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A new way for MMORPG's?
rensta
Member RarePosts: 728
So i was thinking, remember how playing a game, grinding, exploring, getting items was really fun because we never thought about the end game?
For example, today if i grind and get a level 25 rare bow, I'm like... Meh.... Another 5 levels it will be useless.
What if... Games didn't give us a short specific TLDR of the game, but instead, just the basic starting features?
More so, make the game system dynamic, make crafting work differently in different areas, ingame season or even expansions. Make recipes give you really basic information, and have the rest of the materials and crafting methods change every week, or even day.
For example, to craft the great ring of fire you need to collect the heart of a stone golem at midnight and craft it in the big volcano at the end of a raid area. Then after a month , the volcano dies, and until his next cycle, golem hearts are useless.
I'm not really throwing great ideas haha, but yeah, hopefully you get me.
Have items have special abilities like, double jump, gliding, breathing underwater, super speed, transformation, mimic, or just red eyes
For example, today if i grind and get a level 25 rare bow, I'm like... Meh.... Another 5 levels it will be useless.
What if... Games didn't give us a short specific TLDR of the game, but instead, just the basic starting features?
More so, make the game system dynamic, make crafting work differently in different areas, ingame season or even expansions. Make recipes give you really basic information, and have the rest of the materials and crafting methods change every week, or even day.
For example, to craft the great ring of fire you need to collect the heart of a stone golem at midnight and craft it in the big volcano at the end of a raid area. Then after a month , the volcano dies, and until his next cycle, golem hearts are useless.
I'm not really throwing great ideas haha, but yeah, hopefully you get me.
Have items have special abilities like, double jump, gliding, breathing underwater, super speed, transformation, mimic, or just red eyes
Basically clicking away text windows ruins every MMO, try to have fun instead of rushing things. Without story and lore all there is left is a bunch of mechanics.
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Take Wow for instance, today you get to max level several times faster then back in vanilla and you pass twice as many levels at that time. So Your cool lvl 25 bow will be useless almost 10 times faster today then just after launch. Also, you need it less since the lvl 25 content today is so easy a dog could complete it while you could still die rather easily if you messed up in december 2004.
So: Decrease the amount of levels a lot, to 20 or 30. Have a better difficulty curve then super easy to max level and hard after that so mid level gear is more useful and you easee people into the endgame better. Make maxing out 2-3 times as long as today. Your gear will last you longer and you will need it more. Problem solved.
I like you dynamic crafting idea though.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
Basically clicking away text windows ruins every MMO, try to have fun instead of rushing things. Without story and lore all there is left is a bunch of mechanics.
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Basically clicking away text windows ruins every MMO, try to have fun instead of rushing things. Without story and lore all there is left is a bunch of mechanics.
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Trying new ideas and thinking about other ways to make mechanics work is not madness.
As for the endgame people tend to focus on it since leveling is so fast and easy now. We did not even consider the endgame until we maxed out a character in the late 90s.
The whole "early game" have become a far too long and boring tutorial. Yes, getting maxed out is way faster today but since anyone can do it with close to zero problems it lost a lot of what made it fun.
The old games had their problems, spawn camping have always been boring and if you died a few times you could loose a lot of XP and even your gear forcing you to lots of extra grind. But compared to a 3 week tutorial to get the 80+ levels is just insane.
And the endgame is rather small, 10-20% of the game so that the games rush us to it makes little sense. If the endgame would have 80% of the content it would be fine.
If you want to have levels at all they need to matter and I don't mean just in more HP. If you have 20-30 levels you can portion out the new skills far better and make leveling meaningful without splitting up the players too much. It solves your gear problem as well.
Also, it is time to get back the thing that makes you need far more XP as you hit higher levels to reach the next. If an expansion needs to raise the levelcap it can add fewer levels that way while still make gaining them fun. 5-10 levels for each expansion mean you get an insane amount fast, 2-3 would be far better.
As for people wanting more of the same, people don't know if they want something new and different until they get it. Minecraft is a good example and the odd ones that actually is good and fun tend to sell very well while most of the "more of the same" tend to do fine but not great. Sequels not included.
I don't really believe market research since Wow still is the top MMO dog. If the devs really knew exactly what everybody want it would have been beaten years ago.
The higher level mobs give you more option to custom your character .
For example level 1 to 10 give you 4 options , level 10 to 20 the option is 8 , level 20 to 30 the option is 16
Combine with your build chose to create your own unique character .
It also the dress up game here .
The current way is : gears = stats if you change it to gears = ability , your level = stats things change as well
it called recycling .
