same to you in reverse. I didn't write my responses out of concern for your entertainment in case you somehow misunderstood. You are just a convenient coathanger representing the "make it simple and stupid crowd"
Can't resist to be patronizing and condenscending?
I will say i represent the fun loving crowd, and not the "live-in-the-basement-no-life-crowd". And if you think raiding hard core mode is easy and simple, show us your achievements.
In the end, you vote with your time and wallet, i vote with mine (more time than wallet, haha). We will see what the market will do.
Sure it's the fun loving crowd who chain buys video games. I like the way you attempt to equate liking simplified games to being the Dos Equis guy. Nice Try.
I'm not trying to divine what kind of a video game nerd you are versus how much time you spend on social pursuits, I'm saying that when it comes to games your taste stinks and the smell is infecting the MMORPG world.
For those who don't want the large open space, they could create a lobby server with microzones with only "the real content" they would like. They will never have to walk in the open world and can simply port around with a queue system.
I want a large world.
That's of course not anywhere near what anyone asks for.
Loktofeit's quote is sorta hilarious to me, because I haven't seen it before but for the last few years it has been the exact same argument I've made. That players enjoy games the same way they enjoy any entertainment, and purposeless downtime is a waste of time.
Lord of the Rings, due to its familiarity to most, has always been my example of an entertainment product which doesn't take a full year to view, because Tolkien and Jackson both understood the obvious: pointless downtime is a waste of the viewer's time and makes for terrible entertainment.
So then this quote comes along, about a LOTR game, said by LOTRO's developers, and it's pretty hilarious that they're saying the same thing I've been saying (and the quote predates my argument by many years even!)
Good Travel Design requires some time to provide the sense of travel and to establish the new location. But it shouldn't require an excessive amount of purposeless downtime. And that's what you get in a game with "instant" travel: you get the full travel the first time (when travel is actually interesting) and subsequent trips can be made mostly instantly (although you usually walk for a few minutes after you've teleported to reach where you were going.)
Your implication that anyone is asking for an instant on-demand teleport to any coordinate in the game at any time is just nonsense. Nobody wants that, we just want travel times which makes sense -- travel times which don't deliberately waste players' time.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm not trying to divine what kind of a video game nerd you are versus how much time you spend on social pursuits, I'm saying that when it comes to games your taste stinks and the smell is infecting the MMORPG world.
As if there is the "right" or "wrong" taste. I don't apologize for my taste. And if devs want my business, may be i will give them a chance.
World size is a feature and as such a game can be good with or without a "life-sized" play environment. Therefore, as a feature, some gamers will always view large worlds as a must-have, while others are fine with smaller ones (and probably shop at IKEA).
If a developer wants to attract and maintain a large player base they need to offer a big world. Otherwise they are turning off a large percentage of gamers who find small worlds a deal-breaker.
It does not take thousands of man hours to create a larger world. 3D environments for MMO's are in large part computer generated and all they are doing is spreading out the content that takes most of the effort to create.
If a developer wants to attract and maintain a large player base they need to offer a big world. Otherwise they are turning off a large percentage of gamers who find small worlds a deal-breaker.
It does not take thousands of man hours to create a larger world. 3D environments for MMO's are in large part computer generated and all they are doing is spreading out the content that takes most of the effort to create.
Lots of online games have small, or no worlds and they are much more popular than most MMOs (except may be wow). LoL, WoT, D3, .... so "no big world" is clearly not a deal breaker for many players.
And computer generated content is generic and uninteresting. Personally i am not interested in wasting my time going through a huge world just to find a small amount of interesting content. Just let me have the interesting content and be done with it.
Going through a generic world is no fun and tedious for me.
They should be at least as big as vanilla wow ,with multiple starting zones for races/factions and without fast travel until you explore an area.Maybe have different versions of fast travel too, I personally prefer horses or flying mounts on auto pilot but if a player is in a hurry ,he or she could also use portals for a higher fee. Also while content is important it should integrated well into zones and not trying to hide the lack of it by filling the zones with aggressive monsters like Rift did.
Going through a generic world is no fun and tedious for me.
