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Are mmorpgs boring?
Amathe
Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
This may seem an odd question, since I have played many mmorpgs and thought I enjoyed them.
But did I?
Or did I just jump on a progression treadmill and keep going because it was vaguely satisfying?
What I most wanted was the sense of awe and wonder I found in EQ. Every game had some of that, but increasingly less over time.
Mostly I ended up doing a bunch of tasks, expecting the fun would come later when I was higher level. And it mostly never did.
I am having some self doubt. I need a new and better fix.
But did I?
Or did I just jump on a progression treadmill and keep going because it was vaguely satisfying?
What I most wanted was the sense of awe and wonder I found in EQ. Every game had some of that, but increasingly less over time.
Mostly I ended up doing a bunch of tasks, expecting the fun would come later when I was higher level. And it mostly never did.
I am having some self doubt. I need a new and better fix.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Coupled with great flexibility to chat in team, or in the world, or totally mute your team mates if desired there's no reason to ever be not in a group.
I'm rolling nightly with a crew of 5 or 6 regulars and we chat it up with random joiners on a regular basis.
"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
I guess it's harder to explain than I thought, as much as I tried over the years.
Now don't get me wrong, the rampant PKing was very bad. But other than that...
UO felt like a living world.
It was very social, and very much a simulated world. It had a lot of options that pretty much meant it had "something for everyone."
It allowed for your imagination to see it as a world, not a game with features.
My suggestion in your quest for a new fix is to explore what made UO that way.
Understand this, too. UO ran on less processing power than an Apple Watch.
Imagine what can be done today.
Once upon a time....
First of all, computers had already become widespread in use a couple of years before UO released. There were a lot more rural areas that didn't have service, but they were out there in the big boom of computers.
Secondly, people are people, and you have about the same percentages of this type and that type in every "class" of people.
I've heard this take (your post) before, too. It's just part of the PR that's tried to manage what games people think are viable. PR from the "Clone" companies that's been dished out and unfortunately accepted as truth.
Once upon a time....
That is why people cry WoW ruined the genre, that they cater to dumb people etc. But in reality its not about others, its really about them.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Not everyone in UO was a RPer, most weren't. But it was a non-issue for most.
Once upon a time....
Do you think they are really different than D&Ders were?
I don't think so, and I stick to my point that people are people and not really any different than anyone else, in the overall scheme of things.
By the way, from my little corner of the D&D experience, I see much in common with today's gamers.
Reference the "Monte Hall" campaigns.
Once upon a time....
The players were a close knitted bunch and felt special in the niche genre. Then the genre became mainstream and older players blamed newer games while the real change was in the population. Not because it became worse, but because it became normal instead of niche and took that special feeling away.
Remsleep has a good point about more diversity in the playerbase too, it is a side effect of a genre blowing up.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
In UO, the Power Gaps were much lower.
So Guilds stayed together, because there was nothing, design wise, to cause players to leave. Players got to know each other because of this consistency.
Add to that an assortment of Player-Cooperative efforts, like fairs, because there were no auction houses, and in the earliest days there weren't even the Player Vendors at their houses. So players organized fairs where things could be sold (players also hawked their goods at the banks), offer gear repairs, and even set up trade deals.
-"Get me all the reagents you can get, I'll pay you 3 gold each, meet me every Friday night at Brit Bank."
--or--
-"Make me 3 full sets of plate armor of power rank, and meet me at Trinsic Bank West."
And loosely, trade associations (for lack of a better word) formed. Even among guilds, as they ran joint efforts.
Players often helped others out in dungeons, resing them and helping them get their gear and loot back (even the MOBs looted you). People tend to remember people who do that for you.
And players got to know each other, even if not in a guild together.
In the Clones of Level Grinds, it's a different story for most players, and this is why the "solo effect" has taken hold.
In those games, the Power Gaps divide players. Unless you are in a guild with the same players playing together all the time, where no one falls behind in the level groupings. Mostly players have no one to play with most of the time because they fell into a level range with no one else to play with, so they leave said guild.
No bonds are formed. No friendships made. No associations, no glue.
But then there's LFG, grouping on the fly. And again, unless you play equally with a group of the same players, which is uncommon (I offer the "solo effect" as evidence), the same thing happens. No bonds formed.
I noticed that most players that I ran a few quests with on one night, didn't even remember me the next. Why bother when you're going to be separated anyways.
So it is, most definitely, the games and not the players.
Once upon a time....
So I am not sure about the idea of enjoying the exclusivity; for the role players yes, but remember they were trying to get any roleplayers they knew online. For those who were just there for multiplayer, the more the merrier.
That became a side show once the solo gamers, then the console players then the smartphone "players" became the biggest player base. Now mobile players are the biggest player base in gaming, the baulk of whom had never bothered with a game before, well I am not sure gaming let alone MMO's can ever recover from that. But the ££'s and $$'s keep coming in so everything must be alright.
You must think I am a being silly trying so hard but a lot of games cannot grab me like Everquest and the last game that did that was FFXI.
