Are there any "hard" MMO's anymore?

kivi · January 2011

I had such high hopes for Rift. Great idea.

My friends and I have been talking and what we miss are the adventures. When you got a quest, and it felt like a real quest. You weren't pointed in a direction, and the questgiver didn't glow or have a huge check mark over their head.

I am not complaining about what Rift isn't, but I would like to ask if anyone knows of any games out recently, or on the horizon, that look promising within this criteria:

~ No easy quests, or questing treadmills.

~ Dungeons where you need lightsources ( torches , mage, spells ) I am talking DARKNESS !

~ No character "levels". Looking for more of a skill based system. ( although I think the Rift system is pretty neat as far as character customization goes. Reminds me of DAOC )

~ A real living world. You want to be a ninja, go do ninja stuff. You want to farm, build a house, grab some land, and plant some seeds. Sell your items to a cook, who owns a tavern, that serves adventurers.

Anyways, if anyone has a heads up, or understands what I am looking for and knows where we can find it, let us know. I would imagine I am asking for way too much though hehe.

Thanks.

eye_m · January 2011

I agree, and would like to know of one too. What I'm not interested in is a game that is hard because of the world-pvp, rather a game that is hard because of the PvE.

JamezJayz · January 2011

Fonline 2238

itbewilly · January 2011

Most games now days figure if add ons and websites are being made to take all adventure out of the games then why not just add the stuff themselves..

WoW had Questhelper and add ons like it that many people used whether they admitted it or not.If they wasn't using WoW Add ons to tell them exactly how to do what to do they was using WoWhead or any other wow web site.It didn't stop with map/quest help either.Most if not all raiders used add on's for boss fights? is that not just as bad as having a guest log tell you what/where to go?

Every semi-raiding guild ive even been in required deadlybossmod ct mod and a threat meter and they probably still require tools like this.The Boss mod itself was a cheap mod that pretty much told you anytime you was doing something wrong.

You really cant blame the publishers for making easier games when the games they make allow add ons and stuff.Just me two pennies. If they didn't make it the way it was an add on would.What you said is 100% true but i don't see it changing.

Loke666 · January 2011

Wait for WoDO, while you don't need a lightsource (hello, vampires) the rest seems to be just what you are looking for.

Hard is a releative word. Even the easiest MMOs have some hard content (well, I am not sure of everyone but at least most) so how big percentage needs to be hard to call a game hard? 10%? 50%? 100%?

NerdQuotes · January 2011

I wish! there is definetly a market for gamers who want a challenge and not these easy cheesy wow games. I liked the old eq where it was gruelingly tough! I want to see the fear come back into mmos where you actually played smart cause you avoid death at all costs. Most games now i kill myself for short cuts, its sad.

gamubi · January 2011

I tried eve, not sure if it's hard, got confused by everything I just gave up lol. More like a steep learning curve, or i'm just retarted. Wasnt so into it anyhow, more into the rpgs. Though Eve must be doing good, every 2nd website i go to has the eve banners.

Akechta · January 2011

Originally posted by kivi
I had such high hopes for Rift. Great idea.

My friends and I have been talking and what we miss are the adventures. When you got a quest, and it felt like a real quest. You weren't pointed in a direction, and the questgiver didn't glow or have a huge check mark over their head.

I am not complaining about what Rift isn't, but I would like to ask if anyone knows of any games out recently, or on the horizon, that look promising within this criteria:

~ No easy quests, or questing treadmills.

~ Dungeons where you need lightsources ( torches , mage, spells ) I am talking DARKNESS !

~ No character "levels". Looking for more of a skill based system. ( although I think the Rift system is pretty neat as far as character customization goes. Reminds me of DAOC )

~ A real living world. You want to be a ninja, go do ninja stuff. You want to farm, build a house, grab some land, and plant some seeds. Sell your items to a cook, who owns a tavern, that serves adventurers.

Anyways, if anyone has a heads up, or understands what I am looking for and knows where we can find it, let us know. I would imagine I am asking for way too much though hehe.

Thanks.

Try Runescape. Graphics are pretty crap, but graphics don't make a game. Has a largely skill-based system, huge economy, and has been running for a decade now. Updates are very frequent (Jagex, Game Developers, are striving for one update per week). Huge playerbase of about 5 million players, more than 1 million of which have subscribed for just $4.99 USD / Month. Give it a shot.

