Future MMO Prospects

[Yssen]

Uhm, what?

 

What does Square understand that Trion Worlds, Blizzard, Arenanet and countless other developers do not?

 

XIV is only "innovative" in Yoshida's mind. It's not a bad game--if it was, I wouldn't be playing it at all--but it's so far behind the times it's not even funny. 

 

Square's reading out of a playbook that's eight years old, which, ironically, is the same mistake Bioware and EA made with SWTOR.

 

Why did it take six months for us to get a crippled costuming system? Why did it take six months for us to get a chatbox transparency slider? Why can we still not send tells in dungeons? Why can we not leave a dungeon and then return to it without resetting it? Why do the dungeons have pointless timers? Why can't we invite a FC member to join our in-progress dungeon run when a random drops? Why do I have to close any active windows to accept a party, linkshell or free company invite? Why can't I access the Free Company or Linkshell interfaces while I'm in a dungeon? Why is the world so small and shut in? Why doesn't Square try to make FATEs fun instead of just required? Why is the macro scripting so limited? Where is that add-on API and support we were promised before release? Why is Crystal Tower so hilariously faceroll easy? Why can't we queue into it with a full raid yet? Where's horizontal gear progression? Why is the endgame gearing metagame so boring? Why are they gating new content behind deprecated content? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to design a fight that requires precision split-second timing in a game that's already astonishingly laggy? Why haven't you stopped running the game on toasters? Why can't we have scalar raiding at endgame instead of being arbitrarily limited to how many people we can take? Why is there virtually nothing entertaining or rewarding to do in the open world at level 50 except busy work? Why are the enemy animations desynced from the actual attacks? Why is the character creation so limited? Why is the main storyline so lazy, and why does it contain so many fetch quests? Why are we given the hopelessly-transparent illusion of choice with assigning attribute points instead of having a standard skill modifier system or talent system? Why is the attribute bonus determined by class instead of job? Why do classes even exist at all beyond level 30? Why are cross-class actions so limited? Why is every endgame boss room a big circle? 

 

WHY AM I ASKING WHY SO MANY TIMES?!?!

 

This is because Square-Enix clearly does not understand the fundamental aspect of what makes a world-class themepark MMORPG in 2014.

 

That's not to say it isn't fun. It is, but it could be so much more.

 

Okay. Starting to get bugged by this. So here is my "why."

 

Why is it that you keep nit picking at the game over and over and over, only to claim "SE knob slobbing" or some other pointed near insult at a fan defending what they enjoy?

 

I gotta know. Throw out the answer. I have been paying attention for a while, and I do have to say that that behavior is starting to seem wicked toxic. 

 

That said. Most of the stuff involving dungeons and not being able to send tells and all that is because of the whole on different servers that feed from many different servers that are separate from the ones the rest of the world is on. Also, that is not exactly what I would call "a feature critical to the success of an MMO in 2014." It is just a neat feature to have. 

 

Further, many of your "why's" are things you do not personally enjoy. Super. You are entitled to your opinion, and to share it. However, just because you do not like a feature, a boss, a dungeon, or whatever piece of content does not make it a terrible and stupid decision. It just means you don't like it, which you are perfectly free to do. People are also perfectly free to like and stick up for it.

 

The game is far from perfect. Nothing is perfect. This is especially true of things built to have appeal to a mass audience. Not everyone is going to find it perfect or even agree on what near perfect is. So back to my "why." Why the stream of negativity at the game and the people that admit to being fans and enjoying it?

 

Yar.

[Ignacius]

Uhm, what?

 

What does Square understand that Trion Worlds, Blizzard, Arenanet and countless other developers do not?

 

XIV is only "innovative" in Yoshida's mind. It's not a bad game--if it was, I wouldn't be playing it at all--but it's so far behind the times it's not even funny. 

 

Square's reading out of a playbook that's eight years old, which, ironically, is the same mistake Bioware and EA made with SWTOR.

 

