What are MMO's missing? :: Ultimate MMORPG Gaming Community & Trading Zone

atarom
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 03:26 Post subject: What are MMO's missing?

Ok so I've played the majority of MMO's that were released in the last 5 years and I've been trying to figure out why none have come close to EQ to me. WoW Is having the success of EQ but that is largely due to the easy to grasp interface, the ease of leveling, solo experience, and questing. WoW is EQ for dummies. So there are a few things that I have been thinking about and discussing with my friend. There is no MMO available at this point that could hold my interest through the high end content. The only good parts are the parts that Dunn plays 17 times per game with a different class (any maybe some l33t hax) each time. level 1-30/45. My favorite levels in WoW were 10-25 and 45-50. The rest was unremarkable, and then after my umpteenth MC run, I cancelled my account. In EQ I played several characters to about 53-56 and got sick of it. After enough wipes on Aary, Ssra farms, etc, it lost it. But when I was Killing endless bloodgills with Brash and Citgo, I was having a blast. So my question is in the topic. What is missing? My other thought is this: When will games move into skill based leveling? Morrowind was an amazing game partly due to the leveling system. It made more sesne than any other system i have seen. For those that havent played the game, You had 5 primary and 5 secondary skills that defined your class (you could customize them and creat your own class, or pick templates, e.g. Paladin) and as you increased those skills, you gained level. For each 10 primary skill increases or 20 secondary increases (right?) you gained a level, at which point you would be able to increase your stats with multipliers added to the governing stats of your chosen skills. So why haven't MMO's adopted this. This would give players the ability to level without engaging in your typical "hit a go afk" mob grind. For instance you could attain level 40 by only increasing your bartering and brewing skills. However, when a level 5 rogue stuck a shiv in your back, you would still get pwned because you chose to focus on crafts rather than swordplay. You could, however, create drinks that were potent for one minute, or create magical weapons that had super stregth and lasted for 2 minutes. It would be neat to have dynamic characters whom you relied on to craft weapons on the spot (read: during dragon fight) where the players had to constantly run back and recieve new weapons from the magesmith who was standing safely out of the range of the fight. All I know is that the current state of MMO's still leaves MUCH to be desired, and I think someone should take things in a new direction. The differences between EQ and WoW are really not that large. Things must be approached from a different direction. I readily await a paradigm shift in games.

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Jakanden
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Joined: 11 Nov 2003
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Location: Fuck if I know - I am always lost

Posted: 09/12/05 - 03:59 Post subject:

For me, what is missing is simply the (For lack of a better term) "newness" of it. When I first played EQ, It was a revolutionary new game. Sure there were games like M59 and UO out prior to the release, but EQ was completely different. This was 3D, this was epic, this was a world you could get lost in. There were no spoiler sites or message boards to begin with. Everything was learned and discussed in game or with real life friends. No one knew about concepts like aggro, mezzing, pulling, etc.. Now a days, when a MMO is released, all of these concepts are pre-existing and known about. There will already be spoiler sites with a plethora of information as well as tons of forums that existed even before closed-beta. I don't think it can ever be that way again, at least not for me.

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atarom
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 04:08 Post subject:

Maybe this is what I'm getting at. There needs to be a system that is entirely new. A system that requires discovery. I still don't know why they havent made a morrowind MMO though.

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Baha
Sir Postalot

Joined: 12 Oct 2002
Posts: 1214

Posted: 09/12/05 - 04:14 Post subject:

You both touched on it a bit.. "lack of newness". for me, ultimately, lack of content. the content EQ has was great, and I am afraid that it set the bar so high that it wil be some time before we see something like it again, despite its problems. WoW was indeed EQ for dummies; too easy, lack of challenge, and another big thing - lack of content. when someone can attain the maximum level capacity in such a brief time - WITHOUT use of powerleveling, only to find that there is (and all things in life are relative) very little in the way of end game content.. its just a total disappointment. ultimately for me its summed up by content, content, content.. it has to be good, and there has to be sufficient amounts. lots of it. and thats not easy to do, I guess. with EQ they did a good job with introducing new content, but they did not keep the quality level up to par - how many of the expansions were mediocre, or added very little quality updates? now that the market has been well developed, mmorpg producers should be well aware of what is necessary in regards to content, and with a company like blizzard behind it, wow was all the more lackluster.

