Rethinking the MMOG 163
Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."
Interesting points (Score:2)
Re:Interesting points (Score:5, Insightful)
In turn they opened the door to the average Joe who always secretly though D&D and online gaming might be fun if it wasn't for the "nerds" and the amount of time it would take out of their life. They also set the system specs low enough to where anyone with a somewhat modern computer could play it. However, through this "dumbing down" (which I'm not using as a derogatory statement, I'll be the first to say that a lot of MMO's are unnecessarily difficult in a lot of respects) they alienated a lot of the original core audience of MMORPG's. For every WoW player (well, maybe not every seeing that there's so many of them) that makes an joke about EverQuest players, you can be assured that there's an EQ player that's making a crack about WoW "carebear" players.
The core problem is that you'll always have 3 core audiences: Casual players, power levelers/stat whores, and RPGers who are all looking for distinctly different gaming experiences and because of this there's never going to be the typical progression path for the genre. I think because of this, articles that talk about "rethinking the genre" have it all wrong. How do you rethink a genre that everyone wants to jump into, yet appeals (in different ways) to such a diverse audience? Do we rethink the genre or do we finally give up on trying to appeal to everybody and focus on certain core audiences? I think that's the one thing that Blizzard did get right on WoW...they went out of their way to appeal to the casual gamer. Until someone designs a game grand enough in scale to encompass a caste system to divide and account for different play styles or creates a game with seperate servers that drastically alter the game play for each type of player, I think we're better off picking a target audience and sticking with it.
Re:Interesting points (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics.
Blizzard graphics in WoW are actually quite intense. They have their own style and incredibly complex textures. They use fewer polygons in some areas, but are not blocky because they avoid the blockiness by reducing the number of 90-degree angles. (Thus, things don't look blocky to the eye -- cf: City of Heroes.) Many small items or sections use lots of polygons to give it a "full" and complex feel even when surrounding things are relatively low poly counts.
The main gameplay thing that wow mostly eliminated was camping global spawns. If getting rid of what most people consider an utterly stupid concept is "dumbing it down" then I want to play that dumb game. Some people actually enjoyed that aspect of competition in EQ -- but most people who have outgrown pimples eschew such games. Blizzard took most of the best parts of many games, and did it right, making a fun game and hoped people would play it instead of implementing cheesy tricks to keep people playing longer. They also know their audience isn't the hardcore kid with nothing better to do than call his 20 friends when a spawn happened. It's now the somewhat richer adult, often with a wife and kids, who has a few hours here and there to play, and most importantly is willing to pony up $15/month to have fun during that time.
They also have some of the "hardcore" kind of things that others have grown to recognize, and love/hate it. I'm talking 40-man raids (recently changed to 25-man), which are difficult.
The only thing that's actually dumbed down is pvp. And even that could be changed, if they wanted, without affecting other worlds. There are actually only 2 groups of people - casuals and powergamers, and people fall between those two. PvPers are often a subset of powergamers, and RPers may be anything.
Of the three groups people you discuss, no matter what game, the casuals will always bitch about the powergamers who will always bitch about the RPers, who will always bitch (in ye olde english) about everyone who doesn't RP. But WoW actually caters to the three groups much better than other games, and I'd even say succeeds quite well. You can accomplish something as a casual, and you can accomplish something as a powergamer. And there's a little corner for thee, Master RPer. Goeth now and stand there and leaveth the rest alone
Re: (Score:2)
You completely neglect the fact that the entire endgame is based around these 25-man raids and once you get to the maximum level, there is nothing left to do other than PvP - and even then those players that do 25-man raids have better gear/stats than those that don't.
I'll admit though, the burning crusade PvP awards are nice
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One way to combat this (and a way which I don't think would work for WoW the way it currently is) would be to run the game for different lengths of time. say.. 3 months or so, depending on how much content there is, and then switch things around a little at each reset so it's a new world every time. If player-houses are allowed, maybe some kind of token could carried through to the "new
Re: (Score:2)
You completely neglect the fact that the entire endgame is based around these 25-man raids and once you get to the maximum level, there is nothing left to do other than PvP - and even then those players that do 25-man raids have better gear/stats than those that don't.