I don't think anyone is suggesting a big world with more of the generic stuff we are seeing right now. Most people supporting a big world are also saying it needs to be filled out well.
Going through a generic world is no fun and tedious for me.
I don't think anyone is suggesting a big world with more of the generic stuff we are seeing right now. Most people supporting a big world are also saying it needs to be filled out well.
I have no problem with a big world where every 10 feet there is something interesting happening and something to do. I highly doubt any devs have the resources to do that though.
Hence the discussion. If a dev is going to pad the world with lots of uninteresting places i have to travel through and waste my time, i am not interested.
If the world is filled with interesting stuff, then the size does not matter to me. It only means that i will finish the content faster, and move onto to the next game faster.
Going through a generic world is no fun and tedious for me.
I don't think anyone is suggesting a big world with more of the generic stuff we are seeing right now. Most people supporting a big world are also saying it needs to be filled out well.
I have no problem with a big world where every 10 feet there is something interesting happening and something to do. I highly doubt any devs have the resources to do that though.
Hence the discussion. If a dev is going to pad the world with lots of uninteresting places i have to travel through and waste my time, i am not interested.
If the world is filled with interesting stuff, then the size does not matter to me. It only means that i will finish the content faster, and move onto to the next game faster.
No dev is going the have the resources to satisfy content locusts, but designing to satisfy content locusts is bad design for this type of game. They take too many resources and too much time for that to be an effective strategy when they know that no matter how much content they provide, those locusts will simply consume it and move on, leaving behind an empty world and empty servers that forces the devs to either completely change the game to get more people, let the empty servers suck up money for the sake of the few remaining players, or anger the remaining players by shutting down the servers and repurposing them to something else. Any game that relies on one time content and is server based is in trouble; the content provided has to be able to self regenerate and recreate itself on a fairly regular. While world size is not the only piece of that puzzle, world size does influence the ability to implement player driven systems that can sustain a game far better than any dev driven action.
No dev is going the have the resources to satisfy content locusts, but designing to satisfy content locusts is bad design for this type of game. They take too many resources and too much time for that to be an effective strategy when they know that no matter how much content they provide, those locusts will simply consume it and move on, leaving behind an empty world and empty servers that forces the devs to either completely change the game to get more people, let the empty servers suck up money for the sake of the few remaining players, or anger the remaining players by shutting down the servers and repurposing them to something else. Any game that relies on one time content and is server based is in trouble; the content provided has to be able to self regenerate and recreate itself on a fairly regular. While world size is not the only piece of that puzzle, world size does influence the ability to implement player driven systems that can sustain a game far better than any dev driven action.
Everything you said obviously is not true.
Why? Because SP games exist and many play it once and move on. SOme SP games are even better business than most MMOs.
Content locust is easy to deal with. Just use a B2P model, and give them enough content to warrant a $60 buy. That should be easy .. because all you need is the same amount of content as a SP game. Just don't budget more content than that.
Any additional players you get is gravy.
Selling content obviously is a good business. The whole console market is based on that. May be MMO businesses should learn something from consoles.
I beg to differ. MMO world need to be HUGE. The bigger the better. I don't like to be crammed with one mob every 2 meters, and players thick all around me. I really loved SWG best, because it had giant planets with lots of "wasted" space. That felt much more like a real world. In the real world you don't have one bear every 3 meters as well. These highly contracted MMO worlds just feel too artificial to me.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Originally posted by Elikal I beg to differ. MMO world need to be HUGE. The bigger the better. I don't like to be crammed with one mob every 2 meters, and players thick all around me. I really loved SWG best, because it had giant planets with lots of "wasted" space. That felt much more like a real world. In the real world you don't have one bear every 3 meters as well. These highly contracted MMO worlds just feel too artificial to me.
Nope. MMO world does not "need" to be huge. You prefer it to be huge. There is a huge difference.
You have your preference. You don't understand others have theirs, and can be different from yours?
Originally posted by Elikal I beg to differ. MMO world need to be HUGE. The bigger the better. I don't like to be crammed with one mob every 2 meters, and players thick all around me. I really loved SWG best, because it had giant planets with lots of "wasted" space. That felt much more like a real world. In the real world you don't have one bear every 3 meters as well. These highly contracted MMO worlds just feel too artificial to me.