Why did it take six months for us to get a crippled costuming system? Why did it take six months for us to get a chatbox transparency slider? Why can we still not send tells in dungeons? Why can we not leave a dungeon and then return to it without resetting it? Why do the dungeons have pointless timers? Why can't we invite a FC member to join our in-progress dungeon run when a random drops? Why do I have to close any active windows to accept a party, linkshell or free company invite? Why can't I access the Free Company or Linkshell interfaces while I'm in a dungeon? Why is the world so small and shut in? Why doesn't Square try to make FATEs fun instead of just required? Why is the macro scripting so limited? Where is that add-on API and support we were promised before release? Why is Crystal Tower so hilariously faceroll easy? Why can't we queue into it with a full raid yet? Where's horizontal gear progression? Why is the endgame gearing metagame so boring? Why are they gating new content behind deprecated content? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to design a fight that requires precision split-second timing in a game that's already astonishingly laggy? Why haven't you stopped running the game on toasters? Why can't we have scalar raiding at endgame instead of being arbitrarily limited to how many people we can take? Why is there virtually nothing entertaining or rewarding to do in the open world at level 50 except busy work? Why are the enemy animations desynced from the actual attacks? Why is the character creation so limited? Why is the main storyline so lazy, and why does it contain so many fetch quests? Why are we given the hopelessly-transparent illusion of choice with assigning attribute points instead of having a standard skill modifier system or talent system? Why is the attribute bonus determined by class instead of job? Why do classes even exist at all beyond level 30? Why are cross-class actions so limited? Why is every endgame boss room a big circle? 

 

WHY AM I ASKING WHY SO MANY TIMES?!?!

 

This is because Square-Enix clearly does not understand the fundamental aspect of what makes a world-class themepark MMORPG in 2014.

 

That's not to say it isn't fun. It is, but it could be so much more.

 

Okay. Starting to get bugged by this. So here is my "why."

 

Why is it that you keep nit picking at the game over and over and over, only to claim "SE knob slobbing" or some other pointed near insult at a fan defending what they enjoy?

 

I gotta know. Throw out the answer. I have been paying attention for a while, and I do have to say that that behavior is starting to seem wicked toxic. 

 

That said. Most of the stuff involving dungeons and not being able to send tells and all that is because of the whole on different servers that feed from many different servers that are separate from the ones the rest of the world is on. Also, that is not exactly what I would call "a feature critical to the success of an MMO in 2014." It is just a neat feature to have. 

 

Further, many of your "why's" are things you do not personally enjoy. Super. You are entitled to your opinion, and to share it. However, just because you do not like a feature, a boss, a dungeon, or whatever piece of content does not make it a terrible and stupid decision. It just means you don't like it, which you are perfectly free to do. People are also perfectly free to like and stick up for it.

 

The game is far from perfect. Nothing is perfect. This is especially true of things built to have appeal to a mass audience. Not everyone is going to find it perfect or even agree on what near perfect is. So back to my "why." Why the stream of negativity at the game and the people that admit to being fans and enjoying it?

 

Yar.

 

Take it easy, the whole point of this is to stop letting game companies off the hook.  And if the game is far from perfect, it's not a horrible thing to bring it up.

 

What Square gets right in FFXIV is something a lot of companies don't put much thought into, what an MMORPG is fundamentally.  Fundamentally, it's a coffee shop.  It's a gathering place for like-minded people to have fun together and meet strangers.  More than any other game, FFXIV gets that right.  It rewards everyone with at least a little EXP that connects a swing on an enemy, whether it's in the party or not, no matter the level, and doesn't penalize the person fighting the enemy.  It keeps the nodes for gathering localized to each player so we don't have to fight for resources (or lose out to a bot).  You can get credit for quest mobs you kill even if they're out of party, so we don't have to fight for quest mobs.

 

Compare that to WoW, where seeing another player can be a boon if you can get them to party up with you.  Otherwise, they're nothing but competition that steals your resources.  EVE made me actively loath seeing other players, because I simply knew, right out of the gun, that there is nothing in the game world we need to collaborate with strangers to do and every reason for them to kill me and take my stuff.  So I had no desire nor reason to talk to anyone outside my corp.  I've put together more friends in FFXIV than I have in any other game I've played in such a short time simply because it's so easy to meet other strangers and collaborate.

 

Now, with that said... it's a bit like having a Ferrari in Butan; you've got one of the best precision engines ever made and nowhere to use it.  For a lot of the reasons you brought up, it makes social interaction somewhat difficult sometimes and doesn't give you a lot to collaborate on.  Maybe the occasional FATE that requires multiple people?  You can't help on Levequests, so why are they in the open world for other people to see?  You can't help on class quests either, and why can you see some of those?  Worse, if you're in one, you can't call a friend for help unless they're in your LS, and even then they usually can't help you.

 

Most of all, the worst question to ask is, "Why would we need to?"  That's a big problem of every single MMORPG made that I can remember!  Nothing requires that many people collaborating or gives you any sense of real danger because game developers handle us with kid gloves.  Sometimes, games like EVE will try to tell us that games are hard because of PVP.  It's artificial; all PVP-centric games are hard for however many people don't get more kills than they give.  So even a bad PVP player would think the game is easy if everyone was at least worse than him.  It's like saying that because you win your football division, you're a tough team to beat.  You may just be in a weak division.

