edit: Currently my browser is showing normal comment area. I would try to edit in the gaps, but tbh right now im not in the mood for it. The OP sounds like a question and if anybody is actually interested in said question they won't mind reading through my response.(although to save anybody a bunch of reading tl;dr if there is ANY good game now, i won't really care about old games beyond visiting every now and then for old time's sake, which is covered in that part you already read i think)
Ah I see. And agree with your sentiment.
I am a scizo misanthrope. So one day I may go BANZAI on your post. Have not yet though. Maybe there is hope? Nah there is really none for me or the human race.
When WOW launched in 2004, it was meant to be in the vein of EQ. Heck, Blizzard hired numerous raiding guild leaders to design content. WOW was not meant to be a casual game to start.
However, WOW did something that few MMOs had done or thought about - Blizzard took out a lot of time sinks. They lessened the number of people needed for raids, got rid of XP penalties at death, hearth stones to get people quicker, etc...... This not only appealed to new players but it also appealed to many of us that had played DAOC, EQ, etc... One of the worst parts of DAOC was having to run back to Camelot or take horse after horse to get where you wanted to go. XP penalties where you actually lost access to skills? Corpse runs that took hours? Gone.
Blizzard revolutionized the genre. I am not going to argue the impact or if it was dumbing-down or whatever but the massive appeal was there.
What I find interesting is that, to me, I do not have the same nostalgia with WOW as I do with EQ or DAOC. No game since those games gives me the same since of "wanting to go home again". And I think this has to do more with community but thats another post.
It all appealed to me as well. Quest markers? Sweet! I don't need even try to find what I'm looking for! I can fight by myself even easier! leveling is so quick!
It wore off really fast though. 6 months. The fact that I no longer had to think to play the game made it excruciatingly boring.
You might have been editing/writing your comment in HTML mode (comment boxes have two modes). In HTML mode you have to insert the line break explicitly as <br>. If you are on PC there is also a preview button iirc.
If you click on the link, that i posted, it will take you to a place, that explains, that i have a glitched comment area and that post also contains a link with a picture of what my comment area looks like when it's glitched.
Where's this thread been hiding, I have only just seen it!
I have been meaning to take a look at CoH again, this has put it on my radar, will take a peek. I know what you mean about community. When I was in BDO there were a few players who whenever a question was asked in server chat would say "We don't ask questions on "severname"". I was incensed and others too said that was nonsense, but they never stopped.
That sort of thing turns of new players, but then I ask myself does it? Because if the baulk of players in a MMO are butterflies are they bothering to ask anything they can't find out on Discord? Would they be bothered to ask about anything other than what they are immediately doing?
I can remember on Marvel Heroes that you could sit in Avengers HQ and just chat about comics, there was always somebody in the know about anything you cared to ask, comics, films, cartoons did not matter. I was a collector up to my early twenties and I would have team mates telling my to stop chatting and hurry up because we were ready to play the game.
Where's this thread been hiding, I have only just seen it!
I have been meaning to take a look at CoH again, this has put it on my radar, will take a peek. I know what you mean about community. When I was in BDO there were a few players who whenever a question was asked in server chat would say "We don't ask questions on "severname"". I was incensed and others too said that was nonsense, but they never stopped.
That sort of thing turns of new players, but then I ask myself does it? Because if the baulk of players in a MMO are butterflies are they bothering to ask anything they can't find out on Discord? Would they be bothered to ask about anything other than what they are immediately doing?
I can remember on Marvel Heroes that you could sit in Avengers HQ and just chat about comics, there was always somebody in the know about anything you cared to ask, comics, films, cartoons did not matter. I was a collector up to my early twenties and I would have team mates telling my to stop chatting and hurry up because we were ready to play the game.
You should also look at the Rebirth and Thunderspy server options too. They have a lot of changes. I think Thunderspy has fixed Mercs the red headed stepchild in the Mastermind archetype.
Rebirth has a lot of new costumes and have introduced new power sets.
You have to take into account that Homecoming servers have made some changes like stuff you had to earn before like the cape option used to be through a mission. While you can still do the mission the cape itself is actually available at character creation. They have also some free travel options that do not exist in Rebirth which opted for a more at launch version of City of Heroes.
Unfortunately these two servers have a very small population in comparison to Homecoming. If you do decide to play and chose Homecoming chose Everlasting on Homecoming for roleplay and Excelsior for the most populous experience.
