Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by LordOfPit

 

I'm not saying current theme-park MMO's are perfect the way they are, but I am saying more people these days are willing to pay top-dollar to companies developing theme-park MMO's rather than Sandbox ones.

Then how come WoW clones have all merged their servers a few months after launch and then stagnante into nothingness?

Because they recup their investment and make some money from initial box sales? Who says a game need to be long to be good?

I played Deus Ex Human Evolution ... great game ... don't last more than a few weeks. There is no reason why MMOs need to be long.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by LordOfPit

 

I'm not saying current theme-park MMO's are perfect the way they are, but I am saying more people these days are willing to pay top-dollar to companies developing theme-park MMO's rather than Sandbox ones.

Then how come WoW clones have all merged their servers a few months after launch and then stagnante into nothingness?

Because they recup their investment and make some money from initial box sales? Who says a game need to be long to be good?

I played Deus Ex Human Evolution ... great game ... don't last more than a few weeks. There is no reason why MMOs need to be long.

It completely goes against the genre, I have spent over 200h on Skyrim and I still have tons of stuff I want to do, and I still go back once in a while to do stuff I want to do, I want to be part of that world, and there are plenty of people who have spent hundreds of hours in Skyrim aswell doing boring stuff like decorating their house and just riding around for hours. Because DX:HR only lasted a few weeks means nothing, its only a great game by your standards I personally enjoyed the first much more where you know you could do more "boring" stuff. Even the fact that in DX:HR you can only pickup items that are relevant to you bothers me, it breaks the immersion in the first DX you could actually pickup and move just about anything that alone added lots to the immersion, HR was just made so you cannot stray away very much from the path they set you on.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by LordOfPit
 

Then how come WoW clones have all merged their servers a few months after launch and then stagnante into nothingness?

And virtual world != sandbox.

The strange idea that if its not a WoW clone its a sandbox, and that if its a virtual world then you can't play casually, needs to go away. It's perpetuated by the same short sighted WoW players who don't understand how a game without instancing would work.

What?! You want people to travel for hours to accomplish anything. You want people to take hours to shop and look for items. You want people to spend hours looking for the right group composition before engaging a dungeon (where they may be forced to wait for their turn).

All of those are directly against casual-friendliness. The game is not casual if it takes ages to do anything worthwhile. Casual is something where you can log in, do stuff, and log out all within 15min to half an hour.

That's why there's LFG tools, instant travel, jump-in PvP, auction house etc. -To make the game casual-friendly. Many features in virtual world is against this.

Who's talking about "hours"?

I won't even want to travel for 10 min if it is boring. Why should i take the SAME boat ride again and again? It is a game. If i want boring commute, i just have to wake up and go to work.

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by LordOfPit

 

I'm not saying current theme-park MMO's are perfect the way they are, but I am saying more people these days are willing to pay top-dollar to companies developing theme-park MMO's rather than Sandbox ones.

Then how come WoW clones have all merged their servers a few months after launch and then stagnante into nothingness?

Because they recup their investment and make some money from initial box sales? Who says a game need to be long to be good?

I played Deus Ex Human Evolution ... great game ... don't last more than a few weeks. There is no reason why MMOs need to be long.

Originally posted by Foomerang

That used to be mmorpgs. And for the record, I never said get rid of combat.

 

Yes, it used to be, and then things change, but I bet you already know the only constant is change. I hope the next tidal wave of change will introduce communal story-telling into MMO's, possibly through UGC, but only times will tell.

---

Originally posted by LordOfPit

---

Originally posted by Foomerang That used to be mmorpgs. And for the record, I never said get rid of combat.  

---

Yes, it used to be, and then things change, but I bet you already know the only constant is change. I hope the next tidal wave of change will introduce communal story-telling into MMO's, possibly through UGC, but only times will tell.

---

Originally posted by Amaranthar

I won't even want to travel for 10 min if it is boring. Why should i take the SAME boat ride again and again? It is a game. If i want boring commute, i just have to wake up and go to work.

