In which I may be done with MMOs

I stopped playing at PoP for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. I’d be even more interested if it locked at SoL since I didn’t even like PoP.

Is EQ still pretty much a game of grinding? Does this have any of the new conveniences like not having to max sense direction?

Oh yah, there is a ton of modern convenience. No more corpse runs, no sense heading (there is a compass at the top of the UI), maps, quick regen out of combat…/mel for bards so no twisting…there is a quite a long list of improvements if you haven’t played since the sense heading days.

As a general rule of thumb, anything that got added to the game as an upgrade/quality of life, and not specifically for an expansion is more or less in. There is some wiggle room on that, but it’s a guidline.

I thought I was done with MMOs a long, long time ago and just recently was attracted by what I’d heard about Albion Online. I guess it’s what they call a ‘sandbox’ MMO; no quests and virtually everything player farmed and crafted. It’s still in beta and launches in July with supposedly one final wipe. Anyway, what I like about it is that it doesn’t have bleeding edge system requirements; anything but. It’s the old isometric; no first person. It’s big; really big. I like to explore. And it’s all in on a single server a’la Eve. Also there’s full loot PvP toward the end game but you’re very safe early on when you want to be; again like Eve’s space security. It’s geared toward end game Guild v Guild, taking territories, forming alliances, what have you. Hard to explain the leveling system, what they call the Destiny Wheel but if you’ve got the time and motivation you are not locked out by taking and advancing on any path of weapons, armor, or crafting. ‘You are what you wear’ and are judged by the quality of it; 8 tiers in all I think.

The biggest downside, as always, are the people. All I want is an MMO without other people is that so much to ask?

Ever tried Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning? Very much like an MMO but in a single player game.

Albion looks interesting. Another that I’m waiting to see if Crowfall. The only time I play WoW any more it seems is in the month or 2 before and after the release of a new expansion. I should jump back in to GW2 and spend more time with it.

God damn so would I. We’re so weak.

No way, Jose. Roll Dark Elf Necro!!!

Long live Haytred Incarnate.

I miss EQ. :(

i mained a gnome necro. I didn’t realize it at the time but it was a close to a faction dream as possible, at least for a necro.

I reinstalled EQ and logged in for a bit tonight. Man, I just can’t do it. I never really liked the ‘new’ interface. The graphics in the old zones are really looking their age. I’d think if the progression servers but they require a sub. If I’m going to pay for a sub, I’d probably just keep WoW or SWOTOR going.

I loved EQ for what it was back in the day. I remembered why when EQ2 came out I actually preferred it a bit over WoW at launch. The new EQ2 progression server coming out this month is almost enough to make me think of subbing.

I’ve got a lot of good memories from EQ, but I’m just not sure I can go back to it.

The only MMO i spent any significant time in was DAoC and it was due to the PVP. Have not had an experience like that again. But i stopped trying…I refuse to fall into that addiction again. I spent way too many hours playing and posting on guild/class forums when not playing.

Miss my Warden and Valewalker, though. And late night/early morning relic raids.

I consider MMOs a lower class of entertainment. They are rarelly “good”. A MMORPG is generally in all aspects inferior to a RPG except size.

But I play MMO’s when I feel that ich. I think the reason we play MMO’s is because we are humans, and a human is a social animal, we like to hunt with other hunters.

Theres also something to say about the richness of a experience. Singleplayer games are very rich very detailed worlds handly crafted by a artist or many. But they are closed world, all you can learn or experience from a RPG is from the start, they don’t evolve or can teach you anything that was not already in the box. MMOs have people, and by interacting with people you very life can change, potentially. It generally do nothing, but can be.

So I think the conclusion is MMORPG are bad games that call something on us, and contain people and have potential to be worse or better than solo games, generally they are less than solo games.

All MMOs I tried bored me to tears after a few hours. I don’t understand how people get addicted to them.

It’s the social and teamwork aspects of the games that are the real draw for me, and the newer MMOs just don’t hold up for the most part, as they are generally second rate solo questing adventures. Albion is different, and interesting, and I have high hopes for crowfall and camelot unchained, as they both do things differently than the standard questing MMOs.

If they are able to set their systems up so that I can play with my friends instead of being limited by levels/content, that’ll be another big step in the right direction.

If they set the world up so that teamwork yields rewards, like taking and defending resource locationa a’la SB mines, that’ll be another good step.

I think there’s room for MMOs in the world, but I’m just not that interested in the ones we’ve been getting for the last decade or so.

Yeah, I’ve seen that happen in some other MMOs too - it’s usually to do with “autojoin” features, they do tend to make PUG-ing convenient, but too impersonal. It doesn’t capture the social aspect quite.