Sometimes what one personally wants isn't always in line with what's best for the gameplay experience or even in line with good design. However, I am sure that at some time, in some game somewhere, a team lead kicked back a submitted world environment with the reason given as "Not enough wasted space."
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Better to start small and dense rather than big and scarce. There are tons of examples where the developer has started big, but there's nothing there. As a result, people just aren't interested and the game is no fun; whereas, if you start small people will buy and like your game, even if its just for a while. And with a deep enough gameplay, player retention won't be a problem either.
In contrast, there are tons of examples where a game has started off small, but they've had such a genius gameplay, they've been able to push on from there.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Better to start small and dense rather than big and scarce. There are tons of examples where the developer has started big, but there's nothing there. As a result, people just aren't interested and the game is no fun; whereas, if you start small people will buy and like your game, even if its just for a while. And with a deep enough gameplay, player retention won't be a problem either.
In contrast, there are tons of examples where a game has started off small, but they've had such a genius gameplay, they've been able to push on from there.
This ^^^
Without a good game, having a huge world is moot. I am not interested.
It depends on what you want to achieve. You can start small with fun mechanics but you will most likely never get a high player count and thus your profits will be low.
AAA developers have to create enough content to keep players happy for 3 months and make them pay a certain amount of cash during that time. With a low amount of content this will fail:
- Players will get through the content fast and leave. Once players have left they will not come back. Thats why you need enough content to keep them in the game until they lose interest. The average casual player loses interest when he has seen all content or after three months.
- The games technology (graphics) will become outdated after a few years meaning less players will try it. You have to get the majority of players to play before this happens. This is why a lot of games go for abstract art styles (cartoonish) or have an abstract gaming environment (see Eve).
- Other games get released all the time. They will most likely have copied the good features from your game and add further features of their own to create a superior product. Players will then flock to that game.
It is all about creating a game that pays for itself + profit in 6 months. After that the cash cow simply dies.
--- Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Comments
Sure it's the fun loving crowd who chain buys video games. I like the way you attempt to equate liking simplified games to being the Dos Equis guy. Nice Try.
I'm not trying to divine what kind of a video game nerd you are versus how much time you spend on social pursuits, I'm saying that when it comes to games your taste stinks and the smell is infecting the MMORPG world.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
That's of course not anywhere near what anyone asks for.
Loktofeit's quote is sorta hilarious to me, because I haven't seen it before but for the last few years it has been the exact same argument I've made. That players enjoy games the same way they enjoy any entertainment, and purposeless downtime is a waste of time.
Lord of the Rings, due to its familiarity to most, has always been my example of an entertainment product which doesn't take a full year to view, because Tolkien and Jackson both understood the obvious: pointless downtime is a waste of the viewer's time and makes for terrible entertainment.
So then this quote comes along, about a LOTR game, said by LOTRO's developers, and it's pretty hilarious that they're saying the same thing I've been saying (and the quote predates my argument by many years even!)
Good Travel Design requires some time to provide the sense of travel and to establish the new location. But it shouldn't require an excessive amount of purposeless downtime. And that's what you get in a game with "instant" travel: you get the full travel the first time (when travel is actually interesting) and subsequent trips can be made mostly instantly (although you usually walk for a few minutes after you've teleported to reach where you were going.)
Your implication that anyone is asking for an instant on-demand teleport to any coordinate in the game at any time is just nonsense. Nobody wants that, we just want travel times which makes sense -- travel times which don't deliberately waste players' time.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
As if there is the "right" or "wrong" taste. I don't apologize for my taste. And if devs want my business, may be i will give them a chance.
World size is a feature and as such a game can be good with or without a "life-sized" play environment. Therefore, as a feature, some gamers will always view large worlds as a must-have, while others are fine with smaller ones (and probably shop at IKEA).
If a developer wants to attract and maintain a large player base they need to offer a big world. Otherwise they are turning off a large percentage of gamers who find small worlds a deal-breaker.
It does not take thousands of man hours to create a larger world. 3D environments for MMO's are in large part computer generated and all they are doing is spreading out the content that takes most of the effort to create.
