Originally posted by Meowhead

It's perfectly possible to design a system from the ground up without needing to lean on healers, and you can even strip the healer out of a holy trinity system and replace it with something else, though that's more awkward and less elegant.

I think the "WoW Generation" has had the idea ingrained into their heads that MMOs consist of 4 main classes that need tweaking to achieve balance: Tank, Healer, Melee DPS, Distance DPS. It's mostly developers' fault for adhering to it so long that it's essentially an MMO "law of physics".

The very notion that this dynamic doesn't exist is something a lot of gamers will have trouble wrapping their heads around until they play it... just like I read the bitching about the "small number of quickbar slots".

Well the quickbar is being designed from the ground up to adhere to an original system, just like the rest of the game. Not an "original system" like "We took WoW, threw some new art and animations on it and changed class names", but actually original.

That's both exciting and nerve-wracking, as I want it to succeed so badly, yet it's hard to get something like this right on the first try.

And in MMOs, first impressions are everything.

Originally posted by MarlonB

It boggles my mind how anyone can be AGAINST freedom of choice.

Blame this on the principle of "Dungeon Running" for gear.

When a game's developers make it so you have to run the same dungeon many, many times for gear, what do players do? They focus on efficiency, so the grind is as simple as possible.

Players then set about to find the most "efficient" class build for running a particular dungeon, discouraging the "inefficient" builds because they feel no need -- and why should they? The whole point is to grind for gear, not RP.

If Trion can get away from dungeon running for gear, or can find at least several combos of classes that are not clearly the 'more efficient', this 'flexibility" thing might have a shot.

Otherwise, expect more of the same problems that past games have had.

There are only two ways you're going to see a "Next Gen" MMO within the next several years, either:

A) A game will figure out a way to let players affect the game world, like a single-player RPG, without overstressing the servers, WHILE maintaining high-level graphics quality, and/or:

B) Someone TRULY takes a page out of Blizzard's book, which is to copy an existing formula, add a few tweaks to it, and base it on a tremendously popular, buzz-producing IP.

The complexity we demand of a "next gen" game is not only going to cost a TON more money than studios are willing to shell out right now on a risk -- it demands a level of server performance that we don't even see in current games.

I think consumers underestimate the amount of horsepower needed to take the features of a single player RPG, and make them dynamic enough to work on an MMO scale where potentially hundreds of thousands of users could hit it. Most companies can't even keep their current gen games' servers from going down... the bugs and complexity involved in scaling it up further would be tremendous.

It doesn't help that consumers at-large want familiarity too, so you can never deviate TOO far from the way MMOs work right now. Most consumers want both innovation *and* familiarity, which creates almost a Catch 22.

It's like why it's so hard to greenlight original movie ideas: People whine about how many sequels are in movies, but will flock to a B-grade sequel over an A-grade original, given the choice.

Generally, people have to both demand features, AND accept that graphical quality will suffer a bit in order to get these next gen features in... and I don't think people at large will go for that, unless you do as Blizzard did and base an MMO off a HUGE IP that can generate buzz.

My biggest pleasant surprise: It seems they straddled the line well between creating an immersive-looking port and being able to do your business quickly. Lisbon is fairly large and can take a little time to run between areas, but you can access the harbor from Port Guides in every city district.

You can also travel directly to, say, the Commercial District, directly from the harbor as you arrive (you warp to the port guide in that district), which further cuts down on needless running time.

I've had to do more on-foot running doing the School quests than I ever had to do since.

The only problem I have so far: I started in Lisbon and became a food trader, so I have cooking, but of the 5 or 6 ports I have permits to, none of them had a recipe book for my Level 1 cook (I could find as low as Level 3) -- and a Lisbon quest required me make Garlic Cheese. The link the OP shared lists ports in bordeaux and other places, but I can't enter the ports yet.

No issues with any other quests though, and it didn't take too long to figure out what I could safely trade.

Originally posted by Shiymmas

Originally posted by colddog04

Originally posted by VirusDancer

Just because nothing that you do matters in a game, does not mean that in trying to add some form of meaning that one should start with character death...

...that would just leave you with having a costly death in a meaningless game.

Heh. Good point.

Actually, it really is a good point, but only to a degree...

 

I think that by adding a costly death penalty, however, you add value to everything else in the game almost automatically.

The only game I've ever played that had a considerable death penalty was FFXI.  Sure it was annoying and frustrating at times, but it definitely made you fear death and made accomplishments carry more meaning. 

As a fellow MMO lover bored with MMOs, there's a point missing here, and it's why I don't support harsh penalties:

In the MMORPG genre, people are results-oriented. Numbers-oriented, not story-oriented.

