You can still play EQ, UO, and all the other old games.
Very few people play these.
Very few people play them because they're outdated. I didn't post this thread to complain about the games nowadays. I posted it to see if people felt the way i do, and to see how they feel about MMOs nowadays. I don't have a huge problem with the way they're made nowadays, i would just like to see some features brought back to life, like, an active world, world bosses. Just things that bring everyone out and keep the world feeling active. I mean, in WoW for example. Whats the point of them having the world they do besides the questing. Other than that it's dead now. No point for it. Everything is Instanced. I would like to go out and see people everywhere fighting for territory or a world boss come along that actually drops an artifact and people branch together to kill it than roll on the loot. I don't know, just things i would love in a MMO nowadays, but thats my thoughts..
The games you "want to come back to" are ... outdated. Indeed.
The world in WOW CATA will be more alive than any other MMORPG being played in 2011.
The reason is simple: the CATA Archeology is a world discovery profession everyone will need to advance in the end game leveling system of Path of Titans.
You read that right: YOU will never stop "leveling" in WOW Cata and to do it you'll need the world artifacts.
Besides the world is far from dead in this edition too: professions are also in this edition and the auction house proves it. Every night I see the max displayble (49) in Icecrown or Storm Peak.
But please go on about those old games.
People today want to PLAY instead of WAIT. People want to experience ALL the 61 leveling dungeons instead of looking a whole day to find another dude (let alone 4 other ones).
And the way to go is to offer ALL day long play IN ALL options of an mmorpg in both solo play and grouping. In both PVE and PVP at your choice.
That was never offered by the outdated old games.
That's why they are not played by 99.9% of the people anymore.
I used to be able to put the time into oldschool mmo's like EQ but I just don't get online as much as I used to. Thats why Im looking forward to the new GW2, I can go off on my own and bring NPC's(if it's like the first one) and do some missions or what not and not have people stealing my kills or whatever. If I want to play with others I can join someones group or do some pvp for awhile. I don't mind instances anymore because it gives you your own private game and you can always bring others if something is to hard or you want to chat with some friends while doing a quest or some PvP.
Some people say Instances breaks immersion, but so does all the ass hats that like messing around with you trying to have fun for an hour or two. Guess im not into hard core things anymore and just want to relax for two hours and just have fun and not worry about if something is camped or whatever.
It depends on which features you miss. If you mean things like spawn camping, open pvp, no instances, long travel times, players putting up houses haphazardly anywhere, forced grouping, etc., then no, I'll pass.
There's nothing wrong with turning an eye to the past, people do it all the time irl. But remember the bad with the good.
How about we leave out the bad features of old MMOs and just think about the good ones!
Some features should definately be revisited and revised. Others feathers and unrealized design flaws are gone for good reason. And I've already been in to many pissing content about what was good/bad/mistaken design features.
MMO have mimiced classic single player rpgs since EQ. Some like that design philosophy I find it to restrictive. I have a hard time enjoying any rpg online or off line since UO because I feel I am playing someone elses character not my own.
Who would like to see some of the old school MMO features come back to MMOs today? Does anyone even care?
I mean features like Ultima Online offered. I think nowadays MMOs are to instaned and not enough World play. Does anyone know, miss, or want to see a MMO make a livley world where you are free to do w/e and create your own story?
How does everyone else feel about MMOs today and how the used to be? Are you happy with how they are or would you like to see them good ol' features come back to life?
I'm playing an old school MMORPG right now (Darkfall), and I bet you aren't. It's great btw, but I'm sure you don't wanna old schools to come back...
I'm alittle confused by your comment. Anywho, i've heard of Darkfall. I might give that a try. I heard though it was a very time consuming game to get those fun moments poping.
Eh, its all on what you make of it actually. The day to day killing monsters in Darkfall is a lot more fun than most MMOs because the mobs are smart, and you aim your attacks, and feel the constant danger. It is a very oldschool style MMO.
But for those who join it purely to become the best PvPer EVAR, they grind themselves silly raising stats that don't really mean anything then complain its boring. There are no artificial barriers, you can do just about everything within the first week. My first goal was to make a raft and sail around, and I did, finding cool spawns and hidden castles and quests. Others would rather just farm the same mobs all day because its the "fastest way to max out skills".
It is an oldschool MMO, but it is VERY PvP oriented. My style is more opt in PvP a la DAoC, but I still have fun.
Originally posted by JthX Originally posted by SwampRob It depends on which features you miss. If you mean things like spawn camping, open pvp, no instances, long travel times, players putting up houses haphazardly anywhere, forced grouping, etc., then no, I'll pass. There's nothing wrong with turning an eye to the past, people do it all the time irl. But remember the bad with the good.
