Take what any developer/company promises with a grain of salt.
1. Copying another game's technical design elements doesn't mean a game will be good
2. What the player community wants is almost never what is best for the game
3. There is more to a good game than just the gameplay loop
4. No matter how a game is designed or presented, players will always take the path of least resistance/most convenience to accomplish what they want
Kilsin said:Community Debate - As gamers, what are some lessons we should have learned by now from past games, that we haven't? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
What do you mean by 'we' in this context? We meaning VR? We meaning the players? I ask because these are going to be different lists of lessons.
'We' meaning VR:
'We' meaning the players:
IMO:
As gamers..
1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 gamers have a depth and breadth of perspective and experience that cannot be matched by a subset of designers, developers, and coders of any game.
If we were united and communicated effectively as gamers, we could effect change in any aspect of any gaming genre.
Gamer expectations almost always exceed implementation reality.
Some non-traditional funding, development and deployment models (kickstarter / agile / early access) have NOT produced superior games, overall. Supporting them, as gamers, is unlikely to change this result.
A small team can produce great results in a very short time. (Valheim, Starbound, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Project Gorgon, Garden Paws, Wurm Unlimited, Medieval Dynasty, TaleSpire, CDDA, Dwarf Fortress, more) As gamers, these types of projects should be encouraged and supported.
As experienced or veteran gamers, the trip from gamer to developer, artist, designer, or coder is very short, especially with modern languages and tools.
Falling to the pressure of the gaming community could mean you produce a mediocre game that gets played for 3 months and then playership begins to drop off. if you play it too safe, then you could be just another average MMO. Break the mold on what can be done, instead of trying to appease a gaming community that's never satified. Be truly unique and innovated. Don't be pulled from your vision.
The same with most companies now, trying to please everyone.
Why spend so much time modiying the game for a bunch of cry babies that are just going to move on to the next "hot" game soon anyways.
Theres like a check box of all the "woke" things you need in a new game or movie if you want it to get published as well.
These are the things (IMO) we should have learned by now but haven't are:
1. Being able to solo 90% of the time in an MMO is not good.
2. Everyone trying to model their game in the exact same way only leads to mud in the MMO environment.
3. Trinity system or the Qutaritinty system, if it ain't broke don't fix it. This is aimed at games that phase out the use of CC abilities (like WoW), or try to remove an entire class by granting everyone a heal (like GW2).
4. Players like meaningful choices and having to weigh the pros and cons of their actions.
5. Players like freedom and options in how they progress and gear their characters. They don't generally appreciate being told that they must go somewhere or they must focus on a specific item next in their gearing process.
6. Players like utility and the ability to adapt. They also like being able to occasionally step it up in periods of intense critical need. The best dopamine hit is when your group overcomes a challenge that went down to the wire.
7. Heavily scripted fights become predictable with time and lose some of their fun.
8. Homogenization should rarely be the answer to anything.
9. Water environments generally suck in terms of character positioning, mob positioning, and utilizing AOE abilities. Hopefully, the VR team can improve on this area where many have failed.
10. MMORPGs were not meant to be played seasonally or be designed with the e-sports scene in mind.
11. Extreme overuse of fast travel is just as bad as having flight mounts. Both limit the size of your world.
12. Healers and damage.... sometimes healers just want to heal, buff, debuff, and support their group. We don't mind having access to damage spells if the situation and tradeoff allow for it, but most of us don't like being forced into this role.
13. Encounters should be designed to highlight niches and dungeons/raids should have multiple encounters which highlight different niches. Thus creating desirability for multiple classes and many different group compositions.
14. Your world is the most important part of your game, you shouldn't neglect its development by focusing only on high-end gameplay. You also shouldn't neglect high end game play by only focusing on your world development.
15. The more systems you add to your game the more complicated it gets, and systems should never be implemented as a temporary expansion feature.
16. Probably most importantly gamers are not dumb. We know what feels fun and what doesn't. We don't appreciate companies trying to justify their horrible game design by blaming the experience we have on us as players or telling us to give it a bit more time with no intention to change it.
< immature troll reeeeee
EA, Activision, Tencent kills studios and ips
mmo gamers are cows. gotta milk them. treat them good and give them nice things, then chop them up and ill get this finest a7 beef nomnom
devs are farmers and ranchers. gotta work hard, upkeep their produce and work the land.
gamers and devs are in a symbotic relationship,
unless ur too big like wow then u just see gamers as parasites unworthy to suck on the blood of the devs
thank you for making games devs, even crappy games are a learning experience. boop.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - As gamers, what are some lessons we should have learned by now from past games, that we haven't? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
There's more money to be made catering to the middle of the market where the bulk of the customers are... the casual but long-term players, rather than the handful of high-end diehards who spend $20k on a new Alienware computer every 6 months and eat, live, and sleep the game, then get cranky when they've exhausted all the content in 6 weeks and start farming.