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Ishmael
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Joined: 03 Jun 2005
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 05:00 Post subject:

Jakanden wrote:

For me, what is missing is simply the (For lack of a better term) "newness" of it. When I first played EQ, It was a revolutionary new game. Sure there were games like M59 and UO out prior to the release, but EQ was completely different. This was 3D, this was epic, this was a world you could get lost in.

There were no spoiler sites or message boards to begin with. Everything was learned and discussed in game or with real life friends. No one knew about concepts like aggro, mezzing, pulling, etc..

Now a days, when a MMO is released, all of these concepts are pre-existing and known about. There will already be spoiler sites with a plethora of information as well as tons of forums that existed even before closed-beta.

I don't think it can ever be that way again, at least not for me.

Pretty much my feelings exactly. I've never played a game so "Epic" as the first time in EQ before...shit I spend alot of time just trying to recreate that feeling but find it impossible. Sad

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That Lumberg Guy
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 07:20 Post subject:

MMO's are missing titties and beer.

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atarom
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 07:44 Post subject:

not true.

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Cellen
Luke Warm

Joined: 14 Oct 2003
Posts: 234

Posted: 09/12/05 - 08:21 Post subject:

Current MMOs are missing: That sense of "new" Interpersonal/interguild drama / griefing Any method of progression that doesn't involve timesinks once you reach the endgame. It's been said often, but I think people tend to read it as tongue-in-cheek or a joke; the griefing and training and overall drama in EQ is what gave it its staying power. For every person driven away by it, it made ten others more interested, just like a soap opera or a car accident. Drama may be gone forever from MMOs just due to the change in attitudes of the playerbase. Griefing/training in WoW is very difficult by design because Blizzard didn't want to have their GM waste time dealing with those sorts of issues. In EQ most guilds have just gone soft. Hell, last night I just stood at the PoEb entrance shouting random crap at HD and some putz "reported" me to an officer in my guild, saying I was "starting shit." When I called him a "crybaby" in /shout, he told the officer that I'd called him a "fg." This kind of crybaby tattle-tale attitude is what's removed the drama, and most of the entertainment value, from the game. There's no sense of competition, so you may as well be playing a single-player game. Timesinks on the other hand suck, and WoW has more timesinks than I ever remember in EQ, so much so that they tout them in patch notes with bullet points like "New faction to raise - Magic Elves!!!! Raise this faction to get special armors, which are identical to some other faction armor in every way but appearance." Timesinks aren't fun, but there doesn't seem to be any way for these companies to keep people interested once they've reached the max level. Having to do the same instance more than 10 times to get the item you want is a timesink. Battlegrounds was even reduced to a faction timesink. Ignorance is bliss, but once people realize that what they're doing really isn't fun they tend to lose interest quickly. The sense of newness is something that will be difficult or probably impossible to recreate for most people, since if somebody came up with something "really new," the old school EQ people would probably not play it because it isn't enough like EQ was. Also as more and more exploits are found and the general populace learns of them I think it will just p*s people off. A duping bug in a game where the currency doesn't really have much value is one thing; the same bug in a game like WoW where you need a certain amount of in-game money just to play day to day makes that bug many times more important and far-reaching. And also kids today, weaned on MTV and other incredibly stupid TV shows, just don't have the attention spans for today's marketing departments to want to make a game like EQ.

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Mugaaz
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Joined: 16 Oct 2002
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 09:10 Post subject:

Atarom, you know poker is the only mmo worth gettign good at, why the hell aren't you playing lately?

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Docter
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Joined: 21 Oct 2002
Posts: 3420

Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:14 Post subject:

This may sound kind of silly, but in UO, I enjoyed owning a house and setting it up like I wanted to.

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Occulis
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Joined: 11 Oct 2002
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Location: Moral Relativity Central

Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:19 Post subject:

I'm trying to address a lot of the newness issues in Vitrius. Part of the way we're looking to overcome the stale, static lands is with our live resource and creature encampments. With no static spawn locations, and landscapes / camps changing over time, spoiler sites would have to be very, very up to date to spew any sort of relevant data. Sure, the orcs will typically be wherever gazelle are, but if some smartass druid decides to dry up a local oasis, the gazelle will migrate elsewhere and, consequently, so will the orcs. I don't know that these constant changes and circular systems would change everything about MMOs but I think it's a good feature and a nice start.

