Don't expect "world generators" from big developers, they have shareholders to keep happy and their only reason for making a MMO is to jump on the wow train and cash in asap before the game loses interest and goes on life support.
Your biggest chance might be the indy developers, untill they grow bigger and start to cash in themselves. Those indy developers often operate from a ideal of adding something to the game world as a developer, but not always.
That's why I dont trust SOE, who are notorious for milking their customers, turning sandbox MMO into themeparks to generate fast money, and now they are coming with "the ultimate themepark with freedom?"
And that's why I like CCP with their niche game EVE Online at the time who still have a sandbox after 10 years, although some (ex)developers like CCP Soundwave -now LOL dev- saw the potential cashshops generated in other games and tried to dumb down the game to introduce more players (more $$) and introduce cashshops for fluff items. Untill the player community rioted and he had to cancel his ideas.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
The core is what's important, a world wouldn't be much without gameplay systems. Gameplay systems tie everything together into a cohesive product, if they're not done well there's not much value to a world. There's only so much walking around sight seeing one can do in a world, how long would it take to see all of skyrim as an example? Not that long.
The world is a back drop, it's there for atmosphere in most cases as well as believability. Yet it doesn't stand as much on it's own.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by LisaFlexy22 Vanguard has that world - shutting down this summer. I've given up the dream of seeing true worlds like that anymore. I'm good with just a game that makes it feel immersive. For me ESO hits that spot more than any others, even if I do wish it was completely open world and it isn't. The worst example I've found so far of an immersive mmo was probably SWTOR.
Yep, Vanguard proved that if your game systems are awful your game will fail. Plenty of other games have proven if your World is awful it will fail too. You need both.
Originally posted by LisaFlexy22 Vanguard has that world - shutting down this summer.
I've given up the dream of seeing true worlds like that anymore. I'm good with just a game that makes it feel immersive. For me ESO hits that spot more than any others, even if I do wish it was completely open world and it isn't. The worst example I've found so far of an immersive mmo was probably SWTOR.
Yep, Vanguard proved that if your game systems are awful your game will fail. Plenty of other games have proven if your World is awful it will fail too. You need both.
You don't need both. There are plenty of successful games with no world. The world is not that important. Gameplay is a lot more important.
SWG was several worlds, each to be explored, some solo, others only in a group, because on some of those worlds, safety in numbers really meant something. Much like socialising in MMO's used to be the in thing, nowadays it seems like an optional extra. But then so is exploration, everything now has to be linear level based pass go collect £200 kind of thing, trouble is, most players seem to prefer that now
Worlds? Wouldn't "Ghost Towns" be more apt? Well at least before NGE....Post NGE I would think "Fallout" would describe it perfectly.
SWG was a roleplay stage with some tacked on PVP. Great for folks into that stuff, and a joke to folks that aren't.
SWG was several worlds, each to be explored, some solo, others only in a group, because on some of those worlds, safety in numbers really meant something. Much like socialising in MMO's used to be the in thing, nowadays it seems like an optional extra. But then so is exploration, everything now has to be linear level based pass go collect £200 kind of thing, trouble is, most players seem to prefer that now
I found the "world" aspect of SWG to be quite neat but ultimately there was nothing in that world to keep me interested for longer than a few months. You had some neat stuff like player cities but once that wore thin, you were left with a lot of territory populated with generic mobs.
Exploration is great but after a while, you are just exploring the same thing over and over again. This might be enough for some people but does not provide enough intellectual stimulation to me.
The socializing thing was great but once we got bored in SWG, my guild simply moved our socializing to WoW.
Fast-travel is what kills immersion and the sensation of being in a massive world, for me. It turns the giant world into a big sandbox where you go there & there to do that & that.
They now only design zones that link to other zones. Zones are also one-use in many games. Once I'm past level 26, I have no need to ever visit the Wild Lands of Zelata in Age of Conan for instance. That zone, which a game developer, or several, spent hundreds of hours designing, is now useless to me as a player and I may have only spent a couple of hours there.
I think this is one of the reasons that "Themepark" has become such a dirty word to some players who want to play in worlds rather than a series of quick travel linked zones. In many cases the only games with worlds are sandbox games.
I agree with the OP. I really miss the worlds of the early MMOs. Travelling by boat to Kunark in early EQ 1, when you got there you were FAR... You had travelled! And possibly made some new friends along the way with your fellow boat travellers. And the dungeons, with their trains and corpse recovery made it so intense. Not that those are the best mechanics, but damn they were immersive because it was really quite dangerous in there and you were really risking something in the harder zones. I would only go to the most difficult areas with people I knew and trusted.
Doesn't seem like they make MMOs for players like me anymore, sadly.
