Graphics mean nothing to me, I'll take game play....I wish developers would only concentrate on gameplay and stop waisting time and money on graphics.
I'm waiting for Wildstar, depending on payment choice, F2P and cash shops would be out !....HOWEVER all the video clips so far are Red desert areas that would make my eyes bleed. Why does every game since Hellfire Peninsula from WoW have to have this eye bleeding red area ?
Originally posted by Consuetudo This ignores the market, and will inherently lead to niche gaming. Perhaps what made the older MMOs so fantastic was that the graphics were so primitive that element could hardly be a defining factor; now, however, graphics are actually a thing which has substance in the gamer's market. A product would never be able to become big if it didn't take a stab at offering graphics which are as pleasing to look at as the average game. And I believe that should be the focus: a gameplay-dependent thing like an MMO should not strive for graphical innovation, it should merely boast the standard graphics we are used to in the present. Graphics which are so insignificant to the point that they look dated would actually hinder the game's popularity, even if they did offer a great game. The best MMO will be one that offers passable graphics, ones that are neither too demanding nor too primitive, because they should not be an element that either adds to or detracts from an MMO. The person playing an MMO for graphics will undoubtedly be disappointed at having to actually play the game, and will probably stop playing once they leave Tortage; the person playing an MMO to enjoy the game will question how this graphically-primitive offering can be offering anything new given that it looks just like what they were playing 15 years ago, in both of which cases graphics are a distraction from gameplay.
I'm not saying that we should want graphics that look terrible. You can have many or most of the "something elses" above together with graphics that look decent but not great. But you can never have graphics that look as good as if you were trying purely for pretty graphics and willing to sacrifice gameplay as a result.
There's no real "right answer", but some of the tradeoff cited actually tend to (in isolation) favor better graphics. For example, unless a game is specifically doing something fun and clever with having tons of players/units onscreen, it's not necessarily an advantage to sacrifice a little quality for more on-screen units.
Certainly, there isn't a canonical right answer, but only trade-offs. If you're making a 1 on 1 fighter game (e.g., Street Fighter) that only needs to draw two characters at a time, then it's fine if each of those two characters carries a performance hit heavy enough that you can't draw three at a time.
But my point is, if you want the other end of a trade-off in visual quality, you should accept and embrace that that comes with a game that doesn't look as pretty.
Too many try to seperate them as either or,thaty is WRONG.
They should BOTH be there,the game and the visuals.This is not 2D gaming,this is the age of 3D gaming.There is reason Microsoft advanced and developed DX librairies,it is to allow coders to do more not less.There is reason Graphics cards and drives are advancing and it is not to go backwards.
Graphics should not replace gaming but gaming shoudl not replace graphics either.Every single aspect of a game,tells you just how much the developer put into quality and much was cutting corners to save cost.If you see a lot of cost saving and not much quality,the developer imo does not deserve your money.
You shouldn't be saying things like ,oh well it is ok they spent 1 week on graphics,the game play is great.How coud lthe game play possibly be great?You need good effects visuals or they just look awful,you need good animations or everything again looks awful.
The recent arguments on cartoony graphics seem to be a bit off.They are using the term animation,but animationm is just a term based on movement it has nothing to do with cartoony graphics.
Also Pixar made cartoon graphics acceptable but they also are super high quality,i can't even go into the scope of qaulity becuase most of the technical is above my head.They are high reslution high end cartoon graphics.Msot if not all of what we are seeing in our games is not,they are very low end and cheap,no not all but alot are.Just one example Tree texture in Wow ,is awfil or even alot of the rock textures are awful,very cheap efforts.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Execution is muscle memory not intellect. We've been over this. Decision making is trivial because there is a tiny decision space. And most of the true intellectual work is done FOR YOU. By actual smart people.
Also notice how you equated intellect with "skill." I'll concede that for the arbitrary definition of skill, mostly execution/reflexes, modern games do that better, because its all they ever do.
Anyways we've had this out a thousand times so its not worth going over again.
As if there is any decision making back in the old days. Repeating killing the same spawn, with simple combat mechanics, requires even LESS intellect .. at least now there are multiple, more interesting skills to choose from.
Plus, if intellect is the number one fun factor, no one will play action combat. We will all go solve differential equations.
Making a decision of whether to pop a CD may not be intellectual, but at least it is interesting and fun (to me).
Some of us would like at least one modern game with slower paced, more tactical combat that we have come to love with RPG's and MMORPG's. Changing the entire genre into FPS / ARPG's is not my idea of intelligent design.
You can have a prettier looking game world, or you can have a game world that players can substantially modify.
Letting players modify things in the game world means you need more flexibility in what you can draw, which restricts your ability to make things look as good as possible. Things in the game world that players can change are likely to limit your ability to precompute light maps and such. And there's also the fear that players might do things to make your game world look uglier than what you would have done.
I thought for sure that someone would pounce on that line as an anti-sandbox statement. How DARE you imply that player-made content is uglier than what the developers make, etc. etc. At least a few people were predictable enough to throw in the "there are no tradeoffs, everything could be done perfectly and also look perfect if devs weren't lazy and greedy" argument.
Certainly, there isn't a canonical right answer, but only trade-offs. If you're making a 1 on 1 fighter game (e.g., Street Fighter) that only needs to draw two characters at a time, then it's fine if each of those two characters carries a performance hit heavy enough that you can't draw three at a time.