That's why i call current mmorpg maker is wasteful bunch who create things that will be throwaways after few levels
For example , if a bow level 10 have ability to leach 10% of damage while other don't have that ability , do you think it will become trash when your level is high ?
It become trash cause the stats if carry , but if you remove the stats from the items and put the stats on the PC level progression , how it will change ?
My basic idea is that you loot character upgrades instead of using levels. Think it like a deck building game where you loot cards and places it on your character instead of gear. Some cards stack on a place (like one giving you a bonus to an attribute) while others have to be removed to your "deck" when you equip something new there.
And certain bosses could drop specific skill card, a bit like how you get elite skills from bosses in Guildwars.
Also, I would have a few different "rarities" and have the common and uncommon cards be BOP while the rare and ultra rare skills could be traded. Basically so you don't max out slots like HP too fast.
Lets say Hp: you start out with 500 and you can stack up to 50 cards in your HP slot varying from 5-50 hp+ each, all bind on pickup so you will gain HP as you play until all 50 cards are +50 maxing out your HP at 3000 with some adjustment for you constitution. HP would be the largest stackable slot. And yeah, cards like HP and stat improvements should not be possible to trade.
A skillslot could just be 1 card, say we have 12 active skill slots and another 12 passive. You could use a common BoP card or a rare attack, maybe only dropped from one or 2 mobs in the game.
And we could have 3 classes, tricksters, soldiers and spellcasters. Some cards would be class specific while others general or might include 2 of the classes. And all BoP drops should be card you could use while rare cards could be of any class.
Then the gear in itself will just have armor value or damage stat but each would have a card slot for specific effects.
Anyways, that is where I am at the moment, it is just a thought experiment for a leveless system with loot, a nit of the ideas around skills is based on Guildwars and some others from Magic the gathering.
I think the current levelling systems and power gaps suck...like that's doing so well anymore. It's tiresome and lacks excitement that sticks long term.
Looting is a fun thing and players do like it. But it doesn't have to be for items that increase power. It can be, basically, gold in other forms. Jewels, ancient relics of sculpture and art, etc.
Plus looting can have the sorts of things the OP is talking about, ingredients to make items of power (some things can require lots more than others), searching for rare tomes that grant additional or new powers, etc.
The biggest problem with MMORPGs is as was foretold. The predictable game play and expected rewards of "zoning" because of power gaps. Boooring!
Open up the worlds and make them exciting and less predictable.
Forget "levelling" and go with memorable adventure in an open form.
Once upon a time....
Whenever quantity becomes more important than quality the game becomes less fun.
Some games have low quantity AND low quality.
Some games have high quantity AND high quality.
Yet, here we are.
It's not about that. It's about worlds vs. games.
I swear, some of you guys think that quality can only be done in your design principles.
You'd do well to get over yourselves, because you're in decline.
Once upon a time....
The next "big thing" in MMO's will be the projects built on SpatialOS and similar dev tools, which promise to make things possible that were only wishful thinking until now. Games like "Worlds Adrift" and "Seed" are breaking new ground.
It's early days yet for the cloud-based tech, but I believe that will be the most exciting direction in future.
In general terms.
Edit:
Never mind, I looked it up.
Once upon a time....
As for large quantity of good quests, that is rare. Usually they have a huge percentage of filler quests like carrying a letter 20 feet or similar crap.
Heck EQ 1 & 2 had both some of the best and some of the worst quests I ever seen, some of them well written & exciting while others forcing you to kill 100 bugs to find pages they eaten from a book (yeah, both stupid and boring).
My point was that most teams don't have time to add 5000 exciting and fun quests and in that case it is better to have 500 larger and more fun quests then a whole bunch of crap.
Why bother making hastily done shoddy content? And I havn't seen a MMO that at least don't have some content like that. Yeah, can you give us both quality and quantity then that is great but otherwise focus on quality.
Anyways, there is a lot good you still can do with the old and tried mechanics but you have to stop just looking on how older games did it and put your own spin on it. There are also plenty of interesting mechanics from other genres and pen and paper RPGs you could implement or you could figure out something new but just remaking Wow will get you nowhere unless you are Blizzard.
Once upon a time....
If Bread calls for flour/water/yeast,that is what i want the recipe to be forever.I want NEW recipes and everything has to be discovered.
When a dev makes the game all about the levels then yeah of course it will die out eventually.I like to see players learn their spells via quests,real tough quests with hints and lots of exploration needed to figure out the quest.You gain a level therefore you know a new quest or spell is dumb.Point allotment is the exact same just a different angle.
