What you two are railing against isnt the ordinary person being stupid - frankly, I resent that implication. While it may not suit you, it suits plenty of others, leading to whats going on in the industry. Its market forces, that has driven the industry to where it is today. Push and pull and what sells, and what doesn’t.
What you want, you will not find in the established developer / distributor areas, but in the indie field. An indie MMO that is successful enough to create new market directions is unlikely though.
Read what you’re responding to, before you accuse people of calling others stupid. I’ve said nothing of the kind.
In fact, I made it a point to include clarification - because I know it’s a common misconception.
Casual means nothing except casual. If you want to know what I mean by that word, you need only look a few posts above.
As for the rest of your post, my point is - exactly - that the MMO segment is changing.
It’s a very special genre, because it has invited casual gamers with open arms and turned them into… A new breed.
Let’s call them non-gamers who spend A LOT of their time gaming. That’s not so uncommon in itself, as lots of non-gamers spend hours and hours playing Mahjong and similar games.
But the MMO genre is different in that it’s not really casual at the endgame. Not in the traditional sense. It’s changing, I suppose - but it’s very demanding if you’re not really interested in mechanics or investing yourself in the experience.
That’s NOT a derogatory statement.
Also, it’s obviously not the case for all casual gamers. Some don’t spend much time playing at all - and some have actually become enthusiast gamers who care enough to invest themselves and commit to the rather extreme demands of high-end raids, comparitively speaking, and such.
So, the gist of my point is that there’s a time-limit on this kind of themepark design. It’s no longer enough, even for the masses. I don’t see it, anyway.
That’s a load of crap. I’ve been gaming for 30 years, I simply don’t enjoy the forced group model. It caters a small subset of people with either nothing but time on their hands and can wait for groups to form or who have established set groups of people to play with. I don’t fit either model, so once UO had run its course I tried and rejected the EQ/DAoC/Asheron’s Call games, all of which rigidly limited solo play. The WoW model succeeded because it was better, for both casual and hardcore gamers.
Whether you like it or not, the next generation of MMOs is going to be created to make money, not recreate failed models. See Vanguard for a great example of a game trying and abjectly failing to succeed by recreating an Everquest-style world. I had to accept that old school UO is dead and buried as a game play mechanic, you guys will have to do the same. Neither model makes money like an open and easily accessible game like WoW or SWTOR.
Yeah, I fail to see why “forced grouping” is a feature at all.
The reason single-player and dungeon/raid finder models seem on the rise is that IMHO, quite simply, people just want (ideally) to play the game whenever they want and without extra bullshit like having to schedule gameplay or wait hours spamming “LFM for Whatever” in chat.
Plus, with forced grouping, a developer puts their customers’ experience at the mercy of the “community” and/or guild leaders: for example, if a player sucks, a developer is still interested in having them play because they pay, but most people wouldn’t be interested in grouping with him.
uses the ‘that is a Argumentum ad populum fallacy’ card
Well, if you use popularity has what define what is good or not, you must be ready to accept McDonalds has the best food, Justin Biever has the best musician ever, and so on.
If you don’t want to interact with other people, why do you play a MMO? Why not play a single player rpg (which is going to be better in every way except having multiplayer)?
You don’t see people playing team fortress 2 and then complaining because they have to be on a team.
Given the infrastructure costs and continual maintenance involved with any MMO, they have to make money, wouldn’t you agree? That means that what’s popular matters, and what’s unpopular is going to have a hard time being used as the model for a new game. You want forced grouping imposed on everyone. I want a game with no pk switch, where a gang of pkillers can swoop down on your group, kill them all in five seconds and take all of your gear. Neither of us is likely to have the game they want, because they aren’t popular models.
Really? We’ve been over that 1000 times here by now - Some people like to be able to choose, some like the idea of MMO’s but mainly adventure alone due to lifestyle, choice, akwardness what have you.
Its the new way to play MMOs, as can been seen in the market trends.
Other prefer the oldschool way of grouping, but really, not much content in modern MMO’s that require, or even encourage it.
Team Fortress is a competetive game, thus not the same as you quite well know.
Because MMOs are persistent, so you feel that the work you put in your character isn’t “wasted” as the game ends, like it happens in single-player games, and there is a remote server that certifies that your achievements are genuine, so you can compete in that respect even if you play solo.
Also “not wanting to play in a guild” and “not wanting to spend hours spamming trade” is very different from “not wanting to interact with others”.
Personally, I like to play with other people, but I strongly dislike putting in any work to organize that or being bound in any way by social ties in a game. So, I’d like the game developer to provide me with other people to play with without any effort on my part other than playing the game well.
I want to interact with people as I see fit to do so, not be blocked because there’s no groups available or I didn’t get in with the right guild. WoW is a game I can solo in, but I’ve kept with it for so long in large part because I found a comfortable guild with familiar “faces”, so to speak. WoW lets us enjoy both solo and group based play. SWTOR seems to following a similar model. Both are worth my time and money.
