The thing I envy about MMORPGs is that they all have the most awesome settings.

Kerg3927

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Samtemdo8 said:
MMORPG playable as an offline single player game, but of course without the negative aspects of MMORPG gameplay. Imagine World of Warcraft, but none of the grindy questing of "Kill X amount of mobs" with much more deeper and engaging story quests and a party system akin to Dragon Age Origins.
The problem is that the bigger the world, the more open space there is (duh), and that open space gets really, really boring and tedious to traverse unless you fill it with something to do. And that something-to-do usually ends up being tedious kill x amount quests, because writing creativity has its budget limits. Also, the more quests you have, the more of them have to be side quests, because they can't all be essential to the overarching plot, and the more side quests you have, the less urgent and engaging the main plot becomes.

The Witcher 3 made the best attempt at it I've seen, putting huge effort into most of the side quests. Voice animated, cut scenes, solid writing. But in the end, for me at least, it still faced the glaring problem that doing a million side quests made the main quest feel silly. Oh no, Ciri is one step ahead of the Wild Hunt... we must find her immediately and save her before all is lost!!! But meh, on second thought, let's spend three months clearing bandit camps, playing Gwent, doing horse races, drinking ale, fucking whores, and killing minor monsters for the peasants to earn cash to pay our bar/brothel tab. Don't worry, we have this Ciri-and-the-Wild-Hunt pause button here, and you can pause the main story indefinitely. Really, nothing bad will happen. It's really fucking urgent, but it's not really urgent.

Anyway, it's a huge problem in games today. They all want to be massive open world, because ooh pretty mountains and landscapes. But I've yet to see one maintain a thrilling and engaging main story like Dragon Age Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy, and I'm not sure that it's actually doable in the massive open world format.
 

Odbarc

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I have some major issues with MMORPGs.

First one, they seem to be anti-RPGs in terms of story driven content, from what I experienced. Typical RPGs, you are motivated and continue to progress with the story. In MMOs, you grind until you can do content. Or the content is a grind for mindlessly written side quests. The guy needs an amount of something and 100 people a day give him such a thing; The homeless peasant should be loaded with the thing he wanted and he's paid a king's ransom which he should never have afforded. In the end, the skeletons or whatever are still in his backyard, he never leaves, nothing has happened. You've effectively NOT effected the world and you'll forget about NPC#1999.
"RPG elements" seem to be reduced to "a game about numbers effecting your performance" which I'm fine with.

What I REALLY hate is how the game doesn't really feel like it's started until after you've maxed out your level. The grind is a tutorial on how to play as it introduces a massive amount new skills you'll be needing to execute in a more timely fashion like a very prolonged quick time event where your numbers-effecting-performance can make errors feel less punishing (Except your max level so those numbers are capped) and also requires other real life entities to also perform well. It's almost like rockband except no one is allowed to fail or you all do not get the rewards and the wait between attempts is drastically increased to days... which it nearly HAS TO DO because new content, which MMOs heavily rely on for success, must be held back by real life limitations of creating such content. And because one individual may grind the days away and reach max level too quickly, they're made to slow down by tedious quests to grind to max level and stalled by the failures of lesser players in "end game content" which is likely to have a "daily" or "weekly" reset timer so the publishers can predict how long it'll take for people to finish all the content, get bored and quit unless they release said new content in a timely fashion.
It would almost make sense to just limit a persons play-time to an hour or so a day but that hour is just REALLY REALLY fun? Warcraft 3's DOTA was sort of like that.
Imagine, say, a League of Legends MMO where you only get to play a single LoL game a day. The rest of time you can just do social crap, explore, and a majority of the NPCs are "first come first serve" quest givers that depending on how you resolve the quest alter the game world permanently in some minuet way. Over time, the world has changed drastically as the collective of players majority choices push the change in one way or another in a dramatic way. Maybe some changes occur in the daily battle/war/whatever.