How about we leave out the bad features of old MMOs and just think about the good ones! Is the glass half empty or half full?
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices.
Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Who would like to see some of the old school MMO features come back to MMOs today? Does anyone even care?
I mean features like Ultima Online offered. I think nowadays MMOs are to instaned and not enough World play. Does anyone know, miss, or want to see a MMO make a livley world where you are free to do w/e and create your own story?
How does everyone else feel about MMOs today and how the used to be? Are you happy with how they are or would you like to see them good ol' features come back to life?
I'm playing an old school MMORPG right now (Darkfall), and I bet you aren't. It's great btw, but I'm sure you don't wanna old schools to come back...
I'm alittle confused by your comment. Anywho, i've heard of Darkfall. I might give that a try. I heard though it was a very time consuming game to get those fun moments poping.
Eh, its all on what you make of it actually. The day to day killing monsters in Darkfall is a lot more fun than most MMOs because the mobs are smart, and you aim your attacks, and feel the constant danger. It is a very oldschool style MMO.
But for those who join it purely to become the best PvPer EVAR, they grind themselves silly raising stats that don't really mean anything then complain its boring. There are no artificial barriers, you can do just about everything within the first week. My first goal was to make a raft and sail around, and I did, finding cool spawns and hidden castles and quests. Others would rather just farm the same mobs all day because its the "fastest way to max out skills".
It is an oldschool MMO, but it is VERY PvP oriented. My style is more opt in PvP a la DAoC, but I still have fun.
Sounds like Darkfall is on the right track. Once i re-do my laptop i'll probably give it a try
I mean features like Ultima Online offered. I think nowadays MMOs are to instaned and not enough World play. Does anyone know, miss, or want to see a MMO make a livley world where you are free to do w/e and create your own story?
How does everyone else feel about MMOs today and how the used to be? Are you happy with how they are or would you like to see them good ol' features come back to life?
Which part of an MMO being non-instanced are we talking about? Do you mean general pvp and conquest? The opposite of how WoW kind of cordoned off its pvp area into battlegrounds? I always did PvP as an aside, on the small term, so I can't say I ever really missed the chance to conquer the world or have a huge GvG fight over some resource.
Are we talking about instanced dungeons? I enjoy the non-instanced dungeons greatly, but the trouble is even the most incredibly well-designed dungeon will have a maximum population limit. EQ had serious issues at various points because the dungeons were simply chalk full of players. When you can walk from the entrance of a dungeon to the end, doing nothing but passing people at every corner who are just waiting on spawns, I don't really think it's a good system.
As for doing whatever and creating my own story... This stuff always sounds good in theory. Why does it sound good in theory? Because I imagine creating a story with like-minded people. I imagine a lot of people who have the same RP drive I do, and the same creative passions I do, coming together to experience an adventure with the same passion I have. In a lot of ways that's how I remember old games. Those of us playing EQ were all fans of D&D in some form, we all had a bit of RP in our blood and a lure of good adventure. We were already RPG fans and always had our list of favorite NES Final Fantasy titles close by. We automatically had a lot in common.
But the genre as a whole now attracts a much larger audience, and that commonality is a thing of the past. The new audience has Xbox-live microphones, internet-lingo, user-mods, rating calculators, database websites and jobs that prohibit continuous play. These are the people that would share the new EQ world with me, and these people won't create the same feeling I remember, even if the game was identical in every way to an "old school" title. There would be more xx_Frodo_xx's and Sephiroth6969, a lot of min / maxing and grinding to max as fast as possible. There would be a lot more "balance" and a lot less intuition.
In general, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be the same because the community has grown older and expanded its base, and it wouldn't be the same because we're not the same, even if the game were identical in every way.
So yes, I would like to see the old ways come back to life, but it's a physical impossibility - a dream of an old man of his wayward youth and nothing more. It has nothing to do with how "linear" games are, how many instances they have, or whether they have a minimap. These are just the outward signs of change that raise the ire of old school sycophants. The bottom line is that even if the game mirrored old school UO or EQ identically, it would attract an entirely new audience that only had interest getting to max level and raiding, or churning out templates of the most powerful PvP builds. The community has changed significantly, and never in the history of human events has a culture ever regressed, so I don't see it happening here. These questions come up frequently, but there isn't a point in lamenting what can never come.
