| 74 posts found | |
|---|---|
|
Briansho
 Elite Member
Joined: 3/05/06
Functionless Art is Simply Tolerated Vandalism...We Are The Vandals. |
First they whined about the the voice-overs being to slow, they speed it up. Then they whined about the text being too long, they made it instant click to speed it up. Then they whined about the items not being good, they made it so everyone got equal stat items. Then they whined about the quests taking too long, they made it so quests were quick. What next? Insta-click on the NPC to fast forward through texts and they instantly give you items? "Don't sweat it -- it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes." Gene Spafford "A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things." |
Originally posted by MarlonB
Just a POV really. I on the other hand would simply like to walk into a little town and talk to the people living there. Listen to their interesting stories. They tell me what is happening in town and some of them even ask me, the mighty warrior, if i can help them with a "problem". They explain their problem to me and i go off to help them. So, i didn't need an exclamation mark over a person and also no minimap marker as i actually listened to the guys story and directions. I actually became part of the story.
Or, you play the other game ... run to exclamation mark .. run to minimap marker ... run back to question mark. Whatever is more fun to you or is more challenging ... i leave that to your personal taste.
If you have the feeling that you are "having to click every npc" ... then i think you misunderstand the concept of an rpg ... or I do.
What you describe is more of an story based challenge which plays more like a detective story. You are collecting clues and trying to piece together what questions to ask and what needs to be done. For this to work everyone you talk to gives you clues and furthers the story. So the NPCs you meet as you enter the town will tell you who to talk for more info and finally where to find the guy who gives you the quest. This completely falls apart if only one NPC will talk about the anything relevant to the quest so to get it you have to talk to everyone in town (ie 'having to click every npc') to randomly hit the one NPC who can tell you anything. In other words if you want the player to do a simple 'kill 10 wolves' quest and do not want to have a 'detective story' preceding it, do not waste our time with filler. Similarly if the purpose of the quest is exploration then vague directions are fine. However, if the NPC wants you go to a location that the NPC knows very well then it makes no sense for him/her not to give you very precise directions or even point it out on a map. |
|
Originally posted by pencilrick
Everything you say after your first sentence contradicts your first sentence. If you want challenge, then there must be the risk of timesinks in some form (be it making up for experience penalty from dying or having to grind through a dangerous dungeon to get that important and rare quest item). Without timesinks, easy-mode MMO gaming might as well be "Chutes and Ladders". I am firmly in the camp that a challenge does not require risk to be challenging or fun. Any penalty should be there merely to inform you that you failed and need to try again. Adding an element of risk outside the actual challenge is to me simply a form of gambling and discourages trying to become really good at a game for most people. |
|
|
The vast majority of discussion of challenge/difficulty in games is about skill-checks. Because skill-checks constitute the core of what makes games fun: interesting decision-making that you can get better at. Even if we concede time-sinks are a type of challenge, we'd also have to point out that they're the weakest type at producing fun gameplay, and in fact they are at high risk of making the game seem repetitive or tedious (which reduces fun.) Such challenges might be implemented to give the sensation of real risk, and induce an adrenaline, and that's an addicitve quality games can capitalize on -- unfortunately this type of challenge isn't the only way games can induce adrenaline rush type situations, further weakening the argument for using them excessively. So yes, Ilvaldyr's example quest is an example of challenging gameplay. I may be sorta harsh on EVE, but damn is this a cool trailer (EVE Dominion). |
|
|
Why do people feel tedious mechanics equal challenging gameplay? Why would I play a pathetic themepark MMO when I could enjoy a masterpiece like Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age? |
|
Originally posted by Torik I think there has to be some risk, but not too much. It's a balancing game, too little and people become foolish because there are no consequences, too much and people stop trying because they don't want to lose everything. There needs to be consequences to actions, but not such severe consequences that you never want to try again. I've got no problem with a couple of minutes of diminished capacity after you die, it might make you slow down and think about what you did wrong, rather than leaping back into the fray to do the same thing wrong over and over again. Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR |
|
Originally posted by metalhead980
This!
RIP, Orc Choppa |
|
Originally posted by metalhead980
There is another thing .... what is challenging to you, might be boring in my eyes .. and visa versa ...