So in FFXI, what the harsh penalty did was take FFXI's seemingly great job/subjob mechanic and destroyed it -- people found out the 'best' combinations to avoid the death penalty, then only invited people into groups who fit that predefined mold. People did this in WoW when it started too... if you didn't have a particular path on the Priest spec tree trained, you weren't invited to a group. All of the innovation possible gets thrown out the window.

When harsh death penalties are into play, the story-oriented parts of us just want to do well.  In the results-oriented MMO world though, we see a harsh penalty as "losing time" towards our main goal of the max level.

In fact, it's that results-oriented "max level" endgame that makes me and many others not want to bother playing. We can't enjoy the ride to the end like we do in a single player RPG... Level 23 is merely a side street on the path between Level 1 and Level 80. Something not to be enjoyed, but to be endured, and I don't pay per month to "endure" a game for 1-2 months until I get to the "end".

Thanks to games promoting this results-oriented mindset through design, I find levelling in MMOs to be a horrible chore.

Originally posted by darkedone02

 I felt very bored going to this stupid slow-ass tutorial that never ends. This game is not very... interactive. The Graphics are like a generic korean game, The tutorial is too long, I'm about to just say "fuck this shitty game" cause how boring it is. I played a few mmo that does not require much of a tutorial or need to be any longer and learn along the way, this game right here is too boring, too many black screens, and too much of a damn problem then it worth spending my time. I'm uninstalling this game...

I'm surprised to say this, but I'm impressed with UWO's tutorial.

This is not a "typical"-themed MMO, so there will be concepts that people won't know about offhand, which require the tutorial -- it seems comprehensive to me, or at least much more so than your average MMO.

The Trader tutorial covered almost all of the shops, so you knew what the Tavern did, which items are sold where, etc., resupplying your ships, it touched on ship combat and trading... I was happy with it.

I have no opinion yet on how sailing between ports or the actual trading system is, since I just finished the tutorial line, but as someone who played Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the UW games for SNES, I was impressed with the tutorial.

Originally posted by Bladin

Now that people have experienced mmorpgs, have mmorpgs they like, and have already altered themselves into the same mindset they share in real life, they no longer HAVE to accept the BAD THINGS.  They can get their social interaction without losing the gameplay.  They don't have to suffer bugs, server issues, lack of content, because they can get it in other games.

I'll translate the wall of text. ;)

What really makes an MMORPG very successful are guilds. What companies don't understand is that many guilds exist out-of-game. Once you drive these guilds *out*, you never get them *back*. No patches will ever get guilds that left WAR to return -- Guilds don't move back; guilds move forward. By the time they fix their game, these guilds are already engrossed in something else.

This is why MMORPG launches are so important -- games are hyped to bump up the first-month subscription numbers, and once people have to pay, you see a dropoff. Any guilds who leave in that first month are gone, for good.

Then there are players like me, players whose first MMO addictions were 2nd-gen online games like Ultima Online and Everquest. Players who are so jaded by the cookie-cutter mold that we'd rather dump the genre completely than invest more time into it. We WANT to like something, and still can't.

FFXIV will be reasonably successful solely due to the devotion their Japanese fanbase shows towards the brand name. Without an easily accessible UI though, this game may only thrive for the platform it's clearly designed for: Playstation 3.

I really tried to give this game the benefit of the doubt. I tried, but two things I saw a few minutes after logging in, completely soured me on the experience.

The first thing wasn't even the UI, it was the same stupid slowness of movement that I felt in FFXI. The city (Limsa Lominsa or... whatever) is too large and/or the character running speed is too slow -- running from one side of the city to the other takes a needless amount of time. There's something to be said for an immersive world, but being bored of running to a merchant is not immersive.

Then consider that they pointed me to the Zephyr Gate for my first quest, which is not obvious on the map, nor was getting to said gate *thanks* to the map.

For some reason SE decided to stick with FFXI's artificial slowing down of "game life" to... I don't know, I guess promote the idea of using Aetherite teleports and chocobos? Why would you design a system that requires it to be tolerable? And then getting around the city is still a pain in the ass.

And then... there's the horrible UI, made even worse by the fact that an awful lot of things can't be custom-mapped to keyboard keys to ease the pain. Nothing is natural -- the only reason I could select NPCs without too much hassle is the F11 key I memorized from FFXI.

The fact that it still feels like FFXI is a bad thing, especially for a game that's trying to cater more towards casual gamers.

The problem isn't that innovating is seen as bad, it's this garbage thrown at us that's masked as innovation.

If Guild Wars 2's "personal quests" and "decisions that stick with you" are only "personal" within instances, which seems likely, that's not innovation. You know which game started personal quests that only take place inside instances?

Anarchy Online, back nearly 10 years ago.

GW2's developer video, right now, sounds like it's the same thing with a graphical upgrade and more story. But it's the same basic principle. Maybe exciting to the millions of MMORPG players to whom WoW is their only experience, but for people like me around since Meridian 59, this is nothing new.