But my point is, if you want the other end of a trade-off in visual quality, you should accept and embrace that that comes with a game that doesn't look as pretty.
Right.
And I'm only cautioning the extreme end of that side of the spectrum.
You want to treat game creation almost like building a home for someone. If you dont' build someplace they want to stay, they're not going to keep playing. You can bash down that nice looking wall and put a washer/drier into that area of the house, and that will undoubtedly improve the home. But once you start doing things like replacing the kitchen window with a set of cabinets, you start to reduce the desire to live in the house -- because part of the desire to live there is that it's a comfortable, relaxing environment, and the view out that kitchen window has some nice trees to glance at while cooking meals.
Obviously players won't "live" inside your game, but the holistic approach to design in both situations is pretty similar. A game needs to realize players are going to react to it emotionally based on the environment it provides. A game which respects that and offers some nice views (they don't have to be technically impressive views, just aesthetically pleasing) will do considerably better than one which tries to survive purely on utility: like the windowless kitchen with its extra cabinets.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Execution is muscle memory not intellect. We've been over this. Decision making is trivial because there is a tiny decision space. And most of the true intellectual work is done FOR YOU. By actual smart people.
Also notice how you equated intellect with "skill." I'll concede that for the arbitrary definition of skill, mostly execution/reflexes, modern games do that better, because its all they ever do.
By whatever measure you use, modern MMORPGs require more use of the human brain than the early MMORPGs I mentioned.
The definition of skill is simple, not arbitrary, and applies to basically every form of skill I'm aware of. Skill is decision-making and execution. In games, "decision-making" is strategy and tactics. Intellectual skills, if you will. In games, execution is whatever is needed (often "twitch") to implement the decisions you've made.
In the early MMORPGs I mentioned, the act of playing the game required very little skill and certainly not much thinking. This is why none of them kept me playing, because they were big timesinks with little gameplay and little reward for clever play or skill. You had these extremely rudimentary rotations (and "rotations" is probably too kind) in DAOC, AO, AC1, and other early MMORPGs I played, and often it was just pressing one button over and over. If the core activity in a game is pressing one button over and over, I'm sorry but that game doesn't value "intellect". Many of those early games had a two-button rotation (like AC1's debuff-nuke-nuke-nuke-...) but that's barely a step above.
Conversely in modern MMORPGs, skill is much more rewarded and in any given session there are plenty of opportunities for decision-making; especially against bosses who use dynamic abilities to force abnormal paths down the decision tree of an encounter, which forces you to plot out the best path in real-time. It rewards intellect much more than any early MMORPG I played.
Your argument implies the absolute intellect required by modern MMORPGs isn't high, which is true, but neglects what we're actually discussing which is the comparison with early MMORPGs. But you didn't have math majors proving out rotations for you in early MMORPGs because debuff-nuke-nuke-... isn't exactly a rotation that requires it.
So it's clear modern MMORPGs have better gameplay which rewards intellect better than early MMORPGs which rewarded time-investment and not much else. There's no value judgement here: you're not wrong for prefering games where the core gameplay in a session doesn't challenge your intellect. But we're not judging preferences, only measuring the amount a game rewards intelligent play.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
As if there is any decision making back in the old days. Repeating killing the same spawn, with simple combat mechanics, requires even LESS intellect .. at least now there are multiple, more interesting skills to choose from.
Plus, if intellect is the number one fun factor, no one will play action combat. We will all go solve differential equations.
Making a decision of whether to pop a CD may not be intellectual, but at least it is interesting and fun (to me).
Some of us would like at least one modern game with slower paced, more tactical combat that we have come to love with RPG's and MMORPG's. Changing the entire genre into FPS / ARPG's is not my idea of intelligent design.
Hmm ... old MMORPGs are not more tactical. They are less. Take the wiz back in EQ. You essentialy just DPS with the most level appropriate nuke, or root. There is no facing, no proc, no CD to manage. In fact, playing a wiz then needs way LESS intelligence than almost any games today.
Secondly, if you want slower pace .. just slow down. No one says you have to queue one dungeon after next. You can always stop and chat in a city. The point is this ... modern games let you have the option of fast pace or slow pace. Now if others want fast pace, and you can't find anyone to play with, it is not the fault of the game.
Plus, given so many here are complaining about fast pace, it looks like you can find people to "slow down" with you in any modern game.
Well, yeah, graphics is worthless if the game is no fun to play. I think most people will agree about that. Those who dont play shooters, not roleplaying games or MMOs.
I oppose this useage of "pretty". My Lineage 2 characters have been *very* pretty back in the days. L2 was also the first 3D game where I said : OK, this is good enough. Graphics will get better than this in future, but I dont NEED better than this. The correct term to use here is realistic, or of higher resolution.
Seamless worlds do NOT limit what graphics quality you can realize. Seamless means you partition your game into chunks and keep the chunks surrounding the current chunks on the backhand. There is no limit in what graphic quality you can archieve through this, though, you can always just make the partitions smaller if they dont fit into currently available memory. The limit is in how fast you can move through this world, but with current SSDs there is a lot of room for this trade offset.
Many of the "issues" mentioned are just a question of memory, not of computation power. As such, they are a question of available memory, which in these days is usually plenty, and the just mentioned speed of movement / graphic quality conflict.