They now only design zones that link to other zones. Zones are also one-use in many games. Once I'm past level 26, I have no need to ever visit the Wild Lands of Zelata in Age of Conan for instance. That zone, which a game developer, or several, spent hundreds of hours designing, is now useless to me as a player and I may have only spent a couple of hours there.
I think this is one of the reasons that "Themepark" has become such a dirty word to some players who want to play in worlds rather than a series of quick travel linked zones. In many cases the only games with worlds are sandbox games.
I agree. And the silly thing is that they try to give the illusion that your actions change the world with phasing and what not. But the reality is that you will probably NEVER see the area that you "changed" after you complete the quest because you're done with it at that point. So most of the time when I trigger world phasing I think "that's nice," but then I move on never to see that part of the world again, and I'm left wondering what the point of it changing was.
Like you say, they design the world to be "consumed" not to be lived in. Once you consume a part of the world, you move on.
And this frustrates me sometimes because I may actually really like the visual aesthetic of a zone, but I know that once I consume it, I can't stay there any more. In ESO for example, some of the cities in it are absolutely beautiful. I would love to be able to just hang out there and have fun...but instead the city is just reduced to a quest hub because of the "consumeable world" design.
I loved how in older games you could basically choose any area to be your "home" and you were encouraged to play in whatever area you felt like.
Just from looking at the thread-starter post, I was going to agree that the world is one of the most important things in an MMO. But from reading this thread I'm not sure we are all talking about the same definition of "world". For me, the game world's personality, the virtual interactive story it allows the player to step into, is what is incredibly important. Interactibility is also very nice, but I wouldn't be interested in the most highly interactable world ever if it didn't provide an emotionally interesting experience. The quality of a game's world, to me, has absolutely nothing to do with the world's size or even whether you can wander freely over the countryside vs. being required to stay on a path. It is completely unrelated to fast travel, or whether the game has a global marketplace instead of player shops.
How are you (the various people posting in this thread) each defining "game world"?
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
It isn't all about fun though, sick of everyone saying a game has to be fun all the time, like no, you want the highs and lows, if it's fun all the time, it stops being fun all the time and just becomes boring all the time.
Even EQ2 had risk/reward, what an amazing grouping experience that was and it had more loading screens than a teenager has spots. Sadly though they removed the challenge from the game and it become boring.
There's no immersion and the game worlds arn't worth exploring. It's lame as hell. How can devs not understand this? They are getting paid money to make MMORPGs yet they have no understanding of world design.
I play games for entertainment. If I'm not entertained, which includes if I'm bored, then the game is not accomplishing it's reason for existence on my hard drive and will care to exist on my hard drive.
So yes in my mind a game has to be fun all the time. I get my non fun activities outside of my entertainment products.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Fast-travel is what kills immersion and the sensation of being in a massive world, for me. It turns the giant world into a big sandbox where you go there & there to do that & that.
THIS
Fast travel destroys the feel of a world, all we have now are insta porting to instances so the world is deserted...
Originally posted by VengeSunsoar I play games for entertainment. If I'm not entertained, which includes if I'm bored, then the game is not accomplishing it's reason for existence on my hard drive and will care to exist on my hard drive.
So yes in my mind a game has to be fun all the time. I get my non fun activities outside of my entertainment products.
this is the entitlement of the new generation, "oh I must have fun all the tyme, YOLO" and "If Im not insta-ported to the fun all the tyme, dis game suxxors" "If another player dares to gank me in an OW pvp game, he is taking away my fun tyme, OMG OMG, DAT GAME SUX!!!"
Fast-travel is what kills immersion and the sensation of being in a massive world, for me. It turns the giant world into a big sandbox where you go there & there to do that & that.
THIS
Fast travel destroys the feel of a world, all we have now are insta porting to instances so the world is deserted...
Yes, and i don't play games for the feel of a world. I play games for fun combat. If the world is deserted .. ditch it. No one is playing in it anyway.
The solution is to give players what they want .. put them in instances .. .and do away with the unnecessarily parts (the world).
Originally posted by VengeSunsoar I play games for entertainment. If I'm not entertained, which includes if I'm bored, then the game is not accomplishing it's reason for existence on my hard drive and will care to exist on my hard drive.
So yes in my mind a game has to be fun all the time. I get my non fun activities outside of my entertainment products.
this is the entitlement of the new generation, "oh I must have fun all the tyme, YOLO" and "If Im not insta-ported to the fun all the tyme, dis game suxxors" "If another player dares to gank me in an OW pvp game, he is taking away my fun tyme, OMG OMG, DAT GAME SUX!!!"
Using sarcastic language does not make it untrue.
Plus, i am of the old generation and i don't see why i should not have in an entertainment product all the time. That is the POINT of entertainment, isn't it?
And yes, i do not want to depend on others for fun. Hence, i do not like traditional MMOs, and prefer new ones (or non-MMOs).
