My old WoW days were fun when we slow leveled. You would be in a 10-20 level area Like Darkshore for a week, You would get to know everyone in that area. Players would just hang out, chating, fooling around, dueling and flearting. Now and then a few would shout an invite to just quest and three and four would run off in a small group for an hour.
I would be off on weekdays often and our populated server would be a little slow, and you would help someone kill a simple mob team up and chat and quest ALWAYS you would be adding friends to your friends list.
!00% developers killed this. Fast leveling, easy questing, auto grouping, story lines......Now we have crap !!!!......GW2 is a good game, but not an mmo.
But WoW leveling was really fast (compared to other MMOs) and far FAR less social/interdependent than other games... it was kind of the MMO that made soloing fashionable.
I won't disagree that there was down time in these games, but I would also say this was part of what made it social. Stopping to craft, or wait for a shuttle, or getting a buff caused people to chat more, and this caused people to interact in the game and make more plans together as well.
I would say that Doc buffs were too important for a while there, to the point that players didn't want to play without them, which caused lines with doctors. Buffs should have been a bonus, not a requirement, and SOE fixed it eventually.
Down time is great if you're 14 and have no responsibilities, but the average age of MMO players today is 27-28, these are largely people with families and full time jobs who don't have time to spend 12 hours a day on a game. They're lucky if they get an hour or two a day. Myself, I'm lucky if I can get a couple of hours a week. I have no interest in down time, I want to get on, do something, have some fun and get off again. I represent the majority of modern MMO players.
What you describe is fine for people who live in their mother's basement, who do the majority of their socializing online because they think the sun will melt them. Most of us, though, have actual lives and view games and just that... games.
mmo's used to be more social because facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. didn't exist. a lot people would get their social interaction through online games. nowadays people have facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. and they don't need an mmo for social interaction. now mmo's are just games. is has less to do with design decisions and more to do with the way social interaction has evolved on the internet. people don't need mmo's to be social sites anymore. the social sites exist elsewhere.
Originally posted by muffins89 mmo's used to be more social because facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. didn't exist. a lot people would get their social interaction through online games. nowadays people have facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. and they don't need an mmo for social interaction. now mmo's are just games. is has less to do with design decisions and more to do with the way social interaction has evolved on the internet. people don't need mmo's to be social sites anymore. the social sites exist elsewhere.
Nowadays, people go outside! Imagine that! Outside! And they meet people face-to-face! Isn't that amazing? Because most people who play online games aren't the anti-social nerds that they once were. They're not pimply-faced geeks that are afraid of actual girls. Some of them are actually married and... *GASP* have had sex!
The whole idea of having games be the primary social outlet of the player really is absurd, and really sad for the people who want it that way.
Originally posted by muffins89 mmo's used to be more social because facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. didn't exist. a lot people would get their social interaction through online games. nowadays people have facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. and they don't need an mmo for social interaction. now mmo's are just games. is has less to do with design decisions and more to do with the way social interaction has evolved on the internet. people don't need mmo's to be social sites anymore. the social sites exist elsewhere.
This has little or nothing to do with it. Older games had features and designs that brought players together and created player interdependence, and those friendships and relationships were in context with the game we were playing. I don't know how many MMO gamers you talk to on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, but I sure don't use those for that purpose. Most people I know wouldn't even know what the hell I'm talking about if I was to Facebook about an MMO game. Your mileage may vary, but that's my experience.
The type of social experience we are talking about is one where players come together via the mechanics of the game. I know this isn't for everyone, but many of us want the return of this type of MMO game. There's plenty of antisocial games on the market already.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Let's face it; the players will always be evenly split about whether 'interdependence' is 'fun', or isn't.
EQ's players certainly were split on the topic. As someone pointed out earlier, it does in fact seem to work much better in the smaller games, and I believe that to be true...same for "town crier"-based sales/services vs. auction houses.
Not all systems 'fit' all games.
Well, if success is anything to go off of... MMOs without interdependence don't seem to do well, they die within a month and continue to decline, whereas the golden age MMOs grew over time.
I won't disagree that there was down time in these games, but I would also say this was part of what made it social. Stopping to craft, or wait for a shuttle, or getting a buff caused people to chat more, and this caused people to interact in the game and make more plans together as well.
I would say that Doc buffs were too important for a while there, to the point that players didn't want to play without them, which caused lines with doctors. Buffs should have been a bonus, not a requirement, and SOE fixed it eventually.
