Originally posted by John_Grimm Well, i know one game that is like that, Eve Online, most of its space can be used by any lvl char.
That's because EVE has no levels. Wasted "zones" are an attribute of level base games. UO and EVE are two that did not have this issue because they did not have levels.
Originally posted by Timassin Do mid level mmos really cost a 100 million to make? How do indie devs do it on an incredibly lower budget and better most of time?
The "indie" devs you're talking about are not that indie.
The first few MMOs were costing about $1M to make. Because they were the first ones in the door they could avoid the massive bills.
But these days a modern MMO costs millions to make to get those shiny graphics and giant zones. Consider for a second that a developer will be expecting a six figure salary to physically move to your studio and work for your MMO. The more people you need to transfer to your physical studio the higher the cost of making an MMO will cost.
Richard Garriot crowdfunded $2M to make an RPG. It's suspected he'll spend even more on that.
As for the article the presumption that traditional leveling zones are wasted is a bit of a mistake. People don't just make one character in an MMORPG they enjoy, they make many more. One of the things people do in MMOs is revisit zones they were previously in.
The reason why areas were zoned was so that people of equal progression would play together. By congesting everyone into constantly revisiting the same zones all you do is lead to gear dominance and ganking of newer players. It leads to an overall poor experience.
I hope the people at Red 5 Studios are smart enough to know that people of similar progression levels ought to be grouped together.
Seems the OP forgets about Guild Wars 2. You are downleveled to the level of the zone that you move in to. At first I hated this. There is nothing more humiliating then being killed by level 3 mobs when you are a level 20 toon! But, as I played more I realized that there were some zones that I liked more than others. I could and did spend more time there leveling (although slowly) rather than in the higher level zones. In hindsight, I think that this was a brilliant idea. There is no wasted space - every zone can be used to level.
Or go back to our roots, where zones were not gated content. EQ1 for example had mobs from level 1-40 in butcherblock mts. Yes if you ran into that level 40 mob and agroed them as a level 2 you died... fast.
But that just added a level of excitement to the game. Once dev's stop following the "WOW formula" of gated zone content and world design, the genre may move forward.
It’s going to take a lot of work to accomplish this, but it’s imperative that we do. It’s simply gotten too expensive and too wasteful to keep making virtual worlds in a throwaway zone mentality. The cost of failure is too high.
Im sorry but this mob scaling thing fails miserably. It is NOT a good system. Part of playing ANY rpg. MMO or not is the feeling of your character getting more powerful. If when you enter and old zone the mobs are just as hard as the new zone then, all of a sudden it becomes both stupid, and pointless to go to new zones. Why should i travel to a new a place when i can just stay in the same area and kill the same mobs whose spawns i know and tricks i know and get the same XP?
Oblivion had one of the most universally hated systems and it was pretty much as Mark Kern described.
The solution is much simpler. Do what EQ did. Have high level mobs the run around the zone that low level players have to be weary of. And stop making every zone only encompass a certain level range. There is no reason a section deep in the zone can't have level 30 mobs in it if its normall a 1-10 zone. So what if 10% of the zone is used for higher level mobs. Its gives people a reason to come back. I used to go back and kill Kizdean Gix in west commonlands in EQ1 just for shits n gigiles, help out the n00bs, whatever reason i wanted ot.
Guess what you can also do. Attach higher level dungeons to the lower level zones! Holy crap the thought!. Yes, amazing, a level 1-10 zone could easily have a set of goblin caves filled with mid 20's goblins, Who woulda thunk it.
Don't think I could have written it better. Horizontal progressing system may be a great idea in other types of games for example map/lobby based games, but reusing zones like that kills the rpg part of a game. The downlevelling as gw2 present it showed this problem perfectly. Using downlevelling should be used with great thought if used at all.
You need look no further than the original EQ to see that this is pretty much true...WHile there are literally hundreds of zones, the players generally only go to about 10 percent of them if that......Once games started using instancing and quick travel it ruined alot of what the devs were trying to do with MMOs......Most of hte PVP games became battleground instances instead of open world PVP, and PVE games became instanced dungeons where players would run the same ones over and over.
