Originally posted by Quirhid

No amount of day-night cycle, flora & fauna or manual travel can repair my immersion when I see a bunch of character spawn camping mobs farming XP and gold.

Old school MMOs were not immersive for me. The gameplay, the production value, the pacing... they repulsed me more than anything.

A good example how immersion is entirely subjective.

Sucks to be you. I've been getting immersed in RPGs since the '80s.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Sovrath

no it wasn't. Just because you didn't like how many mobs the "quests" gave you to kill doesn't mean it was a grinder.

A korean grinder has you going out into fields or dungeons and that's what you do. You kill mobs. No quests, if there are quests you got little or no xp from them and that's what you did.

grind mobs. Over and over again.

Archlord is a korean grinder, Lineage 1 and 2 are korean grinders, I think maplestory is a korean grinder.

Exactly. NCSoft has always  - even back in 2006 when they were first showing off gameplay and features - stated that it was definitely not a grinder and would have leveling more palatable for the NA/EU audience.

> grind mobs. Over and over again.

It's such an interesting thing on this message board, the rhetoric that goes around and around about "grinding".

I mean, it's an unusual game (these days) that has no way to advance that is not related to clearing mobs; those are the original "grinders", and nearly all of the MUDs, and pretty much every MP game prior to 1995 or so.

But "Korean Grinder" really was a pretty specific set of titles, too.

Tread carefully where your terminology tiptoes, on this here site.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by pkpkpk

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by TheJoda

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by Abuz0r

Aion, this is a Korean grinder, which means they make you WORK for everything you get. However the sense of achievement is amazing. There is an amazing in depth crafting system, fortress sieging, instances, world pvp, you name it. Aion is the only game where I find myself stuck at the PC for more than 8 hours a day if I want to finish my personal laundry list of daily things to do. If you hate WoW and WoW clones, this game is free to play with an item mall that isn't critical, as everything on the item mall can be sold in game.

Aion is not a korean grinder.

 

i When aion first came out it was a grinder......changed bout a year into the game with patches.

no it wasn't. Just because you didn't like how many mobs the "quests" gave you to kill doesn't mean it was a grinder.

A korean grinder has you going out into fields or dungeons and that's what you do. You kill mobs. No quests, if there are quests you got little or no xp from them and that's what you did.

grind mobs. Over and over again.

Archlord is a korean grinder, Lineage 1 and 2 are korean grinders, I think maplestory is a korean grinder.

 

In case you didn't know, "grinder" is a derogatory word. It's not a technical term or term of the trade.

in which case anything could be considered a korean grinder?

If one is going to use a term then one has to be consistent no?

The games I mentioned you basically grabbed a group or went solo to a spot and killed mobs over and over and over until you out-levelled the area. Or until you got what mats you wanted.

You then went to another area or set of areas and rinsed and repeated. And several korean games, with their longer levelling embodied these mechanics. That's why we call them "korean grinders".

In a game like Aion or WoW you go to a quest hub, grab quests, kill x of y or collect x of y, come back, get a chunk of xp and then go and grab more quests and repeat.

"grinder" may  be a derogatory word but adding "korean" or "Quest" before it helps define what type of grinder it is.

There is a reason we have the word "etymology".

 

In any case, I agree with the OP that Aion is a good game. It has its issues but its one of the few games I play.

WoW is a good game because of what it does and how well it does it but I never liked it. Never played LoL, doesn't interest me.

Shrug.... as long as you call games grinders, you will continue to insult them.

Thing is, if you have enough imagination, developers don't need to do anything more than create a world. Get a nice computer that can run the graphics on high. That should be immersion enough. Back when I first started online games it was all text, and the worlds were exactly the same as they are now. Sure, there was quite a bit more challenge, but yeah, pretty much the same. If you wanted more immersion, you role-played.

Oh, I agree completely... but do the masses?

There's so much history of gaming. Devs can look back and basically see what worked and did not work. There is no need to hypothesize. I don't really think intelligent people are tired of "same old, same old". It's just that the so-called  WoW clones aren't actually good games... and on top of that, to distinguish themselves, they always make some tasteless change with no precedence in the history of gaming... oops!

I think some of the Ultima games were probably the best models for immersion. I haven't actually played them yet, but I know one of them was pretty heavy on reagents, day and night cycles, food, etc. It's easier to play those and see how fun they than to dump millions into a game and test it out.

Sounds like it. Then again, I used to be more of a killer and achiever. As I've grown older I've become almost exclusively an explorer with a little achiever on the side.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by TheJoda

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by Abuz0r

Aion, this is a Korean grinder, which means they make you WORK for everything you get. However the sense of achievement is amazing. There is an amazing in depth crafting system, fortress sieging, instances, world pvp, you name it. Aion is the only game where I find myself stuck at the PC for more than 8 hours a day if I want to finish my personal laundry list of daily things to do. If you hate WoW and WoW clones, this game is free to play with an item mall that isn't critical, as everything on the item mall can be sold in game.

Aion is not a korean grinder.

 

i When aion first came out it was a grinder......changed bout a year into the game with patches.

no it wasn't. Just because you didn't like how many mobs the "quests" gave you to kill doesn't mean it was a grinder.

A korean grinder has you going out into fields or dungeons and that's what you do. You kill mobs. No quests, if there are quests you got little or no xp from them and that's what you did.

grind mobs. Over and over again.

Archlord is a korean grinder, Lineage 1 and 2 are korean grinders, I think maplestory is a korean grinder.

In case you didn't know, "grinder" is a derogatory word. It's not a technical term or term of the trade.

