Then the solution is simple. Get rid of the world. Most players like solo-ing or small group anyway. You can easily do instanced stories.
The world is the entire point though. Story is just a placeholder for not having a working simulation.
*was* the entire point. In many MMOs today, people wait in cities for their dungeon or pvp queues. If that is what they prefer to do, what is the point of a world?
Originally posted by AticusWelles An MMORPG without a persistant virtual world is reduced to a online co-op RPG/dungeon crawler.
That genre already exists, no reason to bastardize the MMORPG to do something that's already being done.
And MMO is going in that direction anyway with solo-friendly gameplay, phasing, instances, LFD/LFR tools.
There is actually a good reason to go that direction. People like it. They want this kind of co-op RPG gameplay with AH type trading.
You can call this whatever you want, but that is where i see the genre is going. Not unlike the old "graphical adventure games" become today's "action adventure" games.
I don't see why there isn't room for both. Like he said, these sort of games already exist. Look at Diablo 3. It's not an MMO, but it's soloable, has group play, PvP (eventually) and has an auction house. Who knows, you may be right. Perhaps the MMORPG as we know it will collapse into this style of game.
Then the solution is simple. Get rid of the world. Most players like solo-ing or small group anyway. You can easily do instanced stories.
Many MMOs are like that already.
Well, yes, you can do one or the other.
You can concentrate on the world, and remove all the instancing.
Or you can concentrate on the lobby, and remove the world.
Most MMO's basically mix the two together, usually with the world as an afterthought. Although I prefer the world.
"players like soloing or small group anyway" - these players prefer the world. I'm not sure what your point is. I personally didn't like GW1 at all.
Instances are, in fact, designed for the guilders, mass-groupers where you need 40 people to get anything done. The soloers are who play in the world.
Originally posted by nariusseldon
And MMO is going in that direction anyway with solo-friendly gameplay, phasing, instances, LFD/LFR tools.
You're not making any sense.
Soloers don't care for instances... lol
I think he's referring to instancing not in terms of WoW-style 5-mans or raids, but in in terms of offering the player the ability to play a story-driven portion of the game without experiencing any effects from the actions or decisions of outside players or parties. TOR does this with quest instances and WoW with phasing.
These methods provide ways of telling a SPRPG type of story that gives the appearance of changing the game world for any given player while still allowing him to inhabit a world with thousands of other players.
For example: Player A kills Big Bad Guy in his instance or phase. BBG is still alive for Player B in his instance or phase. Player B now kills BBG, which is now dead for him. But even though BBG is dead for Player A and Player B in their respective instances or phases, he's still alive for Player C when he comes along.
Story is important for the MMO genre to continue growing in a way that will keep people interested and invested in the games. It's a long overdue portion of MMO's, that being said there needs to be more than story for an MMO, and when developers learn to put their effort into each portion of the game and knock them all out of the ballpark, you'll have your next massive success.
I know what he's referring to, I just don't see why he thinks that's what soloers are looking for.
From what I've seen, standard themepark WoW and WoW clones have this layout:
- there is a world, and you play in it until cap. The world is typically not instanced;
- there is the end game, which is played at cap. The world is heavily instanced there.
People who group the most are raiders. Raiders play exclusively in instances. Raiders are playing the lobby game.
People who solo play mostly in the world, which is not instanced. Soloers are playing the MMO.
Making the world instanced kills it for soloers, they'll just go play a single player RPG at that point. I did not enjoy SW:TOR at all nor did any other soloers I know. I especially hated the multiple-instances per area thing.
Whilst I don't think story is inherently bad in MMO's, it seems to me to be a waste of resources.
If you have a good backdrop, interesting factions, an interesting world, good character customization, then players will create their own story.
The logistics of keeping everyone happy with a unified story seem unworthy of bothering with in an MMO. Better to throw time and energy into random variables.
Unless you want an ultra theme park, or LOVE soloing (but then seriously, why play mmos), you may as well just create some awesome races, faction them, make it malleable, provide lots of 'things to do' in the world and shout
Originally posted by AticusWelles An MMORPG without a persistant virtual world is reduced to a online co-op RPG/dungeon crawler.
That genre already exists, no reason to bastardize the MMORPG to do something that's already being done.
And MMO is going in that direction anyway with solo-friendly gameplay, phasing, instances, LFD/LFR tools.
There is actually a good reason to go that direction. People like it. They want this kind of co-op RPG gameplay with AH type trading.
