Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
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Guest, did you like the last podcast notification?? Well here's the second one, and for the third podcast! Yep. This Thursday 8-8-24 at 7pm Central
Go here to check out his podcast thread for info on topics and links!Go into the FoH discord and find the Happy Time Fun Hour channel and give it a listen!
Quaid
Trump's Staff
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If they’ve built in a way to easily circumvent it… why bother at all? All it accomplishes is making the new player experience more frustrating.
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All of that, "this is how it works in DnD!" shit is why MUDs died. That type of "immersion" and "realistic" gameplay works in sessions that take 3+ hours and you interact with them once, for an immersive experience. It doesn't work in an online video game at any length. It just servers as frustrating annoyance.
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Kithani
said, if it's something that's relatively pointless/meaningless, all it serves as is shit gameplay - especially as a new/low level player. I can almost bet it'll be ignored at the high-end, just like it was in EQ. Once you're getting 10+pp/mob, who the fuck is bothering with making sure their rusty hatchet sells for 2 more silver - you're not even looting the hatchet anymore. And at that point, it's just an annoyingly frustrating, ultimately pointless mechanic that is nothing more than a cumbersome timesink that accomplishes little.And if it's something that is meaningful/useful even at the high-end, how fucking annoying is it going to be to have to spend 50 minutes in town every night before you log off, making sure you hit every fucking particular merchant to sell? No thanks.
Just like the industry has moved on from countless titles/genres of games(like MUDs mentioned above), these sort of archaic mechanics just aren't the way to do "difficulty" in video games anymore. The industry has moved on and players have realized that tedium for tedium's sake doesn't make a game fun and just leads to frustrating experiences that cause players to quit.
There are definitely ways to make a slower-paced, "old-school", challenging game without resorting to "realism" as an excuse for tedium, because somehow people think time spent = difficult. A million Korean grinders should be proof positive this is a gameplay loop that most Western players reject and even Korean players pay assloads of money to circumvent.
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Nick
Trakanon Raider
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Thanks for the feedback, definitely valid thoughts.
We're always open to making changes if we feel that they are absolutely necessary. We're trying out some new things and there is still some polish that needs to be done to get them into a better spot, and other systems which can help improve the quality of life when dealing with some of the annoyances you're describing.
If after we've exhausted all avenues of trying to make something work, we won't necessarily force the issue forever.
We're still 16 months out from our planned Early Access date, with even longer to go until the full 1.0 Release. Should be plenty of time for us to look at these things and address them if need be.
Thank you for checking out the game this weekend, hope you guys come check it out again.
We're always open to making changes if we feel that they are absolutely necessary. We're trying out some new things and there is still some polish that needs to be done to get them into a better spot, and other systems which can help improve the quality of life when dealing with some of the annoyances you're describing.
If after we've exhausted all avenues of trying to make something work, we won't necessarily force the issue forever.
We're still 16 months out from our planned Early Access date, with even longer to go until the full 1.0 Release. Should be plenty of time for us to look at these things and address them if need be.
Thank you for checking out the game this weekend, hope you guys come check it out again.
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Arden
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Not a fan of tediousness of any kind, so don't take this as "pro tedious, " but the tediousness of some stuff in EQ did serve a purpose in that it created the conditions for rarity and value.
For example, getting a GBS in early EQ wasn't particularly difficult- Pyz was what, lvl 13? But seeing someone with a GBS was rare because Pyz was a super rare spawn and camping her was very, very tedious. Not a lot of people had the fortitude to sit there at her camp and kill dreadbones and Scruffy the rat for several real life days.
Another example was mastering trade skills in early EQ. Again, early trade skills weren't particularly difficult, but they were super tedious to max. As a result, in the early years there were only a handful of master crafters for certain trade skills.
I'm sure I can think of other examples if I really put my mind to it. EQ had plenty of tedium, and while it didn't make things difficult it did kind of make them hard- hard because it's hard to sit there and do tedious shit for hours on end until your eyes feel like they're going to bleed.