 

The fact is, MMORPGs make everything too convenient for us.  All the enemies are clustered in nice, polite patches off the main road, wandering around aimlessly for us to find.  They have nicely-assigned levels that allow us to know what we're up against.  They're tuned for one person at a time and, if not, we have tools to adequately decide how many people we need.  Enemies never hunt us or give us a hard time, if it's necessary that's what we let players do.  PVP-centric games sin a lot in this regard, as they tend to make the PVE breathtakingly benign.  Hell, in EVE, if there were no other players, there would be nothing to stop you.  Not that WoW or FFXIV are much better, enemies often offer only token resistance and being "jumped" is a scripted affair.

 

It's done in other games, being hunted and not being the upper echelon of a thin food chain.  They appear sometimes in MMORPGs in spurts.  EVE, to their credit, did put in something like that, the Sansha Incursions.  There were some patrolling world bosses that could sneak up on you and ruin your day in vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade (the Fel Reavers just seemed to sneak up on you).  There's just not enough of it; the worlds we're paying to play in aren't dangerous enough.  That work is being either compartmentalized (in instances and raids) or outsourced (in open world PVP).  You always get your party together and hunt the dragon.  The dragon never hunts you.

 

I think that's the biggest failing of modern development.  They haven't yet made the MMORPG that emphasizes the social aspect by making you pray to everloving God somebody finds you or making you grateful to see someone come to help.  That'd emphasize everything an MMORPG can do that no other game can.  PVP, raids, instances, everything can and has been done in other genres of games much more effectively.  It's this one thing that an MMORPG can simulate that nothing else can, meeting random people in an open world to tackle open world problems.

 

To date, I haven't seen anyone able to pull it off.  Not that it's impossible, game developers are either not seeing that opportunity literally dangling in front of their faces, or they're simply too lazy to develop it.

[synaesthetic]

I don't complain about games just to be a downer. When it comes to single-player games I may offer my opinion but I won't go on about it. MMOs are a different story--if I complain loudly and long enough, the developers may realize that they need to change things up.

 

If you were the customer of a service, say mobile phone service, and the service was "okay" but not spectacular, but no other service filled your needs, would you simply remain silent about it? Or would you complain every time your signal tanked for an entire day?

 

@Ignacius: I really think there's a market for what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the mainstream MMO market. That sort of thing appeals to the Kickstarter indie crowd. Most MMO players don't want to deal with that kind of gameplay. How do I know? Old MMOs had those punishing and harsh gameplay mechanics, and people complained about them so much that they were changed. New games that came out didn't have them because most players didn't want them, and the developers saw they could attract far more customers if the games weren't so incredibly punishing.

 

I know that if XIV decided to revert to 1999-2000 era MMO mechanics, I would probably quit right away. I'm not a teenager anymore. I don't have time for a game that you cannot solo in, a game where even the weakest monsters can slaughter you with impunity, a game where you have to dedicate at least a four-hour chunk of time in order to actually progress at all. I'm an adult and I have other things to do besides waste all of my day playing video games. Granted, I do spend many hours playing them (I am a gamer, after all) but I would not play a "hardcore" MMO. I bet you that most MMO players in 2014 would not want to, either.

 

We just don't have that kind of time anymore.

[Yssen]

I don't complain about games just to be a downer. When it comes to single-player games I may offer my opinion but I won't go on about it. MMOs are a different story--if I complain loudly and long enough, the developers may realize that they need to change things up.

 

If you were the customer of a service, say mobile phone service, and the service was "okay" but not spectacular, but no other service filled your needs, would you simply remain silent about it? Or would you complain every time your signal tanked for an entire day?

 

@Ignacius: I really think there's a market for what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the mainstream MMO market. That sort of thing appeals to the Kickstarter indie crowd. Most MMO players don't want to deal with that kind of gameplay. How do I know? Old MMOs had those punishing and harsh gameplay mechanics, and people complained about them so much that they were changed. New games that came out didn't have them because most players didn't want them, and the developers saw they could attract far more customers if the games weren't so incredibly punishing.

 

I know that if XIV decided to revert to 1999-2000 era MMO mechanics, I would probably quit right away. I'm not a teenager anymore. I don't have time for a game that you cannot solo in, a game where even the weakest monsters can slaughter you with impunity, a game where you have to dedicate at least a four-hour chunk of time in order to actually progress at all. I'm an adult and I have other things to do besides waste all of my day playing video games. Granted, I do spend many hours playing them (I am a gamer, after all) but I would not play a "hardcore" MMO. I bet you that most MMO players in 2014 would not want to, either.

 

We just don't have that kind of time anymore.

I am not sure I like that analogy. When my cell service breaks down, I call customer service to see what the problem is and complain if necessary. I don't stand on a box, shout out how much I think my cell service sucks, and the call someone who maybe has the same cell service with a different opinion a "knob slobber" because he has that different opinion. 