You can call this whatever you want, but that is where i see the genre is going. Not unlike the old "graphical adventure games" become today's "action adventure" games.
I don't see why there isn't room for both. Like he said, these sort of games already exist. Look at Diablo 3. It's not an MMO, but it's soloable, has group play, PvP (eventually) and has an auction house. Who knows, you may be right. Perhaps the MMORPG as we know it will collapse into this style of game.
I didn't say there isn't room for both. Seldom things are 0 or 100% in the marketplace. However, the trend is clear. There will be MORE of "this style" of games, and less of other styles (percentage-wise).
And it is precisely that this style is available, and successful, that MMO designs are gravitating towards it.
The logistics of keeping everyone happy with a unified story seem unworthy of bothering with in an MMO. Better to throw time and energy into random variables.
This^^
Thus, most story telling in MMOs are done by phasing or instancing, essentially side-stepping the logistic of keeping everyone on the same page of a unified story.
There is also no need for a unify story in a MP (MMO or not) environment. I have not seen anyone care enough to complain about the discrepencies in stories in games like Diablo. No one worries that the other he just played with has already killed the butcher and we are killing him again.
Consistency in story telling is just not that important in multiplayer games.
The result is a permanent effect on the game world but only a fraction of the games total and eventual population ever gets to experience the content. The return on investment for the development of the content is very low. Maybe 5 players are ever repeatedly there for the new content to experience or achieve the content. Everyone else gets nothing or gets to experience the lesser repeatable content. The game gets the reputation of being a niche game, if you don't take time off from work or school to get the content when it goes live you will lose out on it.
Maybe these problems could be fixed by making it a yearly one week event with the return of the EOL or his next incarnation.
I cut down your post to avoid lengthy pyramid.
I totally understand your point, there is no way an developer will spent resources on an encounter that costs thousand's of man power and money that only a small fraction of players will experience once. Your example is exactly what I was thinking would work but you proved that it will not in an MMO world.
But what would? Is the current method of creating an personal story separate from everyone else the only way to experience your actions having an effect on the world.
How can anyone craft a Over ARching World story if everyone logs in at different times, with different time zones and different player levels.
Different levels can be fixed by GW2's Scaling , but if an Boss Mob can only be killed once, what happened to those that couldn't fight it till weeks after due to travels for work.
Could we have an Boss mob that appears only after their Sub-bosses that drops an certain relic that are in separate pieces and once there is enough collected then appears.
An boss mob that roams the world and gets defeated and flies away or teleports away till its encountered again, and will only be finally defeated after being beaten X numbers of times.
An Boss mob that when summoned will destroy certain villages and towns that once its destroyed gives more quests afterwards based on the amount of damages it caused.
Or an event of where this massive boss can not be destroyed until a few items are collected, or towns are protected?
I truly believe that there will be a way to have an Over Arching World story that can be enjoyed by everyone from different time zones and different regions that gives you the illusion of having an effect on the world that you are playing in.
I believe everything is possible, if you want it enough, its only impossible when you given up.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
I know for sure that answer is not sticking a single player game (hello SWTOR, GW2 personal story) in the game. I just hate that approach personally, it breaks the whole MMO idea where I am in big world interacting with other people. I guess the answer would be somewhere between open unscripted enviroment like DayZ, dynamic world like Guild Wars 2 and not making the player hero. There just cannot be a convincing story when eveyone is a hero.
But yea, 'story' for MMO cannot be done by developer writing the most epic storyline; it has to happen more dynamically. Let players create their own stories (again, DayZ style).
Story in MMORPG's always ends up being bad or useless. Everyone has the same story, and story can be done much better in single player games. The MMORPG part of it becomes pointless and it usually just ends up inserting some kill 10 wolf quests into the game. I have never cared one bit about anything story related in an mmorpg. The things I remember about MMORPG's are what the players do in the game that effects me. In EVE it might be some major war/invasion. In less sandboxy games it might be the guild of pkers that constantly murder people in certain areas. That kind of thing is memoriable, not the silly quests that MMORPG's send you on. Even GW2's personal story is the worst part of the game. For story a single player game will always be better unless an mmorpg tells a story where people have different roles in the same story. Sandboxes make their own story based on player action and this is the best storytelling gets in mmorpgs. Story in your standard themepark is just a really really bad single player/c-op game with a chatroom attached.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now! I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
Then the solution is simple. Get rid of the world. Most players like solo-ing or small group anyway. You can easily do instanced stories.
