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Fun and challenge should exist before endgame
waffleyone
Member Posts: 29
Race to the level cap, through huge amounts of created world, so that you can play the endgame! Why are people racing to the level cap? Because the early game is just a hollow skinner box! Why just a skinner box? Because there isn't any real sense of accomplishment!
What?! Can't somebody develop a game where it's interesting and challenging from the start? Interesting and Challenging doesn't mean 'difficult' per se, not numerically rough or 'hardcore' or permadeath, just that you need to observe and learn and act, with an actual sense of accomplishment, rather than the ever accelerating skinner boxes. I've never made it to endgame in an MMO, and i've tried to do so in more than five, because leveling up and going to a new area never held my attention long enough. The faster I level, the faster I get bored.
Guild Wars 2, for all its possible merits, pissed me off and I quit in the leveling phase because it was too mind numbingly easy. I like Greatswords, and I played a warrior. I ran around, annihilating everything 8 levels higher than me, playing 1handed on a laptop while laying down on a couch with my head on a pillow. And i'm not good at MMOs, it was just that easy. Really, that game might as well only go up to level 16 because you only feel a difference every 5 levels anyway, and they go by fast enough for it.
Numeric inflation is failing as a means to keep people playing, which is why every fifth thread in this forum is "MMOS are Dying!". Offer real challenges earlier, real obstacles. Don't accelerate the hampster wheel, trying to make us think we're going somewhere by running faster. Slow us down. Give us obstacles. Challenge us. We don't need to be hit over the head with shovels all day long, we just need a reason to care why we're playing.
The hundreds of hours I've clocked in MMORPGs has provided me with less interest and accomplishment than any given five hours of Dark Souls or Starcraft, (Excluding soloing bosses in Tera). Somebody needs to get this shit right.
Edit: I'm going to pre-empt the "Go to a higher level area" argument by saying that numeric difficulty isn't challenging, doesn't carry accomplishment. Hit byootans git eckspee levuhl fahster git board kwikur.
Comments
Fun, yes.
But challenge and progression don't mix very well. The way that combat is usually implemented, a given fight could be trivial if you're too high level or impossible if you're too low level. How do you propose to get around that?
I agree and the way games are rushing through levels it makes them totally meaningless.Devs should be making meaningful content at every level and if the yare too cheap or too lazy to do it for 50+ levels,then make less levels.
Meaningful does not mean tie 100 quests to that level ,and add up the simple math to see if it propels you to the next level,that is super trivial gaming and weak/lazy game design.
It is VERY simple to do both challenge and progression,if no challenge,no progression as simple as that.
There are two types of people,those who are left with the feeling of satisfaction of completing a task or a challenge.Then there are those who don't mind having their hand held and practically given everything,somehow those types feel the same satisfation as the others ,even though they were basically handed everything on a silver platyter.
I guess it is like comedy,some people laugh at paint drying,while others have a higher standard of what they call funny.
This genre is still grossly untapped,just a pile of very lazy devs that really are only making these games to cash in on the MMO craze.Luckily as i knew woudl happen,there is always hope,i see some good games on the horizon and games that bring back the word FUN,while still maintaining challenge and depth of game play.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
FRAPS yourself doing catacombs lvl 35. lmfao.
why do people feel the need to get online and act like the're something they are not? FRAPS yourself killing bandit leader robari in brisbane wildlands(lvl 18 i think). i know a dude who use to say the game was this huge cakewalk causing him to quit, but all i remember from him in guild chat was crying for an hour at a time after failing a jumping puzzle or story mode dungeon.
So that you can calibrate end-game PvE challenge better?
What MMO craze? None of the recent big online game successes (LoL, D3, Minecraft, WoT, SC2) are MMOs .. except may be GW2.
If our taste is the same, it would be like preaching to the choir, and discussions will be boring.
You need calibration even if you are not doing e-sport or competitive pve. Why? To calibrate challenge for fun.
It is easier to make a 10 man raid (when you know it is 10 man) a fun challenge. if you let 10000 people in, the content will become trivial if you have 10000 players beating on the boss.
It's a mathmatical equation that will never make sense to me. Years of funding, writing and world generation to have it trivialized in one month lol. Once a big name can attract people to a game longer than one month till endgame I think something unexpected will happen:
More players will actually stick around to play the game that took years to make rather than a huge drop.
Don't bring up WoW. If WoW was released right now it wouldn't do nearly as well.
One month is a long time.
The Avengers costs more than $200M to make .. and it is a 2.5 hour piece of entertainment. A novel takes a writer a year to write, and i can finish it in 3-5 hours.
Entertainment does not always have to last a long time to be good.
If it's very simple to mix challenge and progression and obviously desirable, then why hasn't anyone actually done it?
MMOs do and need income so in order to retain a consistant income they should be focusing on people staying to play thier product. Focusing on MMOs here since its the Pub and all.