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective.

 

 

Sure that is me.

Now you do know that features like LFD is popular on WOW, right? So it is not just me. Just that most people don't post on forums.

I mean, it is your perogative if you want the same boring boatride again and again, but i (and probably many other) will vote with our wallets, and devs will respond to the market. Supply & demand never fails.

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective. 

You think nariu is the only gamer who isn't interested in 10+ minutes of non-gameplay?

Gamers want gameplay.  That's all they want.  In most games, and certainly the vast majority of MMORPG travel, travel is non-gameplay.  The exact opposite of what gamers want.

The fastest way to kill your game in the first 2 weeks is to have it focus on excessive amounts of non-gameplay travel.

Interesting decisions make or break games, and travel lacks interesting decisions.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by Clerigo

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Dead?

The market is huge and may still be expanding. Going into a direction you do not like != dead.

In fact, i think it is becoming MORE ALIVE, solving all the old problems (like camping & finding groups with instances & LFD/LFR), while giving a large part of the games to the players for FREE.

It is getting BETTER.

Did you really put some time into that response or you did it by heart in the heat of the hour?

I honestly cant say i agree 100% with the OP, but i sure can say you are 100% wrong. How can the last years of mmorpg life make it better in any model or conception? Do you really believe in what you are saying?

If i close my eyes to GW2, a tittle that many gamers are following and expecting to bring some freash air to a genre in a decline path, what other new mmorpg launches you can name that actually brought some solid concept? rift? swtor? what...2..3..4 names? Name them plz...after you name them, open the mmorpg list in this site....start counting them, start reading community feedback....and ask yourself....

"what the heck am i talking about??"

Sorry Clerigo but he's right.

Let's take your examples, rift, swtor, etc.

More people play those games NOW after the initial excitement has worn off than any of the early games. didn't EQ have 200 or 250k? did ultima have more? How much? I can't imagine it was hundreds of thousands more. What you seem to be asserting is that the small group of people who started in the mmo genre were right and the many more who are now playing and enjoying these games are wrong.

This is not to say that your opinion of today's games is "wrong" because you like what you like. But the mmo genre has grown and it seems that the majority of people playing are into today's games.

you might rebut with "they never stay in them for more than a few months if that". And I would say "that's because today's mmo gamers are probably not looking for anything with a greater commitment.

You can't take the template of the early adopters and apply that to everyone who has become a current mmo player.

Truth of the matter is that most of these games gather way more people at launch than they rightfully should have. Some of these people are looking for something different from WoW and then start crying because the games are not WoW; some of them are just looking for something to play for a small bit and then they can hop onto the next game that comes out.

When you cut away the players who really would never be interested in some of these games you do find that they still have players.

Rift has players. SWToR has players. AoC has players. Star Trek online has playres. And who do I listen to? The jaded and unhappy mmo gamres who decry the current set of games; where everything is shit, or the guy at work who isn't an mmo gamer but he tried Star Trek online and then says to me "I don't know why some people dont' like this game, it's really fun".

Do I listen to post after post of angry, angry forum goers or the father who plays SWToR with his daughter and I see them going on about how much they enjoy it and how much fun they are having?

Have you ever heard the expression "water finds its own level"? Many of these games had/have issues, true, but they still have an audience playing them. They still have fans.

Heck, I remember one woman at work who, to my surprise, was in a WoW raiding guild and she was applauding the changes that were being made to WoW because it meant that she would have more time to play. Essentially she liked the more casual aspect that was being added.

The mmo genre is growing and like any media, it has gathered greater fans but fans who are not as hardcore or who do not have the desire to play games that are "virtual worlds". Heck, even another guy at work, who I would say is a "gamer" told me last month that he preferred his games to be more like games and less like "worlds".

And the current mmos' are just up his alley.

Sovrath, i understand that, but im talking growth in terms of quality, not quantity.