You can actually see the stats of most raid gear by going to the euro wow site [wow-europe.com] and poking around.
I do not deny that the end-game consists of harder and harder raids. 10-man karazhan can be pugged, but it'll be a while before pugs can beat it. But most people can get 9 others together with a common goal. If you haven't met 9 others on the way to 70 that would want you in the group, you're doing something wrong.
For the casual player, 5-man instances are the end-game. And then 5-man heroics, and there are
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not that WoW is perfect either - they encourage the whole time sink concept. Good example of this is Cenarion Expedition reputation - you'd have to run Steamvaults something like 50+ times (each run t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you didn't play any other MMOs then
In most other games, beating a "Boss" mob is simply having a tank getting beaten on by boss while your other pla
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you kill Ouro or C'htun?
Did you kill bosses in Naxxramas?
Did you clear Karazhan?
Did you kill Magtheridon?
Did you kill bosses in Serpentshire Caverns?
Did you finish all dungeons in heroic difficulty?
There are many very challenging encounters in WoW, many who demand very tight coordination between team members.
Re: (Score:2)
Regarding other parts of your comment, I feel that 'dumbed-down' is bad terminology to use. Making the game less tedious isn't a nerf, it's smart design. Difficulty shouldn't be measured in man-hours. An excellent example of a difficult but accessible zone is Blackwing Lair. You literally walk in the door to your
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't he seem to want contradictory things (Score:3, Insightful)
If you had an extraordinary hero who could do everything right off the bat, what would make him/her extraordinary then?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not that I'd want such a thing myself, but I stopped playing MMORPGS years ago.
Well.. What are they doing wrong? ... (Score:2)
1. Level grinding sucks. We had to do it in Final Fantasy 1,2,3 and most of 4. Same with Dragon Warrior/Quest series. It sucks.
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
3. How do you manage quests for multiple people? This requires real DM's to do, and not set script spawn monsters.
4. Perhaps we ought to integrate a real-time element rather than "hit, hit, hit, chu
Re:Well.. What are they doing wrong? ... (Score:5, Informative)
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them?
America's Army has the best solution to that - the in-game Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.. [filefront.com] "If a player violates enough ROE he is transported to a virtual jail cell at Fort Leavenworth with nothing to do but clink against the bars, pondering his sins. As if to create remorse, one can view the tip of a sunset from the lone, high window the cell but only if one is standing on the toilet."
Re:Ultima Online during 2000 had most of this (Score:2)
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
I would agree. I haven't played Ultima Online for about 7 years now (god has it been that long) but I really enjoyed playing it at the time due to the fact character advancement was based on skills and not levels.
Again, Ultima O
Re: (Score:2)
Animal Crossing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
2. High level areas are fun for the first few times you do it. They are designed as a real challange. But once you figured out the challange, yes they can get boringin when
Re: (Score:2)
I liked how EVE Online dealt with griefers... put bounties on their heads. Sure, the bounties become a trophy for the griefers, but so what? At least people can profit from pk'ing the griefers. And in a way it works into the theme of the game. I mean, what is a space game without space pirates? It is especially interesting when you get certain griefers with a reputation. And people talk about them. It really adds to the d
Re: (Score:2)
Gold farmers have to do with gold currency, not gold mining. In WoW, mining is just another profession, although certain elements (Silver, Gold, True Silver, etc...) are rarer than others (Copper, Tin, Iron, Mithril, etc...).
Gold farmers (AKA Real Money Traders (RMT)) are people who try to earn a lot of in-game money, usually by auctioning items for more than they
Missing Something? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? RPGs and the lack of real changes. (Score:2)
At this point the vast majority of MMOGs are RPGs. From where I sit it seems that all RPGs have always been about being a stats geek. I'm wondering what fundamentals he thinks are being overlooked.
Would they improve with a better story line instead of hack and slash? Potentially but you don't really see a
Re:Really? RPGs and the lack of real changes. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this varies a lot from DM to DM and system to system. White Wolf in particular has a system that really doesn't push for stating. In fact, the thing that made each of the White Wolf (VTM and WW) campaigns I've played in so much fun WAS the story. I'm a geek, through and through, I have geek friends. I used to go to hang out at a local Perkins and recap the game, in story format, to some of my geeky (but not geeky enough to dice) friends. Heck, you kick back in the smoking section and tell a chapter of an epic story and people get interested. I had one guy ask me if I was talking about a movie script. The retelling of those stories was often as much fun as playing them the first time too.