Caine said:Falling to the pressure of the gaming community could mean you produce a mediocre game that gets played for 3 months and then playership begins to drop off. if you play it too safe, then you could be just another average MMO. Break the mold on what can be done, instead of trying to appease a gaming community that's never satified. Be truly unique and innovated. Don't be pulled from your vision.
Yes!
This is what hurt a number of games, including EQ.
It's important to listen to the player (read: paying customer) base, and consider what they have to say, but it's not good to kowtow to them. Nothing will make everyone happy, and just because something makes people happy doesn't make it a good thing for the long term. So many games have been violated by a buff/nerf cycle driven by whining from the gaming community without really good regard to how these changes would affect the game.
EQ had years of "balance" issues where the community would (female dog) and moan about this class or that class, and then there'd be a patch, and the complaining would now shift to a different class that was effectively broken/wrecked/made obsolete by the patch. This cycle would repeat over and over.
The dev team must always maintain the vision for the game. And if Laetitia doesn't like that her ranger can't cast fireballs and backstab people while wearing nuclear plate armour, well, that's too bad, maybe she should play a different class or a different game, rather than change the game she's playing.
FatedEmperor said:1. Being able to solo 90% of the time in an MMO is not good.
You must be old like me :)
The truth is, in 2021, and frankly for at least the last 10 years, my experience is that a huge pool, if not a majority, of players want to join a multiplayer game and totally play it solo. It's weird, but it goes all the way back to EQ (maybe Ultima Online too, but i didn't play that for very long). I can remember having this dicussion in EQ when people would whinge that rogues/enchanters/warriors were hard to solo compared to magicians/necromancers/rangers, and rather than go play a mage/necro/forestgimp they'd rather roll a rogue and complain to devs/forums/chats.
It's weird and I've never understood it, but it caused me to stop using "MMO", and often use the term "Massively Solo ORPG" because that's how so many people want to play, and they get really loud when they can't.
I know what you mean though. I'd like to see a mix of content. There *absolutely should* be some challenging solo content at all stages of the game. I would also agree that you shouldn't be able to be king of the game by soloing only.
Going along with this, there needs to be a mechanism so one guild can't take over a game/server, a la the Goon squad on EVE. All players need to have a reasonable opportunity at the content without having to pay homage to a guild of misanthropic unemployed people who live in the game instead of real life.
FatedEmperor said:3. Trinity system or the Qutaritinty system, if it ain't broke don't fix it. This is aimed at games that phase out the use of CC abilities (like WoW), or try to remove an entire class by granting everyone a heal (like GW2).
4. Players like meaningful choices and having to weigh the pros and cons of their actions.
5. Players like freedom and options in how they progress and gear their characters. They don't generally appreciate being told that they must go somewhere or they must focus on a specific item next in their gearing process.
6. Players like utility and the ability to adapt. They also like being able to occasionally step it up in periods of intense critical need. The best dopamine hit is when your group overcomes a challenge that went down to the wire.
This was part of the beauty of Skyrim, and ESO. You want to be a heavy metal wearing spell caster? OK, you can do it, but you might never be the best warrior nor the best caster, but YOU can make the choice of how to blend them in, and if you're good, you can make something really useful.
The corollary to this is that no choice you make at the very beginning should gimp your character in the future. This is a game balance issue, but if I choose to be Stabbyboi at level 1 because I like daggers and there's a stabby skill, the game shouldn't gimp me later with only low-end daggers and high-end mobs that are oddly immune to stabs, or if I'm a pyromancer, only to head out to the big final boss dungeon who we find out is the Asbestos King in the hall of non-flammable material. This is something that pops up in traditional paper and pencil RPGs, but I've seen it in computer games too.
FatedEmperor said:7. Heavily scripted fights become predictable with time and lose some of their fun.
I'd like to amplify this by mentioning what someone else has said: there are way more players than devs. All scripted fights will be analyzed by the giant supercomputer that is "players with free time on their hands". They will find every weakness, loophole, trick, and exploit to abuse the script. Fights that were intended to be challenging will become simplified in short order. Then people will whine. Then the patch will come. Then it will get weird.
FatedEmperor said:9. Water environments generally suck in terms of character positioning, mob positioning, and utilizing AOE abilities. Hopefully, the VR team can improve on this area where many have failed.
Water environments are cool though, and *could* be done well, but I bet programming it is a challenge. That players find it difficult to figure out the strategies due to positioning etc. doesn't bother me. This is one of those challenges I was mentioning... maybe some solo underwater stuff. Make swimming and waterbreathing useful skills?
FatedEmperor said:13. Encounters should be designed to highlight niches and dungeons/raids should have multiple encounters which highlight different niches. Thus creating desirability for multiple classes and many different group compositions.