Yes the mmorpg genre market is not a niche anymore. It is not big, but not small also. You can have dismall comparisons between every market segment, both in consoles and pc, for every known genre, but we can all agree that it, the mmorpg, has grown over the years.

But we all know why it has grown. Lets face it, games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, EQ 2, EVE, etc helped this genre to achieve new heights.

Im not saying that Ultima Online was not great. Yes it was. In late 90s it was the best this genre had to offer. It served as launch pad for all the rpg onlines to be, as its success boosted the development of games in the genre. The late 90s also brings both Everquest and Lineage as solid games, with great acceptance and favorable feedback.  So when Dark Age of Camelot hits the stands, bringing some radical concepts on PvP environment, everyone knows that a new market segment is born there.

So what happens next?

Early new millinnium brought us a large increase in genre numbers boosted by the phenome of World of Warcraft, and the highly selling Everquest 2 and Lineage 2, with Guild wars presenting itself as a core rpg online game gaining its followers also.

Now when you compare them to its predecessors, no one can blame the late 90s platforms to be worse than the new millennium games, its just evolution as its best, for it has grown in the quality of the final product also.

So, you got a clearly evolution on both quantity and quality of the available platforms, with the direct ranslation in player base numbers. And here i agree with with the word "growth"...

...but...

Following this golden era, everyone was expecting the next jump of the genre. Where can we go next? What can we bring? New graphic engine? New sound stages? New mechanics and game designs?

See, this genre brought some recent big names, backing a big punch in both lore and concept, that failed and failed big.

Where is Warhammer Age of Reckoning?

Where is Age of Conan?

Where is Lord of the Rings Online?

Where is AION?

Where is Star Trek online?

Where is Final Fantasy?

...Where is Star Wars TOR going?...

You can call this evolution, as its the word used to describe the path walked by the genre, but you cant say it is "growth" in particular in quality terms. Its clearly the oppposite.

What failed here? What went wrong? Design misconceptions? Production values, or maybe production rush outs? Mistreated player base?

All of them are open for debate, but what remains is: what should had been the next step in this genre growth, in terms of evolution, brought only its demise.

Now we are currently watching a new effort in this genre. Developers trying hard to bring something new to the genre and indie devs launching new concepts, like The Repopulation. Games like TERA, The Secret World, love it or hate it, trying to innovate, and upcoming Guild Wars 2 and ArcheAge promising a change for better.

I dare to ask: if this new step fails, what will happen to this genre? Can it hold on? Can the indie developers bring new concepts? Can big labels change their politics towards this industry?

Untill then, the genre is not dead, it is plugged to the life support system.

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Originally posted by Quirhid
 

Who's talking about "hours"?

It all adds up. You could roam for 2 hours in Eve for a single 1 minute fight. Thats far from casual, nor is it a very good ratio between looking for a fight and the actual fight.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective. 

You think nariu is the only gamer who isn't interested in 10+ minutes of non-gameplay?

Gamers want gameplay.  That's all they want.  In most games, and certainly the vast majority of MMORPG travel, travel is non-gameplay.  The exact opposite of what gamers want.

The fastest way to kill your game in the first 2 weeks is to have it focus on excessive amounts of non-gameplay travel.

Interesting decisions make or break games, and travel lacks interesting decisions.

 

Travel by itself is pretty pointless, like me going to work on my daily commute, it is pointless and has no fun involved, but when I go hiking for instance and I decide I want to go up some peak and it requires a 2 or 3h hike, it is not boring like my daily commute I can certainly enjoy the journey there, because it is unknown, there are awesome views I have never seen before, etc...

What I am saying, is, that travelling is made non-gameplay, its not like you can't make travelling part of the experience, its just that in recent years travelling has become a time sink and or just a means to go from A to C there is nothing in between B is just moving to the nearest teleporter or wait around while your griphin flies for 4min before you get to your destination or just putting your mount on auto run while you get to C. 