The world is the entire point though. Story is just a placeholder for not having a working simulation.
*was* the entire point. In many MMOs today, people wait in cities for their dungeon or pvp queues. If that is what they prefer to do, what is the point of a world?
Perhaps those MMOs are not actually providing the world people are looking for?
I'm not going to deny there's a niche out there for lobby-based item treadmills. I've even been known to play a few myself and holding down a W key for 10-15 minutes for a daily quest isn't really my idea of a good time. But in a couple of hours, minecraft will sell its 6th million copy. I can't help but look at that and think that my own wishes for more-dynamic worlds is not unique, that there is a niche between WoW and Second Life that MMOs (or at least the ones that people like myself actually get around to trying) are failing to catch.
Then the solution is simple. Get rid of the world. Most players like solo-ing or small group anyway. You can easily do instanced stories.
The world is the entire point though. Story is just a placeholder for not having a working simulation.
*was* the entire point. In many MMOs today, people wait in cities for their dungeon or pvp queues. If that is what they prefer to do, what is the point of a world?
Perhaps those MMOs are not actually providing the world people are looking for?
I'm not going to deny there's a niche out there for lobby-based item treadmills. I've even been known to play a few myself and holding down a W key for 10-15 minutes for a daily quest isn't really my idea of a good time. But in a couple of hours, minecraft will sell its 6th million copy. I can't help but look at that and think that my own wishes for more-dynamic worlds is not unique, that there is a niche between WoW and Second Life that MMOs (or at least the ones that people like myself actually get around to trying) are failing to catch.
I doubt lobby-based co-op game is a niche. It is, in fact, MUCH bigger than sandbox MMOs. How many are playing Diablo 3? How many are playing Eve Online?
There is also another factor. May be there is an audience for a dynamic world but it is expensive to make and needs lots of new R&D. OTOH, a lobby based progression co-op game is a known quality and dev can focus on implementation, polish, content and the good stuff instead of risking their necks on unknown technologies.
Originally posted by AticusWelles An MMORPG without a persistant virtual world is reduced to a online co-op RPG/dungeon crawler.
That genre already exists, no reason to bastardize the MMORPG to do something that's already being done.
And MMO is going in that direction anyway with solo-friendly gameplay, phasing, instances, LFD/LFR tools.
There is actually a good reason to go that direction. People like it. They want this kind of co-op RPG gameplay with AH type trading.
You can call this whatever you want, but that is where i see the genre is going. Not unlike the old "graphical adventure games" become today's "action adventure" games.
My point is there is already a genre providing that type of gameplay without a subscription, why on earth ruin the MMORPG genre, and pay subscription fees, or deal with the hassles of the F2P model instead of just playing the genre that already caters to that crowd?
Player A :" Ok, I will Wait for it to pop and then I kill it and I will Save all the Lands"
Player B:" I just Done that"
I suppose you'd prefer:
Player A: "Did you just kill the Evil Thingy?"
Player B: "Yes!"
Player A: "Oh. Dang I wish there was some content for me to do. Now this area is clear of enemies. I think I'll go play some Diablo instead!"
Player A: "What's New?"
Player B: "Checking the lists ... farmers along the edge of the dark forest are offering a lot of bounty quests today. There's also been an incursion of lizard people from the swamplands and the war with the neighbouring kingdom has moved into the tower valley this week. My research finished on that artifact we picked up a while back - seems it's a ritual key to one of the old burial vaults - probably one of those 20 minute tombs."
Player A: "Let's start with the wolves. Lots of hunters will be going after the bounties, but let's head into the forest itself and scout around to see if we can find out what's driving them out into the open. There were some rumours in the boards that a tier 7 event has spawned in our kingdom and this might be one of the opening threads. Pick up any open scouting missions the watch is offering and set autogather to herbs."
MMO's should not have scripted stories. They should have an enviroment that facilitates interesting situations between players.
I honestly think that MMO's are kind of similiar to real life. You are in a world, there are a bunch of real people around you, stuff happens.
I mean, think about interesting/enjoyable things in your real life. Did these things happen because there was a tour guide showing you exactly what to do and leading your around in a scripted fashion? Or did these things happen because of unscripted interesting situations between you and other people or the environment?
IMO, most interesting things in real life are unscripted. And given that an MMO has the ASSET of tons of players online at once, I really think that these are the kind of situations they should strive to inspire.
