We are all guilty of that to some extent. Some more than others. Nostalsia for it's own sake is not a healthy basis for a good long-term outlook for a game.
The answer is *both* though ;)
Some mechanics have clear negatives but the positives can outweigh them or be mitigated by others.
Good luck VR with the balancing act!
We always favor good memories, that is ingrained in most of us. But in some things, those "bad" memories become good memories over time.
Like rain on a wedding day, on that day it appears tragic, but as time passes, people remember the unique things that the rain created about the day.
Like corpse runs, at the time they are grueling and frustrating. But as time has passed, some of them have created lasting memories that we look back on now fondly.
I don't know if it's hurting the genre, as much as society, technology, and expectations have changed as time has passed.
As humans, we are more likely to voice our displeasure over things than our pleasure. If one is content, theytend to just go on about thier life, if they're displeased, they tend to compain and gripe to anyone that will listen.
"There's alot more complaint departments in stores than compliment departments".
Kilsin said:Nostalgia - Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
The three Nostalgia's that I think people are miss remembering:
1) EC style chat spam selling is fun - - if so I have some sand that you can use as eye wash
2) Waiting a month on rotation to get your one night at competitive raid content and only after the lead guilds are done farming for their core team, btw all the 5+day spawns are already dead so have fun with the trash. - - Basically if you are not dedicated to raiding, you don't get to.
3) X class had X ability in EQ therefor X class in Pantheon should have X ability.
I don't really think VR is suffering under these illusions but that doesn't mean they are not being pressured by them.
I'm worried that we're being a bit too nostalgic. Corpse runs were just plain awful. Deleveling was just plain awful.
Both of these were simply terrible for someone who didn't have a guild to back them up. I can imagine a lot of casual players, or new players, who experience this for the first time, throw up their hands, and say," Ok, well, screw this." Or even if someone is the top level player in their guild - they get their corpse stuck in some dungeon, some place, and everyone in their group of friends is either a) busy, b) too weak to help them.
If we have a robust enough community, with enough nice people, this could hopefully be alleviated. Or maybe something like a Dev/Gm sponsored guild that goes out of their way to help people - or possibly community contests for people who've helped. I don't know :)
I think to some extent, many of us (myself included) tend to remember the things that set older games apart in a good way, while mentally sweeping the stuff we didn't like under the rug. Mostly I think we do this out of frustration with many newer games. Sure, those newer games addressed a lot of inconveniences and complaints that we as a population had back in the day. But, they seemingly did so at the cost of enabling a meaningful experience.
For my part, when I think about what might work and what might not work for Pantheon, I try to be both critical and objective of every game I consider. Every game ever released has done something good, that should be considered. And every game ever released has also done something bad. For example, EQ got the pace of progression pretty close to right, in my opinion. But the game's economy was absolutely doomed to failure because of an ever-increasing money supply and an ever-increasing item supply. And those are just two aspects - there's plenty more we could and should talk about, both good and bad, just for EQ. Either way, my point is that if we just focus on what was good without also talking about what was bad, we're not really learning the lessons of the past, and we'll repeat some of those same mistakes.
Both are good. As for what would be good to include in a game depends on each individual. We all have different opinions on what we think is a great good memory versus a good bad memory at least when it comes to games. Though there are plenty of crossover memories.
Example; I can see the good and bad in trains and not just the nostalgia of them. The good part ( for me ) is that it feels realistic. You piss off a bunch of enemies why wouldn't they want to give chanse and kill you? The bad part is that in an open world game there are side effects to trains and often collateral damage. Besides being AFK, be aware of your surroundings. When you enter a jungle with only a pencil and get eating by lions, you can't blame the lions.
Without difficult things in games such as trains we can't learn from our mistakes and what we did wrong to cause them. Even though we know what causes them...don't we? ;)
I wouldn't want it any other way.
I think it more accurate to say we are favoring *memories* whether good or bad.
There is an enormous sentiment here in favor of corpse runs. At the time - how many of us viewed them as a positive experience enhancing the game and encouraging us to work with other players? How many of us viewed them as a royal pain in the arse taking enormous amounts of time from more important and useful things like gaining experience and getting "phat lewt" (mine seemed to always be on a diet).? Want to bet that the latter outnumbered the former by a huge amount - back in the day?