14. Your world is the most important part of your game, you shouldn't neglect its development by focusing only on high-end gameplay. You also shouldn't neglect high end game play by only focusing on your world development.
Agreed. Everyone should be useful (see my pyromancer comment).
I also believe too much effort goes into accommodating the highest level characters, and that kills games. The game world should be rich enough that when you max-level your character, you can play for a bit, but the push should be to get the player to start a new character in a new class, not just fester at level 100 for years while expansion after expansion comes out.
FatedEmperor said:16. Probably most importantly gamers are not dumb. We know what feels fun and what doesn't. We don't appreciate companies trying to justify their horrible game design by blaming the experience we have on us as players or telling us to give it a bit more time with no intention to change it.
I'm going to respectfully disagree here. Maybe gamers are not dumb, but plenty of them are massively selfish and can't see beyond exactly what they're doing right now, or how what they're doing fits into the game as a whole. They want their character, their stuff, their experience to be awesome, and everyone else can bite. This relates to why you have to hear the community, but you listen with a lot of salt.
An easy way to achieve color harmony across all assets in a game, is for a game's texture artists to agree on a single gamut mask and stay within it.
Level progression doesn't need to mean players become gods.
Massive numbers does not mean progress.
Gear progression doesnt need to mean players become gods.
Outside of a tutorial type level range, fighting what would later amount to critters, nothing in the game needs to be irrelevant, it is all a design choice to turn leveling into godhood and we see it over and over again. Games do this by generic offense/defense skills where every class gains the same per level. A low level can never hit something too high up. A high level becomes a god to anything too low. This leads to 70% of the world being too low to experience eventually. Beyond this skill based trope tied to levels leading to godhood we see everywhere there is the obvious gear levels (ilvls) that are a laughable problem. Do you meet the gear check for the fight? Damage, HP, etc are always going up by leaps and bounds. A sword should be a sword. None of this lvl 1 sword vs lvl 50 sword sillyness. Damage does not need to go up constantly. It effectively eliminates so much content from every game.
Solving level progression problems doesn't mean mobs need to level up with the player as ESO has tried, that simply removes the feeling of progress. You can actually get weaker by playing the game in that system. The solution to this laughable problem is to simply flatten the power players gain while leveling. You don't need to go from 10 hp/damage to 10,000,000. Gear doesn't need to go from having +1 stamina to +500 to multiple stats. Flatten the curve. Leveling doesn't need to be heavily focused on gaining power. The power difference between a lvl 10 and a lvl 50 could be mechanically closer to 5 levels you would see in most games. A high level may be able to take out 5 goblins under ideal conditions, and a group of high levels could laugh at the goblins being so weak, but there is no reason 5 goblins could beat on an AFK wizard without killing them fairly quickly.
You know what I always find funny. As you level up the bandits always level up too. They never have just one high level bandit sweep through and murder everyone and take everything. It would be so easy to do. This leveling up into godhood idea makes the world laughable.
Devs constantly talk about horizontal progression but never actually have it. Horizontal progression is about having options to play the PC in different ways. Players gaining new abilities is obviously the most common horizontal leveling we see in games. You gain a new tool allowing you to do something new but rather than expanding on this idea Devs everywhere keep it minimal and on the rails of the leveling system. Mastery has refocused the horizontal leveling to mastery points which is a wonderful thing (ignoring the respec button) But this could have been the main focus of the leveling process. This could have been the focus of the horizontal leveling idea. Expanding abilities you find around the world as you explore the world to learn them. No zone (past a tutorial type place) is truly obsolete. No mentoring down. No rubberbanding creature levels.
Let a druid go to the winter wonderland to learn how to give frost resistance that will be a great help in the next frozen zone. Gaining gear to survive in this land as they progress through the zone. Let the druid spend time (mastery points) maxing that skill out to being awesome. Another druid may have traveled to another zone and learned a damage shield or poison resist. They could have progressed to the most dangerous of 3 poison zones. Even raided the most deadly poison zone there, but little of that gear really helps them survive in the freezing cold. Their great poison ability may be ideal against the frost giants but pointless against the frost elemental. If any druid want the cold resist ability they need to travel to the winter wonderland zone and put in the work to obtain the frost resist, then spend the mastery points. The creatures shouldn't be grey punching bags from leveling. The poison mastery druid may have an easier time in the zone than someone completely new but a train would still kill them. They should still NEED a group. Make the path adventurers take have meaning.
Leveling could be about experiencing the world. It could be learning from all of the "masters" of your class and gaining every ability. Leveling doesn't have to be "number go up" It doesn't have to be a path to godhood.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - As gamers, what are some lessons we should have learned by now from past games, that we haven't? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
That mob you think you can skate around without drawing aggro is going to go aggro, anyway, so you may as well confront it. :derp:
Jobeson said:Leveling could be about experiencing the world. It could be learning from all of the "masters" of your class and gaining every ability. Leveling doesn't have to be "number go up" It doesn't have to be a path to godhood.