Distant terrain doesnt necessarily need equally much computation power as characters vs character count. Thats because you can keep a lower resolution version of distant terrain and display that one. One can do the same with too many characters, however the network traffic needed for many characters inflicts harsh limits there anyway.
Reusing artwork saves development time and harddisk space - it does NOT reduce archieveable graphic quality.
What the whole article in general misses is a sense for development time. MMOs dont look worse than shooters because the programmers are less competent or more lazy. MMOs look worse than shooters because you can optimize graphics to look beautiful a LOT by using a multitude of maps per object - but also the development time for doing so is very high.
But of course I fully agree that a good game is not defined by better graphics than the concurrence.
Also, for the record:
Customizeability > better looking characters, in a MMO. Having a good looking character is worthless if everybody looks the freaking same.
Sliders < graphic alternatives. With the exception of some general sliders, I find it much more efficient to have nicely designed alternatives instead of trying to create them by modifying a "general" character model which quickly looks really ugly after you moved enough sliders, and ultimately has only limited possibilities to get modified, anyway.
Realistic viewing distances > better terrain resolution, in a MMO.
Telling mobs apart < meh. Who cares ? They are mobs. Unless there is actually something different about them, I dont need to be able to tell them apart.
Collision detection < meh. In a MMO, it just means I'll get stuck more, and people intentionally can block you from accessing important locations.
In general: I want graphics to be good enough. Original EverQuest is definitely not good enough. Original Lineage 2 back in the day was good enough. Vanguard: SoH is far better than just good enough.
But thats all subjective.
3. If there were no drawbacks to making the world seamless, then why would games have loading screens at all? Even if you needed to transfer from one zone to another, why wouldn't they just make your screen go blank for a tenth of a second and then come back with the next zone loaded and ready to go?
Trying to make a seamless world limits how quickly you can need stuff loaded from the hard drive. A loading screen lets you stop for as long as necessary to load as much as you need. You can handle this by reusing artwork more so that you need to load new stuff less, or by making your game world less dense so that there is less stuff that needs to be loaded, or as you said, by making you move around more slowly. Or you can put an SSD in the minimum requirements, or probably some other options. But having a seamless world isn't completely free with no trade-offs involved.
4. Sometimes it's a question of needing more video memory. Sometimes it's PCI Express bus bandwidth. Sometimes it's hard drive capacity. Sometimes it's CPU performance. Sometimes it's storage loading speeds. Sometimes it's GPU power. Often it's a combination of more than one. Often one or more of those things isn't a meaningful bottleneck at all for your particular game.
I'm not arguing that if you want any of the "something elses" that your game immediately can't possibly look any better than Minecraft. Sometimes the hit to screenshot quality is actually pretty small. But there are always trade-offs.
6/7. The reason that reusing artwork allows you to have better looking artwork is precisely because it means that you need less of it and you have limited development resources. Which is what you said in 7, anyway.
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For collision detection, I don't mean running into other players and getting stuck. I mean running into a wall stopping you where it graphically looks like the wall is rather than somewhere else, and as opposed to falling through solid ground or being able to stand in mid-air in situations where it obviously doesn't look intentional.
Graphics mean nothing to me, I'll take game play....I wish developers would only concentrate on gameplay and stop waisting time and money on graphics.
I'm waiting for Wildstar, depending on payment choice, F2P and cash shops would be out !....HOWEVER all the video clips so far are Red desert areas that would make my eyes bleed. Why does every game since Hellfire Peninsula from WoW have to have this eye bleeding red area ?
Unless you want to go purely text-based, you need to have graphics. Though you're probably arguing only that games put too much emphasis on graphics.
Graphics should not replace gaming but gaming shoudl not replace graphics either.Every single aspect of a game,tells you just how much the developer put into quality and much was cutting corners to save cost.If you see a lot of cost saving and not much quality,the developer imo does not deserve your money.
If you've ever played a game where you didn't see a massive number of things that you could point to and say, they did this instead of that because it was easier and/or cheaper, then you don't know what to look for. While you can do a lot more with a larger budget than a smaller budget, $100 million isn't nearly enough to do everything you'd do on an infinite budget. Nor is $1 billion, nor for that matter, $1 trillion.
I've never played a MMO simply because the graphics were good......I've only ruled out a couple (out of hundreds) because the graphics were unacceptable......I'd rather have a game with lesser graphics but no lag than one with great graphics that is a slide show because the graphics tie up too many resources.
So yes, modern combat is marginally better than old school combat. But I hate them BOTH. Just like I hate Starcraft where people use the same limited factions on the same maps over and over but I also hate Dune2. Whereas I want games to be played on random maps where you need a whole different part of the faction tree to succeed, where you have to evaluate what resources to go for in the moment based on the distances and the value of those resources for various aspects of your tech tree. Never playing the same map more than a few times and ideally spread out over your entire play experience. And rarely using the same combinations of units.
Marginally better? That is only your view. I think it is night and day. It is *fun* to react to elite abilities in D3, even though everything is worked outbeforehand, and you can google a strategy guide.
Intellect, imperfect decisions, impromptu math calculations, long term planning, and so forth. Instead of who can micro jetpak guys better on map 4 out of 12.
If you want that, become a theorycrafter, and play the meta game. For example, some does laborous experiments, and math calculations to figure out the attack speed break point for certain skills in Diablo 3. Don't tell me that is not intellectual. Now surely only one guy does that and then he posted it on the internet.