Instead of focusing on delivering a scripted story, the MMO should focus on creating an environment where players can do interesting things together.
For example...instead of having a quest NPC that tells you that you need to kill 10 gnolls inside of a castle because his daughter has been kept captive; you should...
Put the castle there, put the gnolls and the daughter inside, and then let the players decide how they want to handle the situation. Maybe two players find the castle and they decide to kill the gnolls and save the daughter. Maybe they decide to have one player draw the gnolls away while the other saves the daughter.
Then once they save the daughter, they can decide what to do with her. Do they bring her back to her father and gain the goodwill of the townsfolk? Do they sell her into slavery for money?
And none of this would be "scripted" it would just be different objects in the game interacting with one another. The daughter would have a father, she would be in the "captured" state and the father will pay for her. At the same time, the daughter will be of the correct age to be valuable to slave traders.
I think it would just make the game much more dynamic if this "hard" scripting were removed and the game relied more on these kind of "relationships."
A lot of MMORPG's thrive off of impossible worlds. The real life comparison is a bad one for a set of reasons:
- real life doesn't have dragons, spaceships, people doing cleave attacks with swords, or whatever. Developers have to design all that. That's not a "tour guide" but a lot of people seem to confuse that with a tour guide;
- real life is very slow where you have to grow up, work 8 hours a day, study, whatever. It's the task of games to mitigate things like that, while a lot of games have themselves became a job that takes too much time;
- real life typically has a wide array of consequences. That's why people are not ganking each other left and right IRL, because police will get them.
A lot of MMORPG's thrive off of impossible worlds. The real life comparison is a bad one for a set of reasons:
- real life doesn't have dragons, spaceships, people doing cleave attacks with swords, or whatever. Developers have to design all that. That's not a "tour guide" but a lot of people seem to confuse that with a tour guide;
- real life is very slow where you have to grow up, work 8 hours a day, study, whatever. It's the task of games to mitigate things like that, while a lot of games have themselves became a job that takes too much time;
- real life typically has a wide array of consequences. That's why people are not ganking each other left and right IRL, because police will get them.
Duh .
MMORPGs are obviously not exactly like real life in very way...I think that should have been obvious. What I was getting at is that they do SHARE several things with real life, far more than non-persistent games do.
Specifically, an MMORPG can actually have a society, communities, and even a culture. It can be "virtual world" in every sense of the term.
And IMO, this is a big deal, and something many developers choose to try to ignore rather than embrace. And that's what I meant by the tour guide. Instead of trying to create a virtual world that fosters interesting interactions between players, the developers simply create a very scripted path for you to follow and oftentimes don't allow for you to stray far.
The point of the real life comparison is really to say...hey let's look at why real life is interesting and try to incorporate that into our MMORPG.
It seemed to me you were saying that just throwing a bunch of people together will make a good MMORPG because "real life works that way". While you're simultaneously bashing themeparks. I've seen a lot of sandboxes where the idea is to do very little content at all and indeed throw a bunch of people in it and make them do all the work. While a lot of themeparks just have a lot of content that people, for some reason, insist on calling "tour guides". But I don't get what's fun in a game without content, without any dragons to kill.
Also, real life, in many ways, is specifically not interesting.
Player A :" Ok, I will Wait for it to pop and then I kill it and I will Save all the Lands"
Player B:" I just Done that"
I suppose you'd prefer:
Player A: "Did you just kill the Evil Thingy?"
Player B: "Yes!"
Player A: "Oh. Dang I wish there was some content for me to do. Now this area is clear of enemies. I think I'll go play some Diablo instead!"
Player A: "What's New?"
Player B: "Checking the lists ... farmers along the edge of the dark forest are offering a lot of bounty quests today. There's also been an incursion of lizard people from the swamplands and the war with the neighbouring kingdom has moved into the tower valley this week. My research finished on that artifact we picked up a while back - seems it's a ritual key to one of the old burial vaults - probably one of those 20 minute tombs."
Player A: "Let's start with the wolves. Lots of hunters will be going after the bounties, but let's head into the forest itself and scout around to see if we can find out what's driving them out into the open. There were some rumours in the boards that a tier 7 event has spawned in our kingdom and this might be one of the opening threads. Pick up any open scouting missions the watch is offering and set autogather to herbs."
Maplestone gets it!!!
Thats the kind of Themepark quest with Sand Box elements.