Originally posted by nariusseldon Originally posted by Ender4Originally posted by LisaFlexy22Vanguard has that world - shutting down this summer.I've given up the dream of seeing true worlds like that anymore. I'm good with just a game that makes it feel immersive. For me ESO hits that spot more than any others, even if I do wish it was completely open world and it isn't. The worst example I've found so far of an immersive mmo was probably SWTOR.
Yep, Vanguard proved that if your game systems are awful your game will fail. Plenty of other games have proven if your World is awful it will fail too. You need both.You don't need both. There are plenty of successful games with no world. The world is not that important. Gameplay is a lot more important.
Originally posted by LisaFlexy22Vanguard has that world - shutting down this summer.I've given up the dream of seeing true worlds like that anymore. I'm good with just a game that makes it feel immersive. For me ESO hits that spot more than any others, even if I do wish it was completely open world and it isn't. The worst example I've found so far of an immersive mmo was probably SWTOR.
Yep, Vanguard proved that if your game systems are awful your game will fail. Plenty of other games have proven if your World is awful it will fail too. You need both.
You don't need both. There are plenty of successful games with no world. The world is not that important. Gameplay is a lot more important.
Not a single one in the past 8 years now.
What are you dreaming?
D3 is highly successful selling 15M boxes. No world.
PoE is successful and has good reputation here. No world.
GW1 sold millions. No world.
LOL highly successful. No world.
......
and i am only using games listed on this site without going to SP games. Lots of games are great without the need of a world.
Plus, i am of the old generation and i don't see why i should not have in an entertainment product all the time. That is the POINT of entertainment, isn't it?
And yes, i do not want to depend on others for fun. Hence, i do not like traditional MMOs, and prefer new ones (or non-MMOs).
it is like a movie with nothing but car chases. You need pacing or it just becomes dumb, not exciting. Plus it's pretty obvious that the people complaining about MMOs aren't having fun all the time in current games and would have more fun in more immersive games.
Like I actually had more fun in Skyrim by not using the fast travel because it made the world seem more genuine to me. Maybe you don't understand but not everybody has fun in exactly the way you do.
Comments
Don't expect "world generators" from big developers, they have shareholders to keep happy and their only reason for making a MMO is to jump on the wow train and cash in asap before the game loses interest and goes on life support.
Your biggest chance might be the indy developers, untill they grow bigger and start to cash in themselves. Those indy developers often operate from a ideal of adding something to the game world as a developer, but not always.
That's why I dont trust SOE, who are notorious for milking their customers, turning sandbox MMO into themeparks to generate fast money, and now they are coming with "the ultimate themepark with freedom?"
And that's why I like CCP with their niche game EVE Online at the time who still have a sandbox after 10 years, although some (ex)developers like CCP Soundwave -now LOL dev- saw the potential cashshops generated in other games and tried to dumb down the game to introduce more players (more $$) and introduce cashshops for fluff items. Untill the player community rioted and he had to cancel his ideas.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Both the world and the core gameplay (combat, crafting, exploring) are important. Unless both are good, it won't have the longevity that a MMO needs.
Quietly hoping that EQN or Pathfinder will sate my appetite for vast worlds with great combat and character progression.
The core is what's important, a world wouldn't be much without gameplay systems. Gameplay systems tie everything together into a cohesive product, if they're not done well there's not much value to a world. There's only so much walking around sight seeing one can do in a world, how long would it take to see all of skyrim as an example? Not that long.
The world is a back drop, it's there for atmosphere in most cases as well as believability. Yet it doesn't stand as much on it's own.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Yep, Vanguard proved that if your game systems are awful your game will fail. Plenty of other games have proven if your World is awful it will fail too. You need both.
The world is the most important thing in an MMO
The first and most important that they cannot figure it out its the first M in MMO, it means
Massively
99% of the mmorpgs in the last decade are nothing but single player games with online capabilities they got nothing
Massively in them.
You don't need both. There are plenty of successful games with no world. The world is not that important. Gameplay is a lot more important.
Worlds? Wouldn't "Ghost Towns" be more apt? Well at least before NGE....Post NGE I would think "Fallout" would describe it perfectly.
SWG was a roleplay stage with some tacked on PVP. Great for folks into that stuff, and a joke to folks that aren't.
I found the "world" aspect of SWG to be quite neat but ultimately there was nothing in that world to keep me interested for longer than a few months. You had some neat stuff like player cities but once that wore thin, you were left with a lot of territory populated with generic mobs.
Exploration is great but after a while, you are just exploring the same thing over and over again. This might be enough for some people but does not provide enough intellectual stimulation to me.
The socializing thing was great but once we got bored in SWG, my guild simply moved our socializing to WoW.
It's simple, kill the fast travel.