But no one says you have to read it. If you want to play the intellectual game, theorycraft, and don't use others' result..
Most won't do that because that is not fun for them.
As if there is any decision making back in the old days. Repeating killing the same spawn, with simple combat mechanics, requires even LESS intellect .. at least now there are multiple, more interesting skills to choose from.
Plus, if intellect is the number one fun factor, no one will play action combat. We will all go solve differential equations.
Making a decision of whether to pop a CD may not be intellectual, but at least it is interesting and fun (to me).
Some of us would like at least one modern game with slower paced, more tactical combat that we have come to love with RPG's and MMORPG's. Changing the entire genre into FPS / ARPG's is not my idea of intelligent design.
Hmm ... old MMORPGs are not more tactical. They are less. Take the wiz back in EQ. You essentialy just DPS with the most level appropriate nuke, or root. There is no facing, no proc, no CD to manage. In fact, playing a wiz then needs way LESS intelligence than almost any games today.
Secondly, if you want slower pace .. just slow down. No one says you have to queue one dungeon after next. You can always stop and chat in a city. The point is this ... modern games let you have the option of fast pace or slow pace. Now if others want fast pace, and you can't find anyone to play with, it is not the fault of the game.
Plus, given so many here are complaining about fast pace, it looks like you can find people to "slow down" with you in any modern game.
Personally, I'm fine with slow and tactical. Pirates of the Burning Sea's ship combat does that pretty well.
What I'm not fine with is slow and idle. Pull mobs and then stand there for two minutes waiting for them to die without it mattering much what you do in that time (e.g., get up and leave the room to go get some food) is not tactical combat. It's boring combat.
Ideally, I want photo-realistic graphics with all action delivered at 500fps and really deep gameplay that can provide me with endless possibilities and new evolving challenges. Oh, and endless character progression, of course.
Admittedly, only one game currently comes even vaguely close to meeting that ridiculous list of demands: EVE-Online.
But I'm patient. Perhaps I'll have more than 1 serious game option 10 years from now...
Execution is muscle memory not intellect. We've been over this. Decision making is trivial because there is a tiny decision space. And most of the true intellectual work is done FOR YOU. By actual smart people.
Also notice how you equated intellect with "skill." I'll concede that for the arbitrary definition of skill, mostly execution/reflexes, modern games do that better, because its all they ever do.
By whatever measure you use, modern MMORPGs require more use of the human brain than the early MMORPGs I mentioned.
The definition of skill is simple, not arbitrary, and applies to basically every form of skill I'm aware of. Skill is decision-making and execution. In games, "decision-making" is strategy and tactics. Intellectual skills, if you will. In games, execution is whatever is needed (often "twitch") to implement the decisions you've made.
In the early MMORPGs I mentioned, the act of playing the game required very little skill and certainly not much thinking. This is why none of them kept me playing, because they were big timesinks with little gameplay and little reward for clever play or skill. You had these extremely rudimentary rotations (and "rotations" is probably too kind) in DAOC, AO, AC1, and other early MMORPGs I played, and often it was just pressing one button over and over. If the core activity in a game is pressing one button over and over, I'm sorry but that game doesn't value "intellect". Many of those early games had a two-button rotation (like AC1's debuff-nuke-nuke-nuke-...) but that's barely a step above.
Conversely in modern MMORPGs, skill is much more rewarded and in any given session there are plenty of opportunities for decision-making; especially against bosses who use dynamic abilities to force abnormal paths down the decision tree of an encounter, which forces you to plot out the best path in real-time. It rewards intellect much more than any early MMORPG I played.
Your argument implies the absolute intellect required by modern MMORPGs isn't high, which is true, but neglects what we're actually discussing which is the comparison with early MMORPGs. But you didn't have math majors proving out rotations for you in early MMORPGs because debuff-nuke-nuke-... isn't exactly a rotation that requires it.
So it's clear modern MMORPGs have better gameplay which rewards intellect better than early MMORPGs which rewarded time-investment and not much else. There's no value judgement here: you're not wrong for prefering games where the core gameplay in a session doesn't challenge your intellect. But we're not judging preferences, only measuring the amount a game rewards intelligent play.
The mistake you are making all over again is: gameplay=combat. That's why we are in this mess in the first place.
Modern MMORPGs are all like this:
1. Find an NPC with ! over their head, click, click accept.
2. Check map, go to designated area, apply 1-3 skill combo on indicated mobs, loot, repeat till Quest COMPLETE.
3. Return to designated NPC, finish quest, collect rewards
4. Repear 1-3 until level cap.
Any decision making, except which NPC to talk to first, is absent. You are told what to do at every step and rewarded for doing what you were told. Thus the gamplay centers around combat and running around. Player skill is measured by discovering the most efficient skill rotation for a given mob, however since death means nothing, this is just a time delay until you go through the obvious combinations.
Gameplay in RPGs is way more than combat. Or at least it used to be ...
If you keep burning strawmen you are going to set the whole world on fire man. There is no strategy in MMOs and tactics are minimal. Unless you turn up the difficulty to 11 any person who is of average intellegence who also spent the time, what? spending the time in modern MMOs? Crazyness!, to get to end game raiding can handle it. The decisions have far less to do with the outcome of the game than the execution. The decision space is miniscule and everyone knows what to do before hand. When you play LoL the outcome of fights is 100% decided by reflexes, muscle memory, and execution. I've lost 100 fights because my touchpad moves the cursor on my skillshot stun. And another 100 because I just can move the cursor to the right spot fast enough. I know I need to drop the aoe damage field, then the stun, and then the single target nuke to win. But I can't. Because half my touchpad is scraped off and doesn't work. Or just because my fast twitch muscles aren't quite as fast as the other guy. There is no intelligence involved. There is no in the moment calculation of the optimal rotation. The best options are already known. That's not intellect.
