The Elder Scrolls Online

Utnayan_sl said:

Which would be cool if the dungeons themselves were anything as large as an EQ1 dungeon.

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Yeah sadly, dungeons these days are more simplistic and boring than ever.

Dungeons in 2013 - Stormstout Brewery:



Dungeons in 2001 - Ruins of Old Sebilis:

Astral Projection_sl said:

Yeah sadly, dungeons these days are more simplistic and boring than ever.

Dungeons in 2013 - Stormstout Brewery:

Dungeons in 2001 - Ruins of Old Sebilis:

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Sadly we will never see dungeons like Sebilis again.

Quaid_sl said:

Looks like more waiting ahead for a decent MMO. Lets hope Wildstar, EQnext, Pathfinder, or Star Citizen deliver.

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I would add Firefall to that list. It is still in Beta and very much lacking content, but what it does have demonstrates the ability to have lots of interesting and dynamic content.

With the information we have, Wildstar seems like it's probably the only game worth waiting for. We know nothing about EQN and SOE doesn't give me much confidence. Pathfinder is some kickstarter low budget game no?

Star Citizen looks pretty good though, but we don't know a lot about it.

Yeah I know. I had originally typed that Star Citizen wasn't really an MMO, but I didn't want to get into that argument.

With Wildstar I'd be VERY careful about how many of the additions to the WoW formula are actually worthwhile and not just a flashy distraction that turns out uninteresting and pointless after doing it twice. Their additions (pvp plot, explorer/soldier/etc "jobs", hardcore raiding?) do sound interesting but that just means their PR team is decent, not all that turns out great. I mean, what if they plan for the explorer job to keep a max lvl player engaged for 4 months but you are done after 3 weeks? The way Bioware was apparently blindsided according to the GDC interview. Right now I'd rather put my trust in the "no info at all" EQN then a game declared "like WoW but better". Because we had "WoW but better" attempts for half a decade and look what that got us.

Well, EQ had to allow for multiple groups (camps) which I really miss in games. Since everything is instanced, who need all of that content when you are wanting to hit 3-5 names and get out so you can get some stupid currency so you can buy some stupid piece of generic armor from a vendor?

Think of what Solusek Dungeon and the Guks offered players. What... level 20ish or 30'ish pretty effectively all they up to the Raid opportunity.

I think people really underestimate seeing the upper echelon of players "passing by" to get to their group or raid. It fueled me. I knew it would be long way from 20 to 50 but when I saw how awesome someone in my class was walking by, I had to grind it out no matter how many times I died or became frustrated. I miss talking to people in dungeons too. Maybe it was my server but we really had a strong community dynamic. I hope we see this again one day.

Sebilis had to be big enough for several groups and was really the only place to go at levels 58-60. You'd really have to compare it to all heroic/expert/whatever top dungeons todays MMOs have.

It was pretty badass though

What puzzles me is how modern gamers actually make excuses to defend shitty development and lack of effort put into these games today. I think the player base might be as brain washed as the developers.

I would much rather fight through a giant dungeon like Seb with my group looking for the named mobs with a rareish chance to drop loot than the the on rails bull shit token system we have now. I'd also rather grind said dungeon to level and get loot than to follow the same on rails quest system most games shit out these days.

I'd love to see these "quests" which are more like tasks be a solo means to level when you need to bang out 20 minutes of game time while LFG or logging soon and the primary method to level be dungeons / truly elite areas. 2 to 4 instances (different but equal goal) every 5 or 10 levels with great loot and a bunch of random named mobs that are sometimes there or not each with their own unique table. Give some epic quest lines to follow and generally guide you through the zones but this whole pick up 20 quests and turn them in for another 20 needs to die a painful death.

This whole +1 stat bump every quest hub is fucking retarded. Give us some OP gear again, let us twink, let us have fun etc. Stop trying to meter out fun and balance like some giant fun jew because you don't want people to be too powerful. People don't play these games to be weak paupers.

Draegan_sl said:

Yeah I know. I had originally typed that Star Citizen wasn't really an MMO, but I didn't want to get into that argument.

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Oh really? Well, scratch that from the list then. I was under a different impression.

Maybe Titan will get revealed at Blizzcon?

I agree with the poster above. Casuals don't want to spend all day in an instance these days. Blackrock Depths took about 9 hours straight to run from beginning to end, doing all the quests. And it joined to Molten Core, the raid. We're never going to see a new instance the likes of Blackrock Depths, imo. The vast hordes of people who play wow don't have the time.

Pyros_sl said:

It didn't really take 9hours. I've done BRD full quests run including the retarded questline where you had to go outside to kill some event spawned mobs then back in with a semi static guild group and it took like 5-6hours. Granted that's still a very long time, but it was very fun, and BRD was designed in such a way that you could divide it into 45mins-1hour runs fairly easily, with the shortcuts and shit.The only issue is you'd never find people doing certain quests to fill a full group, and it was terrible xp other than the quests so it wasn't worth it for shit, plus it was so close to cap it was also fairly meh when you could just spend that time to hit 58-60 then get carried through strat for much better drops. Oh and the fact the level gap was too big between the lowest part and the highest. Something like 46 to 54 iirc?