There seems to be a large majority favoring allowing other players to train us - although with sanctions if it can be *proven* that it was done deliberately and maliciously. At the time - how many of us viewed this as a thrilling opportunity to enhance the excitement and unpredicability of the game world and make it feel more real? How many of us cursed the idiots doing it, cursed the waste of time and effort, and regretted the loss of opportunity to gain experience and phat lewt. Again, I would bet the latter exceeded the former back in the day.
There seems to be an overwhelming majority favoring slow travel and slow leveling. At the time - how many of us lauded the opportunity to spend 45 minutes running from point A to point B for the 50th time past scenery we had seen so often it was just a blur? How many of us exulted that after a year of playing we were still level 20 and thanked the Gods of the game that we were getting so much value for the money we were paying, and weren't bored out of our skulls by being at maximum level with not as much to do? Or did we wish the accursed experience table wasn't so miserly and wish that at least by the 10th time we didn't have to make that same tedious run? I would bet the latter exceeded the former - though not overwhelmingly - back in the day.
Obviously memories that were positive at the time - that first piece of epic loot or the success at the end of a long dungeon or raid - are also favored.
Please don't take any of my comments as being either for or against corpse runs, slow travel or training. I am just answering the question and find those excellent examples of how nostalgia washes out the pain and turns the unbearable into the desirable.
Lyaelan said:I'm worried that we're being a bit too nostalgic. Corpse runs were just plain awful. Deleveling was just plain awful.
You are confusing thje topic of nostalgia with the topic of risk-vs-reward.
Corpse runs and deleveling and "losing" are SUPPOSED to be awful. They are supposed to be painful and cause fear and frustration. Without the pain of real game loss, the rest is trivial and meaningless.
Kilsin said:Nostalgia - Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
For my part I don't believe I am. I qualify that statement by Hell Levels. I hit 30 at the same time I was learning to Quad Kite.. it was nothing less than grueling I was 30, then 29 then 30 then 29 then 30... I'll bet no less than 6 times before I finally got the hang of it. I find absolutely NOTHING good about hell levels! Incredible memory, in fact I'm still tramatised.
But many other things that I hope return in Pantheon that many claim are just nostalgia had benifit to them. Benifit that was a huge loss.
Corpse runs, this is IMHO emergent content these are Quest. Probably the most completed quest in all of EQ. why would you ever remove that from a RPG?
Slow travel (even contanent to contanent portals are too much IMHO). Seemed boring to repeat journeys in EQ and it was if you played solo. This made the world see me huge, and gave plenty of time to chat if you had made friends and joined a guild.
Trains. I remember the first time playing WOW and a train running by and me jumping to alert mode to deside what to do, get out of the way or take them on when they return, and my partner telling me "don't worry, they will ignore us" the mixed emotions I had right then. It was the death of the world.
It's not nostalgia that makes me want these things (except hell levels) back. It's the COST to remove them is just too high!
It's been 15-19 years for a lot of us since we played EverQuest & the nostalgia blinders are powerful. The major bad mechanics people are bringing up here are: corpse runs & associated experiance loss, slow travel, trains. I hated these when they hit me back in '99, and I hate them today sometimes playing P99. But when I take a step back and consider the impact these mechanics have I feel they're essential to the experience.
Corpse runs suck, they can take hours to recover from. A wipe can end a group when some folks decide they'll deal with it tomorrow. But I don't get the same thrill of victory in other games when I eek out a win in EQ. The greater the risk, the sweeter the reward. If I know I'll respawn at the zone entrance with the rest of the group and just need to repair my gear a little more when we're done I can shrug it off. In EQ I white knuckle the movement keys toward the nearest exit.
Trains are unfair since it's not your fault. But it's a price that has to be paid if you want an open world where everyone plays together. I'd prefer being frustrated that the camp I want is already taken then being handed my own copy of the dungeon. The loot from that would feel like a participation trophy. The world "feels" more alive if I can zone into a dungeon and shout I'm looking for a group. And it feels like I'm a small part of a living world vs being the chosen one.
Slow travel means the world "feels" big. If you can get a wiz/dru to teleport you great, though you'll pay for the convenience and definitely hoof it 3 zones away without blinking. I feel that Plane of Knowledge in EQ killed something about the game by shrinking the world down. Now almost everything was connected via a relatively short walk and it ruins the immersion.