Its the same for battle arenas and the same for endgame raiding. Everyone already knows what to do. If you made a raid boss who could be fought by intellect then anyone after the first raid would be stomping it easily. Because the challenge was living long enough to figure out what to do and do it. Evaluating the math IN THE MOMENT. But you CANT DO THAT. Because themeparks are static and millions of people have to fight that EXACT SAME BOSS. Even raiders who have already beat it need TO FIGHT IT AGAIN. Because gear farming.
Winning isn't about good decisions. Because static content can't work that way. Winning is about executing a plan perfectly that was laid out for all to see months before most people made it to the boss. There are no decisions. And yes, bosses have some random skill orders. But it doesn't matter. Because its the same 10 skills that everyone knows the proper response to and you just have to click a couple buttons and the you go right back to the optimal raid pattern.
One deviation causes you to wipe the whole raid. Because there is no room for decision making.
So yes, modern combat is marginally better than old school combat. But I hate them BOTH. Just like I hate Starcraft where people use the same limited factions on the same maps over and over but I also hate Dune2. Whereas I want games to be played on random maps where you need a whole different part of the faction tree to succeed, where you have to evaluate what resources to go for in the moment based on the distances and the value of those resources for various aspects of your tech tree. Never playing the same map more than a few times and ideally spread out over your entire play experience. And rarely using the same combinations of units.
Intellect, imperfect decisions, impromptu math calculations, long term planning, and so forth. Instead of who can micro jetpak guys better on map 4 out of 12.
This isn't a strawman. You claimed gameplay wasn't better these days and didn't use intellect. I pointed out how it was better, because it quantifiably does involve more decisions (and therefore more intellect.) Whether you care about these games isn't relevant -- you should avoid making statements about games you don't care about if you don't wish people to discuss them with you.
I'm not sure how you could have read my post and thought the issue was whether time is spent. It's an issue of there being nothing to do except spend time (very few decisions.)
You claim winning isn't reliant on decisions. Does this mean you wait until you overgear every encounter? Because I assure you: deciding to stand in the fire rather than moving will get you killed. Winning is reliant on decisions.
I considered starting to describe to you the types of strategic decisions involved in raiding, but then I got to the point where you claimed LoL matches are 100% decided by twitch, which shows you have absolutely no concept of strategy in games. No wonder these conversations have gone so poorly.
I recommend playing at least one game at a pro level of play . I'll see you in 6-12 months when you're able to join the conversation.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
When you play LoL the outcome of fights is 100% decided by reflexes, muscle memory, and execution. I've lost 100 fights because my touchpad moves the cursor on my skillshot stun. And another 100 because I just can move the cursor to the right spot fast enough. I know I need to drop the aoe damage field, then the stun, and then the single target nuke to win. But I can't. Because half my touchpad is scraped off and doesn't work. Or just because my fast twitch muscles aren't quite as fast as the other guy. There is no intelligence involved. There is no in the moment calculation of the optimal rotation. The best options are already known. That's not intellect.
Ah, the ol' "My controller's broken" excuse.
Surely there's no intelligence involved in playing LoL; the correct action to take is not just readily apparent but so glaringly obvious that it even can't rightly be called a decision. The only reason that you've ever lost—other than those incompetant players you somehow keep getting as teammates—is because your touchpad messes up sometimes or your finger slips, never because you made a bad decision during a heated teamfight or in response to a gank. In short, there's nothing further that you (or anyone with the most basic grasp of the game) could do to improve your mastery of the game. #bronzelife
The mistake you are making all over again is: gameplay=combat. That's why we are in this mess in the first place.
Modern MMORPGs are all like this:
1. Find an NPC with ! over their head, click, click accept.
2. Check map, go to designated area, apply 1-3 skill combo on indicated mobs, loot, repeat till Quest COMPLETE.
3. Return to designated NPC, finish quest, collect rewards
4. Repear 1-3 until level cap.
Any decision making, except which NPC to talk to first, is absent. You are told what to do at every step and rewarded for doing what you were told. Thus the gamplay centers around combat and running around. Player skill is measured by discovering the most efficient skill rotation for a given mob, however since death means nothing, this is just a time delay until you go through the obvious combinations.
Gameplay in RPGs is way more than combat. Or at least it used to be ...
And why shouldn't gameplay be focused on combat if that is what is fun for players?
Take the first Diablo. Before that, RPG has all sort of stuff. Heck, if you play Ultima 7, you can even pick up every piece of fork & knife. What Blizz realized, is that people like combat .. and they made a RPG that focus on nothing but combat, items and progression. Nothing else. The quests are made simple .. because they are nothing but excuses to kill lots of stuff.
And what happened? Diablo sold millions. D2 sold millions. D3 sold 12M.
Looks like lots of people like combat.
What you call mess ... i call fun games. Now don't get me wrong, there are other fun stuff, like stealth gameplay. But hunting NPCs to talk to . .is not one of them for me. It is trivial, easy, no challenge, and most of the time boring for me.