 

No one here is in charge of anything as far as the development of FFXIV. No one here is a customer service rep for them. Look, I am not saying don't complain, or have an opinion. I am just saying don't be toxic about it, don't hit us with it constantly, and above all do not insult people because they do not feel the same way as you. 

 

You want to change something, fine. Use the right format, and do not get quite as bent out of shape when people disagree with your opinion. Be more polite about it, and open minded about it.

 

Also I am curious as to why you complain here of all places? I assume you post your opinions on the official forums often as well, where they are much more likely to get exposure to the devs in the first place.

[synaesthetic]

What exactly is "toxic" (good lord I hate that word and the context in which it's used these days) about what I said? Am I making personal attacks? Am I shaming people for enjoying XIV? No. I like this game! I play it and enjoy it (except for Titan but who likes Titan?) and I sure as hell don't see anything in my above post that even approaches slinging ad hominem attacks.

 

All I did was list a long (but certainly not exhaustive) list of gripes I have with the game and the dev team's apparent unwillingness to learn from their competition. MMO devs as a whole seem to have a real problem with making the same mistakes that their contemporaries (and worse, their predecessors) have already made.

 

I don't post on the official forums because I can't; I was permanently banned because a whiteknight got butthurt and asked his little whiteknight buddies to report my post when I questioned why so many people seemed to derive pleasure from denying other people enjoyment.

[Ignacius]

I don't complain about games just to be a downer. When it comes to single-player games I may offer my opinion but I won't go on about it. MMOs are a different story--if I complain loudly and long enough, the developers may realize that they need to change things up.

 

If you were the customer of a service, say mobile phone service, and the service was "okay" but not spectacular, but no other service filled your needs, would you simply remain silent about it? Or would you complain every time your signal tanked for an entire day?

 

@Ignacius: I really think there's a market for what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the mainstream MMO market. That sort of thing appeals to the Kickstarter indie crowd. Most MMO players don't want to deal with that kind of gameplay. How do I know? Old MMOs had those punishing and harsh gameplay mechanics, and people complained about them so much that they were changed. New games that came out didn't have them because most players didn't want them, and the developers saw they could attract far more customers if the games weren't so incredibly punishing.

 

I know that if XIV decided to revert to 1999-2000 era MMO mechanics, I would probably quit right away. I'm not a teenager anymore. I don't have time for a game that you cannot solo in, a game where even the weakest monsters can slaughter you with impunity, a game where you have to dedicate at least a four-hour chunk of time in order to actually progress at all. I'm an adult and I have other things to do besides waste all of my day playing video games. Granted, I do spend many hours playing them (I am a gamer, after all) but I would not play a "hardcore" MMO. I bet you that most MMO players in 2014 would not want to, either.

 

We just don't have that kind of time anymore.

 

See, but I think you've confused two things that aren't in any way connected:  difficulty and time management.  Which, granted, isn't something I hold against you; EVERYONE does that.  But a game being difficult, and a game requiring a lot of time to complete, are not the same thing.

 

Take FFXI for example.  People used to say it was a lot harder than WoW, and so it was.  However, it wasn't hard because of the amount of time it took to level and work (which was significant).  It was hard because as soon as you were out of the introductory levels, there was no solo play.  You got your party in the Valkurm Dunes, pulled a mob into the party, and killed it.  Ad nauseum.  Not many games, for good reason, require a full party to do everything in the game.

 

However, there are plenty of ways to make a game challenging and deep for people who only have two hours a day to play.  One that comes to mind is setting up a set of outposts deep in wilderness, which means you can make the journey in two hour chunks to kill whatever you need to kill, but it might take you a week at that pace to get there.  You might also need to stock supplies or use knowledge to craft survival items while out there.  Sometimes you'd have to be careful because things might hunt you along the way, or you'll need to kill lesser enemies to get what you need as far as supplies go.  That way, if you decide you want to take an expedition to kill something hard in the open world, it's an ordeal that you can do in small chunks; it would just take a lot of chunks.  All you have to make sure is that all things can be completed in two hours, including the fight.

 

You can make all those things, travel, combat, and gathering difficult.  It doesn't necessarily have to be long.

 

And let's face it, most of what people were complaining about in vanilla WoW wasn't how hard the game was, it was the logistical stuff that's been improved lately.  I wouldn't want to go back to /lookingforgroup instead of having a Dungeon Finder, for example.  Putting a PUG together back in the day was horrible.

