2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era

I'd pay $50 a month for some modern graphics/ui, more quests and some quality of life changes in EQ with expansions up to SoL and then some new content that isn't a former expansion.

EQ still doesn't bore me for whatever reason and I enjoyed playing quite a few progression servers, but I'm done with the potato look and feel of the game.

Objectively the popular games like FFXIV, GW2, BDO, WoW, ESO, Lotro aren't terrible but they all can't keep me entertained beyond a week or two any time I try to pick them back up and I think it's mostly due to the lack of difficulty, barring extreme cutting edge content, and the complete lack of community with mega servers, instant que groups and cheap name/server changes etc.

All the survival / player driven MMO style games get boring as hell once everyone is at the top and 1-2 zerg guilds control everything so there has to be some additional PVE content.

IMO.. take away the hand-holding nature of modern MMOs. People consume content ridiculously fast today in no small part to the in-game roadmap. Require players to actually figure shit out for themselves again. The care bear crowd won't like it, and it'll sadly be a niche MMO as a result, but that's how you do it IMO.

Ravishing said:

Grinding/Camping needs to be limited. I want to be able to do Dungeon crawls, missions, raids, etc etc, basically on-demand. If the game can't offer that, it's not the MMO for me.

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This is where you and I differ. I don't like to crawl through dungeons. I prefer to find a spot and camp it with a group.

The dungeon crawl to me always felt like a game-on-rails where you start at point A and go to point B. Lost Dungeons of Norrath added in some point C and D paths, but ultimately, it was still go from the first point to the last point, rinse and repeat.

To me, the dungeon crawl aspect of MMORPGs changed the genre from being living breathing worlds in to just a game. I don't want a game. I want an alternate world to live in to escape the real world every once in a while.

But, that being said, I can see where neither of us are wrong. We simply have different tastes, and hopefully the industry can accommodate us both with different games rather than trying to be everything for everybody (the way designers have been going ever since World of Warcraft was released).

Fond memories playing with RL friends and pulling mobs to camp in Valkurm Dunes (ffxi) back in the day. Mind you, was my first MMO so probably would have enjoyed just eating sand!

I liked dungeons crawls. But no way can a game provide enough content in enough time to support that.

Seems like I read a long time ago they first wanted EQ to be start here, go here, get exp along the way and then on to the next dungeon. That didn't even make it out of alpha probably because people ate content too quick.

mkopec said:

I think camping is one of the only ways other than instancing the shit out of your game(Or just themeparking the shit out of it with boar ass quests) to have dungeons that fully support more than one group and be social. Now that is to say if this is the case, why not support this "camping" a bit better and design around this feature. How bout having have camps be more dynamic. For instance have mini events spwawn, maybe like a mini horde mode and then a boss spawns at the end within your "camp" or some shit like that. Im not a game designer so I dont know, but Im sure they could make the entire "camping" thing way different than just sitting there waiting for spawns. Im picturing sort of a mini dungeon within a dungeon type experience. shit the whole breaking into a camp was an experience of its own and felt really rewarding. Like hell yeah, were in here now boys, start pulling...

I dont like dungeon crawls for the specific reson stated above, it feels like its on rails, plus, yeah, you essentially have to instance. Plus people bitch that dungeons are too long and you end up cutting them up to 30 min chunks, like Wow did Which I hate. THat is nto to say the game should nto have something like this as well, right? How bout both?

I want those huge sprawling EQ dungeons back, like Sebilis, Veks..etc... But with more modern features. Like the above mentioned dynamic shit happening that isnt all static spawns 24/7 on a timer.

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Ravishing said:

Camps that were basically Mobs coming to you would be great lol. Like in Fellowship of the Ring when they are trapped and goblins / cave troll are all coming at them.
However, I think it will essentially be like an EQ "ring event", and not many people enjoyed those I think. People like to dictate the pace of their camps.

Huge sprawling non-instanced dungeons would be great to see again.

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What you both talk about is 100% able to be done with EverQuest today with a designer that is willing to put the time and effort in to making it happen.

This is one of the things I have been tinkering with on my private EQemu server actually.

Every time a mob spawns or dies, you can fire off code in the scripting engine in EQemu. There's any number of things you can do when that happens.

What I am tinkering with is a design where it keeps track of the type of mob killed, where it was killed (with in a range of a location... aka a "camp") and how many have been killed in the past x number of minutes. Based on those variables, any number of things can be triggered. Maybe a set of guards are spawned that patrol from a guard area out to the area where there have been a lot of their kind go missing. If those guards are killed, maybe an alarm is sounded across the zone, and elite guards are spawned that patrol the area. This can all build up to a climax event of sorts, or it can die down based on less killings happening in that area for a set period of time.

That's just one scenario for ramping up a "camp" area based on usage in that area. More groups killing there, more mobs show up. They stay there long enough, and harder mobs show up. Stay even longer at same killing pace, and boss mobs show up... maybe raid level.

