Decline Why do MMOs suck so much?

[KeighnMcDeath]

I mainly wanted to point out those Korean esports and cyberCafes. Holy fucking hell. I guess Cyberpunk2077 is there. Jesus. I bet covid fucked with a lot of that.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

not going to watch.
i thought we always knew it was because chinks like their stuff to be repetitive to death, their graphics silly and their chara design pro-pedo.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ok! How about THIS!

 

[Jadeite]

A virtual world, which would seem to be the ideal of an online RPG, is very hard to create. For now I'll exclude the thought of graphical games from consideration. Even taking a text MUD (RPI, enforced role-playing, permanent death, character approval), what are the problems? Well the main one is that in life we do not choose who we are. So one idea is to randomize our characters. Unfortunately with the very low population of most of these games, the outcome of this may not make a compelling world. If I can nap, get up, get a bite to eat, listen to music, etc. here, why would I go in a virtual world to do it? So these are always struggling against inertia. Another option is for the GM to offer only premade characters, but then you are acting in a play; the imaginative element is removed from it.

Games as UO which presented the possibility for virtual world elements but didn't enforce them, may be the best middle ground, but the trouble is 1) the developers will likely change it to earn more money or be more fashionable and 2) without some compulsive leverage they can't compel people to stick around. The peasant types that an online world needs to stick around absolutely hated it, because under the free for all system, they got the short end of the stick. UO came very near an actual caste system on a large scale. The bottom caste didn't like it, and now they're playing World of Warcraft at level 300 summoning comets that do 9 million damage. They didn't want a virtual world, but an easy game that made them feel good, with a chat room attached to it.

So a virtual world, or good online RPG (one and the same really), may be impossible to make. Maybe the best simulation of reality is... reality. Second Life may be a good simulation. You sign on and strike up a chat with someone, or you could go to your local supermarket and strike up a chat with the clerks, etc. The outcome may not be appreciably different. The tendency in both Second Life and online RPGs has been on one hand to ramp up the sex and the other to ramp up the violence to 'extend the enjoyment', but both of these are patently ridiculous and pathetic (we can agree to disagree). Early computer RPGs were very good simulations of what we are speaking of here. If that's not good enough, maybe it's time to step outside a bit, rather than trying to concoct improbable scenarios to entertain yourself.

The requirements for an online RPG to be 'good' are so incredibly hard to come together, and they continue to increase as we become older and more finnicky, that maybe we had better set them aside and play the game of life instead. Even in the perfect storm of UO in the 90s, I think the failure of Origin (or Electronic Arts, was it?) to enforce a naming convention would have annoyed me to no end. How can I be a serious character when there are people with insincere names running around me everywhere? So RPI MUDs get many things right, it's just that they will always be competing with inertia, for the players time. They want to simulate a medieval economy, but this is very hard to do with only 5 players logged on concurrently.

One last thought I had, is that an RPG like Everquest could have been designed around a story, but it would have to have permanent death to reinforce the seriousness of it. Rather than expansion packs, they would create new stories, and when the last story ended there would be a player wipe. This is the kind of thing that would be amazing to play. But I doubt it would ever happen. Think of a game like Might & Magic I, where you try to unlock the secret of the story. I've never seen anything like this in online RPGs, so probably impossible. Diablo comes closest, but it's too linear, and there's no permanent death. The quest should be VERY HARD.*

*Yeah and come to think of it, Everquest wouldn't even make aggressive monsters outside of the front gate, without permanent death. I forget the subscription model. So yeah it's all about money as others said. It would be very possible to make a good MMORPG. It just can't happen. A much harder and more confusing version of Diablo II with permanent death (and different combat of course) is what I'm thinking of. But the entire game would change when someone completed it. Nothing would be repeated. Oh and puzzles and exploration. Lots of it. In any case it would take a lot of work to prevent the greatest problem I see with this, which is overcrowding. And then places would have to 'respawn' for other people, but not while the previous ones are in there (or while someone is coming in behind them). Collision detection would prevent a lot of things, but then you need guides watching out for people abusing it to grief others. So make PvP free for all (which I had never discounted), but then you're back to UO, and you'd hear the same crying I think and lose all the players.

The main obstacle to creativity in MMORPGs too is the cost and time it would take even to make one in two dimensions. That's why MUDs are so important, but I've never seen or heard of anything like the above on a MUD. First you need lots of players, which MUDs don't have, a way to convince a substantial number to play when they might die permanently (till they create another character), someone willing to redesign the MUD every time someone completes the story, etc. etc. etc. The only MUDs with permanent death I know of, other than a few easy ones, are RPI MUDs, where combat with monsters is very hard and dangerous--one wrong move and you're gone forever. But the character approval process weighs these games down heavily, and the non-combatants are very wary of easy character generation, since they don't want to die. But an RPI MUD definitely has the best PvE I've ever seen in a online game--incurable poison, sandstorms, darkness, swarming, bleeding, deadfalls into monster dens, etc.

 

[Jadeite]

Ha, this is right down my alley of things I love to feel miserable about. I'm not going to claim MMOs are awful, which would be silly considering how many people enjoy them, or that modern MMOs have zero interest to me, as I do enjoy some aspects of them at times. However...

Like many RPG players of a certain age, I was already dreaming of MMOs before they happened. Pre-Internet, like. Yes, yes, I know, dark, dark days... I'm not sure what happened first then, but I remember Meridian 59 as one of the earliest I got to try and it felt magical. Absolutely magical. I knew nothing about that world, but seeing the other characters played by human doing their thing was incredible. And where classic games had static behaviours encoded for NPCs, here I could ask people for help in killing that giant centipede (yes, giant centipedes, M59 was... special...) or shout and point at the known murdered in town and see the other characters run towards the foe. Mind blown.

Then, it was Ultima Online. And this was the dream come true. Ultima was my big favourite franchise, thanks to having started with Ultima 3 on my Apple //c, and Ultima7 BG/SI rating as some of my all-time favourites to this day. UO promised to be like an online U7. Take my favourite world, add player agency, pump that up with player-run economy, it was going to be everything I ever dreamed of. Well, that and a girlfriend, tbh. Dark, dark days... And then, it happened. At first it was insanely great. I could roleplay as a beggar and make a living out of wandering the streets and chatting with other players and relying on the generosity of high rollers and the unsafe purses of others. Fishing and cooking was a thing and with food requirements, someone had to do it. Activities, no matter what they were, were valued.

