Who said convenient? It's all about development time and cost. Years since EQ, tech have nothing to do with that.
EQ Never
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I agree, and I think that it is more than that.
The key to the next generation of fun and resilient MMOs is likely to involve compressing all players down to play together in similar zones while still allowing individual player progression. The next big hit is likely to be those two with the ability to play socially in small doses. My thinking is that this is what people get out of MOBA games, sandbox building in Minecraft, COD matches online, so this is how people want to play online now. If this proves true, then it isn't really about the tech and more the evolution of the game mechanics. EQNext is experimenting with something that may end up being "in the right direction".
Look at it this way, name the games out there where you and some friends can get together and play, at any point, for a few hours and have a good time together. The majority of these games are FPS, RTS, MOBAs etc. MMORPGs are tough for casual friends to play unless you either play at the same exact time always and never progress farther that the other. Or you play long enough that you are both at max level and around the same item progression point.
My personal example for this is my brother in law and I. We both have kids, our gaming is limited to a few hours a night a few days a week. Sometimes I get on an hour before him or vice versa. An MMORPG isn't something we can do together. At any point where we play by ourselves, we move beyond that other person. The challenge for future MMORPGs, in my opinion, is getting rid of linear progression paths and create more open ways for players to progress in a more organic fashion. GW2 did a pretty good job with this to start.
This relates to levels. You have to get rid of them to break this barrier. Levels are a way to gate content. These gates are so small and short that you quickly segment off players. ESO was the worst offender of this with all their phasing. This is why MMORPGs have gone far far into the solo leveling gameplay for the focus of the majority of the content.
My personal example for this is my brother in law and I. We both have kids, our gaming is limited to a few hours a night a few days a week. Sometimes I get on an hour before him or vice versa. An MMORPG isn't something we can do together. At any point where we play by ourselves, we move beyond that other person. The challenge for future MMORPGs, in my opinion, is getting rid of linear progression paths and create more open ways for players to progress in a more organic fashion. GW2 did a pretty good job with this to start.
This relates to levels. You have to get rid of them to break this barrier. Levels are a way to gate content. These gates are so small and short that you quickly segment off players. ESO was the worst offender of this with all their phasing. This is why MMORPGs have gone far far into the solo leveling gameplay for the focus of the majority of the content.
In regards to getting rid of levels to negate gaps between characters, I feel there should always be gaps (in some form) between characters. The desire to be the like the guy ahead of you in gear or progression creates just that.... Desire to progress your character. I don't think that somebody who is just starting should be able to relate to somebody who has seen some shit....... High level characters telling stories at the local inn to fresh players about a dragon they killed today..... that would get me pumped if I was a new player. I remember when I just started leveling a Iksar SK and sitting there was a wood elf bard looking fresh as all hell playing a flute... I watched him run around at light speed and thought what a total bad ass. Looking back I now realize I had a desire to be a wood elf... male..... bard............. I'm happily married BTW.
Well, Guess i'm out.
In seriousness I think it will be a mix of both. Having a mix of class abilities to do a focused job instead of being all over the place will be a true indicator of good versus bad players.
But everyone will have to farm for their classes and then once they get the classes they will have to farm to rank the classes up THEN they have to farm for the correct set of gear they will need for their classes.
MMO's where never a skill based genre no matter how many times someone tells you that standing out of fire or grinding to 60 is skillful, it's not.
MMO at their core are time based, Games like EQ and those Asian grinders are at one end of the time spectrum and recent mmo disasters like swtor and eso are on the other end.
Games like EQ rewarded time with gear and progression but actively punished lack of time by blocking off major parts of the game to players who did not devote time to it. Games like Swtor reduced the time requirements so much that the players instead of being blocked off from content, consumed it too fast and left.
I remember seeing decked out characters in EQ when I was younger and using that as a motivation to put in more time to the game. Now, everyone looks the same 3 months into the expansion and the motivation to put in time is nill.
It's a hard thing to balance, I don't know if it actually can be balanced.
Daidraco
Avatar of War Slayer
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To be fair, he did see a Bard in EverQuest playing a flute and thought to himself that the Bard was a Bad Ass. Especially running around playing the flute.