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Pags
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Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 3260

Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:27 Post subject:

Jakanden wrote:

For me, what is missing is simply the (For lack of a better term) "newness" of it. When I first played EQ, It was a revolutionary new game. Sure there were games like M59 and UO out prior to the release, but EQ was completely different. This was 3D, this was epic, this was a world you could get lost in.

There were no spoiler sites or message boards to begin with. Everything was learned and discussed in game or with real life friends. No one knew about concepts like aggro, mezzing, pulling, etc..

Now a days, when a MMO is released, all of these concepts are pre-existing and known about. There will already be spoiler sites with a plethora of information as well as tons of forums that existed even before closed-beta.

I don't think it can ever be that way again, at least not for me.

/agree

Also the sheer size of Norrath, and the corpse recovery system, made exploring hard/dangerous/exciting, whatever you want to call it. I must have deleted and started over my first 3 chars in EQ. I was either a wood elf or high elf char to start w/, would get to lvl 3 or 4, zone over to dwarf zone (can't remember name :/) and get lost and killed by a zombie or something. That was before I knew about /loc ;p But it was fun to explore. Now every game that comes out has detailed maps of every zone and what mobs spawn where and what they drop...

EQ was the first MMO I played, so everything was completely new to me, and I was only 13 I think when I first started playing. All added to the 'newness' of it I guess...

edit: As much as I hated retrieving my corpse/stressing over not ever getting it, it added to the adventure of exploring/raiding/etc. FG/Dragon raids (or any raid for that matter) wouldn't have the same meaning if once you all got wiped, you could just say "oh well better luck next time" and log. It forced you to figure out successful strategies, and people had to work together if they wanted to see their corpse again. But doing CR's till 5am is not FTW. /shrug

Last edited by Pags on 09/12/05 - 10:33; edited 2 times in total

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Frax
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:31 Post subject:

I don't know how successful they'll be, but Sigil is trying to pull this off with Vanguard by keeping much of the game info vague. We'll see next spring how they do...

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Tamrissa
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:32 Post subject:

fun.

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Pags
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 10:34 Post subject:

Could you be more specific Tam? :)

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Aluaeia
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 12:32 Post subject:

Needs VR or brainstem interface.

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Renork
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Posts: 6282

Posted: 09/12/05 - 12:58 Post subject:

Aluaeia wrote:

Needs VR or brainstem interface.

Neural Interfacing 4greatjustice, aparently there has been some break throughs in skull caps that can be used to receive signals but that doesnt do much in the way of true VR. We need full interfacing so the game can put signals into the brain not just receive. .hack or whatever it was IRL would be so pwn.

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Frehya
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 13:01 Post subject:

alot of the above, but also I think the fact that we started out with smaller groups of people to play with made it more personal. Once the games turn into 40-60+ people that are a raid machine, it gets less personal and more an obligation to be a cog in a machine that would happily replace you with someone else just as well or better geared. Remember the fun in some of the big dungeons in early EQ and Kunark? We all pretty much adventured with 6 people. What each person said and did had an impact on how the experience struck us. I found that more fun, even the mindless grinding for exp was fun if you had a congenial group to chat, die and save your selves with.

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Jakanden
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Posted: 09/12/05 - 13:06 Post subject:

Frehya wrote:

alot of the above, but also I think the fact that we started out with smaller groups of people to play with made it more personal. Once the games turn into 40-60+ people that are a raid machine, it gets less personal and more an obligation to be a cog in a machine that would happily replace you with someone else just as well or better geared.

Remember the fun in some of the big dungeons in early EQ and Kunark? We all pretty much adventured with 6 people. What each person said and did had an impact on how the experience struck us. I found that more fun, even the mindless grinding for exp was fun if you had a congenial group to chat, die and save your selves with.

Kedge Keep 4tw!

