Caliostro said:
Therumancer said:
The "no grinding bit" sounds interesting until you consider that it's not nessicarly even a good idea. Grinding exists like it currently does because to be honest it works. Casual MMORPGs have been attempted before, but typically fail due to a general lack of long term goals and accomplishments, as well as chasing away the hardcore crowd. A lot of those browser and free to play MMORPGS were specifically developed to try and draw in a casual crowd.
Not to mention the fact that grinding is needed to prevent people from going through content too fast, and/or encouraging people to replay what is there. They can only produce so many zones and so much content. If they want people to keep playing they have to keep people occupied with what is there until they can produce more content.
This is not at all true, and the fact that so many developers subscribe to that theory is most of the reason I avoid MMOs like the plague.
Games like Counter Strike, Jedi Academy and such have no grinding and the former is still a landmark in online gaming, while the second manages to stay "barely alive" 7 years after release with 0 support from the developers. These are just examples, but the bottom line is, if the GAMEPLAY is good enough people will play the game... to play the game. Because the game is fun. Which, to my mind, is what a game should be.
Games that introduce grinding usually do so because they're NOT fun to play. They're boring and repetitive, and need to artificially inflate gameplay so people stick around for a shallow ego stroke everytime the "level up" message shows up.
What your talking about are online competitive shooters, not really MMOs as there is no real persistant world other than perhaps leaderboards. Competitive "twitch" games like that present immediate gratification to players, which is why they continue to be made. In such games it's about having a cool firefight in the short term, and that is typically the point, rather than working towards something in a persistant enviroment where there are always hundreds of people active at any given time. What's more part of the point of an MMORPG is specifically to remove the equasion of individual skill (other than perhaps mental abillities and disapline) and focus on the development of character abillities. Detaching the player from his avatar in a way FPS games do not.
What's more most FPS games, including things like "Counterstrike" and "Team Fortress" *DO* involve grind, and a massive amount of it. After all your basically killing the same basic things using the same basic weapons, on the same basic maps, again and again and again. Any long term goals ARE a grind to get a certain kill/death ratio or move up on leaderboards. Ironically for all the criticisms, most MMORPGs already have this kind of thing in them. WoW for examples has a ranked PVP system where people can login to the same maps to beat the crud out of each other and play capture the flag a nearly infinite number of times. They even have low-level divisions which are about skill given the way gear is capped (basically you have to build and play an effective character using what tools are availible at that level... basically twink wars, which is a HUGE deal to some people, especially since unlike endgame PVP there is no real chance of new lewt from the latest dungeon changing the landscape, or forcing everyone to play catchup to remain competitive). Basically the FPS-arena type thing is more of a FEATURE of an MMO, rather than the focus.
That said, MMORPGs were never really intended for the "immediate gratification" crowd, which is why they are based on a subscription model (so far) under the assumption of long-term play. No type of game is for everyone. For the shooter crowd, there are literally dozens of short term "gratification" games, some of which can be incredibly involved with long term goals like earning rank to unlock weapons and such.
When it comes towards working towards long-term goals, a game where everyone is always on the same level and twitch reflexs are the determining factor is counter productive to that since the only real "goals" that can exist by definition have to be cosmetic, or based on relative ranking. This is why even most shooter-RPG hybrids have gear systems, and at least some degree of experience point based customization. In say Borderlands some newbie fresh off the bus with his starter gun is not going to beat an established character with top end gear... period (if nothing else the shields will regen too fast to do any real damage, and something like a turret, phase explosion, or bloodwing will resolve the fight even if the established guy is so reflex deficient in comparison that he can't line up his gun).
I suspect one of the big problems with shooter fans and MMO fans is generally that shooter fans don't like being looked down upon, and to some extent like the idea of a persistant world to hang out in, a nearly endless PVP map so to speak. Shooter fans also want to be able to login here and there and get something done (even if it's gaining or losing a few ranking points), as opposed to needing to make a long-term committment equal to at least a part time job. Then of course there is always the issue of the casual player who logs into a game and is grinding cows or whatever, seeing people talking about killing gods, and strutting around with their glowing uber-weapons which anyone dedicated enough to the game (even casually) to notice is going to wish. It can be demoralizing when you learn that the guy who has a weapon like that put like three years moving through the game level by level to get to that point. It hurts even more when you realize that what your doing is irrelevent since your basically power grinding in an effort to play "catch up" to relevent content. It's annoying when all of the lore seems irrelevent, as the storylines are what made a lot of the early game enjoyable.
At any rate, for all of this long rambling, my basic attitude is that if your a DEDCICATED shooter/immediate gratification fan, back away from MMORPGs entirely. They generally aren't for you. Don't expect the world to adapt to you, anymore than I (as an RPG fan) demand that they add phased pseudo-turn based combat to Counterstrike, or Bioshock 2 (which I do play). There are plenty of deep FPS games out there, some of which even have social lobbies and such apparently. Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead, can be fairly deep given the game style, and TF2 in paticular has been accused a couple of times of simply becoming TOO involved for many of the fans due to all the changes and additions.