In a MMO video game, I don't think it would have much of an impact though. For two reasons:
1) The games are stat dependent. It doesn't matter how well you know the Barron, his aura is going to smack you and you need the gear (stats) to survive it.
2) As soon as anything is done once, instructions are posted on the web. It doesn't matter if you spend 4 days in the libraries learning all you can about the boss, when it comes down to it, someone can just look up the encounter on thottbot or wowhead and know it all.
Think about it, if you're telling a story from a pen and paper game to another gamer, it's new and different. If you're telling a story about how you took out a boss in WoW to another WoW player, they're going to respond with "Oh yeah, my guild took him out last week."
-Rick
Re: (Score:2)
Some seemed to
Re: (Score:2)
But a few good story tellers (and DMs) who really took the focus off of leveling and put it into the story really changed my approach to gaming.
Damn you, now I'm starting to get an urge to fire up a WW or VTM campaign again
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, fella, don't knock it until you've tried it (going insane, that is). Heh.
Damn you, now I'm starting to get an urge to fire up a WW or VTM campaign again.
As I've gotten older the thrill in playing has more to do with playing with old friends. If it weren't for people who I have a real history with I don't know if I'd even be playing any RPGs anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
-Rick
Re: (Score:2)
No, YOU, think about XP. (Score:2)
Not everyone does. I typically just don't give shit. XP is something that just happens to increase, and at points you go "ding" and you get some new option that might change the way you play your character a little. Big difference at least in MMORPG land between a healer who can just heal and a healer who get his rez spell. "Oops, sorry buddy, didn't notice your meter there, *cough*, can I try my new rez spell on you btw?"
I have done a lot of MMORPG's as well as the western CRPG's and the Pen & Paper s
Sounds to me... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust your ability to balance things later. That?s the easy part.
No. It most definitely is not. Example: I'm a relatively new member of the dev team at Eternal Lands [eternal-lands.com], an open source, free (as in beer) MMORPG. Early on, the dev team had added in a sword worth an utter fortune to an NPC. It could be crafted, but took an obscenely high level to craft. Eventually (after some similar problems on a smaller scale), the devs came to the realization that once people reached that level, the market would be flooded: people would make those swords in bulk, sell them to the NPC, and completely destroy the game's economy. Fixing it got on their TODO list, but wasn't a top priority item. There was so much else to develop, and hey, nobody was near that manufacturing level yet. A minor oversight, though: you can get blessings from your god (including the manufacturing God) to temporarily up your levels -- all for just a 50 gold fee. The high level manufacturers started making and selling the swords in bulk and threw the economy out of whack.
Now it's out of whack. How do you fix it? Not only do the manufacturers now have obscene amounts of money, but through their purchases, they've messed up the amount of money that others have. Do you just roll back the entire game to a few months prior? Good way to lose almost your entire player base. It took a long time for them to rebalance the game, and they lost a number of players in the process.
In short: NEVER trust your ability to rebalance things later. That's the HARD part. Plan everything to death before you hook it in.
Re: (Score:2)
Ego (Score:2)
Single player games play to the ego. YOU are given a quest of great importance. Only YOU could defeat the really f'ing strong bad guy. No one but YOU can organize a rag-tag bunch of badasses to smash evil and bring blah blah blah to the blah blah blah.
How many single player games are there that represent you amongst a whole group of potential heroes? If you decide to slack off and not do what you're supposed to, does someone else st
change the world (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My first MMOG: boring (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing that classic linear offline games are boring and limiting and going away. But that's like saying that a book is too limiting because it only has one possible outcome. With a video game or a book, I want to be the hero, I want to see the journey. I don't want to be thrown into a world where my only goal is to make money or get bigger. What fun is that? I can do that in real life.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If you were sitting around watching timers, you weren't playing the
Time wasted^3 + experience = power (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer is simple. These are games of skill. If I decided to play chess or Counter Strike against someone who had been playing it for 2 years straight, they might kick my ass, but not because they have a super Queen that can teleport across the game board while I only have pawns, nor because everyone else starts out with shoot-through-walls rail guns while I start with a knife.