I think from the 3 million forumpost on mmorpg we can conclude that not every game is for everyone :) ... and i'm fine with that :) |
|
|
pencilrick
Elite Member
Joined: 12/11/07
Before WOW, there were MMORPG''s. After WOW there were online solo single RPG''s. |
Originally posted by Torik I am firmly in the camp that a challenge does not require risk to be challenging or fun. Any penalty should be there merely to inform you that you failed and need to try again. Adding an element of risk outside the actual challenge is to me simply a form of gambling and discourages trying to become really good at a game for most people.
The penalty is to get your heart to beating faster; to make you "feel". I remember when Kunark came out in EQ1 and I rode a boat and got off on the coast of The Overthere. I was scared crapless of the Dark Elves in the port city and the wandering mobs. The game made me "feel". In contrast, I recently ran a character through some high level zone in Outland (in WOW) and felt nothing. Just nothing. The reason? In WOW, the penalty for dying is so minimal it is meaningless. The gear is so easily obtained, it is meaningless. To "feel", you have to introduce challening rewards and meaningful stinging penalties for failure. And all of that translates into timesink, if you think about it. Maybe "risk" + "timesink", not just the latter. |
|
zazz
 Novice Member
Joined: 9/18/05
"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women." |
Originally posted by pencilrick I am firmly in the camp that a challenge does not require risk to be challenging or fun. Any penalty should be there merely to inform you that you failed and need to try again. Adding an element of risk outside the actual challenge is to me simply a form of gambling and discourages trying to become really good at a game for most people.
The penalty is to get your heart to beating faster; to make you "feel". I remember when Kunark came out in EQ1 and I rode a boat and got off on the coast of The Overthere. I was scared crapless of the Dark Elves in the port city and the wandering mobs. The game made me "feel". In contrast, I recently ran a character through some high level zone in Outland (in WOW) and felt nothing. Just nothing. The reason? In WOW, the penalty for dying is so minimal it is meaningless. The gear is so easily obtained, it is meaningless. To "feel", you have to introduce challening rewards and meaningful stinging penalties for failure. And all of that translates into timesink, if you think about it. Maybe "risk" + "timesink", not just the latter.
Pencilnick ur write on the money but for torik what ya on about man lmao? , give us a few examples then how this would work, challange without risk......
|
Originally posted by pencilrick You are talking about the 'rush' of an encounter and not its challenge. That's more of a personal thing. I get no rush from gambling and rollercoasters do very little for me. Your personal experience of those activities will be different. Using skydiving as comparison, the challenge in the activity is jumping out of the airplane correctly, controlling your falling and then deploying the parachute and landing without killing yoursef. The rush of the activity is the fact that you can die. Personally I get a rush out of the intellectual challenge of beating an encounter. Whether I am risking something or not will have no effect on whether I try my best to beat it. Too much risk will however, make me less likely to try the encounter int eh first place or retry it after an initial failure. Too much risk in fact lowers my enjoyment of the challenge since beating the encounter comes more as a relief rather than a rush.
|
|
Originally posted by Inzra
Only a 5 year old will think writing down some words (copied from text) is HARD. It is tedious and boring to me. You are confusing between hard and tedious. And i highly DOUBT asking people to copy down text will make a quest unique. How many people you know cannot read & write?
|
|
Originally posted by Inzra
But how did people get "quests" in the medieval times, they didn't go looking for people with floating question marks over their heads. But I'm pretty sure if they had that option, EVERYBODY would have been using it, because it would be more convenient. If the quests aren't easy, that can make the questreward more valuable. So having to put some effort in just finding hte quest to begin with adds to the effort you have to put into getting the reward.
