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Hard==GRIND, Easy==WoW
Teikk
Member Posts: 70
So ofer the past few weeks (and in general since WoW release) this site has been plagued by thousands of posts about what makes a game easy or hard. I just thought i would share my thoughts just because. Feel free to agree or disagree.
So the general census is that to make a game hard IE EQ1 etc etc you have to add this crazy long grind to it so players will pay month after month just to get to END GAME where the game STARTS at evidently we have all these games to PLAY and we cant really PLAY till the END GAME because you cant START PLAYING the game till the END of the game which is ... um what?
Anyway back on topic this just really seems odd to me because the grind is not what i found to be hard or challenging in EQ. The only thing the grind required was time.... which i had allot of back then and was in no way a "CHALLENGE". What i found challenging in the original EQ and DAoC and like older games was that well just use EQ as an example were things like quests. Yes EQ did have quests... you just had to FIND them and then well you had to figure out how to GET them and then well you had to figure out what the quest actualy WAS and what you needed to do by chatting with this NPC in various forms of
I will take the bag to the town
where is the box?
what do i need to do?
untill you would finaly got a reply from the damn thing giving you another riddle to figure out lol. Now with the advent of things like you know YOUTUBE this type of questing system seems kind of easy and of course there were some downfalls such as waiting in player made LINES to get a drop that could take WEEKS, but hey if you think about it if you didnt follow a guide it was quite HARD to figure this crap out. In fact if you werent an apt riddler you would likely never get your epic weapon without a said guide from the net.
Dungeons are another HARD thing that i really liked in EQ. They were LARGE and unless you had this cool site called EQATLAS on speedbrowse you could quite easily become lost in most of them ( yes even the noob dungeons) which was not always a good thing. Roaming mobs, random spawns and not being instanced could lead to some very interesting encounters espeicaly if the group that was deeper in got in trouble and decided to make a mad dash for the exit.....TRAIN!!!!This playing everyone in the same instance gave the zones a very much needed feel of randomness and unexpected where you couldnt just look up a guide and expect everything to go EXACTLY how it said it on the site.
Now as for the IF IT HAS THIS == WoW CLONE EASY!!! I am in fair agreement with a few of the other post about accessability != EASY. WoW made some great advances in the areas of getting groups , guilds, and people in general together and updating the UI etc. The part that made WoW and like games easy was the lack of the HARD things i listed above.
Run and fetch 10 this or that quests with a big shiney red pointer on a compass to tell you where to go is IMO what makes games like WoW easy. Having dungeons fairly strait forward with everything exactly the same all the way to the BOSS that has a few random scripts that have already been strategicly planned out and frapsd to YOUTUBE the only hard part about it is getting the required number of people to get there timming right and have the gear on to withstand the damage output.
Basicaly the GRIND IE the HARD part thats hated by all the CASUALS that do the raiding has been moved from the leveling process to the END GAME where the game STARTS so you can GRIND for GEAR to GRIND another BOSS over and over so you can get more GEAR to .... well you get the idea.
So anyway here we are with anything discouraging the CASUAL with only 5 HOURS A DAY to play running so n so FPS map..... errr DUNGEON with there group of 5 or 10 or what ever the case may be to be a bad thing.
Now on to the PLAYER SKILL argument..... I play RPGs you know that stands for ROLE PLAYING GAME just FYI in case you didnt know. Now Role playing is not spouting crap in chat IE " though art loverly purdy ladiey will thoust giv us a kess!!" crap to me ROLE play means i play with my CHARACTERS skills. I for 1 am no master swordsman , armorer, olympic runner, sprinter, or able to shoot lightning bolts OUT OF MY EYES!!! so i will ROLE PLAY to my CHARACTERS SKILL... If all games were based on human skill how many of you could have your toon run from the couch / chair you sit on to the mailbox? or how many of you could hit the broad side of a building with a bow? eh come on were gona make a game based on YOUR SKILLS. OOO and PLEASE if you can shoot FIREBALLS from your fingers LOOK ME UP REALLY i wana learn how to blow shit up with my mind!!!!