As if there is any decision making back in the old days. Repeating killing the same spawn, with simple combat mechanics, requires even LESS intellect .. at least now there are multiple, more interesting skills to choose from.
Plus, if intellect is the number one fun factor, no one will play action combat. We will all go solve differential equations.
Making a decision of whether to pop a CD may not be intellectual, but at least it is interesting and fun (to me).
Some of us would like at least one modern game with slower paced, more tactical combat that we have come to love with RPG's and MMORPG's. Changing the entire genre into FPS / ARPG's is not my idea of intelligent design.
Hmm ... old MMORPGs are not more tactical. They are less. Take the wiz back in EQ. You essentialy just DPS with the most level appropriate nuke, or root. There is no facing, no proc, no CD to manage. In fact, playing a wiz then needs way LESS intelligence than almost any games today.
Secondly, if you want slower pace .. just slow down. No one says you have to queue one dungeon after next. You can always stop and chat in a city. The point is this ... modern games let you have the option of fast pace or slow pace. Now if others want fast pace, and you can't find anyone to play with, it is not the fault of the game.
Plus, given so many here are complaining about fast pace, it looks like you can find people to "slow down" with you in any modern game.
I said slower paced combat, not slower paced game. Yes there were tactics in EQ, you had to deal with aggro as a wizard and in long drawn out battles, you needed to manage your mana as well as making choices on which spells to use for which types of monsters, when to use crowd controls and when not to use aoe's in order to not break crowd controls...etc.
The mistake you are making all over again is: gameplay=combat. That's why we are in this mess in the first place.
Modern MMORPGs are all like this:
1. Find an NPC with ! over their head, click, click accept.
2. Check map, go to designated area, apply 1-3 skill combo on indicated mobs, loot, repeat till Quest COMPLETE.
3. Return to designated NPC, finish quest, collect rewards
4. Repear 1-3 until level cap.
Any decision making, except which NPC to talk to first, is absent. You are told what to do at every step and rewarded for doing what you were told. Thus the gamplay centers around combat and running around. Player skill is measured by discovering the most efficient skill rotation for a given mob, however since death means nothing, this is just a time delay until you go through the obvious combinations.
Gameplay in RPGs is way more than combat. Or at least it used to be ...
And why shouldn't gameplay be focused on combat if that is what is fun for players?
Take the first Diablo. Before that, RPG has all sort of stuff. Heck, if you play Ultima 7, you can even pick up every piece of fork & knife. What Blizz realized, is that people like combat .. and they made a RPG that focus on nothing but combat, items and progression. Nothing else. The quests are made simple .. because they are nothing but excuses to kill lots of stuff.
And what happened? Diablo sold millions. D2 sold millions. D3 sold 12M.
Looks like lots of people like combat.
What you call mess ... i call fun games. Now don't get me wrong, there are other fun stuff, like stealth gameplay. But hunting NPCs to talk to . .is not one of them for me. It is trivial, easy, no challenge, and most of the time boring for me.
There wouldn't be an issue if the entire genre weren't bandwagoning into the FPS / action adventure side of things, leaving almost no choice in new games coming out.
Comments
Graphics mean nothing to me, I'll take game play....I wish developers would only concentrate on gameplay and stop waisting time and money on graphics.
I'm waiting for Wildstar, depending on payment choice, F2P and cash shops would be out !....HOWEVER all the video clips so far are Red desert areas that would make my eyes bleed. Why does every game since Hellfire Peninsula from WoW have to have this eye bleeding red area ?
I'm not saying that we should want graphics that look terrible. You can have many or most of the "something elses" above together with graphics that look decent but not great. But you can never have graphics that look as good as if you were trying purely for pretty graphics and willing to sacrifice gameplay as a result.
Certainly, there isn't a canonical right answer, but only trade-offs. If you're making a 1 on 1 fighter game (e.g., Street Fighter) that only needs to draw two characters at a time, then it's fine if each of those two characters carries a performance hit heavy enough that you can't draw three at a time.
But my point is, if you want the other end of a trade-off in visual quality, you should accept and embrace that that comes with a game that doesn't look as pretty.
Too many try to seperate them as either or,thaty is WRONG.
They should BOTH be there,the game and the visuals.This is not 2D gaming,this is the age of 3D gaming.There is reason Microsoft advanced and developed DX librairies,it is to allow coders to do more not less.There is reason Graphics cards and drives are advancing and it is not to go backwards.
Graphics should not replace gaming but gaming shoudl not replace graphics either.Every single aspect of a game,tells you just how much the developer put into quality and much was cutting corners to save cost.If you see a lot of cost saving and not much quality,the developer imo does not deserve your money.
You shouldn't be saying things like ,oh well it is ok they spent 1 week on graphics,the game play is great.How coud lthe game play possibly be great?You need good effects visuals or they just look awful,you need good animations or everything again looks awful.
The recent arguments on cartoony graphics seem to be a bit off.They are using the term animation,but animationm is just a term based on movement it has nothing to do with cartoony graphics.
Also Pixar made cartoon graphics acceptable but they also are super high quality,i can't even go into the scope of qaulity becuase most of the technical is above my head.They are high reslution high end cartoon graphics.Msot if not all of what we are seeing in our games is not,they are very low end and cheap,no not all but alot are.Just one example Tree texture in Wow ,is awfil or even alot of the rock textures are awful,very cheap efforts.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Some of us would like at least one modern game with slower paced, more tactical combat that we have come to love with RPG's and MMORPG's. Changing the entire genre into FPS / ARPG's is not my idea of intelligent design.