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Maldek
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Joined: 16 Oct 2002
Posts: 2089

Posted: 09/12/05 - 13:10 Post subject:

So much b****g Games are what you make of it. I can still have a blast with Excitebike if I'm in the mood. Relying solely on the developers to enchance your experience is destined for disappointment. Not saying that it plays no part, but a lot of these "woes" just sound like cranky bitter MMO whiners that you hear b*h everytime there's an expansion = "Omg this game is dead" To contradict myself however, I have to agree with what Jakanden said about the newness of certain concepts. Nowadays things like Main Tank, Main Healer, Aggro, Crowd Control, Assist, and such are built-in to the game. WoW and EQ2 and other lesser games would simply not exist if it wasn't for EQ1 bringing these concepts to life. It was a truly revolutionary experience being a part of the game when these things were being discovered. I remember hearing about ED sekrit leetness practicing the as-yet-unheard-of CH rotation on Stanos in HHpass and being like "omggg dam that is teh LEET" and later helping TA1.0 put it to use on our 1st vindi kill. That was back when no tank had a BoC or aggro weapon except maybe red epic or jman stick. Aggro was about yelling at wizards and putting a warrior against the mob for a solid 5% to lock-in the aggro. That being said, like alot of old-timers on this board, I eagerly await Vanguard. In the meantime, I've played EQ2 and enjoyed 95% of it. Sure it does get repetitive, but the mid-levels are alot of fun. I thought the combat system was alot better than EQ1 with mana-management for all classes and the hero wheel for increased teamwork benefits. Plus I had a great time with the quest system in this one, and still have alot of heritages to complete even at level 50. It's kinda like starting over in EQ1, except the graphics are superior and the exploration is more user-friendly. Some may call this hand-holding, but I don't see anyone but trust-fund kids, the unemployed, and jaded housewives having enough spare time to accomplish anything without it.

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Qaldyin
Sir Postalot

Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 1346

Posted: 09/12/05 - 14:31 Post subject:

I miss the contested content. I mean...the BC TA races every week kicked ass.

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Desaitar
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Joined: 30 Apr 2003
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Location: whore island

Posted: 09/12/05 - 14:45 Post subject:

Cellen wrote:

Current MMOs are missing:

That sense of "new"
Interpersonal/interguild drama / griefing
Any method of progression that doesn't involve timesinks once you reach the endgame.

It's been said often, but I think people tend to read it as tongue-in-cheek or a joke; the griefing and training and overall drama in EQ is what gave it its staying power. For every person driven away by it, it made ten others more interested, just like a soap opera or a car accident. Drama may be gone forever from MMOs just due to the change in attitudes of the playerbase. Griefing/training in WoW is very difficult by design because Blizzard didn't want to have their GM waste time dealing with those sorts of issues. In EQ most guilds have just gone soft. Hell, last night I just stood at the PoEb entrance shouting random crap at HD and some putz "reported" me to an officer in my guild, saying I was "starting shit." When I called him a "crybaby" in /shout, he told the officer that I'd called him a "f*g." This kind of crybaby tattle-tale attitude is what's removed the drama, and most of the entertainment value, from the game. There's no sense of competition, so you may as well be playing a single-player game.

Timesinks on the other hand suck, and WoW has more timesinks than I ever remember in EQ, so much so that they tout them in patch notes with bullet points like "New faction to raise - Magic Elves!!!! Raise this faction to get special armors, which are identical to some other faction armor in every way but appearance." Timesinks aren't fun, but there doesn't seem to be any way for these companies to keep people interested once they've reached the max level. Having to do the same instance more than 10 times to get the item you want is a timesink. Battlegrounds was even reduced to a faction timesink. Ignorance is bliss, but once people realize that what they're doing really isn't fun they tend to lose interest quickly.

The sense of newness is something that will be difficult or probably impossible to recreate for most people, since if somebody came up with something "really new," the old school EQ people would probably not play it because it isn't enough like EQ was.

Also as more and more exploits are found and the general populace learns of them I think it will just p**s people off. A duping bug in a game where the currency doesn't really have much value is one thing; the same bug in a game like WoW where you need a certain amount of in-game money just to play day to day makes that bug many times more important and far-reaching.

And also kids today, weaned on MTV and other incredibly stupid TV shows, just don't have the attention spans for today's marketing departments to want to make a game like EQ.

Couldn't agree more, perfect.

