I prefer to use the word "mystery" rather than "challenge" because there is no challenge in any MMORPG .
Indeed within months if not weeks every quest, NPC location, fight, raid in an MMORPG is analysed and solved in great detail on many web sites . The only difference is that 20 years ago no you tubes , tweets or other facebooks existed so that some parts of an MMORPG were still unknown after 1 year or more . What happened was that with the new social media this "mystery" time has been so dramatically shortened that no mysteries exist anymore . So yes, the exploration/wonder/immersion dimension has been broken beyond repair .
However I believe that precisely this dimension is instrumental to the feeling to be in a real breathing world and makes the specific charm of MMORPGs compared to other games . So, obviously, it is only a matter of time untill somebody will find a way to make the fantasy worlds mysterious, appealing and unknown again . As this is impossible to do with scripted, predetermined design the only solution I see is AI and evolving environment . That's why I would think that the future MMORPG will use more and more sophisticated adaptative AI and allow irreversible changes in the environment (towns get destroyed, kings die, wars erupt, alliances are forged and betrayed ....) . For me the MMORPG of the future will be like history in writing where nobody will be able to predict exactly what will happen .
Kilsin said:Challenge:
- Have today's MMORPGs watered down the genre too far,
- has the challenge been removed beyond repair,
- and how do you think this will effect MMORPGs in the future?
a- unfortunately, yes. the PVE challenge is removed, the whole world can be soloed, the mobs are wimps, on level mobs are much weaker than same level player character. some games still have small instanced part which is dungeons and raids that requires a group but it is not saving the game as a whole.
b- no, not beyond repair, I think that in every MMO, if we will take the "basic" mob, and will scale it to the difficulty of a player character of its level i.e.: same HP, armor, weapon damage, and spells. then the game world will become challenging and interesting overnight. people will make groups and use CC in order to stand to the mobs.
just imagine if the whole world of warcraft world is built as one huge seamless mythic dungeon, and the only "safe spaces" are the main cities.
it is the catering to the lazy player that seeks instant gratification what brought us up to here.
c- the pendulum will reach its edge and come back, even now there are many games in the making that are not watered down (though most of them are PVP games, and Pantheon is a sole PVE game)
another issue is that in the "old" MMOs the content was the reward and the gearing was the means to reach that reward, the players 'collected' content but with time, the gear became the reward and the content became the means to reach that reward, and players started to collect gear. we have to reverse this back.
Yes, today's MMO's are very care bear, hold your hand and guide you through every step of the game.
The challenge of adventuring and exploration do not exist as they once did.
This can and will be brought back in Pantheon.
The future of MMO's will hopefully follow this design.
Yes, challenge is gone on the very most MMORPG i know, and i know many...
To please the mass of players and give them satisfaction the playtime needs a good reward. When things are to challenging for the casual average gamer, they leave and with them their money.
So, i think the game industry just looking for number of subs they can get (i can understand this). And there are way way more players in this section then in the section of challenging mmorpg.
This days all must be entertaining without a great afford to get it, thats the problem. A real challenging game would have a stable player base, while others sub and unsub very random and short times to see something new. The game relaeses in the past years showed me almost the same: People buy the game, level up in 3 days to max level and then play 3 months the easy way, then move to next game and so on. In the last years nearly all known games was going this way to feed the common casual player. The most players i know quit plaing MMO because they are not challening and easy to play. For them its wasted time and they prefer to watch the newest movie instead to log into a game.
For the future: Studions make games, players buy and play it for few month then move along. Add ons while bring them back maybe for another short time. So i personally think studios will go the way to sell games like offline games and earn the money as fast they are able to. Even the F2P games will loose many players because the micropayments annoy more and more players (in Germany for sure, not sure about the rest of the world).
As technology evolved and improved with each passing year and different gamers came into the fold the direction that games took in their development met the expectations of their target market. programmers and developers came up and alongside their players. So the games evolved.
However, I believe technology can also allow for the ability to bring back those who can best attest to the notion that the "old" MMOs are missed and are desired. Lots of "old" people that were the gamers back then probably can still play games today. Back then the older generation did not play games. Now, for the most part, all people and all generations play games. We don't pop quarters into machines to play arcade games anymore. We don't play 64K games on consoles anymore. We don't play 256K games on Apple ][+ machines anymore. The nineties really accelerated the way we could play and interact with games. Technology has made it far easier to claim disposable income from people. A little bit of disposable income from a lot of people can be funneled very efficiently into games and recovery costs for game developers. Even better to claim lots of disposable income from some of the people along the way.