This would totally eliminate the whole the area is cleared now, what to do mentality
Scouting Quests, Bounty Quests, Research Quests are all quests that can have a wide variety of dynamic in them. ( wished I would have thought of them ^^ )
Those would be what Sandbox players called Themepark quests that is given and written by Developers, but because they occur randomly it provides them with a feeling of dynamic effect.
All we have to do is add some player consequences from Open World PVPing, then we will have an wonderfully story driven, world.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
I don't mind the personal story type deal Guild Wars 2 is doing. That doesn't bother me because it's completely optional. What bothers me is SWTOR/TSW from what I can tell. The players themselves, the actions they take, things that are going on around the world. That is where in my opinon "content" is created.
Players will create the content, drama, fueds and all of that if you give them the proper tools to do so. Lore is fine, backdrop of what you are playing in and why, but story for me doesn't cut it in an MMO and I'm not sure what has given Devs this idea that it's wanted. Ehhh....
Shouldn't your story be the ones you and your friends create? Sounds more fun to me.
Comments
*was* the entire point. In many MMOs today, people wait in cities for their dungeon or pvp queues. If that is what they prefer to do, what is the point of a world?
I don't see why there isn't room for both. Like he said, these sort of games already exist. Look at Diablo 3. It's not an MMO, but it's soloable, has group play, PvP (eventually) and has an auction house. Who knows, you may be right. Perhaps the MMORPG as we know it will collapse into this style of game.
I think he's referring to instancing not in terms of WoW-style 5-mans or raids, but in in terms of offering the player the ability to play a story-driven portion of the game without experiencing any effects from the actions or decisions of outside players or parties. TOR does this with quest instances and WoW with phasing.
These methods provide ways of telling a SPRPG type of story that gives the appearance of changing the game world for any given player while still allowing him to inhabit a world with thousands of other players.
For example: Player A kills Big Bad Guy in his instance or phase. BBG is still alive for Player B in his instance or phase. Player B now kills BBG, which is now dead for him. But even though BBG is dead for Player A and Player B in their respective instances or phases, he's still alive for Player C when he comes along.
Story is important for the MMO genre to continue growing in a way that will keep people interested and invested in the games. It's a long overdue portion of MMO's, that being said there needs to be more than story for an MMO, and when developers learn to put their effort into each portion of the game and knock them all out of the ballpark, you'll have your next massive success.
@Rockhide
I know what he's referring to, I just don't see why he thinks that's what soloers are looking for.
From what I've seen, standard themepark WoW and WoW clones have this layout:
- there is a world, and you play in it until cap. The world is typically not instanced;
- there is the end game, which is played at cap. The world is heavily instanced there.
People who group the most are raiders. Raiders play exclusively in instances. Raiders are playing the lobby game.
People who solo play mostly in the world, which is not instanced. Soloers are playing the MMO.
Making the world instanced kills it for soloers, they'll just go play a single player RPG at that point. I did not enjoy SW:TOR at all nor did any other soloers I know. I especially hated the multiple-instances per area thing.
Whilst I don't think story is inherently bad in MMO's, it seems to me to be a waste of resources.
If you have a good backdrop, interesting factions, an interesting world, good character customization, then players will create their own story.
The logistics of keeping everyone happy with a unified story seem unworthy of bothering with in an MMO. Better to throw time and energy into random variables.
Unless you want an ultra theme park, or LOVE soloing (but then seriously, why play mmos), you may as well just create some awesome races, faction them, make it malleable, provide lots of 'things to do' in the world and shout
GO!
I didn't say there isn't room for both. Seldom things are 0 or 100% in the marketplace. However, the trend is clear. There will be MORE of "this style" of games, and less of other styles (percentage-wise).
And it is precisely that this style is available, and successful, that MMO designs are gravitating towards it.
This^^
Thus, most story telling in MMOs are done by phasing or instancing, essentially side-stepping the logistic of keeping everyone on the same page of a unified story.
There is also no need for a unify story in a MP (MMO or not) environment. I have not seen anyone care enough to complain about the discrepencies in stories in games like Diablo. No one worries that the other he just played with has already killed the butcher and we are killing him again.
Consistency in story telling is just not that important in multiplayer games.
I cut down your post to avoid lengthy pyramid.
I totally understand your point, there is no way an developer will spent resources on an encounter that costs thousand's of man power and money that only a small fraction of players will experience once. Your example is exactly what I was thinking would work but you proved that it will not in an MMO world.
But what would? Is the current method of creating an personal story separate from everyone else the only way to experience your actions having an effect on the world.