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Silvermouse
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Joined: 12 Oct 2002
Posts: 11015

Posted: 09/12/05 - 15:26 Post subject:

I think the reason I like levels 1-20 so much are because of the abundance of solo quests that give you something. You can quest for every piece of your noob armor and be relatively well off. Plus, I like questing! My level 65 druid? Yeah, go ahead and stick to gaining xp, bud, there's no solo quests left. I'd like to see more class-specific armor quests later in the game. Make them soloable or duoable. The endgame (xp wise) is boring.

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Samiam
Luke Warm

Joined: 18 Jan 2003
Posts: 319

Posted: 09/13/05 - 00:01 Post subject:

Frehya wrote:

Remember the fun in some of the big dungeons in early EQ and Kunark? We all pretty much adventured with 6 people. What each person said and did had an impact on how the experience struck us.

And it was bloody hard too. None of these "mobs at 10 paces" (you can see them, but they are somehow unable to see you) waiting for you to attack them, lather, rinse, repeat. You needed a well thought out plan and every person in the group had to execute their unique and specific role or the group was dead.

And getting dead meant something and was to be avoided.

The thing that set EQ (and earlier, UO) apart for me and that is missing from subsequent MMOs can be summed up in one word:

Immersion.

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IceIsFun
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Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 781
Location: Orlando, FL

Posted: 09/13/05 - 00:31 Post subject:

I think the problem with most recent MMORPGs is that they try to focus on a single element of the MMO experience and do it perfectly. Whether it's gameplay, quests, character development (virtual ck) or socialization, it's hard to beat a game that offers all of these in very acceptable quantities. In EQLive, you can do a ton of questing until you're bored of it, then work on your virtual e-peen while socializing with your uber guildmates or vice versa (lots of v-ck with some questing peppered in). Meanwhile, you're interacting with the game via an ugly (yet incredibly effective) first-person view of the virtual world - making the gameplay something that feels natural after awhile. Shifting to a hotkey page and using an ability is a natural reaction to danger in your virtual world. Sitting when the battle has abated is a habit that feels natural. These conditioned behaviors and ways of interacting with the virtual world are a by-product of the addictive tasks mentioned before. Other games make the mistake of focusing on killer content - but their gameplay doesn't feel like a natural extension of your senses and actions. Or the gameplay is spot-on, but you just don't give a fk because character development is easy, meaningless. People don't want to play for 2 months to get a 4 inch ck in a world of 4 inch c***s. They will pursue the dream if the 40 mile long, 8 mile wide behemoth is attainable that makes Ron Jeremy's look like a nub - but it can't be easy (or at least, fast). There must be some relationship between time/dedication/skill (ok, no) and character development. Quests don't necessarily have to be mentally stimulating. They simply need to have the cheese at the end of your virtual rat's maze. If that reward is character development, then it's great for the e-peen crowd. If the reward is some fantastic lore or a well-scripted ending, then it's entertainment: an interactive movie. Socialization and gameplay are hard to separate. If the communication medium in your interface isn't natural for the masses (think AIM or IRC-style), then communication breaks down and your game loses its social appeal. If communication is efficient and easy, people will talk. They will coordinate and cooperate on their quests and virtual penis-pumps, which will have a synergistic effect with character development. Socialization and the value of character development are directly proportional - if people can't compare, compete or cooperate a specific addition to their character, then the development was pointless.

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atarom
Guest

Posted: 09/13/05 - 19:02 Post subject:

Mugaaz wrote:

Atarom, you know poker is the only mmo worth gettign good at, why the hell aren't you playing lately?

i been playen empire for rakeback. bodog bonus takes too long to f*****g clear. annoying as shit.

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Obmar
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Joined: 22 Oct 2002
Posts: 1934

Posted: 09/13/05 - 19:44 Post subject:

1) Death should hurt. 2) You should lose shit when you die (exp items corpse whatever) . Death should be scary and you should be f***g p**d when you die. Your sphincter should tighten up the first time you enter a new dungeon for fear of (2). You should have to count on the group - forcing a higher level of skill or (2). - this leads to reputations mattering. why the hell do you think people get all worked up when you talk about who the uberest puller was in EQ (me by the way). Cause it mattered - there was skill involved, and pride in that skill.

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