I played UO for the longest time and I still think that it holds up as one of the best games ever - pre-Ren that is. It had a combination of PvP, content (though not quests), and other stuff to do to immerse you in the world. (Yes the 2d graphics could be argued as not very immersive - but then that means the gameplay was that much more, right?)

I dont necessarily think that MMORPGs are on their face boring.
Many people like to explore, like to seek new places and NPCs out and have lots of fun doing so. If you make the world expansive and detailed enough...as well as attractive enough, there is enjoyment to be had just from that. (Ever notice people that have the forum sigs that read " Killer - 20%, Socializer - 10%, Explorer - 80%...etc" ? People like exploring.)

The game my group is working on (not doing a self-promotion, I promise) is hoping to mix genres to make something thats more than the sum of its parts.

>MMO Structure:
A skill per use system where you get better by using something, not grinding xp. There are skills you may train in a million different things - from weapons, to gambling, to stealth, medical arts,...et alia. the list goes on.

>FPS Structure:
Ultimately at its heart the game is a FPS PvP game with many weapons and hidden dangers from REAL people as well as modern-AI.

But there will be interactivity with the world as in up-to-date mystery games. Perhaps puzzles to solve, bombs to disarm, ...a million different ways to interact with the world.

>RTS Structure:
In order to expand and hold territory, you have to collect and extract vital resources like water, food, oil/gas...etc in order to support the movement of the troops you are PvPing with.

>Base-building:
Bases can be put onto the world in any spot to claim that area...if you have the resources and the troops to do so. You will also be able to add different buildings with towers, walls, gates etc. to add bonuses to your pvp skills.

>Vehicles:
Of course there will be vehicles, but with upgradable parts and customizable skins which will change the performance, hitpoints (through car armor), speed and other ways. Hell who''s to say that people wont build up cars and race them betting currency from the game? And if the game gets big and you can sell money on ebay, wouldnt that be like making a living off racing?

>Mini-games:
Melee combat will be of a console style with an easy to use interface, but with moves that you have to buy as skills. 3 styles to blend the current types as seen in Dead or Alive 3 (brawling, wrestling, martial arts)

Gambling - with an interface much like the card games you can buy in the bargain bin. I mean hell, in a post-apoc world there are dirty little gambling towns where you can live off your winnings, cheat the house, or die trying.

Frontieering - living off what you kill in the various zones, with an interface like the current video game "Big Game hunter" so that tracking and hunting lifelike creatures is a lot more interactive than just point and auto-attack.

Ok, so I did a little self-promo, but the point is that we hope that taking a lot of currently unsegmented parts (I didnt even go into the whole game...there''s much more) that the entire world will be somewhere that people will enjoy just existing in.

I think that as games get more and more functionality and detailed interaction with the world that they will become places people will spend all their free time in because there''s always something interesting to do.

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Original post by Evil_Greven

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DAOC hasn''t been out for four years. It was released in October of 2001, and since I bought it two weeks after release and played it through March of 2004, I think I know what I''m talking about. And I also know that your accusations of ''no patience'' are utterly incorrect.

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Sorry the 6 month pay instead of yearly throws me off on my dates. so actually played for 2 years.



Anther thing you said you found planetside Fun then maybe you should play FPS games rather than RPGS I already stated that, your the type that lacks patience and fondness of Role Playing.

I can tell you what games you probbly enjoy.


Oh something else The reason I dont like MMOFPS games is because you can just pop on kill some people and your off. No leveling no Building yourself up for Fighting.(never played planetside)

One more thing I have never had trouble getting a group in DAOC or had horrible inbalance issues untill Trials of ALantis came out.

Vanquish, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I like exploring. In fact, I enjoyed DAOC more over Horizons due to DAOC''s less linear layout. (Since Horizons give you speed bonuses for sticking on the road, and since your character can''t traverse very high terrain, you almost always want to stick to the designer''s trails they laid out on the maps. DAOC''s layout encouraged exploration.) I also felt more danger when playing DAOC, as I might be taking a shortcut to some village but a certain high-class mob might spawn on the path. It''s what made exploring so fun, being able to find new routes or new mobs and such, plus the danger of getting your ass whooped.