Fast-travel is what kills immersion and the sensation of being in a massive world, for me. It turns the giant world into a big sandbox where you go there & there to do that & that.
Game designers have stopped designing worlds.
They now only design zones that link to other zones. Zones are also one-use in many games. Once I'm past level 26, I have no need to ever visit the Wild Lands of Zelata in Age of Conan for instance. That zone, which a game developer, or several, spent hundreds of hours designing, is now useless to me as a player and I may have only spent a couple of hours there.
I think this is one of the reasons that "Themepark" has become such a dirty word to some players who want to play in worlds rather than a series of quick travel linked zones. In many cases the only games with worlds are sandbox games.
I agree with the OP. I really miss the worlds of the early MMOs. Travelling by boat to Kunark in early EQ 1, when you got there you were FAR... You had travelled! And possibly made some new friends along the way with your fellow boat travellers. And the dungeons, with their trains and corpse recovery made it so intense. Not that those are the best mechanics, but damn they were immersive because it was really quite dangerous in there and you were really risking something in the harder zones. I would only go to the most difficult areas with people I knew and trusted.
Doesn't seem like they make MMOs for players like me anymore, sadly.
Chris
I agree. And the silly thing is that they try to give the illusion that your actions change the world with phasing and what not. But the reality is that you will probably NEVER see the area that you "changed" after you complete the quest because you're done with it at that point. So most of the time when I trigger world phasing I think "that's nice," but then I move on never to see that part of the world again, and I'm left wondering what the point of it changing was.
Like you say, they design the world to be "consumed" not to be lived in. Once you consume a part of the world, you move on.
And this frustrates me sometimes because I may actually really like the visual aesthetic of a zone, but I know that once I consume it, I can't stay there any more. In ESO for example, some of the cities in it are absolutely beautiful. I would love to be able to just hang out there and have fun...but instead the city is just reduced to a quest hub because of the "consumeable world" design.
I loved how in older games you could basically choose any area to be your "home" and you were encouraged to play in whatever area you felt like.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Just from looking at the thread-starter post, I was going to agree that the world is one of the most important things in an MMO. But from reading this thread I'm not sure we are all talking about the same definition of "world". For me, the game world's personality, the virtual interactive story it allows the player to step into, is what is incredibly important. Interactibility is also very nice, but I wouldn't be interested in the most highly interactable world ever if it didn't provide an emotionally interesting experience. The quality of a game's world, to me, has absolutely nothing to do with the world's size or even whether you can wander freely over the countryside vs. being required to stay on a path. It is completely unrelated to fast travel, or whether the game has a global marketplace instead of player shops.
How are you (the various people posting in this thread) each defining "game world"?
It isn't all about fun though, sick of everyone saying a game has to be fun all the time, like no, you want the highs and lows, if it's fun all the time, it stops being fun all the time and just becomes boring all the time.
I want Risk/reward
I want basically EVE Online with a world.
There's no immersion and the game worlds arn't worth exploring. It's lame as hell. How can devs not understand this? They are getting paid money to make MMORPGs yet they have no understanding of world design.
So yes in my mind a game has to be fun all the time. I get my non fun activities outside of my entertainment products.
THIS
Fast travel destroys the feel of a world, all we have now are insta porting to instances so the world is deserted...
this is the entitlement of the new generation, "oh I must have fun all the tyme, YOLO" and "If Im not insta-ported to the fun all the tyme, dis game suxxors" "If another player dares to gank me in an OW pvp game, he is taking away my fun tyme, OMG OMG, DAT GAME SUX!!!"
Yes, and i don't play games for the feel of a world. I play games for fun combat. If the world is deserted .. ditch it. No one is playing in it anyway.
The solution is to give players what they want .. put them in instances .. .and do away with the unnecessarily parts (the world).
Using sarcastic language does not make it untrue.
Plus, i am of the old generation and i don't see why i should not have in an entertainment product all the time. That is the POINT of entertainment, isn't it?
And yes, i do not want to depend on others for fun. Hence, i do not like traditional MMOs, and prefer new ones (or non-MMOs).
You don't need both. There are plenty of successful games with no world. The world is not that important. Gameplay is a lot more important.
Not a single one in the past 8 years now.
What are you dreaming?
D3 is highly successful selling 15M boxes. No world.
PoE is successful and has good reputation here. No world.
GW1 sold millions. No world.
LOL highly successful. No world.
......
and i am only using games listed on this site without going to SP games. Lots of games are great without the need of a world.
it is like a movie with nothing but car chases. You need pacing or it just becomes dumb, not exciting. Plus it's pretty obvious that the people complaining about MMOs aren't having fun all the time in current games and would have more fun in more immersive games.
Like I actually had more fun in Skyrim by not using the fast travel because it made the world seem more genuine to me. Maybe you don't understand but not everybody has fun in exactly the way you do.