In terms of story, in the few months I played in Vanilla WoW, I can't say I've gotten any story from the game. NPCs have problems, you join a clan to kill a guy. Loot. Why are we killing a guy? Who cares. What happens when he dies? You kill him again for more chances for loot. The only thing I seem to get from the game the expansion reveals saying something or another is coming. If they released Warcraft 4, I'd have no idea what's going on since Warcraft 3. WoW should absolutely have had an impact on it's lore of Warcraft but I don't know where or what happened even if I kept playing.
Bad guy appears; somehow both sides are independently responsible for saving the world and killing that bad guy. Everyone forgets or never cared because there's another bad guy. Repeat. This isn't interesting in terms of story. You aren't really playing a role in the story. You're playing the footmen no one cares about.

What they COULD HAVE done is "This is boss #1. When the alliance and horde kill him, they're presented with a choice. There would be difference incentives for the A/H for their choices/morality/ect. and whichever choice is the majority 'vote', the next content patch will determine what is added/removed/changed to the game like you had some actual impact. What if a majority of the game players decided to kill a certain dude that released that 'destroys the game' Dragon expansion they had? Players would have felt like they were responsible for it instead of presented with it randomly. It would be less of an expansion reveal/trailer and more like, "Okay, Blizzcon/whatever/WoW players. Most of you killed whats-his-name. Here's the reveal of how it effected the World of Warcraft. (Dragon pops out, destroys the world.) Everyone goes ape shit because they feel responsible, "Is everyone dead?!" -- buy expansion to help rebuild, ect. ect.

::

I get that that's a "way too much" kind of proposal to fix a genre (or specific game) that's done exceptionally well without my input and has no incentive or reason to change.



It misses hard on a very specific thing the genre presents to players. If there's 10000 real life people inhabiting your world in real time, none of it seems to really matter other than watching them jump around or be AFK. Things should be happening AT players. Or incentivizing players to do things to other players. Have an "hourly" quest or something where both sides are presented with opposing goals in an instanced (or not, where everyone can interrupt a side quest for the lulz), like a protect quest. A slow moving carriage with the City's gold to transfer to another city. Side 1 protects it, side 2 is tasked with killing everyone. Maybe nothing happens because the bad-guys have fewer players and you're route ends up being harmless while other times you might be mobbed hard with no chance. And it's real life players effecting you directly.
Quests could be divided into multiple goals. What if you needed another team to complete their goal for yours to succeed (or improve your chances)? Some lowbies have the lowbie quest of rushing the gold, the higher tier quest then has to fight ______ with or without the benefits of spending that money which will effect the highest tier portion of the quest.
As global quests go, in between them you can socialize, take a break, explore the world, whatever.

*sigh*
Sometimes I need to rant.
 
Apr 5, 2008
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Samtemdo8 said:
Frozen Throne is up there as one of the best expansion packs to a game ever. Along side Medieval 2 Total War: Kingdoms.
I couldn't agree more. It took a game that was great and made it sublime. It deserves all the praise it gets and it's not exaggeration to say it's quality, popularity and fanbase are driving factors in WoWs overwhelming success. Even excepting the mechanics and gameplay, the story of Arthas' face-heel turn is up there with Anakin Skywalker.

Seth Carter said:
Dragons Dogma was largely of the same cloth too.
I must disagree here. Dragon's Dogma was an open world RPG, more akin to Skyrim, only made a Japanese developer for a western audience. It has no more in common with MMOs than could be said for other open world RPGs. Side quests have existed in RPGs for as long as the genre has, so it isn't fair to chalk DD:DA questing down to MMO design. Granted, the escort and gathering quests are fairly uninspired, but Skyrim had them, as did Oblivion and Morrowind before them.

Not all side quests need be descended from MMO design. Where DD:DA shined, in addition to the exceptional character creation/building, the great pawn system, the Dark-Souls esque monster battles, interesting world and functional story, was in a certain amount of reactivity. The world went thru a few changes depending on progress in the main quest, relationships with NPCs could vary as could the Arisen's "True Love" (mine turned out to be the hairy, burly blacksmith. I only sold him my old gear, turns out my Arisen liked his man-love).

I cannot speak for the others you mentioned, although Final Fantasy 14 came out after so many offline games that I think FF has been its own thing for a very long time. I just wanted to say that I think it's unfair to describe DD:DA as being MMO-like.

Samtemdo8 said:
Like I feel like there is wasted potential in making these games a single player RPG ala say Skyrim or Final Fantasy 15.