Considering I used to play week-long Master of Orion games (and even longer VGA Planet games, for those of you who might remember the glory days of BBS gaming), patience isn''t an issue here. I wouldn''t mind spending hours leveling up my character if the game mechanisms weren''t so transparently obvious. After just ten or so levels, you tend to see everything the game has to offer. (Another area where DAOC excelled, with the inbetween lands of the realms, and then of course foreign realms themselves. You had something to look forward to later in the game.)

I don''t even bother to RP in MMORPGs, because in the context of these MUD-like games people''s concept of RPing is very basic. Coming from a MUSH/MOO/MUCK background, anything that I see in a MMORPG environment just isn''t that appealing to me.

And for those curious, why did I leave DAOC if I sounded happy with it? Mainly because of the random nerfs. Mythic had a good game from day one, but they didn''t listen to the beta testers when they begged them to balance the races/classes a bit more before release. So, lots of last-minute stuff that ended up screwing a lot of folks. After watching a friend get no less than five characters of his nerfed into uselessness, and my own character (Healer) nerfed, I just gave up.

Now, I use that free time to write games. :D

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- 2D/Pixel Artist - 3D Artist - Game Programmer - Ulfr Fenris
[[ Gaping Wolf Software ]] [[ GameGenesis Forums ]]

UO way back in the day, before all this safety zone busness (i quit before they came out with that) the game rocked. in fact, in the begining when there was still the notoriety system and i was a dread lord, walking around killing people, nothing could compare to that.. there has never been any game that could even come close to that for me.. sadly there never will be.. i also played AC for around a year, it was pretty good too (played on Darktide the pk server.. i used to love the PvP in that game). in fact PvP was the whole fun of MMORPG''s. i would never play any of these non PVP games. i played Shadowbane for a little while, got to level 60 and the game was boring as shit... it was a good try though. i think UO just ruined every other game for me since it...

More focus must be put on player interaction events, such as raids and pvp. Daoc did pvp very well, i never tried UO, but many people seems to think they also did pvp ok. But aside from that, no other game on the market can compare with daoc''s pvp system. Say what you want, the idea to force the playerbase into three realms - brilliant! Making them not beeing able to communicate, even more so. This was ofcourse very intentional. Forcing players into diffrent factions created a natural reason to fight, a reason to get a max level character, to attend raids to aquire ever better equipment, etc..

As for raids, i mean raids where 50-200 players go to kill a mod for a chanse that it drops something. It has potential to be something really fun, but in the games iv tried so far, it is more common than not that you go to one of these events for a few hours, and at the end you get nothing and leave very frustrated for wasing your time. This is because the monster you kill often just drop a few items, and who gets them is decided trough lottoing. If a player goes to one of these events, it should be guaranteed that he gets something out of it, both daoc and eq failed horribly in acchiving this.

But thats what i feel should be exploited more in the mmorpg genre, player cooperation and player vs player, it has yet alot of unused potential.

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Original post by Raymondo
A keyboard macro does wonders for games like that.

If the game wont accept external keyboard inputs, then I usually go for the elastic band and masking tape method.

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i did that in the beta of jump gate, walked off for a while after sending my space ship towards a jump gate, i come back and everythings blackish, im like hmm whats that, then i realise my ship is 2 seconds from crashing straight into that asteroid. I pull up but too late there goes my ship and all its cargo

Anyone every play Meridian 59? I thought that was a brilliant MMORPG, not sure what it was about it that I liked, I just liked it.

P.S. This Progress Quest game is great.

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Let's struggle for our dream of Game!

http://andrewporritt.4t.com

[edited by - f8k8 on June 13, 2004 9:03:46 AM]

The main problem I have with every MMORPG game out currently is their amount of immersion.

