This is all, of course, in the context of my opinions. I don't like the system. I think that the way that MMORPG's are designed today isn't very good. That doesn't mean that they aren't very good in reality - it just means that I don't like them as they are.

I'm well aware of the economic drive in MMORPG's. It's a great way to make money - and a bad way to make good games. I'm not saying that MMORPG's are horrible because of this, I'm saying that they sacrifice gameplay for profit. They do. This is a travesty from a creative standpoint. But, in the business world, that really doesn't matter. I see your point, but I'm arguing from a creative perspective. Creatively speaking and from the perspective of the gameplayer/consumer, there are flaws. This is because of the fact that MMORPG's aren't geared towards providing a play experience that is fun (and therein motivating you to keep playing and buying the plethora of sequels that will be released for any given title) as much as they are geared towards providing an addictive and time consuming one. It's business.

And, it's creative treason.

I'm not doubting their business model - that's solid. I'm just saying that, in my opinion, many MMORPG's suck in many ways as far as gameplay is concerned.

If you look at the argument from the perspective of a person intending to create a fun game experience without any hope of getting paid for it, it would probably make alot of sense - even into the parts where I define what an RPG should be, in a seemingly opinionated manner. It would surely turn out to be the best game nobody played, and the best company ever to go bankrupt.

But this thread isn't about the business. It's about what could theorhetically be done to make the 'best' MMORPG.

With all due respect,
Nytehauq.

Oh, and you can give the player goals that interfere with other players. It's just harder to do, and not very cost effective.

And the deathmatch shooter analogy was meant to tie into gameplay gripes. The ideal game - from a consumer standpoint - would have a gigantic world that would be as detailed as a smaller set of levels in a single player game. It's just about the ideal of having lots of content while still preserving detail in design and combat. Alot of RPG's have lots of space - and nothing to do in it. Naturally, quality and quantity don't go hand in hand - but it would be nice if they did.

[Edited by - Nytehauq on June 4, 2005 5:36:39 PM]

Reverting back to the topic of "Purpose in MMORPG's", I personally feel that MMORPG's like MUDs really originate from the dreams of players of RPGs to be able to share their experience with other players/friends.

Originally, most games were single player and people could only talk about what they did in the game. There was almost no way to "do something together" with a friend who is also playing the game. So, personally, I feel MMORPGs and MUDs were born out of the dream of being able to share a common space with friends and do things together and have fun.

So, the pen-ultimate purpose, I guess, is to have fun with friends in a shared environment. Doesn't really have to be beautiful or anything, which is why MUDs are still around.

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Original post by Nytehauq Creatively speaking and from the perspective of the gameplayer/consumer, there are flaws. This is because of the fact that MMORPG's aren't geared towards providing a play experience that is fun (and therein motivating you to keep playing and buying the plethora of sequels that will be released for any given title) as much as they are geared towards providing an addictive and time consuming one.

Still, millions of people play them. By choice. So they must be fun. Sure, they're not perfect, but few games are.

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Oh, and you can give the player goals that interfere with other players. It's just harder to do, and not very cost effective.

Care to give some examples? I don't doubt this is true, but if you're ignoring cost effectiveness you're doomed to go down this route. I don't really see you proposing much that could give online games the sense of purpose that you lack, without it being entirely impractical in terms of the amount of content you'd need to generate.

Purpose implies progress towards something. Progress implies irrevocable change. Irrevocable change implies 'completed' or 'destroyed' content. Destroyed content implies an eventual lack of enough things for players to do.

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And the deathmatch shooter analogy was meant to tie into gameplay gripes. The ideal game - from a consumer standpoint - would have a gigantic world that would be as detailed as a smaller set of levels in a single player game. It's just about the ideal of having lots of content while still preserving detail in design and combat. Alot of RPG's have lots of space - and nothing to do in it.

Which deathmatch shooters are you talking about? I don't play many but in UT levels the scenery is reasonably detailed but there's nothing to do. I don't see an improvement over persistent RPGs there.

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Original post by Kylotan You can get away with it when the world isn't persistent. In a persistent world you can't give the players goals that, when completed, are going to remove goals for other people.

you make a persistent mmorpg where quests are created dynamically.
For example:
1) (pvp world)
give people the tools to hunt down outlaws. This would be a very dynamic quest and very challenging.