Playing most MMORPGs is like playing chess against someone with a teleporting queen while you get three pawns, or playing Counter strike where you start with a knife and everyone else gets instant kill rapid fire laser guns. MMORPGs stack the game against you twice. First, people who play more will be more skilled at playing (make sense, eh?). Second though, the game also rewards them a thousand times over for playing a lot. So, not only do you play with people who are more experienced, but have the MMORPG equivalent of teleporting Queens against your two pawns.
Start a n00b off in Counter Strike or Chess, and the n00b at least has the possibility of winning. Take the most skilled WoW player in existence, give him a level 1 character, and make him fight a level 60 no matter what happens, the level 60 will always win.
This is the reason why a lot of people loath MMORPGs. I love the idea of a massive online world with other players to interact with, quest with, and fight with (or against). What I hate is that MMORPGs unlike most other multiplayer games, is that MMORPGs DEMAND that you spend thousands of hours of your life in them before you are even given something that kinda-sorta resembles and even footing with the top players.
Why can't we have an MMORPG where the older and more experience are not given the double bonus of l33t stats and equipment in addition to superior skill at playing that they should have developed?
Hell, I'll answer the question. The reason why MMORPGs used this worthless system is because they have simple and basic gameplay. If in an MMORPG your stats/numbers/equipment didn't constantly slide upwards, people would simply quit the game. The game play is so dull that MMORPGs need to rely on addiction to seeing stats go up to keep people in these games. Take out of the 'achievement' aspect that comes with killing 10,000 kobolds and people would not suffer the horrible and repetitive gamplay of an MMORPG. The gameplay of MMORPGs does not stand on its own for very long. Hence, we have piles of MMORPGs with atrocious game play that retain players by keeping them addicted to the 'achievement' aspect of their repetitive gameplay.
When you see an MMORPG that can stand on the merits of its actual game play and not rely on hopeless addiction to watching stats slowly tick up, you will be seeing the first TRUE second generation MMORPG... not the copy cat Everquest crap that is spaming the market right now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your link to unstopable force [thottbot.com] didn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
www.darkfallonline.com for more info
Re:Time wasted^3 + experience = power (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the problem is poeple playing MMO are focusing way too much on kicking each other's asses in PvP rather than the coopertive playing that was originally intended?
I run a medium sized guild, or Linkshell, as it's called in the game, that has players of various levels, skills, and dedication. We do events where we work togather for a certain goal, and everyone, no matter how much levels or skills they may have, they uaully find some way to contribute. It doesn't really matter if the guy next to your pawn has a teleporting queen if you are working togather on the same team. I donno about what the majority of the players thesedays want, but I do know that it's more fun for me to play with people who aim to help out each other and work togather, rather than waiting for any chance to frag my buttock whenever my back is turned.
I mean, yeah, there are MMOs where PvP was the whole selling point, but I am not even gonna touch those. IMHO, if you just want to show off your skills, kick people's asses while yelling something obscene, wihout putting many hours to level up your character, maybe a session based game where you get an even battlefield each time, like first person shooters, is a better choice?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I use to play Puzzle Pirates [wikipedia.org] for quite awhile. I spent several months grinding(pillaging) and saving to buy all the stuff I could want. However, Puzzle Pirates really has two tiers of items, things that are really expensive, and things that are only attainable by winning contests of skill against other players. That second category was something I was never able to win, not
Re: (Score:2)
I would like mmogames to be more skill based, but I just can't picture it. Subspace/continium is as close as I can see to what you are looking for and that game gets boring after a few hou
Re: (Score:2)
Treat a MMORPG as an RPG, not a FPS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
WW2OL.