Another design I have thought about is specialized to named NPCs like a cook. If Commander Uber Orc shows up and paths to the dining area of the dungeon, theres a chance an orc grunt spawns in the dining area, paths over to the commander, some npc dialog ensues, the orc grunt paths off to the kithen area. When the grunt orc gets to the kitchen area, it spawns Cook JoeBob Orc who paths around the kitchen before pathing to the dining area. etc...

Any part of this even can splinter or even end abruptly based on the actions of the players in the area. If they kill the commander before he talks to the grunt, the cook will not spawn for that event (he might spawn for some other event or just randomly as a named spawn later on). If they kill the cook before he paths to the dining area, they will be able to fight him with out fighting the commander and him at the same time. If the cook dies, it can trigger an event for the commander to get upset with waiting so long, and he paths to the kitchen to find out what is taking so long. When he gets to the kitchen area, he sounds an alarm for intruders because the cook has been killed.

The point is, a camp based design can be dynamic. It is all up to the designer as to how dynamic it is made.

Plenty of mmos being made in Asia. Most of which are grind til you're blind games with P2W shops. It's the west that has given up on mmos.

It is pretty clear to me why the majority of the games these days are terrible, while 2 decades ago you could reliably count on one or two classics a year and studios that never laid an egg.

It is kind of cliche at this point, but in the 90's and early 2000's you had games being made by gamers. Today, you have games being made by corporations. Making games went from being a passion, to being a job.

Blizzard was the most reliable hit maker because they apologetically said, "We don't know how long this is going to take us to finish our game, but when we do we promise it is going to be a classic. So, wait. Be patient and we will deliver you something that you will be playing for the next decade." That shit doesn't fly today. The successful teams of people became companies. These companies became corporations. And these corporations started making so much money that they got addicted to it. Now they have to show revenue yearly and even quarterly or everyone loses their jobs.

I feel awful for people trying to make it in this industry today. They aren't failing just because they are a bunch of SJW cucks like some of you seem to believe. They are failing because the corporations are forcing unrealistic timelines on the teams trying to make games. The good leadership and talent has been pushed to the sidelines if they aren't will to play by the corporate rules. And they are told they they WILL have marketplace and micro-transactions baked deep into their game systems. Games as a live service, season passes, cosmetics, and subscription based content are all a guise for Keno machines that just keep asking, asking, and asking without delivering anything satisfying.

How do you even have large, sprawling, non-instanced dungeons in a game with over a million players? Even if you had 20-30 of them, there still would not be enough content to go around.

Elidroth said:

IMO.. take away the hand-holding nature of modern MMOs. People consume content ridiculously fast today in no small part to the in-game roadmap. Require players to actually figure shit out for themselves again. The care bear crowd won't like it, and it'll sadly be a niche MMO as a result, but that's how you do it IMO.

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That wouldn't change much. FFXIV's recent Easter quest was pretty much a puzzle that players had to figure out with virtually no hints in the game. I'm reasonably certain 90% of players just googled the solution and finished it that way. All removing ingame roadmaps does is make players tab-out and look for solutions online or encourage someone to make UI add-ons that do it. And I mean hell, even WITH ingame handholding, people still shout out to the zone asking for help in locating whatever.

mkopec said:

There was no way to crawl through EQ dungeons because of the level disparity of the mobs. Often times you would have 20 or so level difference between the "upper" mobs vs the the ones deep down.

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Some of them, but mostly it wasn't feasible because a) popular dungeons were camped 24/7 so there was nothing to crawl because almost all the mobs were accounted for via camps and pulls to those camps b) those dungeons you could crawl had shit loot and usually piss poor RvR tuning...which is why you could crawl them, because no one gave a fuck about the dungeon and thus it was a ghost town.

mkopec said:

Then you spawn instances of those, like EQ does now, and AO did back in the day with their social dungeons. I liked the way AO did it. Say a dungeon reached a certain player threshold, a new one would spawn.

But no, I dont think this was ever a problem in EQ. For one EQ never had millions of players, and even then only about 5K or so on any given server, probably closer to 2.5K prime time. Only time I really felt this was when EQ first launched and you had 25-30 people in blackburrow. But then players dispersed and most camped the over world zones anyway because they were easier and if they died it meant easier corpse retrieval. Most dungeons in EQ were dead and empty back in the day, save a few popular ones like Velks, Seb...

Also remember that dungeons were only a single piece of the puzzle, there was a whole world out there to farm and explore too.

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Even back in EQ, the dungeons with good mob difficulty and good loot were pretty much empty of mobs because every square inch was camped. SolB, LGuk, Seb, Cazic Thule Temple or whatever the fuck it was called that used to drop the ruby armor, Karnors Castle (cept the deep part), etc to name a few.

However, like electricity, people always, always, ALWAYS go for the path of least resistance. That resistance can be something as simple as xp per hour vs. how difficult the mobs are. You can make an entire world, but if only 5 spots are "good" in the eyes of the playerbase, then it doesn't matter if there are 60 other spots, everyone is going to squish into the 5.