I think the subscription model will appeal first to the older gamers who want to get back to relaxing on their desktop. I think the valuation of spending disposable income in a subscription game will appeal first to the older gamers. I also think that not revealing everything about what has been developed to allow for it to be discovered with carefully controlled (and hidden) algorithms that make predictive analysis more difficult will appeal first to the older generation gaming type (changed the reference to say "gaming type" since newer generations of players may also find this style of gaming appealing). For an illustrative example - itemization and encounter spawning can be implemented in an easy and efficient manner and less predictive manner with a variable reference to zone population or area population or bubble population. Encounter design is very appealing - with and without a shiny item as a reward. Surviving an encounter does have an appeal as its own reward and an item doesn't need to be the reward.
A slower combat mechanic is not for everyone and there are comments on these forums that will back that statement up. A punishing death mechanic is not for everyone and there are comments on these forums that will back that statement up. And a game that can engage a casual player is not for everyone and there are comments on these forums that will back that statement up. I am well aware that this game will have as part of its playerbase those that are not casual gamers by their own definition. But by my own definition I am a "casual gamer" and by my own understanding the tenets of Pantheon have not driven me away and I find they fit in well with my definition of who can be engaged with this game (emphasis on "who can"). I state this not as a divisive remark but as a remark to address an older generation of players similar to myself who would have no problem paying a subscription for this game even though they may not play it constantly and may take a long time to discover and absorb content that has been painstakingly developed and refined for consumption. Some people would have a problem paying $180 for content when they could just as easily pay $15 for the same content and just spend more time in real life absorbing that content - and other people would have no problem whatsoever paying $180 to absorb that content (using a $15/month subscription cost basis as an illustrative example).
Subscriptions are not based on time playing the game but based on time in real life. Play the game for ten hours per month as opposed to ten hours per day and pay the same. Figuring out what a minimum subscriber base to make it worthwhile would entail is up to VR to decide and not have to publish. They have to recover costs already sunk and they have to be able to grow and pocket some extra coin along the way. I believe VR is on the right path because the game of Pantheon appeals to me.
I have a lot more disposable income now than I did 20 years ago. I also find I engage in gaming far less today than I did 20 years ago. But I also want to engage in playing a game just as much as I did 20 years ago. I, simply, am not engaging in much for gaming because there isn't much that is holding my interest. I WANT an "old style" pen-and-paper D&D based MMORPG and I actually WANT to hand over some of my disposable income in the form of a subscription to have access to that world. I WANT to give a gaming company some of my money to play a game and I have no problem giving them lots of money to play a game where I absorb content at a slower pace. I will pay more as a subscriber and want to pay more as a subscriber than someone who wants that very same content but for less spent money (which equates to playing the game more in a compressed period of time). The technology of today with high speed internet, memory, processing speed, advanced algorithms, and emergent AI means that things can be engaged and rewarded differently and different people can arrive at the end differently and even look different because they are different.
The tenets of Pantheon as has been laid out appeal to me. Others may have different reasons for why Pantheon appeals to them.
There is hope. I see it. I have it.
Riahuf22 said: I have to disagree with you deadshade, you have being back the challenge quite easily, like bosses randomly procing their abilities, but do proc them in a set giving amount of time like let's say they do a aoe life tap at least every 6 seconds but can do it 1 second after the prev one and so on that way their is no, this is how you fight him and counter his moves by simply counting to 4 before you move out and lose los before moving, things like this will make it to where their can't be a way to know how to fight the fight, you merely understand the mechanic and try to do your best to counter it but knowing your not going to be 100% at it at the same time, shot I remember in EQ you could literally have a CH chain going and in one phase maybe lost 10% of my health and before the next one got to me I was dead, the spiky damage from the raid mobs themselves could be a nightmare for healers, they you bring in other things some the casters aren't just standing their nuking things to death, Like aoe stuff like in velious, but not to make it feel wow raiding and doing dance Dance revolution, just enough to where they at least have to move and not just hotting hokey numbers to cast spells mindlessly. I believe the raids can be known, can understand everything about it and how it works like the back of your hand, but understanding you can still wipe just like that.
