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No consuequences make the genre grey & dull.
Mr_C
Member Posts: 112
About the whole MMO genre has become to a point where you can 'fail' your way until you have the best gear. Ridiculous. And this is even without any consuequences whatsoever.
When in the world will the genre add these options where you HAVE to make a choice which have some dire consuequnce for your character? The option of slaying 20 bears for a hungry family is't actually like there can be anything wrong done. I cant' remember the last time I bothered to read the quests info; cause they have no meaning anyway:
-Go to pt B, kill X amounts of the mobs Y, return to point A to get your reward. Oh, how refreshingly challenging.
I had a long time break from one of the biggest MMO's while I tried to play some other MMO's. I went back to the "Behemoth" of MMO's purely for having some world PvP experience. Me and a group of friends started out, doing instances to get us some levels until we felt we had enough tools to be competetive in (world) PvP. Well, I was able to hang in the instances for a few rounds and the I smacked into the wall of boringless becasue it all was just the same all over again and agan, like a nightmare on a repeat.
Today it seems that most of them MMO gamers I know is in the same boat; they play their old (mostly the first MMO they got into) mostly out of good old memories.
Now, will the genre EVER be able to get us any option ingame where we have to take any hard decision which affects the characters standing, against factions or even with a decision that could have us kicked out of a main capital because we are not wanted there anymore?
Now that would be the biggest leap in the MMO world today if you ask me. I find it totally meaningless to not even have to read the quest info cause you just know there is no consuquence involded completing it. What a shame.
Comments
You are going way off topic when discussing solo vs group play. I won't even touch base on that.
Furthermore, there is room for casual and what we know as standard MMO's. Its just a shame that most games went the way of the casual. I agree with the OP. I hate having no consequences. I get bored. The game has to make the missions/story entertaining to keep me otherwise, and even then they can't keep that up forever so I will quit anyway. If in the original Super Mario Brothers I couldn't die, it would be boring to just try and collect all the coins and stomp all the creatures. It was the fact that I didn't die (when I could have) that made beating a level fun!
Didn't mean to go off-topic just miss the good ole days. They don't make em like they used to.
MMOs are no longer about the characters we create and how they interact with the world. They are just excuses to fight opponents. Endlessly. There is no wrong decision there, just win or die.
Even death has very little to no consequences. Just respawn and go back at it.
If a player likes combat, they are in hog heaven. If a player seeks more than just that, they are left out in the cold.
A character grows in so many, varied ways, besides numerical values. Reputations with guilds and factions can grow or decline. The common populace can change their views of the character over time. So many character interactions that can change the game play are neglected in order to sell more copies.
It is a shame about what the genre used to have and subsequently lost due to the massive influx of "I kin whup yer ass!" fighters that have now swelled the ranks.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I'm still confused by the idea players post about where you can somehow be rewarded without beating the boss.
With the exception of terribly-designed world content where you can graveyard zerg, a boss resets if you fail. You get no loot. Try again. Until you don't fail.
The consequence for failure is a boss reset. That's all. And that's all it needs to be.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I am with the OP.
they need to bring back meaningfull factions, and quests that allow or even force players to make choices. In the end all and everyone will have an opinion about you.. Either they hate you, they are indifferent to you, or they hate you and all the steps in between. Wether it be doing quests ( or not doing them) helping certain npc or killing a bunch of pirates or city guards, it will have consequences.
On top of that add more challenging gameplay, making people constantly overthink a situation and considering if its a risk worth to take, because the first thing in a harsh world you really want is to survive. Allways a choice between gaining some good loot or loosing something.
I currently have high hopes for EQ next bringing exactly these things back to mmo gaming... Consequences of your actions.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Agreed. I can remember many dungeon fights with people in DAoC where some brave soul sacrificed himself so the rest of us wouldn't lose XP. Or where we fought our way back to the bottom of the dungeon to recover his grave so he'd get some xp back.
Or, sometimes when I'd be down to 10HP, just needing a good block to get off my final move to take down THE LAST GUY, being frantic the whole time.
Those memories, even when they resulting in a frustrating death, stuck with me, made me remember people and the places I experienced there.
I have almost no memories of modern MMOs. The attitude is "who gives a fuck if we die". No one really tries. No one is selfless and tries to hold off the horde while the rest escape. No new missions pop up trying to avenge prior deaths. It's just all a big collage of nothing.
You're not exactly being fair here, because you're not considering the pitfalls of MMO design. MMO's are not single player games, they can't really have dire consequences because that would simply break the game very quickly.
