This is because it is starting to be pounded through your skull slowly but surely that most MMORPGs are just really poorly made RPGs.
Play a decent game like Legend of Grimrock 2 (assuming you like the gameplay, which you may not) and you reach the "aha! moment" of wow yeah MMORPGs leveling experience sucks, because well the games suck. There is no meat on the bone.
So the solution is to strip the RPG elements out of them rather than making them better RPGs?
I am not sure where you get this "solution" I certainly never said that. The solution is to actually make an MMORPG that is actually a good RPG. There almost aren't any and very rarely have been.
Thanks for explaining. I thought you were agreeing with the OP about removing levels from MMOs . I agree with your post.
I believe I have reached the point were leveling is actually turning me off from games..
Uh ... then I have a VERY hot tip for you:
STOP SWITCHING AROUND GAMES !
Play one MMO over a long time, and you will have to level ONCE and not every time again and again and again.
If you keep starting new games, well then you'll have to restart from zero. Thats how this works.
At the current state of MMOs, I have no clue why anybody would complain about levels. You level like a month or two and then you're done. Almost forever. Until the devs introduce new levels.
I think this is a themepark phenomenon (sp?). You get on your tracks and have to do stuff alone, or in some distinct area, since you guys need to be in the same part of the story. In games like Ryzom you went to the main island and off ya go hunting/digging for mats, raising your skills. You could just fight and level your combat skills, you could explore the region dodging mobs, or watch the trecks of herbivores wandering about (I remember taking a ten minute walk just to enjoy the view at the world from the top of a waterfall).
In Anarchy Online you left the starter area and you could go out huntingm or you went to the Subway. Teaming was brought to you early, since you could go deeper and past mid-bosses earlier. You were not bound to story bits. Interdependence was brought in by different jobs. Fixers made you faster, could boost your NCU (buffs were limited by memory), give HoTs. Traders could boost you generally at cost of their own stats (Rift has a soul like that now), Doc had the usual DoTs, slow-downs and heals. Beurocrats had pets, charms and crowd control. You could combine different jobs and if you had a bad name to you, you wouldn't get buffs you needed.
Modern games all have in common I got bored when I reached max level and had to notice all that was there to do was gear grind. Doing the same instances to get gear just for the sake of doing the same instances again. So no levelling = no RPG to me. The solution IMHO would rather be to open games up more. Open dungeons (more than one per level/faction), interdependence, more exploration and an interesting world. Make the RPG come back and get rid of single player methods like "hard mode". I'm not playing DMC and even there I'm not into replaying the game again and again just in higher dfficulty. More RPG would be the solution to me, not less.
I agree with many that I think most have an issue with themepark leveling.. I know that I'm tired of that treadmill and really have played any games for any significant time for years.. I'm waiting for a sandpark game to come out.. I don't want to follow the breadcrumbs again.. I want the freedom to just go out and find my own trouble.. I'm all for LORE being in the game, and NPC that have bounty rewards in place, but no more storyline leveling.. BORING.. That should be left to SPG..
Now for the leveling aspects.. I would like to see minimal vertical progression and more horizontal achievements.. Use a military type of structuring.. Sure your veterans are more experienced and will normally defeat rookies, but that isn't to say a rookie couldn't tag along with a veteran and earn exp.. and definitely means that a veteran is a god that no rookie can defeat in PvP.. or keeps vets from one shotting 90% of the mobs in the game because of their top tier level..
Instead, lets focus on achievements.. Have in place a system like WoW's for example of achievements, but add to it.. Reward players with medals, ribbons and titles.. And have those achievements mean something in the game.. For the most part, design the game that promotes repeat play, without making 95% of the game obsolete because you out leveled it..
I think those who complain about leveling are the power levelers. If you take your time follow the story go explore treasurs and fight rare mobs it's a completly different experience then a 12 pack of mt.Dew and telling yourself "must hit level cap before everyone else".
I agree, if you think about it the single greatest new component of a new expansion is the levelling experience, and that primarily means quests, and in the case of wow, superb story telling. Many people say they love the experience. What I dont understand is people who say they are excited about an expansion, and in the same breath say they hate levelling - and charge right on back to the raiding cycle they have just played to death for 18 months - what?!
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
It still takes a long time to level in a mmo but it's easy as hell. You do the same quest over and over x 10000. It was more fun in Everquest where you grouped together and the world was an unforgiving place. But maybe it's fun someone who is new to quest in WoW, maybe any game genre becomes boring after so many times of play. Maybe try something else, the developer have been trying to please it's fans everytime a new mmo comes out it's something new. Action mmo's, sandbox and hardcore etc. But still people complain maybe you're just burned out go play some SC2 or something. I mean you can even buy a high level toon in WoW and EQ.