This reminds me of when I used to play Runescape years back. I think they actually did a pretty good job with having zones that people would revisit. Of course there were still many places that you would only go once and never visit again, and quite a lot of them, but there were a good many towns and resource locations that would have people comming back regardless of their level. At least a lot more than other games I have played. They were able to do this beacuse these spots would either have something unique there or would have more content opened up as you gained levels. They also did something like reusing areas, adding dungeons, npcs, buildings, etc, to already existing locations when adding new content.
I agree with what is proposed here, as most MMOs either spend too much time/effort for the number of zones, or take the "easy way out" and reuse art and landscapes to the point of their embarrassment just to give more real estate for mob placement.
The better balance would be adding tiered layers in content. Imagine near the "starter" area (let's say it is a town surrounding a castle) there is a crude village of goblins. In the beginning, players will perform some raids on the perimeter, taking down the lower level grunt goblins. There is then an interior part of the goblin camp filled with elite goblins several levels higher that players will return to battle later in their career. We have now created two levelling areas out of one set of assets (although I would expect the goblins to look far stronger with their size, weapons and armor). Not too complicated, eh?
Ragnarok Online actually did this. There'd usually be two or three levels to a dungeon, and the level of the mobs would change significantly depending how high up you went. It was actually a good idea, as dungeons were usually full of varied level players, and I never felt like they were dead inside.
Truthfully, I think Ultima Online has the best approach with its no level system. Having characters just go off skills is great. You can get caught up well enough to play with your friends fairly quickly and start enjoying the world. You'll have plenty of room to move around and improve, but you won't be miles behind everyone else. You'll be playing with them in no time. To me, Ultima still embodies the best way to use real estate in a game.
Firefall solved the problem alluded to in this article. They decided that instead of making content on par with other MMOs, they'd make 5% of what's considered acceptable content and call it a day.
Why build a full game when you can just build a small percentage of the game and claim you're being efficient? LOL
the "money invested vs. money returned" approach to mmos is exactly why games have gone down the tube. Money invested per square inch DOES NOT translate to gaming enjoyment per square inch.
just look at EvE, or DayZ, or Minecraft. there is no way those games spent 3.5 millions per zone and yet they are some of the most iconic, most innovative and fun games of the last 3 years.
games are about, fantasy, imagination, freedom, and innovation. without those you can spend billions and all you'll get is Star Wars prequels, and Jar Jar Binks clones. Business man DO NOT make good games. Artists, visionaries, and innovators do, because they do not ask themselves "how am I going to make money out of this?", they ask "what kind of world would I want to lose myself in?".
THAT is what makes great games.
The rest is just greedy suits complaining how throwing money at the industry doesn't work like it does at the strip club.
I have to agree with the point about money invested vs returned in regards to mmorpgs. They call it over production and it leads to having minimal content as anything extraneous is wasting money. Games need to become bigger with tons of areas to explore but a small number of places that provide "benefits". Beancounters are ruining this world with their minimalist philosophy.
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?"
Agree, thos se bean counters would have all green space in RL covered by shopping plazas because of the 'greater footfall', we humans love space and opportunities to explore - why should it not be the same and indeed exaggerated in a virtual world.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
In order that I played them: Neverwinter Nights on AOL, Meridian 59, Sierra's the Realm, and Ultima Online did not have tutorials. I think Asheron's Call might've been the first that had a tutorial?
I very much felt this way about Perfect World. Now theres an empty MMO. Certain areas are always full but I would say 99% of the map is empty and that seems a real pity because some of the areas are amazingly beautiful. I made quite a few threads in the suggestion box about this and ways to encourage players back, but to no avail.
Compare that with GW2 which Ive gotten back into lately. In actual fact, most of it is empty also. Large numbers of players do a continual rotation of events/bosses etc in Queensdale which is a starter zone. Because of the level scaling, you get just as good rewards there as you do in a level 80 zone, which kinda feels weird to me. I mean, on my lvl 80 char in Queensdale, a level 10 mob can drop a piece of level 80 gear but if I switch to my level 15 char, I get level 15 drops, and irrespective of which char I play, a successful event gives a % as a reward, so both chars effectively get the same amount of xp per event. Im not sure if the devs consider this an issue but I just soloed 5 other zones - 2 zones had a few people doing events like me, 1 zone I saw 2 other people I think and in 2 zones I didn't see another char.
