Revolutionizing Fantasy MMORPG

bigdogchris

bigdogchris

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With the announcement of The Elder Scrolls Online, a lot of gamers and journalist have commented on it being "just another fantasy MMO".

My topic of discussion is what do you think needs to change about current fantasy MMORPGs in order for a new game to feel fresh, in this industry? I like the genre and do not want to see it die, but understand why some people may think it's time to go without for a while.

For me, I think that in order for a fantasy MMO to be fresh to the industry that it needs to better bridge the gap between solo and group players. I've never played a solo friendly MMO where the grouping feels satisfying. That's where I would start.

What would you do?
 
Less repitition. All MMORPGs are stuff full of fighting the same 5 enemies a million times.

Then have some kind of flimsy text based plot which has no bearing on the world around you if you complete or don't complete it. Would be nice to be in a changing world with more variety and less grinding. All MMORPGs have it way too much.
 
Less Western European Feudal Kingdom(tm) settings dear fucking lord

I'd kill for say, a fantasy MMO primarily set in the Asian steppes and/or Persia + the Middle East.
 
it's too late

Ascherons calls, EQ and ultima online were the deepest mmo.

When Brad Mcquiad tried to do something different, players and the press revolted.

it's too late. What halo and COD did to FPS is what WOW did to MMO.
 
ikarinokami said:
it's too late

Ascherons calls, EQ and ultima online were the deepest mmo.

When Brad Mcquiad tried to do something different, players and the press revolted.

it's too late. What halo and COD did to FPS is what WOW did to MMO.
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I agree. Ever rising development costs mean that everyone is going to stick to the Copy - Paste MMO's. There isn't much innovation out there atm. Every company smells $15 a month, but feel as if they can't deliver unless they copy WoW.

As long as there isn't innovation, every new MMO will be a copy of the WoW formula. Unless there is innovation, WoW will never die and continue to be the gold standard by which new development studios will study and copy their formula. As long as they keep copying and WoW lives on, consumers will get turned off to the genre as they've been there and done that. The WoW clones will continue to go F2P, and we'll keep playing until the free month runs out then find another fix.

Personally I found Skyrim to be boring so I'm not even remotely interested in this train wreck that's about to occur. I can imagine trying to play this future XBOX port with KB/M on a pvp server. I despise the Skyrim controls and can't only cringe at trying to select skills in a timely manner. The possibility of FAIL is strong with this title. I give it a 90% chance to disappoint.
 
Falling Anvil said:
Less Western European Feudal Kingdom(tm) settings dear fucking lord

I'd kill for say, a fantasy MMO primarily set in the Asian steppes and/or Persia + the Middle East.
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I'd say the exact opposite:

No more asian grind mmorpgs please. Hate the art direction, hate everything about asian inspired mmos. Stop with the 14year old, huge eyes, short skirt look already, it's embarrassing.

Please make a decent mmo in a medieval setting of europe without fairies, without goblins or orks and just make it resemble the times with knights, traders, jesters etc. Give it factions (or even nations) with real borders that can have feuds, have wars, have tournaments etc. The setting would be as in the "Thief" series or think "Darklands" from Microprose back in the days.
 
PVP is great, but people will bitch more about it being in the game than being left out. PVP will never be balanced, and every game developer has some stupid idea that it should be. It should not, and developers need to realize this. The sad thing is, EQ may have been the best at this, because they focused purely on the pve content and PVP was basically left alone.
 
Falling Anvil said:
Less Western European Feudal Kingdom(tm) settings dear fucking lord

I'd kill for say, a fantasy MMO primarily set in the Asian steppes and/or Persia + the Middle East.
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I would agree but there are enough Asian Fantasy MMO's floating out in the ether as well.

We need an entirely NEW approach to MMO's that doesn't mean "WoW" all over again and again and again.
 
ikarinokami said:
it's too late

Ascherons calls, EQ and ultima online were the deepest mmo.

When Brad Mcquiad tried to do something different, players and the press revolted.

it's too late. What halo and COD did to FPS is what WOW did to MMO.
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You are correct! GW2 developement team talks about the holy trinity...well those three games were the HOLY TRINITY OF MMO's and they were all fantastic. Combine the best aspects from each and you have the best MMO to date. You can improve those three games and modernize them without losing their greatness. I think its HILARIOUS how all 3 of those games still have servers up and running over 10 years later. How many MMO's have we seen die after 6months, 1,2,3 years?

In regards to Brad Mcquaid, Vanguard wasn't finished. Nothing kills new MMO's faster than an unfinished product.
 
