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Wizard101 - A Community Divided - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Wizard101 - A Community Divided - MMORPG.com
While game difficulty disagreements have always been around, it took center stage when Mirage, Wizard101's newest world, Mirage, made its debut and it took some players by surprise. Mirage could easily be a tough adjustment for some. Difficulty concerns were echoed on the official message boards though other players welcomed the change in difficulty and praised KingsIsle for the new challenge.
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"Hardcore" MMORPG people play 8-10 hours a day (which is NOT simply regularly) and will spend thousands of dollars.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Playing 8-10 (or even 5-7) hours each day is what I meant by "regularly." Apologies for the confusion. Casual players only play 2-3 hours or a few times a week from what I've seen. It might be different in other communities.
I actually thought recently about going back to wizard 101 because I did have some fun in it. But---bleh, I'm so far out of it now I don't even want to try to get back into it.
A big part of the problem for wizard 101, like all progression games, is that they have to keep adding more stuff at the high end to keep people playing. More levels, more and better gear to get, bigger flashier spells, new areas and so on. They have to do that in a character progression game, I understand that, but in the process the original game (and whatever made it fun) tends to get buried under all the clutter.
It was really starting to feel that way to me the last time I played and that was a while back. Maybe it was Azteca? Heck, I can't even remember where the game was at when I quit the last time.
I have to say though---if they started over fresh with a sequel <wizard 102>, I would almost certainly play it.
If there needs to be some Wizard 102 overlay (and I'd enjoy it too), it might be reasonable to find some way of extending/duplicating the already existing assets. 1) Let people enter a zone on "Difficult" mode where everything is scaled up. Or 2) let people set a "Difficult" mode flag on their character so that they begin with an overall penalty and have to work harder to succeed (and earn better loot than "Normal" mode players in the party). If they could just improve resolution on everything without losing previous animations and sounds, that'd be nice to see.
I'd rather they spent time improving some basic Casual/Family elements in the core game.
1) Change some of the least-used "twitch" pet games into more thinking/memory/logic games like the dance (memory) game.
2) Let family accounts share/trade items. If they can, I've never figured it out.
3) More character slots. At least 1 more, for obvious reasons.
4) If someone really wants to enter a building without "pickup" volunteers, let them have a toggle switch on their character that keeps the timer from activating or allowing others to stand on the entrance pad, so they just zone right through the door immediately.
5) Stop micromanaging inventory storage everywhere with increasingly elaborate workarounds. Let people "store" any number of looted assets by selling them to a vendor that tracks them by user. Selling an item to the vendor will "store/unlock" the item in that store, so the user can go back and purchase them (at full cost, from any character on the account) if they desire them later.
6) Some of the pathing is still bad, and some areas of sidewalk are not actually safe zones for walking or standing around observing.
7) Reduce difficulties in some areas, if necessary, to get back to Casual gameplay.
8) Fix the camera POV issues during combat. Sometimes I cannot see relevant information because of figures in the way or they are above/below my field of view.
9) Improve combat speed a little bit, please.
9a) When opponents are fully defeated, skip casting anything else except heals that would land on player characters.
9b) Whenever a specific spell is cast by a player, make subsequent casts of that spell by that player result in a shorter animation sequence. I'm a big fan of the ninja pigs and the snowball, in particular, but I don't need to see them repeatedly throughout every combat.
However, the fact they went all in with the story and innovative character interaction did give KI a lot of praise, but those things alone didn't make playing worthwhile. I'm a hybrid player myself, but the pip conversion stat was useless and shouldn't have tried to cram it down everyone's throat and call it a worthwhile stat while critical and block was still the major factor. A combination of lack of worthwhile gear along with the hardcore mobs made the game not worth playing and I only bought enough crowns to open what little of Mirage left I had to open up. Hopefully they do learn, as you said, make it a steady increase of difficulty in each follow up world instead of spiking the difficulty between two worlds so much it aggravates players more than enjoying the content.