Naturally the mmorpg world should be dynamic but not in a goofy way the way Arena net tried to portray dynamic.
Mobs should move about,you can interact with them or not he choice is yours or if aggressive maybe theirs as well.We should not be interacting with the world for a level number and definitely not questing for a level number.
So basically we have done all the non realistic mmorpg game designs and were accepted because most ideas were rather new and we just wanted to play.Now it is time to make a real mmorpg and not some superficial linear questing/level number game.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
So this is why i will talk bad about a giant like Blizzard,they have the money,the manpower and i am quite certain the know how but refuse to put the effort into a AAA game,they rather sell us the same old cheap game design.Square is the same,sure they tried to improve some aspects in FFXIV but overall took a step back imo.Zeni did ok with TESO but wtf was BDO trying to do?
Time to step up,if you have the money,make the AAA game,if you don't ,then don't try and pan your game off as being really good,i am not buying into BS.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
If you mix long epic quests with DEs, dungeons and other types of content the experience get rather different though.
TSW for instance have a rather good quest system with 1 epic quest and a side quest at a time. It makes for a rather different experience compared to a full questlog you speedrun to complete as many as possible.
Quests were originally (in Meridian 59) though as optional content, not the point you play the game.It is not a bad or good system in itself, but overuse it with badly written ones and you get a really grindy experience for the players.
It is the same like phasing or cut scenes, a few of those makes the game more fun, too many and it just get tedious.
Throwing the one ring into mount Doom is a perfect quest, it is a long term hard mission that should be rewarded accordingly.
Delivering a letter from one guy to his brother 20 feet away (because they don't talk to eachother or whatever) is the opposite, it has zero challenge, offers nothing fun and a real adventurer should probably drag one brother to the other instead and have them talk it out or ignore the idiotic request.
Just mixing Wows questbased gameplay with GW2s DE driven one would create a more fun system then either of them. Mix in more stuff and we get a far more varied and fun gameplay.
But I certainly agree that most devs look themselves blind on levels and think 100 rather pointless levels is more fun then a few that makes a difference.
And a MMO with more realistic combat and approach to the content would if nothing else be very refreshing. Maybe something a bit closer to Mount & blade?
Just do what D3 does. Don't pretend it is anything but action combat + item hunt + pushing GR ladder.
It's nice to face the related problems and obstacles on the way. But no man has ever stopped to pick flowers for the village's idiot on his way to kill a dragon.
Repeatable on demand or one off as a world event?
(In a one off, there'd need to be ways to make it better than just a mad dash of a massive hoard of players to the Dragon, as in finding it first, or defeating it's minions to get to it, or whatever other ideas.)
I see "one off" quests like this as World Events and part of that quest is to seek out the goal, a race of sorts against every other group of players doing the same thing.
Once upon a time....
I like the idea of a skill based game (like UO, with locks and up/down settings for each skill), and then have special quests to perfrm in order to become a specific class.
So a characters skilled as a warrior or priest can attempt to become a Paladin (if they have the right set of skills) but must first do a special quest such as bring the heart of a Deamon to the Paladin Lord. And in this case, a Deamon would be somewhat rare in the world and difficult to slay. The location can basically be set up as a personal instance and designed much like a WoW quest.
The same sort of quest could be required for other special "classes" within the skill system.
Modified, of course. Druids could have a quest for entry based more on balancing nature somewhere in the world, for example.
Once upon a time....
So you make a Ring of Fire normally, or you can make it extra powerful by adding your Stone Golem Heart into the forge. But it only works at midnight and at this specific forge at the end of this dungeon.
You want this to change and become useless after a while.
What I'd rather see is a system that uses a cycle based on the stars. So this particular quest becomes available again after the system cycles through all the other "quests" to make extra powerful items. Each one as specific as this. (A game could have more than one special thing for each star cycle too, and add to it over time.)
I'd also add in mystery to the whole thing. I'd make players discover these formulas and techniques through ancient lore and lost manuscripts, and puzzling the answers out. And then trial and error to prove out the correct formula.
I'd also do something to prevent players from revealing what they discover on the net.
Nothing will work all the time, but if overuse of a particular "formula" makes the forge in question break for several cycles, then players are less likely to just hand out the answers to everyone. At least, in a game with a good economic trade system where these items have real value. i.e. a "Worldly" game, not a Themepark game.
Once upon a time....
Themeparks-in-decline with better same ol' game play.
Just remember, there are no refunds for your tickets on the ship that has sailed.
Once upon a time....