We can't have the family die if you didn't kill the bears because there are going to be zounds of people performing that same task. We can't have monsters be really dangerous and able to destroy cities because there's a high chance they'll just kill off all the players and win. Open dungeons or anything end up camped or zerged. Having consequences for player actions is very dangerous due to the extremely high propensity for essentially trolly behavior as well as unrealistic behavior.
These things need to be kept in a vague balance where they feel realistic but really aren't. If you know a way to implement this that doesn't disbalance the whole game or is highly exploitable, I suggest you go start a Kickstarter because that'd be one hell of an MMO. Anyone who ever sat down to think about MMO design realizes this is a gargantuan problem.
You can add certain consequences for the individual player, but that doesn't fit a fairly large chunk of MMO's. A lot of themepark MMO's in particular are closer to competitive multiplayer games where people try to out-min-max each other and defeat a PvE enemy first. Adding consequences doesn't work there because people make their choices for different reasons; they don't care for RP, they care what stats they get. So all you are going to do is gimp the people who bother.
There are some types of consequences that I wouldn't mind which would fit with themepark MMOs - experience loss on death, durability/item loss on death. Tbh, wiping a theampark dungeon is not the most enjoyable experience as it is. That doesn't seem to be what you're talking about, though.
Faction relations and stuff are things that mostly work in sandbox or at most quasi-sandbox (Vanilla WoW, EQ, etc.) MMO's where rushing to endgame isn't the point. Everywhere else you're just adding a mechanic nobody will care about - like light-neutral-dark choices in SW:TOR, if people know going all Light or all Dark will get them some cool items that is what they're going to do.
Ergo: realize you're asking for sandboxes and stop bashing themeparks that were never directed at you in the first place.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
Well, except that it's not working. The implosion of most AAA MMORPGs over the last 7 years doesn't exactly justify this "mainstream" market people keep talking about.
And did the previous poster just call early WoW a quasi sandbox? Holy shit, I guess the MMO genre has hit a pretty low point if THAT game is considered anything but a hand holding linear instanced arcade MMO.
I am still unclear, what it is that any of you is looking for in terms of consequences. When I read, “The option of slaying 20 bears for a hungry family is't actually like there can be anything wrong done.” I took this to mean you sought an option in the game world to do things that would be considered wrong, since the games rules or mechanics prevent that. Rather than volley ambiguous terms like consequences, clearly state what it is you want to do and what are the results you expect for that action.
EQ2 had a traitor quest line for changing faction. WoW’s rules, lore, and game mechanics do not allow for faction change. But WoW does have many factions, some with opposing faction that will react negatively based on your faction standing. I suspect this is more about losing favor with a starting or home faction. And usually doing so requires antisocial behavior.Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Well, that's hard...
Have you actually played Vanilla WoW?
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
It's the only WoW I played. I found it to be incredibly boring, limited, hand holding, and shallow. It was the most casual MMO on the market when it launched, and its patched itself over the years to remain so.
The problem is they have hand held so much, that all meaningful choices have been taken out of the player hands.
The most meaningful choices in MMO's now a days generally boil down to mostly aesthetics.. oh do I want a blue or a red cape?
Do I want to swing one big axe, or two small ones ? etc
Do I want to shoot fire, ice or lightning?
etc etc.
Most of the questing is completely guided, you don't have to explore, you don't have to think, nope, just invest the time and you'll complete the quest and get your reward. Whether it is kill X boars, or go travel to points X, Y, and Z it all ends up being completely insignificant. There isn't any real reason to get involved in the quest or lore at its heart, because your about to repeat the same quest with different aesthetics about 1,000 times.
Is all of this new? No, but at least older games let player interaction and choice have enough influence in the game to mask this and perhaps were more novel back then.
I don't know... this is why I haven't touched an MMO in quite some time and I am not really missing it. I find just having a wide variety of games keeps me sane and sated, although I do miss some of the hardcore RPG elements that are heavily invested in MMOs.
The reduction of consequences started long before the current plague of themeparks came along and for a very good reason; they were unfit for purpose. What I mean by this is that they accomplished the exact thing that no developer wants, they frustrated many players to the point of rage quitting the game. The main culprit of this was xp loss or delevelling; especially if the character death was not the fault of the player but of another players stupidity ( opening chests that contained a molerat when the entire group was on 1 hp anyone? ) or of course the dreaded lag death. For this reason xp loss and delevelling were done away with, and quite rightly.
I agree with the original poster that MMO's need some consequences but they have to be the right consequences and many that used to exist did not work as intended.