But it wasn't long before UO faced the obstacle that would pretty much kill the dream of putting RPG into the MMO: gamers. I soon had to face the fact that most people in the game didn't care for the RP part of RPGs. They were never here to be someone else, to play out a dream, to have a giant pen-and-paper session without a DM. They were here to loot, min-max numbers, and destroy anything that could be built. Economy got wrecked, pvp out of control, and the turning point happened: rather than spend a lot of time and effort in fixing that (and I'm not saying I've got any magical recipe myself), they folded. They launched Trammel. And that's when the dream died. This was the turning point when the game stopped being this awesome playground for roleplaying, and became a glorified fantasy-skinned chatroom with minigames. PvP became consensual. Pickpocketing forbidden. Food requirement was dropped. Other players suddenly became optional NPCs. You didn't need them anymore. Everyone suddenly played their own game with an optional coop option.

And that has been the dominant template ever since. And in fairness, I can't blame the developers. This is what the vast majority of gamers want: a safe space where they can increase stats and play dress up without having to rely on anyone else, and social features tacked on to increase stats and play dress up in a group. The old RPG player in me is sad about it, but my dream was always a niche thing. It won't happen because gamers are gamers, and anonymity doesn't bring out the best in people. If it can be broken, it will, and designing a game that will work around that seems incredibly difficult. Kudos to the EVE developers in that regards, it's possibly the biggest player-driven sandbox around and seems to still be going strong.

Anyhow, MMOs these days are something else, and something that plenty of gamers enjoy. It's not my place to tell them they should know better. And I've learn to enjoy the chill experience that is the safe MMO space over time (had a lot of fun exploring Middle-Earth with friends in LotRO), as well as the lovely madness that is faction-based PvP (LotrO again, GW2 these days). As far as I'm concerned, MMOs don't suck, they're just not what they could have been. And it's our fault: we can't be trusted.


tl;dr: gamers happened.

Yeah I never played UO but this was my understanding what happened from reading and playing MUDs at the time (which were like it). An online RPG without fighting of other players is strange. Most people are off the mark here if they aren't repeating that. Everquest was bad, very bad. All. you. do. is. fight. The entire concept is screwed up. It's McDonald's. There was only one good large online RPG, and that was UO. Nobody was running gambles with hundreds of thousands after that. UO is anathema to the masses. Online RPGs began and ended there.

 

[Jadeite]

WARNING: View video in incognito or delete history after so you don't get recommendations for this cunt's videos

***Cancer thumbnail warning***

Spoiler

I want to invest 365 days played into a game and have zero regrets.

That's what's wrong with MMORPGs; a huge number of their playerbase actually feels this way and there's a split between sane people who play games for a hobby and crazy motherfuckers who actually expect a game to be engaging for thousands of hours.

There must be a psychological disorder that describes people who can even conceptualize spending 365 days played in one game and having zero regrets. Like, even thinking that it's a legitimate possibility is a sign of something very wrong, but devs spend time catering to these people instead of actually making the game fun.

I spent a ton of time in Everquest and World of Warcraft when I was young. It's not a psychological disorder, it's the difference between youth and old age. I wouldn't wonder MMORPGs are so popular, I had no scruples playing them when I was young. For one thing I didn't appreciate how sad it is when the only thing you can do in the months and years you're playing a game is kill things. I think if young men were able to see this the industry might be quite different. When I log into a game that purports to entertain me for hundreds of hours and the first thing I'm holding is a weapon I shut it off. When you go after something with a weapon you shouldn't expect entertainment for more than a few minutes, and even if you get out alive bleeding and broken bones are not fun. I think the industries have been making violent games without end since '85, however the first violent MUD of the EQ style was likely DIKU MUD, in the late 80s, before that they had mostly been social or adventure games.

 

[Jadeite]

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

 

[Nikanuur]

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

But isn't Everquest the same as all others? Just people talking it's different but in reality the same, as for example the Warcraft is similar to AoE? I mean are there any really different things like real exploring, awarding paying attention, meaningful non-combat related content and/or skills, story that doesn't suck rocks out of the mud pool for sustenance, branching quests with different approaches or no respawning mobs and fetch 10 quests?

 

[Jadeite]

A few simple things.

First, no one wants to play a "dead" MMO without people around. The model only works when there are lots of players on all the time.

Therefore, you must make a game either so good or so addictive that people don't want to stop playing it, just to keep your population stable.

Very few games can actually be good enough to keep someone playing for 2000 hours.

Therefore, unhealthy Skinner box manipulation tactics are in essence required to maintain ultra long term player interest. These techniques can make a very addictive game, but not a good one.

Very little in the universe of MMORPGs is not steeped in the legacy of DIKU MUD, those tongue-in-cheeks games from the late 80s and 90s that college kids played, where they could kill the smurfs and go on quests to recover The Lost Ark. They were parodies, they were jokes, they were degenerate. Ultima Online is the main one in question when one thinks of good online RPGs, though I am sure there are many derivatives today. And I am not sure UO needed lots of players on all the time. I think it is easy to get your view distorted if you actually see Everquest as a serious game. It was an unprecedentedly and obnoxiously large 3-D game made by an electronics conglomerate, and yes few would wish to play it dead, because the world is massive, you can do nothing alone, and the only point of it is to kill things, players become increasingly spread over wider and wider areas trying to kill stronger ones. Whereas MUDs, even DIKU, can do fine with a dozen or so players. And I don't think games as Meridian 59 were meant to be ones where someone played 2000 hours, at least in any reasonable time frame. As far as I know you could cross the entire continent in an hour. Anyway you can resign the designation of MMORPG to million dollar DIKU derivatives if you wish, I just wish to be sure you understand most games held up to have some integrity (generally text, since all the good graphical ones went belly up, though I believe Meridian 59, Tibia and maybe UO are still playable in some modified way) were much more economical, a good MUD could probably simulate EQ (though it would not then be a good MUD) with fewer than 50 players. Yes among their many many faults Everquest and its ilk, which I don't regard as RPGs, were built with planned obsolescence, once every one is 'done' with it, they move onto the next expansion, and once the player pool dries up the game isn't playable; low level players can't find groups, nothing works as it should, the economy is flooded with others giving high powered items away to level 3s, the challenge is broken. But characters don't age, can't lose items or money, never die, and they're as rich as Croesus, but always find time to raid another tomb. At least the developers of the original one had some knowledge of the kind of game they were making when they made the trolls and ogres scratch their posterior every few seconds. The sequel seemed to have acquired some kind of Pampers-wearing dignity and austerity all its own, and there was no more leeway to fight Yogi Bear and hope Ranger Rick didn't path in.