The new is here to stay.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
It depends on which features you miss. If you mean things like spawn camping, open pvp, no instances, long travel times, players putting up houses haphazardly anywhere, forced grouping, etc., then no, I'll pass.
There's nothing wrong with turning an eye to the past, people do it all the time irl. But remember the bad with the good.
How about we leave out the bad features of old MMOs and just think about the good ones!
Is the glass half empty or half full?
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices.
Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Actuallly you must have not played MMOs back in the day, because there was alittle more to the good side than just being able to make a charecter. lol
It depends on which features you miss. If you mean things like spawn camping, open pvp, no instances, long travel times, players putting up houses haphazardly anywhere, forced grouping, etc., then no, I'll pass.
There's nothing wrong with turning an eye to the past, people do it all the time irl. But remember the bad with the good.
How about we leave out the bad features of old MMOs and just think about the good ones!
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Well all the good ones are already in modern MMOs (and adding a lot more like LF Dungeon Tool).
Only the bad ones .. like horrible down-time are eliminated.
My first mmo was DAOC and I do look at more recent games and wonder why they are not as fun as things released a decade or more ago.
Some of it is certainly the rose-colored glass effect where gamers remember the good times and forget all the the annoying and monotonous time sink stuff like really long downtimes, dependence on boring healbot playstyles, camp stealing and massive level / points grinds.
Fun in an mmo is highly subjective, which is why I suspect many stick with the genre despite disapointments. I am interested to see how the quality level of this year's relases will compare to the big games of the past 2.
Take a number and camp? Why not just spawn more baddies faster if there are more players in the immediate area?
But uh...wouldn't that be a natural evolution of the camp concept? Evolution isn't old school. It's progress.
...and in fact WOW uses exactly that system. Spawns (including resource nodes) are grouped in a way such that if a group's population count falls below a certain threshold respawns begin triggering immediately. Usually such groups are spread over big areas (or the entire zone, for resources) so it's a little difficult to notice this mechanic unless you've played for a while -- but it's there.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I mean features like Ultima Online offered. I think nowadays MMOs are to instaned and not enough World play. Does anyone know, miss, or want to see a MMO make a livley world where you are free to do w/e and create your own story?
How does everyone else feel about MMOs today and how the used to be? Are you happy with how they are or would you like to see them good ol' features come back to life?
Which part of an MMO being non-instanced are we talking about? Do you mean general pvp and conquest? The opposite of how WoW kind of cordoned off its pvp area into battlegrounds? I always did PvP as an aside, on the small term, so I can't say I ever really missed the chance to conquer the world or have a huge GvG fight over some resource.
Are we talking about instanced dungeons? I enjoy the non-instanced dungeons greatly, but the trouble is even the most incredibly well-designed dungeon will have a maximum population limit. EQ had serious issues at various points because the dungeons were simply chalk full of players. When you can walk from the entrance of a dungeon to the end, doing nothing but passing people at every corner who are just waiting on spawns, I don't really think it's a good system.
As for doing whatever and creating my own story... This stuff always sounds good in theory. Why does it sound good in theory? Because I imagine creating a story with like-minded people. I imagine a lot of people who have the same RP drive I do, and the same creative passions I do, coming together to experience an adventure with the same passion I have. In a lot of ways that's how I remember old games. Those of us playing EQ were all fans of D&D in some form, we all had a bit of RP in our blood and a lure of good adventure. We were already RPG fans and always had our list of favorite NES Final Fantasy titles close by. We automatically had a lot in common.
But the genre as a whole now attracts a much larger audience, and that commonality is a thing of the past. The new audience has Xbox-live microphones, internet-lingo, user-mods, rating calculators, database websites and jobs that prohibit continuous play. These are the people that would share the new EQ world with me, and these people won't create the same feeling I remember, even if the game was identical in every way to an "old school" title. There would be more xx_Frodo_xx's and Sephiroth6969, a lot of min / maxing and grinding to max as fast as possible. There would be a lot more "balance" and a lot less intuition.
In general, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be the same because the community has grown older and expanded its base, and it wouldn't be the same because we're not the same, even if the game were identical in every way.
So yes, I would like to see the old ways come back to life, but it's a physical impossibility - a dream of an old man of his wayward youth and nothing more. It has nothing to do with how "linear" games are, how many instances they have, or whether they have a minimap. These are just the outward signs of change that raise the ire of old school sycophants. The bottom line is that even if the game mirrored old school UO or EQ identically, it would attract an entirely new audience that only had interest getting to max level and raiding, or churning out templates of the most powerful PvP builds. The community has changed significantly, and never in the history of human events has a culture ever regressed, so I don't see it happening here. These questions come up frequently, but there isn't a point in lamenting what can never come.