I understand OP...but a pity, it is just out of technical possibilities.
MMORPG like this could be made, but it would be just huge and super expensive to produce. Calculate all player actions to have some value. And then calculate choices.
Situation: lame NPC sits near half-burned house and weeps: Oh thee, Big Hero, help me rebuild this house!
choice A: burn down lame NPC and its house
subchoice A1: loot all so that nothing happened
subchoice A2: leave everything intact, let them know who did that!
choice B: burn down lame house:
subchoice B1: beat NPC so it never more remembers who did that
subchoice B2: do not beat, loot all so that almost nothing happened
subchoice B3: do not beat, leave everything, so that everyone know what monster did that
choice C:rebuild house
choice C1: ask for money and rebuild house
choice C2: ask for money and rebuild part of the house
choice C3: don't ask for money, rebuild the house
choice C4; don't ask for money, rebuild part of the house
choice
ignore lame NPC and lame house
choice E: inform about lame NPC and lame house
subchoice E1: inform evil faction:crush, kill and destroy!
subchoice E2: inform good faction
subchoice E3:inform guard NPC so that he helps
subchoice E4:inform merchant NPC so that it sells materials
And each subchoice may have its own sub-sub choice, like:
subchoice A1: loot all so that nothing happened
sub-subchoice A11: sell to good faction trader (they start to hate you)
sub-subchoice A12:sell to evil faction trader (they start to like you)
sub-subchoice A13:sell to neutral trader (various outcome, from "guards!" to "good, kill more")
sub-subchoice A14:bring to your house/bank (robbery by some NPCs possible).
And we can have sub-sub-subchoices, like: if NPCs robbed your house when you were not there, you may track them and kill or spare or make your slaves. In short - if we have 4 possible answers and each divide into 4 sub-answers and those into 4 sub-sub answers - looks like 84 outcomes for one NPC. Oh, and if we have 1000 NPC - only 84.000 possible outcomes with varying results. Add some factions (like - "town A hates NPCs with houses, therefore expells anyone who helps to rebuild"), add some interaction, like "NPC A is a friend to B and enemy to C" - and we get too complex game.
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
I too miss the old good days when you fought hard mobs together with your friends. Problem is that you cant find Groups like this anymore,grouping has become boring frustrating and worse than going to work.
What do you mean there is no consequences?
You down the boss, you get a roll to see if you get a piece of gear.
You do not down the boss, you get nothing.
That is, by definition, consequences.
I agree with part of the post above. Even their 'good ol' games' DID NOT have what they think they did. People need to be honest and stop looking through rose-colored glasses. Many of the games, were just 'dice roll' games so when you done something, something else happened. It was one of 6 things so it was not random or unscripted. The world was just less interactive and therefor the script was harder to see.
It is hard to have a game with NPC's and expect the world to change if you do or don't do something. It is too hard to make a game like that. Now, if there were just an empty slate with no animals or anything and then the players created what was in the world, then you may be able to do what you want.
Honestly, if people got the MMO they say they wanted in this thread, within a few days all mobs and NPCs would be dead and the game would be nothing but PvP.
You want that? Just make a game with no mobs, no NPCs, no dev made structures or tools and give players the systems/tools to build by building tools and then using tools to build building materials ala Minecraft style and let the world populate and destroy and rebuild itself by player action only.
Which is something people (indies) are trying BTW.
Lots of players are ALREADY doing that. Why do you think there are 30M+ active players on LoL and WOT is a huge success?
I'm not talking PvP only I'm talking a "true" sandbox in that everything is player made with zero dev content or creations other than the tools/systems and art assets players get to see.
Like a full scale Minecraft MMORPG.
Though Minecraft has plenty of "PvE" elements with the mobs/NPCs even dev crafted (even if generated) dungeons/fortresses.
EXACTLY.
The best thing about sandboxes, IMO, is when they are MY sandbox and I get to choose who I share it with (if anyone.)
I fear and loathe the public far more often than I am surprised by the genuine kindness and creativity of a stranger.
Consequences are kinda hard in large multiplayer games.
Last time I saw anything like that was when a guildie was clearing random quests in EQ2. He did some rather odd quests but wasn't really reading the text anyways when he suddenly saw he was about to poison the entire council, btray the good side and turn evil... So close.
But it is hard making stuff like that in a MMO, KOTOR had plenty like that but they never really made it into TOR. When you have 10K players or more on the server those choices can really only be personal.
I guess you could do a MMO with aligment and multiple options though but adding single player content like that never really worked out before.