 

[Jadeite]

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

But isn't Everquest the same as all others? Just people talking it's different but in reality the same, as for example the Warcraft is similar to AoE? I mean are there any really different things like real exploring, awarding paying attention, meaningful non-combat related content and/or skills, story that doesn't suck rocks out of the mud pool for sustenance, branching quests with different approaches or no respawning mobs and fetch 10 quests?

My gripe with Everquest and its ilk is they're not role-playing games. You're not role-playing anything. Doing anything but beelining straight for the bats and rats is like watching paint dry. And yet why am I killing bats and rats? They're games for unintelligent people (or kids, if I'm being fair). People that don't want to role-play, that don't feel comfortable role-playing, that simply can't role-play, those are the kinds that play Everquest. Well assuming they don't have objections to slaughtering things for no reason. And if 'it's all a game', they might as well swap out the creatures for flying pigs and boogers with eyes. Why not make people laugh in the process, if it's not serious? I'd probably have understood the game better as a kid if that's what I was fighting, but unfortunately Sony was (nearly) dead serious. Fooled me for a long time. Because it resembles a role-playing game. It's just demented. They're selling these games to kids, why don't they take some responsibiltiy for it? A good contrast is Ultima Online. They had a living ecosystem they were making, where animals would migrate and such based on complex rules. In RPI MUDs if you kill things for no reason, you can get in serious trouble. If tribes see a dead tribesman they'll start swarming the area, if you kill animals for no reason the druids and rangers might kill you, breaking laws could put you in jail for a very long time. Everquest has none of this, everything exists only in the game to be killed, it's like Deer Hunter. It's the absolute lowest form of game imaginable (that isn't rated X), and so no I don't distinguish among or even care about the fine points of it.

 

[anvi]

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

It's kinda too hard to explain without writing a book, but basically that's not the same game as the one I talk about I'm afraid. The abomination that exists today is a totally different game to the original EQ. They had 27 meddling expansions that drastically changed everything, not just adding overpowered spells and items but lots of changes to stats and rolls across the board which have drastically changed the game in a huge way, they added an in game map, teleports all over the place, faster regen, much easier enemies, changes to the rules to allow overpowered spells to work together etc. etc. It is a totally different thing now. TL-DR is that they dumbed it down because WoW stole all the players so they tried to make themselves into WoW and truly butchered themselves in the process. Basically the original team left in about 2001 and people were saying, "This isn't even EQ anymore" even by 2004, and by 2009 it was even further away from the original vision. What exists now is just 1000% different. With the Progression servers, all they do is disable the later expansions and then unlock them slowly. But all the dumbing down is still in place. And apparently the original code to the game is long lost and the modified butchered mess that exists now is all that there is, so even if someone bought the company and tried to re-engineer the original game, they couldn't.

Basically the EQ that I talk about is long dead and the one that you can play now is far from it. P99 is a different story though, that's pretty damn close to early EQ. That server is so much more popular than all the others because they reversed all the many changes that happened to the game, not just the later expansions. It is a huge project and the end result is a lot like early EQ, but I can't recommend it because it is run by scumbags who spy on your PC so I highly recommend not playing it. Which is a shame... RIP EQ.

I'll try to explain more about why the current EQ is different in this next reply.

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

But isn't Everquest the same as all others? Just people talking it's different but in reality the same, as for example the Warcraft is similar to AoE? I mean are there any really different things like real exploring, awarding paying attention, meaningful non-combat related content and/or skills, story that doesn't suck rocks out of the mud pool for sustenance, branching quests with different approaches or no respawning mobs and fetch 10 quests?

Short as I can version of MMO history is that most MMOs are like WoW because that game was a massive success. WoW and EQ share a lot of the same mechanics on paper. But the experience of playing both is (was) very different.

WoW and most games since then, are more like the Diablo gameplay loop. You run around with your flashy superhero character in 3rd person view (1st person usually an option). You find a little town with 3 huts, and a man with a flashing sign above his head gives you a quest to kill 20 goblins or kill a bandit leader and return with proof or whatever. Basic quests, they take 20 minutes, you press a few buttons and the enemies explode in storms of lightning and fireballs and blood, and then complete the quest and get ding ding ding and flashing lights, a new cloak, and you level up, and you feel like you achieved something. Then you get another job and repeat, that's the "gameplay loop". Then in the higher levels it can change quite a lot and it becomes more PVP focused or dungeons/raiding, but still the same loop, it just takes longer and requires other players.

If you die at any point you respawn 20 feet away as an invincible and invisible ghost and you fly back to where you died and then continue as if nothing ever happened... A minor setback, back to the 20 minute hamster food gameplay loop. I don't like shitting on WoW players but it's hard to explain without just saying, WoW and most MMOs since then are child-proofed theme park rides where you can't fail and it just funnels everyone through the levels to the same point where they repeat it all in groups or raids.


EQ was a very different experience, it was a survival game that was deep and amazing and wild and had emergent gameplay and stuff. Mostly first person because 3rd person was janky. Despite the name there was no quest grinding and there were no little quests like you get now or "quest hubs". The world was not designed like a 'game', where everyone starts off equal distance from the nearest town and every town has a bank, auction house, etc.. EQ wasn't like that at all. It was designed like a world and the players had to find a way to survive in it. Not everyone started equal, you might start in a city or swamp or anything in between. And the nearest town could be very different journeys, and not all towns are equal or friendly. Most players were almost blind at night, depending on their race. You would have to carry a light source in your hand or the first slot in the backpack. But even that would only show you a small area around you. Where you start there are usually low level mobs to fight, but there were also high level mobs roaming around that would kill you on sight and often did. There was a /yell button and people would run and click that to get help from nearby players but they might not want to help because the thing could kill them too.

A lot of enemies couldn't be hit unless you had a magic weapon, and at the start of the game nobody did. So attack a ghoul or something and you do 0 damage with each hit, and yet they will kill you just fine.

There was also no map at all, no radar, no mini map, and no on-screen compass like Elder Scrolls or anything. And you couldn't alt-tab to get one because there was not much info online, and no google, and also the game locked your screen so you couldn't alt-tab, and it was windows 98 which wouldn't let you override and alt tab. So basically nobody knew where the they were going, so everyone would follow the game's paths and rivers and look at landmarks and figure their own way out. People got lost all the time, and would hunt in places that were too dangerous just because they didn't know where else to go and exploring was too dangerous.