What you're talking about is an effortless transition in playing where you are immediately in the world. I don't know whether it will ever happen again. Have we played too many games for it to happen?
Initially since it was essentially my second PC game so I was totally green to PC gaming I was completely overwhelmed and lost. I made several characters and I lost a few to the brutal world and even gave up and started in other starting areas after Toxxulia swallowed a few corpses to never give them up again. I drowned in that well in Qeynos trying to find my guild. I got completely lost in that tunnel in Surefall Glade, I was convinced I was never going to find my way out (human blind as a bat). The list goes on and compounded by the fact that I didn't know how to chat at all. Someone finally realised that and sent me a tell explaining how to step by step.
I chose really, really bad places and then I landed outside Felwithe. Then things changed and I began to enjoy myself. Probably because I was finally getting the hang of the world after a few lost characters and experiences.
I do agree grouping was fabulously fun once I started doing it and I become so invested in my character and doing my best. I fell in love with people and they became my focus and my whole gaming world in Everquest revolved around them. Grouping was truly what saved me. I might have left the game had I not discovered it but I won't know that for sure though.
All the other MMORPGs I played after Everquest that I played happily and had fun all involved a lot of grouping like City of Heroes, Anarchy Online and FFXI.
I didn't really answer the topic though. I guess it depends on the game.
However if you have some other aspect of the game that keeps you engaged it can mean that you would log on for that too. Like housing or collecting something, can be anything but something that is engaging enough to keep you coming back.
It's based on personal interests in the end. Some people hate housing and others play a game solely for that. So what overcomes the usual boredom that sets in inevitably can be cured.
I like a game that I can just "Go and Do" and not need to follow a direct story, or have to follow the predefined script to the end.
In fact, if the Tutorial can't be done in about an hour, I get really just so done with the game.
This is what made games like EQ, so great. You had freedom to progress as you want. You could get involved in the story, you could do the side quests, you could work favor, you could just camp a spot and grind levels, you could quest after gear, there was no one telling you how you had to play the game.
That same level of freedom was also in GW2, after the Opening Story, you were free to do whatever you wanted at that point. Want to just explore, craft, follow the story, run dungeons, fram gear, or any of the many various things in the game, and it was there for you.. play how you like.
I loved games like Trove and DDO for the same reasons. No one told me that I HAD to do specific things. or that I had to do any or all quests, I was free to do what I wanted to do, and not do what I didn't want to do.
Personally, I think when WoW became just a juggernaut, that was when people who only knew how to design Single Player games thought they could make an MMO, and that is why so many MMO's feel like a single player game and players get bored and burned out fast.
Where GW2, allowed a player to solo and play their own pace, the game itself, never felt like a single player game, other players being there around you, able to help you, and players could work together organically, really made it feel like a world.
Such a good game, too bad they buckled to the WoW trolls and pissed all over their own flagship till it stunk.
Boring means the game has to offer ideas that cover many topics like interesting,challenging,problem solving,tactics,collecting,scary,risky the list can go on and on.
So if a game offers lots of ideas that keep the player's satisfied then i guess it is not boring.IMO there is however a line to be crossed,if you are going to call your game a MMO and a RPG it had better stick to those two ideas and NOT cross the line into something else that is silly and NOT supporting the mmorpg theme.
Example ? and ! over npc heads is absolutely a dumbass idea.A Super Mario map is a dumb idea,jump puzzle maps do NOT fit either a MMO or RPG.Giving experience to your character because they went from point A to point B is again such a dumb idea i want to eliminate that developer from ever making games again.
I have yet in all these years seen one mmorpg that constantly makes sense,usually just random off topic ideas and always to attain two things,levels and loot.So then the argument begins,to some those dumb ideas might not be boring but to others the idea of ruining a mmorpg ,turning it into something else makes it boring.
I feel 95+% of mmorpg gamer's don't CARE,they are playing a mmorpg or if the game revolves around being an MMO or a RPG,all they care about is having something to do,some goals.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Don't do that and you should be fine.
For example, doing tedious things now in the hope of fun then sounds pretty boring to me, especially if then is going to be a long time from now. So, I don't do that.
That does come with the cost that I'll likely never experience the cutting edge of any game's content, but I'm not convinced that wouldn't be more like work than fun anyway.
There are numerous things to do in (some) games that I don't have a whole lot of interest in doing myself. But other players do. And it's just kind of cool to see them getting industrious about their chosen thing to do, as a group.
That's part of "Worldly."
It's bound to make a game more successful, which is a plus for all it's players who want their game to continue with revenues for maintaining it properly.
It also makes a game more interesting. I don't want a game with a bunch of look-alikes to me....talk about boredom! I can see that any time, and it's old hat by now.
Once upon a time....
I mostly solo'd until level 12 to 15. I was learning the game by trying every race and class combo. The ones I had the most fun with I kept playing. When I finally found a guild that suited me, my fun intensified, but that took a good year to find. I left many corpses all over Norrath, too
Even when I bought City of Heroes, I turned down so many group invites at first because I wanted to learn the game before involving other players. I wanted to be able to hold my own or pull my weight. Many players were quite forgiving, though
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR