All parts of a game should be fun. if a part of a game isn't fun, what is the point of playing it?!?
But I see this a lot. People making all kinds of excuses for games.
People complaining about TESOs start being horribly boring and people saying its just "starter island" the game opens up after or that all games are like that at the beginning.
People complaining about the grind fest of "enter game here" and people saying that the real game is the end game or that a company should want it to take longer to get to end game.
And of course here, people saying end game doesn't need to be fun.
Why don't people just say they like a game and stop using crazy excuses to defend it and let those with issues voice out their complaints? If part of a game isn't fun to the person, something is clearly wrong for that person, let it be.
I was reading a comment from another post and this caught my attention.
Never really thought about endgame in such a way, or better yet, lets not confuse people. Lets call endgame for what it is.
the game after the levels.
Well for the game after the levels, who ever said this part of the game was ever meant to be fun?
Some games have no levels, and endgame is day 1. So who said it had to be fun? What about rough. Most sandbox (aka so called sandbox) MMOs have no character levels. Their endgame starts when you jump in. And it has a large setback of FFA gank fest environment. Thats not fun.
but again who ever said its suppose to be fun?
But on the flip side, what would endgame be, if it was suppose to be fun? How would that change the outcome of most games?
Would long term appeal increase or decrease from whatever changes were needed to make the endgame fun, instead of not fun?
A nitpick : Sandbox does not equal FFA PvP. That's just something that's been frequently implemented.
And now, a comment. Any game with players is fun to the people who are enjoying it because "fun" is a relative term. I don't enjoy being punched in the face, but a masochist would find it "fun". So end game raiding is "fun", for the people who enjoy it. Ditto for end game PvP, OW FFA PvP in a sandbox or in a theme park, etc.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
OP is 100% correct. Its not fun to play video games. And the onlines ones are just collecting data on us with us being hamsters on their illusive hamster wheel chasing a carrot on a sugar cane cake.
In fact, they should pay me with all the data they collected on me, test subject x13123123123.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
I swear to god every time I mistakenly click on a thread created by OP I can feel my IQ draining away.
Endgame not supposed to be fun? What kind of drugs have you been into? Endgame is when everything is supposed to be available to you and your options for activities are supposed to open up. UO was miserable before you GM'd your first few skills, in EQ and WoW there were no raids until endgame. If you weren't at least r6 in shadowbane you were going to have a bad time. The more time you invest in an mmo the more fun it should become, that's the very foundation of the genre. Don't make threads trying to blame the player base for problems the developers have caused due to their laziness / lack of foresight and understanding.
Don't agree. I have always had fun in any end game that I have stuck around for, ones that I don't have fun, I leave. Dailies are not much fun and a unimaginative way to get people doing a checklist imo. I don't play a mmo to be told what I should be doing.
The developers are trying to profit off an addiction - so the OP is right to some small extent. They get you addicted and then try to string you out by time delaying the raids or using difficulty to slow you down. I think that's his point. But it supposed to be fun too.
Using the addiction metaphor - people getting high might tell you they have a problem and its not fun - but the certainly got into because it was fun and if suddenly heroin made you focused and thoughtful they would quit.. Likewise if your endgame truly sucks even the addictive tricks won't keep you hooked. Deathwing was boring. It was easy to stop playing WOW for example..
The developers are trying to profit off an addiction - so the OP is right to some small extent. They get you addicted and then try to string you out by time delaying the raids or using difficulty to slow you down. I think that's his point. But it supposed to be fun too.
Whether it is addictive or not ... the fun needs to be there. It is hard to imagine a non-fun game can hold onto players when competition is so fierce.
The idea of an 'Endgame' itself should be thrown out. The entire game should be the Endgame.
Endgame is myopic and lazy game design. It's just a way to keep people p(l)aying in game where content is limited and new content takes significant time to implement, which, when it is, is consumed quickly and it's back to end-game content.
The whole idea is crap.
PnP RPGs have no endgame, which are really the progenitors of this genre. Designers/Devs/Players would do well to look at these games and reflect on what these games could be instead of cannibalizing and regurgitating the last 10 years of game-design.
The developers are trying to profit off an addiction - so the OP is right to some small extent. They get you addicted and then try to string you out by time delaying the raids or using difficulty to slow you down. I think that's his point. But it supposed to be fun too.
Using the addiction metaphor - people getting high might tell you they have a problem and its not fun - but the certainly got into because it was fun and if suddenly heroin made you focused and thoughtful they would quit.. Likewise if your endgame truly sucks even the addictive tricks won't keep you hooked. Deathwing was boring. It was easy to stop playing WOW for example..