Also even the races that had one of the various vision buffs, they still couldn't see very well. Most zones had fog and it was set to be really close to your face because even the top graphics cards at the time could barely render what was going on. If you still have it installed you can set clipping plane to 0 and see how it used to be. So everyone was trying to navigate this dark foggy world that was deadly and you had no idea where anything was. Also every time you did anything you used mana which required a long rest to 'meditate' it back... And that only worked on the spellbook screen so you couldn't see anything at all. You could hear footsteps and if you stood up to see what it was, your mana would stop regenerating.

There was no auction house, you would trade with people you met on the road or you would shout to hawk your wares in a busy area.

It was tuned so that even a single level 1 enemy would kill level 1 players if they did something wrong. So players would find a friend and then it was a bit safer. But you would still get jumped by a higher level enemy that sneaked up behind you and someone would probably die and the other guy would have to run for their lives. And when you died, you would respawn at your home town which meant if you went exploring for 2 weeks to some new place and then died... it might take you 2 more REAL LIFE weeks to travel back there to find your corpse. And if you don't, you lose ALL YOUR ITEMS forever. These were characters that people played daily for years, so dying was a big deal. People would hire other players to help them get back to their corpse after a screw up.

There was no fast travel, people went everywhere slowly by foot, and by boat. And if you fell off the boat you would drown, get eaten by sharks, or you could try to swim to some nearby island which might be haunted by undead spectres that kill you in 1 second. And again, you now have to go back here or you lose everything you earned. And dying happened all the time. A cloth wearing spell caster could die in a few seconds to even a same level enemy. And every death was a huge setback, not just making sure you get your gear back but you also lost about 2 hours worth of experience.

A lot of people simply never got to see the high levels. It forced people to team up and make friends just to get by. Some people just became full time crafters or traders. There were some quests but they were long and complex and mostly the reward was an item. Most people were focused on just getting experience to get through the levels, and that was done by killing mobs over and over. But becoming a hunter in a world where you started out like the prey, was a long term thing you needed to work towards. The enemies were mostly in large groups and they would help each other out if they saw players attacking them. If your Ranger just shoots at something then there is a good chance your whole group will get wiped out. Skilled players needed to hunt and there were people who were well known as being the guy you want to take with you or whatever.

Items were weak and sparse. Everyone started out with nothing and even weeks later you mostly had a bunch of cloth items with +1 AC on each item and pair of rings which have maybe 2 dex and 2 agi, which to a spell caster was useless. But it was that or nothing. But when you finally got something really special it made a huge difference for you.

Buying spells was so expensive you usually had to just pick 1 or 2 of the best sounding ones out of the several you get each few levels. And again with no tooltips or guides, you had to cast the spells on yourself or your friend and hope it didn't kill you. Sometimes it just made you shine for a second and you had no idea what it did. And there was a research thing to make the spells.

I could go on forever, there were so many things that made it so interesting to play and everything has been sold for scrap.

A few simple things.


First, no one wants to play a "dead" MMO without people around. The model only works when there are lots of players on all the time.

Therefore, you must make a game either so good or so addictive that people don't want to stop playing it, just to keep your population stable.

Very few games can actually be good enough to keep someone playing for 2000 hours.

Therefore, unhealthy Skinner box manipulation tactics are in essence required to maintain ultra long term player interest. These techniques can make a very addictive game, but not a good one.

Very little in the universe of MMORPGs is not steeped in the legacy of DIKU MUD, those tongue-in-cheeks games from the late 80s and 90s that college kids played, where they could kill the smurfs and go on quests to recover The Lost Ark. They were parodies, they were jokes, they were degenerate. Ultima Online is the main one in question when one thinks of good online RPGs, though I am sure there are many derivatives today. And I am not sure UO needed lots of players on all the time. I think it is easy to get your view distorted if you actually see Everquest as a serious game. It was an unprecedentedly and obnoxiously large 3-D game made by an electronics conglomerate, and yes few would wish to play it dead, because the world is massive, you can do nothing alone, and the only point of it is to kill things, players become increasingly spread over wider and wider areas trying to kill stronger ones. Whereas MUDs, even DIKU, can do fine with a dozen or so players. And I don't think games as Meridian 59 were meant to be ones where someone played 2000 hours, at least in any reasonable time frame. As far as I know you could cross the entire continent in an hour. Anyway you can resign the designation of MMORPG to million dollar DIKU derivatives if you wish, I just wish to be sure you understand most games held up to have some integrity (generally text, since all the good graphical ones went belly up, though I believe Meridian 59, Tibia and maybe UO are still playable in some modified way) were much more economical, a good MUD could probably simulate EQ (though it would not then be a good MUD) with fewer than 50 players. Yes among their many many faults Everquest and its ilk, which I don't regard as RPGs, were built with planned obsolescence, once every one is 'done' with it, they move onto the next expansion, and once the player pool dries up the game isn't playable; low level players can't find groups, nothing works as it should, the economy is flooded with others giving high powered items away to level 3s, the challenge is broken. But characters don't age, can't lose items or money, never die, and they're as rich as Croesus, but always find time to raid another tomb. At least the developers of the original one had some knowledge of the kind of game they were making when they made the trolls and ogres scratch their posterior every few seconds. The sequel seemed to have acquired some kind of Pampers-wearing dignity and austerity all its own, and there was no more leeway to fight Yogi Bear and hope Ranger Rick didn't path in.

EQ is as much of an RPG as anything, but it does have a bunch of problems. Casters are awesome but melees were shallow. The obsolete content bothered me right from the start, because getting higher level gave you fewer places you could go to and still make progress. By level 50 most of the areas in game were useless to me now. That's how a lot of games work but they could have reused content in a lot of different ways and they never did. New players were pretty steady in the old days but once that dried up, it does ruin the game for anyone new. In the sort of sequel Vanguard they made it so higher level players could 'mentor' and lower their level to match a lower level group of players. It was cool. There are modified versions of EQ (on private servers) which work well with a small playerbase of about 50 ish by just shrinking the world a bit, and they also fixed high level players screwing things up for newbies and various other stuff too. Some great ideas in that server, but also made a bunch of bad ideas too which kinda ruined it.