I think many will disagree when i say that 2D graphic is most effect graphic type for MMORPG.
At lest , it never out date (because it ready out date lol),
if you comparing 3D games of 2000 to 2004 and to 2012 , you will see that 3D not a good chose to develop MMORPG.
A lot developers fall in "out date graphic pitfall" with 3D graphic
If they don't release they game after 3 or 5 years develop , then it will fall in out date graphic and have to re make from start.
But pretty 3D graphic are they seller so no one want to take risk.
That's why i feel no hope in future MMORPGs ,
we will have more "1 month contents" pretty MMORPGs ,
thought i enjoy them haha.
I thought for sure that someone would pounce on that line as an anti-sandbox statement. How DARE you imply that player-made content is uglier than what the developers make, etc. etc. At least a few people were predictable enough to throw in the "there are no tradeoffs, everything could be done perfectly and also look perfect if devs weren't lazy and greedy" argument.
Right.
And I'm only cautioning the extreme end of that side of the spectrum.
You want to treat game creation almost like building a home for someone. If you dont' build someplace they want to stay, they're not going to keep playing. You can bash down that nice looking wall and put a washer/drier into that area of the house, and that will undoubtedly improve the home. But once you start doing things like replacing the kitchen window with a set of cabinets, you start to reduce the desire to live in the house -- because part of the desire to live there is that it's a comfortable, relaxing environment, and the view out that kitchen window has some nice trees to glance at while cooking meals.
Obviously players won't "live" inside your game, but the holistic approach to design in both situations is pretty similar. A game needs to realize players are going to react to it emotionally based on the environment it provides. A game which respects that and offers some nice views (they don't have to be technically impressive views, just aesthetically pleasing) will do considerably better than one which tries to survive purely on utility: like the windowless kitchen with its extra cabinets.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
By whatever measure you use, modern MMORPGs require more use of the human brain than the early MMORPGs I mentioned.
The definition of skill is simple, not arbitrary, and applies to basically every form of skill I'm aware of. Skill is decision-making and execution. In games, "decision-making" is strategy and tactics. Intellectual skills, if you will. In games, execution is whatever is needed (often "twitch") to implement the decisions you've made.
In the early MMORPGs I mentioned, the act of playing the game required very little skill and certainly not much thinking. This is why none of them kept me playing, because they were big timesinks with little gameplay and little reward for clever play or skill. You had these extremely rudimentary rotations (and "rotations" is probably too kind) in DAOC, AO, AC1, and other early MMORPGs I played, and often it was just pressing one button over and over. If the core activity in a game is pressing one button over and over, I'm sorry but that game doesn't value "intellect". Many of those early games had a two-button rotation (like AC1's debuff-nuke-nuke-nuke-...) but that's barely a step above.
Conversely in modern MMORPGs, skill is much more rewarded and in any given session there are plenty of opportunities for decision-making; especially against bosses who use dynamic abilities to force abnormal paths down the decision tree of an encounter, which forces you to plot out the best path in real-time. It rewards intellect much more than any early MMORPG I played.
Your argument implies the absolute intellect required by modern MMORPGs isn't high, which is true, but neglects what we're actually discussing which is the comparison with early MMORPGs. But you didn't have math majors proving out rotations for you in early MMORPGs because debuff-nuke-nuke-... isn't exactly a rotation that requires it.
So it's clear modern MMORPGs have better gameplay which rewards intellect better than early MMORPGs which rewarded time-investment and not much else. There's no value judgement here: you're not wrong for prefering games where the core gameplay in a session doesn't challenge your intellect. But we're not judging preferences, only measuring the amount a game rewards intelligent play.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Hmm ... old MMORPGs are not more tactical. They are less. Take the wiz back in EQ. You essentialy just DPS with the most level appropriate nuke, or root. There is no facing, no proc, no CD to manage. In fact, playing a wiz then needs way LESS intelligence than almost any games today.
Secondly, if you want slower pace .. just slow down. No one says you have to queue one dungeon after next. You can always stop and chat in a city. The point is this ... modern games let you have the option of fast pace or slow pace. Now if others want fast pace, and you can't find anyone to play with, it is not the fault of the game.
Plus, given so many here are complaining about fast pace, it looks like you can find people to "slow down" with you in any modern game.
3. If there were no drawbacks to making the world seamless, then why would games have loading screens at all? Even if you needed to transfer from one zone to another, why wouldn't they just make your screen go blank for a tenth of a second and then come back with the next zone loaded and ready to go?
Trying to make a seamless world limits how quickly you can need stuff loaded from the hard drive. A loading screen lets you stop for as long as necessary to load as much as you need. You can handle this by reusing artwork more so that you need to load new stuff less, or by making your game world less dense so that there is less stuff that needs to be loaded, or as you said, by making you move around more slowly. Or you can put an SSD in the minimum requirements, or probably some other options. But having a seamless world isn't completely free with no trade-offs involved.
4. Sometimes it's a question of needing more video memory. Sometimes it's PCI Express bus bandwidth. Sometimes it's hard drive capacity. Sometimes it's CPU performance. Sometimes it's storage loading speeds. Sometimes it's GPU power. Often it's a combination of more than one. Often one or more of those things isn't a meaningful bottleneck at all for your particular game.