Travelling can def be integrated into the gameplay to provide a more meaningful experience, I can come up with a few ideas right here that would make it fun for ME to travel, I am sure a team of paid designers can come up with hundreds of fun ideas that would appeal to a wider audience with the added benefit of being able to actually test things with hundreds if not thousands of people. So yeah I agree, with you, travel is non-gameplay because it has become a standard of being just a boring time sink of giving you a mild feeling that the world is big rather than actually being part of gameplay.

Ill give you a quick example of a concept which would make travel awesome for me, think Infinity Quest for Earth, where they have said that galaxies and planets will be seeded as players travel further ( much like Minecraft's world is generated as you explore ), preparing a massive expedition with friends to explore different planets and unknown star systems for me would be gratifying in itself let alone getting there and having other activities that I may or not have seen before. I think there are plenty interesting decisions if you factor in all the dangers that travelling through space pose, the constant decision making in the middle of the unknown, this same concept can be applied anywhere this is just one concept out of a design page of Infinity.

Originally posted by Clerigo

 

Sovrath, i understand that, but im talking growth in terms of quality, not quantity.

 

 

Quality is in the eye of the beholder.
 

For example, personally, i find STO a MUCH better space combat game than Eve. Combat is more interesting. There are good scripted ground missions.

So from where i am seeing ... quailty grows too.

Plus, all the new good features like LFD/LFR are new ... certainly a growth in my eyes.

Originally posted by Raven

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective. 

You think nariu is the only gamer who isn't interested in 10+ minutes of non-gameplay?

Gamers want gameplay.  That's all they want.  In most games, and certainly the vast majority of MMORPG travel, travel is non-gameplay.  The exact opposite of what gamers want.

The fastest way to kill your game in the first 2 weeks is to have it focus on excessive amounts of non-gameplay travel.

Interesting decisions make or break games, and travel lacks interesting decisions.

 

Travel by itself is pretty pointless, like me going to work on my daily commute, it is pointless and has no fun involved, but when I go hiking for instance and I decide I want to go up some peak and it requires a 2 or 3h hike, it is not boring like my daily commute I can certainly enjoy the journey there, because it is unknown, there are awesome views I have never seen before, etc...

What I am saying, is, that travelling is made non-gameplay, its not like you can't make travelling part of the experience, its just that in recent years travelling has become a time sink and or just a means to go from A to C there is nothing in between B is just moving to the nearest teleporter or wait around while your griphin flies for 4min before you get to your destination or just putting your mount on auto run while you get to C. 

Travelling can def be integrated into the gameplay to provide a more meaningful experience, I can come up with a few ideas right here that would make it fun for ME to travel, I am sure a team of paid designers can come up with hundreds of fun ideas that would appeal to a wider audience with the added benefit of being able to actually test things with hundreds if not thousands of people. So yeah I agree, with you, travel is non-gameplay because it has become a standard of being just a boring time sink of giving you a mild feeling that the world is big rather than actually being part of gameplay.

Ill give you a quick example of a concept which would make travel awesome for me, think Infinity Quest for Earth, where they have said that galaxies and planets will be seeded as players travel further ( much like Minecraft's world is generated as you explore ), preparing a massive expedition with friends to explore different planets and unknown star systems for me would be gratifying in itself let alone getting there and having other activities that I may or not have seen before. I think there are plenty interesting decisions if you factor in all the dangers that travelling through space pose, the constant decision making in the middle of the unknown, this same concept can be applied anywhere this is just one concept out of a design page of Infinity.

That happens only ONCE, the first time you get there. So that is not an excuse not to have fast travel. Do it the WOW way. First time, you have to hike there. Second time, you have the option of fast travel.

And travel is NOT the only dead time. How about waiting for groups. Waiting is waiting, no matter how you cut & dice it. LFD solves that problem to some extent.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Raven

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective. 

You think nariu is the only gamer who isn't interested in 10+ minutes of non-gameplay?

Gamers want gameplay.  That's all they want.  In most games, and certainly the vast majority of MMORPG travel, travel is non-gameplay.  The exact opposite of what gamers want.