Andrew_Carr said:
I hope they use the Gamebryo engine for it too. That'd be awesome.
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Could have a feature called "crash" which would just start off happening all the time once youd be playing for 30 minutes or if you were lucky when the game loaded. It's not full of bugs, it's a feature! :p
 
Ditch the contrived theme parks and go back to making ONLINE WORLDS again. MMOs started off as really great niche products and it all went downhill when WOW made a shit-ton of money.

Even ignoring the online world aspect and looking at the gaming aspects of the older games they were SO much more complex. Pop the hood off Dark Age of Camelot and there was a wealth of stuff to learn about the combat. Just basic stuff like weapon penalties and bonuses depending on the damage type versus different types of amour, or the knowledge that 2-handers were hard to parry, dual wielders were hard to dodge, etc, etc. You don't get any of that kind of detail in MMOs today. You're lucky if a game has something simple like elemental resistances.
 
Make the gameplay fun and intuitive which, speaking just for myself, I can't say any MMO I've sampled has met that criteria.

The price structure. Get real. $50-$60 to buy the game and how many dollars a month after that? No way. That's got to go away. Again IMO.
 
I had the most fun in WoW during BC doing the Isle dailies. We would end up forming a raid group to PvP. Battlegrounds get boring and pointless, because you just respawn, but it's more fun to kill someone, and teabag them while they walk back to their corpse. There should be better rewards for protecting your city, and better rewards for taking over enemy strongholds and what not. Instead of separating the PvE from the PvP and in effect almost making two different games, someone needs to make an MMO that's focused on world PvP and less on questing and grinding.
 
Amaroth said:
In regards to Brad Mcquaid, Vanguard wasn't finished. Nothing kills new MMO's faster than an unfinished product.
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Vanguard was a pile of crap when released, but I did go back like 1.5 years later and play the game and it was quite good then. I was one of the first people in the closed beta and it did evolve quite a bit, but was rushed into launch by probably at least 6 months. It was a shame that the game didn't release like that, because I could have seen it doing quite well. But games that are crappy at launch are always going to have awful populations no matter how good the game gets.

I currently returned to EQ recently with the Free to Play conversion and have been pleasantly surprised. The game still has an addictive habit for me, and it being free has been a blast to go relive some of the glory days of my youth.

I am hoping that EQ Next as it's code named will actually live up to the hype. I am sure it won't, because SOE cannot seem to get their heads out of the asses, but I can still hope lol. New MMOs lack depth. Although I wouldn't dream of making a game where it takes 1 year played time to reach max level (play project 1999 if you want this), I do find it stupid to make it so a casual player can be max level in 1-2 months max.
 
[F8];1038694169 said:
I had the most fun in WoW during BC doing the Isle dailies. We would end up forming a raid group to PvP. Battlegrounds get boring and pointless, because you just respawn, but it's more fun to kill someone, and teabag them while they walk back to their corpse. There should be better rewards for protecting your city, and better rewards for taking over enemy strongholds and what not. Instead of separating the PvE from the PvP and in effect almost making two different games, someone needs to make an MMO that's focused on world PvP and less on questing and grinding.
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Knight online. I played that for a little bit with the usual people I play games with. Was before WoW and had huge battles every few days (it was more than 200 people I think) at a set times on a special battlefield. There was one for the lower level players and higher levels. You fought to kill the commander (NPC) of the opposite team.

When one side lost, then the opposing team world became accesible open to the winner, through special insavion points. They could all flood the world (you'd have to fight the normal enemies there too). Killing someone in either stage gained you 50% of their money until the timer ran out and everyone was taken back to their world, or the capital was taken over. I'm sure that gave you something special, can't remember. Pretty much the point of the game was gearing up for the giant battles. You could also become ruler of the realm or something.

There was a central area where you could cower and hide from the battles, but it only had low level enemies and was meant for level 1-10 people or something. Later there were seige battles I think.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Knight online. I played that for a little bit with the usual people I play games with. Was before WoW and had huge battles every few days (it was more than 200 people I think) at a set times on a special battlefield. There was one for the lower level players and higher levels. You fought to kill the commander (NPC) of the opposite team.

When one side lost, then the opposing team world became accesible open to the winner, through special insavion points. They could all flood the world (you'd have to fight the normal enemies there too). Killing someone in either stage gained you 50% of their money until the timer ran out and everyone was taken back to their world, or the capital was taken over. I'm sure that gave you something special, can't remember. Pretty much the point of the game was gearing up for the giant battles. You could also become ruler of the realm or something.

There was a central area where you could cower and hide from the battles, but it only had low level enemies and was meant for level 1-10 people or something. Later there were seige battles I think.
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Knight online has the best pvp system of any game i have every played but the rest of the game is the worst of any mmo i have every played. I have yet to understand why no one has tried to copy the pvp system they have.
 