I'm not arguing that if you want any of the "something elses" that your game immediately can't possibly look any better than Minecraft. Sometimes the hit to screenshot quality is actually pretty small. But there are always trade-offs.
6/7. The reason that reusing artwork allows you to have better looking artwork is precisely because it means that you need less of it and you have limited development resources. Which is what you said in 7, anyway.
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For collision detection, I don't mean running into other players and getting stuck. I mean running into a wall stopping you where it graphically looks like the wall is rather than somewhere else, and as opposed to falling through solid ground or being able to stand in mid-air in situations where it obviously doesn't look intentional.
Unless you want to go purely text-based, you need to have graphics. Though you're probably arguing only that games put too much emphasis on graphics.
If you've ever played a game where you didn't see a massive number of things that you could point to and say, they did this instead of that because it was easier and/or cheaper, then you don't know what to look for. While you can do a lot more with a larger budget than a smaller budget, $100 million isn't nearly enough to do everything you'd do on an infinite budget. Nor is $1 billion, nor for that matter, $1 trillion.
Actually... a bit of a hybrid with an isometric view is the most efficient way for an MMORPG.
You could get a really nice looking game that allows for more features and mechanics.
Personally, I'm fine with slow and tactical. Pirates of the Burning Sea's ship combat does that pretty well.
What I'm not fine with is slow and idle. Pull mobs and then stand there for two minutes waiting for them to die without it mattering much what you do in that time (e.g., get up and leave the room to go get some food) is not tactical combat. It's boring combat.
Ideally, I want photo-realistic graphics with all action delivered at 500fps and really deep gameplay that can provide me with endless possibilities and new evolving challenges. Oh, and endless character progression, of course.
Admittedly, only one game currently comes even vaguely close to meeting that ridiculous list of demands: EVE-Online.
But I'm patient. Perhaps I'll have more than 1 serious game option 10 years from now...
The mistake you are making all over again is: gameplay=combat. That's why we are in this mess in the first place.
Modern MMORPGs are all like this:
1. Find an NPC with ! over their head, click, click accept.
2. Check map, go to designated area, apply 1-3 skill combo on indicated mobs, loot, repeat till Quest COMPLETE.
3. Return to designated NPC, finish quest, collect rewards
4. Repear 1-3 until level cap.
Any decision making, except which NPC to talk to first, is absent. You are told what to do at every step and rewarded for doing what you were told. Thus the gamplay centers around combat and running around. Player skill is measured by discovering the most efficient skill rotation for a given mob, however since death means nothing, this is just a time delay until you go through the obvious combinations.
Gameplay in RPGs is way more than combat. Or at least it used to be ...
This isn't a strawman. You claimed gameplay wasn't better these days and didn't use intellect. I pointed out how it was better, because it quantifiably does involve more decisions (and therefore more intellect.) Whether you care about these games isn't relevant -- you should avoid making statements about games you don't care about if you don't wish people to discuss them with you.
I'm not sure how you could have read my post and thought the issue was whether time is spent. It's an issue of there being nothing to do except spend time (very few decisions.)
You claim winning isn't reliant on decisions. Does this mean you wait until you overgear every encounter? Because I assure you: deciding to stand in the fire rather than moving will get you killed. Winning is reliant on decisions.
I considered starting to describe to you the types of strategic decisions involved in raiding, but then I got to the point where you claimed LoL matches are 100% decided by twitch, which shows you have absolutely no concept of strategy in games. No wonder these conversations have gone so poorly.
I recommend playing at least one game at a pro level of play . I'll see you in 6-12 months when you're able to join the conversation.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ah, the ol' "My controller's broken" excuse.
Surely there's no intelligence involved in playing LoL; the correct action to take is not just readily apparent but so glaringly obvious that it even can't rightly be called a decision. The only reason that you've ever lost—other than those incompetant players you somehow keep getting as teammates—is because your touchpad messes up sometimes or your finger slips, never because you made a bad decision during a heated teamfight or in response to a gank. In short, there's nothing further that you (or anyone with the most basic grasp of the game) could do to improve your mastery of the game. #bronzelife
And why shouldn't gameplay be focused on combat if that is what is fun for players?
Take the first Diablo. Before that, RPG has all sort of stuff. Heck, if you play Ultima 7, you can even pick up every piece of fork & knife. What Blizz realized, is that people like combat .. and they made a RPG that focus on nothing but combat, items and progression. Nothing else. The quests are made simple .. because they are nothing but excuses to kill lots of stuff.
And what happened? Diablo sold millions. D2 sold millions. D3 sold 12M.
Looks like lots of people like combat.
What you call mess ... i call fun games. Now don't get me wrong, there are other fun stuff, like stealth gameplay. But hunting NPCs to talk to . .is not one of them for me. It is trivial, easy, no challenge, and most of the time boring for me.
I said slower paced combat, not slower paced game. Yes there were tactics in EQ, you had to deal with aggro as a wizard and in long drawn out battles, you needed to manage your mana as well as making choices on which spells to use for which types of monsters, when to use crowd controls and when not to use aoe's in order to not break crowd controls...etc.
There wouldn't be an issue if the entire genre weren't bandwagoning into the FPS / action adventure side of things, leaving almost no choice in new games coming out.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011