The fastest way to kill your game in the first 2 weeks is to have it focus on excessive amounts of non-gameplay travel.

Interesting decisions make or break games, and travel lacks interesting decisions.

 

Travel by itself is pretty pointless, like me going to work on my daily commute, it is pointless and has no fun involved, but when I go hiking for instance and I decide I want to go up some peak and it requires a 2 or 3h hike, it is not boring like my daily commute I can certainly enjoy the journey there, because it is unknown, there are awesome views I have never seen before, etc...

What I am saying, is, that travelling is made non-gameplay, its not like you can't make travelling part of the experience, its just that in recent years travelling has become a time sink and or just a means to go from A to C there is nothing in between B is just moving to the nearest teleporter or wait around while your griphin flies for 4min before you get to your destination or just putting your mount on auto run while you get to C. 

Travelling can def be integrated into the gameplay to provide a more meaningful experience, I can come up with a few ideas right here that would make it fun for ME to travel, I am sure a team of paid designers can come up with hundreds of fun ideas that would appeal to a wider audience with the added benefit of being able to actually test things with hundreds if not thousands of people. So yeah I agree, with you, travel is non-gameplay because it has become a standard of being just a boring time sink of giving you a mild feeling that the world is big rather than actually being part of gameplay.

Ill give you a quick example of a concept which would make travel awesome for me, think Infinity Quest for Earth, where they have said that galaxies and planets will be seeded as players travel further ( much like Minecraft's world is generated as you explore ), preparing a massive expedition with friends to explore different planets and unknown star systems for me would be gratifying in itself let alone getting there and having other activities that I may or not have seen before. I think there are plenty interesting decisions if you factor in all the dangers that travelling through space pose, the constant decision making in the middle of the unknown, this same concept can be applied anywhere this is just one concept out of a design page of Infinity.

That happens only ONCE, the first time you get there. So that is not an excuse not to have fast travel. Do it the WOW way. First time, you have to hike there. Second time, you have the option of fast travel.

And travel is NOT the only dead time. How about waiting for groups. Waiting is waiting, no matter how you cut & dice it. LFD solves that problem to some extent.

Yes and I agree and design decisions work towards it, if you read the rest of my post on procedural generated content, it would work to continue exploring, but I agree once something has been estabilished you cannot have the back and forth, the go do a quest, walk to town and sell, go and make a quest, rinse and repeat is boring, and that should be addressed, there are ways of addressing this problem, by adding ways of quick travel as people discover things, by adding mechanics that encourage you to stay where you are instead of mindlessly going back to town every 30min, which is something fairly annoying on pretty much every MMORPG released in the last 10 years, this cycle of go back to town your bags are full.

I wish going back to town was more like an event rather than a chore, as I said there are ways of making the "have to travel" experience much better by tweaking the design, travel itself isnt the problem is how travel is integrated into an already broken design that doesnt need travelling.

Everytime I find a town near a dungeon that is essentially just placeholder for a couple of vendors and a couple of quest givers I die a little bit inside. 

Originally posted by Raven

Travel by itself is pretty pointless, like me going to work on my daily commute, it is pointless and has no fun involved, but when I go hiking for instance and I decide I want to go up some peak and it requires a 2 or 3h hike, it is not boring like my daily commute I can certainly enjoy the journey there, because it is unknown, there are awesome views I have never seen before, etc...

What I am saying, is, that travelling is made non-gameplay, its not like you can't make travelling part of the experience, its just that in recent years travelling has become a time sink and or just a means to go from A to C there is nothing in between B is just moving to the nearest teleporter or wait around while your griphin flies for 4min before you get to your destination or just putting your mount on auto run while you get to C. 