Down time is great if you're 14 and have no responsibilities, but the average age of MMO players today is 27-28, these are largely people with families and full time jobs who don't have time to spend 12 hours a day on a game. They're lucky if they get an hour or two a day. Myself, I'm lucky if I can get a couple of hours a week. I have no interest in down time, I want to get on, do something, have some fun and get off again. I represent the majority of modern MMO players.
What you describe is fine for people who live in their mother's basement, who do the majority of their socializing online because they think the sun will melt them. Most of us, though, have actual lives and view games and just that... games.
Again that is your preference, and your cutesy insults aren't helping anyone care about your point.
I am a casual gamer with my own company, a family, and other hobbies such as martial arts that I do every week. I still want a deeper MMO experience. I don't care if it takes me longer to get to some arbitrary goal in an MMO game because I can't play as much. Sandbox type games have horizontal progression, so there is no race to end game.
Seems like someone has to say this in EVERY post these days, but there should be different games for different kinds of gamers. YOU may not want this type of game, but a growing number of people do. The market is already saturated with casual, solo, mind-numbing games for people who prefer them.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Originally posted by muffins89 mmo's used to be more social because facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. didn't exist. a lot people would get their social interaction through online games. nowadays people have facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. and they don't need an mmo for social interaction. now mmo's are just games. is has less to do with design decisions and more to do with the way social interaction has evolved on the internet. people don't need mmo's to be social sites anymore. the social sites exist elsewhere.
Nowadays, people go outside! Imagine that! Outside! And they meet people face-to-face! Isn't that amazing? Because most people who play online games aren't the anti-social nerds that they once were. They're not pimply-faced geeks that are afraid of actual girls. Some of them are actually married and... *GASP* have had sex!
The whole idea of having games be the primary social outlet of the player really is absurd, and really sad for the people who want it that way.
Give me a break already. We get it, you want everyone to think you are Mr. Social Butterfly who only plays video games due to some issue with self-loathing. We can see by the list of games you have played, that you hate them.
This discussion is about making the in-game experiences more social amongst other players while you are gaming. It's to foster a deeper, more interesting game for people who want them. No one, but you, has mentioned making MMO games a primary social outlet.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Eh, the games uniqueness, at least in my view, does not stem from its Interdependence as much as it came from numerous useful non combat classes.
I remember being a Dancer or a Musician and having fun leveling up in cities just chatting. That was awesome and there are very few other systems that have useful non combat classes. This is why I stuck with FF14 for longer then most because even though the combat absolutely sucked it actually had VERY detailed crafting classes.
I really miss relevent things to do that are not kill 1000 things. I liked building castles and summoning in shadowbane. I liked Diplomacy/Politics of Vanguard. I liked the live event parties of Matrix Online.
Why did MMOs streamline some of the most unique things about them away><
SWG had the MOST AND LARGE VARIETY of non combat classes of any other MMO. I could do SO many things.
... Anyway, I hope this helps in some way for some people to understand how much deeper these games can be. ...
Sadly, a majority of people buying MMORPGs these days does not want a deeper game. They want an easy arcade/action game where they can hop in, get instant fun, instant rewards and instant satisfaction. Nothing else matters. To them depth and player interdependence is a bad mechanic.
Of course the studios and publishers know this - that's why they make the games the way they do. Luckily there comes some noise from the industry recently that these shallow instant-fun games also don't bring in enough revenue: the casual instant-fun crowd doesn't stay long with a game, they jump to another casual instant-fun game in a heartbeat.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
Originally posted by MindTrigger Originally posted by Cephus404Originally posted by muffins89mmo's used to be more social because facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. didn't exist. a lot people would get their social interaction through online games. nowadays people have facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, etc. and they don't need an mmo for social interaction. now mmo's are just games. is has less to do with design decisions and more to do with the way social interaction has evolved on the internet. people don't need mmo's to be social sites anymore. the social sites exist elsewhere.
Nowadays, people go outside! Imagine that! Outside! And they meet people face-to-face! Isn't that amazing? Because most people who play online games aren't the anti-social nerds that they once were. They're not pimply-faced geeks that are afraid of actual girls. Some of them are actually married and... *GASP* have had sex!The whole idea of having games be the primary social outlet of the player really is absurd, and really sad for the people who want it that way.Give me a break already. We get it, you want everyone to think you are Mr. Social Butterfly who only plays video games due to some issue with self-loathing. We can see by the list of games you have played, that you hate them.
