[General Discussion] MMO Design

MMOs have been ruined since World of Warcraft. WoW made everything easy, because the majority of gamers are the kind who want their hand to be held.

In EverQuest, pre-WoW, we had something called a corpse run. If you died, you dropped every item you owned on a corpse, and you had to retrieve that corpse by hook or by crook. This would often mean running half way across the world map, running like the clappers through dangerous territory with not a single item of cloth or steel between you and your next negative exp hit, should you stray too close to that wandering orc and be killed once more. What if you dropped your corpse in the depths of a dungeon? Good luck getting that out. You'd either have your guild mates help out, or you'd have to wait until another party cleared the path for you. Players could take days trying to retrieve a corpse.

See, it meant there was this thing called risk. Dying could mean everything, and playing the game could be tense. Y'know, exciting. If you had to cross some dangerous territory to get to some destination or another, it was an edge of the seat experience.

Back then there was no easy way of skipping out huge swathes of land, because there wasn't the huge prevalence of ports that there are for todays lazy gamer. Travel took time, and reaching a new land truly meant something, because you could feel the distance travelled, through the time it took and the danger evaded. MMO game worlds gave a true impression of variety and vastness.

Can you imagine this in todays MMO? The typical MMO players face would crumple at the merest hint of such a punishing experience. "If I'm not careful and I die I might lose everything?! You're telling me there's some kind of PENALTY for death?! or "I have to walk all that way on foot?! And then I have to - let me see if I've got this straight - I have to WAIT for a boat to arrive, and then sit on it and WAIT for it to make its crossing?! Like how boat travel actually is!? Can't I just teleport there?".

When WoW came out it molly coddled the gamer. Since the majority of gamers are of the casual breed (casual not in terms of hours played, casual in the sense of fearing hardship; challenge), everyone of course flocked to WoW, and it gained the huge market share it has today. And the only way to eat into this pie is for other MMOs to play copycat and also pander to the casual gamer and make their games easy.

Gamers like me are a niche market. Darkfall shows promise in showing MMOs can target a niche market and be profitable, but it's still early days for that game yet. For the time being I consider the MMORPG, in the sense I once knew it, to be utterly dead.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Devo

Not to mention real PVP is pretty much dead since there are so many hilarious advantages (gear wise, level wise). I went into WoW just wanting huge epic battles, instead they instituted arena bullshit. If I wanted to play a small competitive twitch game bullshit I'd load up an FPS that does it loads better. It's all about grinding battlegrounds for gear (not actually playing them), losing quickly if that means honor/marks faster and playing in a gametype that only heightens the imbalances between classes. Their most recent 'open pvp area' is only open every couple of hours and even with the restrictions on numbers it still lags like a bitch.

Yeah arena type pvp is a massive example of risk removal. In EQ pvp there was no such thing as a safe zone. Players could be stalked in their own home city by a lone assassin who was brave enough. You had to be constantly alert and always watching over your shoulder. Just how it should be.

EQ pvp was balanced too. As long as your resists reached a certain minimum, you stood a fighting chance against people who could be 5-10 levels higher than you with better equipment, provided you edged them in pure skill.

It's funny because Verant Interactive didn't give a fuck about pvp, so the fact that the games pve mechanics translated so well to pvp with very little tweaking was something of a coincidence.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Well I didn't quite mean every item you owned. That's where the bank system came in. Some players were even prudent enough to store a whole backup equipment set in there to aid in the recovery of a corpse.

And I exaggerated the prominence of the assassin. There weren't enough player killers with the audacity and guile to infiltrate an enemy town and attack from within to make it a common occurrence. But it could happen. They weren't hard coded out of existence. It made for a more dynamic and player driven game.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Whilst we're cataloging the ways WoW ruined mmorpgs, how about outlawing cross faction communication? Lets make a game in a genre where the whole point is thousands of players being in the same universe, having a shared experience as part of a global community. Now lets make it so half the players can't talk to the other half of the players.

Communication is for fostering rivalries as well as alliances. The very fact that an opposing player can curse me after I've killed him is what seperates him from being another characterless npc drone. It's the heart and soul of pvp.

But nah, let's throw all that out cause someone might be called a naughty word once and get offended.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Agt Cody Banks

MMO shouldnt let players go through other players. I mean if i can't taunt a player of my healer, at least i could block his way. And Friendly fire would be awesome in World of Warcraft. If someone gets in the line of sight, they should be able to be hit by that spell.

Yeah, this is really basic stuff. EQ had collision detection. Pretty sure Darkfall has friendly fire, since it uses FPS style mechanics for its combat system.

I was speaking idiomatically.