I'd love to play a game made by you.
If only crybabies like myself who move on to other games quickly didn't have to, because there weren't unbeatable gods with big guild names that monopolize (24/7) all of a server's most valuable content with the game developers thanks and blessing for doing so.
Pantheon is definately going to allow godhood, though. You can already see it when you look at the current class descriptions. The obvious desparity between low level skills and high level ones. At least the gear is promised to not be too op.
squid said:Maybe gamers are not dumb, but plenty of them are massively selfish and can't see beyond exactly what they're doing right now, or how what they're doing fits into the game as a whole. They want their character, their stuff, their experience to be awesome, and everyone else can bite. This relates to why you have to hear the community, but you listen with a lot of salt.
As the type of player you probably dislike, Agreed.
The world is a big place, I have every right and ability to only play games that fit me and my desired experience. Everyone else can bite.
Vr should have the same right for only making games that fit them. Everyone else can bite. Or perhaps just get their own special rules server if VR wants their money bad enough.
Class stats that really matter as they are described when creating the character. I've been screwed at character creation for believing what is written about the character and the way attributes function in the world.
If a game is too difficult to be able to incorporate all of the stats available at character creation through the leveling up within the game then remove those stats from the game. If wisdom for one class is exactly the same as intelligence for another class it's just a different manner of getting mana but outside of that the stats have no meaning to any of the other classes then get rid of one of them (say wisdom) and just make it intelligence. But I feel that whatever the stat it should have some innate benefit for having it as opposed to not having it.
Have strength mean something to a spellcaster however miniscule it might be. Have intelligence mean something to a basher class no matter how miniscule it may be. Have wisdom mean something to a aclass that requires intelligence as their primary method for mana and have intelligence mean something to the class that requires wisdom.
If charisma is going to be in the game then make it matter. People may not care for the benefit that it brings the class and that's fine - they can choose to avoid it. But if someone does decide they like that attribute then make it matter for them rather than tying an attribute to one class and say that's the end of that for attribute meaning.
Anyway, that is my answer to what are some lessons we should have learned by now from past games, that we haven't?
"Community Debate - As gamers, what are some lessons we should have learned by now from past games, that we haven't?"
I've noticed that gamers (myself included) jump around from game to game always searching for the next best thing. And that "best" thing to one person is not what someone else is looking for, but happens to be a game that has more aspects of what a person may want in a single game. Some people may play one game to fulfill a specific desire, like say combat mechanics or boss complexity, while playing another game to fulfill a desire for role playing, and yet another for PvP, so when a game comes along that toutes combining fight mechanics and role play, players gravitate toward that game in hopes of consolidating those desires... until a game comes along touting to combine even more... only to go back to games that prioritize a single genre.
I think the "lesson we should have learned by now" is to not expect a game to fulfill multiple genres. As our technolgy improves, multi-tasking is becoming expected in everything, but we need to dissociate that from gaming; If a game is focused around RPG, don't expect great PvP or balanced combat mechanics. If you jump into a game reknown for its great PvE, don't expect great PvP simply because its the next new shiny game using some kind of new technology... because the "technology" isn't that new, just a new way to look at it.
BeaverBiscuit said:Pantheon is definately going to allow godhood, though. You can already see it when you look at the current class descriptions. The obvious desparity between low level skills and high level ones. At least the gear is promised to not be too op.
Oh I am fully aware from what I have seen it will be the common MMO trope with leveling which really makes me sad for a game like Pantheon. Kilsin did say "that we haven't?" which is on point.
I will eventually be one of those gods, but I honestly plan to die dozens of times intentionally since they don't seem to want to give us a mastery slider to put xp towards mastery or a simple stop leveling button. Intentionally stay within a level range longer to go explore all zones on different continents also for lvl 25s. See the world as it should be seen, grouping with players of a similar level range.
I am even worried about the gear as it makes me think we will see worthless magic items being vendored in mass. Constantly replacing your sword for a sword with more damage or simply a sword with 1 more con and str.
VR should give the creater of each toon as much info as possible. Give your players the knowledge of what each point they assign will do. Does a point in strength for a caster mean extra power/effective/damage to the spell? The more characteristics that matter to each class the better. Does strength help me carry more stuff or does constitution? Allow a choice of weapons to start.
Items need to drop. I know VR wants items to be meaningful and special. But you must balance that with letting players fill their armor/weapon slots. A lot of players play just for the shineys.
Try, try, try not to nerf items/spells/abilities. Nothing pisses off a player more than when their stuff becomes useless.
Stick to your quaternary of roles. Role blending should not happen to give a class more to do, as they gain levels.
Give players as much info as you can. Put seconds back in the chat.
Improve the website. Finish the race/class chart. Update 187's faq.