When your main concern is "What is my current level", rather than "How can I do this current content with my current set of tools"; the RPG game you are playing has failed as an RPG.
I think most people can easily, if they are honest with themselves and forgot how "invested" they are, agree that a large portion of MMORPGs engender this issue.
The problem is not levels, although I personally prefer skill-based games, the problem is that in most MMORPGs you are ONLY chasing levels or some other form of progression. You are not actually playing the game. This is how you know most MMORPGs are just bad games in general.
Now I could write a very long post about all the various and sundry aspects that go into this, things like challenge and gameplay and how content is constructed. But I don't feel like it. Suffice it to say it is a mix of many things.
But boil it down to just the above statement as an elegant way to figure out what is wrong from the 50,000 foot perspective and that is it. There is no game, there is just the "ding!" next level.
When you have dinged 1000s of level across 100s of games, it intuitively becomes less and less impressive and it as the shininess wears down to tarnish you stop getting blinded by the reflection and start looking for the "game" underneath. You then slowly start to realize there is no game. Which is very hard to accept, because these are supposedly games and people are playing them, including yourself. But there is no game. You are just doing your time for your next "ding!". Whatever that "ding!" happens to be; level,skillpoint, loot drop, what-have-you.
Its a mile wide and an inch deep. After doing most MMO content once, you are basically done. I recently played TOME 4 on its highest difficulty setting (which is totally meant to be unfair). I had played through the game multiples and won more than once. Yet I had to consider and think each move I made all the way to the end. Most MMORPGs don't do this, because they mostly suck as games.
In that TOME 4 run I had my entire build planned out before starting, I had tested the build in the previous difficulty and I still needed to watch each threat and consider my tactics having to dynamically assess and react to each situation as it came up. Each phase of my "progression" was not about grinding out more uberness toward no purpose(most mmo grinding is crap; you can already kill that stuff), each part was purely about getting to the next step of the content, about whether the build I had planned could make it through either due to having enough offense or defense of the appropriate type at the appropriate time. Even after being fully kitted out and into the endgame I had to think and adjust at one point about 90% through, even fully advanced in gear and levels, I had to find a way to bypass a certain random boss that was unkillable by my build. This is something I planned for and was able to do. This was part of playing the game. There was an actual game to play.
Most MMORPGs never really give you a real game to play, they just repeat the same cycle over and over and slap a slightly different look on it. If something kills you, grind out more levels or loot. Bam that is it. How are leveling areas made? various mob spawns in regular placed locations. What is the game? Mindlessly go from spawn to spawn, kill stuff, hear a ding. Oh but bosses can be like challenging and scripted .... SO WHAT? That is a boss, where is the damn game? Answer: nowhere, it doesn't exist. MMORPGs are a collection of sometimes interesting things with no actually interesting game holding them together.
Why do you think you hear people sometimes advocating for huge worlds or open worlds? Its just another symptom of the same problem. No game and the need to distract from this fatal flaw. Because that whole line of reasoning has a terrible flaw to it. Large doesn't mean interesting. You can have a huge but empty world. Yet these people yearn for something interesting, something to play with and play for and so they latch on to something seemingly grand. Same with forced grouping. A feature that was uncommon and unliked in the era of MUDs but for some people the forced socialization works to help them obscure the fatal flaw of there being no real underlying game.
If you ask yourself "What am I trying to do in the game?" and your answer is "Get to level 100" then you are playing a bad game. Not because the game has a leveling experience but because everything you did to get to level 100 is obviously trivial crap or you would be saying something else. Rather than something like "I need to make friends with the halfings because the dwarves told me only they know where the amulet of yendor is, but then again Fredo the elf implied I might be able to steal a tablet from the bee people that might tell me what i need to do". Now I know of some people will say all sorts of MMORPG quests say stuff like that. Sure, but YOU DON'T FUCKING CARE and it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. You only care about what level you are. And the reason for that is the underlying game sucks.
Nice rant, gestalt11. But we do not want games, we want a world to live in, to make friends, to socialise, with interesting places to explore and with rewards for the risks we take.