I remember my older brother talking to me one time when I was younger (probably around the time I started WoW at Wrath), he used to love mmorpgs because he felt a connection with the devs that made it (kind of like devs being the 'dungeon masters' and the players being the 'pawns' getting through the traps etc). Many games up to that power were kind of like bigger versions of survival games when you think about it. Needing to find anything that you can do for yourself to get by when you first start out, maybe helping some people you pass by if your class can offer assistance, needing a bigger group/community to tackle things that were designed only for them and there not being any other way to move forward outside of said community (no catch up mechanics, etc). All of those factors combined kind of made it sound like people had second lives as opposed to playing a game for a few hours each week.
When WOW launched in 2004, it was meant to be in the vein of EQ. Heck, Blizzard hired numerous raiding guild leaders to design content. WOW was not meant to be a casual game to start.
However, WOW did something that few MMOs had done or thought about - Blizzard took out a lot of time sinks. They lessened the number of people needed for raids, got rid of XP penalties at death, hearth stones to get people quicker, etc...... This not only appealed to new players but it also appealed to many of us that had played DAOC, EQ, etc... One of the worst parts of DAOC was having to run back to Camelot or take horse after horse to get where you wanted to go. XP penalties where you actually lost access to skills? Corpse runs that took hours? Gone.
Blizzard revolutionized the genre. I am not going to argue the impact or if it was dumbing-down or whatever but the massive appeal was there.
What I find interesting is that, to me, I do not have the same nostalgia with WOW as I do with EQ or DAOC. No game since those games gives me the same since of "wanting to go home again". And I think this has to do more with community but thats another post.
It all appealed to me as well. Quest markers? Sweet! I don't need even try to find what I'm looking for! I can fight by myself even easier! leveling is so quick!
It wore off really fast though. 6 months. The fact that I no longer had to think to play the game made it excruciatingly boring.
I understand this sentiment well. It was great at first to progress by doing more than just killing the same respawns over and over.... Until I realized I was still killing respawns over and over, it was just punctuated by long runs to complete tasks designed for me to do by myself.
Some quests benefitted from group tagging to kill mobs, but the drop quests gave little benefit to cooperation unless you had a group that was monopolizing the spawns.
But the way the game focused on quests as the best general way to level really cut into the social aspect, too. Yes, grinding was slightly faster.. *If* you had the gold to keep up with your equipment. World drops wouldn't keep you up to date.
The quests did a lot of cordoning off of players at similar levels.
"No, I'm not on that quest step, sorry."
"Shit, this quest isn't shareable, so you get absolutely nothing if you help me complete it."
"Oh, you guys are doing a speed run for the set Tier quest? Nah I already did that one, thanks though."
In the end, the way they were implemented in WoWs earlier days kept players separate as much as together.
When I play old games, I can clearly see, at all levels of the game, that the developer's only intent was making a game based on concept and vision.
When I play a new game (in the mmo genre specifically), I see a game chopped up into pre-planned monetized bits, paint by number system and mechanic development, little to no attempt at innovation, and a development schedule targeted not for the game's health but rather for product release alignment based on corporate quarterly return scheduling.
Games used to be an artform. They are now a vehicle coming off of an assembly line with no lemon policy, built for the masses. That said, indie game development based on different principles still exists. It's just an endangered species currently.
For me, the appeal of older games is that they are complete. There isn't the angst that it may change your game negatively. Older games don't require patience and faith in some developers to actually finish the game. There generally isn't a cult of fanbois preaching the virtues of a game that may never see completion. An old game is unlikely to be different tomorrow that it was today. That gives me the feelings of stability and maturity.
Old games are what they are. They may not be perfect, but there's no incessant pressure to fund the game anymore.
That alone is worth the price of admission to me.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
When WOW launched in 2004, it was meant to be in the vein of EQ. Heck, Blizzard hired numerous raiding guild leaders to design content. WOW was not meant to be a casual game to start.
However, WOW did something that few MMOs had done or thought about - Blizzard took out a lot of time sinks. They lessened the number of people needed for raids, got rid of XP penalties at death, hearth stones to get people quicker, etc...... This not only appealed to new players but it also appealed to many of us that had played DAOC, EQ, etc... One of the worst parts of DAOC was having to run back to Camelot or take horse after horse to get where you wanted to go. XP penalties where you actually lost access to skills? Corpse runs that took hours? Gone.
Blizzard revolutionized the genre. I am not going to argue the impact or if it was dumbing-down or whatever but the massive appeal was there.