The new is here to stay.
First off, let me commend you Zarcob for your post. Full of great points, but here let me give some points. You are right about everything you said.but why does it all have to be a thing of the past? Just because our generation is older and different, why do we set our different path for the younger generation? It should to a certain extant be like it used to. I think the younger generation coming into this great genre should be able to have the experiences we once had. What are they getting now? Scripted play with no real abilty to use imagination and a feeling of freedom. I do think MMOs are heading in a good direction but not the best direction. and even for people like us with limited time or a dieing imagination in RP don't mean it still wouldn't be great to have. Trying to bring those qualitys back dosen't mean they have to make it a time comsuming thing. Personally i don't need a game where i can RP with others anymore but , for me, it would still make of a great community feel. As far as open world raiding goes, no , i could care less about that and maybe isn;'t the best thing, but theirs nothing wrong with having instanced raiding AND open world bosses. Battlegrounds are great but should be treated as a mini game for fun and not treated like a main source for PVP play. PVP play to me should be in open world. Hence the MMO. not much of a massive community if you don't get to experience the massive community feel. and reverting to some things of the past isn't always a bad thing. Don't you think if humans still practiced moral behavior our world would be a much better place. Old values arent always a bad thing.
People today want to PLAY instead of WAIT. People want to experience ALL the 61 leveling dungeons instead of looking a whole day to find another dude (let alone 4 other ones).
And the way to go is to offer ALL day long play IN ALL options of an mmorpg in both solo play and grouping. In both PVE and PVP at your choice.
That was never offered by the outdated old games.
That's why they are not played by 99.9% of the people anymore.
Simple: people want to have a fun way of playing.
I think there is definitely something to be said about that.
The things I sort of hated about my experience in Lineage 2 was that there was a lot of waiting at times. Waiting for bosses to spawn for days, hoping you got into a raid group because you needed that boss for your subclass or next class progression.
And of course sitting in town "looking for group" which could easily devolve into a harrowing experience.
But having said that there was a greater feeling of achievement for me to finally get that boss. And a pretty good feeling of community knowing that we were getting together so others could get it.
I think because of those game mechanics the sense that you really were in a "world" and one that took its cues from you and all the other players made it a bit special.
But I would agree that for most people, and even myself to a bit, having to rely upon a group or a boss or having limited amount of time to play with a harsh death penalty always hovering over you is going to deflate the whole experience.
I just like how the older games had better fleshed out worlds and more interesting game mechanics.
I mean, in DAoC you buy a ticket for a boat and actually give it to the npc. If you need to intereact you might be asked to type something next to the npc which will trigger him.
It just seems that some of the newer games might be a bit too whitewashed.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Wouldn't mind some of the old school features coming back but not sure if the game would be economically viable due to the general nature of the new breed of gamers.
Who would like to see some of the old school MMO features come back to MMOs today? Does anyone even care?
I mean features like Ultima Online offered. I think nowadays MMOs are to instaned and not enough World play. Does anyone know, miss, or want to see a MMO make a livley world where you are free to do w/e and create your own story?
How does everyone else feel about MMOs today and how the used to be? Are you happy with how they are or would you like to see them good ol' features come back to life?
The problem with reminiscing about "old school" is that we often look back through rose tinted glasses.
There have been games in recent years that have gotten some of the features right, features that we look back so fondly on. Unfortunately there are always other aspects of the games that ruin the good parts, just as it was in the games we remember so fondly from 5 or 10 years ago, but we tend to forget what was wrong with them, purposefully or not.
I'm sure there has been a thread done about this in the past, so if someone can point me in the right direction it would be wonderful. Is there a thread lurking somewhere on here that attempted to compile a realistic list of most wanted new & old features for one game?
First off, let me commend you Zarcob for your post. Full of great points, but here let me give some points. You are right about everything you said.but why does it all have to be a thing of the past? Just because our generation is older and different, why do we set our different path for the younger generation? It should to a certain extant be like it used to. I think the younger generation coming into this great genre should be able to have the experiences we once had. What are they getting now? Scripted play with no real abilty to use imagination and a feeling of freedom. I do think MMOs are heading in a good direction but not the best direction. and even for people like us with limited time or a dieing imagination in RP don't mean it still wouldn't be great to have. Trying to bring those qualitys back dosen't mean they have to make it a time comsuming thing. Personally i don't need a game where i can RP with others anymore but , for me, it would still make of a great community feel. As far as open world raiding goes, no , i could care less about that and maybe isn;'t the best thing, but theirs nothing wrong with having instanced raiding AND open world bosses. Battlegrounds are great but should be treated as a mini game for fun and not treated like a main source for PVP play. PVP play to me should be in open world. Hence the MMO. not much of a massive community if you don't get to experience the massive community feel. and reverting to some things of the past isn't always a bad thing. Don't you think if humans still practiced moral behavior our world would be a much better place. Old values arent always a bad thing.
I deliberately tried to avoid saying whether the features themselves were good or bad. I personally like community-building aspects of an MMO but I could see where others might not. I didn't really want to discuss what was bad or good, simply that the good was born not only of the game's features but the type of player that used those features.
That player is now much older and different in many ways. It's true, that there are younger versions of "us" that would probably enjoy those old games as they were, and it may even be worth passing on to another generation, but I also said I felt the community not only aged but expanded to include new types. These types aren't interested in RP in the least. They aren't interested in the adventure. The dungeon is merely a grind to them, no matter how it's dressed up. They're interested in other things, be they good or bad, such as competition, communication and character progression. And yes, they're interested in things like Scripted events as well. Is it an awful thing they are not granted license to explore the world as their imagination bids them? I do not know, but I do know how significantly they've changed the genre.
Let me put it this way. Take the 6 newest friends I've made in the past 5 years on MMOs, excluding my long-term friends that I knew from EQ and UO. Of those 6, five have never read Dragonlance or a D&D related novel. Three do not even claim to read fiction at all. In comparison, I don't recall ever bumping into someone in EQ that had not read, or at least was familiar with, the old Dragonlance books.
In a way, the scripted events of these new games are their books. They enjoy them for the very reason others don't: Because they want to be told a story, rather than have the freedom to create their own. Perhaps to them, there is enough freedom in just expressing themselves on ventrilo during a raid. A book, after all, is nothing but a linear story, so perhaps their story of Tanis and Raistlin is actually that of Thrall and Medivh. Maybe they're not interested in being left to their own freedom, but experiencing an interactive story, who can say for sure.
I can say for sure that they play a variety of MMOs and will be present at any release, even something like an UO return. Their tastes and their habits would ultimately shape that game as surely as ours shaped our games a decade ago, and it would ultimately not end up as the same type of game. MMOs evolve to reflect the playerbase as much as the playerbase is drawn to the MMO.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices. Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Actuallly you must have not played MMOs back in the day, because there was alittle more to the good side than just being able to make a charecter. lol
And same can be said to you. First of all, I'm completely confident of my history, having started with MUD's and playing MMO's since Ultima Online. It's funny you can write such remarks but yet you cannot point out any more of the "good sides" that I have listed. You tell me what I missed or yuo just proven me right. Don't give the thread these one liners with no actual support to the contrary. It's near thoughtless and inconsiderate.
It was new, it was fun, but it was fairly generic and a less fleshed out version of the MMO's we have today. It was fun back then because it was new, it wasn't done yet, but now the genre has to progress and move forward to continue providing fresh experiences. Not rehashes of the same thing.
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices.
Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Actuallly you must have not played MMOs back in the day, because there was alittle more to the good side than just being able to make a charecter. lol
And same can be said to you. First of all, I'm completely confident of my history, having started with MUD's and playing MMO's since Ultima Online. It's funny you can write such remarks but yet you cannot point out any more of the "good sides" that I have listed. You tell me what I missed or yuo just proven me right. Don't give the thread these one liners with no actual support to the contrary. It's near thoughtless and inconsiderate.
It was new, it was fun, but it was fairly generic and a less fleshed out version of the MMO's we have today. It was fun back then because it was new, it wasn't done yet, but now the genre has to progress and move forward to continue providing fresh experiences. Not rehashes of the same thing.
I pointed out great things of the past. You appparently did not start reading from the beggining. I didn't Re-point them out because im not going to sound like a broken record.
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices. Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Actuallly you must have not played MMOs back in the day, because there was alittle more to the good side than just being able to make a charecter. lol
And same can be said to you. First of all, I'm completely confident of my history, having started with MUD's and playing MMO's since Ultima Online. It's funny you can write such remarks but yet you cannot point out any more of the "good sides" that I have listed. You tell me what I missed or yuo just proven me right. Don't give the thread these one liners with no actual support to the contrary. It's near thoughtless and inconsiderate. It was new, it was fun, but it was fairly generic and a less fleshed out version of the MMO's we have today. It was fun back then because it was new, it wasn't done yet, but now the genre has to progress and move forward to continue providing fresh experiences. Not rehashes of the same thing.