This discussion is about making the in-game experiences more social amongst other players while you are gaming. It's to foster a deeper, more interesting game for people who want them. No one, but you, has mentioned making MMO games a primary social outlet.
Muffins has a really good point. Plus, their name is Muffins.
Anyway, even people who are in game are socializing through Facebook or Team Speak with their friends. MMORPG just can't compete with those external systems unless they either embrace those types of systems or those systems themselves. They could work out a deal with Google so that when players start an account, they have a Google+ account that advertises whatever they want advertised and when players create Google groups, those groups exist in the game. MMORPG are still doing good to let people join a single guild and the text chat is functional, but that's really the best thing you can say about it.
What MMORPG can do is work on other interactions. More things like letting players own shops to sell their items instead of posting things in a stock market. Letting players or guilds own tracts of land that can be visible to other players. These are not socializing in the commonly held sense, but they are social interactions.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Sadly, a majority of people buying MMORPGs these days does not want a deeper game. They want an easy arcade/action game where they can hop in, get instant fun, instant rewards and instant satisfaction. Nothing else matters. To them depth and player interdependence is a bad mechanic.
Of course the studios and publishers know this - that's why they make the games the way they do. Luckily there comes some noise from the industry recently that these shallow instant-fun games also don't bring in enough revenue: the casual instant-fun crowd doesn't stay long with a game, they jump to another casual instant-fun game in a heartbeat.
The fault in your premise is that accessibility and user-friendliness is somehow against depth when they are not. Furthermore, what you perceive as depth may not be depth to some.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Sadly, a majority of people buying MMORPGs these days does not want a deeper game. They want an easy arcade/action game where they can hop in, get instant fun, instant rewards and instant satisfaction. Nothing else matters. To them depth and player interdependence is a bad mechanic.
Of course the studios and publishers know this - that's why they make the games the way they do. Luckily there comes some noise from the industry recently that these shallow instant-fun games also don't bring in enough revenue: the casual instant-fun crowd doesn't stay long with a game, they jump to another casual instant-fun game in a heartbeat.
The fault in your premise is that accessibility and user-friendliness is somehow against depth when they are not. Furthermore, what you perceive as depth may not be depth to some.
Why did you quote me? I didn't say a word about "accessibility" and "user-friendliness".
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
make sure that the game is based on building and make sure that you need lots of people to build some very big and interesting things. Everything else will fall into place.
For all the great things SWG did - it did a lot really, really bad too.
SWG was a great sandbox in terms of the variety of activities you could participate in and how linked things were to each other as you say, but like most sandboxes it relied far, far too heavily on repetitive, grind-heavy time sinks as a substitute for fun gameplay.
The RPG aspect, like always, pretty much ruined the MMO aspect of the game.
Even if you ignore all of the ridiculous bugs and broken professions/systems and extreme polish issues and exploits - like many if not all of the MMOs of old everything was tedius and repetitive and in hindsight - incredibly boring.
Do I want instant access to everything in the game? No.
I fully understand the storytelling devices of the "Hero's Journey" and how integral this has been tied into the RPG genre.
Progression and character advancement is a staple of this genre and one of the key elements of the formula.
But EVERYTHING in SWG was prefaced by grinding countless hours for whatever XP type you needed to fill out whatever skill boxes you needed to actually enjoy any of the systems/content in the game.
Don't even get me started on all of the FOTM builds, how JTL was completely ruined by the RPG aspects, and the infamous Holocron grind.
This game had some great ideas and some of the most piss poor implementation and post-launch management in the history of the genre. WAR suffered from the same problem.
The most Rosey of Rose-Colored Glasses can try and forget how bad this game was by writing incredibly well written and eloquently worded essays touting the few shining bright spots..
But there is a reason SWG did the CU and NGE - everyone had already left and the game was continuing to hemorrhage subs to the likes of WoW and EQ2 because those games were actually fun to play.
People seem to forget that.
Now, YES they had two options - try and make the game better, get people to stay, and maybe even bring people back. That would have been the SMART option.
And we all know they went with the stupid option of "just replace everything."
But don't for a second forget how rough of shape the game was in before they did CU and NGE - and never forget why it was in such bad shape.
I know - I was there for the first 6-7 months and then came back very briefly for JTL before WoW was released.