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WoW's approach to Quests is what killed the group-experience.

I'm still looking forward for a triple A game where I'm set free from the very first minute with plenty of content (dungeons, solo and group content to do). Problem with all the new MMORPGs is that every player is busy with their predefined path and all these infinite "quests" he must keep up with. No one is free to look around and make friends to overcome a challenge of a dungeon anymore.

They are just too afraid to let go of you... God forbid you have to just think for a second and do what you actually prefer to do. They just need to hand-hold you ALL THE TIME.

You are set free in WoW, Laura. It is a conscious choice to click the big exclamation mark/question mark denoted npc and follow the dialogue. It isn't required; it isn't forced. It doesn't instantly negate the ability to form groups by clicking the npc. Literally not a single thing is stopping you from doing exactly as you like in the game you decry as having removed the ability to do so.

Honest question: Have you actually played WOW and similar games or are you basing your assumptions on information you have read/heard from others? Because all those question marks and shit that follow you throughout the game? Sort of don't matter in the long run. There are very, -very- few quests, if any, in any game, that force you to run shit you don't want to or do things you don't want to. Roughly on par with having to do the VP key to get into VP or doing the VT key to get into VT. Or the ST key to get into ST.

I mean seriously, have you actually played the games you claim killed the group experience or are you sort of just going "Yeah I liked EQ and EVERYTHING ELSE SUCKS~!" and using that as the only basis for your ideas? Yeah, Questing exists in WOW. It is -always- faster to group up and do group related content to xp or gain gear or literally do anything in the game than to do so solo. Minus the fucking retarded dailies (which if that was your primary gripe, I would 100% agree) it has -exactly- what you describe. So I sort of fail to see what your complaint about modern games is, unless you simply dislike the idea of options. Is that the key complaint?(which would make total sense, as it is the key complaint about many people who don't understand modern gaming) That because the game has the -option- to have your hand held through content, that you cannot enjoy it if other people are having their hands held? That they -must- go through the same story/plot/conceptless playthrough that you crave in order for -you- to be satisfied that the game is a real thing? That the only way to experience a game is the way you personally experience it? Newsflash: People had vastly different viewpoints on how UO played. They had vastly different viewpoints on how EQ was played. They had vastly different viewpoints on how FFXI was played.

I gotta be honest. I played the shitload out of yesteryear's mmos, and all the differences that you claim killed this or that portion of the game don't actually exist in reality. It is the inability of the person making those claims to realize that the same shit still exists in every single facet that existed before. It simply takes that nonsense and adds the option to have a narrative while doing so. Or a cleaner UI. Or a better array of channels. You know... shit called progress.

Erronius_sl said:

I don't necessarily equate instancing with a lack of content, as far as size goes - Vanilla WoW had some very large dungeons for example. I think EQ2 did as well, at least early on. But I also remember hearing people bitch and moan about how long it could take to get through a dungeon, so I guess seeing shorter instances (especially the multiple wing model) isn't surprising.

I feel both instanced and uninstanced content has their own specific issues. With uninstanced content there never seems to be enough content and it tends to bottleneck. So with zones like LGuk, I think the lion's share of complaints was when you had tons of people fighting over the same loot and camps. Offer more alternatives (loot/camps/dungeons) and that would probably alleviate many of the issues, which were in part what led to instancing in the first place. With instances, if you offer enough that are decently sized and intricate then that too addresses much of the issue (I can't remember many people complaining that BRD, LBRS/UBRS/Scholo/Strat were necessarily "too small").

People will of course have their own preferences, but imho both instanced and uninstanced content suffer from the same thing. Whether people want to believe that it's simply laziness on the part of developers, or acknowledge that there must be a content creation/time+money problem since just about every MMO has an issue with this, I don't really care, but Devs have been saying since EQ1 that keeping ahead of gamers on content is almost impossible, and all we see is how different Devs and studios approach the same problem.

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I was just saying that from a design perspective, with their current reward system, it is most effective to have smaller dungeons with less content because you are trying to achieve a currency to get armor. It is a better pay out, to take a daily quest and then any other quest that may have to do with the instance and hit that instance as quickly as possible so you can get the token for killing the boss, completing the zone, and each of the quests. That is the direction I see... Even in PvP, it's all about completing a match or a quest to get the reward. No one is rewarding the content and actions themselves. If I kill mob in an instance, it's rarely something I really need because I need 250 tokens for my breastplate. In PvP, a kill is just a point to determine a score in a match. Most of the times, not even that because it is more important to control an object or score by crossing a line. The mobs and the players themselves in PvP are primarily just ancillary pieces of the puzzle.

Quaid_sl said:

Oh really? Well, scratch that from the list then. I was under a different impression.

Maybe Titan will get revealed at Blizzcon?

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Before you scratch it off your list, go read some of their blogs on their main page. There is some great stuff going on over there. It'll definitely be worth playing.