That said, there was a key component to the most tedious shit in EQ: pretty much all of it was optional. If you had the stamina to do some of that stuff and accomplish those rare feats, good for you, you end up with something rare and valuable. But you could certainly play the game just fine without doing that stuff.
It sounds to me like the tedious stuff in M&M isn't particularly optional. Having to locate and run around to various different vendors to sell different mob trash does not sound fun at all. And EVERYONE needs to sell mob trash to get that early coinage. So you are pretty much forcing a scenario where you are mandating tedium on the entire player base. Probably not a good idea.
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There is almost 0 tediousness that was intentional in EQ. Basically all of it was entirely because of the tech limitations and developer inexperience at the time. There's a reason almost all of it was gone by PoP and they had gone through great lengths to slowly remove more and more of it each expansion.
Look, I love playing EQ for nostalgia reasons here and there. I've done TLPs multiple times. But the TLPs have removed a LOT of EQ's "original" version and thus most of its tedium. I lasted all of about 1hr on P99 before I realized how annoying most of those systems are to deal with in modern gaming.
Right, but that doesn't necessarily make a game difficult. And it certainly doesn't make it "fun", especially by 2024 standards.
The issue so many people have with remembering nostalgic things like this is they so easily forget where the world, gaming, and especially the internet were in 1999. You had no social media, we hadn't "been there done that" with 5,000 online/games as a service titles, thousands of games in our Steam library, etc. So, all of those system were still novel. We "enjoyed" them because our ignorance allowed us to in 1999. On top of that, you spent much of that tedious downtime often socializing in chat, where you could let some WILD shit fly. There are basically zero online games anymore that don't almost instantly ban you for saying a "hurty" word in chat anymore, for fear of it ruining their entire company because of one Tweet. Hell, many online games don't even let you chat at all with other players.
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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If you want "meaningful merchants", then make them attractive instead of "worthless".All of that, "this is how it works in DnD!" shit is why MUDs died. That type of "immersion" and "realistic" gameplay works in sessions that take 3+ hours and you interact with them once, for an immersive experience. It doesn't work in an online video game at any length. It just servers as frustrating annoyance.
Like
And if it's something that is meaningful/useful even at the high-end, how fucking annoying is it going to be to have to spend 50 minutes in town every night before you log off, making sure you hit every fucking particular merchant to sell? No thanks.
Just like the industry has moved on from countless titles/genres of games(like MUDs mentioned above), these sort of archaic mechanics just aren't the way to do "difficulty" in video games anymore. The industry has moved on and players have realized that tedium for tedium's sake doesn't make a game fun and just leads to frustrating experiences that cause players to quit.
There are definitely ways to make a slower-paced, "old-school", challenging game without resorting to "realism" as an excuse for tedium, because somehow people think time spent = difficult. A million Korean grinders should be proof positive this is a gameplay loop that most Western players reject and even Korean players pay assloads of money to circumvent.
Take a page from the old EQ merchants, in fact. Merchants will buy you everything, but offer you a slight premium for what they are specialized for. What they do instead, is re-sell what they are specialists in. A weapon merchant will keep an inventory of weapons sold by people, and offer some back for sale. Put an internal "rarity" value if there isn't one on display, and it will sell back two "trash" weapons, two "low qual" weapons, two "mid-qual" ones, one "high-qual" weapon and one "top-range" one. And maybe they rotate every hour or so. Database space is cheap compared to when EQ was out, so your merchant can afford to keep 200+ sales in inventory, allowing him to offer a variety of things. Maybe make sure that once he has 3 of something to sell back, he's not adding further crafting trash to his inventory.
That means visiting the merchant can be useful. At first, he's not going to have much of an offer outside of his base stock, but as time passes, you'll see things pop up.
With the premium, you're probably better off buying from a player, but now you have an incentive to visit merchants. Not to sell, but to BUY.
(and that removes gold from the economy too)
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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That said, having to manually assemble each crafting combine a la classic EQ is going to be hard to put up with.
