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story instances MUCH better than open world question/mob grind
nariusseldon
Member EpicPosts: 27,775
... for me (because fun is personal, right?).
Story instances can make "quests" much more interesting with scripted staged events, and change of environment (because you are in your little world) and there won't be a bunch of other players breaking your immersion.
I have been playing some STO the last few days, and some of the episodes are a lot of fun with multiple location, and different stuff to fight while moving a mini-story ahead. I wish WOW (not that i play it anymore) has more story/event focus dungeons, instead of boss focus dungeons.
DDO also have pretty good story instances (some even have puzzles).
Some of these settings are MUCH more suited (Star Trek in particular) for episode type story missions. Of course aside from interesting missions, combat needs to be good .. and that is probably easier to control in an instance.
Now some may ask .. why do you need a MMO for story instances? I think the answer is .. you don't .. but MMOs fit the bill well. Think about it .. there is no recent Star Trek RPG in the last few years, and STO is the place to be if you want to play story missions, particularly in MP, in the trek universe. Ditto for Dungeons & Dragons.
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"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Exactly. People at this site must love Mob Fields (ie. fields of mobs just standing around for miles on end doing nothing except waiting to be killed) because they sure want to go back to them/continue with em.
Look at single player offline games with large open worlds, like GTA or Red Dead Redemption. They have vast open areas that are just EMPTY of enemies, and then all the action takes place in special story missions around the ame, unless you want to cause chaos or whatever.
Just because you have an open world. DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE TO FILL IT WITH MOBS. There may be a lot of gangsters in mos eisley, but that doesn't mean every single one of them wants your head.
CoS sounds interesting. I wonder if they can pull it off.
The core concept is not that uncommon though. D3 does it. Borderlands does it. STO does it. DDO does it. DCUO does it. TOR does it (though i don't like TOR ... too much talking, and combat is not as fun as these other games).
I think the key difference doing this in a MMO, instead of a online SP/MP game, is that there is more content, and updates are expected to be more frequent.
instances belong to single player games IMO, or co-op games.
real mmorpgs shouldnt have any instances, not even for dungeons, but thats just MY personal opinion.
and npc-questing is also questionable. at least when it comes that the same npc is giving the same quest to everybody. this is something a real mmorpg should avoid. quests should be given by players or random dynamic events.
grinding is also not the right way of gaining experience.
And you have openly admitted several times you aren't a fan of MMORPGs. Can you just like, stop making threads already? They're just troll baiting at this point.
So those of us who LIKE MMORPGs can carry on discussing them?
Yes and I wonder at times why so few are not calling for those isntance story/themepark/handrail to just be "outside" the main world.
Main world, sandbox. completely open.
story, themeparks. instanced, outside the main world.
It would allow the main world to be very large, open for exploration and allow real world housing. With the instanced story and dungeons it would also allow for easy expansion of the game by allowing them to add additions to the game easily due to being able to place anything almost anywhere. By keeping the two MMO game types seperate in this way it would allow companies to make games for a larger audience. It IS possible beacuse when it comes down to it a sandbox world is EASY to make. SWG had worlds created by a RANDOM GENERATOR... and once that world is made, its DONE and they can work on the instanced parts.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
One that I think did storyline instancing well is Guild Wars. Although personal, it was always groupable because players who joined in would play or re-play that event.
Worst, from my perspective, was WOTLK style phasing in WoW. Out of phase with someone who wants to group with you? Grouping became impossible. In my opinion, killing grouping opportunities should not be a design objective in an MMORPG.
In retrospect, it's pretty sad that a game that isn't even an MMORPG had more flexible grouping than a game that is an MMORPG.
It doesn't matter what you call it, the two cannot exist together in a balanced game. Basic game design.
They can and they have.
Asherons Call 1 was a sandbox game, all of its dungeons were instanced and it had a storyline that could be followed or ignored.
SWG was a sandbox game, it had a story which could be followed or ignored and it had random generated quests from a damn BOX in town.
As long as the main world remains sandbox and any and all storylines/themeparks do NOT inhibit it, it remains a sandbox.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Dungeons in Asheron's Call were NOT instanced. And you really can't call something a full sandbox if it has instances. The whole point of a sandbox is to influence the people and world around you. Instances are the exact opposite.
That would be really cool but I don't see how that is even remotely realistic.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I got tired of "mob fields" long ago, Coming to games like meridian 59 and then EQ from muds it was a shock, in muds some of the quests and npcs were so well done that nothing in mmo games compares even now, even back then story became important, we had the basic mob fields but also instances with fully scripted stories. Maybe it was because we lacked the visual shiney shiney that the story was so much more important.