[Ildur]

Yet your way of making travel difficult seems to be for you to take fourteen hours to reach your target, plus whatever time buying and gathering the correct supplies and crafting takes. And that's not considering that the player might die during the trip and have to redo one or more chunks of it, recrafting, gathering or buying supplies once again. A journey lasting fourteen hours to reach a goal is no different, conceptually, than fourteen hours of grinding to make gold, or upgrade your Relic weapon or some other goal.

 

Or...that's if I'm reading things correctly after waking up. I bet I totally am.

 

What is true is that difficulty shouldn't be necessarily linked with time (even though learning complex, 'hard' things takes longer), but with the effort/time ratio.

That's why grinding mobs is not difficult: you are applying little effort, but the ammount of time units required to overcome it is large.

I guess that's why many people, including developers, keep thinking that a hard thing is anything that takes a long time. Then we are stuck with simple mobs with eight times the HP they should have and sillyness like that.

 

Though we should note that 'difficulty' is incredibly relative since, once you learn to overcome it, it becomes easier. Then all you have left is how much time it takes to complete the task.

[Naunet]

I think WildStar is shaping up to be a truly challenging MMO. I might not have said that back in September when I first started testing, but now that I've had a chance to explore a rather broad swathe of its content, and seen demonstrations of what I haven't, my tune has changed. The crafting isn't necessarily time consuming, but the "minigame" nature of crafting an item is certainly a far cry from "click craft to make" (and, though infuriating at times, it's a heck of a lot more interesting than FFXIV's >_<). The combat as you level builds in a really smooth difficulty curve, but still has a number of "spikes" where you can test your mettle - in group mobs (that are legitimately difficult even when you're not trying to solo them), world bosses, and dungeons. The dungeons... well, I don't think I had to give a single thought to a dungeon in FFXIV while leveling; they were pretty much uniformly mindless. That's certainly not the case in WildStar. Even just picking out your arrangement of skills for the LAS, skill points, and AMPs could be considered a "challenge" in that you've got a lot of very good choices that you have to whittle down to what is suitable for your current play. The path system also offers a rather unique set of challenges that you might not necessarily get in other MMOs. Many of the puzzles you have to solve on scientist are serious brain teasers, and locating all the data cubes is both an exercise in patience and at times requires cooperative play; it can be quite a task figuring out how to scale that cliff or waterfall or whatever to get to your explorer point, or solving riddles for a scavenger hunt. And then there are the very aptly named "Challenges", which are spontaneously initiated open world "minigames".

 

I mean, I guess the game doesn't have permadeath. You don't drop your inventory when you die, or lose XP, or any of the other common "Back in the old days..." gripes. But those are just annoyances, not challenge.

[TheLastCandle]

I haven't been very impressed with my beta play in Wildstar, but I've come to think I judged TESO a bit too harshly. Class customization is actually a thing! For instance, taking a look at a single class - Templar - I'm seeing people playing a perfectly viable tank with sword, shield and heavy armor. There are people playing with medium armor and a bow, supplementing their arrows with some of the templar's ranged spells. Dual-wielding, two-handed weapons, full-on healer with a staff, the list goes on.

 

Quests aren't centralized in hubs, but are found out and about in the world in a similar fashion to the offline Elder Scrolls games. There are active events involving portals of invading atronachs and the like. The world is wide open, colorful, and seems to encourage exploration.

 

I don't think I've ever pulled such a 180 on a game that utterly failed to meet my expectations in open beta, but I'm certainly eyeing that Imperial Edition now.

[Naunet]

I couldn't get in to ESO when playing its betas mainly because the lore bored me to death and everyone looked identical (all species are identical human models with some texture swaps for skin). >_< The combat felt extremely clunky, too.

 

I did like the level of class customization it had, though.

[Ignacius]

Yet your way of making travel difficult seems to be for you to take fourteen hours to reach your target, plus whatever time buying and gathering the correct supplies and crafting takes. And that's not considering that the player might die during the trip and have to redo one or more chunks of it, recrafting, gathering or buying supplies once again. A journey lasting fourteen hours to reach a goal is no different, conceptually, than fourteen hours of grinding to make gold, or upgrade your Relic weapon or some other goal.

 

Or...that's if I'm reading things correctly after waking up. I bet I totally am.

 

What is true is that difficulty shouldn't be necessarily linked with time (even though learning complex, 'hard' things takes longer), but with the effort/time ratio.

That's why grinding mobs is not difficult: you are applying little effort, but the ammount of time units required to overcome it is large.

I guess that's why many people, including developers, keep thinking that a hard thing is anything that takes a long time. Then we are stuck with simple mobs with eight times the HP they should have and sillyness like that.

 

Though we should note that 'difficulty' is incredibly relative since, once you learn to overcome it, it becomes easier. Then all you have left is how much time it takes to complete the task.

