Have the days of the Epic Questline disappeared from MMO's?
- Thread starter Newbie007
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I'm hoping for a graphically updated version of EQ with the same class mechanics, same world size, same game mechanics even. Possibly tune the group encounters for 4 people and raid encounters for 10 and 20 people and bring boss tactics more up to date. Maybe try and move away from the stat based gear MMO, into a more personal character development style of power gain. Item Loot that dropped would be more cosmetic maybe, with possibly a book/tome/scroll dropping that would advance your Character in some way. Aim for the niche market, I'm sure there are enough of us that are tired of the modern, 'McDonalds style' MMO.
Then again, probably a good thing this won't happen as I would kiss goodbye to whatever life I have now
If the direction WoW was going was the right one they wouldn't be haemorrhaging subs would they?
Why does every MMO that comes out have to be a WoW killer? As I said above, aim for the Niche market, Im sure there are enough of us to sustain a decent profit margin.
Blizz arent haemorraging subs, 100,000 last quarter on a player base of over ten million is so small as to be seasonal variation, and after the fail of SWTOR theyre not likely to be challenged anytime soon. Besides there are plenty of niche MMOs out there, WWIIOL, Darkfall, Fallen Earth to name but three. Its just that everyone says they want something different, then wont pay to play it.
This little rant is inspired more by a comment made in this thread (and also seems to crop up in every thread discussing the state of the MMORPG) rather than the actual subject raised by the OP - so-called "dumbing down".
Why is user-friendliness interpreted as "dumber" gaming? You have to be intelligent to play less accessible games? You're stupid if you think WoW: Cataclysm is a better MMORPG than Everquest or Ultima Online?
The "old MMO days" that everybody seems to reminisce about can be described with one word - hardcore. The games rewarded how hardcore you were willing to play them. They did not reward the players who were more intelligent - there would be very little difference in achievements earned by an idiot who played 12 hours a day and a genius who played 12 hours a day - and to honestly believe that your ability to get into less accessible games makes you smarter than somebody that will play WoW for half an hour every night just suggests that you are a gaming snob.
The MMO genre seems to have two seperate types of player whose wishes seem to be at odds with one another - there are the casual players who want to enjoy everything the game has to offer without being put at a disadvantage by the time they are (or aren't) willing to put in, and there are the hardcore players who want the freedom to take themselves and the game as far as possible regardless of the effort required. The simple fact of the matter is that the hardcore players are in the minority and so are likely to be the ones unhappy with the direction most developers take.
World of Warcraft is not a "dumber" game than it was in 2004. Star Wars: The Old Republic is not a "dumber" game than Star Wars Galaxies. They have been purposely designed to be more accessible and user-friendly so to attract a wider audience - if that means you can't get into the games because they don't fit into what your idea of an MMO should be (rewarding the hardcore player), then that's tough really. Your opinion is one of the minority. But don't for one second try to say your opinion is based upon the game being too stupid for you - you just sound like a condescending arse-hole.
Note - this isn't directed at anyone here in particular, though I imagine there will be plenty who contest it
Why is user-friendliness interpreted as "dumber" gaming? You have to be intelligent to play less accessible games? You're stupid if you think WoW: Cataclysm is a better MMORPG than Everquest or Ultima Online?
The "old MMO days" that everybody seems to reminisce about can be described with one word - hardcore. The games rewarded how hardcore you were willing to play them. They did not reward the players who were more intelligent - there would be very little difference in achievements earned by an idiot who played 12 hours a day and a genius who played 12 hours a day - and to honestly believe that your ability to get into less accessible games makes you smarter than somebody that will play WoW for half an hour every night just suggests that you are a gaming snob.
The MMO genre seems to have two seperate types of player whose wishes seem to be at odds with one another - there are the casual players who want to enjoy everything the game has to offer without being put at a disadvantage by the time they are (or aren't) willing to put in, and there are the hardcore players who want the freedom to take themselves and the game as far as possible regardless of the effort required. The simple fact of the matter is that the hardcore players are in the minority and so are likely to be the ones unhappy with the direction most developers take.
World of Warcraft is not a "dumber" game than it was in 2004. Star Wars: The Old Republic is not a "dumber" game than Star Wars Galaxies. They have been purposely designed to be more accessible and user-friendly so to attract a wider audience - if that means you can't get into the games because they don't fit into what your idea of an MMO should be (rewarding the hardcore player), then that's tough really. Your opinion is one of the minority. But don't for one second try to say your opinion is based upon the game being too stupid for you - you just sound like a condescending arse-hole.
Note - this isn't directed at anyone here in particular, though I imagine there will be plenty who contest it
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Inclined to agree with this.
GW2 is looking to bring some fun things to the table -- the hassle free, faux cooperation in public quests is awesome.