How can anyone craft a Over ARching World story if everyone logs in at different times, with different time zones and different player levels.
Different levels can be fixed by GW2's Scaling , but if an Boss Mob can only be killed once, what happened to those that couldn't fight it till weeks after due to travels for work.
Could we have an Boss mob that appears only after their Sub-bosses that drops an certain relic that are in separate pieces and once there is enough collected then appears.
An boss mob that roams the world and gets defeated and flies away or teleports away till its encountered again, and will only be finally defeated after being beaten X numbers of times.
An Boss mob that when summoned will destroy certain villages and towns that once its destroyed gives more quests afterwards based on the amount of damages it caused.
Or an event of where this massive boss can not be destroyed until a few items are collected, or towns are protected?
I truly believe that there will be a way to have an Over Arching World story that can be enjoyed by everyone from different time zones and different regions that gives you the illusion of having an effect on the world that you are playing in.
I believe everything is possible, if you want it enough, its only impossible when you given up.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
Stories in MMO's are really... tough.
I know for sure that answer is not sticking a single player game (hello SWTOR, GW2 personal story) in the game. I just hate that approach personally, it breaks the whole MMO idea where I am in big world interacting with other people. I guess the answer would be somewhere between open unscripted enviroment like DayZ, dynamic world like Guild Wars 2 and not making the player hero. There just cannot be a convincing story when eveyone is a hero.
But yea, 'story' for MMO cannot be done by developer writing the most epic storyline; it has to happen more dynamically. Let players create their own stories (again, DayZ style).
My Guild Wars 2 blog. Read it. The bestestest and most TRUTHEST BLOG EVER!!
Story in MMORPG's always ends up being bad or useless. Everyone has the same story, and story can be done much better in single player games. The MMORPG part of it becomes pointless and it usually just ends up inserting some kill 10 wolf quests into the game. I have never cared one bit about anything story related in an mmorpg. The things I remember about MMORPG's are what the players do in the game that effects me. In EVE it might be some major war/invasion. In less sandboxy games it might be the guild of pkers that constantly murder people in certain areas. That kind of thing is memoriable, not the silly quests that MMORPG's send you on. Even GW2's personal story is the worst part of the game. For story a single player game will always be better unless an mmorpg tells a story where people have different roles in the same story. Sandboxes make their own story based on player action and this is the best storytelling gets in mmorpgs. Story in your standard themepark is just a really really bad single player/c-op game with a chatroom attached.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now!
I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
Perhaps those MMOs are not actually providing the world people are looking for?
I'm not going to deny there's a niche out there for lobby-based item treadmills. I've even been known to play a few myself and holding down a W key for 10-15 minutes for a daily quest isn't really my idea of a good time. But in a couple of hours, minecraft will sell its 6th million copy. I can't help but look at that and think that my own wishes for more-dynamic worlds is not unique, that there is a niche between WoW and Second Life that MMOs (or at least the ones that people like myself actually get around to trying) are failing to catch.
I doubt lobby-based co-op game is a niche. It is, in fact, MUCH bigger than sandbox MMOs. How many are playing Diablo 3? How many are playing Eve Online?
There is also another factor. May be there is an audience for a dynamic world but it is expensive to make and needs lots of new R&D. OTOH, a lobby based progression co-op game is a known quality and dev can focus on implementation, polish, content and the good stuff instead of risking their necks on unknown technologies.
My point is there is already a genre providing that type of gameplay without a subscription, why on earth ruin the MMORPG genre, and pay subscription fees, or deal with the hassles of the F2P model instead of just playing the genre that already caters to that crowd?
I suppose you'd prefer:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Player A: "What's New?"
Player B: "Checking the lists ... farmers along the edge of the dark forest are offering a lot of bounty quests today. There's also been an incursion of lizard people from the swamplands and the war with the neighbouring kingdom has moved into the tower valley this week. My research finished on that artifact we picked up a while back - seems it's a ritual key to one of the old burial vaults - probably one of those 20 minute tombs."
Player A: "Let's start with the wolves. Lots of hunters will be going after the bounties, but let's head into the forest itself and scout around to see if we can find out what's driving them out into the open. There were some rumours in the boards that a tier 7 event has spawned in our kingdom and this might be one of the opening threads. Pick up any open scouting missions the watch is offering and set autogather to herbs."
MMO's should not have scripted stories. They should have an enviroment that facilitates interesting situations between players.