Imagine my suprise when joining my first mmo I found the npc to be so generic and souless as if the game developement had took a step back.
I do not need to kill the same creature 500 times to feel important and 99% of the loot from most of the mmo games I have played in the last 16 years have gone from my mind but I still remember the quests and stories that stood out.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Yes they were instances back when instances were called "Zones". They were handled by a server other than the server the main world was on and was PROVED to be true shortly after the olthoi queen instance was added to the game, the instance server crashed and you couldnt "portal" into any of the dungeons being handled by the same server.
As for the last part of your comment...whatever, YOU put that limitation on the definition of sandbox, not the industry.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
OP I think you are being a little black and white in your argument. There can be good storyline/quest opions and open world mob grind for groups/solo. Look at Vanguard, it has both.
I always thought Eve's complexes and missions might as well be instances. Yeah, you can probe people out and "invade" like you do in Dark Souls, but you could do a lot more with instances, and you could get a performance boost too. If you can load up the assets while the "invader" is in warp that is. There is this odd crowd who think loading screens are cyanide or something...
I would recommend using instances whenever the dev can get away with it. Always if the end result is the same.
In every game I've played, instanced content has been the best content in the game. Its always on a level higher than the world content. World content is usually just padding. And if its just padding, I tend to skip it and go for the little islands of good content in the game. There is no reason for me to stay with the game after that because I've already experienced the best it can offer.
And then there's this abhorrent static world syndrome... In instances, what you do can have a permanent effect while in world content, something has to reset at some point for the other guy to have a chance at being the hero. The guy who wants boar hides never has enough.
And the curious expectation that just because something can happen it will happen? -They forget that overwhelming majority of times, nothing happens, and when it does, it is usually very underwhelming and uninteresting. Yeah you might get ganked by "bandits" on the way, but even if they did, a gank is just a gank among many more just like it. Even if its performed by players there is only a handful of ways it can go down. Just like a scripted random encounter. And often its merely a nuisance too, not something you wish for. Its not worth it. Its not. So far, for me, never has been.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Instances and zones are two entirely different concepts and features. Learn the difference before trying to talk about MMORPGs.
I'm with you there bro.. Real MMORPG's should have any instances... Instances belong to single player lobby based games..
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I think it depends on the implementation. SWToR's story instancing was very well done, but the entire rest of the game was just weak. It took too much away from the story content so it didn't matter how good the story content was. The Secret World's story content isn't nearly as personal as SWToR's, but it integrates much better into the rest of the story world, and the rest of the game outside of the story is much better done.
Compared to SWToR, I think an open world quest/mob grind game could be much better. Compared to TSW, I think an open world quest/mob grind game is inferior. Even there, it depends on how the open world quest/mob grind game is implemented. Is it something more like Fallout's style, where you're wandering, or is it the quest hub to quest hub style where the player has no choice about where they are going? Quest hub to quest hub isn't any better than SWToR, even if well implemented, but giving the player a choice about where they go in the world would be much better.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Learn about the history of the genre before trying to talk like you have a clue. I provided all the proof needed that I not only actually PLAYED Asherons Call 1 but how they are what is called instanced today.
The dungeons had their own SERVER not tied to the main worlds server. Not all dungeons were on the same server...AND you had to portal into each and every single dungeon.
You dont understand this because you came into the genre with "multi-instanced" gaming in which there can be copies of he same instance. Your understanding is limited. Take this opportunity to learn and grow.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
I don't claim to understand AC1's systems but to instantiate something in computer science is to initialize a copy of an object. That copy may contain different sets of data but it is derived from the same source. Instancing a dungeon or whatever is derived from this same concept considering video games are partly created by programmers.
Zones are not instances, and instances can be zones. Take vanilla everquest 1 for example. They did not have instances, they had zones. The zones were shared, and were never copied (or instanced) no matter how many people were in it. It'd probably crash if it reached its limited, or become too unplayable due to lag.
However, Everquest 2 had both zones and instancing. In EQ2 you would have the commonlands "zone". If the population would reach a certain level, it would then create an instance of the commonlands zone. So you would have two copies of the one zone. Other games do this as well, but this is a clear difference of zoning and instancing.
Based off your argument I believe Eve's universe would be called instanced. Which several Eve fans would vehemently argue against that point. The reason I say this is because Eve's universe is clustered onto different server nodes to handle the load of having a single universe. I believe WoW even does this per continent.
There is no such thing as "real mmorpgs". It is just an arbitrary categorization in your mind.
To me, games are games. Anything is fair game. So let's call STO, and DDO co-op games. Nothing changed for me. I will still play them.