Everyone gets basically the same equipment. Yes, longtime players have the capability of getting slightly better equipment (like an Fw190 instead of Me109e4), but then only in very limited quantities (ie they are competing against each other for the limited resource, and thus trying to kill each other once
Re: (Score:2)
Try playing an MMO that isn't an MMORPG. Not surprisingly, MMORPGs have RPG elements, such as leveling and stats. That's why they're called MMORPGs.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.armageddon.org/ [armageddon.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It came to mean that when the GM became a computer.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if for warriors, the game was a FPS hack and slash. Charge the enemy lines, chop shit up, use your shield, slaughter, pillage, you know the game. CS with swords.
Imagine if for a thief, the game played mor
Re: (Score:2)
If you think that killing bunnies to get levels is what makes a game for you, then there really is nothing that needs fixing. The current crop of MMORPGs with the possible exception of old UO follow this formula with minor variations. If this is what you want, you got it. The next "generation" if MMORPGs will almost certainly regurgitate this
Re: (Score:2)
That said, I think that there is a lot of people out there that are untapped. Lots of people have read some good old fashion Cyberpunk and completely get off on the idea of massive online (fantasy or otherwise) worlds where people figh
Re: (Score:2)
I have trouble believing that any MMO game will ever catch on without these elements. Without the constant progression, it'd be hard to keep players coming back for months and years.
Remember that the "spreadsheet" gameplay was originally implemented because it was the simplest way to do it. Physical challenges and tests of skill are harder to balance and harder to imp
Levelling too important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps a majority of the problem is the ridiculously unrealistic gap between an experienced warrior and one with relatively less experience.
I think the entire problem would resolve itself if the difference between a level 1 character's fighting ability and a level 90 character's fighting ability was significantly less.
In an MMORPG environment, if 3 level 1 characters could gang up and take down someone who has reached the highest point you can reach, then I think the entire concept of the grind would take a back seat to interesting gameplay.
PlanetSide is an MMOFPS that takes this concept and deals with it quite well. You can spend your points each level to gain the ability to use new weapons or vehicles, with some abilities having pre-requisite abilities. If you want, you can trade the abilities back for the points you used to earn them, but you can only 'sell' one ability every 6 hours. Once you're level 8 or so, you have access to pretty much everything the game has to offer, and further levels only serve to expand the number of things you can do at once -- essentially expanding your flexibility. But by no means is a level 20 character STRONGER than a level 8 character, they simply have more venues of attack.
Original Comment: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222646&
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Looking at the wrong thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Let the players run the game (Score:4, Interesting)
The best massively multiplayer online game I've seen or heard of, bar none, is Tom Vogt's BattleMaster [battlemaster.org]. (Said Tom [slashdot.org] is actually a Slashdot regular, too, and with a 3-digit UID ;-) ) While it is not perfect (as what can be?) and is more or less in a state of perpetual beta (which I find a great deal of fun, but others wouldn't), it does a great job, in general, of dealing with the powergamers who want to turn the whole thing into a numbers game, and does its best to give even casual gamers the chance to participate meaningfully (ie, invest ~15 mins/day, and keep up pretty well with those who invest 15 mins/hour).
BattleMaster is a roleplaying strategy game, where the player has a small family of nobles who can command troops in any of several different classes. The real key here is that in BattleMaster, there is precious little centrally-provided content: the interaction between the players is, essentially, the whole game. Which isn't to say that it's pure, text-based roleplaying (though the game is entirely text-based, aside from the maps); it has a relatively comprehensive system that helps to model a medieval European setting, complete with diplomacy, battles, wars, etc. But all the story is created by the players.
It's a heck of a lot of fun, and I've been playing it for the past 3 years and more. I don't explain it too well, so take a look at the site, linked both above and in my sig.
If someone were to take the concept and make a commercial MMORPG out of it, I dare say they could do pretty darn well--at least, once they had enough players signed up to populate a large area. The fun is directly proportional to the complexity of the system, which grows out of the number of people playing...
Dan Aris
More reinvention (Score:2)
There may be archives of the handful of conferences they held as well, which were filled with a bunch of great talks and new ideas.
Multiple games at once... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... what if all those were one and the same? More on that in a second. A quick look at MMOG Chart [mmogchart.com] reveals the market to be, at most, about 15 million players. Considering the increasing popularity of the genre, increasing access to broadband worldwide, and economic conditions worldwide, the market will be increasing. Maybe some day there will be 30 million or 50 million MMO players.