QuasiRain · January 2011

Hard really is relative. X_X

How about if someone makes a Touhou Online, Battletoads online, or an Iwannabetheguy online? XD

Still, I'm not into hard, but I like challenging. For PvP-challenging, Aika Global's mass war is the best. If you're not careful, you'd most likely end up getting caught in the front line and destroyed in seconds by enemy fire (and there are hundreds of players at once usually, some on your side, others are enemies). There's also another one other game called Cardmon Hero and it's challenge lies in building a great summon and skill team (your summons are cards, as well as your skills, so you'd have to be careful in what you use).

Still... Touhou Online... XD

elocke · January 2011

Last truly "hard" game I've played is Vanguard. So....go play that?

Haggis13 · January 2011

Originally posted by kivi
I had such high hopes for Rift. Great idea.

My friends and I have been talking and what we miss are the adventures. When you got a quest, and it felt like a real quest. You weren't pointed in a direction, and the questgiver didn't glow or have a huge check mark over their head.

I am not complaining about what Rift isn't, but I would like to ask if anyone knows of any games out recently, or on the horizon, that look promising within this criteria:

~ No easy quests, or questing treadmills.

~ Dungeons where you need lightsources ( torches , mage, spells ) I am talking DARKNESS !

~ No character "levels". Looking for more of a skill based system. ( although I think the Rift system is pretty neat as far as character customization goes. Reminds me of DAOC )

~ A real living world. You want to be a ninja, go do ninja stuff. You want to farm, build a house, grab some land, and plant some seeds. Sell your items to a cook, who owns a tavern, that serves adventurers.

Anyways, if anyone has a heads up, or understands what I am looking for and knows where we can find it, let us know. I would imagine I am asking for way too much though hehe.

Thanks.

Sounds like you're describing DarkFall. That is to say, I think DarkFall comes closest to what you're describing, but still lacks certain essential elements you (and I, too) would like to see.

Don't get me wrong, I used to be a complete DarkFall hater, but tried it out for some time to see what all the fuss was about. I also quit one and a half week after I bought it, not because I think it is not a great game, not because of the awful UI, bags, and chat systems, but because of the extremely steep progression and its unfriendliness towards casual players like myself. Don't play it if you can't devote some four hours a night, because it will take you ages to progress in this game.

On to your bullet list:

DarkFall has extreme AI akin to modern day FPS. This means mobs manually dodge your ranged attacks, strafe to throw your aim off-balance (and are pretty effective at it, too), hide behind corners, call in reinforcements (and not just when they're low on HP and not in all cases), attack you if you are in their line of sight and line of effect, regardless of distance (i.e. I have had it happen quite often that an arrow suddenly swooshed past my ear from out of the foliage), come to investigate the noise you're making (unless you try and sneak quietly), and make noise themselves so that you can deduce their approximate location behind some wall or another. In other words, their fighting tactics are extremely believable and unpredictable, which makes for some insanely hard PvE solo gaming. This means that, while some quests will inevitably involve killing 10 goblins, there is so much variety to the fights themselves that you will never feel like you're running an attack rotation. Sometimes, you'll find the head-on approach is easiest, while on the next fight, you and the mob are using some rock formation as cover whilst trying to land an arrow on each other. In addition, the fights are so complicated that it takes some 5 minutes to track down the mob you just heard walking, to approach them without drawing too much attention to yourself, and then to finish them off

I have no idea about light sources, because I quit quite early on, but DarkFall gets REALLY dark at night, and that does matter in combat situations.

DarkFall is purely skill based and unlike popular belief, there is freedom of character progression to some extent. There are at least three viable builds and due to the the-more-you-use-it-the-better-you-get skill system, you can theoretically max everything. Practically, this takes ages and you will definitely use different fighting tactics (or perhaps you focus on crafting) than the next guy.

The world in DarkFall is dead. That is to say, apart from the players, you will not find many villages or cities with more than five to six NPCs in them and these NPCs are stationary. This is also why I quit; there was zero atmosphere. As far as doing your own thing goes, there are two different things you can really do in DarkFall: craft and PvP. Yes, there are houses, yes, you can build stuff for them, but no, you cannot place your house where you like and there is no freedom for you to shape the world outside of PvP domination. Which depends on PvP. Which depends on crafting to make the same set of bone armour for every player in your guild. On the bright side, you can craft your own ships.

Also, in addition to your bullets, there are two other bullets that are important to me as far as immersive MMO gameplay goes:

The MMO needs contemporary graphics and art direction. If you think it does not, go play UO or EQ.