Maybe a bit incorrectly, but not that incorrectly.  I just decided to pick up a quick way to do it.  In fact, I'm somewhat disappointed by MMORPGs consistently making the worlds small and/or empty, but I'm more disappointed by the way MMORPGs handle travel.  It might be an element of modern design, getting people as quickly as possible to the next vignette, but the core element of great fantasy isn't the goal, it's the journey.  That's why Lord of the Rings was so great, getting to Mordor was a great adventure, it in and of itself was a place of no return, and the ring falling into the Crack of Doom was the culmination of the journey.

 

It just seems to me that towns are too numerous, the world's not dangerous, and all we're doing is traveling from cell to cell of quest objectives.  Travel is just a time sink in between quest and quest, not an interesting diversion where sometimes you run right through something random you didn't know would be there.  Do you run through, say, the raging battle happening along the road you were traveling or do you know a pass through the caves nearby, which might have its own issues.

 

We can handle this with modern technology.  The harder part would be handling the NPCs in a more organic way, where animals might cover wide regions or bandits might move from place to place.  However, I'd rather have server resources allocated to making a world unpredictable and dangerous and my drive space used to cover a massive, organic world.

 

I've got ideas on how things like this might work, and I'd say most gamers do as well.  But basically, it's too easy to get from A to B.  It kind of ruins the idea of having an open, living, breathing, persistent world when it actually plays like pages in a book.  Traveling shouldn't be an inconvenience or a time sink to be shortened, it should be, at the very least, a major part of the point.

[Zyrusticae]

Welp, MMOs have just been ruined for me forever.

[video=youtube]

(Skip to 10:20 if you want to see an amazing city)

[Naunet]

Even their test server can't handle loading everything at once. That doesn't bode well for the general populace.

 

[edit] Regarding the city, impressive and all, but I'd be willing to bet you can't enter any but a very few buildings. Would love to see cities in MMOs that actually feel like cities instead of constructed facades. GW2 is as close as I've ever seen get to that.

[Ignacius]

Even their test server can't handle loading everything at once. That doesn't bode well for the general populace.

 

[edit] Regarding the city, impressive and all, but I'd be willing to bet you can't enter any but a very few buildings. Would love to see cities in MMOs that actually feel like cities instead of constructed facades. GW2 is as close as I've ever seen get to that.

That might be due to the rather limited scope of games as it relates to cities.  I mean, we want huge cities that feel like they live and breathe, but we don't necessarily need them.  I mean, what exactly do we need buildings for?  We don't actually need to represent the dwelling of every person that lives and works in the town (though that would be awesome in an MMO, a la Fable, for everyone to have to go to bed, lock up shop, and hope the guards stop you from robbing the place).  Outside of that, we don't often need legal representation or to visit a government sewage office.

 

I can think of a game that would and could need that, but even I'm thinking that's outside the scope of today's probability, to need to break into the sewage treatment offices to steal plans or plant bugs in order to access the sewers for another break-in later.

[Clover]

Very nice video! Black Desert has very nice graphics and atmosphere. However, I don't find this landscape video and the city displayed any more or any less impressive than Bless Online. In fact, both games look very similar landscape wise.

 

I just hope that cities will be truly alive. By that I mean I'd be happy just being able to sit on benches or chairs, and having nice spots like taverns or restaurants, FFXIV style. FFXIV's cities might not be very big, but they definitely are full of wonderful spots and details that make me able to enjoy them like no other MMORPG.

[Naunet]

Playing the need vs. want game is a bit silly. We're talking about video games. We don't need anything, but there's a lot we want. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting things.

 

I just love being able to go inside buildings. I get a thrill every time I find an enterable building. One more potential setting for rp! FFXIV has a lot of enterable buildings, but not in their cities. Two of the three cities in XIV don't feel like cities so much as... a cluster of market places and pathways. I mean, where the heck to people live in Limsa? There's not a single place where you could conceivably point and be all, "Yup, that's a home."

 

Obviously we don't need enterable buildings. I've used the balcony outside Ruby Road Exchange numerous times as a pretend stage for an inn room. We've used the building out in Highbridge as a stage for a Brass Blades office that's supposed to be in Pearl Lane. There's a little hermit house in La Noscea that we've used as a stage for a character's home in Limsa. In TERA, one of our characters owned a medical clinic, and frequently we just stood at the corner at the edge of the street where we'd decided the clinic would be and just rp in party chat (or sometimes /say, which got entertaining results). We've pretended the empty, probably never-to-be-used "housing" areas in Velika were jail cells, and psychotherapy rooms, and multistoried mansions, and inn rooms.