I pointed out great things of the past. You appparently did not start reading from the beggining. I didn't Re-point them out because im not going to sound like a broken record.
So why post in the first place then? Postnig things like that just makes you come off as a flamer/troll because you are not providing any valuable input. It makes you look condescending and without any proof to show for why you are above others like myself. By the way, I looked at all your "great points" and obviously none of them explicitly answered my question. Again, What was there in the past that was so great that is not currently in MMO's today?
I already addressed the community part, obviously very different than it was in the past when you draw in a much bigger population, but the good and the bad plaeyrs are always going t be everywhere since MMO's are big now.
Please if you are going to respond, not another thoughtless 1-2 liner. Contribute to the topic or don't at all, its a waste of space if you're not going to point out things and elaborate and judge other posters that you don't even know about.
I want a game with the playability and userfriendliness of WoW along with the depth and challenge of Everquest not games like Darkfall which promote clunky UIs and a lack of direction and features as game mechanics.
Comments
That CATA idea sounds really fun on a PVP server
I used to be able to put the time into oldschool mmo's like EQ but I just don't get online as much as I used to. Thats why Im looking forward to the new GW2, I can go off on my own and bring NPC's(if it's like the first one) and do some missions or what not and not have people stealing my kills or whatever. If I want to play with others I can join someones group or do some pvp for awhile. I don't mind instances anymore because it gives you your own private game and you can always bring others if something is to hard or you want to chat with some friends while doing a quest or some PvP.
Some people say Instances breaks immersion, but so does all the ass hats that like messing around with you trying to have fun for an hour or two. Guess im not into hard core things anymore and just want to relax for two hours and just have fun and not worry about if something is camped or whatever.
How about we leave out the bad features of old MMOs and just think about the good ones!
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Some features should definately be revisited and revised. Others feathers and unrealized design flaws are gone for good reason. And I've already been in to many pissing content about what was good/bad/mistaken design features.
MMO have mimiced classic single player rpgs since EQ. Some like that design philosophy I find it to restrictive. I have a hard time enjoying any rpg online or off line since UO because I feel I am playing someone elses character not my own.
Why oldschool when we get Guild Wars 2!!?
Eh, its all on what you make of it actually. The day to day killing monsters in Darkfall is a lot more fun than most MMOs because the mobs are smart, and you aim your attacks, and feel the constant danger. It is a very oldschool style MMO.
But for those who join it purely to become the best PvPer EVAR, they grind themselves silly raising stats that don't really mean anything then complain its boring. There are no artificial barriers, you can do just about everything within the first week. My first goal was to make a raft and sail around, and I did, finding cool spawns and hidden castles and quests. Others would rather just farm the same mobs all day because its the "fastest way to max out skills".
It is an oldschool MMO, but it is VERY PvP oriented. My style is more opt in PvP a la DAoC, but I still have fun.
Is the glass half empty or half full?
To be honest, what were the good features and what were the bad? Back then, MMO's were few and far between. The good features back then was having my own character, fighting monsters, other people and persistence. That's in all MMO's today and we have so many choices.
Sure you can also argue about community etc., but every MMO has their own flavor of communities and you learn to separate the good frmo the bad (and that alone is personal opinion). Game mechanics back then were generic compared to whats nitroduced today especially to the levels people have taken them. Encounters are varied and more interactive. I can't think of more but I'm off to lunch!
Sounds like Darkfall is on the right track. Once i re-do my laptop i'll probably give it a try
Which part of an MMO being non-instanced are we talking about? Do you mean general pvp and conquest? The opposite of how WoW kind of cordoned off its pvp area into battlegrounds? I always did PvP as an aside, on the small term, so I can't say I ever really missed the chance to conquer the world or have a huge GvG fight over some resource.
Are we talking about instanced dungeons? I enjoy the non-instanced dungeons greatly, but the trouble is even the most incredibly well-designed dungeon will have a maximum population limit. EQ had serious issues at various points because the dungeons were simply chalk full of players. When you can walk from the entrance of a dungeon to the end, doing nothing but passing people at every corner who are just waiting on spawns, I don't really think it's a good system.
As for doing whatever and creating my own story... This stuff always sounds good in theory. Why does it sound good in theory? Because I imagine creating a story with like-minded people. I imagine a lot of people who have the same RP drive I do, and the same creative passions I do, coming together to experience an adventure with the same passion I have. In a lot of ways that's how I remember old games. Those of us playing EQ were all fans of D&D in some form, we all had a bit of RP in our blood and a lure of good adventure. We were already RPG fans and always had our list of favorite NES Final Fantasy titles close by. We automatically had a lot in common.