If MMORPG's keep going in the same direction at the same speed theyre going now, then we're just going to be playing League of Legends in Smite form. Honestly, separation of people does suck - but in my mind, MMORPG's shouldnt be the fucking Obama of the gaming world. Hell, even League of Legends separates its players by level regardless of skill (lvl1 vs lvl30). If you're a wealthy middle class person, chances are that you arent hanging out with the petty fucking drug dealers at the bottom of the wealth spectrum and thats real life. These types of games are the same way and just wont work that way, and deep down - you guys know that. Thats not to say you need to hide content behind phasing, or your average quest being a 15 part chain, or just something as simple as not being able to group with someone thats been playing a few hours more than you. But the MMORPG still needs that carrot, that diversity, that world that people can escape to for fun, where they can escape to and be the hero they want to be, the villain or just to obtain that feeling of achievement because they cant find that feeling in real life.
Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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This is the goal of all casual games but as Daidraco says in his later post it just doesn't work, in real life or in games. In real life for the obvious reasons and in games because it is boring.
zzeris
The Real Benny Johnson
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It's the goal of every game. Who plays games to be average? As stated earlier, the goal is to let skill and experience be the divider but still allow people to play together. Just because people want artificial time constraints to separate players doesn't mean it's a better system.
Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Which people want "artificial time restraints". Does anyone here admit to that?
Most people like competition, it's part of human nature, we strive to be better. Caving to the casual crowd that only want's content that every slug can play just makes a slow, boring and ultimately empty game. Even slugs hate the games they cry for that lets everyone be special.
Nobody would watch the NFL if everyone won the Superbowl, every game, every year.
Exactly. My entire point is that levels aren't the problem, shitty leveling experiences are the problem. The reason why EQ worked was because it took so long to level, you actually stayed in areas longer (meaningful content), met more people, cared about the loot (you didn't re-gear every half hour, and better loot actually made your character more powerful), and were scared to die (EXP loss). Most of the tards who think that removing all that stuff is going to make the game better are not intelligent enough to realize that all that stuff is what made MMO's like the original EQ great in the first place. But I'm sure you'll all enjoy EQN for the month or so that you play it, and then wonder why you're already sick of playing it.
zzeris
The Real Benny Johnson
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Levels are exactly artificial time constraints. They are a required time sink. They restrict access. EQ was a game every slug could play. You camped a spawn for loot and the only ability you needed was to be there first. That's some high end competition! People spent more time sitting than doing. That's not competitive. Mobs were simplistic even in raids. Exploits made many encounters easy after you learned them. MMOs aren't the NFL and this game certainly isn't the SB.
EQ didn't work... WoW worked. EQ had two years of great success followed by a very quick drop off after WoW hit the scene. It was a fairly successful option until a better company fixed a plethora of poor designs. Removing all that stuff is exactly what successful games have done since EQ. Even SOE.
EQ didn't work... WoW worked. EQ had two years of great success followed by a very quick drop off after WoW hit the scene. It was a fairly successful option until a better company fixed a plethora of poor designs. Removing all that stuff is exactly what successful games have done since EQ. Even SOE.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Levels are not a problem, they're a simplistic solution.
What - a fairly large subset of - people want is progression, that's marked by their ability to do stuff that they can't do at first. In a roleplay-based combat game, where your character is what fights (rather than a mere avatar thru which the player fights, like a FPS), you have a wide variety of ways of doing that: Skills (Fireball I, then II, then III), stats (10 STA, 20 STA, 80 STA), gear (+5 dmg, +15 dmg, +25 dmg), levels. Anything that plugs in the combat formula, directly or indirectly.
Levels are extremely simplistic because they're a single measure of progression, and they're horribly fungible: anything can add to your level (and thus, people tend to gravitate toward the easiest/most obvious way of getting levels).
However, after you have a progression mechanic, people want a scale to measure. That's where levels win: they provide both progression AND scale to measure. And people like scales. Witness WoW: once levels became meaningless as a measure of progression (because everyone had max level), they invented gearscore. Then Blizzard gave us the average ilvl, and it became the progression scale.
You can remove levels and provide other mechanisms of progression. But people will ask for a scale, and if you fail to provide one, they will invent one and measure you according to it (even if you don't want to). "LFM dps for raid, must have all elite III skills min, IV preferred".
Lleauaric
Sparkletot Monger
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Levels are a purchase where time is the currency. The end result is an increase in power and abilities.
Obviously you want to extend the playtime of an MMO by having increases in power be directly tied to time played. The problem MMOs have is that it followed the D&D model but in D&D experience was dolled out and controlled only in meaningful encounters. You couldn't go out and farm to grind levels in table top D&D like you could in EQ/WoW et. al. This to me is the fundamental flaw in the genre.
I believe the way around this is pretty simple. If you tie increases in power directly to items and abilities earned from specific rare and unique encounters, you can still have the necessary time sink and remove the ability to grind levels, which have to have a numeric value. Experience can become actual experience and not repetitious mindless bullshit.
