ZeniBot, I wouldn't necessarily call that proof that the Bethesda formula cannot work in multiplayer as much as I'd call it proof that the fanmade multiplayer for Morrowind is unfinished. (Of course, I'm a
little biased.)
- Players could damage the game world by killing NPCs, stealing from shops and making quests impossible to complete. The compromise would be to make these NPCs immortal but in multiplayer all that really lead to is more grieving as the NPCs would leave attack mode and thus couldn't be interacted with. The server opted for making items and NPCs respawnable but it just resulted in more grinding and a lot of duping.
It makes sense to have dead NPCs around if you're playing in coop and your friends are trigger-happy. Of course, you seem to be talking about public servers, and I agree there should be better options there. What do you think about making town NPCs unattackable instead of respawnable?
- There is no economy in the game and so the majority will just steal items in order to make money, rendering Questing rather pointless except for those OP items that can't be stolen. Most of the systems in the game go unused.
Part of that is caused by guards not chasing down all the players because the multiplayer AI isn't finished. As a result, stealing is easier than it should be.
Still, what would be the most appropriate solution? Perhaps making it impossible to sell stolen items?
- Spellcrafting would result in Goku like characters flying around spirit bombing entire cities. It was funny the first time we saw it, but after the 50th time it got old. Bethesda doesn't get how to design for Multiplayer because they just rely on the player character being OP as some sort of ego fantasy. Sure Morrowind is an exception because the spell crafting was OP. But imagine this being applied to Skyrims shouts and AOE spells, it'd still be bad even with the nerfs.
It's possible to add stringent limitations to the spellcrafting. It will kill some of the fun, but it makes sense for balancing.
- Lockpicking meant that player housing was out of the question because people would just steal your shit anyway and everyone would buy a level 100 unlock spell which resulted in redundant skills.
Server scripts can completely prevent other players from interacting with the items in your house, or even prevent them from entering your house, so that's a non-issue.
The Unlock spell does make the Security skill a bit pointless. I suppose it could be removed from sale, or allowed only in weak versions.
- Its like you give everyone a heap of choices in different skills but in the end only 1 or 2 are actually worthwhile and everything else is shit. As such every character plays the same none of the player characters are unique because every skill is available. (this is why MMOs have classes!). Fallout 76 tried to deal wit that by putting in perk cards but that's a stupid way to deal with it, it would've been better to do what Star Wars Galaxies did and allow the player to elect skills via trainers this would fix the issue because then you've got a select skill pool and cannot just learn everything.
Maybe we could add a severe penalty to your ability to increase the skills that don't belong to your class, while also doing some balancing?
- There is no reason to play with other players, there is no reward for it (see Fallout 76).
I've been thinking that player-run factions and quests given to you by other players could solve some of that in a future update. Ultimately, though, you do need to be in a sociable mood to get much out of it.
- Once all of the quests have been finished by a player the world feels really empty. There is also nothing for the players to do after the quest content is done.
That's where the countless already existing landmass and quest mods are supposed to come in. I think it's something automated mod synchronization would mostly solve.
- None of the enemies are balanced for multiplayer (same problem System Shock 2 had with Co-op) As such playing with other players feels too easy, I've noticed Fallout 76 also has this issue from the look of it.
Setting the difficulty higher the more players there are should help with that.
- PvP sucks because eventually people start enchanting their armour. Once you get to that point all their damage is nullified. PvP played like I was fighting someone with god mode on. I see Fallout 76 also has that issue.
Not sure what the solution would be. Maybe boosting PvP damage, or putting strict limits on armor enchantments?
- Fast travel and teleportation rendered the whole point of this game being an open world redundant and as such the only places you'd find players was in Balmora. Every other town in the game was a ghost town.
I mean, it is a tiny fanmade project where everyone can run their own server instead of being forced together on a single server, so I'm not sure how many players you can reasonably expect to have around in any given town on any given server.
However, I suspect being able to see other players on the world map would alleviate some of this. Right now Balmora is used more as an agreed-upon meeting place because that's where players spawn by default and you don't really know where they are otherwise.
The biggest problem I see with their format is that its a lot of work to take it from Singleplayer and make it work Multiplayer.
Well, it depends. It works reasonably well in coop with friends, which is its originally intended game mode. Making it work properly as an MMO-like is something that has never received any official focus, but I can imagine a number of adjustments – some of them mentioned above – making it viable for that.
Morrowind was redeemable because what it lacked in game it made up for in style.
Now that we have an open source recreation like OpenMW around, I like to think we can keep the style and improve some of the more obviously lacking parts of the gameplay.