It serves a purpose. Zone progression is another form of progression, going somewhere for the first time is fun. Seeing more powerful monsters as you enter new zones is also fun. Having places in the world too dangerous to venture is exciting.
Games could do a better job of getting people back to older zones with events, but the reality is that people enjoy seeing new things rather than seeing the same things over and over again.
If game production is getting so expensive that they can't make a profit, I don't think making less content is the solution. Perhaps better tool development is one way. If you stick your players in one area for too long they will rapidly grow bored of it.
Originally posted by John_Grimm Well, i know one game that is like that, Eve Online, most of its space can be used by any lvl char.
That's because EVE has no levels. Wasted "zones" are an attribute of level base games. UO and EVE are two that did not have this issue because they did not have levels.
Eve cannot be included in this discussion at all. EVE has literally no content. Each sector of space has a planet that is for all intents and purposes a texture in the background, a few moons, and some asteroids. All the ships you encounter are the same ships as everywhere else, just different names.
Creating content in EVE is nothing at all even remotely in the same realm as creating content for a standard MMO.
And yes, EVE "wastes" plenty of zones. Pretty much 95% of the zones in the game have nobody in them, yet Jita will have several hundred people at once. Its just like any other MMO in that respect.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Originally posted by black_isle Is this a weekly Firefall advertisement column or just a dev writing a general column who also happens to be working on a game? This shameless advertising disguised as a column is becoming very irritating.
yeah I agree, and released A DAY BEFORE THE GAME GOES OPEN BETA! Koinkydink? I think not.. And yes, he pulled numbers out of his ass as well.. Terrible
Originally posted by Letsinod This is where EQ1 got it so right. There were many level ranges of mobs in each zone. Spectres to docks anyone? Giants also. You would often have high level toons leveling next to newbs in some areas.
EQ got it right? That really made me laugh. At least EQ had some difficulty, but when you get down to it, it was the poster child for all the current theme parks out there today. It's competition was UO and AC which did not have zones so EQ basically invented the idea of different level zones for different levels.
The problem with zones, they are inherent when you have levels and levels are tied to the theme park design. To remove zones for specific levels would require a huge redesign of a game. No developer would take that on.
If really have to have a sandbox design to remove the zones. Where character levels are meaningless or nonexistent.
Comments
and Wushu
Wasted ?
One could say that about the movie that cost over $100 million to make that you just watched ... or the television series you just finished watching.
The "indie" devs you're talking about are not that indie.
The first few MMOs were costing about $1M to make. Because they were the first ones in the door they could avoid the massive bills.
But these days a modern MMO costs millions to make to get those shiny graphics and giant zones. Consider for a second that a developer will be expecting a six figure salary to physically move to your studio and work for your MMO. The more people you need to transfer to your physical studio the higher the cost of making an MMO will cost.
Richard Garriot crowdfunded $2M to make an RPG. It's suspected he'll spend even more on that.
As for the article the presumption that traditional leveling zones are wasted is a bit of a mistake. People don't just make one character in an MMORPG they enjoy, they make many more. One of the things people do in MMOs is revisit zones they were previously in.
The reason why areas were zoned was so that people of equal progression would play together. By congesting everyone into constantly revisiting the same zones all you do is lead to gear dominance and ganking of newer players. It leads to an overall poor experience.
I hope the people at Red 5 Studios are smart enough to know that people of similar progression levels ought to be grouped together.
Website: http://www.thegameguru.me / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/users/thetroublmaker
Or go back to our roots, where zones were not gated content. EQ1 for example had mobs from level 1-40 in butcherblock mts. Yes if you ran into that level 40 mob and agroed them as a level 2 you died... fast.
But that just added a level of excitement to the game. Once dev's stop following the "WOW formula" of gated zone content and world design, the genre may move forward.
It’s going to take a lot of work to accomplish this, but it’s imperative that we do. It’s simply gotten too expensive and too wasteful to keep making virtual worlds in a throwaway zone mentality. The cost of failure is too high.
I have to agree on this.