But the genre as a whole now attracts a much larger audience, and that commonality is a thing of the past. The new audience has Xbox-live microphones, internet-lingo, user-mods, rating calculators, database websites and jobs that prohibit continuous play. These are the people that would share the new EQ world with me, and these people won't create the same feeling I remember, even if the game was identical in every way to an "old school" title. There would be more xx_Frodo_xx's and Sephiroth6969, a lot of min / maxing and grinding to max as fast as possible. There would be a lot more "balance" and a lot less intuition.
In general, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be the same because the community has grown older and expanded its base, and it wouldn't be the same because we're not the same, even if the game were identical in every way.
So yes, I would like to see the old ways come back to life, but it's a physical impossibility - a dream of an old man of his wayward youth and nothing more. It has nothing to do with how "linear" games are, how many instances they have, or whether they have a minimap. These are just the outward signs of change that raise the ire of old school sycophants. The bottom line is that even if the game mirrored old school UO or EQ identically, it would attract an entirely new audience that only had interest getting to max level and raiding, or churning out templates of the most powerful PvP builds. The community has changed significantly, and never in the history of human events has a culture ever regressed, so I don't see it happening here. These questions come up frequently, but there isn't a point in lamenting what can never come.
The new is here to stay.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
Actuallly you must have not played MMOs back in the day, because there was alittle more to the good side than just being able to make a charecter. lol
Well all the good ones are already in modern MMOs (and adding a lot more like LF Dungeon Tool).
Only the bad ones .. like horrible down-time are eliminated.
My first mmo was DAOC and I do look at more recent games and wonder why they are not as fun as things released a decade or more ago.
Some of it is certainly the rose-colored glass effect where gamers remember the good times and forget all the the annoying and monotonous time sink stuff like really long downtimes, dependence on boring healbot playstyles, camp stealing and massive level / points grinds.
Fun in an mmo is highly subjective, which is why I suspect many stick with the genre despite disapointments. I am interested to see how the quality level of this year's relases will compare to the big games of the past 2.
But uh...wouldn't that be a natural evolution of the camp concept? Evolution isn't old school. It's progress.
...and in fact WOW uses exactly that system. Spawns (including resource nodes) are grouped in a way such that if a group's population count falls below a certain threshold respawns begin triggering immediately. Usually such groups are spread over big areas (or the entire zone, for resources) so it's a little difficult to notice this mechanic unless you've played for a while -- but it's there.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Now, let's be honest here.
Once I flush the wc, I don't want to see the same shit again.
First off, let me commend you Zarcob for your post. Full of great points, but here let me give some points. You are right about everything you said.but why does it all have to be a thing of the past? Just because our generation is older and different, why do we set our different path for the younger generation? It should to a certain extant be like it used to. I think the younger generation coming into this great genre should be able to have the experiences we once had. What are they getting now? Scripted play with no real abilty to use imagination and a feeling of freedom. I do think MMOs are heading in a good direction but not the best direction. and even for people like us with limited time or a dieing imagination in RP don't mean it still wouldn't be great to have. Trying to bring those qualitys back dosen't mean they have to make it a time comsuming thing. Personally i don't need a game where i can RP with others anymore but , for me, it would still make of a great community feel. As far as open world raiding goes, no , i could care less about that and maybe isn;'t the best thing, but theirs nothing wrong with having instanced raiding AND open world bosses. Battlegrounds are great but should be treated as a mini game for fun and not treated like a main source for PVP play. PVP play to me should be in open world. Hence the MMO. not much of a massive community if you don't get to experience the massive community feel. and reverting to some things of the past isn't always a bad thing. Don't you think if humans still practiced moral behavior our world would be a much better place. Old values arent always a bad thing.
That font color is terrible.
That is all.
I think there is definitely something to be said about that.
The things I sort of hated about my experience in Lineage 2 was that there was a lot of waiting at times. Waiting for bosses to spawn for days, hoping you got into a raid group because you needed that boss for your subclass or next class progression.
And of course sitting in town "looking for group" which could easily devolve into a harrowing experience.
But having said that there was a greater feeling of achievement for me to finally get that boss. And a pretty good feeling of community knowing that we were getting together so others could get it.
I think because of those game mechanics the sense that you really were in a "world" and one that took its cues from you and all the other players made it a bit special.