Who wouldn't want to play a proper Single Player RPG of the Matrix Online if it played like Grand Theft Auto and Deus Ex had a baby?
You know what? I suppose there are some worlds that it would be great to visit offline. I and many others have said that the Secret World's world is wasted on an MMO. Saying that, even as an MMO it's engaging and utterly unique, not least because of the setting, creative quest design, challenge and worldbuilding.

I think it's a little weird however to describe some of these as MMO worlds. Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars...all of these existed in other forms before the MMOs ever did. I'd play a single-player RPG set in the Matrix, Middle Earth, Star Trek/Wars/Old Republic worlds just because I would, not because they were MMO settings brought offline.

Saying that, they took Tolkein's seminal work of fantasy folklore and gave us the lootbox laden, microtransaction pushing Shadow of War...make of that what you will. The latest EA Star Wars game suffers from the same thing. Considering these IPs and the corporate wankers that own them, I don't think it's possible to make a good SP game with any of these properties. As such, it might be better to just have better games made by smaller devs set in new worlds not owned by EA, WB or Activision.
 

sXeth

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Kerg3927 said:
Samtemdo8 said:
MMORPG playable as an offline single player game, but of course without the negative aspects of MMORPG gameplay. Imagine World of Warcraft, but none of the grindy questing of "Kill X amount of mobs" with much more deeper and engaging story quests and a party system akin to Dragon Age Origins.
The problem is that the bigger the world, the more open space there is (duh), and that open space gets really, really boring and tedious to traverse unless you fill it with something to do. And that something-to-do usually ends up being tedious kill x amount quests, because writing creativity has its budget limits. Also, the more quests you have, the more of them have to be side quests, because they can't all be essential to the overarching plot, and the more side quests you have, the less urgent and engaging the main plot becomes.

The Witcher 3 made the best attempt at it I've seen, putting huge effort into most of the side quests. Voice animated, cut scenes, solid writing. But in the end, for me at least, it still faced the glaring problem that doing a million side quests made the main quest feel silly. Oh no, Ciri is one step ahead of the Wild Hunt... we must find her immediately and save her before all is lost!!! But meh, on second thought, let's spend three months clearing bandit camps, playing Gwent, doing horse races, drinking ale, fucking whores, and killing minor monsters for the peasants to earn cash to pay our bar/brothel tab. Don't worry, we have this Ciri-and-the-Wild-Hunt pause button here, and you can pause the main story indefinitely. Really, nothing bad will happen. It's really fucking urgent, but it's not really urgent.

Anyway, it's a huge problem in games today. They all want to be massive open world, because ooh pretty mountains and landscapes. But I've yet to see one maintain a thrilling and engaging main story like Dragon Age Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy, and I'm not sure that it's actually doable in the massive open world format.
Ultima 4 is one of the few (only?) ones I can think of that somewhat addressed that in its main plot design. There was no overarching threat or anything. The game was based around becoming the Avatar. So in order to do that, you had to prove your commitment to the Virtues, which was largely reflected in side-questing (albeit this was in the mid-80s, not terribly indepth anything). (Who or what was observing you was also kind of left off).

Later entries kind of half try and mix it in with actual traditional RPG threats. You can't level in 5 if you don't maintain your virtues. While 7 and 8 feature a straight storyline to the end, they do at least pay some dialogue service to the idea that healing the land and being a beacon of faith not tied to the corrupt organizations the Guardian has set up somehow weakens him and his influence.
 

sXeth

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KingsGambit said:
Seth Carter said:
Dragons Dogma was largely of the same cloth too.
I must disagree here. Dragon's Dogma was an open world RPG, more akin to Skyrim, only made a Japanese developer for a western audience. It has no more in common with MMOs than could be said for other open world RPGs. Side quests have existed in RPGs for as long as the genre has, so it isn't fair to chalk DD:DA questing down to MMO design. Granted, the escort and gathering quests are fairly uninspired, but Skyrim had them, as did Oblivion and Morrowind before them.

Not all side quests need be descended from MMO design. Where DD:DA shined, in addition to the exceptional character creation/building, the great pawn system, the Dark-Souls esque monster battles, interesting world and functional story, was in a certain amount of reactivity. The world went thru a few changes depending on progress in the main quest, relationships with NPCs could vary as could the Arisen's "True Love" (mine turned out to be the hairy, burly blacksmith. I only sold him my old gear, turns out my Arisen liked his man-love).