Elephant in the room?
My opinion mirrors yours in many details. While SWG had a real interesting crafting system, and free form play, it was pretty broken at release. I was interested in the game, but didn't play it at any length. Due to my location, I was friends with a couple of the Devs of SWG, and they warned me away, saying the game was half baked, many elements were broken, and the management awful.
A decently made game incorporating some of the strengths of SWG could do well: As long as it accurately estimates the number of people interested enough to support it, and budgets accordingly.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Seems like someone has to say this in EVERY post these days, but there should be different games for different kinds of gamers. YOU may not want this type of game, but a growing number of people do. The market is already saturated with casual, solo, mind-numbing games for people who prefer them.
And I agree with you, there should be different games for different kinds of gamers, but while you and others claim that there are enough people to support these kinds of games, the market research done by developers doesn't support that claim or they'd already be making those games! These companies exist to make money. If there was a significant, much less growing segment of the gaming population that was not being served where they could make money, they'd be doing it already. I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who would be interested in paying for such a product.
The fault in your premise is that accessibility and user-friendliness is somehow against depth when they are not. Furthermore, what you perceive as depth may not be depth to some.
Why did you quote me? I didn't say a word about "accessibility" and "user-friendliness".
I'm sorry, my intention was to mature your argument there, but if you really want to stick with "instant-whatever" then go right ahead.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
This discussion is about making the in-game experiences more social amongst other players while you are gaming. It's to foster a deeper, more interesting game for people who want them. No one, but you, has mentioned making MMO games a primary social outlet.
Unfortunately, that takes better people, not better games. Once upon a time, the majority of MMO gamers came from a single demographic, the nerd. They all had similar interests, they had things to talk about, they enjoyed doing the same things, that's why we had such good communities in games. Then, games went mainstream and it was no longer a bunch of nerds playing, the community was splintered into an almost infinite number of factions. People no longer necessarily liked the same things or had anything to talk about so people stopped talking. You couldn't count on that random person you ran into would like Star Trek or be able to quote Monty Python. People stopped socializing because they had so little in common, outside of the game, with those around them.
And that's one genie you just can't put back in the bottle. You can't make games only for nerds anymore. The gaming community just isn't that way anymore and never will be again. Any attempt to force these people together, to force them to interact through down time, etc. is doomed to failure. The kind of games you had 15 years ago are gone and never coming back because the type of gamer you had 15 years ago is gone and never coming back.
There was a similar concept in FFXI, not because there were non-combat classes but because no combat class could really do anything alone. Aside from Beastmaster, no class could effectively solo past level 15ish. And nobody, Beastmasters included, could hunt down their Artifact Armor alone. Limit Breaks, key quests, unlocking sub jobs, advancing your nation's rank through missions, and all the expansion story chains all required the help of others. The difficulty was that those others often wouldn't need the same things you did, so they had to be present altruistically, often getting nothing except an assurance that you'd be there to help them get something when they needed it in return. This required players to be friendly, social and helpful in turn. Not a bad model in this regard.
However.
One terrible side effect of this is that you can't always gather players to go do what you want when you want. More time was spent in that game looking for members and trying to piece together a party for anything than was actually spent doing stuff. Part of the reason, I believe, was the haphazard way goals were presented to the player. There usually would be some overlap in player goals, but players weren't made aware of this naturally and thus were rarely on the same stage of an objective. As such, you often couldn't find players who needed to do the same thing you did, and thus had to rely on the aforementioned altruism.
I actually enjoyed the element of social cooperation much more in vanilla WoW when I moved on to that from FFXI because of this. Every important goal for your characters in WoW guided players to the same locations. You needed something from Scarlet Monestary? So did everyone else. Adventure buddies presented themselves in abundance. Level 50 class quests took every player to Azshara and eventually Sunken Temple to fight a variety of optional bosses. If you needed the boss for your quest, your fellow party members were usually happy to accomodate because they could get something out of it too. If nothing else, it was a new adventure in a very open, cavernous, maze-like dungeon, which was exciting to many players. (Where did those WoW dungeons go, by the way? Last I played, everything was purely linear. You used to be able to get lost in places like BRD, UBRS/LBRS, SCHOLO and STRAT. But that's another conversation.)
It's probably also important to point out that players weren't speed clearing douchebags back then. Most players were new, many even new to MMOs, and hadn't had time to hone their skills and develop egos and arrogance.
Anyway, I don't know what it was like in SWG, but I would wonder if there was as much downtime as there was in FFXI due to your reliance on "hiring" or getting favores from other players to acheive any of your personal goals. I enjoyed my change to WoW coming from FFXI because it felt like nonstop action with minimal downtime for years. Eventually that changed, for a variety of reasons, but that's a separate discussion too.
Seems like someone has to say this in EVERY post these days, but there should be different games for different kinds of gamers. YOU may not want this type of game, but a growing number of people do. The market is already saturated with casual, solo, mind-numbing games for people who prefer them.
And I agree with you, there should be different games for different kinds of gamers, but while you and others claim that there are enough people to support these kinds of games, the market research done by developers doesn't support that claim or they'd already be making those games! These companies exist to make money. If there was a significant, much less growing segment of the gaming population that was not being served where they could make money, they'd be doing it already. I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who would be interested in paying for such a product.
As a counterpoint (though I agree with a lot of what you've said), MMOs have such a long development time, that you are seeing what were considered the 'great ideas' of five years ago in the games coming out today. If someone tweaked to this last year, the game they'd be working on would be years in the future. It is always possible that ArcheAge or the Next EQ or some other game in production may incorporate some of those elements. And perhaps they will do well.
Sites like this, however, lead to an echo-chamber effect that makes the interest in such things seem larger than they may actually be.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Those of you who did not have the pleasure of playing Star Wars Galaxies for any length of time surely have a hard time understanding what we are talking about. From the outside looking in, especially from today's perspective, SWG probably seems like a 'failure' to some of you. You probably know something about the New Game Experience controversy, so I won't get into that, and you've probably heard about the fact that it did have many bugs and issues during its lifetime.
[...]
Great Post OP, you capture the meaning of what many here think should be the Defacto Design Platform for an MMO.
But, present day Devs do not follow it, they are younger, some of them never experienced it (in either UO, or SWG and similar Old School MMOs), most importantly, they are instructed to make games like WoW forced by the Investors who are just Business men in for a quick buck and read Financial Charts to make their decisions.
So unless a solution can be found to that Interdependency, the genre will continue to churn out Themepark after Themepark which has no other Focus than raw gameplay, which we are all so bored of, and nostalgic of the more meaningfull experience that games such as SWG were able to deliver.
Cheers!
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
There are so many valuable observations. I'm taking notes. To broaden the picture: Fundamentally, player-interdependence provides the player with the feeling that they have a porpoise in the game-world. To use a cake, themes are the icing. The systems already exist in a wide range of games; and, in such an ideal game, players receive what they put into it, as far money and power are concerned, depending on the area -- or "mini-game": combat, harvesting, crafting, resource-trading, politics, building, exploration, et so forth. You can be a casual player (like moi) or a "hardcore" player: this is where developer-edited player-created content applies.
Further, the "mini-game" approach enables either very different styles of play in each category, some of which may not require player-interdependence (like exploring procedurally-generated or player-created content); or a different sort of interdependency within each category, some of which may be more time-intensive (like searching for and then investing in another player's new farmland resource instance for a percentage of the new farmland resource instance's future total income), or less time-intensive (traveling to a persistent PvPvPvPvEvEvEvE instance and there killing a particular unit/mob and dropping the treasured item into the bazaar/broker/auction haus for use by crafters, all in fifteen minutes).
Originally posted by 3SulpNietorp There are so many valuable observations. I'm taking notes. To broaden the picture: Fundamentally, player-interdependence provides the player with the feeling that they have a porpoise in the game-world. To use a cake, themes are the icing. The systems already exist in a wide range of games; and, in such an ideal game, players receive what they put into it, as far money and power are concerned, depending on the area -- or "mini-game": combat, harvesting, crafting, resource-trading, politics, building, exploration, et so forth. You can be a casual player (like moi) or a "hardcore" player: this is where developer-edited player-created content applies. Further, the "mini-game" approach enables either very different styles of play in each category, some of which may not require player-interdependence (like exploring procedurally-generated or player-created content); or a different sort of interdependency within each category, some of which may be more time-intensive (like searching for and then investing in another player's new farmland resource instance for a percentage of the new farmland resource instance's future total income), or less time-intensive (traveling to a persistent PvPvPvPvEvEvEvE instance and there killing a particular unit/mob and dropping the treasured item into the bazaar/broker/auction haus for use by crafters, all in fifteen minutes).
I've never had a porpoise in any game world. :-(
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by 3SulpNietorp There are so many valuable observations. I'm taking notes. To broaden the picture: Fundamentally, player-interdependence provides the player with the feeling that they have a porpoise in the game-world. To use a cake, themes are the icing. The systems already exist in a wide range of games; and, in such an ideal game, players receive what they put into it, as far money and power are concerned, depending on the area -- or "mini-game": combat, harvesting, crafting, resource-trading, politics, building, exploration, et so forth. You can be a casual player (like moi) or a "hardcore" player: this is where developer-edited player-created content applies.
Further, the "mini-game" approach enables either very different styles of play in each category, some of which may not require player-interdependence (like exploring procedurally-generated or player-created content); or a different sort of interdependency within each category, some of which may be more time-intensive (like searching for and then investing in another player's new farmland resource instance for a percentage of the new farmland resource instance's future total income), or less time-intensive (traveling to a persistent PvPvPvPvEvEvEvE instance and there killing a particular unit/mob and dropping the treasured item into the bazaar/broker/auction haus for use by crafters, all in fifteen minutes).
I've never had a porpoise in any game world. :-(
It makes me sad, too. :-( Not even ships. At least a porpoise keeps players happy, in several ways.
Comments
But WoW leveling was really fast (compared to other MMOs) and far FAR less social/interdependent than other games... it was kind of the MMO that made soloing fashionable.
Down time is great if you're 14 and have no responsibilities, but the average age of MMO players today is 27-28, these are largely people with families and full time jobs who don't have time to spend 12 hours a day on a game. They're lucky if they get an hour or two a day. Myself, I'm lucky if I can get a couple of hours a week. I have no interest in down time, I want to get on, do something, have some fun and get off again. I represent the majority of modern MMO players.
What you describe is fine for people who live in their mother's basement, who do the majority of their socializing online because they think the sun will melt them. Most of us, though, have actual lives and view games and just that... games.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Nowadays, people go outside! Imagine that! Outside! And they meet people face-to-face! Isn't that amazing? Because most people who play online games aren't the anti-social nerds that they once were. They're not pimply-faced geeks that are afraid of actual girls. Some of them are actually married and... *GASP* have had sex!
The whole idea of having games be the primary social outlet of the player really is absurd, and really sad for the people who want it that way.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
This has little or nothing to do with it. Older games had features and designs that brought players together and created player interdependence, and those friendships and relationships were in context with the game we were playing. I don't know how many MMO gamers you talk to on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, but I sure don't use those for that purpose. Most people I know wouldn't even know what the hell I'm talking about if I was to Facebook about an MMO game. Your mileage may vary, but that's my experience.
The type of social experience we are talking about is one where players come together via the mechanics of the game. I know this isn't for everyone, but many of us want the return of this type of MMO game. There's plenty of antisocial games on the market already.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Well, if success is anything to go off of... MMOs without interdependence don't seem to do well, they die within a month and continue to decline, whereas the golden age MMOs grew over time.
Again that is your preference, and your cutesy insults aren't helping anyone care about your point.
I am a casual gamer with my own company, a family, and other hobbies such as martial arts that I do every week. I still want a deeper MMO experience. I don't care if it takes me longer to get to some arbitrary goal in an MMO game because I can't play as much. Sandbox type games have horizontal progression, so there is no race to end game.
Seems like someone has to say this in EVERY post these days, but there should be different games for different kinds of gamers. YOU may not want this type of game, but a growing number of people do. The market is already saturated with casual, solo, mind-numbing games for people who prefer them.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Give me a break already. We get it, you want everyone to think you are Mr. Social Butterfly who only plays video games due to some issue with self-loathing. We can see by the list of games you have played, that you hate them.
This discussion is about making the in-game experiences more social amongst other players while you are gaming. It's to foster a deeper, more interesting game for people who want them. No one, but you, has mentioned making MMO games a primary social outlet.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Eh, the games uniqueness, at least in my view, does not stem from its Interdependence as much as it came from numerous useful non combat classes.
I remember being a Dancer or a Musician and having fun leveling up in cities just chatting. That was awesome and there are very few other systems that have useful non combat classes. This is why I stuck with FF14 for longer then most because even though the combat absolutely sucked it actually had VERY detailed crafting classes.
I really miss relevent things to do that are not kill 1000 things. I liked building castles and summoning in shadowbane. I liked Diplomacy/Politics of Vanguard. I liked the live event parties of Matrix Online.