"Korean grinder"... give me a break. "American Carebear game", then.

Reminds me of the time I won the Cloak of Flame from what's-his-name in Kunark. Roughly 40 people wanted it. Raid leader rolls a 1d40, lands on my name. :) Now THAT's working for  your gear. Thing was the best haste item in the game. Made enough plat when I finally sold it to fund an entire twink. But yeah, WoW had similar moments, though not nearly on the scale of EQ. Nothing will compare to the feeling of reward from a several hour camp of a mob, winning a rare item in a massive raid, or finding a nice world drop in the wild. I got lots of loot in WoW, but some of my fondest memories were actually in 5-mans, when rare items were rare. It took me probably 30 runs of Scholomance before I got my Cadaverous Armor. And winning items in bleeding edge content like AQ 40 or Naxxramas was pretty thrilling.

Sadly you're right. Those days are slowly fading. Random items are inherently unpopular with the masses. They operate very heavily on instinct, and on an instinctive level people are very goal- and progress-focused. The idea that they would do something for fun is not as appealing to them as if they were doing it for progress. They don't see forward into the long-term.

Youthful idealism!!

It's time to start stocking up on single player classics. Once you're sick of League of Legends there's nothing left to impress the gamer of refinement.  As for consumer traps, sure, I know people in their 30s who still ping-pong between the latest crappy games, playing one for a few days before going to the next, etc. With the expectancy that this will happen, in fact, companies no longer go the extra mile in their games, and so they all suck; and, in fact, if a company does go the extra mile, generally gamers of refinement are not the target audience, so they will suck anyway.

Been browsing through this thread, and thought I'd clear up a few misconceptions briefly:

1) SW: TOR was a sci-fi RPG, something pretty unusual and unpopular compared to fantasy RPGs, which may explain its failure in part.

2) EVE Online is more like a simulation than an MMORPG.

2) Stop saying WoW Clone. These games are the modern MMORPG. WoW is a great game; buy an original boxed copy and find a way to play on an emulated server and you will see. The WoW of today is simply a financial property and investment; it's not itself any more than a modern Gundam anime today is related to Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, or the modern Everquest is related to the original Everquest. You can tell the loyalists of these games that the creator himself personally spit and stubbed his cigar on the original design documents and they won't care. Stop dragging the name of great games through the mud because the creators didn't fawn over it for several years. I've yet to see a good MMORPG not cannabalize itself with expansions, so I assume it's not possible and imagine Blizzard took that for granted, too. Really, if you villify even Blizzard for making WoW, who can you respect in the MMORPG industry? I'll respect people that have actually made good MMORPGs over speculative and failed ones any day.

4) Not only are MMORPGs not in their infancy, but have existed in the form of MUDs since the '90s. Also, MUDs were almost exclusively solo games--a solo MMORPG can be good (i.e. classic WoW). Just because one or two big budget games, one of which was sci-fi, roughly approximated a once-good game now supported mostly by loyalists, and in its seventh or eight year of existence, and on its fourth expansion, and failed, really means nothing. WoW: Cataclysm or Mists of Pandaria is not a good game? No kidding! The game needs a total wipe and rebalancing to be good again, not another expansion. Most serious WoW players I knew quit before even the first expansion was released, and although a few came back, I doubt many stayed long enough to see the Cataclysm or even the latter part of WotLK, both of which were in exceptionally bad taste and suggestive of very low-wage, untalented designers having something unimportant shoveled off to them.

5) Solo leveling quest-based MMORPGs can be good--virtually any kind of hare-brained, seemingly modern MMORPG can be good if the designers want it to be. But if you design according to market studies, and no one on the team has the balls to say--hey--the game needs to be designed this way, because of so and so, then you will end up with something mediocre like I imagine  Rift was (and I still have my doubts as to whether that was a true 'AAA' MMORPG). What other 'AAA' MMORPGs have there been? Aion? Guild Wars 2? Maybe the former was a good game (Lineage 2 was another example of a pretty good solo MMORPG, so I would trust NCSoft), but the latter wasn't really even an MMORPG. It was a lousy mixture of hack-and-slash combat and the trivial, foolish PvP and quest system of Warhammer Online. Are these all your 'AAA' MMORPGs? Sorry, but classic WoW was from a different era. Games these days aren't cloning it, and if you think they are, you truly are not very perceptive of subtleties. WoW was fine-tuned and hand-crafted; it was still based on sound gaming principles. The modern Monty Hall style MMORPG really has no relation to it. WoW was contemporary with some of the paragons of MMORPGs like EQ2 and FFXI; if you think the games of today are even coming close to 'cloning' it, and that their failure somehow represents the lack of viability of a good MMORPG based on the age-old, tried-and-trusted mechanics of the MUDs of the '90s, you are sorely mistaken. Face it: a good game hasn't been made in the genre for at least 6 years. The genre is dead. Gaming doesn't operate in long stretches like that. If good games aren't being released at least every two years in a genre, then that genre is dead. Companies can't even get the basics right; it's like any art form today; they're so obsessed with doing something new, different and modern, yet have no classical foundation or understanding in their art, that what they ultimately design is just garbage. But why be surprised? Single player gaming has been dead for even longer than multiplayer. It was about time that this died, too. The fact that people now believe the only alternative to bad game design (what they call 'themepark') is something completely different and fairly untraditional (what they call 'sandbox') goes to show how far the industry has fallen. Which is why I only play single-player games from the 70s, 80s and 90s any more.

Amen... I agree completely.