Similar for GW2’s brave attempt to get some kind of casual-social thing going - those events where everyone would rush together to do the thing. It had a certain echo of some of the old-style MMO social habits, and it was kinda fun, but it didn’t quite reintroduce the sociality in the way that I think the developers might have hoped.

Again, hearkening back to CoX, there was no autojoin (not until much later in the development of the game, anyway), you actually had to build a team “manually”, but somehow the way the game/UI was set up it was incredibly easy. In the first place, PUGs had a well-defined “leader” position, and the leader had some hiring and firing responsibilities and capabilities that others in the team didn’t have. There was an easily-identifiable list of people who had flagged themselves up for teaming, they had quickly-identifiable icons for what “class”-equivalent they were, it was quick and easy to fire out a bunch of private tells, there was an alert tone for private tells that was distinct from the alert for someone saying something in the team, so you could easily respond to any responses on the side, while chatting with the team. Just … etc. SOMEHOW it was really easy to do, SOMEHOW everything clicked to make it easy to form PUGs just by chatting to people. PUG-building was fast, so fast that you could guarantee to be playing with other people within a few minutes of logging into the game, either as a leader or as a joiner.

Another neat thing was that everyone could see all the missions everyone had, so you could have a little discussion about what mission to do next out of all the missions everyone had - again, just a small part of the strange synergy that Cryptic had (probably accidentally, in view of their seeming to forget everything about all this with their later games) set up.

And what this resulted in was “ship of Theseus” PUGs that would last for hours, dropping and picking up people as they went, doing instance after instance together, maybe ending up with only one or two of the people who had originally joined. (Even the leader who’d initially formed the PUG could drop out - and pass the leadership “star” to someone else in the team, after a wee discussion as to who might be up for it - again, another little opportunity for conversation, as with the initial forming, the mission list, etc.)

I’ve never seen that kind of casual-social gameplay repeated in any MMO since, yet it would seem to me to be the ideal way to have an MMO that both has a mass appeal AND manages to foster social gameplay at the same time.

(Comparing and contrasting with Vanguard, which I played a while after CoX - it had a similar “manual” way of forming PUGs, superficially actually quite similar - but something about it was just clunky in comparison to CoX’s system, so one tended to use autojoin instead. WoW’s system for team-forming too, it was clunky in a different way - and of course if it’s a toss up between clunkiness and autojoin, it’s human nature to go with the autojoin.)

I think this is one of those cases where the synergies necessary are really subtle and delicate (maybe even down to seemingly irrelevant things like the colour and size of icons) - and CoX hit an elusive sweet spot in its way of PUG-forming that developers have never managed to duplicate.

I think even the way the gameplay was pitched made PUG-ing enjoyable. For instance, the “classes” were well-defined, so you actually needed at least one of each in your team, and each class had one or two spectacular “neat tricks” that could turn the tide of battle for the team, and wow everyone else (e.g. dps toons had a massive, room-clearing “nuke” on a long timer, cc toons could lock down an entire room maybe once or twice in a mission). There was a difficulty slider, so the team leader could pitch the difficulty right for the team (i.e. if everyone was experienced, at level or above, whack it up to invincible, if there were some newbies in the team, lower it a bit to give the newbies a chance to do some actual damage, etc.), but also the general spawning in missions was somehow just right so that there was a balance between steamrollering some bits of content, and having occasional bits where you’d have some difficulty, but nothing so tricksy that new players could fuck up so badly as to embarrass themselves. Plus, no loot, so no contention and bad vibes (although that’s a different argument).

And finally, it was rewarding to play in PUGs, marginally more rewarding enough, in terms of xp, that people wanted to do it.

The sense of casual camaraderie in being in a PUG that moves from mission to mission together, dropping people and picking people up as it goes - that’s what you really want in an MMO that’s both casual AND social, IMHO.

WoW killed the social aspect in a number of ways, that were meant to be “improvements”.

  1. Cross server grouping. Meant to cut down on wait times to get groups, real result, with a huge player pool and no real “server community”, people just became faceless bots, never spoke, etc. You never ran into the same people twice, or very rarely. This also all but eliminated server reputation, which is an absolutely huge part of the MMO experience. MMOs that have specific closed servers, develop their own soap operas, complete with villains and heroes.

  2. Everyone capable of solo play from level 1-max. Still the single biggest thing that killed the MMO in my opinion. Socializing sort of has to be forced on most people. If you can keep to yourself, most people will. Lets face it, grouping with people is often a real pain in the butt, but it’s essential to forming friendships, and running into those people you click with.

  3. No real penalty for failure. You died? Who cares, you really didn’t lose much except some meaningless gold. When actions have no consequences, they quickly become meaningless. I have very often, especially in the early days, felt an actual sense of fear in Everquest (when it still had corpse runs). That fear created excitement, something that is absolutely 100% missing in WoW.