Let tradeskill combines destroy items when they fail, whatever. But counterbalance this with something reasonable like the ability to load the crafting of Widget you want and just put in the overall quantities you're trying to make. So you still have a bit of the classic feel of putting items in the combine window. But don't have to do it for each individual item being crafted. Then let the crafting destroy anywhere from 0%-100% of the components on a failure.
EX:
1. I load my crafting window with 10x components of A, B, and C to make Widget 1.0
2. I can then craft Widget 1.0 10 times (even if you have to click combine 10 times).
3. I reload my crafting window with 20x of components Y and Z to make Widget 3.0
4. I hit the craft button 20 times.
Vendor purchased trade goods like flux/powder/recipe stencils need to be cheap AF. Especially for the lower level stuff.
I do like that most classes seem to get their core skills before level 10.
Let tradeskill combines destroy items when they fail, whatever. But counterbalance this with something reasonable like the ability to load the crafting of Widget you want and just put in the overall quantities you're trying to make. So you still have a bit of the classic feel of putting items in the combine window. But don't have to do it for each individual item being crafted. Then let the crafting destroy anywhere from 0%-100% of the components on a failure.
EX:
1. I load my crafting window with 10x components of A, B, and C to make Widget 1.0
2. I can then craft Widget 1.0 10 times (even if you have to click combine 10 times).
3. I reload my crafting window with 20x of components Y and Z to make Widget 3.0
4. I hit the craft button 20 times.
Vendor purchased trade goods like flux/powder/recipe stencils need to be cheap AF. Especially for the lower level stuff.
I do like that most classes seem to get their core skills before level 10.
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Quaid
Trump's Staff
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Definitely gonna play the hell out of this every chance I get. It feels great.
If you’re involved in development I’m glad to see you here. You’ll get more unfiltered feedback than what I’ve been seeing on Discord/Reddit.
Guess I have to tone down calling things retarded now though. Fuck.
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Pharone
Trakanon Raider
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Honestly, I hope that you guys just make YOUR game the way YOU want to make it.
The industry trend for the past two decades has been to make what the loudest players scream for which usually ends up being a shallow experience that nobody wants to play for the long term. Just make your game. Some people will kick, scream, and throw a hissy fit, but in the end let your game stand or fall based on YOUR decisions rather than the loud crowd.
Me personally, I think that people are going to be all uptight about the slowness of the game BECAUSE they are used to all other MMORPGs being a nitro-charged race to the finish line. They feel that they are missing out if they aren't racing through the game, so when they have to find the right vendor to get the most money for their stuff, they look at that as "OMG I am getting behind... how will I keep up with the no lifers?!!?!!!" They need to calm the fuck down and realize that this game isn't designed for racing to the end and they're not getting behind because EVERYBODY is taking that same time to get around and do things. It's a slow experience all around, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Same thing goes with the crafting. If crafting is painful, tedious, and slow, that's only a bad thing if the crafting results are similar to games like WoW where what you make is pure ass shit that is worthless five minutes later. If the results of your crafting is fucking amazing shit that you are going to keep a really long time, then it deserves to be painful, tedious, and slow to make.
I just really feel like most people coming in to this have been trained by the industry over the past two decades to RACE RACE RACE through these games and consume the content as fast as possible. They come from games like EQ where you literally pay to win with Krono (and for the most of them, THEY DO) or WoW where you literally fast track your ass through the content so you can do mind numbingly boring dailies for the rest of the year.
The industry has ruined the consumer's perception of what to expect from a MMORPG. We need a developer that is willing to reset the expectations of the consumer and ignore the MMO addicts that just want to fuck up yet another MMO for their addiction-feeding needs.
Just my 2 copeprs.
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En Sabah Nur
Potato del Grande
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Siliconemelons
Avatar of War Slayer
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En Sabah Nur
Potato del Grande
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That’s what I thought and was what immediately stood out to me when watching a video of the gameplay. I don’t understand why they would put so much emphasis on this being a spiritual successor to EverQuest and not have the first person POV. The result is something that more resembles WoW than EverQuest.