Comments
It's not "Hard=Grind". Grind is grind whether it's hard or easy, if you accept your meaning of grind (which I do, i.e. get 10 of these, kill these bosses, get this gear).
I think that it's the general grind that players are tired of, hard or easy. Playing "fill this order" repeatedly.
Once upon a time....
No need for Fireballs from your fingers, you just need this (approx 1:20).
@ Amar , you see leveling slowly IE EQ is now considered a GRIND by most people .. while doing instances over and over is considerd ..... not a GRIND? and PLAYING the game by the majority now. This just really confuses me to no end lol.
@ JACO LOL awsome flick i think ill start spouting that in general chat every time i want a group for something.
Hard is more in-depth gameplay other than hack-n-slash of modern MMOs, and yes this use to exist.
FYI...Vanilla WOW today would fail because most of these MMO gamers would say it was to hard and it is extemely harder than what we got today coming out.
In Asherons Call people these days would probably consider it a grind, but back then it didnt feel like it because we all wernt in a hurry to max level. see in that game there wasnt level restrictions on content, you could do what ever you want. sure some stuff was harder than others and being higher level helped out in that but there was plenty of other things to do at any level. it was a real adventure players wernt just in a race to max level to do " end game ". there was no such thing, the whole game was fun not just the max level content.
most players these days started with wow and i get that, wich is why most players these days have no clue what a real MMO is all about.
After reading a few posts i happend to see the cool SWTOR add about the
GET THE ULTIMATE FAST LEVEL GUIDE NOW!!!
i havent played it but just out of curosity wasnt the first guy to 50 ( top level) after release didnt he do it in like what a week?
@ DrunkWolf , yep thats another thing i see with allot of current games. Why do you want to lvl restrict content? IF i wana take my level 1 rogue and sneak into a dunbeon where the mobs could sneeze on me and BOOM why cant i? Sure you could add requirements such as KEYS etc this makes it you know harder but not impossible. The artifical lvl requirement on differnt areas and gear for that matter is annoying.
Oh yea and as far as the GRIND in older games i would say the reason no 1 really every knoticed it is because you could literaly spend WEEKS just crawling through different dungeons. Hell i spent 4 days just trying to figure out how to get an erudite necro through qeynos when EQ launched. It wasnt a grind because you really didnt knotice the levels as much as WHATS AROUND THAT CORNER? or WHATS IN THAT HOLE? and by the time you figured it out you were leveld up enough to check out the next dungeon.
Back in the EQ days getting to max level was part of the fun. The game began the minute you started your character, unlike now "ez-game mode" where the game starts at end game.
You answered your own questions really.
The grind only becomes a grind when the quests and story are boring. Some of us actually read quests, we keep track of the story, and we make the most out of it. Most of the "pre-wow" crowd had a similar mindset. Unfortunately those days are over. EZ mode is here to stay, MMOS are no longer about exploring and finding things out yourself. Heck, you dont even have to walk to the dungeon anymore, you can just press "queue" and be instant teleported to the dungeon with a random group. So in essence MMOs are headed to the lobby-game model.
There is nothing we can do about it other than move on.
the biggest difference I saw with WOW vs older mmos (besides polish) was the lack of a death penalty
which allowed players to jump back in with little downtime
GW1 had a death penalty
every death would result in 15% overall penalty w max of 60% penalty reduction until you leave the zone
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Death_Penalty
GW2 seems to have a milder death penalty than GW1
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Death_penalty
ANET has said they dont want death to get in way of fun
http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/
Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn't fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don't have to penalize you a second time.
EQ2 fan sites
No, I agree with you on that part. The "End Game" is indeed just more "grind". My point was that grind is still grind, it doesn't matter whether it's easy or hard. That difference is only a question of the required time it takes to finish that segment of the grind game play. So, in other words, hard does not equal grind if easy is also grind game play.
If you eat a carrot fast, or eat it slow, you still ate a carrot.
Once upon a time....
so i'm brain dead because i spend more time earning my first degree than playing video games? wow. that's a new one.
EDIT: also meat boy is pretty hard. not much grinding in that. (or if we want to stick to mmos: eve is pretty low on grind yet is insanely hard). WoW is pretty easy yet the whole thing is a grind. ... i think your argument is more holey than god's own swiss cheese.
so i'm brain dead because i spend more time earning my first degree than playing video games? wow. that's a new one.