[F8];1038694169 said:
I had the most fun in WoW during BC doing the Isle dailies. We would end up forming a raid group to PvP. Battlegrounds get boring and pointless, because you just respawn, but it's more fun to kill someone, and teabag them while they walk back to their corpse. There should be better rewards for protecting your city, and better rewards for taking over enemy strongholds and what not. Instead of separating the PvE from the PvP and in effect almost making two different games, someone needs to make an MMO that's focused on world PvP and less on questing and grinding.
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agree completely, and I want people to be able to take my stuff if I lose and me theirs'.
 
ikarinokami said:
it's too late

Ascherons calls, EQ and ultima online were the deepest mmo.

When Brad Mcquiad tried to do something different, players and the press revolted.

it's too late. What halo and COD did to FPS is what WOW did to MMO.
Click to expand...

So much said in so few words. Sadly we will not get these types of games anymore because developers don't see money in it.

We will continue to get games on similar UI's, similar engines, similar gameplay style and zero depth with NO world interaction :(.

That was my favorite part of EQ and AC. You felt like you were in the world, as geeky as that sounds I miss the music, world and randomeness (and the horrible travel times) of EQ. I don't care that it took me a few days sometimes early in the game to get somewhere, if I had fun getting there what does it matter I didn't make lvl 50 first?
 
ikarinokami said:
When Brad Mcquiad tried to do something different, players and the press revolted.
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You mean, when Brad went absentee during development due to a drug problem, and the dev team ended up having 15 months to push out a 5 year project with no leadership, the players and press revolted. It didn't fail because it was different.

Vanguard was probably the worst loss to the MMO scene ever, because what was there, even in its incompleteness, would have been great. It is still up and running, even if rather abandoned, and is going free-to-play this summer.
 
For me it's all about the combat system. After having played a number of MMOs over the years starting from Asheron's call, they all felt the same. It was all just "sticky" targetted attacks where you press a hotkey (usually 1 - 9 , +/-). It was not real time at all. And this just really annoyed me on a fundamental level. It felt unnatural and robotic. Of course, now you have games like Tera and Darkfall which use a real time combat system like you'd find in an FPS game. I'm glad to see this revolution.

Yes, I realize back then there was no where near the high speed internet infrastructure available, but still.
 
I would love to see an MMO with a real "economy." Limit the amount of stuff that's available from vendors and the like. Good equipment would be the stuff made by the players. I.E. instead of looting a '+30 meat cleaver of profound insights' or some shit, you'd get generic weapons and money.

You'd then either take the generic shit and break it down for materials, harvest materials, or whatever other mechanic you have in place. And then either craft it yourself, or pay some other player to do it for you.

That would give players a real reason to go out and do things. The path to better gear would require a lot more effort than current games do, but only in terms of time spent collecting the necessary resources to obtain the items required.
 
spugnor said:
I would love to see an MMO with a real "economy." Good equipment would be the stuff made by the players.

You'd then either take the generic shit and break it down for materials, harvest materials, or whatever other mechanic you have in place. And then either craft it yourself, or pay some other player to do it for you.
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RIP SWG(2003-2004)
 
Harkamus said:
For me it's all about the combat system. After having played a number of MMOs over the years starting from Asheron's call, they all felt the same. It was all just "sticky" targetted attacks where you press a hotkey (usually 1 - 9 , +/-). It was not real time at all. And this just really annoyed me on a fundamental level. It felt unnatural and robotic. Of course, now you have games like Tera and Darkfall which use a real time combat system like you'd find in an FPS game. I'm glad to see this revolution.

Yes, I realize back then there was no where near the high speed internet infrastructure available, but still.
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Coming from Asheron's Call you should know that their PvP was some of the best. You could at least dodge spells, projectiles, and melee attacks. Terrain would also block those very same attacks. That was 1999. We are just now seeing modern MMO's get with that program.

Spugnor, you can't get real economies anymore. You don't spend enough time at any level for crafting to matter, everything is BoP now, and loot drops are always better than crafting. I think Ashron's Call did crafting and the economy right. Crafting got you the best items in the game. It was easy to get the materials but you had to have some serious luck to land the best enchants, and then tinker it up. The customization you could do on the weapons/armor was insane for that time. What you ended up with was a real currency (pyreals/notes) and then a barter system as well. People complain about grind, but AC had a level grind and it was DAMN REWARDING to level up.
 