Here’s the problem. Once players begin to bump into interesting content that they can only do in groups, players will start to resent the game if they feel this content is locked for them. So if the game design is primarily one of group content, you’re going to lose all the players who for one reason or another are not able to get in groups with any regularity.
You can see that with a game like Warhammer where the public quests are a fail because you’re often the only player there to do one of them. The designers made it as easy as possible to group for those and yet it’s still content locked to most players because it’s impossible to get a group going.
I’ll disagree about WoW. I don’t think Blizzard got lucky. I think they looked at EQ and saw the things that players didn’t like and removed those – long times to med for mana, death penalties, slow leveling, etc. I’d argue the opposite – Verant got lucky because they launched EQ at a time when there was a modest curiosity about a graphical MMO and there were no other options besides UO. And then after launch there was a lot of social stickiness in the game. People stayed in the game not because they loved corpse runs but because their guild and their friends were there.
There is a difference between people who want to do both (solo when they feel like it, group when they feel like it) and people who never want to interact with another player under any circumstances. The second seems to be becoming more and more common.
I actually fall in to the first. I am playing SWTOR now and i solo or group with a single out of game friend 90% of the time, but I also enjoy doing group content every so often too.
Single player games have achievements now if you feel the need to extend some electronic badge of… honor. Single player games also have no monthly fee while being vastly superior in every way other than multiplayer.
You can do stuff in mmorpgs without spending any effort at becoming organized, just like you can in real life. What you cannot do is expect to be as effective as people who do organize, just like real life.
People who put more effort in to organizing, thinking and strategy are always going to do better than people who don’t in group activities. Unless you force people to be in random group, this will never change. This is not something specific to the mmorpg genre or even gaming itself.
Yes, this is actually the exact same position I hold. I just think it is silly that people expect a pickup group of random strangers setup by the game to compete with an organized group of focused individuals who have a strong interest in the advancement of the whole. I’ve always thought that desire to do well/attention was just as important as general skill or knowledge. Even the best player with the best equipment will not do well if they are only half paying attention during a fight. This is something pickup groups of unrelated strangers completely lack generally. Why should i care about these people I will never see again beyond the direct benefit to me they are?
I played starcraft 2. I just played it for the single player and yet i didn’t go complain on battle.net that there is a strong focus on multiplayer.
I’ll semi agree but also disagree with you. Blizzard did get lucky but they also effectively exploited the wave to make mmorpgs more casual friendly. They saw that the modern mmorpg was changing and so they jumped on the bandwagon. In no way did they create this trend though or make major innovations to the genre (ok, i admit official support for UI mods was a major innovation but other than that…), but they did (very) effectively exploit it.
Anyway for me, i like single player mmorpgs somewhat, but they can never hold my attention for more than the starter month because they can never compete with single player rpgs even before i start thinking about the higher cost. If i’m going to be paying a monthly fee there needs to be “something” extra that makes up for the current limitations in the mmorpg genre. This “something” has generally been “social elements.”
Yes, this is actually the exact same position I hold. I just think it is silly that people expect a pickup group of random strangers setup by the game to compete with an organized group of focused individuals who have a strong interest in the advancement of the whole. I’ve always thought that desire to do well/attention was just as important as general skill or knowledge. Even the best player with the best equipment will not do well if they are only half paying attention during a fight. This is something pickup groups of unrelated strangers completely lack generally. Why should i care about these people I will never see again beyond the direct benefit to me they are?
Well, the idea of a matchmaking system is that you would be strongly encouraged to do your best, because otherwise the next times you will be grouped with crappy players, and you won’t be able to kill the boss on the hardest difficulty and progress.
Instead, if you prepare and play perfectly, you’d eventually get to play with the best in the world, and get matching progression.
Anyway for me, i like single player mmorpgs somewhat, but they can never hold my attention for more than the starter month because they can never compete with single player rpgs even before i start thinking about the higher cost. If i’m going to be paying a monthly fee there needs to be “something” extra that makes up for the current limitations in the mmorpg genre. This “something” has generally been “social elements.”
For me I don’t care that much about social ties, although it’s kind of nice to play with other people.
The REALLY good thing of mmorpgs is that heroic raiding is the hardest kind of “adventure/RPG gaming” available, and progress really feels meaningful, and is publicly displayed on a scoreboard.
By comparison, all single-player RPGs are ridiculously easy and progress in them carries no prestige/achievement traits, because the focus there is mostly story and presentation, and not mechanics and challenge, and being able to actually finish the game is always taken for granted, while it is not so in MMORPGs.
The only thing that is similar to MMORPGs in that respect are online permadeath roguelike games (e.g. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup played over the Internet), which however achieve their difficulty in a very different fashion.