What I find interesting is that, to me, I do not have the same nostalgia with WOW as I do with EQ or DAOC. No game since those games gives me the same since of "wanting to go home again". And I think this has to do more with community but thats another post.
It all appealed to me as well. Quest markers? Sweet! I don't need even try to find what I'm looking for! I can fight by myself even easier! leveling is so quick!
It wore off really fast though. 6 months. The fact that I no longer had to think to play the game made it excruciatingly boring.
I understand this sentiment well. It was great at first to progress by doing more than just killing the same respawns over and over.... Until I realized I was still killing respawns over and over, it was just punctuated by long runs to complete tasks designed for me to do by myself.
Some quests benefitted from group tagging to kill mobs, but the drop quests gave little benefit to cooperation unless you had a group that was monopolizing the spawns.
But the way the game focused on quests as the best general way to level really cut into the social aspect, too. Yes, grinding was slightly faster.. *If* you had the gold to keep up with your equipment. World drops wouldn't keep you up to date.
The quests did a lot of cordoning off of players at similar levels.
"No, I'm not on that quest step, sorry."
"Shit, this quest isn't shareable, so you get absolutely nothing if you help me complete it."
"Oh, you guys are doing a speed run for the set Tier quest? Nah I already did that one, thanks though."
In the end, the way they were implemented in WoWs earlier days kept players separate as much as together.
I can the draw, as I also enjoyed WoW's quest markers once I gave it a try. However, I'm an "explorer" at heart. Sometimes, in EQ I tired of "Hail!"-ing every NPC in the game, but sometimes I "discovered" quests I had no clue about, like the tax guy in Freeport that wanted the tax collected from a list of people.
Then you had the "sewer cleaner" in Qeynos(?) that eventually sent you into the sewers where you met Cubert, the gelatinous cube.
It was fun (usually) for me discovering quests like these, but it could quickly become tiresome
- 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
Comments
Have not yet though. Maybe there is hope?
Nah there is really none for me or the human race.
It wore off really fast though. 6 months. The fact that I no longer had to think to play the game made it excruciatingly boring.
Death by comma
I have been meaning to take a look at CoH again, this has put it on my radar, will take a peek. I know what you mean about community. When I was in BDO there were a few players who whenever a question was asked in server chat would say "We don't ask questions on "severname"". I was incensed and others too said that was nonsense, but they never stopped.
That sort of thing turns of new players, but then I ask myself does it? Because if the baulk of players in a MMO are butterflies are they bothering to ask anything they can't find out on Discord? Would they be bothered to ask about anything other than what they are immediately doing?
I can remember on Marvel Heroes that you could sit in Avengers HQ and just chat about comics, there was always somebody in the know about anything you cared to ask, comics, films, cartoons did not matter. I was a collector up to my early twenties and I would have team mates telling my to stop chatting and hurry up because we were ready to play the game.
Rebirth has a lot of new costumes and have introduced new power sets.
https://forum.cityofheroesrebirth.com/index.php/topic,269.0.html
You have to take into account that Homecoming servers have made some changes like stuff you had to earn before like the cape option used to be through a mission. While you can still do the mission the cape itself is actually available at character creation. They have also some free travel options that do not exist in Rebirth which opted for a more at launch version of City of Heroes.
Unfortunately these two servers have a very small population in comparison to Homecoming. If you do decide to play and chose Homecoming chose Everlasting on Homecoming for roleplay and Excelsior for the most populous experience.
Some quests benefitted from group tagging to kill mobs, but the drop quests gave little benefit to cooperation unless you had a group that was monopolizing the spawns.
But the way the game focused on quests as the best general way to level really cut into the social aspect, too. Yes, grinding was slightly faster.. *If* you had the gold to keep up with your equipment. World drops wouldn't keep you up to date.
The quests did a lot of cordoning off of players at similar levels.
"No, I'm not on that quest step, sorry."
"Shit, this quest isn't shareable, so you get absolutely nothing if you help me complete it."
"Oh, you guys are doing a speed run for the set Tier quest? Nah I already did that one, thanks though."
In the end, the way they were implemented in WoWs earlier days kept players separate as much as together.
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
When I play a new game (in the mmo genre specifically), I see a game chopped up into pre-planned monetized bits, paint by number system and mechanic development, little to no attempt at innovation, and a development schedule targeted not for the game's health but rather for product release alignment based on corporate quarterly return scheduling.
Games used to be an artform. They are now a vehicle coming off of an assembly line with no lemon policy, built for the masses. That said, indie game development based on different principles still exists. It's just an endangered species currently.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
- 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