Why did MMOs streamline some of the most unique things about them away><
SWG had the MOST AND LARGE VARIETY of non combat classes of any other MMO. I could do SO many things.
Sadly, a majority of people buying MMORPGs these days does not want a deeper game. They want an easy arcade/action game where they can hop in, get instant fun, instant rewards and instant satisfaction. Nothing else matters. To them depth and player interdependence is a bad mechanic.
Of course the studios and publishers know this - that's why they make the games the way they do. Luckily there comes some noise from the industry recently that these shallow instant-fun games also don't bring in enough revenue: the casual instant-fun crowd doesn't stay long with a game, they jump to another casual instant-fun game in a heartbeat.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
Give me a break already. We get it, you want everyone to think you are Mr. Social Butterfly who only plays video games due to some issue with self-loathing. We can see by the list of games you have played, that you hate them.
This discussion is about making the in-game experiences more social amongst other players while you are gaming. It's to foster a deeper, more interesting game for people who want them. No one, but you, has mentioned making MMO games a primary social outlet.
Muffins has a really good point. Plus, their name is Muffins.
Anyway, even people who are in game are socializing through Facebook or Team Speak with their friends. MMORPG just can't compete with those external systems unless they either embrace those types of systems or those systems themselves. They could work out a deal with Google so that when players start an account, they have a Google+ account that advertises whatever they want advertised and when players create Google groups, those groups exist in the game. MMORPG are still doing good to let people join a single guild and the text chat is functional, but that's really the best thing you can say about it.
What MMORPG can do is work on other interactions. More things like letting players own shops to sell their items instead of posting things in a stock market. Letting players or guilds own tracts of land that can be visible to other players. These are not socializing in the commonly held sense, but they are social interactions.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The fault in your premise is that accessibility and user-friendliness is somehow against depth when they are not. Furthermore, what you perceive as depth may not be depth to some.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Why did you quote me? I didn't say a word about "accessibility" and "user-friendliness".
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
make sure that the game is based on building and make sure that you need lots of people to build some very big and interesting things. Everything else will fall into place.
Elephant in the room?
My opinion mirrors yours in many details. While SWG had a real interesting crafting system, and free form play, it was pretty broken at release. I was interested in the game, but didn't play it at any length. Due to my location, I was friends with a couple of the Devs of SWG, and they warned me away, saying the game was half baked, many elements were broken, and the management awful.
A decently made game incorporating some of the strengths of SWG could do well: As long as it accurately estimates the number of people interested enough to support it, and budgets accordingly.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
And I agree with you, there should be different games for different kinds of gamers, but while you and others claim that there are enough people to support these kinds of games, the market research done by developers doesn't support that claim or they'd already be making those games! These companies exist to make money. If there was a significant, much less growing segment of the gaming population that was not being served where they could make money, they'd be doing it already. I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who would be interested in paying for such a product.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I'm sorry, my intention was to mature your argument there, but if you really want to stick with "instant-whatever" then go right ahead.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Unfortunately, that takes better people, not better games. Once upon a time, the majority of MMO gamers came from a single demographic, the nerd. They all had similar interests, they had things to talk about, they enjoyed doing the same things, that's why we had such good communities in games. Then, games went mainstream and it was no longer a bunch of nerds playing, the community was splintered into an almost infinite number of factions. People no longer necessarily liked the same things or had anything to talk about so people stopped talking. You couldn't count on that random person you ran into would like Star Trek or be able to quote Monty Python. People stopped socializing because they had so little in common, outside of the game, with those around them.
And that's one genie you just can't put back in the bottle. You can't make games only for nerds anymore. The gaming community just isn't that way anymore and never will be again. Any attempt to force these people together, to force them to interact through down time, etc. is doomed to failure. The kind of games you had 15 years ago are gone and never coming back because the type of gamer you had 15 years ago is gone and never coming back.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
There was a similar concept in FFXI, not because there were non-combat classes but because no combat class could really do anything alone. Aside from Beastmaster, no class could effectively solo past level 15ish. And nobody, Beastmasters included, could hunt down their Artifact Armor alone. Limit Breaks, key quests, unlocking sub jobs, advancing your nation's rank through missions, and all the expansion story chains all required the help of others. The difficulty was that those others often wouldn't need the same things you did, so they had to be present altruistically, often getting nothing except an assurance that you'd be there to help them get something when they needed it in return. This required players to be friendly, social and helpful in turn. Not a bad model in this regard.