There's nothing to be hyped about until we see gameplay footage and further details.

Originally posted by Yamota

It has not as much as feeling to be special but rather competetiveness. If 1000 people compete and they all get to be number 1 then where is the competetiveness.

What you call grind I call putting in an effort, if everyone can be number 1 with no effort then there is no number 1. Also territorial PvP becomes meaningless as the territories would not be worth anything.

Your idea has been spoonfed to you by the Everquest machine and all copies thereafter, including WoW. The idea that numerical goals should be where the competition lies.

I welcome any company's image that level caps should be irrelevant. The moment you put in a numerical goal to the game, players will generally do nothing but work towards it.

In Warhammer Online's RvR, the developers were puzzled why nobody was defending a fort. Everyone played offense, nobody played defense. Why would we not have the pride to defend our forts? Simple -- Mythic made the mistake of having RvR armor require Renown Rank to purchase, and the returns in Renown EXP were much higher if you just captured instead of defended. Players had their eyes on nothing but "maximum returns".

These numerical goals have to be eliminated -- not managed, *eliminated* as much as possible -- to keep ideas like yours from ruining the game for more casual players.

In EA's NHL10, skaters were able to pretty much "max out" the bonuses they earn for their online skaters about a month after the release (150 games or so). And yet loads of people are playing it almost a year later. Why? Because it's a sport, not a min-max grind -- skill and teamwork are emphasized over numerical goals.

If a company can pull this off, they can actually keep both hardcore and more casual players under one umbrella... unless you're the "chase after min-max number goals" hardcore type, which no company should build a game around.

Here's the thing:

ArenaNet's trailer, while exciting, comes very close to saying that the player's choices will influence the world around him/her. It won't. These Personal Quests are almost certainly going to be in an instanced format.

And the more illusion ArenaNet wants to create about us influencing the world, the more instancing will be necessary, because technology just hasn't advanced to the point that an "open world" MMO can handle this.

Maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully I'm wrong. God, I hope I'm wrong -- it would be fantastic if it happened in the open world -- but I definitely don't see it happening with a subscription-less heavily instanced format.

ArenaNet's challenge will be trying to maintain an "MMO" sense with all these personal stories thrown in. In the original Guild Wars it felt too much like Diablo -- the "open world" was nothing but a lobby in a town where you meet to hop into an instance. These Personal Quests could just be elaborate, personalized instances, which would be a letdown.

So yeah, I'm not hyped until I get more informaiton.

Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to have an MMO success discussion without World of Warcraft, since that game not only dominates the MMO industry, but it's largely responsible for the MMO player base growing so large that all these MMOs can exist to begin with.

Several companies tried to be the "2nd Best MMO Under Blizzard" -- most notably with Age of Conan and WAR -- and failed miserably due to their inability to either listen to their player-base, or measure the cause-and-effect of their design decisions (which killed Warhammer).

It seems even when ideas are good on paper, developers just can't seem to get a grasp on MMO trends... like why people are playing, and the incentives they want when they do. WAR looked nice on paper... but the developers were SHOCKED that nobody played defense in PvP when it first came out. Simple: People would get rewards faster with the "Keep Circle Jerk". The devs thought people would fight for the thrill of the fight. MMO audiences do nothing for the sake of it.

This also became the plight of Pirates of the Burning Sea -- with a system that worked for a small beta population, but was hell at release because WE all know what players will do, given the chance, but these developers don't.

That sort of misunderstanding of the player base is at the heart of what's killing even these games that seem like they SHOULD work, games that DO attract audiences. And then they sit in the "failed" pile.

Originally posted by flydowntome

They aren't failing. If anything they are exploding in terms of number and type.

People are chasing shadows, trying to recreate a mythical UO/SWG/DAOC experience that never really happened, and any real game will never live up. They were just as bad before if not worse.

That doesn't mean they're not failing or aren't destined to fail. Many people think developers are throwing darts at a dartboard to see what sticks.

What they're really doing is... you know at the market where you can buy Jif peanut butter or some generic brand? We've got about 35 generic brands of peanut butter on the shelf, and these companies wonder why only a few are selling.

Hardly any of them sit back and go, "Hey... how about some generic coffee instead of peanut butter?" Nope. They see the JIF brand (let's call that WoW) sells, so damn it, we're sticking with peanut butter!

But you're right that, by-and-large, since Dark Age of Camelot it's hard to name MMOs that had an effect on the population at large other than the one obvious one. EVE and FFXI are probably the closest... and that's not saying much.

Thank you, OP.

I'm near the end of my one-week trial and my thoughts echo yours almost to a "T". It's clear after only a few days that it's going to take more grinding, and more time in general, to become less than useless than I'm prepared to put into an MMO at this point.