So while all of these things are objectively negative they really do breathe some danger, frustration, and life into the game. If you take away risk you're left with a slot machine with pretty colors that always rewards you.
One thing to bear in mind. Delayed gratification and struggling to concur something directly contributes to the magnitude of the feeling of achievement. Additionally increasing the penalty for failure also increases the excitement and pressure of the moment which also often adds to the feeling of achievement.
Many of the older games were based more off the 2nd ed D&D death penalties where often dying meant losing the character entirely or a great deal of time and resources. While Perma-death games do exist and from what I heard it was really exciting to have a Jedi in the days of SWG perma-death it is not very suited to an MMO unless that is exactly the design of the MMO. Finding a middle ground in an MMO where death hurts but not so much that you rage quit when it happens is a challenge.
An idea I thought of recently that might be interesting is the difference between protected and unprotected experience. The crux of it is you can only protect your exp by logging out in an Inn or an appropriate similar location. From the time to leave the Inn to the time where you return your newly gained experience is unprotected. If you die you loose all your unprotected experience unless you receive a resurrection from which you will regain a portion of your lost exp.
Likewise your inventory could be “insured” at a bank of some sort. If it is really infeasible to retrieve your corpse you can pay your deductible and get your inventory back that you had at death the last time you recorded your gear. Anything that was not on your corpse when you died would not be returned to you and anything you had gained since you last saved would also be lost in addition to the cost. When you collect your gear from the bank your corpse in the wild fades away.
This makes corpse runs and resurrections the best choice by far but still can allow you a second option.
clepius77 said:It's been 15-19 years for a lot of us since we played EverQuest & the nostalgia blinders are powerful.
It it's been 15 years, then you did not play EQ1: The Golden Years. You played what came after the Golden years, when SoE sledgehammered it with whatever they felt would give them millions of players.
I am not supessing the bad memories. In fact they are what make the good memories so good. The bad things that could happen only served to highlight the good times. If you make this game with no chance of anything bad happening to the player it will fail to be what you are selling it as.
I am not saying allow everything that is wrong with gaming to be allowed, I do not condone griefing when the player has no recourse to defend themselves and I don't want powerful guilds to be able to lock other ones out of content. I do want a harsh death penalty and difficult encounters that the average player cannot defeat unless they learn adapt and grow. I want to hear people shouting train to zone and I want there to be places like Fear that would ruin your day if you went in unprepared.
If there is a chance that you couold lose your corpse with all of your gear on it you will care more about your character period. That fear is what helped make the game real. All of those bad things helped to make any accomplishment you have that much better. I got 3 or 6 epic weapons in EQ2. I dont really remember actually getting them. I remember my one epic in EQ1, and I remember every raid I ever did there.
In short I want to have bad memories of things in Pantheon. They will make it so 20 years from now I might still remember my good times here.
Heck no.
I believe that quality of life improvements come in two categories. The arguable and the un-arguable. For example, a lot of times it seems this forum is split almost evenly with wanting an auction house, versus wanting the players to decide in which zone auctions should take place. Too some, having an auction house falls under a quality of life improvement. For others, an auction house is a hand holding mechanic that does more harm than good.
But then there are other things that are unarguably necessary in the MMO's of today that EQ didn't have. Raid windows, guild functionality (you can't even get a list of guild-mates in old EQ!), that horrible interface at the beginning. These are things that we might remember fondly, but they certainly aren't things we want to bring back. I get that little fuzzy feeling everytime I see that really old interface that gives us a small square of game to see, but no way in hell do I want it back - and I'm fairly sure that goes for just about everyone here.
For the rest? The lack of maps, the auction houses, the corpse runs, the death penalties of the world? That's not nostalgia Vs non-nostalgia. That's just this Vs that. It's just disagreements about what's important in an MMO, and no different from any other disagreements.
Frankly, I think the question that needs to be asked is "do you think people use the 'rose-colored-glasses' rejoinder only when they've run out of good arguments?". To which I might answer "slightly agree".
To answer the topics question directly. Yes you are favouring the good memories ( at least for me ) and that is a good thing. Granted I haven't played your updated version of them yet since I'm not in pre-alpha ,but I still play EQ and the old versions don't prove to be an issue for me.