LOL .. ha ha ha ha ha ha .. you think REAL people went on quest?? You need to have your head examined. We are talking about GAMES here. How do people slay dragons in medieval times? Ha ha ha ha .... Yeah, put effort into KILLING the boss. Make THAT hard. I don't need to have boring game mechanics disguised as challenge. If you like boring stuff, here is an idea. Fill the town with 1000 NPCs with random dialogue and only 1 will give you quest. Have fun finding a needle in a hay stack. Walk-click-walk-click .. wow REAL challenging. |
|
Originally posted by zazz
That's very easy. You take any big encounter like a boss fight and you make it a fight about coordination, positioning and knowing what your character can do. If you fail, the fight resets and you have to start from the beginning and try again till you get it right. It could be an endurance fight where you try to survive attacks that will kill you if you do not neutralize the worst parts of them. It could be a DPS race where you are trying to put out massive amounts of damage before time runs out. It could be a 'dance' fight where you and your teammates have to position yourself correctly and then move in a coordinated fashion If the fight requires you to learn new skills or use existing skills in new ways then it is a challenging fight. The difficulty of the fight itself will not change if you have xp loss or corpse runs or armor decay. All of these are outside factors that simply determine if attempting the challenge is worth your while. |
|
|
Honestly, how many "different" things can you do with a theme-park that revolves around combat in regards to encounters. There's only so much you can do in terms of absolute good designs and they can't just haphazardly throw any type of encounter in because "diddy hasn't done it before". Its funny to see people complain about not having enough challenges or new experiences but these are the same people that most likely cannot even come up with new and original encounters that'll be sufficient enough to even entertain themselves. Everything listed in the above post has been done already in WoW, again how much new, quality encounters can you make within a game before you have to re-use particular concepts? In terms of challenge, have you ever played some of the older MMORPGs like Everquest or DAoC with those death penalties? It's not necessarily the best thing to provide a high risk, it all is dependent on the design of the game. WoW focuses around providing fun and experiences to as many people as there are purchasing their game and it is designed as such. If a particular MMO isn't satisfying you in terms of challenge, then its best to find another, but you better not complain about it being too hard when you get there ;) |
|
Originally posted by zazz
I Want to Be The Guy is basically an 8-bit Mario clone. Dying restarts you from your last save, which might cost you anywhere from 3-60 seconds of gameplay (not actually sure of the upper end, but that sounds about right.) Despite death barely costing you anything, the game is extremely challenging, and unless you're extremely good there's no way you're going to make it through on the hardest difficulty. So like others are saying, challenge is largely separate from risk. Here's another way of looking at it:
When put that way, Time Consumption doesn't really make you more likely to fail. It merely makes things more painful when you do fail.
I may be sorta harsh on EVE, but damn is this a cool trailer (EVE Dominion). |
|
Originally posted by Inzra
So what is your solution? ____________________________________________ |
|
Originally posted by Inzra And this matters, why? Let the hack 'n slash have their fun and you have yours. |
|
Originally posted by Jairoe03
I think you're slightly misunderstanding "more challenge." We're not asking for more (quantity) content (well we are, but not in this thread.) We're asking for more challenge! Challenge = difficulty. We want things to be hard. And like my other post explained, penalty/risks don't make a game harder. They only make it more time consuming, tedious, or less fun. As Torik explained, you need exactly as much death penalty as is necessary for gameplay purposes (and to communicate to the player, "hey you screwed up"), and no more. Anything beyond that is excessive and simply ruins the fun. I may be sorta harsh on EVE, but damn is this a cool trailer (EVE Dominion). |
|
Originally posted by Axehilt
I don't agree about the death penalty. Lineage had the best one in my opinion, you lost some experience points and sometimes you also lost a random item (which your buddies could pick up for you, or if you wiped, a random monster would and add it to his loot). Death penalty should be something that actually hurts even if not as much as a corpserun. Dying should be bad, in AoC did people even die on purpose before to use it as a teleporting mechanics. But yes, games should be harder. You should actually be proud when you reach max level, it shouldn't be something anyone can do in a few weeks. and group content should be harder then solocontent. In many games now it is the other way around. I want to be challenged when I am playing. I don't mind that there is games for kids that is easier but I don't like where you just sit and push buttons without even bothering to think and still beat the boss. I also don't like the whole tank, DPS, buff and healer system, it just makes things too easy. Guildwars aggro system is a lot better. Mobs should act more like real humans, you don't tank anyone in PvP. The AI of other game-genres is a lot better today but we are still in EQ with the MMOs. |
|
|
2 dilemma's here to think about all you "knowing it better" people.