Amaroth said:
Coming from Asheron's Call you should know that their PvP was some of the best. You could at least dodge spells, projectiles, and melee attacks. Terrain would also block those very same attacks. That was 1999. We are just now seeing modern MMO's get with that program.
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My favorite thing to see today is people asking "what is the inventive to pvp?"

Used to be if people were red they were f'ing dead.
 
Nothing better than looting someones gear because a death item wasn't available.
 
bigdogchris said:
MMORPGs in order for a new game to feel fresh, in this industry?
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Drop levelling, but find an alternative. For instance, I used to play Runes of Magic, and instead of levelling you could perhaps use runes to improve your abilities as well as your equipment.
 
1. Action/player skill oriented combat, no more fucking hotbar/auto attacking, it's old, outdated.

2. Get rid of Theme Park Worlds. Worlds do not have to be designed as "theme parks" like EQ did, and WoW does, basically where you are "led" by the hand through the world, from lv 1 to endgame being told exactly where to go, what to do, where you are penalized for exploring (go into a higher lv zone at a lower lv, you can't explore unless you want to die over and over).

3. Trinity needs to die, nothing is worse in mmo's then having the entire game designed around the "Trinity" class focus, The Healer/Tank/DPS. You do NOT need this focus for people to group, PLENTY of people grouped in UO without this.


I honestly think if they made an Ultima Online 2, stuck strictly to how Ultima online was pre trammel days 98-99) and was backed by a AAA publisher and people gave it a try (IE Ex-WoW/current WoW players) that they'd see how vastly differetnt mmo's CAN be and used to be.

BAck when I started playing mmo's, We had Ultima online, with it's huge open sandbox world, COMPLETE player freedom, you could rob other REAL players, you could loot things off people you kill, hell you could actually kill other real players. The game felt the closest to "The Elder scrolls" as an mmo could be, everything you can do in TES you can mostly do in old UO, stealth, stealing, killing anyone (even Lord British was killed lol).

Then there was EQ, which was quite different to UO. It started what we have mostly today, the "theme park" design, the trinity class focus, however it was far far far harsher in many areas, you died and you had to go find your corpse to reclaim it. The "grind" was notorious for being extremely hard in late levels. You wanted to travel you had to do it in real time, use actual boats that you'd get on and they'd take you tot he place.

Then there was Asherons Call. It was a bit inbetween them, it did some things of it's own as well. One of the things that Asherons call did the best, that even to this day NO other mmo has done were it's monthly "updates."

ASherons call felt like the only mmo that was truly "dynamic." The world didn't stay the same as it does in almost any mmo aside from crappy shitty " holiday" crap that you get in WoW. They actually did small things, such as the weather changing seasons (IE One morning you'd login, see snow gently failing in lush green town you were near. Then login that evening, the snow was falling harder and the snow was actually settled on the ground/trees/buildings) then they had major updates that would actually advance the storyline of the game. Imagine THAT! An mmoRPG that actually has an evovling story that they didn't just charge you for in an expansion! A few examples I remember where this giant black spire things that showed up in the skies, hovering over cities, and new "Creatures" int eh wild that came from them. Then they even had a major Hero of the world appear in game, fighting a boss. It was epic.

Now if these three games could be so different, and ALL THREE were popular int heir day/successful, why can we not have this today? Why does EVERY AAA=backed mmo have to follow the "wow" style of game? They don't, just the stupid suits that control developers think "WoW = the m ost popular mmo, so if we want success we should make something similar" (the same way many fps games are modern military shooters these days).

Personally for me, I think someone needs to realize that mmorpgs don't have to be definied as "rpgs" at all. MMO's can be ANYTHING.

I would personally LOVE to see an old western mmo. Not an rpg in the sense of most things, but one where combat relies on true player skill, full aiming/hit detection. The ability to setup player towns like in UO, make your own house, do everything you could think of, from being an outlaw (being able to rob stage coaches, trains, banks, steal cattle, etc), to a sherrif, to a bounty hunter, to a blacksmith, to running a salon, to gambling at said salon, running your own farm with animals you sell to make money, etc.

Where the world is completely open for players to play how they want, good, bad, everything in between. You kill players? Fine you can do that, however you get a bounty on your head, players can then hunt you down and claim said bounty.

The MMO market is the most Untapped market in gaming imo, not because no one knows about it, they certainly do. It's untapped because publishers are too scared to branch out, to understand that "mmo's" do not infact HAVE to be rpgs and can actually be about any genre you want, Alliance anyone? That was fun when it lasted, way too ahead of it's time.

Sorry I went on a long ass rant, to sum it up, mmo's need a change, the main things that need a change are combat, the "trinity" mentality and the world design/quests focus. They need to make combat itself FUN, where people actually PLAY THE GAME BECAUSE IT'S FUN, not because "my friends play it."
 
