Hope you weren't too excited about that Elder Scrolls MMO

[Agayek]

Have YOU? Which ones did you play? Darkfall, with its tiny population? Did you ever see what became of Ultima Online after player housing went in? Boy that was a treat. The entire fucking countryside looked like New Jersey with row houses on every free scrap of land.

There's extremely good reason to fear the consequences of non-instanced player housing in a game with an Elder-Scrolls level fan base. I've played MMO suburbia already, I'm in no rush to play it again.

As for Skyrim making a good foundation for a MMO, I'm going to have to agree that it wouldn't. Yes, it's a sandbox, but so is Sim City. Not all sandboxes are the same, and single player CRPGs and MMORPGs are distinct genres with different game play conventions. You could borrow SOME ELEMENTS from Skyrim, but you couldn't tweak 1-2 things and have a working MMO. It would be *awful*.

I never made any mention of free-reign player housing. I said specifically player cities. There would have to be a group of some minimum size in order to even build anything, and there would be an area around it where other groups would not be able to found their own city. It would also have the size limitations I mentioned in a previous post.

I'm well aware of what rampant player housing can do, and I'm not suggesting it.

As for the rest of it, what in it wouldn't work well in an MMO? I'm honestly curious on the specifics here. There would definitely need to be balance changes made, as the skill/leveling system was clearly never designed with balance in mind, but what part of the core mechanics wouldn't work?

 

[SajuukKhar]

I never made any mention of free-reign player housing. I said specifically player cities. There would have to be a group of some minimum size in order to even build anything, and there would be an area around it where other groups would not be able to found their own city. It would also have the size limitations I mentioned in a previous post.

I'm well aware of what rampant player housing can do, and I'm not suggesting it.

As for the rest of it, what in it wouldn't work well in an MMO? I'm honestly curious on the specifics here. There would definitely need to be balance changes made, as the skill/leveling system was clearly never designed with balance in mind, but what part of the core mechanics wouldn't work?

Player cities run into the same problem of land as player houses do.

Eventually the groups that got there first would establish a city and over time all lands would be taken up making it impossible for new people to get to do it.

Furthermore the game devs would have to make large spaces of nothingness lands for these cities that could be used for other, more useful things.

Player cities are a bad idea at their core.

 

[Agayek]

Skill decay requires the ability to lock the skill once you get it where you want it. Otherwise you have a system where you cook a bun and you're suddenly not a Grandmaster Swordsman any more, and I think we can all agree that's a rubbish system.

Not what I'm talking about. The skill decay I'm trying to get at is not a zero-sum getup. In essence, it's a (relatively slow) process by which over X amount of play time where a skill is not used, it's value starts to decrease. Right off the top of my head, I'd probably go with 1% of a level per hour of playtime or thereabouts, and the percentage value would slowly increase the longer you go without using that particular skill, with a minimum threshold it can decrease in a given period of time (probably something like 10% of the initial, highest level per week). You can keep any skill capped by using it regularly, but skills you never use atrophy. It keeps players invested in the set of skills they selected as their "core". How big that is depends entirely on the player and how much time they want to invest into it.

 

[Andrewtheeviscerator]

2) Have you ever played an MMO with player cities? You don't need to instance them anywhere. Let a group (let's call it a guild for simplicity's sake) claim some land, the size of which being dependent on how many people in the group, then give a reasonable amount of space for it. The only instancing involved would be for the player housing once the guild gets above a certain size and it's no longer feasible for everyone to have their own distinct plot (and this is good because it discourages massive hoard guilds).

You really haven't played many sandbox MMOs before have you?

Have YOU? Which ones did you play? Darkfall, with its tiny population? Did you ever see what became of Ultima Online after player housing went in? Boy that was a treat. The entire fucking countryside looked like New Jersey with row houses on every free scrap of land.

There's extremely good reason to fear the consequences of non-instanced player housing in a game with an Elder-Scrolls level fan base. I've played MMO suburbia already, I'm in no rush to play it again.

