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The PvP Era - Garrett Fuller - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The PvP Era - Garrett Fuller - MMORPG.com
As MMO players we have likely seen it all. Starting in the early days where MMOs were also open battlegrounds. Games like Ultima Online were just open, with few safe zones. In order to really play though you had to venture outside. However, this trend in competitive gaming has really grown strong in recent titles. Here are a few examples of how we are living in the PvP era.
Comments
Nothing kills immersion for me more than Battlegrounds / dedicated PvP areas. I remember when SWTOR came out. Huttball?! /facepalm.
Companies keep trying to chase certain big name games. After WoW, online gaming blew up, with more, and more being released all the time, to the point that now online games seem to be treated like temporary games, that companies fully expect to shut down later. After LoL, DOTA 2, and Smite, MOBA, after MOBA has been released, and often shut down a while after. After arena games got big again with Overwatch, we're seeing the same thing happen again.
Just because companies are chasing trending PvP games, doesn't mean everyone wants PvP. PvP tends to be the thing that dies off first in online games that have both. With Blade & Soul, they've been trying to push it as an Esport game from the start over here, but most playing it now seem to have little, to no interest in PvP. Instanced based online games always have people going nuts over the PvP arena, for a while, then the ones that are left are soon complaining how there's no one PvPing, while the PvE continues to work just fine.
Crowfall and CU and the potential they represent for the near future in enjoyment and competition is like a wet dream for me and the thousands of other hardcore pvpers I've fought alongside and against in the past decade. We've been starved of a good new open world pvp mmo, as each one has come with either p2w, servers unable to handle what they advertise (Swtor and ESO for example), no attempt at balance, or minimal content and attention.
Our guilds have been forced to go into inactive statuses or suck it up playing dated mmos or half-assed attempted mmos in recent years. We are here, we are waiting, we are legion. Cya on the battlefield...
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
the rules that worked in pvp games 15 years ago dont work anymore. not saying it wasn't fun back then, just that the same game would not be fun today. its a different type of player now. a lot more predatory, a lot more aggressive. the first thing they do is try and find an advantage, the second thing they do is try and find exploits or ways to cheat. it pretty sad.
Battlegrounds in DAOC was just something you could do while leveling up.. it was a training ground if you will that allowed players to get ready for RvR. And here is the kicker, the DAOC battlegrounds were persistent, always on.. non of this queuing up going into an instance to capture a flag mindless crap. If anything this article should be about how all the MMORPGs got Battlegrounds so wrong after DAOC.
But really, if you are going to reference DAOC talk about what made it special.. RVR. If you aren't talking about RvR and the incredible experience that it gave the gamers who played it (still has not been clone in any game to date), then all you are doing is using their name as click bait.
And here is something to chew on.. DAOC was not a PvP game... let that sink in. They did have a PvP server like many other games, but the core game was not PvP. If you don't understand that then you need to go do a lot of research about the game because there is an entire generation of gamers who don't get it.
The thing with MMO PvP though is that it never really took off the same way PvE have done. How large percentage of the MMORPGers only play PvP compared with the ones only playing PvE? 20%?
It might be more but nowhere near the amount of PvEers. There is of course a lot of people like me playing both as well but PvP still isn't as popular as PvE.
Now, that doesn't mean it couldn't be as popular, or for that matter shouldn't be. The reason PvE is so more popular is because MMORPG mechanics so far have done PvE better then PvP. And many of the upcomming games are trying to change that but we aren't there yet and they might very well fail.
We seen many games that tried it, some with better result then others. DaoC and SWG did a good job trying but fell just a little short to really compete with PvE. Guildwars also did a good try and so did Lineage.
The problem so far have mainly been that the huge powergap most MMORPGs uses means a lot of the combat had a predetermined outcome based on level and gear. That together with lousy mass combat rules that makes any large fight a zerg means it have a huge problem going up against other genres like FPS and Mobas where every combat could go either way. A combat is just fun if it can go either way, autowin or autoloose makes the game boring and predictable.