 

[Poseidon00]

It's kinda too hard to explain without writing a book, but basically that's not the same game as the one I talk about I'm afraid. The abomination that exists today is a totally different game to the original EQ. They had 27 meddling expansions that drastically changed everything, not just adding overpowered spells and items but lots of changes to stats and rolls across the board which have drastically changed the game in a huge way, they added an in game map, teleports all over the place, faster regen, much easier enemies, changes to the rules to allow overpowered spells to work together etc. etc. It is a totally different thing now. TL-DR is that they dumbed it down because WoW stole all the players so they tried to make themselves into WoW and truly butchered themselves in the process. Basically the original team left in about 2001 and people were saying, "This isn't even EQ anymore" even by 2004, and by 2009 it was even further away from the original vision. What exists now is just 1000% different. With the Progression servers, all they do is disable the later expansions and then unlock them slowly. But all the dumbing down is still in place. And apparently the original code to the game is long lost and the modified butchered mess that exists now is all that there is, so even if someone bought the company and tried to re-engineer the original game, they couldn't.

Basically the EQ that I talk about is long dead and the one that you can play now is far from it. P99 is a different story though, that's pretty damn close to early EQ. That server is so much more popular than all the others because they reversed all the many changes that happened to the game, not just the later expansions. It is a huge project and the end result is a lot like early EQ, but I can't recommend it because it is run by scumbags who spy on your PC so I highly recommend not playing it. Which is a shame... RIP EQ.

I'll try to explain more about why the current EQ is different in this next reply.




Short as I can version of MMO history is that most MMOs are like WoW because that game was a massive success. WoW and EQ share a lot of the same mechanics on paper. But the experience of playing both is (was) very different.

WoW and most games since then, are more like the Diablo gameplay loop. You run around with your flashy superhero character in 3rd person view (1st person usually an option). You find a little town with 3 huts, and a man with a flashing sign above his head gives you a quest to kill 20 goblins or kill a bandit leader and return with proof or whatever. Basic quests, they take 20 minutes, you press a few buttons and the enemies explode in storms of lightning and fireballs and blood, and then complete the quest and get ding ding ding and flashing lights, a new cloak, and you level up, and you feel like you achieved something. Then you get another job and repeat, that's the "gameplay loop". Then in the higher levels it can change quite a lot and it becomes more PVP focused or dungeons/raiding, but still the same loop, it just takes longer and requires other players.

If you die at any point you respawn 20 feet away as an invincible and invisible ghost and you fly back to where you died and then continue as if nothing ever happened... A minor setback, back to the 20 minute hamster food gameplay loop. I don't like shitting on WoW players but it's hard to explain without just saying, WoW and most MMOs since then are child-proofed theme park rides where you can't fail and it just funnels everyone through the levels to the same point where they repeat it all in groups or raids.


EQ was a very different experience, it was a survival game that was deep and amazing and wild and had emergent gameplay and stuff. Mostly first person because 3rd person was janky. Despite the name there was no quest grinding and there were no little quests like you get now or "quest hubs". The world was not designed like a 'game', where everyone starts off equal distance from the nearest town and every town has a bank, auction house, etc.. EQ wasn't like that at all. It was designed like a world and the players had to find a way to survive in it. Not everyone started equal, you might start in a city or maybe a swamp or anything in between. And the nearest town could be very different journeys. And not all towns are equal or welcoming. Most players were almost blind at night, depending on their race. You would have to carry a light source in your hand or the first slot in the backpack. But even that would only show you a small area around you.

A lot of enemies couldn't be hit unless you had a magic weapon, and at the start of the game nobody did. So attack a ghoul or something and you do 0 damage with each hit, and yet they hit hard.

There was also no map at all, no radar, no mini map, and no on-screen compass like Elder Scrolls or anything. And you couldn't alt-tab to get one because there was not much info online, and no google, and also the game locked your screen so you couldn't alt-tab, and it was windows 98 which wouldn't let you override and alt tab. So basically nobody knew where the they were going, so everyone would follow the game's paths and rivers and look at landmarks and figure their own way out. People got lost all the time, and also also would hunt in places that were too dangerous just because they didn't know where else to go and exploring was too dangerous.

Also even the races that had one of the various vision buffs, they still couldn't see very well. Most zones had fog and it was set to be really close to your face because even the top graphics cards at the time could barely render what was going on. If you still have it installed you can set clipping plane to 0 and see how it used to be. So everyone was trying to navigate this dark foggy world that was deadly and you had no idea where anything was. Also every time you did anything you used mana which required a long rest to 'meditate' it back... And that only worked on the spellbook screen so you couldn't see anything at all. You could hear footsteps and if you stood up to see what it was, your mana would stop regenerating.

There was no auction house, you would trade with people you met on the road or you would shout to hawk your wares in a busy area.

It was tuned so that even a single level 1 enemy would kill level 1 players if they did something wrong. So players would find a friend and then it was a bit safer. But you would still get jumped by a higher level enemy that sneaked up behind you and someone would probably die and the other guy would have to run for their lives. There was a /Yell button to yell for help from other players who would maybe want to help but might want to run away because whatever was chasing that guy would chase you if you got too close... And when you died, you would respawn at your home town which meant if you went exploring for 2 weeks to some new place and then died... it might take you 2 more REAL LIFE weeks to travel back there to find your corpse. And if you don't, you lose ALL YOUR ITEMS forever. These were characters that people played daily for years, so dying was a big deal. People would hire other players to help them get back to their corpse after a screw up.

There was no fast travel, people went everywhere slowly by foot, and by boat. And if you fell off the boat you would drown, get eaten by sharks, or you could try to swim to some nearby island which might be haunted by undead spectres that kill you in 1 second. And again, you now have to go back here or you lose everything you earned. And dying happened all the time. A cloth wearing spell caster could die in a few seconds to even a same level enemy. And every death was a huge setback, not just making sure you get your gear back but you also lost about 2 hours worth of experience.

A lot of people simply never got to see the high levels. It forced people to team up and make friends just to get by. Some people just became full time crafters or traders. There were some quests but they were long and complex and mostly the reward was an item. Most people were focused on just getting experience to get through the levels, and that was done by killing mobs over and over. But becoming a hunter in a world where you started out like the prey, was a long term thing you needed to work towards. The enemies were mostly in large groups and they would help each other out if they saw players attacking them. If your Ranger just shoots at something then there is a good chance your whole group will get wiped out. Skilled players needed to hunt and there were people who were well known as being the guy you want to take with you or whatever.

Items were weak and sparse. Everyone started out with nothing and even weeks later you mostly had a bunch of cloth items with +1 AC on each item and pair of rings which have maybe 2 dex and 2 agi, which to a spell caster was useless. But it was that or nothing. But when you finally got something really special it made a huge difference for you.

There were plenty of new players and the few higher level players often restarted with new characters.

I could go on forever, there were so many things that made it so interesting to play and everything has been sold for scrap.