As for Skyrim making a good foundation for a MMO, I'm going to have to agree that it wouldn't. Yes, it's a sandbox, but so is Sim City. Not all sandboxes are the same, and single player CRPGs and MMORPGs are distinct genres with different game play conventions. You could borrow SOME ELEMENTS from Skyrim, but you couldn't tweak 1-2 things and have a working MMO. It would be *awful*.

Why is everyone so hung up on the lack of houses in it, is it that big of a deal? When I play WoW or other mmo's I'm not thinking "know what would make this game really fun? My own house"

 

[BloatedGuppy]

As for the rest of it, what in it wouldn't work well in an MMO? I'm honestly curious on the specifics here. There would definitely need to be balance changes made, as the skill/leveling system was clearly never designed with balance in mind, but what part of the core mechanics wouldn't work?

The mechanics are pure slop, and can/would be affected by latency, which can be problematic unless your game is 100% PvP and you just don't give a fig about the people with shit connections. The world is too small, and too content lite/repetitive. The great strength of Elder Scrolls games comes through willing suspension of disbelief and inhabiting their carefully built world, which is a world sized and built for one. Having other players...HUNDREDS of other players...knocking around in that space wouldn't do it any favors. And GameByro has been used for an MMO before (WAR) and ran like a crippled pig.

You'd want a robust, crisp engine. You'd want a significantly larger world, with significantly broader/more diverse content. You'd need to completely rebuilt/rescript combat, both to be forgiving of latency and to create cooperate/competitive challenges in order to properly leverage the one great selling point of MMOs. You'd have to deepen and expand the leveling and crafting. You'd have to allow a shift to third person...PROPERLY ANIMATED third person...for those who like to be able to see their character, which at this point has become an expected genre convention. By the time you were done, it wouldn't really resemble Skyrim at all.

Not what I'm talking about. The skill decay I'm trying to get at is not a zero-sum getup. In essence, it's a (relatively slow) process by which over X amount of play time where a skill is not used, it's value starts to decrease. Right off the top of my head, I'd probably go with 1% of a level per hour of playtime or thereabouts, and the percentage value would slowly increase the longer you go without using that particular skill, with a minimum threshold it can decrease in a given period of time (probably something like 10% of the initial, highest level per week). You can keep any skill capped by using it regularly, but skills you never use atrophy. It keeps players invested in the set of skills they selected as their "core". How big that is depends entirely on the player and how much time they want to invest into it.

Well that's just terrible. That would shackle players to the game, or their characters atrophy. Or shackle you to specific tasks, or specific skills atrophy. The genre badly needs to move AWAY from that, not towards it. I don't think you'll ever see a system like this, outside of maybe an extremely niche indie/kickstarter project.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Why is everyone so hung up on the lack of houses in it, is it that big of a deal? When I play WoW or other mmo's I'm not thinking "know what would make this game really fun? My own house"

I think people are hung up on it because Kotaku paraphrased what Zenimax said abysmally.

According to Kotaku, Zenimax said "You can't own a house because it's "too hard to implement in an MMO".

What Zenimax actually said is "Making player housing work the way fans expect is too hard to implement in a MMO"

But then again Kotaku is infamous for lying about what the Devs said, the entire article is full of poor paraphrases of the GI scans that twist shit into things it isn't.

 

[Death916]

hand? sounds like 3-7 abilities st the ready max. Seems to me like battles might end up like league of legends, have good build/ pop your combo dodge wait for CD, repeat.

Captcha: Hooray Henry who's Henry and what'd he do to receive praise

Sounds like guild wars 1 and guild wars 2 were you only had 8(GW1), or 10(GW2) skills with you at one time

I'm sure thats probably more like it, Just when i think of a "hand" in that sense I thing of poker

Edit: also what's really different between GW and WOW? Ive never played it so im ignorant to the details but Only 10 skills just seems like a low level WOW player's hotbar

 

[Agayek]

Actually GW2 work on "you can travel from anywhere to a wayshrine". which is how I would think the ES one works also.

So it is a "travel from anywhere to any one of these fixed points" system.