Really have no idea how open world pve could be balanced though, if it is dynamically scaled then how do you deal with people afking or under performing. 5 man high end pve will probably be challenging, but class stacking could be a concern. Still holding high hopes, but holding concerns too, longevity is another real one.
Whats exciting about Titan is that Blizz now have experience running a massively successful mmo with 10++ million players. It gives them the opportunity to create something from the ground up, without some of WoW's constraints. The fact it's a new IP is interesting on its own.
Nothing wrong with making MMOs more accessible, infact most of the new accessibility features benefit all player "classes" (Be it super casual or hardcore)
You cannot deny the games have been dumbed down however and it is NOTHING to do with intelligence (Not sure why you even bought that into the debate, perhaps watered down is a better term to use?)
It is everything to do with Time VS Reward, back in 'the day' the ultimate rewards came from investing time. The ratio of time:reward shrinks with every generational shift. Now it largely does not mater how much time you invest as you will have a largely diminished advantage over someone who invests much less time.
The other side effect is the removal of the feeling of achievement. Go ask any WoW player what their most memorable boss kills are, you can bet most of them occurred in Vanilla WoW or very hard content. It's not because they were necessarily better encounters, it's because the player had a much greater sense of achievement. Achievement scales with difficulty and effort, it's nowhere near what it used to be.
You cannot deny the games have been dumbed down however and it is NOTHING to do with intelligence (Not sure why you even bought that into the debate, perhaps watered down is a better term to use?)
It is everything to do with Time VS Reward, back in 'the day' the ultimate rewards came from investing time. The ratio of time:reward shrinks with every generational shift. Now it largely does not mater how much time you invest as you will have a largely diminished advantage over someone who invests much less time.
The other side effect is the removal of the feeling of achievement. Go ask any WoW player what their most memorable boss kills are, you can bet most of them occurred in Vanilla WoW or very hard content. It's not because they were necessarily better encounters, it's because the player had a much greater sense of achievement. Achievement scales with difficulty and effort, it's nowhere near what it used to be.
eve-online is a niche mmo that seems to be profitable, its almost 10 years old to
Do you think EVE would be made now? MMOs have evolved, the entire genre used to be niche.
MMOs target the cash for the best part these days.
Perhaps because of the definition of the word "dumb"? Watered down would be more apt, and I wouldn't disagree with it; but people know what they mean when they say a game is "dumbed down", and I don't agree with the sentiment. The suggestion that games becoming more accessible and easy to play has anything to do with a diminished intelligence of the average user is the point I was trying to contest.
Its all about access.
There are still large scale, epic/legendary quests even in the latest expansion of wow and similar to the old epic quests of Everquest unless you are in the right sort of guild, without the right sort of support your chances of completing the quests are close to zero.
It is also worth noting that in the original incarnation the final step of the Water sprinkler was quite a toughie, the final stage was simplified twice.
Originally the creature you needed to kill was dragon being on a 3-7ish day competitive spawn in the back end of a high level dungeon. So either you needed scouts in the dungeon to see if the mob was up and when it spawned call your guild in (if it was within your "prime" time), or you needed to camp at the spawn loc with support to keep everything clear and hold the spot. Remember this was a competitive spawn in an open dungeon. 24hours a day, mobs spawning every 20 mins or so to relieve the boredom.
Servers were world wide, so euro off time was generally either west coast US and the Hong Kong. Server and guild relations were key to either an orderly queue (a list) or KS'ing, "training" and lag inducing madness.
This sort of final step of a quest induced all kinds of drama, little of which was epic.
Myself, having completed this quest after they had "dumbed" it down once, so now the final creature spawned in an open zone (skyfire), rather than Sol B, after a 6 day 14 hour camp, yes it felt good. More so because so many people helped, stopped by and chatted and helped pass the time, mostly though I felt tired and very shortly after I went to sleep...
The quests have not been dumbed down, far from it, the legendaries in WoW for example require friends/community/guild to get together do something epic and it takes a while to achieve.
What has changed is access and definitely player expectation, not everything needs to be epic, you don't for example generally have a Sunday roast every day, but you do like to eat. Players want to log on and play, be doing something meaningful within 5 minutes, the "McDonalds" MMOs... which is why everything is metric'd and marketed and pyschanalysed.. it is less like play and more like psychology of play.
Whichever way, you certainly don't need to have to camp Ragefire for 6 days only for him to spawn at 2am on a tuesday morning, all your guild mates to be asleep and then have to watch as <Stars> come in and trounce your camp...
But hey we stole their mod rods at Kael, so honors even
(not checked for spelling, missing words, or grammar)
There are still large scale, epic/legendary quests even in the latest expansion of wow and similar to the old epic quests of Everquest unless you are in the right sort of guild, without the right sort of support your chances of completing the quests are close to zero.