Lots of online games have small, or no worlds and they are much more popular than most MMOs (except may be wow). LoL, WoT, D3, .... so "no big world" is clearly not a deal breaker for many players.
And computer generated content is generic and uninteresting. Personally i am not interested in wasting my time going through a huge world just to find a small amount of interesting content. Just let me have the interesting content and be done with it.
Going through a generic world is no fun and tedious for me.
They should be at least as big as vanilla wow ,with multiple starting zones for races/factions and without fast travel until you explore an area.Maybe have different versions of fast travel too, I personally prefer horses or flying mounts on auto pilot but if a player is in a hurry ,he or she could also use portals for a higher fee.
Also while content is important it should integrated well into zones and not trying to hide the lack of it by filling the zones with aggressive monsters like Rift did.
I don't think anyone is suggesting a big world with more of the generic stuff we are seeing right now. Most people supporting a big world are also saying it needs to be filled out well.
I have no problem with a big world where every 10 feet there is something interesting happening and something to do. I highly doubt any devs have the resources to do that though.
Hence the discussion. If a dev is going to pad the world with lots of uninteresting places i have to travel through and waste my time, i am not interested.
If the world is filled with interesting stuff, then the size does not matter to me. It only means that i will finish the content faster, and move onto to the next game faster.
No dev is going the have the resources to satisfy content locusts, but designing to satisfy content locusts is bad design for this type of game. They take too many resources and too much time for that to be an effective strategy when they know that no matter how much content they provide, those locusts will simply consume it and move on, leaving behind an empty world and empty servers that forces the devs to either completely change the game to get more people, let the empty servers suck up money for the sake of the few remaining players, or anger the remaining players by shutting down the servers and repurposing them to something else. Any game that relies on one time content and is server based is in trouble; the content provided has to be able to self regenerate and recreate itself on a fairly regular. While world size is not the only piece of that puzzle, world size does influence the ability to implement player driven systems that can sustain a game far better than any dev driven action.
Everything you said obviously is not true.
Why? Because SP games exist and many play it once and move on. SOme SP games are even better business than most MMOs.
Content locust is easy to deal with. Just use a B2P model, and give them enough content to warrant a $60 buy. That should be easy .. because all you need is the same amount of content as a SP game. Just don't budget more content than that.
Any additional players you get is gravy.
Selling content obviously is a good business. The whole console market is based on that. May be MMO businesses should learn something from consoles.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Nope. MMO world does not "need" to be huge. You prefer it to be huge. There is a huge difference.
You have your preference. You don't understand others have theirs, and can be different from yours?
Sometimes what one personally wants isn't always in line with what's best for the gameplay experience or even in line with good design. However, I am sure that at some time, in some game somewhere, a team lead kicked back a submitted world environment with the reason given as "Not enough wasted space."
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Better to start small and dense rather than big and scarce. There are tons of examples where the developer has started big, but there's nothing there. As a result, people just aren't interested and the game is no fun; whereas, if you start small people will buy and like your game, even if its just for a while. And with a deep enough gameplay, player retention won't be a problem either.
In contrast, there are tons of examples where a game has started off small, but they've had such a genius gameplay, they've been able to push on from there.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
This ^^^
Without a good game, having a huge world is moot. I am not interested.
It depends on what you want to achieve. You can start small with fun mechanics but you will most likely never get a high player count and thus your profits will be low.
AAA developers have to create enough content to keep players happy for 3 months and make them pay a certain amount of cash during that time. With a low amount of content this will fail:
- Players will get through the content fast and leave. Once players have left they will not come back. Thats why you need enough content to keep them in the game until they lose interest. The average casual player loses interest when he has seen all content or after three months.
- The games technology (graphics) will become outdated after a few years meaning less players will try it. You have to get the majority of players to play before this happens. This is why a lot of games go for abstract art styles (cartoonish) or have an abstract gaming environment (see Eve).
- Other games get released all the time. They will most likely have copied the good features from your game and add further features of their own to create a superior product. Players will then flock to that game.
It is all about creating a game that pays for itself + profit in 6 months. After that the cash cow simply dies.
---
Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.