If all PCs have a pretty set and standard amount of health (everyone has 100 core health for example), then your power level increases through more damage mitigation and the ability to overcome mobs mitigation. Avoidance will not be a factor in this game as it is manually controlled through all directional attacks and no tab targeting. This seems much easier to control, especially when you can have limitless forms of damage.
Obviously you want to extend the playtime of an MMO by having increases in power be directly tied to time played. The problem MMOs have is that it followed the D&D model but in D&D experience was dolled out and controlled only in meaningful encounters. You couldn't go out and farm to grind levels in table top D&D like you could in EQ/WoW et. al. This to me is the fundamental flaw in the genre.
I believe the way around this is pretty simple. If you tie increases in power directly to items and abilities earned from specific rare and unique encounters, you can still have the necessary time sink and remove the ability to grind levels, which have to have a numeric value. Experience can become actual experience and not repetitious mindless bullshit.
If all PCs have a pretty set and standard amount of health (everyone has 100 core health for example), then your power level increases through more damage mitigation and the ability to overcome mobs mitigation. Avoidance will not be a factor in this game as it is manually controlled through all directional attacks and no tab targeting. This seems much easier to control, especially when you can have limitless forms of damage.
You've never played League of Legends I take it? When I first started playing the game a year ago, I was level 1 playing with my level 28 brother in law playing with a gold III player for funsies. The vast majority of players in this game play at level 30. The level 1-30 time period is a glorified tutorial. So your comparison really doesn't work at all.
To the rest of your post, you're just glorifying a the game in your brain. When you use the word "escape for fun", or "escape to be the hero ..", you're just putting way too much emotion into the game to make rational design discussions. If you find a dev saying shit like "Feelign achievement because the can't find that in real life" tell him to stop making video games and go see a shrink.
The goal of every online game is to bring people together and have fun. Obviously in a game about character progression and building you'll have layers of haves and have nots and the severity of that is up to the game developer. I'm not arguing against that design element. I'm talking about game design that doesn't physically separate people by game mechanics. Which is why I'm against levels and quest grinds.
I'm a casual player these days, I don't have the time to make a single MMORPG my hobby any more where I put unhealthy amounts of time playing. But I still love playing MMORPGs. Most of them these days are designed to play solo while you level up, at least the vast majority of designed content is made for that. The only social aspect of it is hopping on a vent server and chatting with people as you grind quests/mobs. The only other alternative is leveling with another person 100% of the time so your quest progression is synced.
Older game design was just sitting in a group killing a few mobs over and over. The idea of that is great. Hop on, join a group, gain experience. However the game play is boring as a motherfucker (though I suppose some people like it for some reason). This is why I like the idea behind EQNext because they seems to want to make a world that does shit that you can hop into and out of as you log in and out with your friends.
You need to build a game that's transient. That allows players to log in and out and gain meaningful rewards while playing (whether that's experience, gold, materials whatever) but also while playing with other people including your friends.
WOW does this somewhat. They have a shit ton of things for you to do, but it's all based on solo activities. Pet Battles, Crafting/Gathering, Dailies whatever. The only group activity that you would want to hop on and play with a buddy is raiding which can be a fun or frustrating experience (normals vs. LFR etc).
TLDR: Games can divide players based on skill, based on progressive power gains etc. That's good game design and should be there. Games need to move away from the solo level for 20-30 hours with quests and 60 levels by yourself, then play with your friends paradigm.
Bruman
Golden Squire
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I think you've put yourself into a hole though - people need something to do while waiting for the "rare and unique encounter". These are subscription based games typically. Hence why we have the repetitious mindless bullshit. The rare and unique encounters to get real progression (aka, better gear) is time-limited once-a-week-typically raid encounter.
The next step in character development is to get rid of levels completely and base everything on achievements. You can have small short term achievements (kill a bunch of dudes), long term achievements of killing the big bad guy that has a series of unlocks along the way. You can have hidden achievements etc.
We started off by giving players mobs to kill for experience to gain a level. WOW gave players quests that gave experience to mask the grind of killing mobs to gain a level. This merely gives players objectives to complete and not quests to mask the quest grind to gain progression.
I think this is what EQN is going to try to do.
We started off by giving players mobs to kill for experience to gain a level. WOW gave players quests that gave experience to mask the grind of killing mobs to gain a level. This merely gives players objectives to complete and not quests to mask the quest grind to gain progression.
I think this is what EQN is going to try to do.