It was the same feeling I had when I started playing Aion -- yeah, the game might have a decent endgame, but I could never see myself getting there. I've just got too many other games I could be playing (non-MMO) that don't subject me to that sort of punishment.

The exploration was bland enough to make travel just between the starter towns and goblin spawns tedious. That's a bad way to start out in a game.

The community babble was about what I expected, which is unfortunate.

After 5 days I still can't get used to the control scheme either -- the very act of looting mobs, then trying to react to something hitting my back drove me nuts.

Maybe I'd get used to it, but I don't have to. Got too many other games to play, and Darkfall doesn't offer me enough incentive to stay plugged in.

I think a week will be long enough. The trial will serve the exact purpose that people like me are seeking: a taste of how Darkfall "feels". Not so much whether the design "feels right", but whether it feels "right for me".

MMO tastes are so subjective that you can never rely on forums, even a forum consensus, to figure out if something is right for your own style.

Of course, right now the torrent download for the client isn't up yet, but downloading it via the patcher is still fast. We'll see how fast it is later today. lol

Oh shoot. Now I've got to try it! lol.

Normally I'd be like, "Why a dollar...?" but I understand why -- they can ban the payment methods of people caught hacking this way; protects the player base a bit. Not a bad move at all.

Originally posted by mCalvert

Im not willing to risk $50 on a questionable MMO.  Thats just the way it is. Devs of all MMOs just need to accept that their customers want to try before they buy. If they want money, theyll do it. If the dont, they wont. Till then I have other MMOs where my money will go.

Absolutely.

Except there are no other MMOs where my money will go. In fact that's related to the very reason I won't get Darkfall without trying it: I've been burned too many times in the past to take the chance.

Contrary to what some of you believe, I'm telling you right now that there's no such thing as "growing into" an MMO. You either like the concept right off the bat and it keeps you playing, or you don't like the concept, you stick around for a bit hoping you will, then you quit out of boredom.

So a 10-Day trial would be the best way to get fence-sitters and cynical MMO vets like me (and I'm a UO and Shadowbane alumni) to take the plunge. The game's got to feel good to me. It's got to feel right.

A typical $50 game is a game. An MMO is a hobby, an investment. I don't buy a big train set until I play around with some exhibits and smaller ones.

Originally posted by illspawn

Well this game has been suggested to me as to being the closest thing to Shadowbane, so I will have to check it out.

This is why I would love a trial version to come out soon -- Shadowbane was a great game, but an MMO is a different kind of "investment" than a typical game (personal taste varies more widely). I hesitate to drop money on a game in a genre that has generally disappointed me into cynicism without getting a feel first.

But I'm trying to convince myself using YouTube video footage people took in-game. My only concern on the "Con" side is that many people have quit because of the "grind" feeling. That's the typical reason I quit MMOs too.

However, when MMORPG.com's forum for a game is NOT filled with vitriol... the game has got to be doing *something* right.

Absolutely.

Mortal's state right now reminds me of the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta. With a beta-level population the game is... workable. But most of the design decisions are so bad that once the game is released and more people come in, all hell will break loose.

The skill system is needlessly complicated, without much feedback at all from the game on what's what. You also can't run thru people! -- till you realize at release these idiots will intentionally block doorways, and attacking them flags you a criminal to the guards.

Want some hilarity? Start a band of several thieves, and use your bodies to trap people in near the furnaces in Meduli. They can't hit you without going gray, and because of lag issues, "shoving" them often also causes you to go grey. How fun, all that ore for the pilfering!

There's a nearly-endless amount of weapons to create, but almost nothing interesting to kill.

There's no in-game map, and no in-game feedback to point you where to get what. This is a critical mistake, as only a fraction of a playerbase ever visits the forums... and only a fraction of those visit regularly. And only a fraction of *those* participate.

And the community is easily one of the most hostile I've encountered. Even on IRC, it gets really bad with the "go back to WoW" chants.

Also, I can't find it in the patch notes, but another glaring change:

Raw mined materials are worth nothing to vendors now.

Pre-patch, Saburra was trading at an obnoxiously high price where people were saying "gold has no value" -- but when I was crafting I had nothing to use the money *for*, because dedicated crafters are essentially gimped in combat anyway. Why would I wear high-grade anything? PKers would have a field day with me. Bad design upfront anyway.

Now they've swung too far in the other direction, taking away almost every way to create that initial flow of money in the game (so I can buy my skill books to get into mining) except whacking little mobs, without a base supply-and-demand economy in place. Kind of ironic, limiting freedom in a "sandbox" game.

Fanboys on IRC are screaming, "Go Back to WoW if you can't handle it". I could handle it; I just don't care to. There might be a functioning economy in a few weeks, but until then, they can enjoy whacking mobs.