However.
One terrible side effect of this is that you can't always gather players to go do what you want when you want. More time was spent in that game looking for members and trying to piece together a party for anything than was actually spent doing stuff. Part of the reason, I believe, was the haphazard way goals were presented to the player. There usually would be some overlap in player goals, but players weren't made aware of this naturally and thus were rarely on the same stage of an objective. As such, you often couldn't find players who needed to do the same thing you did, and thus had to rely on the aforementioned altruism.
I actually enjoyed the element of social cooperation much more in vanilla WoW when I moved on to that from FFXI because of this. Every important goal for your characters in WoW guided players to the same locations. You needed something from Scarlet Monestary? So did everyone else. Adventure buddies presented themselves in abundance. Level 50 class quests took every player to Azshara and eventually Sunken Temple to fight a variety of optional bosses. If you needed the boss for your quest, your fellow party members were usually happy to accomodate because they could get something out of it too. If nothing else, it was a new adventure in a very open, cavernous, maze-like dungeon, which was exciting to many players. (Where did those WoW dungeons go, by the way? Last I played, everything was purely linear. You used to be able to get lost in places like BRD, UBRS/LBRS, SCHOLO and STRAT. But that's another conversation.)
It's probably also important to point out that players weren't speed clearing douchebags back then. Most players were new, many even new to MMOs, and hadn't had time to hone their skills and develop egos and arrogance.
Anyway, I don't know what it was like in SWG, but I would wonder if there was as much downtime as there was in FFXI due to your reliance on "hiring" or getting favores from other players to acheive any of your personal goals. I enjoyed my change to WoW coming from FFXI because it felt like nonstop action with minimal downtime for years. Eventually that changed, for a variety of reasons, but that's a separate discussion too.
As a counterpoint (though I agree with a lot of what you've said), MMOs have such a long development time, that you are seeing what were considered the 'great ideas' of five years ago in the games coming out today. If someone tweaked to this last year, the game they'd be working on would be years in the future. It is always possible that ArcheAge or the Next EQ or some other game in production may incorporate some of those elements. And perhaps they will do well.
Sites like this, however, lead to an echo-chamber effect that makes the interest in such things seem larger than they may actually be.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Great Post OP, you capture the meaning of what many here think should be the Defacto Design Platform for an MMO.
But, present day Devs do not follow it, they are younger, some of them never experienced it (in either UO, or SWG and similar Old School MMOs), most importantly, they are instructed to make games like WoW forced by the Investors who are just Business men in for a quick buck and read Financial Charts to make their decisions.
So unless a solution can be found to that Interdependency, the genre will continue to churn out Themepark after Themepark which has no other Focus than raw gameplay, which we are all so bored of, and nostalgic of the more meaningfull experience that games such as SWG were able to deliver.
Cheers!
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
Odd, I never had that problem. Don't know anyone else who did, either.
Wonder what you did wrong.
There are so many valuable observations. I'm taking notes. To broaden the picture: Fundamentally, player-interdependence provides the player with the feeling that they have a porpoise in the game-world. To use a cake, themes are the icing. The systems already exist in a wide range of games; and, in such an ideal game, players receive what they put into it, as far money and power are concerned, depending on the area -- or "mini-game": combat, harvesting, crafting, resource-trading, politics, building, exploration, et so forth. You can be a casual player (like moi) or a "hardcore" player: this is where developer-edited player-created content applies.
Further, the "mini-game" approach enables either very different styles of play in each category, some of which may not require player-interdependence (like exploring procedurally-generated or player-created content); or a different sort of interdependency within each category, some of which may be more time-intensive (like searching for and then investing in another player's new farmland resource instance for a percentage of the new farmland resource instance's future total income), or less time-intensive (traveling to a persistent PvPvPvPvEvEvEvE instance and there killing a particular unit/mob and dropping the treasured item into the bazaar/broker/auction haus for use by crafters, all in fifteen minutes).
The EQ Next ideas thread: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=399389
I've never had a porpoise in any game world. :-(
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
It makes me sad, too. :-( Not even ships. At least a porpoise keeps players happy, in several ways.
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Dolphin_vs_Porpoise
Dolphins are themeparks and porpoises are sandboxes.
Wholphin.
The EQ Next ideas thread: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=399389