While I do believe things need to be not so predictable, this idea is a terrible one imo. Random procs and spike dmg are a good thing. It keeps you on your toes. However, fights being based on total RNG are never a good thing. In your example, the way to over come this problem would be to bring no melee at all and have 1-2 tanks that are overly geared. This completely negates the RNG of it but it also cuts out people based on class choice which is not what anyone wants. Healers can't react or even cast a heal in the little time frame your giving in this scenario. It's good to have complex scripts to fights and it's good to have a lot going on all over the fight but fights should not ever be left to RNG.
In terms of challenge, it's been watered down a lot but it still exists. WoW destroyed the genre over the past 7 or so years. However, their Mythic raids are still very challenging. Most people don't even attempt more than 1-2 bosses in mythic and maybe only 500 or so people in the world actually complete the entire thing (outside of buying carries through it). The real void in challenge is in the everyday stuff. Leveling, grinding, general grouping type stuff. Since the days of EQ that challenge has been lost. You can solo everything from 1 to cap with ease. Most of the time it doesn't even take long.
A lot of challenging factors have been removed in newer MMOs, most importantly the need for groups. But for me that's not the main factor that the newer MMOs can't keep me. I've played through the (solo) campaigns of several MMOs in the last years, and I found most of them fun and engaging. However, all of these games were built in a way that once you finish the campaign and arrive at the "end game", the fun stops pretty much right away. Instead of questing and exploring, the focus turns completely to grinding (gear, faction, ...) and becomes very repetitive. At that point, I lose interest.
The lesson seems pretty clear to me. The journey (to max level) must take longer than it does in many new MMOs, requiring others to advance is part of that. Making the monsters harder (thus non soloable) also makes them more memorable. And most importantly, at the "end" there must not be a complete "switch" to the gameplay.
Kilsin said:Challenge - Have today's MMORPGs watered down the genre too far, has the challenge been removed beyond repair, and how do you think this will effect MMORPGs in the future? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
Yes, today's MMORPGs have done significant damage to the genre. There has been a sort of race to the bottom in terms of removing the challenge in MMORPGs. I have always felt that Everquest was at the top in terms of difficulty and challenge but as we all know, this challenge was removed over time and is what pushed many of us away from it. The problem with this race to the bottom is that it continues to set expectations of players (especially newer ones) with low barriers and easily solo-able worlds.
This is the state of the game for pretty much all MMORPGs these days. A game which sets its pole firmly in the challenging camp (such as Pantheon) will stand out from the others. Marketing and word of mouth will set expectations for those who are looking for a new game to play. People can decide if they want to play a simple game which they can master in a few months or one which will take years. Pantheon also has great pedigree starting with Brad McQuaid and flowing through the entire development team and the solid fan base of players who are all looking for something challenging.
I don't think that challenge has really been removed, per se. I've played plenty of MMOs that challenged me when they released. But what's happened is:
- Most MMOs have moved towards a group-optional content model. Challenges are scaled for the solo player, not the group.
- Most MMOs seem to assume that players will not focus on horizontal progression (such as building out a good gear set) until they hit the level cap. Thus, for those of us who invest time in making our character more powerful outside of actual levels, the challenge drops off very quickly.
- Most MMOs seem to assume that players won't try to do all the content that they're presented with, and so level progression is built such that you can move on without completing everything. For those of us who take the time to actually do everything, the challenge ends up being lost.
- When it comes to group content, most MMOs seem to have the philosophy that players are differentiated into "normal" and "hardcore", and their response to that is to build things like "hard modes" where the same group content is available in a more challenging form. The "normal mode" content is generally built with the idea of the lowest common denominator in terms of player preparedness.
- Most MMOs introduce a very high level of power scaling between entry level equipment at the level cap, and the best equipment that can be obtained. This is meant to give players a horizontal progression to pursue, but the result is that players who pursue that progression effectively trivialize all but the most difficult content avaialable to them.
Like I said, when I play MMOs at launch, I find the challenge is still there. It's in the months/years after launch, when things become known, when everyone's geared out and capped out, that the challenge bleeds away. I think there's multiple ways to prevent this problem from happening, but it requires a developer team to be very careful with itemization and player power, as well as content design.
Nephele said:..
Like I said, when I play MMOs at launch, I find the challenge is still there. It's in the months/years after launch, when things become known, when everyone's geared out and capped out, that the challenge bleeds away. I think there's multiple ways to prevent this problem from happening, but it requires a developer team to be very careful with itemization and player power, as well as content design.