1. ------- > The bigger the chances of win ... the bigger the chances of finding groups to play with. And MMO's .... thrive on playing with people (in dunegons/raids/PvP fights) in co-op modes besides of the choices of solo play and crafting etc... 2. -------> Challenge can also come from competition. Pure adrenaline competition. Winning that fight to CLIMB up the ladder based PVP competition. I have seen grown up men to smash their mouses against the wall and (God!) monitors when they lost a rated fight in WOW's arena. I myself see my heartbeat pump up every time we await a rated arena match and we want to go for that title at the end of the seasons. NOTHING beats this form of "involvement". Nothing. I await the upcoming rated BG's btw. So think about challenge and easy mode first before being baffled why WOW offers it BOTH.
|
|
Originally posted by Zorndorf Yeah, WoW offers challenge but in a far lesser way than it did in BC and old Naxx. There are 3-4 hard hardmodes at the moment, bar TOTC. Comparing MMOs with burger companies-the epitome of logic. |
|
Originally posted by Thenarius Yeah, WoW offers challenge but in a far lesser way than it did in BC and old Naxx. There are 3-4 hard hardmodes at the moment, bar TOTC. I think Blizzard was VERY smart in inviting everyone to do Raids in WotLK. The same goes now for the Heroics in patch 3.2.. It was so much played, they had huge population problems with their dungeon system. You offer MORE group play by offering SCALING in difficulty. Like it or not and it is ALWAYS a question of being happy to play WITH people. The battle stress in Arena is excellent and it shows the challenge of getting a title NEAR your limited capacity. Not everyone is Carl Lewis but at 54 I am PROUD of being a Challenger (prouder than having downed Onyxia back in the day). That's why SCALED difficulty is incredible succesful IN game . Not in the bragging and lying forums of course. Easy mode for you may be VERY challeging for another person. And Blizzard offers it in .... scales. Beautiful mechanic.
|
|
|
I for one DESPISE HAND HOLDING technology in MMORPGs! Many of them come off like: "Here, take this quest, we'll show you where to go, and what to kill (it will be easy), and then when you turn the quest in, you get L33T bragging rights, a big e-peen, and a cookie". Their advertising should look like: "You too can be a LEVEL 99 UBER-WARGOD in 10 easy steps. No thinking required." Bah!
Ken
www.RealmLords.com |
|
Originally posted by Loke666
Dying is bad, even in MMOs where the penalty is "light". Even in other genres where MMORPGers would describe the game as having "no" penalty, dying is bad. Dying used as teleporting is a two-fold problem of ensuring the game has robust enough fast travel, and ensuring death costs more gold than you could farm in the time you saved by death-teleporting. Or kill two birds with one stone and just give players a Recall ability that lets them teleport to the nearest respawn point (because most of what players have a problem with is the idea that they're killing their character to teleport around, not that they can teleport around.) DPS, Buffing, and Healing will always be around. It's a role-playing game. It's going to have roles. You're probably going to kill things, so one role will be DPS. The easiest game mechanic to add after that is healing, so one role is probably going to be healing. And since you're trying to differentiate the roles, you make one role Support (buffing): someone whose DPS isn't that great, but whose contribution to the team makes the team's net DPS greater than if he was just another DPSer. The "expendible" role here is tanking. I'm neutral on tanking. I want to see people take a stab at making something new, but I also recognize that it's a fun game mechanic. It's understandable to players and the better games make it a game unto itself, and it's fun to learn the tricks to manipulating the mob AI. It's sort of a concession of developers that, "We know you're going to exploit our mobs' AI, and we know you know it's just AI, so let's turn it into its own game instead!" Healing I could also see taken in interesting directions. I think a game could exist with no healing classes, and no automatic health recovery inside instances. Playing DDO a few months back, it struck me how their dungeons provided a finite amount of Rest Shrines and that was all the health you got to make it through the entire dungeon. I think the design could be significantly improved by having incoming damage be more controllable via playerskill, and having mob kills occasionally drop health packs. So unlike DDO you wouldn't get into a situation where you knew your piddly 5 hp wasn't going to be enough to get you through the last 25% of the dungeon, and you may as well give up/reset because you're toast. But the gameplay of such a game would be a lot more playerskill-centric than normal MMORPGs, because you'd want to make it a true feat of skill for players to get through that final 25% of the dungeon when they were at 5hp at one point. I may be sorta harsh on EVE, but damn is this a cool trailer (EVE Dominion). |
|
.jpg){kind=avatar}