But I would agree that for most people, and even myself to a bit, having to rely upon a group or a boss or having limited amount of time to play with a harsh death penalty always hovering over you is going to deflate the whole experience.
I just like how the older games had better fleshed out worlds and more interesting game mechanics.
I mean, in DAoC you buy a ticket for a boat and actually give it to the npc. If you need to intereact you might be asked to type something next to the npc which will trigger him.
It just seems that some of the newer games might be a bit too whitewashed.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Wouldn't mind some of the old school features coming back but not sure if the game would be economically viable due to the general nature of the new breed of gamers.
http://www.grecca.net/
There's some potentially fun old-school in there.
The problem with reminiscing about "old school" is that we often look back through rose tinted glasses.
There have been games in recent years that have gotten some of the features right, features that we look back so fondly on. Unfortunately there are always other aspects of the games that ruin the good parts, just as it was in the games we remember so fondly from 5 or 10 years ago, but we tend to forget what was wrong with them, purposefully or not.
I'm sure there has been a thread done about this in the past, so if someone can point me in the right direction it would be wonderful. Is there a thread lurking somewhere on here that attempted to compile a realistic list of most wanted new & old features for one game?
I deliberately tried to avoid saying whether the features themselves were good or bad. I personally like community-building aspects of an MMO but I could see where others might not. I didn't really want to discuss what was bad or good, simply that the good was born not only of the game's features but the type of player that used those features.
That player is now much older and different in many ways. It's true, that there are younger versions of "us" that would probably enjoy those old games as they were, and it may even be worth passing on to another generation, but I also said I felt the community not only aged but expanded to include new types. These types aren't interested in RP in the least. They aren't interested in the adventure. The dungeon is merely a grind to them, no matter how it's dressed up. They're interested in other things, be they good or bad, such as competition, communication and character progression. And yes, they're interested in things like Scripted events as well. Is it an awful thing they are not granted license to explore the world as their imagination bids them? I do not know, but I do know how significantly they've changed the genre.
Let me put it this way. Take the 6 newest friends I've made in the past 5 years on MMOs, excluding my long-term friends that I knew from EQ and UO. Of those 6, five have never read Dragonlance or a D&D related novel. Three do not even claim to read fiction at all. In comparison, I don't recall ever bumping into someone in EQ that had not read, or at least was familiar with, the old Dragonlance books.
In a way, the scripted events of these new games are their books. They enjoy them for the very reason others don't: Because they want to be told a story, rather than have the freedom to create their own. Perhaps to them, there is enough freedom in just expressing themselves on ventrilo during a raid. A book, after all, is nothing but a linear story, so perhaps their story of Tanis and Raistlin is actually that of Thrall and Medivh. Maybe they're not interested in being left to their own freedom, but experiencing an interactive story, who can say for sure.
I can say for sure that they play a variety of MMOs and will be present at any release, even something like an UO return. Their tastes and their habits would ultimately shape that game as surely as ours shaped our games a decade ago, and it would ultimately not end up as the same type of game. MMOs evolve to reflect the playerbase as much as the playerbase is drawn to the MMO.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
And same can be said to you. First of all, I'm completely confident of my history, having started with MUD's and playing MMO's since Ultima Online. It's funny you can write such remarks but yet you cannot point out any more of the "good sides" that I have listed. You tell me what I missed or yuo just proven me right. Don't give the thread these one liners with no actual support to the contrary. It's near thoughtless and inconsiderate.
It was new, it was fun, but it was fairly generic and a less fleshed out version of the MMO's we have today. It was fun back then because it was new, it wasn't done yet, but now the genre has to progress and move forward to continue providing fresh experiences. Not rehashes of the same thing.
I pointed out great things of the past. You appparently did not start reading from the beggining. I didn't Re-point them out because im not going to sound like a broken record.
So why post in the first place then? Postnig things like that just makes you come off as a flamer/troll because you are not providing any valuable input. It makes you look condescending and without any proof to show for why you are above others like myself. By the way, I looked at all your "great points" and obviously none of them explicitly answered my question. Again, What was there in the past that was so great that is not currently in MMO's today?
I already addressed the community part, obviously very different than it was in the past when you draw in a much bigger population, but the good and the bad plaeyrs are always going t be everywhere since MMO's are big now.
Please if you are going to respond, not another thoughtless 1-2 liner. Contribute to the topic or don't at all, its a waste of space if you're not going to point out things and elaborate and judge other posters that you don't even know about.
I want a game with the playability and userfriendliness of WoW along with the depth and challenge of Everquest not games like Darkfall which promote clunky UIs and a lack of direction and features as game mechanics.