The MMO needs an intuitive and accessible UI. I do not enjoy a game if its UI is cumbersome.

It is in these two points that I think DarkFall utterly fails. The world is bland and uninspired, animations are horrid, and the clunky graphics prevent me from immersing myself into the game. The UI is so overly unintuitive and clunky that 50% of your concentration while playing the game needs to be devoted to managing the UI. For instance, the chat box has tabs, which is fine, but you can not decide what is in each tab. Want party chat, guild chat, and racial chat on the same tab? Too bad. Want whispers to show up in your active chat log? Impossible. What's worse, if a new tab falls outside of your chat box's tab bar, you have no way of knowing it is there unless you click the arrows next to the chat bar to see other tabs you might want to select. This means that you have no way of knowing if somebody whispers you. The other major issue comes in the form of hotbars. Yes, you have ten hotbars, but no, there is no way of showing more than a single hotbar. This is especially problematic because you want to put different weapon sets on your hotbars, so that you can switch between them in the heat of combat. However, you also want your spells there, and your potions, and whatnot. This means you have to bind shortcut keys to all hotbars and put your items/spells on those hotbars, but you have to memorise exactly which rarely used item or spell is under which shortcut key if you want to be effective in combat.

Long story short, DarkFall comes quite close to what you say you are looking for, but I believe that what you say you are looking for is not what you are looking for, unless you really like clunky gameplay and ugly and most importantly unrealistic visuals.

kivi · January 2011

Thanks all, good to know I am not the only one.

And by hard, I guess I do mean challenging. And have consequences to your actions. I do agree with you, Haggis13, on your last two points.

Good luck all and I will see you online somewhere hehe.

kivi · January 2011

Oh yeah, I almost forgot... do any of these games allow you to build a home where you please? Some games have amazing crating systems, and some have agreat combat, but do any of them have both?

( I would guess not else it would be the number 1 game always and forever hehe )

Shinami · January 2011

There aren't really as many since difficulty changed.

In the 90s and early 00s difficulty was all about improving the A.I itself. Today difficulty is about giving handicaps to both sides. One positive to the enemy and one negative to the player. This makes a game more Absolute-Percentile based. In the long run a game forces players into a wall in doing things.

My favorite MMO which was NOT popular in the states and lasted for a short time was the very first Risk Your Life. You made your character and leveled it but all attributes had something physical you could see with your eyes and while the game wasn't super balanced, it had a theme. You were one of two races trying to kill each other and before the update patch One race could actually "win" the race war.

The goal of the game was to build a character up and shape it into a certain build-type and then gather a few parties and attack the enemy race's maps. Each race had 2 maps. A party of 10 would team up with other parties of 10 to enter the High Level and Low Level map of the enemy and then attack Hardpoints throughout the map. If all hardpoints were destroyed, the attacking race would win...all players on all three maps would be spawned in their map 1 and all flags would be reset and the server would grant two global bonuses, one racial bonus and one region bonus....chosen by the leader of the party that destroyed the final hardpoint. This was before the patching applied that ruined the game, but private servers exist for the game that were before the heavy patches and some that were modded.

The game allowed you to run, swim, jump, etc...You literally had total control of the character including weapons and it wasn't a point and click MMO in PvP either. What I loved most to the original game (not the Crappy Sequal) was how Assassins operated. They became "Cloaked" and all skills were amplified...a player would then attack another player cloaked (to come out of cloak) with a special attack and had potential for a one-shot kill.

I ran a modded server for this game for a long time and played in some of the free servers out there...I enjoyed how it was easy to reach PvP, and once you got there it wasn't about playing for 1000s of hours to get equipment but it became more about simply PvPing as something " normal" and part of the game without all the point and click stuff. You normally found me on the roof of a building casting spells.

The game had TONS of bugs, and its graphics were not the best but the game itself had (and still has) certain elements that many MMOs today do not have. A lot of PvPs out there exist that are not fun, and many say its not about fun...and if playing a game is not about having fun, then how come I am not getting paid to play them?

psyclum · January 2011

it really comes down to what YOU personally define as "hard". there are different definitions and levels of hard that is involved in a MMO.

you want hard, yet you dont want a steep learning curve... completely understandable, but some would say that "handholding" is easymode.... there needs to be a balance between how "hard" the content is vs how user friendly the game is to play. you dont want the quest giver to have a big check on top of their head, But, some would consider that as dialing back the learning curve... not being able to see, like a lvl 1 erudite in the forrest at night, is part of your definition of "hard". but some other people simply consider that an annoyance and part of the learning curve to overcome that annoyance.