That's not bad. I'm not sure I like fast travel in MMOs (hearthstones, etc) in the first place, but that's about as reasonable as such a system can be.

Name one game that did it well.

as has been pointed out before the only ones that have done it eaither
A. became massive sprawling doom cities like Ultima
B. had increadibly small populations so it never became a problem.

Star Wars Galaxies did it very well.

I'll cede because of point B though, as the rest of my examples fall under that.

Player cities run into the same problem of land as player houses do.

Eventually the groups that got there first would establish a city and over time all lands would be taken up making it impossible for new people to get to do it.

Furthermore the game devs would have to make large spaces of nothingness lands for these cities that could be used for other, more useful things.

Player cities are a bad idea at their core.

The simplest solution would be for newbies to roll on another server with some free land, but that's not very elegant or nice from a "continuing the game" point of view. The second solution that comes to mind is a "siege" mechanic, wherein one group could literally come in and take the land from the people possessing it. Make people fight for it.

Now, I wouldn't say it should be mandatory that anyone can come in and take the city, I'd probably set it up as a flag system where you can flag your city as attackable, but with the risk comes some very good benefits (like taxes on all transactions within your city for guild funds, let it serve as a transit hub, etc). Basically, just something that encourages people to flag their cities and have to fight to keep them, while giving new players the opportunity to take/retake claimed land and build it back up.

 

[SajuukKhar]

snip

Player cities still require tons of land for a feature a large portion of the population will never care about or use. It is really better for everyone to just throw in more dungeons and caves that everyone has the chance to use.

The only real reason I can see as to why people would be pissed is solely because it is a feature they didn't put in the game.

This is the "spears/crossbows/throwing knifes" thing all over again. Those things were in Morrowind, almost no one used them, people often complained about how useless they are, and how they would rather Bethesda work on making the good weapons looks better etc. etc.

Low and behold when Bethesda did just that in Oblivion HERE CAME THE SHITSTORM for removing them.

People are mad solely because it is a feature they COULD have possibly put into the game, ignoring all the balancing and other insight it would take to put them in.

 

[Agayek]

Well that's just terrible. That would shackle players to the game, or their characters atrophy. Or shackle you to specific tasks, or specific skills atrophy. The genre badly needs to move AWAY from that, not towards it. I don't think you'll ever see a system like this, outside of maybe an extremely niche indie/kickstarter project.

Quite possibly. It wouldn't shackle anything to the game at least, because if you'll note I said play time, not real time. The other concern is something to be addressed, but as I came up with the basic model in about 45 seconds, I'm fairly confident there are ways around that. Simplest way is a diverse set of tasks that involve the skill. Procedural generation of content would do well there, allowing for very different approaches to using the same task. For example, a radiant quest to manufacture a set of weapons for a jarl to keep blacksmithing up, vs a radiant quest to hunt down a specific sword, upgrade it (again, keeping blacksmithing up), and present it to someone.

Basically, the context of the act can make even an utterly repetitious grind engaging. The game just needs to be good about giving opportunities and hooks for players to keep using their core skills, whatever those happen to be.

Also, I totally give you the technical limitations for Skyrim not functioning as an MMO. That doesn't mean the core mechanics are flawed though, but I guess that comes down to semantics and the definition of "mechanics". To clear up any confusion, I mean "mechanics" as in the conceptual sense, such as "level 10 skills and level up your character", or "using an ability levels the associated skill", not the actual technical implementation.

 

[z121231211]

Real time combat? In an MMO?

Phantasy Star Online 2. SURE, it's all anime style with spiky hair and giant swords. SURE, they consider it a "light" MMO. BUT, it's still an MMO with real-time combat and hit-detection.

The technology is all there to make it happen, but developers still have that "It must be like WoW" mentality.

 

[Agayek]

Player cities still require tons of land for a feature a large portion of the population will never care about or use. It is really better for everyone to just throw in more dungeons and caves that everyone has the chance to use.

The only real reason I can see as to why people would be pissed is solely because it is a feature they didn't put in the game.