What this means is that there's room for other types of games (I can see a Cabela's Big Game Hunt MMO as being appealing). If Ultima Online can survive a decade on 100,000 subscribers, we could see an explosion of focused , low-population MMOs if the overall market keeps increasing. It would just be a continuation of what we see today.
But back to my earlier question? Why do these all need to be separate games? Why can't they all be in one?
What if there was a game that combined all of these elements and let players decide what they wanted to do? I'll put my example in "real-world" terms but this would obviously be modified to sci-fi or fantasy terms as needed. Let's say you've got a dog breeder that wants to breed his prize dogs with a specific type of wild dog (this player largely plays a Nintendogs-type of sub-game). This wild dog is only found in a very dangerous nature reserve (dungeon) controlled by an enemy territory. He'd have to hire mercenaries to infiltrate and capture this animal (traditional combat MMO players). The enemy territory also has players protecting their resources.
Let's say something needs to be transported. Ordinarily, you might be able to use in-game methods (CPU controlled) but you may need to hire a smuggler to take it (combat driving game). The goal of this, the end result is to have a lot of different sub-communities while on the larger scale, you've got a lot of players you're interacting with.
I think that's the "next level" in MMOs and it would solve a lot of the problems with current ones (albeit introducing new ones).
PlanetSide had a great leveling system... (Score:2)
It worked like this: you earned battleranks (BRs) for capturing bases and killing enemy soldiers and vehicles. The BR cap was set at 20 last time I played.
BRs allow you to purchase various equipment and vehicle certifications.
The only thing a higher level gives you is more versatility. A battlerank 20's chaingun is not more powerful than a battlerank 6's. In fact the only difference (on paper) between a level 1 and
Re: (Score:2)
Too many rules (Score:2)
Varying quest types by level and by class (Score:2)
One idea that popped up while reading this, was varying quests by level in an MMORPG (addressing points #1 and #2 of the article, namely boring gameplay and grinding). Anyone who has played WoW knows that most of the quests boil down to the following archetypes:
1) Fetch X number of Y o
Ahem... (Score:2)
He is talking about the most successful new genre of games, isn't he?
instances (Score:2)
Worlds need to be persistent. This is huge and will revolutionize things. Yeah..it means you have to make a huge world to support a lot of players. Guess what? That will make it awesome. The greatest MMORPG that will come along will be one that will have a land area that is equivalent to a la
Re: (Score:2)
The WoW server I play on has 11k accounts on it. I can spend hours wandering around some places and *never see anyone*. With the exception of a few specific places I won't pass anyone flying around, I'll never hear a comment other than an occasional person selling something. Calls to help perform
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Which isn't really doing that hot at the moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Heavy WoW player that just quit (Score:2)
I liked playing the game but as you can see from my number of high level characters and my experiences in game, it was really
MMOG (Score:2)
That way, newbies can play against and with newbies, and not get shafted by playing people who've been playing the game since dinosaurs roamed the planet. And more i
Short Article Analysis (Score:2)
I have a tip for the author: If you don't like that kind of game, don't play them. No, I'm serious. Go play Counterstrike Source, Gears of War, or Diablo 2. You can even play Counterstrike Source or Diablo 2 online with a limited numbe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
why?
In a non-level based game, your skills have to only adhere to three rules:
1: The skill should be fun.
2: No trade skill should be not worthwhile.
3: Common skills must be useful almost all the time; rare skills must not overpower common skills.
In a level-based game, you have a slightly harder design, with four rules.
3: No combination of Defensive skills should make a character invincible for the rest of the
Re: (Score:2)
2: No trade skill should be not worthwhile.
3: Common skills must be useful almost all the time; rare skills must not overpower common skills.
1 is very hard
2 is nearly impossible
3 is doable with soem effort
remember even making a single player game fun is hard. doing so with a multiplayer game with mulitiple classes and several valid avenues of advancement/playing styles is very hard and only a few companies ever get it right. The rest just hack somethign out and promise updates.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine that in the middle of the forest is a main travel path. You see lvl 60's go through it all the time. You're guild makes treehouses on either side of the path and camo's them. Then ambushes people as they go through? That would be awesome. Truly unique.