I think the 1st step you want to do is to define for yourself what it is YOU are looking for in a game, not just using subjective terms like "hard" to fish for answers:D

personally, i consider HARD as something that requires near 100% mental concentration for a fairly long duration to accomplish a fairly impossible task otherwise. what would be even HARDER is if that requirement is demanded of muliple people equal to the number of people in the raid. the more people that is REQUIRED to concentrate on the task and not fug up in order to accomplish the task, then the harder the task becomes... that was what made EQ1 great. 72 people required to beat the raid encounter, and if 1 single person fug up within the 45min fight,(not counting the effort to fight to the boss mob or the prep/instruction time) the raid wipes:D

so. the fair question should be what is it that YOU consider hard, and if there is a game that matchs what you are looking for.

toddze · January 2011

Unfortunately, the days of the hard MMO's are gone. Developers just see more money in the casual crowd, I really cant blame them because they only care about 1 thing, and thats money.

Just going to throw my opinion on whats hard in just for shits and giggles. its really hard to make a game hard. How do you make something hard for someone who sits on his butt hitting keys on a keyboard? So I think "Hard" is Time and effort spent into something to acheive a goal. The more time and effort a person puts into something, the more they should get out of it. Casual players really resent this style of play, because for whatever reason they cant put the time in and feel inferior.

Velocinox · March 2014

Sure, there's plenty of them in fact.

There's the one where you only equip items half your level.

Then there's that one where you start a pet class but never use the pet.

I think that one where you hunt in areas 10 levels over your head.

Finally there's that one that's really difficult and spawned a whole new game style called Hardcore mode, it's the one where you delete your character whenever you die.

Plenty of difficult MMOs out there, and the bast part is they are in your favorite MMO right now.

DEAD.line · March 2014

Oh, hello there....

Name: thread_necromancy.jpgViews: 3448Size: 48.6 KB

Velocinox · March 2014

Originally posted by DEAD.line
Oh, hello there....

Wow, really? Didn't notice. Just thought it was the same question that keeps coming up;

Why can't I make games more difficult for everyone else?

Flyte27 · March 2014

Being able to not see very well at night was a role playing mechanic. It wasn't there just to make the game harder. I think that's one of the things the masses of MMO players don't get. Various races could see in the night and others could not. There were spells to provide night visions. There were various light sources that were easy to obtain like torches and fire beetle eyes.

That leads me to another RPG issue that people don't talk much about. High fantasy games now have discarded the uniqueness of races. In old fantasy books like lord of the rings and the hobbit there were racial stereotypes. They weren't as prominent in the movies and they even tried overcome them, but they were there. To me what gave the races some uniqueness was they all acted a certain way. If you read any dragonlance books it described vividly that humans were the only race that could be either evil or evil and with an ability to be any class equally well. That was what made them unique. Other races were more powerful in certain in certain ways, but were restricted to either good or evil and to act a certain way. Dwarves liked gold, living down in the earth, and mining. Elves like the forest, nature, and were very logical "like volcan's in start trek". Orcs were an evil and vicious race hellbent on the destruction of all things good. To me this kind of thing has all been lost in recent times. Therefore there is or real reason to play as a certain race anymore. They are all just humans with various different features. This takes a lot of the meaning out of a fantasy setting role playing game.

Rydeson · March 2014

Damned if you do, Damned is you don't..

Isn't it funny how when a question gets revisited, you're told to "search" through previous post threads on the topic.. The moment you do, and resurrect that thread, you're accused of necro-threading.. You can't win either way.. Just an observation.. I guess the only true option is to not say anything at all.. LOL

pbat263 · March 2014

Life

The ultimate hardcore sandbox MMO.

reeereee · March 2014

Originally posted by Rydeson
Damned if you do, Damned is you don't..

Isn't it funny how when a question gets revisited, you're told to "search" through previous post threads on the topic.. The moment you do, and resurrect that thread, you're accused of necro-threading.. You can't win either way.. Just an observation.. I guess the only true option is to not say anything at all.. LOL

This is an excellent thread to necro though, as this discussion could have just as easily happened today as three years ago.

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Are there any "hard" MMO's anymore?

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Are there any "hard" MMO's anymore?

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