I wouldn't even call it an addiction metaphor in many cases. Fulfilling a desire to get that .1% better, or to get that ultra-rare collectible, is demonstrably what many players grind for. Has anyone ever gone through a two-hour raid where the end boss very rarely drops item x that has unique ability x or slightly better stats than all others or is some kind of status symbol - and when it drops, someone who can make use of it says "Oh no, take it, I'll happily run through this another hundred times"? If not, then don't tell me you run that stuff "for the challenge" or "for the social experience".
There's also another factor, there's actually a term for it though I can't recall it right now, but it's essentially this: You've spent days, weeks, maybe months on your character, on learning the game, maybe on building contacts to other players. Then you hit a point where the things that you most enjoyed so far get more and more rare or vanish completely. But you've already spent so much time to get right to that point! Now the game still gives you a chance to get even more out of it, and even though it's far less for a whole lot more effort, it doesn't matter - you've already spent so much time that stopping now would feel like admitting that you made a mistake in spending all that time, and noone likes that, humans have a natural block against stopping at such a point that it's pretty easy to exploit.
PnP RPGs have no endgame, which are really the progenitors of this genre. Designers/Devs/Players would do well to look at these games and reflect on what these games could be instead of cannibalizing and regurgitating the last 10 years of game-design.
Because pnp rpgs are slow, and there is always someone (the DM) to create content.
You can't afford to hire a DM in a computer game. The best solution is structuring content like in a SP game. Play the content .. finish it ... wait for the expansion.
Originally posted by reignfyre Wat. I assume every aspect of a game is supposed to be fun. HELLO its a game! Soon after realizing a game is not fun, I'm done. Way too much stuff to do to waste entertainment time being bored.
So you think that the billing process is supposed to be fun?
There are some things that companies do, not because they think players find it fun, but because they want to make money on the game. They do, of course, try to make the game fun enough to get players to stick around and put up with paying for the privilege of doing so.
you are obviously taking his comment out of context.
How about "every aspect of a game, when you are playing, is supposed to be fun"?
You've never seen a game where the billing process was handled in-game?
Do you really think that the reason companies put stuff in the item mall is that having it in the item mall will be fun?
How about spamming players with system messages about the newest additions to the item mall? Do companies really think that players will find that fun?
There are some things that are put into games for "we can make money off of this" reasons, not "players will find this fun" reasons. That includes anything put into an item mall. It also includes end-games.
If you want to disagree, I've never seen anyone come up with a coherent explanation of why lengthy raid lockouts are fun.
Originally posted by evilized I swear to god every time I mistakenly click on a thread created by OP I can feel my IQ draining away. Endgame not supposed to be fun? What kind of drugs have you been into? Endgame is when everything is supposed to be available to you and your options for activities are supposed to open up. UO was miserable before you GM'd your first few skills, in EQ and WoW there were no raids until endgame. If you weren't at least r6 in shadowbane you were going to have a bad time. The more time you invest in an mmo the more fun it should become, that's the very foundation of the genre. Don't make threads trying to blame the player base for problems the developers have caused due to their laziness / lack of foresight and understanding. Thanks.
If you have a ton of different, viable options on what to do, then by definition you're not at the endgame. Some MMORPGs don't have an endgame at all; sandboxes generally don't, for example. The endgame is once you're past all of that, and there's one thing or maybe a few things that you have to focus on in order to progress further--and have to grind heavily to progress slowly.
When you are considering buying a box of candy....Do you ask yourself....."What is the last piece going to taste like " ? Or do you say....."Am I going to enjoy this box of candy " ?
The best way. Gimme' a break. The easy way more like it or the 'everyone does it this way' or 'I never put in any time into thinking of alternate ways'.
The better solution would be to design the game so the players create the gameplay through systems in place (an economy, resource control, political control, crime and punishment, social systems). The content should be a result of player actions and interactions, not exclusively force-fed content that you wait for once you reach level cap (another idea that has to go: levels)
It doesn't mean you can't have dungeons or raids. It's just that these activities are ALL available at the 'start' of the game, instead of climbing a level-ladder to the top and only having these repetive activities to do that have no real impact on the game world. Levelling and progression should be what happens while playing the game not the purpose of the game.
Endgame is ridiculous, and it severely limits the game design AND the kind of activities that could be included.