This is the "spears/crossbows/throwing knifes" thing all over again. Those things were in Morrowind, almost no one used them, people often complained about how useless they are, and how they would rather Bethesda work on making the good weapons looks better etc. etc.

Low and behold when Bethesda did just that in Oblivion HERE CAME THE SHITSTORM for removing them.

Eh, I can't really argue that. Player cities wouldn't make or break the game for me either way, I just disagree that it's an inherently flawed concept. There are definitely ways to make it work, and I'd like to see it, but their absence isn't going to cause me any undue grief.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Eh, I can't really argue that. Player cities wouldn't make or break the game for me either way, I just disagree that it's an inherently flawed concept. There are definitely ways to make it work, and I'd like to see it, but their absence isn't going to cause me any undue grief.

Player cities IMO would only work in a game built specifically around them.

Just putting them into a MMO isn't a good idea.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Quite possibly. It wouldn't shackle anything to the game at least, because if you'll note I said play time, not real time. The other concern is something to be addressed, but as I came up with the basic model in about 45 seconds, I'm fairly confident there are ways around that. Simplest way is a diverse set of tasks that involve the skill. Procedural generation of content would do well there, allowing for very different approaches to using the same task. For example, a radiant quest to manufacture a set of weapons for a jarl to keep blacksmithing up, vs a radiant quest to hunt down a specific sword, upgrade it (again, keeping blacksmithing up), and present it to someone.

Basically, the context of the act can make even an utterly repetitious grind engaging. The game just needs to be good about giving opportunities and hooks for players to keep using their core skills, whatever those happen to be.

Also, I totally give you the technical limitations for Skyrim not functioning as an MMO. That doesn't mean the core mechanics are flawed though, but I guess that comes down to semantics and the definition of "mechanics". To clear up any confusion, I mean "mechanics" as in the conceptual sense, such as "level 10 skills and level up your character", or "using an ability levels the associated skill", not the actual technical implementation.

That's a pretty generous interpretation of "mechanics", so yes...I will give you that some of the looser game play concepts could come over just fine.

Your radiant questing model is very ambitious, and...most particularly at this time in the evolution of the MMO...not terribly realistic. I for one would like a deformable world, ala Minecraft, but that looks and plays like a modern MMO. So if I want to sink a mineshaft and mine ore to build my player city which can then be knocked down by player crafted catapults, I can. Alas, this is also not realistic, so the only place I'll be playing said game is in my imagination.

Part of the reason so many "WoWisms" like third person OTS cam, skill bars, crafting, levels, distinct classes, etc, etc seem to worm their way into modern games isn't just developer laziness. It's also because players have come to expect them. It does a developer little good to sink years of effort and hundreds and thousands of dollars into some ambitious trailblazing MMO only to have people log in, feel discomfiture because many of their favorite conventions are absent, and say "Fuck it I'm going back to WoW". MMOs are SO EXPENSIVE to make and so bloated with content that they're probably more aggressively focus grouped then any other genre. It's all well and good for us, the fans, to want them to be more innovative. And I do...I really do. But I'm not the one footing the bill, and I'm not the one looking for a ROI. If I was a shareholder instead of a fan, I might feel differently about letting developers go all Molyneaux on my ass and start redesigning the wheel.

 

[Gibboniser]

I suspected this would happen, didn't mean I didn't have hope though, damn

 

[darron13]

Well.
My excitement for this game just dropped to zero.

 

[ThePenguinKnight]

Wow, I'm so shocked and surprised! /sarcasm

 

[Grunt_Man11]

Just visited the Bethesda forums and the feedback is vastly negative.

I completely understand why. Bethesda is making the massive mistake many others before them have made. They're trying to be World of Warcraft.

They need to take a cue from Tera Online, Guild Wars 2, and Planetside 2. From all I've seen and heard from these three MMOs are that they stating that they are NOT WoW.

They figured why try to climb the hotkey MMO mountain that WoW has dominated for 7 years, when there are all these other MMO mountains to climb that are just as high?

Let's hope Bethesda and Zenimax see the error of this decision and opt for a 2-4 player, invite only, Co-Op mode DLC for Skyrim instead.