2) if your quest is "retreive the ring of doom", it would have an origin. Somone would take it, use it, sell it. The next guy who wants it would need to use some sort of locator spell. Quest items could exist anywhere in the world (not individual storage).

Dynamically quests in a pvp world are the way forward.

It would be very satisfying to do something which has a global effect.

'Dynamically' is a very vague term. What do you mean by it?

Your examples:

Quote:

1) (pvp world) give people the tools to hunt down outlaws.

This already exists in various forms in existing games. You've changed monster-killing grind into player-killing grind. No qualitative improvement.

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2) if your quest is "retreive the ring of doom", it would have an origin. Somone would take it, use it, sell it. The next guy who wants it would need to use some sort of locator spell. Quest items could exist anywhere in the world

How many objects are you going to have in the world that are worthy of being in a quest? Enough for every player to be on 2 or 3 quests at once? If so, aren't these items going to necessarily be somewhat mundane? And numerically speaking, if there are fewer such objects than players, that means some players don't have quests. What do you do to complete the quest - return the object to an NPC who happens to lose it again so that the next guy can do the quest? Or hold onto it yourself, at which point does someone else get a similar quest meaning that you're now hunted down for that item? Not good if you're not playing PvP. What if the person with the item goes offline? Or stays offline for months? How can each player have a global effect - if every item is so important as to affect everybody, then won't such effects be so common as to be insignificant anyway? Or at the other end of the scale, won't the vast majority of people be excluded since they are unable to complete the really important quests? If some players can have global effects on the world, doesn't that have implications for the other players... probably negative, in terms of fairness and fun?

There needs to be more thought put in before writing off the existing model. It's prevalent because so far, it's the only one we know how to make work.

Ive long felt the same way as the OP. The solution is interaction and immersion.
Ok - two worthless buzzwords, right? Not really.

I've long thought that the interaction with the gameworld that single player games like Myst, Nancy Drew, and others have. Flipping on and off lights when you're hiding from a mob, a radio dial with switches...etc. These things would make interaction in a game more meaningful. They have to be tied to gameplay, but they would make the experience so much better!

Immersion for me in MMOs means having a working simulated environment behind the scenes. Yes there are AI and draw loads to think about that cause lag, but creating such worlds means its not all about kill and be killed. You have NPCs with goals that carry out lives which affect the gameworld almost as much as players do.

That's an abbreviated version of my "I have an MMO dream" speech. We're working to make it happen.

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How many MMORPG's force you to grind to level? When you enter the game world, what is your purpose? Why are you just killing things for days? Why are you even going on quests? (This ties together, bear with me)

A level-based mmorpg is just an improved diablo where thousands of people can play together. There is not a virtual world in such a game. You keep going from one area to another designed for your level. Hmmm..all are just like what's in Diablo.

You'll see that when your char is placed to a level map (which is not a virtual world), what do you expect it to do? Naturally, it's all about killing things and grinding up.

What stuns me is that even some skill-based games are designed in a similar way as those level-based games. They (the devs) dont pay efforts in crafting the virtual world which is what the level-based games lack, rather they simply take everything from the level-based games, even Wish and afew other skill-based games made such a mistake. That's how they failed.

It's actually not that difficult to design a virtual world, by using UO as a blue print. Yet noone does that, it's sad. Thou a level-based game is much easier to design and to make money and it's much less error-prone to make, there is still a market for a *good* skill-based game. The cant make the design right, that's the problem, maybe the devs are influenced too much by level-based games that they cant make a good skill-based game out.

In a word, designing a 'virtual world' for a skill-based game is very different from that for a level-based game. If the design is wrong, the whole game will be ruined.

Im not getting how the two types of game need different worlds. And what are the differences? Educate me.

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Original post by Vanquish Im not getting how the two types of game need different worlds. And what are the differences? Educate me.

Just to name afew,

A) Level design:
1) In level-based game, you are not supposed to go a high level area designed for high level chars, you'll be one-hit killed by the mobs wandering there if you char is not at that level.

2) In a skill-based game, you have more freedom and can go *deeper* into the *dangerous* areas without being insta-killed.

