Oh yeah. Remember that first part of my first post, where I specifically said that I am not an MMO developer and that I only put as much thought into my first post as I could in the time it took me to type it out (which was maybe 20-30 minutes)? I specifically said that I never worked on the details. I specifically said that no one should post and say what you said because I all read knew all the crap that you were going to say. But you did anyway. People like you are why I tend to think that coming up with good ideas isn't as easy as people like you claim it is. Otherwise you would have had the good idea to leave this thread well enough alone. |
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Originally posted by fischsemmel
Of course it's lacking details. I mentioned that it would be and explained why it was right at the get-go.
As to what else you said in the quote above... all you've done is demonstrate to me what is wrong with oh, so many people who I see talking on these forums. You, and thousands and thousands of others like you, are so stuck on what has been and what is that you cannot see what can be. Your talk of tagging mobs, respawns, clearing, and a line of groups waiting to farm for gear...
It's a sign of a mind gone soft. No its a sign your idea is flawed. ---------- "No, your wrong.." - Random user #123 "Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features. How are you?" -Me |
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Unfortunatly Fischsemmel, Torik is right, I accept that you stated in your OP that this was something you threw together as an example of how raids should be and that we shouldn't attack it for being unrealistic, but I think Torik was specifically commenting upon your much later post (#54) stating that because GMs churn content out (as I always do) then we should be able to churn 'dungeons' out. He correctly highlights a considerable difference between what I can do in my mind and what I can do on a computer, especially when we consider that a Devs career is based upon them not messing up and costing their employer lots of grief when players start laughing at the doors to nowhere, or NPCs trapped behind a blade of grass. Having said that I agree with your earlier arguement (as do many others I'm sure) that we need more interesting content and if possible dymanic content. Raston (#12) provided an excellent brief for the castle raid were multiple possible 'objectives' can drastically modify the end result, giving the players the opportunity not only to employ a wider skill base, but to play to their own strengths as a group and use their brains rather than simply button bashing. I liked the drama this would impose to the raid as the warriors burst into the great hall and face off against the demonically enhanced duke wondering if their companions battling through the temple will actually suceed in sapping his power before the duke turns them into jam. One option would be to build a game system that provides you with a much easier time to churn out new content, as you say it need not be perfect and can use all the same models (make sure you've got a lot), but different content and triggers. Well this is not so far fetched, I believe CoH has just introduced such a system for players to build their own content, so Fischsemmel I think you will be provided with your wish (hopefully soon). This will of course lead very nicely into a sandbox game permitting players to design their own 'homes' and fill them with stuff, the main prob will be ensuring that the pathing systems work hence you need the 'building tool' to deduce the correct pathing nodes (not impossible, but always prone to a flaws). I think the easiest way of integrating into the game would be to have a walkway around it (as part of the building tile) and so overwrite local pathing nodes with a nice path round the building and entrance exit points as defined by the building tool. Job done(ish). So now we have the tower and the NPCs, a few triggers (as complex as you want) and all we need now is the world to put it in... and here we find another problem highlighted already. If its hidden it will be found, if its found it wont be the way you want it. I think the idea you had about not being able to see it unless you did the prep-work was good, but its just another step that the Wiki will tell you to perform before you can do this 'mission'. The random tower is nice (very krull), a few signs and portents then wham a tower, all charge in, bash bash, quick get out before it jumps again... Yeah, this idea has legs. But I think you wanted a more general solution to the problem, and I dont think that this is it. It must be dynamic content, and this is no little thing. Of course we could cheat... why not have the players build the tower, recruit its gaurds and sit at the top as the evil Liche? When your defeated the lucky mortal follower sneaks back in and takes over the shop... You wont find much more dynamic than a human mind. I'm not proposing that you can only attack when the player is online, they need only set up the tower and then sit back. The more 'visitors' the greater their rewards, of course losing the battle will result in losing the tower (and so the rewards). As to how you select the new owner or what these rewards may be.... thats up to you ;) PS: Sorry post so long, sitting here with a beer and no TV. |
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