Travelling can def be integrated into the gameplay to provide a more meaningful experience, I can come up with a few ideas right here that would make it fun for ME to travel, I am sure a team of paid designers can come up with hundreds of fun ideas that would appeal to a wider audience with the added benefit of being able to actually test things with hundreds if not thousands of people. So yeah I agree, with you, travel is non-gameplay because it has become a standard of being just a boring time sink of giving you a mild feeling that the world is big rather than actually being part of gameplay.

Ill give you a quick example of a concept which would make travel awesome for me, think Infinity Quest for Earth, where they have said that galaxies and planets will be seeded as players travel further ( much like Minecraft's world is generated as you explore ), preparing a massive expedition with friends to explore different planets and unknown star systems for me would be gratifying in itself let alone getting there and having other activities that I may or not have seen before. I think there are plenty interesting decisions if you factor in all the dangers that travelling through space pose, the constant decision making in the middle of the unknown, this same concept can be applied anywhere this is just one concept out of a design page of Infinity.

Yeah as soon as the non-gameplay of travel becomes gameplay (as it is in Puzzle Pirates, for example) then that completely reverses the situation, and travel becomes the thing pursued. The problem is most defenders of travel defend the current implementation of travel, which contains virtually no gameplay (no decisions apart from avoiding mobs, which is a really flat form of gameplay.)

But yeah there's tons of potential for adding travel gameplay to games.  Dynamic encounters are a start.  But say you had a spaceship MMO and during travel a Travel Hotbar appeared with various abilities you use to overdrive your engine.  And depending on how you handle the dynamic challenges the game throws at you (overheating, breakdowns, overdrive opportunities, activate nitrous) that determines how fast you travel through space.  Now this minigame would have to be deep and fun enough to be worth playing over and over, but if it was then you'd have a game where travel involved worthwhile gameplay -- a game where it'd be fine to spend most of your time traveling.

---

The problem is most defenders of travel defend the current no-gameplay* implementation of travel.

---

Originally posted by Foomerang
Really? Who?

Basically everyone except the people asking for travel to be kept to an absolute minimum.

Given that almost no games involve gameplay during travel (Puzzle PIrates is the only example I've come up with so far), anyone defending travel is almost certainly defending the way travel is actually implemented in 99.99% of games.  And that style of travel involves virtually no gameplay -- it's overwhelmingly just an empty, shallow timesink.

Originally posted by Raven

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Raven

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Amaranthar

Yeah, but that's you. And as you're next quote shows, you don't even believe that an MMO needs to last more than a few weeks.

Someone like you talking about MMO's seems very out of place compared to most of us. You have a totally different, hardcore gamer perspective. 

You think nariu is the only gamer who isn't interested in 10+ minutes of non-gameplay?

Gamers want gameplay.  That's all they want.  In most games, and certainly the vast majority of MMORPG travel, travel is non-gameplay.  The exact opposite of what gamers want.

The fastest way to kill your game in the first 2 weeks is to have it focus on excessive amounts of non-gameplay travel.

Interesting decisions make or break games, and travel lacks interesting decisions.

 

Travel by itself is pretty pointless, like me going to work on my daily commute, it is pointless and has no fun involved, but when I go hiking for instance and I decide I want to go up some peak and it requires a 2 or 3h hike, it is not boring like my daily commute I can certainly enjoy the journey there, because it is unknown, there are awesome views I have never seen before, etc...

What I am saying, is, that travelling is made non-gameplay, its not like you can't make travelling part of the experience, its just that in recent years travelling has become a time sink and or just a means to go from A to C there is nothing in between B is just moving to the nearest teleporter or wait around while your griphin flies for 4min before you get to your destination or just putting your mount on auto run while you get to C. 

Travelling can def be integrated into the gameplay to provide a more meaningful experience, I can come up with a few ideas right here that would make it fun for ME to travel, I am sure a team of paid designers can come up with hundreds of fun ideas that would appeal to a wider audience with the added benefit of being able to actually test things with hundreds if not thousands of people. So yeah I agree, with you, travel is non-gameplay because it has become a standard of being just a boring time sink of giving you a mild feeling that the world is big rather than actually being part of gameplay.