 

Obviously pretend is a powerful thing. It's still nice to be able to go inside buildings, and it is frustrating when you're walking around in a city but all the doors (if there are any) are impenetrable.

[Zyrusticae]

FYI a lot of those buildings can be owned by players as housing (and converted into shops). So yeah, enterable.

 

Also just saw this on Facebook and had to share it:

[Ildur]

That sounds awesome and incredibly tiresome. Then again, I think that's a sandboxy game, so things might not be as terrible as they'd be in a themepark.

 

Maybe they'll be more terrible...

[Naunet]

Haha yea. On the one hand, points for realism. On the other hand, minus a whole lotta points for massive inconvenience.

[Clover]

I'm not sure I like that system, unless armour isn't too stat dependent. As if farming a single set of good armour wasn't enough, will we have to farm for several sets just so that we can be well dressed at any area of the map? ;

 

Game still looks very interesting and I'm definitely playing it, in any case.

[Ignacius]

Playing the need vs. want game is a bit silly. We're talking about video games. We don't need anything, but there's a lot we want. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting things.

 

I just love being able to go inside buildings. I get a thrill every time I find an enterable building. One more potential setting for rp! FFXIV has a lot of enterable buildings, but not in their cities. Two of the three cities in XIV don't feel like cities so much as... a cluster of market places and pathways. I mean, where the heck to people live in Limsa? There's not a single place where you could conceivably point and be all, "Yup, that's a home."

 

Obviously we don't need enterable buildings. I've used the balcony outside Ruby Road Exchange numerous times as a pretend stage for an inn room. We've used the building out in Highbridge as a stage for a Brass Blades office that's supposed to be in Pearl Lane. There's a little hermit house in La Noscea that we've used as a stage for a character's home in Limsa. In TERA, one of our characters owned a medical clinic, and frequently we just stood at the corner at the edge of the street where we'd decided the clinic would be and just rp in party chat (or sometimes /say, which got entertaining results). We've pretended the empty, probably never-to-be-used "housing" areas in Velika were jail cells, and psychotherapy rooms, and multistoried mansions, and inn rooms.

 

Obviously pretend is a powerful thing. It's still nice to be able to go inside buildings, and it is frustrating when you're walking around in a city but all the doors (if there are any) are impenetrable.

I meant more that the cost/benefit analysis in game company's heads isn't going to pan out for us at this particular moment.  I used to love the Park district in Stormwind in WoW because that's what it was.  Just a bunch of buildings based on the templates for an inn and a couple shops.  That place was RP central.  I was a bouncer twice a week at an inn in the Park for a year on Thorium Brotherhood.  And we actually made money doing it!  I got paid 50 gold a night back when 50 gold was worth something.

 

The Cataclysm destroyed the Park.  It was a great idea though.  God only knows why Blizz felt the need to get rid of it.  Maybe it was the feeling that they'd have to either provide those areas in all major cities or get rid of Stormwind's, and RPers just aren't a big enough chunk of the playerbase.

 

As far as games go, though, there's a difference between having a few enterable buildings (as there have been) and having EVERY building in a massive city be enterable and often have something in it.  It'd be great to have if we could afford it in terms of system resources, but the reason we don't have many games like that is that there's not much payoff in terms of gameplay that you don't get out of creating a mass and bump mapping a few doors in.

 

I can think of a few, though.  You could get a Fable/Assassin's Creed thing going on where the people who work in shops need somewhere to live and often their families stay home.  You could break into those buildings and steal from them or even perhaps purchase property (although hard-coding the livable spaces in a city might be a bit counterproductive at a point when the lack of player housing is becoming a relatively major issue even for non-RPers).

 

Another issue might be that most buildings in a major city aren't residences and aren't entertaining, they're just boring.  A populated building in your city might be a local office park.  While IT consultants are an important part of any city and you'll find their office spaces in a great many buildings, in the game world, what buildings will see frequent use?  Weapons, armor, et cetera.  We don't need a great variety of food choices, but (speaking as a man living in Columbus, OH) probably 1/4 of all the places I see on the roadside are restaurants.  Carson St. in my birth city of Pittsburgh is the most amazing place in town, seriously just block after block of knocked out bars.

 

There can be times where you might need those things, though.  I could think of a way to have shifting stock float around so that when you go shopping, you get, say, all the "auction house" items in shops and have to literally shop around for good deals.  You wouldn't know where they were.  Or, you could have a game with a lot more going on in it.  Or you could also give players supply quotas from those places, meaning you could be getting your "quests" from those stores and thus it would be better to have them exist.  Mimicking a real supply chain, in a way.