Really, where does it say that in my post?Ok guys can we not do the blame game of ooo im braindead or OOOOO gamers who are stuipid is the problem
Is it so hard for people to simply discuss a topic.
Anyway yep amar i think you are right I believe that the concept of a GRIND is based on that IF YOU ARE HAVING fun doing what ever it is then its NOT a GRIND.
IE i enjoyed spending a few hours seeing how far i could get into a dungeon with a group and seeing how long we could survive once we reached its depts. Also seeing what kind of SHINEY we could get. This ended up being ME or US killing THOUSANDS of the same mob OVER AND OVER. This wasnt a grind because i found it FUN.
Now the general census seems to be almost the same except instead of killing thousands of mobs you run the same instances over and over to get the SHINEY. Completely fine with that but i would consider this a grind.
i apologize. i read "gamers" not games. sorry about that.
EDIT: i do want to add though that, as stated in my original post, grind is not what makes something hard. that's what makes it a pointless time-sink. fer instance: i'm playing eve right now. very difficult, a lot of thinking has to go into it, but it doesn't have to take up all my time.
@ Attic , i wasnt argueing for or against what is easy or hard, i was simply stating FEATURES i see to be either or. and the general consensus of the current gaming generation.
older mmos made you lose experience when you died - WOW never had that penalty (same as Diablo)
I used to travel the WOW world dieing on purpose to skip to the next graveyard (in classic WOW)
otherwise I agree - the death penalties with negative experience is primarily a time sink
edit:
correction on Diablo2: you could lose experience in harder modes but you would never go lower than your current level
EQ2 fan sites
Word.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
and i'm responding with what i think qualifies as hard, and in my opinion it has nothing to do with grinding (see the edits on my previous two posts). i am just posting my opinions in response to your opinions. i'm not trying to be belligerent, i'm just trying to contribute to the discussion.
On the issue of death penalty there is a really old MMO that never made it called DAWN.
They had a really cool idea similar to EVEs clone system except the player would marry and have KIDS or adopt a CHILD and set it on the corse to LEARN skills as you played. Now if you chose the same skills as you already had the child would learn quickly up to your current skill level depending on how much time went by between deaths. IE you die, you have a KID set it to learn skills..... you die in 24 hours skills of kid are same lvl as when you died. IF you die in an HOUR skills are next to nill..
This was an interesting way of doing things to bad the game never made it... O if you chose differnt skils ( you didnt have to pick the same skills every time) the only difference was that there was a cap on skill lvl that could be attained as the skills chosen were different than the FATHER or MOTHER and that the skills would raise a little slower.
I guess its semantics in the end but when I said WOW lacked a death penalty when compared to older mmos
I didnt mean it had no death penalty -- I meant the WOW death penalty was insignificant and not really noticeable
EQ2 fan sites
Another cool game idea that never made it from an old MMO called "Boundless Adventure" There unique idea was in the true global ( well as close as can be done with the current tech at the time) game world that was deformable. IE you could dig holes in the dirt etc.
How they planned to do the later i have no idea but to make the full global world they had the idea of linking zones ( no seamless worlds at that time) together in such a way that when you "zoned" you would come out in a corresponding area in the next zone. lets see something like
if you take a globe and split it up into 6 squares..... 1 box north pole 4 boxes making the biggest part of the globe in the middle 1 for each side and another box for the south pole.
North pole depending on where you zoned would connect you to the corresponding location on the box next to it. IE if you zoned on the SE side of the North pole box you would end up in the NE or NW of the corresponding boxes connected in that area depending on exactly where you zoned. The same for the south pole.
Basicly this idea would allow players to circumnavigate the globe in essence. Yes not a true globe but it could "TRICK" you into thinking it was.
Think of it as say going to say felwith in EQ and taking a ship around to odus and likewise taking a boat from north antonica across the north pole to come out in say if you left in halas and you traveld NE across the NP you would come out in probably north of Kaladim as it seems to fit as being on the OTHER SIDE of the world on a flat map.