It is also worth noting that in the original incarnation the final step of the Water sprinkler was quite a toughie, the final stage was simplified twice.
Originally the creature you needed to kill was dragon being on a 3-7ish day competitive spawn in the back end of a high level dungeon. So either you needed scouts in the dungeon to see if the mob was up and when it spawned call your guild in (if it was within your "prime" time), or you needed to camp at the spawn loc with support to keep everything clear and hold the spot. Remember this was a competitive spawn in an open dungeon. 24hours a day, mobs spawning every 20 mins or so to relieve the boredom.
Servers were world wide, so euro off time was generally either west coast US and the Hong Kong. Server and guild relations were key to either an orderly queue (a list) or KS'ing, "training" and lag inducing madness.
This sort of final step of a quest induced all kinds of drama, little of which was epic.
Myself, having completed this quest after they had "dumbed" it down once, so now the final creature spawned in an open zone (skyfire), rather than Sol B, after a 6 day 14 hour camp, yes it felt good. More so because so many people helped, stopped by and chatted and helped pass the time, mostly though I felt tired and very shortly after I went to sleep...
The quests have not been dumbed down, far from it, the legendaries in WoW for example require friends/community/guild to get together do something epic and it takes a while to achieve.
What has changed is access and definitely player expectation, not everything needs to be epic, you don't for example generally have a Sunday roast every day, but you do like to eat. Players want to log on and play, be doing something meaningful within 5 minutes, the "McDonalds" MMOs... which is why everything is metric'd and marketed and pyschanalysed.. it is less like play and more like psychology of play.
Whichever way, you certainly don't need to have to camp Ragefire for 6 days only for him to spawn at 2am on a tuesday morning, all your guild mates to be asleep and then have to watch as <Stars> come in and trounce your camp...
But hey we stole their mod rods at Kael, so honors even
(not checked for spelling, missing words, or grammar)
Did you have an active social life and girlfriend?
I found it easy enough to sink shedloads of time in to WoW when I was working, but I was single and only went out 2 weekends a month.
A few hours gaming every other evening is all I can manage now, and it will be even less once kids are on the cards.
I don't play any MMO at the moment, not for a year or more infact, and haven't played WoW in 2 years at least.
But there are special moments I will never forget in WoW and one of them was our first Ragnaros kill, only 7th or so on the server, but the effort put in into turning our small to medium sized guild into a raiding guild and then gradually killing each boss, then farming fire resist gear until we could make decent attempts on him, and then finally, FINALLY, the evening when he went from 1%hp to dead!!!
The cries over Vent (or was it TS back then?) were amazing, everyone was ecstatic, and it really was an epic moment. Just trying to convince people that it was worthwhile gearing up to try and fight those first two Magma giants was hard work when there were only maybe 400 level 60s on the server and no-one had killed more than 2 or 3 bosses.
That's what I want from an MMO again, that feeling of venturing from levelling, to the new world of the raid dungeon, to helping everyone in your guild gear up in other dungeons, farm materials to craft the gear you needed, and edging nearer and nearer to your goal. I loved the fact for example that you needed people to travel to the far ends of the world to visit a tiny lump of rock in the sea to get an item to allow you to advance in the dungeon. There were no shortcuts, you needed everyone to pull their weight and cooperate in more ways than one. That's what I see as epic, coordinating all those things to finally kill a big boss...
I'm getting all nostalgic now, but that's the feeling i want in an MMO and i don't get it anymore, and i feel that maybe the "rush to top level and clear all dungeons" aspect has killed the epic feeling of vanilla WoW or older MMOs (that i never played to be fair)...
/sob
I remember some of the Everquest ones fondly, but wouldn't go back to that style again.
Unless you were in a decent guild it was a right chore and I only ended up doing most of them once the next expansion had come out.
I enjoyed grinding for Vex Thal key in Lucin expansion. And Gaining access to Plane of Time in Planes of Power expansion. But lost interest for all successive epic quests in later expansions.
World of Warcraft seems to have replaced its epic quest lines with achievements. Most of which are probably more frustrating to get.
Unless you were in a decent guild it was a right chore and I only ended up doing most of them once the next expansion had come out.
I enjoyed grinding for Vex Thal key in Lucin expansion. And Gaining access to Plane of Time in Planes of Power expansion. But lost interest for all successive epic quests in later expansions.
World of Warcraft seems to have replaced its epic quest lines with achievements. Most of which are probably more frustrating to get.
I still get chills and hair stands on end when I watch back some of our nerd scream boss kill videos.
Kil'Jaeden and M'Uru were SOUL SOUL-DESTROYINGINGLY difficult but getting the kill was so much better as a result.
To date C'Thun is probably one of my favourite boss kills, when that guy died I swear I had heart pulpertations