I cannot speak for the others you mentioned, although Final Fantasy 14 came out after so many offline games that I think FF has been its own thing for a very long time. I just wanted to say that I think it's unfair to describe DD:DA as being MMO-like.
I mean, part of Dragons Dogma could be the very obviously unfinished seams showing. But basically every quest except the battle with Gregori could prettymuch fit into MMOs and be perfectly comfortable. Drive-by characters are the norm. NPCs literally teleport around like they do in MMOs. The game literally has a post-game with an MMO-style Raid, and an actual MMO world boss (never got Dark Arisen, though I've heard its mostly a similar dungeon). The fact that you use a party of 4 instead of 6-20 (although ESO for instance, also uses 4 in dungeons) doesn't really deviate it from the overall design much. Even the way you set up your combat skills and the way they level up leans pretty heavily on that format. Static spawns, pallete swap versions of monsters for higher level areas.
 
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Seth Carter said:
I mean, part of Dragons Dogma could be the very obviously unfinished seams showing. But basically every quest except the battle with Gregori could prettymuch fit into MMOs and be perfectly comfortable. Drive-by characters are the norm. NPCs literally teleport around like they do in MMOs. The game literally has a post-game with an MMO-style Raid, and an actual MMO world boss (never got Dark Arisen, though I've heard its mostly a similar dungeon). The fact that you use a party of 4 instead of 6-20 (although ESO for instance, also uses 4 in dungeons) doesn't really deviate it from the overall design much. Even the way you set up your combat skills and the way they level up leans pretty heavily on that format. Static spawns, pallete swap versions of monsters for higher level areas.
Perhaps one could as easily say MMOs borrow from RPGs for *their* design. The Bitterblack Isle dungeon/boss and the "online" boss are closer to Dark Souls than they are to an MMO. BBI is sorta a Roguelike dungeon crawl (without the permadeath) and plays much more like Dark Souls, where you proceed thru a challenging environment and have a boss at the end of it. It's also kinda Diablo-esque, in the rolling for loot.

As for NPCs, characters of varying depth and what have you, again, normal RPGs, heck, even books and movies have had similar. Seeing things they share in common doesn't strictly make one derived from the other. MMORPGs borrow many RPG conceits and sidequesting, NPCs and dialogue/exposition storytelling, gear, etc are RPG staples.

For skills and combat related, I don't know what to say to that really. Every game has its own take on combat. Most MMOs use a cooldown/hotbar/rotation style of gameplay but even for the more action-oriented ones, I would still say DD:DA is unlike anything I've played, online or offline. Getting skills (Passives in particular) requires swapping classes entirely, something MMOs don't do (Secret World is reputedly "classless") and builds are made up of these active and passive skills as well as armour, trinkets and weapons. Not even including enemy weaknesses and how the player and pawns interact (that shield launchpad skill comes to mind). That's RPG gameplay, not strictly MMO.

I appreciate the similarity in party design from players tackling an MMO dungeon vs DD:DAs party design, but even in 2000, when I was playing Baldur's Gate II, I had Jaheira, Minsc and Viconia in the front in full plate, with my PC and Aerie in the back casting spells. Healing, tanking and DPS existed in RPGs before MMOs distilled them down to be so formal and defined. NWN 1 and 2, Mass Effect, Icewind Dale all offered party based combat (to varying extents).
 

sXeth

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KingsGambit said:
Perhaps one could as easily say MMOs borrow from RPGs for *their* design. The Bitterblack Isle dungeon/boss and the "online" boss are closer to Dark Souls than they are to an MMO. BBI is sorta a Roguelike dungeon crawl (without the permadeath) and plays much more like Dark Souls, where you proceed thru a challenging environment and have a boss at the end of it. It's also kinda Diablo-esque, in the rolling for loot.
That honestly sounds even more like an MMO dungeon/raid then the first one.

Diablo's an interesting mention, because while it predates (most) MMOs, its definitely a hefty presence mechanically. Skills on cooldowns, randomized loot, colored tiers, etc. (The WoW style MMOs. The other ones that evolved from Ultima Online and revolve a lot more around skills and player economy systems (EVE would be the big on there nowadays) are a slightly different bag of things).