EQ is as much of an RPG as anything, but it does have a bunch of problems. The obsolete content bothered me right from the start, because getting higher level gave you fewer places you could go to and still make progress. By level 50 most of the areas in game were useless to me now. That's how a lot of games work but they could have reused content in a lot of different ways and they never did. New players were pretty steady in the old days but once that dried up, it does ruin the game for anyone new. In the sort of sequel Vanguard they made it so higher level players could 'mentor' and lower their level to match a lower level group of players. It was cool. There are modified versions of EQ (on private servers) which work well with a small playerbase of about 50 ish by just shrinking the world a bit, and they also fixed high level players screwing things up for newbies and various other stuff too. Some great ideas in that server, but also made a bunch of bad ideas too which kinda ruined it.

Very cool to hear how the original EQ was, I remember watching it being played by my uncle when I was a kid from 2000-02 but I was too young to remember much of it myself.

And god damn do I want that original game.

 

[Jadeite]

My problem with WoW is the way the dungeons work.

Can you explain?

So my first MMO was EQ and the dungeons are amazing. They are huge, multiple groups can be in there at the same time, and things can go wrong. You see a room with 3 enemies so attack one, and 6 come because 2 were behind a hidden wall, and one was wandering past at the wrong time and now you have to fight 6 and might wipe unless the group is really good. WoW dungeons are never like that, they are very finely tuned instances, identical every time, never too difficult, same amount of mobs on every pull, everyone does their routine and everyone wins. There are a lot of things about WoW I don't like but the dungeons are what killed it for me the most. Some stuff I miss from WoW though.

Really? I went back and played it as far as City of Mist and people just camped in fixed spots. To speed it up they'd log in their higher level, give us buffs that made us nearly invincible, or a high level bard stood there drawing aggro from everything while we beat on its back. Nearly every one in the group was wearing level inappropriate items farmed with spoiler sites and bought by high level characters. This was only not true for the first few months of a new server. And then within a year came the expansion and the economy was ruined because nobody ever lost anything, and low level players would have items that weren't even balanced for the original game.

Sure Everquest could be challenging, but not continually. You could easily join a group and spend hours doing nothing but mindlessly clicking. It's not as hard as you think. If it were there would be people quitting, and the game is deliberately designed to prevent that, since it costs subscriptions.

It's kinda too hard to explain without writing a book, but basically that's not the same game as the one I talk about I'm afraid. The abomination that exists today is a totally different game to the original EQ. They had 27 meddling expansions that drastically changed everything, not just adding overpowered spells and items but lots of changes to stats and rolls across the board which have drastically changed the game in a huge way, they added an in game map, teleports all over the place, faster regen, much easier enemies, changes to the rules to allow overpowered spells to work together etc. etc. It is a totally different thing now. TL-DR is that they dumbed it down because WoW stole all the players so they tried to make themselves into WoW and truly butchered themselves in the process. Basically the original team left in about 2001 and people were saying, "This isn't even EQ anymore" even by 2004, and by 2009 it was even further away from the original vision. What exists now is just 1000% different. With the Progression servers, all they do is disable the later expansions and then unlock them slowly. But all the dumbing down is still in place. And apparently the original code to the game is long lost and the modified butchered mess that exists now is all that there is, so even if someone bought the company and tried to re-engineer the original game, they couldn't.

Basically the EQ that I talk about is long dead and the one that you can play now aint it. P99 is a different story though, that's pretty damn close to early EQ. That server is so much more popular than all the others because they reversed all the many changes that happened to the game, not just the later expansions. It is a huge project and the end result is a lot like early EQ, but I can't recommend it because it is run by scumbags who spy on your PC so I highly recommend not playing it. Which is a shame... RIP EQ.

I'll try to explain more about why the current EQ is different in this next reply.


[snip]


EQ is as much of an RPG as anything, but it does have a bunch of problems. The obsolete content bothered me right from the start, because getting higher level gave you fewer places you could go to and still make progress. By level 50 most of the areas in game were useless to me now. That's how a lot of games work but they could have reused content in a lot of different ways and they never did. New players were pretty steady in the old days but once that dried up, it does ruin the game for anyone new. In the sort of sequel Vanguard they made it so higher level players could 'mentor' and lower their level to match a lower level group of players. It was cool. There are modified versions of EQ (on private servers) which work well with a small playerbase of about 50 ish by just shrinking the world a bit, and they also fixed high level players screwing things up for newbies and various other stuff too. Some great ideas in that server, but also made a bunch of bad ideas too which kinda ruined it.

Alright I'm a bit conflicted here. You're trying to draw me into an argument about EQ's gameplay, which I don't care about, since EQ is not an RPG. And at the same time you're saying EQ is an RPG.

EQ is a hunting game. It's not an RPG. It's not that sophisticated.

 

[anvi]

How is it not an RPG or sophisticated? It has all the D&D spells and more. You might not see it in the iPhone version they turned it into but the depth is huge. What other game has spells that need components to make, reagents to cast, and then can either fail 100% to even cast, get resisted by the several different resistances, get interrupted by attacks, or get reflected back at you?

Invisibility vs animals. Camouflage. Etc. Works against most things except undead. For that you need Invisibility vs Undead which only a few classes have. And when you use that the undead wont see you but everything else will... And you couldn't use both. So getting past a bunch of skeletons standing by a bunch of golems or something was impossible unless you can sneak past one and use the other invis without being seen... And invis can fade randomly at any time.

Then if you are attacked you die in 3 seconds unless you keep the enemy away from you. You can cast Root to hold it in place but then any direct damage spell will break the root and you die. A snared enemy runs slowly but you couldn't snare and root at the same time, it was one or the other. It depends on how much room you have to fight. Some mobs need to have their resistances reduced first. Ench can reduce their magic resistances, Mage can reduce their elemental resistances, etc

Every stat point matters. Druids want Wisdom but they probably want Charisma too for charming animals. But many went with Stamina for the extra hitpoints. Some thought Dexterity helped with spell casting, nobody knew for sure. Every class had multiple stats to consider like that. There's a lot of item slots to fill eh? Breastplate, 2 earrings, 2 rings, head, face, neck, arms, gloves, left wrist, right wrist, legs, feet, two held items, a ranged slot, charm? Critical hits, critical heals, focus effects, hundreds/thousands of usable items, best AI and aggro system ever, dungeons with hidden walls and traps, invisible ambushes, etc.. etc.. Best crowd control of any game! 14 classes with all sorts of synergies and pros and cons. Epic quests that take months. Illusions that changed your faction and relations. A full hardcoded faction system with every character in the world. Multiple pets that each had pros and cons and you could give them equipment and any use any spells on them. Friendly fire with players killing themselves to Liching or 'rains' and breaking other players spells. Charmed enemies as pets. Area damage groups that kill entire areas. Etc..etc.. All this and more in the 90s!!