Uh? Lots of non-MMO online games have overhead.
Starcraft
Diablo 3
even COD4 .. anything with a server has it. MMO is not that unique.
In fact, if you look at xfire chart, games like COD and Battlefiled last way longer (at least pvp) than MMOs.
I think there should be both and something in between. I'd lean towards playing something more akin to what you describe though.
And in place of the tools to actually Roleplay we're getting a "4th Pillar" called story.
Can't agree more with you OP. I think that's the reason I LOVED Lineage II back in the days. No real race to cap (took way too long) and at lower levels you could already do alot of fun stuff in game. Played it for 6 years till NCSoft decided to make it a 'race to 85' MMO as it was. The new players did in 4 weeks what I did in over 5 years FFS >:(
At this moment I'm semi-seriously playing SWTOR, but on the PvE server for the story told. Will replay it once on an other char and when both are at cap and the personal story is over, then the game is dead for me.
After that I think I'll go back to either EQ2 of Vanguard. Both games are still about the story and you can disable the leveling (fully in VG, with AA% high on EQ2 setting how fast you want to level). Then I can enjoy the game the way I like and not skip whole area's of content just because I'm too freaking high level to do it (happens in WoW, SWTOR and a lot more of those race-to-cap MMOs)
I guess it's true that some console games have overhead and I'm always amazed at how you can use a part of a sentence to wiggle out of being wrong on your main point. Normal MMOs need a susatained income so your idea of not wanting to have along lasting product is incorrect IMO.
Excellent point.
Endgame's fun and challenge are just a lie to keep people stop compare when they max level
you can't have fun when you get to endgame.
Game only fun before endgame , it's when you swim through game content.
Endgame mean time to quit haha.
As for challenge , try to make a challenge for yourself.
Something like :
stealth item and don't let monster notice you (i love to do it when gather marterial lol)
Enter boss room without get notice by monster
Fight with 10 strong monsters at same time
ect ...
Have fun to created challenge for yourself
As my own experience , stealth alway give you best feeling of challenge than fight with stronger enemy.
But there are alway some exceptions.
well you are the one who said MMO has overhead and so needs sustained incomie .. well surprise surprise many games have that.
And sustained income? Does any company who has a staff needs that? MMO companies are not special in that.
The 'overhead' thing is a giant tangent, and I'd like to put it to rest here: MMO subscription fees are partially about overhead but mostly about recouping production costs in the first place. Second, Non-Massive online games have a tiny fraction of the overhead that MMOs do, due to efficiencies in communicating less player actions to each other as well as more direct interaction between clients. We're talking 1/10th or less. I doubt the overhead in bandwidth/server costs are more than a dollar or two per month per subscriber (in successful MMOs) anyway.
Regarding games with endgame focus, games without level caps, and those with caps but lack of focus on them: I think there's room for multiple types in the market, and that the variety would be good for almost everybody.
Here's the thing: Some of us don't want to swim through game content, we want to fight our way through it. I play games to challenge myself and relax, oftentimes both at once. Self-created challenges can be fun, but it's hard to engineer actually good/interesting ones as a player, whereas developers can actually artistically engineer challenges.
Edit: If the only fun part is before the endgame, and that part keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter... there's less and less game.
P.S.: More game for the money is good - not the only important thing, but good - and if a $60 game lasts me less than 10 hours i'm going to be pissed. My goal for any game purchase is a dollar cost per hour played.
You're comparison of movies and books to an MMO was incorrect, can't you just admit that without misdirection?
Wow... Talk about thread derailing....
So Narius, you spent $60 to get into The Avengers movie showing? and you spent $15 a minute to keep watching it? I think not.
Games these days are letting out less and less content for the same price. Saying that you can get quality entertainment without a huge time invested is like compairing playing a game to watching a movie or reading a book.
Next time you buy a book for $60, and pay $15/month to keep the book accessible on your shelf, please document this and share it for the MMO world to see. Because then and only then can you make an accurate compairison between an MMORPG and a book/movie.
Glad you raise the price we pay.
A movie ticket is $11 ... say $10 .. that is like $5 per hour.
A novel is like $7 for paperback, and $15-20 for hard back .. so $2-3 per hour.
A one month MMO? If it costs $60 .. and you play 15 hours a week (very low number) ... you get $1 per hour. 2x to 5x better than movies & books.
So yeah, 1 month is way long and get your month worth.
But originally argumetn by aelious is "Years of funding, writing and world generation to have it trivialized in one month" .. which has nothing to do with how much you pay, but the amount of investment in the product.
He is obviously wrong .. since other stuff has a much higher investment/(hour of entertainment) ratio.
It would better if they stop trying to create neverending mechanics and focus on exactly 2 weeks - 1 month of gameplay. This way they can create better games.