I don't like how for the sake of endgame developers don't make the levelling content interesting like good story,character development,engaging quests,intersting and cool locations and enemies,etc which makes the leveling process boring and repetitive and when the end game content also fails to impress then it was all worth nothing getting there.
Originally posted by mohit9206 I don't like how for the sake of endgame developers don't make the levelling content interesting like good story,character development,engaging quests,intersting and cool locations and enemies,etc which makes the leveling process boring and repetitive and when the end game content also fails to impress then it was all worth nothing getting there.
I agree .. they should learn from SP games. Put everything in an instance and make it interesting. If Dishonored can have interesting missions, MMOs can have interesting quests.
Originally posted by mohit9206 I don't like how for the sake of endgame developers don't make the levelling content interesting like good story,character development,engaging quests,intersting and cool locations and enemies,etc which makes the leveling process boring and repetitive and when the end game content also fails to impress then it was all worth nothing getting there.
I agree .. they should learn from SP games. Put everything in an instance and make it interesting. If Dishonored can have interesting missions, MMOs can have interesting quests.
Wait, what? Put everything in an instance? So you want to play an MMO where the entire game is an SP/co-op instance?
Originally posted by mohit9206 I don't like how for the sake of endgame developers don't make the levelling content interesting like good story,character development,engaging quests,intersting and cool locations and enemies,etc which makes the leveling process boring and repetitive and when the end game content also fails to impress then it was all worth nothing getting there.
I agree .. they should learn from SP games. Put everything in an instance and make it interesting. If Dishonored can have interesting missions, MMOs can have interesting quests.
Wait, what? Put everything in an instance? So you want to play an MMO where the entire game is an SP/co-op instance?
yeh .. with a nice lobby to match up with others (if i so desire). And they don't have to even call it a MMO .. i care less about the label.
Comments
All parts of a game should be fun. if a part of a game isn't fun, what is the point of playing it?!?
But I see this a lot. People making all kinds of excuses for games.
People complaining about TESOs start being horribly boring and people saying its just "starter island" the game opens up after or that all games are like that at the beginning.
People complaining about the grind fest of "enter game here" and people saying that the real game is the end game or that a company should want it to take longer to get to end game.
And of course here, people saying end game doesn't need to be fun.
Why don't people just say they like a game and stop using crazy excuses to defend it and let those with issues voice out their complaints? If part of a game isn't fun to the person, something is clearly wrong for that person, let it be.
A nitpick : Sandbox does not equal FFA PvP. That's just something that's been frequently implemented.
And now, a comment. Any game with players is fun to the people who are enjoying it because "fun" is a relative term. I don't enjoy being punched in the face, but a masochist would find it "fun". So end game raiding is "fun", for the people who enjoy it. Ditto for end game PvP, OW FFA PvP in a sandbox or in a theme park, etc.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
OP is 100% correct. Its not fun to play video games. And the onlines ones are just collecting data on us with us being hamsters on their illusive hamster wheel chasing a carrot on a sugar cane cake.
In fact, they should pay me with all the data they collected on me, test subject x13123123123.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
Endgame not supposed to be fun? What kind of drugs have you been into? Endgame is when everything is supposed to be available to you and your options for activities are supposed to open up. UO was miserable before you GM'd your first few skills, in EQ and WoW there were no raids until endgame. If you weren't at least r6 in shadowbane you were going to have a bad time. The more time you invest in an mmo the more fun it should become, that's the very foundation of the genre. Don't make threads trying to blame the player base for problems the developers have caused due to their laziness / lack of foresight and understanding.
Thanks.
End game can be amazingly fun if you want it to be.
1. Learning new bosses. Failing over and over, until finally winning!
2. Socially invest into multiple other players, share experiences. Tell stories. Do try not to steal all their items on a bad day.
3. Observe the multitude of other players with equipment less epic then yours. Sagely tell them, if they too work hard, they may be like you one day.
4. Kill a thousand other players. Hear the lamentations of their women. etc.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
Don't agree. I have always had fun in any end game that I have stuck around for, ones that I don't have fun, I leave. Dailies are not much fun and a unimaginative way to get people doing a checklist imo. I don't play a mmo to be told what I should be doing.
This ^^^ .. and by extension, if a person play a part of a game for a long time, it must be fun for him. Otherwise, why would he be playing it?
Logically, wherever you end your game will probably be where the fun ran out. But that doesn't mean a developer should actively try to make it unfun.
The developers are trying to profit off an addiction - so the OP is right to some small extent. They get you addicted and then try to string you out by time delaying the raids or using difficulty to slow you down. I think that's his point. But it supposed to be fun too.