Those three things, are all something the player base cried about, and insisted they wanted. The end result of this, is that people don’t make friends or enemies. Both are actually important to a good MMO in my opinion.

WoW has always bored the snot out of me, from day one. The only exception to that, was group PvP over mumble. For a period of time I was in a pretty fun PvP guild, and that actually had some excitement to it, once again, largely due to the friendships and not the gameplay.

The thing with the EQ Corpse runs is, they were legendary for the wrong reasons. 8 hour corpse runs in Fear were not uncommon. I remember grinding some levels in Dalnir’s crypt and even with the necro invisiblility having some crazy runs.

I get there should be some punishment for dying, and the current standard is a little too easy, but I’d never want to go back to EQ’s corpse runs.

Everyone has an opinion. To me, MMOs have some of the best combat game play anywhere.
I’m not drawn to MMOs for the social aspects, or guilds, or even story. I enjoy the PVE combat and leveling up, gearing up, etc.

Some of my favorite times in gaming:

  1. Quad-kiting as a Druid in EQ
  2. Group killing as a Frost Mage in WOW.
  3. Multi-boxing in WOW, EQ, and EQ2.
  4. Almost all of the zerg killing in Black Desert Online
  5. Mission running in EVE.

None of these are replicated in regular RPGs. Sure, the story and quests can be superior. I’m still a huge fan of all things RPG, but don’t discount MMOs.

There are a ton of people that push developers to make MMOs more solo friendly too. I get why some people say they should force the social aspects, but I’m one who disagrees. There’s nothing wrong with having solo game-play available in a social environment. I like to compare to what others are doing with their class or gear, or how they take on certain challenges. I also like casual conversation with people while playing a game. That doesn’t mean I want to spend my evenings in groups or dungeons with them.

My ideal MMO would be if someone made a game where I could control multiple characters (not multi-box) and fulfill several roles myself, while still having guild chat and other socials elements available (auction house, crafting, etc). There was one called Granado Espada a while back, but it had too many other issues.

There was a MMO in development maybe seven or eight years ago that allowed you to create a party where everyone but you was NPC’s. Part of the game play was hunting for tokens that allowed you to generate different types of NPC’s. So you could have a party with you and a healer, and a tank, etc. It was some sort of Greek Pantheon, you are the son of a God, etc. story. I got into the alpha or beta for it but it was fairly underfunded and I don’t think it ever launched. Or perhaps it came and went without making much of an impact.

Right after I posted this, I remembered the name. It’s called Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising.

I really liked the idea of the game, if a new one of this type came out, it might actually be enough for me to get interested in MMOs again.

I was in the initial alpha/beta for Gods and Heroes : Rome Rising. It was ambitious, and the warband system of completing quests/challenges/etc. to obtain tokens to add new NPC characters to your camp was really cool. You could collect as many NPCs as you could find and afford, and then select from one to four of them (depending on your level and other quests you had done to unlock an increase in followers) from your camp to travel and fight with you. Best of all, you could group with other PCs and their NPCs, in effect creating a small army of players and NPCs to take on larger threats. When it was working as intended (which wasn’t often in the early beta) it was like having a large raid, but only needing 3 or four actual players to pull it off.

The developer, Perpetual, was also developing a Star Trek MMO at the same time, and when money became tight, they stopped all development on G&H to focus on Star Trek. This was long before Kickstarter. Eventually Perpetual went under, selling STO to Cryptic studios and abandoning G&H altogether. Years later Heatwave Interactive obtained the rights to G&H and attempted to rebuild the game. I was lucky enough to get into the beta once again, and I thought Heatwave seemed to be doing a slow but steady job of making G&H playable again. Unfortunately, Heatwave too had money issues, and they were forced to release the game to retail long before it was anywhere near ready. Of course it failed, even after transitioning to a $10 one-time purchase / F2P thereafter model. It didn’t help that Heatwave seemed to spend far more time trying to tack on player housing to the game than in updating the graphics or gameplay.

End result was that Gods & Heroes : Rome Rising was a fantastic concept ahead of its time doomed by two developers neither of whom ever had the resources to properly see the game’s vision through to completion. Today a game like Gods and Heroes would probably be a lot easier to make, but the demand for MMOs has passed. The idea of creating a mercenary camp of available NPCs, choosing a handful, and then grouping with other players to complete content and compete would probably be a great idea for a MOBA-like game now, rather than a true MMORPG.

This is why I love this forum. There is always someone here who has seen it, played it, reviewed it, and sometimes even programmed it or designed it.

I like the idea of what they were doing, it sounds very outside the box.