Don't think I could have written it better. Horizontal progressing system may be a great idea in other types of games for example map/lobby based games, but reusing zones like that kills the rpg part of a game. The downlevelling as gw2 present it showed this problem perfectly. Using downlevelling should be used with great thought if used at all.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Ragnarok Online actually did this. There'd usually be two or three levels to a dungeon, and the level of the mobs would change significantly depending how high up you went. It was actually a good idea, as dungeons were usually full of varied level players, and I never felt like they were dead inside.
Truthfully, I think Ultima Online has the best approach with its no level system. Having characters just go off skills is great. You can get caught up well enough to play with your friends fairly quickly and start enjoying the world. You'll have plenty of room to move around and improve, but you won't be miles behind everyone else. You'll be playing with them in no time. To me, Ultima still embodies the best way to use real estate in a game.
Firefall solved the problem alluded to in this article. They decided that instead of making content on par with other MMOs, they'd make 5% of what's considered acceptable content and call it a day.
Why build a full game when you can just build a small percentage of the game and claim you're being efficient? LOL
/raises hand
I remember my first tutorial starter zone:
*raises hand*
Anarchy Online - gutting leets in the backyard - good times
I have to agree with the point about money invested vs returned in regards to mmorpgs. They call it over production and it leads to having minimal content as anything extraneous is wasting money. Games need to become bigger with tons of areas to explore but a small number of places that provide "benefits". Beancounters are ruining this world with their minimalist philosophy.
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?"
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
I very much felt this way about Perfect World. Now theres an empty MMO. Certain areas are always full but I would say 99% of the map is empty and that seems a real pity because some of the areas are amazingly beautiful. I made quite a few threads in the suggestion box about this and ways to encourage players back, but to no avail.
Compare that with GW2 which Ive gotten back into lately. In actual fact, most of it is empty also. Large numbers of players do a continual rotation of events/bosses etc in Queensdale which is a starter zone. Because of the level scaling, you get just as good rewards there as you do in a level 80 zone, which kinda feels weird to me. I mean, on my lvl 80 char in Queensdale, a level 10 mob can drop a piece of level 80 gear but if I switch to my level 15 char, I get level 15 drops, and irrespective of which char I play, a successful event gives a % as a reward, so both chars effectively get the same amount of xp per event. Im not sure if the devs consider this an issue but I just soloed 5 other zones - 2 zones had a few people doing events like me, 1 zone I saw 2 other people I think and in 2 zones I didn't see another char.
It serves a purpose. Zone progression is another form of progression, going somewhere for the first time is fun. Seeing more powerful monsters as you enter new zones is also fun. Having places in the world too dangerous to venture is exciting.
Games could do a better job of getting people back to older zones with events, but the reality is that people enjoy seeing new things rather than seeing the same things over and over again.
If game production is getting so expensive that they can't make a profit, I don't think making less content is the solution. Perhaps better tool development is one way. If you stick your players in one area for too long they will rapidly grow bored of it.
Eve cannot be included in this discussion at all. EVE has literally no content. Each sector of space has a planet that is for all intents and purposes a texture in the background, a few moons, and some asteroids. All the ships you encounter are the same ships as everywhere else, just different names.
Creating content in EVE is nothing at all even remotely in the same realm as creating content for a standard MMO.
And yes, EVE "wastes" plenty of zones. Pretty much 95% of the zones in the game have nobody in them, yet Jita will have several hundred people at once. Its just like any other MMO in that respect.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
yeah I agree, and released A DAY BEFORE THE GAME GOES OPEN BETA! Koinkydink? I think not.. And yes, he pulled numbers out of his ass as well.. Terrible
Just want to point out that your understanding of the Game creation is a little out.
In most cases the Sound/Voicing and cinematics are the big budget these days.
"The monster created isn't by the company that makes the game, it's by the fans that make it something it never was"
EQ got it right? That really made me laugh. At least EQ had some difficulty, but when you get down to it, it was the poster child for all the current theme parks out there today. It's competition was UO and AC which did not have zones so EQ basically invented the idea of different level zones for different levels.
The problem with zones, they are inherent when you have levels and levels are tied to the theme park design. To remove zones for specific levels would require a huge redesign of a game. No developer would take that on.
If really have to have a sandbox design to remove the zones. Where character levels are meaningless or nonexistent.