^^^ You make a lot of good points



Anyways, I've always wondered what an MMO would be like that openly allowed script PC actions (yes, botting). No grinding! You could script a miner to mine, a lumberjack to chop wood, or have your Knight train on a practice dummy. Granted sword skill gain is faster if you're fighting live. People scripting too much? Attack the miners and plunder their resources. But miners may hire guards.... or hire other people who bot guards. It's all in the economy.

And now how the money is made to handle any extra server load ... you can only have one actively working/training character per subscription. Yes, you know some will pay for any army of accounts! And you don't have to even have your computer connected to bot. Just upload the code to the server and let the servers do all the work. You can shut off your computer for the night, knowing your fella is going to be busy.... that is if no raider finds you... did you pay the guards?

When scripting for crafts, mining the same piece of rock won't yield diminishing returns. You'll have to move around the mine or maybe relocation to another mine. Some mines/forests will be better than others... and those lands with excellent resources will be the ones people make alliances to conquer. War!

Don't know how to program worth beans? Just google a code snippet and use it! Maybe learn how to tweak the code... or trade services for better scripting code from a mate.



Funny thing... most of this was pretty much in UO, if you played a free shard that allowed scripting.
 
evilsofa said:
You mean, when Brad went absentee during development due to a drug problem, and the dev team ended up having 15 months to push out a 5 year project with no leadership, the players and press revolted. It didn't fail because it was different.

Vanguard was probably the worst loss to the MMO scene ever, because what was there, even in its incompleteness, would have been great. It is still up and running, even if rather abandoned, and is going free-to-play this summer.
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Yep. Vanguard was fucking awful and was like a poison to the MMO scene.
 
Stiler, yup. We never had it so good when playing Asheron's Call. The monthly content updates were just freaking awesome and as you said it really evolved the entire game world almost in real time. I loved having snow on the ground during winter irl. You actually got your moneys worth. I hope one day Turbine will do Asheron's Call 3. AC2 failed because it didn't follow the firsts formula and improve upon it. Asheron's Call also gave you complete freedom with class specs. Mages in plate armor :) Oh and player/guild housing open to the world that wasn't instanced! What a concept. All done in 1999.
 
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Amaroth said:
Stiler, yup. We never had it so good when playing Asheron's Call. The monthly content updates were just freaking awesome and as you said it really evolved the entire game world almost in real time. I loved having snow on the ground during winter irl. You actually got your moneys worth. I hope one day Turbine will do Asheron's Call 3. AC2 failed because it didn't follow the firsts formula and improve upon it. Asheron's Call also gave you complete freedom with class specs. Mages in plate armor :) Oh and player/guild housing open to the world that wasn't instanced! What a concept. All done in 1999.
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Actually about that housing thing, Aion actually just barely added non-instanced housing. Granted, you need a ton of money to even place a bid on the houses, but I thought it was kind of cool. One of the only "modern" MMOs with non-instanced housing (though they do have small personal instanced "studios", much like apartments).

But generally, I agree with everything Stiler said. MMOs are stagnate, and have been for the last 6 years or so, all due to WoW and its influence.
 
Asheron's Call had instanced housing in their game in the form of apartments. They had apartments, houses, villas, and mansions. Each had a monthly maintenance cost and were finite. There were some serious mad sprints by players when certain real estate became vacant. They allowed for storage and decoration. It was awesome to be roaming the landscape and to come up on a neighborhood or a beach side villa. Games like UO, EQ, AC make me jaded towards modern MMO's.
 
The combat system does need to be a little more interactive. Less button mashing and mix more FPS skills into it. GW2 is a step in the right direction with some of their abilities (like dodging). These type of games are not RPG's and never will be, they should have some more action elements in them.
 
they really havent been RPG's since UO, EQ and ascheron's call. the last one with strong RPG elements was SWG before the "fix".

th RPG stuff got in the way of what Blizzard calls "fun" and since Blizzard has carried the day, most everyone has chosen to follow.
 
I would strongly disaagree with charaterizing EQ as the theme park. First the zone sysem enabled each section to be extremely detailed. Secondly in the begining, it felt most like a real world. each town felt complete and had distinct features and functionality.

thirdly you were most certainly not led by the hand in that game, OMG were you never. that was one of the most flexible games ever, there were so many zones and places to level. it was impossibe to level and fight in all the zones in eq, because there were so many choices. the choices were really only limited once you got to 45 plus before the expansion and you were limited to two zones, lower guk and seb, but the expansion ROK fixed that. the best expansion of all time by the way. they dont make them like that anymore.
 
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