 

In the end, I think you'd definitely see that more except for one major problem: MMORPGs, so far, have been very country-centric.  In essence, town is a safe place to get gear and relax before you go back into the "game-world", meaning outside town.  Real towns at the scale you're talking aren't meant to be stopping stations, they're meant to be lived in, worked in, and relaxed in.  I think you'd get a lot more mileage out of cities that size if they were more the setting rather than a stopping shop.  We're thinking like Midgard or New Seattle size metroplexes where having every building be habitable and useful would be a distinct advantage.

 

Which, in the end, doesn't sound like a bad idea.  I'd love to see the game where city is setting.  Any MMOs like that around or are they all doing the windswept vista thing?

[Zyrusticae]

That sounds awesome and incredibly tiresome. Then again, I think that's a sandboxy game, so things might not be as terrible as they'd be in a themepark.

 

Maybe they'll be more terrible...

Haha yea. On the one hand, points for realism. On the other hand, minus a whole lotta points for massive inconvenience.

I'm not sure I like that system, unless armour isn't too stat dependent. As if farming a single set of good armour wasn't enough, will we have to farm for several sets just so that we can be well dressed at any area of the map? ;

 

Game still looks very interesting and I'm definitely playing it, in any case.

The thing you have to understand is that gear is not intended to be permanent in this game. It cribs off of EVE Online where everything is designed to be easily made and easily replaced (and most of it is player-made goods, too).

 

There will be no mega-uber max-item level gear in this game, it simply isn't that type of game. Or rather, even if there are such items you have to weigh the risk that comes with it (if you lose such an item obviously it'll cost you a lot more than if you just used something standard and replaceable). Again, using EVE Online as an example, there are officer and deadspace modules which have a very high 'meta level', but using such items only gives you a marginal benefit and makes you an absolutely massive target for PKers.

 

Themepark MMOs (of which FFXIV is one) have driven into players this idea that all gear will stay with you until you find the next great piece, but it wasn't always this way and, honestly, I don't think it should be this way. In the real world a lot of what we have is disposable - it only makes sense that our games should mimick this in some fashion as well.

[Naunet]

So wait, is Black Desert doing the whole "someone PKs you and takes your stuff" and/or the whole "if you die, you can lose your stuff" dealio? Interest gone.

[Lost River]

So wait, is Black Desert doing the whole "someone PKs you and takes your stuff" and/or the whole "if you die, you can lose your stuff" dealio? Interest gone.

 

The game still looks awesome; but sadly, idiots (of this MMO generation) tend to ruin PvP open games due to "lolfag, die" and such.

[synaesthetic]

I've always said the best way to make an MMO with a vibrant, thriving economy is to make equipment fairly easy to come by, but make sure that when it breaks, it actually breaks and can't be "fixed."

 

The best idea that I've had to solve the usual gear grind vs. consequences argument in any MMO (though this applies to themeparks in particular) is to disjoin equipment from "stats."

 

Take this hypothetical: you have clothes, armor and weapons that you can equip and use, and these may allow you to do something and give a logical bonus. The big bonuses, though, would come from intangible things like setting talents and skills or acquiring "mods" which stand in for the idea of "gear" as a themepark MMO views it.

 

This way you wouldn't ever need a vanity system because the concept would be superfluous and irrelevant; your clothes are mostly cosmetic. You'd get a suit of chain armor and all it'd have is a defense modifier. To get bonuses to your raw stats and derived stats you'd need to take passive skills or find mods that you can link to your character.

 

You get a sword, and it lets you do sword attacks. You can set active sword skills and use the sword to perform those attacks. You can set sword mods to make yourself more deadly with a sword (for damage-dealers) or more defensive (for tanks). But all the actual sword, on its own, lets you do is hit people with a sword and use sword skills. Then you get into incomparables--i.e. the weapons are all zero-sum, balancing speed, accuracy and power together to cancel out. You use mods (rather than gear) to "get positive."

 

Rambly post is rambly, but the idea is that you could make a system in which gear is both desirable and easy to obtain, and a world where everything is essentially a consumable item. There's a real easy way to do this, too; simply give all items hitpoints and whenever the hitpoints reach 0, the item is broken and suffers penalties, and if the hitpoints reach some negative number, the item is destroyed and can't be repaired. The more damaged an item is when it is repaired, the more maximum HP it loses. Eventually the item can't be repaired further and can be discarded, sold as junk or recycled for raw materials to build something else.

 

You could even "have your cake and eat it too" by creating legendary weapons that can't lose maximum HP, but cost a lot to repair (as they're magical, exceptionally-crafted artifacts that only a few master artisans could possibly maintain) and make these drop from some big fuck-off dragon. Then you'd have both the whole "get loot and feel good about it" bit. You'd save your legendary sword for fighting those big fuck-off dragons, but use your normal sword for dispatching random highwaymen.