A good enough PvP game can certainly take the genre to the next level. Just look on FPS games, once most of them were single player games but Quake 2 and Counter strike changed all that which open the genre up to many times the players it had before.
However I feel you are taking out the victory before the battle, none of the PvP games so far have really made it huge besides Lineage aand maybe BDO, at best the others have topped with half a million players and even if you skip Wow as comparision those are nothing compared the PvE games. We might be on the edge of the breakthrough but we might not be as well.
I do believe that the right PvP MMORPG eventually will become huge but that could just as well take 20 years as something releasing soon. We just need that single amazing game that does for MMORPGs what counter strike did for FPS games but games like that are far between.
And what is that universal definition of fun? I'm sure you will have no problem at all to define things like toy, game, play, fun that will be complete and most will agree with
TLDR : Fun is highly subjective.
I've often wondered what a MMORPG might look like with a PVP model that let players be competitive regardless of level.
Sure, Planetside took one approach, but no real progression to it. DAOC was another good idea, battlegrounds grouped around your level while you progressed, (though seriously, in a 20-24 BG most would not show until lvl 23)
RVR, which while open to all from lvl 20 onwards, most would not venture much in the frontiers until lvl 49 plus unless they enjoyed getting pointlessly rolled a lot by higher levels.
Imagine however an open world MMORPG where a player might be "level 10" in terms of PVE progression but should another player attack them both players would be elevated to the same relative level of power, so that there really was an opportunity for a good fight based mostly on skill rather than gear or even the element of surprise.
Even in the situation of many against few or even one, elevate the side with a disadvantage so much that if 10 attacked one, they'd find themselves fighting the equivalent of a minor dungeon boss mob.
Sure, the one might lose, but if he was able to kill 7 of the 10 my guess is a lot of the sting would be removed.
In short, remove the wolves vs sheep design, make it more like wolves attacking another and finding themselves facing a grizzly bear.
Sure, they might still win, but not without significant cost.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The most suitable name I can think of for the current MMORPGs is 'the credit card PvP era'. Unfortunately for those of us who don't enjoy 'credit card PvP' it almost always affects both PvE and PvP, I'm sitting out this era of MMORPGs and hoping the next one will be more enjoyable :]
I know many hold DAoC in high regard, but I really think ESO already surpassed it. ESO's siege battles are just a few leagues ahead of everything that was done before it. Now if they'd only fix the technical part of the game, we could talk about best PvP of all time.
I fucking hate to see what wow has become, a mainstream kid game with no challenge what so ever! Long Live Vanilla and 40 man raids! ¨
I want a game where i am afraid to level in the opposite faction area, I want a game where I log out of frustration because of corpse camping!
Sick and tired safe zones, Russian zergs etc.,
mmorpg junkie since 1999
PvP has been extremely popular since broadband became common place. There may be more options for doing PvP online these days - mobas and survival games primarily - but it doesn't feel like the PvP population has grown at a faster rate than the games industry as a whole.
Certainly within MMOs, it doesn't feel like we're in a PvP era. We might be on the edge of one, as a lot of the crowd-funded MMOs are focusing on PvP, but for what we have available right now I wouldn't say we're in a PvP era. I'd say we're in a solo story-focused era. I will be glad when the current era ends as for a long time nothing has been worth my time, I hate this era of MMORPGs.
Now bring on the player driven systems! Risk reward!
And you, good sir, get the comment of the day award. Indeed we really, really should. EQNext held a huge promise as a concept.
We need not the theme parks, pathetic theaters - but the worlds that have their own life. Life we can share, influence and grow into. I mean there are plenty games that are just games for the purpose of fun - lighthearted or otherwise. MMORPG were worlds from get-go, that was - at least for me - their attraction and fascination.
We need purpose back in our MMORPGs. Without it they will always be lacking and any Renaissance we hope for is simly impossible.
And after all this on the topic.