 

[Morenatsu.]

what the fuck are you retards talking about

 

[Norfleet]

They're talking about how the past was both more romanticized and more inclined than today.

 

[Morenatsu.]

They're talking about how the past was both more romanticized and more inclined than today.

I thought it was just some mad autist on a rant about how literally nothing in the entire world is roleplaying.

 

[Norfleet]

That also. But I prefer not to get caught up in pejoratives as a distraction from the core message.

 

[anvi]

He is right that roleplaying is long dead and there was a lot in the early ones like UO and EQ before it got neutered. And I don't think he is talking about roleplaying like greetings m'lady, he is talking about being able to make a character that becomes a well known blacksmith that players travel far to visit for your famous swords or whatever. Or your former friend tries to rob and player-kill you and you end up killing him and now you are an outlaw. Stuff like that was actually possible. But the whole genre quickly devolved into glorified MOBAs, bash a few buttons, get level ups and new gear, repeat forever.

And all the depth is irrelevant when they dumb games down to the point that you press a few buttons and everything dies. Rift beta was so cool, similar to old EQ, dangerous to travel. You couldn't just run through hoards of enemies because you were heading beyond them, they would knock you off your horse and beat you to death. It made things matter.. You walked along the edge of a cliff to avoid fighting some bad looking stuff. When you did fight you had to be on your game. But they made it easier before release, then twice in patches, and again with the expansion. Now even at high levels I could target a SAME LEVEL enemy, press 12345 and blast it to shit before it even reaches me and lands a single blow. From a cool tactical survival type experience, to mindless bullshit with the tweak of a few numbers in the code. GW2 beta the exact same thing. The same thing happened to EQ post release and pretty much every other MMO.

But it is only mirroring single player games. The

in RPGs is so obvious, but the same happened with everything else too. In Rainbow 6 (1998) you would die if you took a single bullet. You had to plan the mission to perfection and then nail it or you got shot dead and had to restart. 20 years later that series is just another cover based shooter where you get shot to shit and then hide behind a water cooler for a few seconds so the screen stops flashing. All games declined! Including MMOs. But I think indie games will keep things competitive in the future. X3/X4 space games, Arma 3, DCS, Project Cars, etc. MMOs don't really have indie innovators like that because it is more expensive, but it will happen eventually.

 

[Jadeite]

How is it not an RPG or sophisticated? It has all the D&D spells and more. You might not see it in the iPhone version they turned it into but the depth is huge. What other game has spells that need components to make, reagents to cast, and then can either fail 100% to even cast, get resisted by the several different resistances, get interrupted by attacks, or get reflected back at you?

Invisibility vs animals. Camouflage. Etc. Works against most things except undead. For that you need Invisibility vs Undead which only a few classes have. And when you use that the undead wont see you but everything else will... And you couldn't use both. So getting past a bunch of skeletons standing by a bunch of golems or something was impossible unless you can sneak past one and use the other invis without being seen... And invis can fade randomly at any time.

Then if you are attacked you die in 3 seconds unless you keep the enemy away from you. You can cast Root to hold it in place but then any direct damage spell will break the root and you die. A snared enemy runs slowly but you couldn't snare and root at the same time, it was one or the other. It depends on how much room you have to fight. Some mobs need to have their resistances reduced first. Ench can reduce their magic resistances, Mage can reduce their elemental resistances, etc

Every stat point matters. Druids want Wisdom but they probably want Charisma too for charming animals. But many went with Stamina for the extra hitpoints. Some thought Dexterity helped with spell casting, nobody knew for sure. Every class had multiple stats to consider like that. There's a lot of item slots to fill eh? Breastplate, 2 earrings, 2 rings, head, face, neck, arms, gloves, left wrist, right wrist, legs, feet, two held items, a ranged slot, charm? Critical hits, critical heals, focus effects, hundreds/thousands of usable items, best AI and aggro system ever, dungeons with hidden walls and traps, invisible ambushes, etc.. etc.. Best crowd control of any game! 14 classes with all sorts of synergies and pros and cons. Epic quests that take months. Illusions that changed your faction and relations. A full hardcoded faction system with every character in the world. Multiple pets that each had pros and cons and you could give them equipment and any use any spells on them. Friendly fire with players killing themselves to Liching or 'rains' and breaking other players spells. Charmed enemies as pets. Area damage groups that kill entire areas. Etc..etc.. All this and more in the 90s!!

Let's take a step back in time for a moment. Way back in 1974 someone created something called Dungeons & Dragons. Very shortly therafter students at universities with access to terminals created games of it. That was in 1975. Not very long after, people at home got to play these, thanks to various creators and new companies. And then in the next year more were made. And then in the next year, the next year, etc. The graphics gradually changed, but in many cases the game was still the same. In all cases these were role-playing games. Then about 1986 something changed. Two games, Might & Magic and Dragon Quest, appeared, that challenged the preexisting paradigm of role-playing games. The first because although it was a huge world with a long quest, one found it remarkably easy to die, and yet on dying he did not fall face down miserably in the dirt and rue his choices, he and his friends were whisked away to an inn somewhere in full health with all their possessions. The second because for perhaps the first time in role-playing games one began to feel sympathy for the creatures he was fighting, and yet also for the first time it became manifestly clear unless he killed many of these pitiful things, he would have no chance to 'go beyond the next bridge'. My point is, violence became the norm in video games, and anything went to extend it longer, sell it to more people, etc. The game you're referencing is one such. You have this fanatical passion for a $3 million game by Sony with 110 develoepors that let you kill things in 3-D endlessly, I say it's garbage. And no even throwing $3 million and 110 developers at it, they couldn't manage to create a role-playing game. Haven't people in this very thread explained the problems of huge groups? Why would you think it any different in game development? It's a case of mutual social irresponsibility, huge groups of people making bloodbaths to sell to young people, with no redeeming merit or purpose.

 

[Zombra]

The original RPGs were not foundationally sets of rules made for the explicit purpose of modeling repetitive violence.

 

[Jadeite]

The original RPGs were not foundationally sets of rules made for the explicit purpose of modeling repetitive violence.