There's no real uniqueness to interacting with the world. In other words there are no "true" benefits to roleplaying or traversing through the "world" presented. I create a character, walk around and find 20+ others that look exactly like me. Everyone emotes, fights and casts spells exactly like i do. I work my way up to mid - high levels in order to obtain an item, only to find people that have already collected 12 of them. A quest that is supposed to be detrimental to the fate of my people, changes nothing, and everyone has access to be able to complete it.

NPC creature and people AI are dumb as dirt. Most games use the same old 'cycle targets' and 'auto-attack' combat system, which means a 1st level frog technically appears to fight exactly the same as a 45th level dragon.

There's no stealth as I can't use the environment to my advantage. Some games don't even allow you to jump, and often even if they do are severely limited in their representation of possible character movements. There's no hiding, laying in wait, ambushing, jumping of a roof to make a kill, attacking from a moving mount/vehicle, etc.

The whole fact there they even have "levels", not to mention limits on those "levels", is limiting (skill based systems with emphasis on usage or a cross there of seems more appealing). There should always be a challenge somewhere for anyone willing to pursue it. Those challenges should also present some form of uniqueness that differentiates itself from previous encounters.

There are no game centric enforcements of internal laws of ethics, religion, race relations etc., even basic ideas like stealing, treachery, hatred, persecution, heroism, patriotism, etc. are usually non existant and people complain about negative actions which means no theft or backstabbing (things any roleplayer should have no problem with).

There's no particular interaction with the overall story or plot, or any real enforcement of a characters purpose in the world.

There's no real way to distinguish yourself from everyone else; everyone knows your name (its usually floating above your head :P), people can tell by looking at you your current status in the world (there's no way to wear a dingy cloak over say your Armor of Darkness to give an unassuming appearance), and there are no real interfaces for displaying any sort of intended personality traits, etc.

There's no real intracacy to the social aspects presented in most of these types of games - you talk, group, "fight" and ummm, lets see...no wait...yeah, ok, that's about it.

Most of these games assume there is some unbroken code of honor, where i can't take hostile actions agains a supposed friend, and i cant make support actions to an enemy (lots of comlaining by people have had most games take steps to just about ruin any complex actions relating to both good and evil decision when it comes to social interaction). If I want to heal a pathetically weak opponent to keep it alive while I practice a skill, I should be able to do so. And anyone happening to be doing battle when I feel a little mischievious, should know how to run should I decide to empower something they are fighting (lol). Again since someone mentioned Role-Play, this should be something any role-player should accustomed to and prepared for, yet in EVERY game people cry and moan when these things happen. Design experience/skill, law, punishment, and reward systems accordingly (instead of being lazy) and there should be no problems allowing these thing to happen in a game.



There's more even on top of this. Some of these things could possibly be irrelevant should other areas come to the forefront to offset their glaring obviousness. Some things are limited on technology boundaries, others out of carelessness or lack of effort. In my opinion anyways.

One of these days I would like to see (create) a massively multiplayer action rpg cross-breed. Actually take some of the standard rpg building blocks, mixed with combat stylings of say - Dynasty Warriors, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, etc. Need to come up with more interactive way to manipulate the world presented because as it stands every MMORPG I've played allows for the most basic of interactions, with the world itself responding with an even more basic set of reactions.

In my opinion, mmorpgs r the most boring things in the world. They have no plot and all u do is run around and level up really. Quests and junk dont satisfy my thirst for a good meaty plot to get into.

I'm currently working on my own VB MOMRPG. It's like an all scenario game where you can even become king multiple ways and goto war and stuff. The coolist thing about it is I made a God program for it so if someone is like a farmer and really needed to get some mony and their crop was finally completed(you'll be able to own land) I can just set it on fire. You'll be able to own land, make contracts so you don't have to worry abour schemers, become world leaders, be the first to invent things(I'll invent stuff through inventers in the game really) and all sorts of stuff. It's really great so far but has a lot of lag so far. That's why I haven't released it yet.