So in a skill-based game, mobs should be carefully spawned such they'll give the required challenge to the highend chars while they wont totally block your access to a large landmass of the *virtual world* (of course, there are always certain areas a noob cant go into, just a matter of percentage). In a level-based game, it's rather simple, just focus on the *level-design* and forget about the low lever explorers.

B) World to new players:
1) In a level-based game, you may abandon a newly created char to any place and give them some wolves to kill (such as in WOW, EQ2, Lineage2 etc., that's good enough to start the grinding. You'll never come back after level 10 anyway.

2) In a skill-based game however, you need to bear in mind that you need to give the new players a warm welcome with a message/perception that "Hello, this is a virtual world you are living in, do you feel the warmth and how real the virtual world is".

It's exactly what's UO, new chars are always welcome by a city with shops and NPC walking around to give you the virtual world feeling. And soon you'll see rats, cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, boar, deers, horses, goats plus the lightly spawned lizardmen, ogres, trolls, harpies and like. The effect is very different. You perceive that you must do something on those small animals with your sword, yet not that obvious as the given wolves in a level-based game. It's conveying the message that it's an option to kill them or not, you may skip the lovely animals and pick on the ogres if you choose to protect the poor animals, lol, role-playing. Anyway, it's about virtual world realism which has no value at all in a level-based game.

So in a skill-based game it's a very lame design to abandon the new chars in the wildness and give them some wolves to kill, but several skill-based games start new chars this way, it's lame.

C) NPCs
1) It's ok in a level-based game to see all the NPCs just stationed there like a log, anyway, you dont want to see the NPCs who's giving out quests moving around that you may lose sight on them. Time is crucial for grinding, you dont want to spend time in locating the NPC who's giving out your class-change quest.

2) In a skill-based game, however, you'll prefer to see the random and it's lame to see the same NPC standing in the same spot 24/7.

As a result, in a skill-based game it's better to see NPCs walking around, they may go to the tavern during lunch and their own houses during the night and so on. It's however totally not necessary in a level-based game, as you need to locate a certain char quick plus that you may never return to low level areas when you are at high level, who cares about the NPCs, just grind and go go that's all.

D) Goes back to the maps
1) In a level-based game, most maps are used only for once, as you level up, low level areas become meaningless to you. Again it's all about level-design.

2) In a skill-based game, you are expected to return to alot (if not most) of the cities/dungeons/mines etc repeatedly. So there must be some hot spots where players will feel the fun to come and again.

There are more, I just dont have the time to dig them all up.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on June 6, 2005 5:25:44 AM]

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Original post by Kylotan 'Dynamically' is a very vague term. What do you mean by it? Your examples: Quote: 1) (pvp world) give people the tools to hunt down outlaws. This already exists in various forms in existing games. You've changed monster-killing grind into player-killing grind. No qualitative improvement.

i would say fighting human players is more entertaining than fighting the same npc monsters over and over and over again. Also, it is more satisfying to defeat the outlaw as you are being noble and serving the players.

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Original post by Kylotan Quote: 2) if your quest is "retreive the ring of doom", it would have an origin. Somone would take it, use it, sell it. The next guy who wants it would need to use some sort of locator spell. Quest items could exist anywhere in the world How many objects are you going to have in the world that are worthy of being in a quest? Enough for every player to be on 2 or 3 quests at once? If so, aren't these items going to necessarily be somewhat mundane? And numerically speaking, if there are fewer such objects than players, that means some players don't have quests. What do you do to complete the quest - return the object to an NPC who happens to lose it again so that the next guy can do the quest? Or hold onto it yourself, at which point does someone else get a similar quest meaning that you're now hunted down for that item? Not good if you're not playing PvP. What if the person with the item goes offline? Or stays offline for months? How can each player have a global effect - if every item is so important as to affect everybody, then won't such effects be so common as to be insignificant anyway? Or at the other end of the scale, won't the vast majority of people be excluded since they are unable to complete the really important quests? If some players can have global effects on the world, doesn't that have implications for the other players... probably negative, in terms of fairness and fun?

you wont be told to go get item x by anyone. You would explore, interact with other players, read stuff then you would say "i want that item", then you pursue that item.

Or you pay some guy to go and get it for you.

If the player goes offline, the item then exists in his house and you must break in and take it. Then you have some sort of bounty. Then you are hunted as an outlaw by the other player(s).

Many an interesting story can come from combining dynamic/player driven quests.