Some of these posts are hard to respond to. Let me put it this way. There were two models for games like Everquest, MUD1 (late '70s) and DND ('75). Everquest, in my book, is neither a MUD1, or a DND. 10s of thousands of video games later in the late 80s, some college students fused MUD1 and DND, and made DIKU MUD, a satirical game where people took quests to fight Captain Crunch, as they chatted to their flatmates in the computer lab. By this point in video games, if someone has a realistic view of life, and is not a reclusive novelty seeker living in a basement, I would hope the general apathy towards video games would be sympathetic. This gentleman has dug deep into the bowels of degeneracy, satire and apathy, pulled out a cast off relic of Sony Entertainment that has no purpose or point to it whatsoever--or has only one that, so easily achieved, could be done in 15 minutes and the PC retired--and asked me to pronounce it an RPG. No. It's a hunting game. If it were some psychedelic mid 90s DOOM Game with purple elephants and tubas shooting musical notes, I'd hope we could agree it was a joke. But Sony has made it in the same spirit but with 'serious things' and it has fooled many a recluse. There is no purpose to it, it makes no sense, case closed.

 

[anvi]

How is it not an RPG or sophisticated? It has all the D&D spells and more. You might not see it in the iPhone version they turned it into but the depth is huge. What other game has spells that need components to make, reagents to cast, and then can either fail 100% to even cast, get resisted by the several different resistances, get interrupted by attacks, or get reflected back at you?

Invisibility vs animals. Camouflage. Etc. Works against most things except undead. For that you need Invisibility vs Undead which only a few classes have. And when you use that the undead wont see you but everything else will... And you couldn't use both. So getting past a bunch of skeletons standing by a bunch of golems or something was impossible unless you can sneak past one and use the other invis without being seen... And invis can fade randomly at any time.

Then if you are attacked you die in 3 seconds unless you keep the enemy away from you. You can cast Root to hold it in place but then any direct damage spell will break the root and you die. A snared enemy runs slowly but you couldn't snare and root at the same time, it was one or the other. It depends on how much room you have to fight. Some mobs need to have their resistances reduced first. Ench can reduce their magic resistances, Mage can reduce their elemental resistances, etc

Every stat point matters. Druids want Wisdom but they probably want Charisma too for charming animals. But many went with Stamina for the extra hitpoints. Some thought Dexterity helped with spell casting, nobody knew for sure. Every class had multiple stats to consider like that. There's a lot of item slots to fill eh? Breastplate, 2 earrings, 2 rings, head, face, neck, arms, gloves, left wrist, right wrist, legs, feet, two held items, a ranged slot, charm? Critical hits, critical heals, focus effects, hundreds/thousands of usable items, best AI and aggro system ever, dungeons with hidden walls and traps, invisible ambushes, etc.. etc.. Best crowd control of any game! 14 classes with all sorts of synergies and pros and cons. Epic quests that take months. Illusions that changed your faction and relations. A full hardcoded faction system with every character in the world. Multiple pets that each had pros and cons and you could give them equipment and any use any spells on them. Friendly fire with players killing themselves to Liching or 'rains' and breaking other players spells. Charmed enemies as pets. Area damage groups that kill entire areas. Etc..etc.. All this and more in the 90s!!

Let's take a step back in time for a moment. Way back in 1974 someone created something called Dungeons & Dragons. Very shortly therafter students at universities with access to terminals created games of it. That was in 1975. Not very long after, people at home got to play these, thanks to various creators and new companies. And then in the next year more were made. And then in the next year, the next year, etc. The graphics gradually changed, but in many cases the game was still the same. In all cases these were role-playing games. Then about 1986 something changed. Two games, Might & Magic and Dragon Quest, appeared, that challenged the preexisting paradigm of role-playing games. The first because although it was a huge world with a long quest, one found it remarkably easy to die, and yet on dying he did not fall face down miserably in the dirt and rue his choices, he and his friends were whisked away to an inn somewhere in full health with all their possessions. The second because for perhaps the first time in role-playing games one began to feel sympathy for the creatures he was fighting, and yet also for the first time it became manifestly clear unless he killed many of these pitiful things, he would have no chance to 'go beyond the next bridge'. My point is, violence became the norm in video games, and anything went to extend it longer, sell it to more people, etc. The game you're referencing is one such. You have this fanatical passion for a $3 million game by Sony with 110 develoepors that let you kill things in 3-D endlessly, I say it's garbage. And no even throwing $3 million, and 110 developers at it, they couldn't manage to create a role-playing game. Haven't people in this very thread explained the problems of huge groups? Why would you think it any different in game development? It's a case of mutual social irresponsibility, huge groups of people making bloodbaths to sell to young people, with no redeeming merit or purpose.

So your point is that violence is an issue, with EverQuest? A game with no blood, where you travel around fighting slime monsters, fire elementals, and Frogloks? In a world of Sniper Elite with slow mo bullets ripping through soldiers organs and Mortal Kombat with spines being pulled out and stuff, EQ is the bigger problem with people using magic against Goblin Shamans and stuff? Interesting point. Do you work for PETA?

Also EQ never had 110 developers, it was made by about 5 guys originally and the budget was 3 million, what's wrong with that? Baldur's Gate was 4.5 million and is a much smaller game. Rift, WoW, etc had 200 million budgets. So making such an amazing and huge game with 3 million is great, no? When it got successful they ended up with big teams working on lots of games and syphoned profit away from EQ to endless other projects, 99% of which failed miserably. They never backed EQ because the engine was too old, they wanted to just remake it, but then failed.

Also you talk about killing things endlessly but why aren't you bitching about Diablo or RTS or something where that is far more relevant? Also why are you ignoring what I keep telling you that what you played is not the same thing that I talk about. You never played EQ, you played the chatroom that it got turned into. The battles weren't endless slaughters, they were slow tactical battles that were puzzles to figure out how to pull it off... Breaking a room of a major dungeon was difficult and complicated and the most amazing thing I've ever seen in gaming, and you haven't seen any of it! Calling it garbage after seeing nothing but the mutated old botoxed and botched surgery version of it is a waste of time. Your argument is Meg Ryan was never hot cuz you saw a pic of her and she was like 70 years old and has a messed up face.

 

[Jadeite]

Look man, I don't really care. I didn't come here to argue. My point is Everquest has no purpose, no plot, no meaning. It's not a realistic game. It's a hunting game, a shooting gallery. You're welcome to enlighten me what the point or purpose of it is, but I won't discuss it beyond that.

 

[Zombra]

RPGs are realistic games about reality