This is a great summary of what happens (the rest of your post laid out the points perfectly). Short-term, the games will be challenging. Long-term takes effort and planning to pull off and keep interest while avoiding the "mud-flation" problems. I think that Pantheon looks to be on the right track as it will require player development in order to be able to get to a lot of the good content (using things like player acclimatization to be able to access cold, toxic, hot zones etc. and fight mobs with attacks which use these types of environmental effects)
Kilsin said:
Challenge - Have today's MMORPGs watered down the genre too far, has the challenge been removed beyond repair, and how do you think this will effect MMORPGs in the future? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
Convenience and challenge aren't mututally exclusive, but financially, history has demonstrated they go together very well.. provided the convenience is high and the challenge is low. (GW2/SWTOR/Rift/more)
What hasn't been demonstrated, yet, is an MMO with high convenience and high challenge. We've already seen low/high with EQ1. Personally, I'd like to see high/high. But I suspect Pantheon will (at best) be a mediuim/medium.
vjek said:
Convenience and challenge aren't mututally exclusive, but financially, history has demonstrated they go together very well.. provided the convenience is high and the challenge is low. (GW2/SWTOR/Rift/more)What hasn't been demonstrated, yet, is an MMO with high convenience and high challenge. We've already seen low/high with EQ1. Personally, I'd like to see high/high. But I suspect Pantheon will (at best) be a mediuim/medium.
Convenience doesn't just mean getting a group together. It means inventory management. Travel. Banks. Money. Weight. Enchantments. Crafting. Harvesting. Refining. Dyes. Appearance. Flight (or not). Schedules. Guilds. Notes. Maps. Pins. Picks (or not). Targeting. Highlighting. Macros (or not). Follow (or not). etc. etc.
From a purely combat perspective, getting a group together quickly is certainly a convenience. Yet, it does not have to be cross server, cross zone, or have teleportation to be convenient in context. Having matchmaking work in the same zone only? Very convenient, and not socially toxic.
Ignoring the previous comments in this thread and looking only at the OP's question - yes and no.
Yes the challenge has been watered down enormously. No it is not beyond repair.
Three things that are horribly wrong with the genre today - and unlike many of my opinions I may be in sync with the majority of us on these points.
1. Ability to level past content *very* fast in certain dungeons or other areas either designed for powerleveling or used emergently for that purpose and never fixed to prevent that use. Rift's Intrepid Adventures. EQ2's Level Agnostic Dungeons. Level cap in a day, at least when I was playing, and the main reason I left. Typically instances that let anyone enter over a fairly low minimum level and allowed the lower levels to get enormously fast experience if any higher levels were in the group.
Fix - trivially easy in concept. If you allow low levels to group with high levels make *very* sure they don't get better experience per minute than they could adventuring at-level.
2. Ability especially at lower levels to kill anything quickly and with essentially no risk. Designers obviously feel that players that actually *die* may stop playing, Gods forbid. So any class even tanks or healers can solo mobs significantly higher than they are (yellow and orange typically to use the standard color scheme but even red and sometimes purple) fairly rapidly and with little or no risk at least through orange.
Fix - obviously make characters weaker or mobs stronger so that even a mob at your level is a challenge and an orange means run or die. Or - much better - form a group. But *please* do not overbalance this and make healers or tanks incapable of soloing at all. I do not say all classes should be able to solo equally well but all should be able to kill at-level enemies.
3. Ability to reach level cap far too fast even just doing normal content. Even in LOTRO which I keep playing because it takes more time than most MMOs to get to high level I can reach level-cap much too fast just doing normal quests - no exploits or experience boosts or powerleveling.
Fix - another easy one - either give a LOT lower experience per kill and per quest or require a LOT more experience to level. Caveat - we do not want level two to take weeks to get to; new players need some positive feedback. But by level 10, for example, even a tenth of a level should be cause for "woot" not 5 minutes of effort.
Kilsin said:Challenge - Have today's MMORPGs watered down the genre too far, has the challenge been removed beyond repair, and how do you think this will effect MMORPGs in the future? #PRF #MMORPG #MMO #communitymatters
The games are waterdown, they took what started out as computerized representation of the old pen and paper games, and over time removed the numbers and rolling and they evolved into more of an arcade style game.
Many of the new games are still challenging, but overtime, that challenge dwindles as the repeatativness of actions begins to appear as lack of challenge. Zone to Zone, it is basicallty rinse and repeat just at a higher level.