Ill give you a quick example of a concept which would make travel awesome for me, think Infinity Quest for Earth, where they have said that galaxies and planets will be seeded as players travel further ( much like Minecraft's world is generated as you explore ), preparing a massive expedition with friends to explore different planets and unknown star systems for me would be gratifying in itself let alone getting there and having other activities that I may or not have seen before. I think there are plenty interesting decisions if you factor in all the dangers that travelling through space pose, the constant decision making in the middle of the unknown, this same concept can be applied anywhere this is just one concept out of a design page of Infinity.

That happens only ONCE, the first time you get there. So that is not an excuse not to have fast travel. Do it the WOW way. First time, you have to hike there. Second time, you have the option of fast travel.

And travel is NOT the only dead time. How about waiting for groups. Waiting is waiting, no matter how you cut & dice it. LFD solves that problem to some extent.

 

Yes and I agree and design decisions work towards it, if you read the rest of my post on procedural generated content, it would work to continue exploring, but I agree once something has been estabilished you cannot have the back and forth, the go do a quest, walk to town and sell, go and make a quest, rinse and repeat is boring, and that should be addressed, there are ways of addressing this problem, by adding ways of quick travel as people discover things, by adding mechanics that encourage you to stay where you are instead of mindlessly going back to town every 30min, which is something fairly annoying on pretty much every MMORPG released in the last 10 years, this cycle of go back to town your bags are full.

I wish going back to town was more like an event rather than a chore, as I said there are ways of making the "have to travel" experience much better by tweaking the design, travel itself isnt the problem is how travel is integrated into an already broken design that doesnt need travelling.

Everytime I find a town near a dungeon that is essentially just placeholder for a couple of vendors and a couple of quest givers I die a little bit inside. 

It's funny how, over the many years now, it's always the same negative assumptions. Boring travel in a non changing game world, anything else can't be done, etc., etc.

You hit on something here that I've always wanted to see. Campsites. Sort of like SWG had, player made, player enhanced, but with the added option of player run/owned caravans to haul stuff back to town and to warehouses that are owned by players and rent storage space (optionally owned by towns). Just adds to game play. Of course, it probably would be deemed "can't be done" or "won't work".

Those phrases, I've grown to hate them in life. Losers say these things, winners find a way to make things work. And this industry most certainly is dominated by losers. I don't want to hear about the Bean Counters and money restrictions. Not one of the money bags would say "yeah, make a loser with my money". Yet that's exactly what's going on. It's not the freakin' bean counters, it's the lead developers who oversell them on anything to get the job. Ethically challenged individuals hoping for lightning to strike, because they sure as hell don't have any talent.

Originally posted by Foomerang

 

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Originally posted by nariusseldon
Dead?

 

The market is huge and may still be expanding. Going into a direction you do not like != dead.

In fact, i think it is becoming MORE ALIVE, solving all the old problems (like camping & finding groups with instances & LFD/LFR), while giving a large part of the games to the players for FREE.

It is getting BETTER.

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the genre is dead. not the market. the business of taking old console game concepts into the mmo space is huge. the genre that attempted to make virtual worlds is dead.

somebody give this man a trophy, he can walk and chew gum at the same time. My hats off 2 you for getting it.

Originally posted by Amaranthar

It's funny how, over the many years now, it's always the same negative assumptions. Boring travel in a non changing game world, anything else can't be done, etc., etc.

Of course that's the assumption!  For starters, that's all that exists on the market (except extremely rare exceptions.)  And then nobody who asks for it explains how to make it deep and fun.

Until the players asking for it explain how it becomes an activity which is fun, deep, and chock-full of interesting decision-making, other people will continue to assume travel is boring and virtually devoid of gameplay.

Originally posted by Amaranthar

 

It's funny how, over the many years now, it's always the same negative assumptions. Boring travel in a non changing game world, anything else can't be done, etc., etc.

What assumptions? I was there when games have boring travel. Don't want to see it return.