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Remember this kind of fun ?
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
It's not Nostalgia that made past mmos great. I wasn't first generation mmo, I jumped in during Vanilla WoW and EQ2 days........But I can say this.......The depth of the game was built into interactions of playing with others.
You had your own abilities, but YOU ALSO HAD TO COUNT ON OTHERS ABILITIES !!!
It's like this :
Remember how every so often you would get that great ability that you had been waiting for ?....The one that would change your play style, the one that makes you rearrange your action bar. It maybe finally getting your pet, or getting that group heal or getting that real strong casting AOE damage ability.
To compliment this, your groups also changed your play style. You had to think differently. Maybe not send in your pet so quickly, or step back and play the healer and not so much damage but keep others alive.
EVERY GROUP WAS DIFFERENT. Maybe because of class makeup, or reaction times. This caused you to have to adapt, and this was fun in itself.
In order to have this kind of fun......EASY has to go, scripted content has to go, play-to-win cash shops have to go.
You need to have hard situations that need to be figured out by the group. If anyone hap-hazardly (new word) runs in, they get the entire party killed......Something your group naturally stumbles upon, not scripted by developers to be done one way.
Simple situations, but not simple to do. If your solo you have to go around until you have friends with you. Even Vanilla WOW had random keeps and towers, where if you entered you died. Vanguard had simple holes in the ground where you can jump in......a hole !..... Nothing drew your attention to it other than simply saying " what's that, lets go see ! ".
Well, maybe it's just me. Maybe I just tired of doing part 157 of my solo story line like in Final Fantasy 14. And I could do without my Chuckaboo pet ( another new word ). I think they were yellow, I'm not sure and I don't feel like looking it up. I'm going back to bed.
Comments
Great post, your statement right here says it all.
"You had your own abilities, but YOU ALSO HAD TO COUNT ON OTHERS ABILITIES !!!"
Today most kids and now young adults, DO NOT like to work with others in a competitive environment, nor do they have the patients.
This game will like all games have its initial flood of players, the caterwauling will be spectacular, the hate on the forums legendary, but enough people mostly older gamers will love and appreciate what they have built and stick around.
I also like this:
"Remember how every so often you would get that great ability that you had been waiting for ?....The one that would change your play style"
This RARELY or never happens anymore in MMO's, you get all your core abilities by level 10 then its just spamming and dodging. Everything after that is just passives and bland abilities the ever so slightly improve your character. or slight variations to what you can already do, just busy work skills.
And this:
"EVERY GROUP WAS DIFFERENT. Maybe because of class makeup, or reaction times. This caused you to have to adapt, and this was fun in itself. "
Now every run is cookie cutter because everyone can do everything, there is simply nothing to think about anymore when with your group, its just every man for himself zerging with strangers you don't have to talk to or work with.
The shift to ease of use, everyone is a winner, and extreme overbalancing has removed a core aspect of what made old mmos great. Again it is not nastalgia, because atm I am having more fun EQ1999 and an oldschool/nobuff private server of FFXI then I am on the current retails servers that been dumbed down to the extreme and the new mmos, if you can even call them mmos.
Today if you go into a mmo, all classes in an archtype are equally as good at literally every aspect of the game. No matter what the party setup is it is honestly played the same. Combat is also never changing anymore it is do the maximum DPS rotation and dodge 1 shot/high damage mechanics in every single fight. Hate control is gone. Healing is a joke. Openworld is piss easy, dungeons are piss easy, and there is usally 1 hard raid active at once.
Items are as complex as put on the highest Item Level gear. Nothing is situational everything is ultra linear.
The open world is nothing more then a solo quest hub to quest hub.
Honestly the genre is still moving down the wrong direction. I am in the genre is dying camp and I feel is still walking towards the light even more so today. The garbage put out now I would not even call a mmorpg anymore because it lacks almost all the defining elements of what made mmorpgs different the offline genres outside the massive amount of people online part.
Look at some of the new crap that has come out. No more healer classes, no more tank classes, grouping is completely optional outside a few dungeons. Support and Crowd control has completely been thrown away. Hell vanity gear is now even the primary awards in some games. Guilds are nothing more then extended chat channels. You can level to cap level in less then 50hrs of playtime in most mmos. You can finish an expansion and all the relevant game content in 2-3months (most mmos have a 6+ month major patch cycle). Everything meaningful is instanced away from the gameworld. These are not advancements in the genre, they are regressions.
As for FFXIV Me and My guild just stoped playing that game this patch, it is obvious the devs cannot create a game with more then 5hrs a week of content at endgame. So many people are praising that game as being great. It is a pretty WoW clone that has been stripped down the extreme. FFXIV is the most Shallow AAA mmo on the market and I have played about all of them in the last 6yrs. The world seems vast until get to endgame.... then yea better like vanity/achievement hunting or you better have another game to play along side ffxiv. Then again from my above post you can sorta see why I hate FFXIV. It is a shame because I considered FFXI to be one of the greatest endgame designs of any mmo, and they took nothing from it.
It is why I and alot of my guild are looking towards pantheon. It is checking so many of the above boxes that new mmos are missing. If the game supports guilds (and not just a chat channel or vanity garbage) and itemization is solid and they actually have the man power to release content and keep up then I can see me and my guild playing this game for a long time.
I think players genuinely want some multiplayer, but it has to be convenient and has to suit whatever mood strikes them at the time. For example, if they want to be an engineer instead of a medic, then the game lets them. And content is geared specifically to the makeup of the group, so you'll always be able to do it. Interdependency is sacrificed if it's a burden.
So it's an MMO until it's inconvenient or too interdependent. It's the same for anything else, like persistence or economy or travel.
And you know when you do that the boogie man is listening to step in and tell you Black is White and your favorite colour is not what you think it is but is his favorite colour and you are just wrong.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Tactical situations
Remember this........Scarlet Monastery
Library courtyard, Using your tank with a bow to pull mobs out of the room, and don't forget the room off to the right with the hounds.
Cathedral, seemingly harmless once you opened the big door, but if one party member stepped one foot in the party was dead.....It was always best to ranged pull smaller mobs, one group at a time into the yard. After doing this about six times is was at least a little safer to go in. After everything was completely cleared the group would have to deal with the two bosses on the alter. But that's a story in itself.
Nothing scripted, you would just had to know. However as long as your group moves slow and cautious anything can be done. Slow was always the key.
Slow dungeon crawling in all mmos was always the answer
There you go, enjoy the world of enforced codependency.
Buy the whole hawg or none.