Using the addiction metaphor - people getting high might tell you they have a problem and its not fun - but the certainly got into because it was fun and if suddenly heroin made you focused and thoughtful they would quit.. Likewise if your endgame truly sucks even the addictive tricks won't keep you hooked. Deathwing was boring. It was easy to stop playing WOW for example..
to elaborate,
Games, play, fun?
I'm not sure if you just chose to word this wrong or what, OP but yea I'm pretty sure 'fun' is the objective.
Whether it is addictive or not ... the fun needs to be there. It is hard to imagine a non-fun game can hold onto players when competition is so fierce.
I can easily go to another game that is more fun.
The idea of an 'Endgame' itself should be thrown out. The entire game should be the Endgame.
Endgame is myopic and lazy game design. It's just a way to keep people p(l)aying in game where content is limited and new content takes significant time to implement, which, when it is, is consumed quickly and it's back to end-game content.
The whole idea is crap.
PnP RPGs have no endgame, which are really the progenitors of this genre. Designers/Devs/Players would do well to look at these games and reflect on what these games could be instead of cannibalizing and regurgitating the last 10 years of game-design.
I wouldn't even call it an addiction metaphor in many cases. Fulfilling a desire to get that .1% better, or to get that ultra-rare collectible, is demonstrably what many players grind for. Has anyone ever gone through a two-hour raid where the end boss very rarely drops item x that has unique ability x or slightly better stats than all others or is some kind of status symbol - and when it drops, someone who can make use of it says "Oh no, take it, I'll happily run through this another hundred times"? If not, then don't tell me you run that stuff "for the challenge" or "for the social experience".
There's also another factor, there's actually a term for it though I can't recall it right now, but it's essentially this: You've spent days, weeks, maybe months on your character, on learning the game, maybe on building contacts to other players. Then you hit a point where the things that you most enjoyed so far get more and more rare or vanish completely. But you've already spent so much time to get right to that point! Now the game still gives you a chance to get even more out of it, and even though it's far less for a whole lot more effort, it doesn't matter - you've already spent so much time that stopping now would feel like admitting that you made a mistake in spending all that time, and noone likes that, humans have a natural block against stopping at such a point that it's pretty easy to exploit.
Because pnp rpgs are slow, and there is always someone (the DM) to create content.
You can't afford to hire a DM in a computer game. The best solution is structuring content like in a SP game. Play the content .. finish it ... wait for the expansion.
You've never seen a game where the billing process was handled in-game?
Do you really think that the reason companies put stuff in the item mall is that having it in the item mall will be fun?
How about spamming players with system messages about the newest additions to the item mall? Do companies really think that players will find that fun?
There are some things that are put into games for "we can make money off of this" reasons, not "players will find this fun" reasons. That includes anything put into an item mall. It also includes end-games.
If you want to disagree, I've never seen anyone come up with a coherent explanation of why lengthy raid lockouts are fun.
If you have a ton of different, viable options on what to do, then by definition you're not at the endgame. Some MMORPGs don't have an endgame at all; sandboxes generally don't, for example. The endgame is once you're past all of that, and there's one thing or maybe a few things that you have to focus on in order to progress further--and have to grind heavily to progress slowly.
This is why we can't have nice things.
The best way. Gimme' a break. The easy way more like it or the 'everyone does it this way' or 'I never put in any time into thinking of alternate ways'.
The better solution would be to design the game so the players create the gameplay through systems in place (an economy, resource control, political control, crime and punishment, social systems). The content should be a result of player actions and interactions, not exclusively force-fed content that you wait for once you reach level cap (another idea that has to go: levels)
It doesn't mean you can't have dungeons or raids. It's just that these activities are ALL available at the 'start' of the game, instead of climbing a level-ladder to the top and only having these repetive activities to do that have no real impact on the game world. Levelling and progression should be what happens while playing the game not the purpose of the game.
Endgame is ridiculous, and it severely limits the game design AND the kind of activities that could be included.
I have never seen a game where i cannot ignore the item mall. So yeah .... if the billing process is handled in-game, it does not affect me.
I agree .. they should learn from SP games. Put everything in an instance and make it interesting. If Dishonored can have interesting missions, MMOs can have interesting quests.
Wait, what? Put everything in an instance? So you want to play an MMO where the entire game is an SP/co-op instance?
yeh .. with a nice lobby to match up with others (if i so desire). And they don't have to even call it a MMO .. i care less about the label.
The point of a game is that its fun.
Thus, a game that isnt fun has no point.