Treblaine said:
BrotherRool said:
Treblaine said:
OK, then please DO enlighten me to the MMO in existence where:
-your actions on the world have persistent effect
-it has deep gameplay controls (more than EVE's space sim)
-Your interaction with the millions of players online it truly significant, not just the dozen or so in your party of PvP instance.
-No subscription fee greater than $2 per month.
-No excessive grinding for progress
As an nitpick your significant interactions with millions of others is almost impossible, depending how you define significant. Because if millions of people are having significant actions then, everyones actions basically have 1/1 000 000 significance, because everyone else is doing them too. I think EVE level interaction is pretty near the peak really, maybe actual worldbuilding could added but not much more without screwing over gameplay.
That's a theoretical thing though, not really commenting on your MMO thing and well naturally EVE level of interaction is possible which is pretty good, and EVE doesn't have some of the other things you mentioned. Tho I thought EVEs game controls had problems with clunkiness and lack of usability as opposed to depth
If you don't significantly interact with millions or even thousands then the "massive" part is worthless. It's not really different from Call of Duty where dozens interact in a particular instance. The "million Play MMO" is therefore a gimmick, it sounds good but could be removed without affecting gameplay.
That's the thing, in a regular RPG or other game when I kill Diablo, he is dead... or at least until very specific circumstances bring him back in a sequel. Not simply me leaving the dungeon for 5 minutes and another raiding party coming in after me. The only way I can fight him again (in the same game) is to rewind the clock, go back to an earlier save or start a new game.
I would pay such a large amount of money to have such an insignificant role in the world. I understand the MMOs sacrifice tactical control (ability to manoeuvre and aim to deal more damage and avoid more damage yourself) for more strategic control but that is compromised for how I am making so little progress in the environment. Enemy scaling is inevitable which makes most weapon upgrades pointless except for being permissible to access other areas.
Other games the difficulty scaling is not in your character attributes but your own knowledge and mastery. The RPG aspect should be used to EXPAND your your repertoire of abilities for increased variety of gameplay, not just increase damage by 50% to only see all enemy health increase by 50%.
Just make a big MMO like Skyrim and have a well implemented multiplayer aspect. No need to be "massively multiplayer" with all the huge costs and conflict of interests with subscription fee. Yes, there is a huge conflict of interest in a subscription fee to drag out the game with grinding and fluff just so that people keep paying for more months.
Begun, the off-topic "What's so great about MMOs" forum war, has.
What you say is fair enough, but it is undermined that several million people enjoy these things enough to pay for them and play them umpteen hours straight. It's clearly not a genre for you but I would say, despite all logic to the contrary, it's just factually unsound to suggest MMOs don't have something special to them.
I guess it's possible that a multiplayer Skyrim would be good enough but there are games wit interesting multiplayers that haven't taken from the MMO crowd.
I imagine the advantages of MMOs are, real economies, chance to meet people you don't know, non-pre-scheduled interaction. Community, culture. The world feels full because so many real interacting things inhabit it. The world feels real because it's always the same world you go back to and it's largely the same for every other person playing it. If you just have multiplayer Skyrim, someone has to go to someone else's world, or it's a world that gets very imbalanced if the people who originally inhabited it drop off.
And EVE level interaction isn't possible in any other type of genre. On a smaller scale, Realm of the Mad God makes it feel like you really interact with all the other people in the world because if you finish enough quests the world gets destroyed and replaced with a new one.
Star Wars Galaxies also had a huge amount of interaction as you could build buildings, create towns, cities, elect mayors between yourselves etc.
And in any MMO they limit your ability to do any one thing, forcing you to interact with other people. You don't need 1000's of people for that, but having 1000's keeps those interactions fresh and when you have thousands of people all interacting with each other, things happen.
MMOs do have serious flaws but they offer enough good for lots of people to look past those flaws. And those flaws aren't necessarily insurmountable, just recently we've seen three MMOs, Guild Wars 2, Terra and The Old Republic all solves pieces of those puzzles.
Respawning enemies is okay, there's something fun about the idea of fighting the tide and it would feel more unnatural not to have enemies around, the problem is when enemies respawn in quest areas that devalues the feeling of the questing. Solutions to that include instancing and radically rethinking the quest system. For instance, a crafting only system would completley rid the problem, or if you had it that the main quests all involved ways of enemies trying to take over places, you could push them back and gain land and gaining land as a group gives rewards but it's balanced that the further you push them back, the harder they push, so it becomes inevitable that the land will be lost again or you have to fight for it. If you have quests at all they'd be mini things you can do to help the progress of the war.
What's more if you make it so the spawns and assaults are kinda randomised with special event sprinklers, then give easy ways for players to be alerted to places losing ground, then it would feel very dynamic, suddenly out of nowhere one of your cities gets sneak attacked, 200 people converge on it and after a hard fight defeat the invaders off. Or one gets taken over completely and people have to band together to go out to take it back.
In fact if you generate free land and cities by some sort of algorithm, you can have groups of people striking out into the waste lands to claim an area for their own and make a new city. It would make a very awesome political system where you naturally ally with someone just by existing in some areas. People would join the biggers ones for the larger power but some people would want to be in control and so set out to create their own piece, and in time they'd try to make war against the large cities so that people come over and join their city.
People would need classes, Hunter, Crafter, Smith, Merchant etc so that there were plenty of fun but not unique activities to do in a freed area, so that fighting to claim areas would be more unique feeling. People who just wanted to fight would patrol the borders and take out small bands before they became big ones.
I actually kinda wish someone would make this now, it would make your actions feel very real, you could have a Lord of the Rings/Mordor aesthetic so it really feels something when you take back an area. It would look especially cool on the edge. You could give people hard missions (dungeon dives) into enemy territory and if they manage to get all the way through, they win information about where the next attack will come from for everyone.
On a larger scale there could be an incredibly difficult enemy fortress that can only be overcome with months/years of effort planning and when it is overcome they release what's basically the new expansion pack they've been working on.