City of Heroes showed that an alternative way is possible. Some mysterious synergy in the way that game was made (proabably accidental, seeing as Cryptic totally cocked the social aspect of Champions Online) allowed for a social game for casual players.
IOW, perhaps it’s not that people want to solo in MMOs, perhaps it’s that old skool nerd developers have unconsciously equated “casual” player with “solo”, and “grouping” with “guild”.
In CoX in its heyday, a huge chunk of players PUG-ed as a matter of course - it was by far the most sociable (of not stricaly “social” in the old skool sense) MMO I’ve ever played.
Yet it was heavily instanced.
Yet it was casual.
So yeah, it wasn’t much of a virtual world in the nerdy sense you’re talking about above (which I agree is a strong founding tradition of the genre, and I agree it’s in some ways regrettable that it’s fallen by the wayside), but it was a virtual place where people could play together, chat together, and have fun together, day in and day out, for years.
I think it was several things:-
UI very easy for the eye, ergonimically, etc. Just simple, but highly functional (right down to two tones of beep, one for incoming tells and one for team chat - dumbly simple yet extraordinarly effective and easy on the brain for a stressed leader, to help him carry on looking for people while chatting to the team and keeping everyone appraised of events).
Combat itself - just the right sweet spot between hard and easy. Hard enough to have some meat in it and to have some headroom to excel, but easy enough and forgiving enough for newbies to tag along without the risk of cocking things up too much for the rest of the team (and, again, easy enough for “knowledge” to be passed around about any tricky bits). IOW, PUG-ing wasn’t such a traumatic experience as it can be in other games, so it was a fun alternative to soloing for innately social but still only casual players.
NO LOOT. I’ll say that again: NO LOOT. For ever such a long time, CoX had no loot. This was something that led many people to predict the game’s early demise. Also, perfunctory endgame, and not much added over the years. No loot, and no endgame - how weird that a game could survive without those two things, eh? But perhaps these lacks were part of the synergy that led the game to survive? (I agree, not excel - CoX was no WoW, for sure - but perhaps another game that built on CoX’s strengths could do better?)
Strong reliance on alt-ing, and with an incredibly flexible character creator that allowed you to dream up your own characters, with a build system that was (again) not too complex, but complex enough to excel at with a bit of research. So alt-ing was “moreish”. (It’s also extremely moreish in Champions Online, but CO lacks some of the other elements that made CoX great.)
Difficulty slider. The benefit of this is obvious - if you’re a hardcore player or group, crank it up, if you’re a roleplayer, leave it at “Heroic”! Also, you get a sense of progression from being able to gradually get to the stage where you can crank it up to “Invincible”. Part of the charm of CoX was how the “conning” was really obvious (the reticules were well done), so one’s progression meant eventually “being able to confidently beat Purple mobs reliably, so long as you’re paying attention”
Easy, transparent mission completion whether grouped or solo - e.g. if someone clicks a glowie, it counts for YOUR mission. But this was totally transparent in a way that some games seem to fail to be able to do.
Being able to instantly see what missions other members of the team have available. This is partly a UI thing but it deserves its own mention. Part of the sociable aspect was that everyone could discuss what mission to do next (“Oh look, Bob’s got a mission in this zone, let’s do that”).
Sidekicking and Exemplaring - again, another obvious one, that many other companies have tried variations of.
Now, having said that, going back to the virtual world thing - something, or some combination of things, eventually killed some of CoX’s charm. People have proposed several obvious candidates, but I think it’s the various forms of instant travel that eventually got into the game. See, during the “golden years” of CoX, you still had to travel, using your travel power and the train lines, THROUGH THE CITY, to get to an instance. It took a bit of time, sure, but not a prohibitive amount of time, and in that time, people chatted and played with emotes; and meanwhile, if you were getting to a mission, you had a sense of moving through a virtual world (albeit at superspeed, or flying). I think giving so many instant travel forms away as goodies is a subtle thing that diminished CoX quite a lot - certainly diminished what sense of virtual world CoX did actually have for a long time.
What I mean is, ok, teleport is a Good Thing for teaming if everyone’s yomping around on Shank’s Pony, but given the superhero thing, and the fact that you have to have a “travel power” in a superhero game, the early development phase was right in not giving away too much instant teleportation, in forcing people to USE their travel powers to get around.
Anyway, yes, I think it bears more investigation. It’s more than a lobby/arena, yet less than a virtual world, but it’s a good compromise, I think, between the two.
And as I say, the key is, not to think of casual players as automatically wanting to solo. Give them a chance to casually team, and be sociable, make it easy to get into, yet enjoyable (if not exactly hard) to master, and you have a game design that somewhat avoids some of the issues about MMO design that people are going round and round in circles with.