I honestly think that MMO's are kind of similiar to real life. You are in a world, there are a bunch of real people around you, stuff happens.
I mean, think about interesting/enjoyable things in your real life. Did these things happen because there was a tour guide showing you exactly what to do and leading your around in a scripted fashion? Or did these things happen because of unscripted interesting situations between you and other people or the environment?
IMO, most interesting things in real life are unscripted. And given that an MMO has the ASSET of tons of players online at once, I really think that these are the kind of situations they should strive to inspire.
Instead of focusing on delivering a scripted story, the MMO should focus on creating an environment where players can do interesting things together.
For example...instead of having a quest NPC that tells you that you need to kill 10 gnolls inside of a castle because his daughter has been kept captive; you should...
Put the castle there, put the gnolls and the daughter inside, and then let the players decide how they want to handle the situation. Maybe two players find the castle and they decide to kill the gnolls and save the daughter. Maybe they decide to have one player draw the gnolls away while the other saves the daughter.
Then once they save the daughter, they can decide what to do with her. Do they bring her back to her father and gain the goodwill of the townsfolk? Do they sell her into slavery for money?
And none of this would be "scripted" it would just be different objects in the game interacting with one another. The daughter would have a father, she would be in the "captured" state and the father will pay for her. At the same time, the daughter will be of the correct age to be valuable to slave traders.
I think it would just make the game much more dynamic if this "hard" scripting were removed and the game relied more on these kind of "relationships."
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
A lot of MMORPG's thrive off of impossible worlds. The real life comparison is a bad one for a set of reasons:
- real life doesn't have dragons, spaceships, people doing cleave attacks with swords, or whatever. Developers have to design all that. That's not a "tour guide" but a lot of people seem to confuse that with a tour guide;
- real life is very slow where you have to grow up, work 8 hours a day, study, whatever. It's the task of games to mitigate things like that, while a lot of games have themselves became a job that takes too much time;
- real life typically has a wide array of consequences. That's why people are not ganking each other left and right IRL, because police will get them.
Duh
.
MMORPGs are obviously not exactly like real life in very way...I think that should have been obvious. What I was getting at is that they do SHARE several things with real life, far more than non-persistent games do.
Specifically, an MMORPG can actually have a society, communities, and even a culture. It can be "virtual world" in every sense of the term.
And IMO, this is a big deal, and something many developers choose to try to ignore rather than embrace. And that's what I meant by the tour guide. Instead of trying to create a virtual world that fosters interesting interactions between players, the developers simply create a very scripted path for you to follow and oftentimes don't allow for you to stray far.
The point of the real life comparison is really to say...hey let's look at why real life is interesting and try to incorporate that into our MMORPG.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
It seemed to me you were saying that just throwing a bunch of people together will make a good MMORPG because "real life works that way". While you're simultaneously bashing themeparks. I've seen a lot of sandboxes where the idea is to do very little content at all and indeed throw a bunch of people in it and make them do all the work. While a lot of themeparks just have a lot of content that people, for some reason, insist on calling "tour guides". But I don't get what's fun in a game without content, without any dragons to kill.
Also, real life, in many ways, is specifically not interesting.
Maplestone gets it!!!
Thats the kind of Themepark quest with Sand Box elements.
This would totally eliminate the whole the area is cleared now, what to do mentality
Scouting Quests, Bounty Quests, Research Quests are all quests that can have a wide variety of dynamic in them. ( wished I would have thought of them ^^ )
Those would be what Sandbox players called Themepark quests that is given and written by Developers, but because they occur randomly it provides them with a feeling of dynamic effect.
All we have to do is add some player consequences from Open World PVPing, then we will have an wonderfully story driven, world.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
If this kind of thing realy bothers you, rpgs aren't for you.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Story AS the mmo, e.g. swtor not good.
I don't mind the personal story type deal Guild Wars 2 is doing. That doesn't bother me because it's completely optional. What bothers me is SWTOR/TSW from what I can tell. The players themselves, the actions they take, things that are going on around the world. That is where in my opinon "content" is created.
Players will create the content, drama, fueds and all of that if you give them the proper tools to do so. Lore is fine, backdrop of what you are playing in and why, but story for me doesn't cut it in an MMO and I'm not sure what has given Devs this idea that it's wanted. Ehhh....
Shouldn't your story be the ones you and your friends create? Sounds more fun to me.
story based MMO is joke , story should stay in background only