1. Trains = good memories
2. no map = good memories
3. No hand holding ( quest exclamation point, lack of quest hubs ) = good memories
4. Slow strategic game play =good memories
5. Corpse run = hard, but good memories
6. Exploration = good memories
7. No spell/ability spamming = good memories
Haters will always hate. Learnng different things old or new is good. Hopefully I'm understanding this topic. The whole idea of bringing back an old school gaming MMO is a good nostalgic memory.
Yes,
But I would add that the good memorieS (plural) are there because of the one bad memory. I would say that Nostalgia is all the successes where the bad memory did not occur but may have been anticipated.
This could have/almost happened IF that bad memory occured, but since it did not occur- we fought around it and we won! or if nostalgia is deep- we lived...
Interestingly, we don't remember walking into a new dungeon and not dieing and doing well, but instead lament the laborious camps or the "grind" in that dungeon for the certain item.
Maybe that is what made Karnor's Castle so memorable for EQ players. By the time you got there, you assumed trains would be done with- a lowbie event- not for polished and world traveled adventurers. "Trains to the LEFT, gosh-darn it!" *sheepish voice from the entrance-* "left coming in or left going out?" "WHAT DO YOU THINK?!....*newb*"
TBH the bad memories are what makes the good memories good. I have a weird example, but I will say it anyways. Lets take games like the Counterstrike genre and Call of Duty Genre and ask some simple questions. How did it feel to die? and, How does the combat feel. To those answers, dieing didn't mean a lot and the combat was fast pace and mind numbing. The counter example of that would by something like DayZ. DayZ had a huge amount of frustrations, like spawning naked with no gear and dying to campers that like killing noobs. There was also running long distances to get to places and when finally spending an hour running around getting geared up for a fight you end up dying in like 30 seconds. Too be fair starting out in that enviroment frustated the hell outta me, but when I got good it became way more rewarding in the end.
So there has to be some sort of struggle in this game. Whether it is time spent, difficulty, or w/e. Example: I hated corpse runs with a passion, but I also loved the sense of going into a dungeon I haven't been in with a group and dungeon crawl with the hanging fear over my group that if we make a wrong turn and run into something we can't handle and die, having to go through that nightmare. It sucked, but I wouldn't have ever felt that sense of danger and excitment if corpse running wasn't there. EQ now, played on the TLP, lets you spawn with your gear back. I don't care if I die, even with the exp loss. It would get annoying or frustrating, but I never felt a sense of fear of dying, even with exp loss.
So I think people need to really think about what excatly made that moment nostalgic for them. Usually the nostalgia comes from a lot of surrounding bs that you didn't like, like corpse runs, that made that one moment feel great. So really think about why that was a good moment, before people start going all insane with I don't like this or that. Some of the things that you didn't like are probably the reason why you have such good memories to begin with.
While its natural to fondly remember the good and gradually forget the bad parts of any experience, I think for many of us here, we can remember the bad parts of a game just as vividly as the good if not more. This much is obvious from some of the discussions circling the threads here. Lots of players, very pationate about their past experiences, many of whom are seeking to relive their good experiences but the most active threads here circle around the seemingly bad experiences or systems of the various games we've played. I mean this for both sides of the discussion as well. Many players for example hate the idea of raid content that can be monopolized because its open world content while Many players hate the idea of forced rotations, lockouts or other artificial restraints. These strong dislike opinions don't grow out of fond memories of yesteryear but rather bad memories of how a previous games mechanics ruined the experience for us.
Zorkon said:Kilsin said:Nostalgia - Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
Trains. I remember the first time playing WOW and a train running by and me jumping to alert mode to deside what to do, get out of the way or take them on when they return, and my partner telling me "don't worry, they will ignore us" the mixed emotions I had right then. It was the death of the world.
It's not nostalgia that makes me want these things (except hell levels) back. It's the COST to remove them is just too high!
This exactly, no one loved these things but without them the Nostalgia we have for EQ would not exist. The COST to remove them is too high.
But to answer the question, I think perhaps we do favor good memories and perhaps this is what the Genre needs. To find the context within which those good memories existed. If your from EQ, you likely have many good memories of getting out of situations you hated.
-Az