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WTB: MMO
Azureal
Member UncommonPosts: 235
Looking to buy new MMO.
Must have:
The long lasting appeal of UO. Even after originally quitting (to play DAoC) Ive reactivated my account several times over the last 4-5 years. It was my first ever MMO, and it holds a special place in my heart.
A player housing system, ready at launch, or within six months there of. And not some zoned-out-of-the-way crap like DAoC, but intergrated into the gaming world, like UO and SWG. Have no build zones if you must (in fact its a good idea for many obvious reasons). Allow us to create our own cities and towns (SWG). Along with this housing system Id like every possible way to customise and decorate my digs. Gimme furniture and plants and rugs and pictures and junk.
Consentual PVP. Always gonna be hard to make everyone happy, and I dont envy any developer tasked with creating a PvP system within an MMO. DAoC was the game that made me wanna PvP, I could go to the frontiers anytime "I" wanted to. Whether it was my own (Hibernia FTW) or Midgard/Albion, the choice was mine to make. Also, give PvP a meaning. Taking and holding keeps was fooking great fun. Getting those realm bonuses to Melee/Spell damage was cool too. Watching a wave of Albions come pouring through a milefort gate and simultaneously getting hammered from behind by the Midgard horse was extremely intense and great fun. Stuff like that.
Gimme an indepth crafting system like SWG. Yeah the grind to get to master was fooking tedious (I was a master Weaponsmith) but after that, the crafting was beyond awesome. Making schematics, running factories and harvestors, maintaining upkeep on the aforementioned, collecting resources, dealing with customers. It was all I ever logged in for. And the best part was, the harder you worked (at doing all those things I mentioned) the better your items were in the end. I had high hopes for Vanguard, but the reality was, my Sword of Stabbiness was exactly like the other 100 Weaponsmiths making the same item. Allow us to craft everything and anything. Clothing, armor, weapons, furniture. Being a tinker in UO was great, maing a set of cutlery, whilst completely useless was still cool. Even better if you made it out of shadow iron or valorite 
Make it look nice. Sure graphics arent "everything" but we all want something nice to look at. Im not sure what the right term is (optimisation?) but make sure that its goona look good on as broad a spectrum of computers as possible. Have a slider for evey video setting you can make, from shadows to distance to pixels of hair on a characters head. Allow us to customise everything about our characters, just like SWGs slider system (and others, though DO NOT make it anything like Vanguard, every male character looked gay, seriously WTF). These will be our digital representatives in your world, we want them to be unique and recognisable, day in and day out.
Allow us to make a permanent impact upon your world, thus making it our world.
If its a fantasy based game, give us recall/gate/mark spells just like UO. If its a sci-fi based dealio give us personal transporters/locators/warpgates, whatever. DO NOT make us spend 15-20 minutes travelling by foot/slow horse/ what ever to get to our friends/fave hunting ground/house/city. Vanguard did this. It was shite. Theres no fun in spending a big % of your play time in travelling. yes your game will look lovely, and will be worth going and looking at, but I'll do it when Im ready. Preset travel routes, be it on horse or gryphon are semi-acceptable, so long as they are fast enough. Something I thought DAoC did right was the ability to jump off your horse at any given point, probably a little harder to do if youre on the back of some great flying bird.
Aside from levlling/gaining skills/maxing our characters, give us other things to do. Fishing. Treasure Map hunting. Collecting rare items. Sight seeing. House decorating. Crafting. Ive mentioned these previously but they cant be hinted at enough. Something to do aside from the grind will keep me coming back.
Give me these things and I'll buy your game. I'll pay per month to play it too. Hell Ive had no qualms about doing it for others far less deserving of my money. All of these things can be done, they were done in the past, by people with far less experience in MMOs, with far less technology at their disposal. So theres no reason that you cant do it now.
** These are my views only. Opinion mixed with a goodly part of reminiscence. Feel free to discuss, agree or object to any part of my post. Weve all got ideas on what would be "the" MMO.
PAST: UO-SWG-DAOC-WOW-DDO-VG-AOC-WAR-FE-DFO-LOTRO-RIFT-GW2
PRESENT: Nothing
FUTURE: ESO
Comments
Welcome to the world of the MMORPG'r... we're a disgruntled group of gamers who many would classify as "whiners, crybabies, or worse". As of this moment your feelings seem to be growing across the range of all MMO'rs as we tire from such non-creative games as WoW, LoTRO, FFXI, and the list continues of uncreative games. Many people are coming off of the WoW TBC high as they are realizing that the "quest XP" system is turning into shit and the rep grinds are turning it into an asian grinder.
Many are screaming from the highest mountains about what you wrote about, but for some reason, developers just aren't seeming to get the idea and deliver.
"And after blizzard takes over the world, they are gonna gather a bunch of lemmings, sit on their fat asses near a cliff, and watch the little fuzzy bastards suicide dive into the ground below. . . . . all just for their own entertainment."
After so many years, and so many games, it seems that developers are either forgetting, or simply ignoring past achievments made by other MMO developers. Its almost as if using something that worked in another game would be giving credit to that company, and therefore the competition.
Everyone knows of the massive hype surrounding Vanguard before its release. I can remember signing up to the forum, and pouring over the pages of info, the excitement by those wanting to be part of the beta. The speculation and rumours and outright hopes of so many avid gamers. I was swept up by it, and thought hey, this might just be it.
I guess I knew right at the character creation screen that things just werent right. The models were ghastly, the human males were so terrible I ended up selecting random as no matter what I tried everything looked terrible. The animal type avatars (vulmane and ?) looked nice, but the sliders didnt really change anything. Ear length, snout length, but from memory the fur pattern remained exactly the same. I can remember playing the SWG beta and sitting for a goodly long while messing around creating a wookie. The pattern designs were awesome, the variation in size and shape and colour were beyond anything else at the time.
Vanguard seemed to (and most probably still does) strived towards making things "hardcore". Though in the end they just made them frustrating. Travelling was horrific, horses felt barely faster than running, and were most times slower than bard speed ( though this was fixed, I think). Building a house in Vanguard was almsot harder than building one in real life. The amount of time making a house was ludicrous, and ironically enough, once you had your house is amanged to serve little or no purpose. Housing zones (or chunks) were in out of the way places, travelling to and from was a waste of time. There were no storage containers to keep valuables in, and even if there were, there was nothing of any real value worth storing.
I hope that it isnt old age thats turning me into such a cynic (I recently turned 30, sigh), but judging by the previous post Im not alone in what I believe should be accomplished when making an MMO. I kind of believe that its too easy to create an MMO, and that because so many companies can do it, the level of quality that we as paying gamers deserve has decreased.
PAST: UO-SWG-DAOC-WOW-DDO-VG-AOC-WAR-FE-DFO-LOTRO-RIFT-GW2
PRESENT: Nothing
FUTURE: ESO