This doesn't means that the older style is gone forever, but that the newer gamers haven't been exposed, add in that we have become a much more instant gratification society and it could prove to be too difficult for some to really get taken in by it. But I beleive there are still plenty of gamers who do like a challenge, who do like to work co-op play, and who will find the old style game enjoyable and rewarding.
I don't think it has been removed beyond repair, granted maybe that's because I haven't been heavily involved in a mmo in about a decade because games don't seem to hold my attention for long anymore but...
The last time I was heavily involved in a game there were a couple times that raids were released with a new expansion that no one beat until the following expansion. This, to me, is challenge done wrong. It is not balanced well. No one enjoys running an encounter over and over and always failing. I understand balance can be a fine line to walk but if no one on any server is beating the encounter then something is wrong with the way it is implemented.
On these forums I have been using the general statement that I am "looking for challenging gameplay", but the above example is not what I am looking for. I'm actually looking for a mediocre challenge with extremely harsh penalties for failure. No one likes unbeatable content that you have to wait until the next expansion, or a next major power increase, to complete.
There are some pretty good points being made. Nephele's points about group-optional content seems to ring very true.
To me, I think the challenge is still there in some aspects. The best analogy I could think of is driving a Model-T Ford vs driving a Charger SRT Hellcat. Back then there was no power steering and you could only go so fast, and there were only so many paved roads. Now, you have all these convenience options with paved roads everywhere and you can fly down the highway doing 75-80. Some things are definitely easier, but challenges are still there.
There are a lot of Model-T drivers around here that probably think that forced slow driving without power-steering is by default more challenging. That may be true in many contrasts but the totality of a specific game and where it's specific challenges lie have to be taken into consideration.
One thing to keep in mind is that tedium does not equate to challenge, and tedium is typically what a lot of the quality of life improvements remove.
Most of the challenge has been removed from most any MMO but I wouldn't say beyond repair. You can see it in the attitude of many, even here, who dismiss the idea that PvE content can even be challenging. The idea that if the average/casual player has fair/easy access to try content (raid or otherwise) that it suddenly becomes a loot piñata or "everyone gets a trophy", a complete dismissal of the idea the game can be so hard as to filter the skilled & dedicated from the average.
Too many MMOs/games are afraid of punishing players for mistakes, to fail "trash" content half the group has to be AFK and bosses allow for mistake after mistake as more and more "oh ****" buttons are added to different classes.
I'd like to see more expansion on the difficulty hinted at in the old stream from the Tower of the Reckless Magician: freight truck hitting Gurkhas that will crush a non-tank in a couple seconds if they take aggro and caster mobs that can sometimes one-shot other casters if not interrupted correctly or pre-shielded. Allow fewer mistakes in general.
Regardless of the MMO, it's going to be "easier" for people who know what they are doing. Our first MMO's challenged us because we didn't know what we were doing. Now we, as players, know all the secrets and as a collective whole the players vs. the designers, we are more innovative and creative than them but only because of pool of resources is much deeper. (I'm not trying to say any devs are boring or dull, but when it comes to it, 300,000 people vs. 30 devs, the people are going to win in the realm of creativity, innvation and figuring out the puzzles faster then the development team could put them together).
So as challenging as a game is designed, the challenge won't be as it once seemed.
They could give us a game with no UI, that would be challenging. Until UI mods come out.
They could give us a game with no maps, that would be challenging. Until map mods come out.
They coud give us a game with no chat system, that would be challenging. Until we download a VOIP.
The callenge could and would be there as long as we want it to, but we will find a way (quickly) to over come that challenge and progress through the game faster than it was intened and designed because we already know how to play these games, and the games within them.
There is definitely still challenge in MMOs. Due to an ever changing player mentality the challenge has shifted from leveling up / exploring to max level instances and raids.
Even with WoWs addons telling you exactly what to do, when, there are still fractions of a percent of the playerbase that is able to kill the top end mobs. So the challenge is still present, I feel it's just shifted to a different segment of the game.
I also dont think you will ever be able to replicate the mystery of early games like classic eq and classic wow, weve changed and adapted. Weve learned how to go about exploring in a safe and efficient way. We read blogs. And watch videos and look at database sites. You cannot change this. Before the game is even launched you will have the beginnings of database sites sprouting up, giving players information that they otherwise wouldn't know unless they did it themselves.