^^ Following on from above, there was a time when RPG's were about providing a framework and great setting/story to allow people to roleplay, then mmorpg came along and we had online avatars to do this - awsome! then over time more and more we drifted from role play and great story telling until certain games turned into buckets of features and mini games. players Avatar was no longer the focus, instead it was dps meters and mini games. What we lost was Story telling, cohesive worlds and Role playing Avatars - thing's that many modern players literally cannot comprehend (I hate reading the quests, I want to rush through the new world to get back to my raiding world! )
The positive is that games like Wildstar have shown to investors that the market has had its fill of this type of game, and WOW serves its purpose to keep people who want this happy - fair enough. It will be interesting to see what new MMO's come out post Wildstar and how the other AAA mmos continue to develop. When you no longer care when you next ding because you are having too much fun, that's when you know you are back in a great game.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Why do you think you hear people sometimes advocating for huge worlds or open worlds? Its just another symptom of the same problem. No game and the need to distract from this fatal flaw. Because that whole line of reasoning has a terrible flaw to it. Large doesn't mean interesting. You can have a huge but empty world. Yet these people yearn for something interesting, something to play with and play for and so they latch on to something seemingly grand. Same with forced grouping. A feature that was uncommon and unliked in the era of MUDs but for some people the forced socialization works to help them obscure the fatal flaw of there being no real underlying game.
If you ask yourself "What am I trying to do in the game?" and your answer is "Get to level 100" then you are playing a bad game. Not because the game has a leveling experience but because everything you did to get to level 100 is obviously trivial crap or you would be saying something else. Rather than something like "I need to make friends with the halfings because the dwarves told me only they know where the amulet of yendor is, but then again Fredo the elf implied I might be able to steal a tablet from the bee people that might tell me what i need to do". Now I know of some people will say all sorts of MMORPG quests say stuff like that. Sure, but YOU DON'T FUCKING CARE and it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. You only care about what level you are. And the reason for that is the underlying game sucks.
First, thank you for your well thought out post...It was interesting to read
Exploration can be an end in itself in games. Skyrim is a perfect example. I did not care at all for the silly main quest in Skyrim. Same goes for most of the side quests [which are typically very MMO like "Go to this dungeon.Kill Badass McBoss and get my family necklace back." What I did like doing in that game was just wandering around exploring stuff. The quests were just an excuse to go rooting around in an area I had not been to before.
I think SWTOR tried and to some level succeeded in bringing an meaningful story to MMORPGs. But that game also illustrates them main problem in doing this. You can only produce so much high quality handcrafted content. Even with a huge budget, eventually the players are gonna run out and be sitting around bored and you will pretty much have to pad out your game with "kill 10 rats" stuff because it's not acceptable for an MMO to say "The game is over now." like a single player game can. Either I think MMOs should follow the multiplayer version of Skyrim route and use procedural generation to inundate the player with admittedly mediocre content but a huge world to explore or they should go full on sandbox mode and let the player interactions tell the story of the world. Expecting a years long Witcher-calibre story all handcrafted by human devs would be awesome but I don't see how it's at all practical.
First, thank you for your well thought out post...It was interesting to read
Exploration can be an end in itself in games. Skyrim is a perfect example. I did not care at all for the silly main quest in Skyrim. Same goes for most of the side quests [which are typically very MMO like "Go to this dungeon.Kill Badass McBoss and get my family necklace back." What I did like doing in that game was just wandering around exploring stuff. The quests were just an excuse to go rooting around in an area I had not been to before.
I think SWTOR tried and to some level succeeded in bringing an meaningful story to MMORPGs. But that game also illustrates them main problem in doing this. You can only produce so much high quality handcrafted content. Even with a huge budget, eventually the players are gonna run out and be sitting around bored and you will pretty much have to pad out your game with "kill 10 rats" stuff because it's not acceptable for an MMO to say "The game is over now." like a single player game can. Either I think MMOs should follow the multiplayer version of Skyrim route and use procedural generation to inundate the player with admittedly mediocre content but a huge world to explore or they should go full on sandbox mode and let the player interactions tell the story of the world. Expecting a years long Witcher-calibre story all handcrafted by human devs would be awesome but I don't see how it's at all practical.
There is another more subtle benefit of all that story telling, it provides weight and a background to that virtual world. The benefit of this is that if done well players love returning to the world, and if this is complemented with content that remains playable at max level you dont need to pump out endless content at an impossible rate. One approach is to slow progression drown dramatically and apply some player scaling - now that world remains meaningful and the game does not focus on literally consuming everything and moving on. We talk about player locusts, but when a developer designs a permanent world that makes 90% of itself redundant and empty at the end - and then compounds the problem by SPEEDING up the levelling process instead of SLOWING IT (insane) then that's a big problem.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Why do you think you hear people sometimes advocating for huge worlds or open worlds? Its just another symptom of the same problem. No game and the need to distract from this fatal flaw. Because that whole line of reasoning has a terrible flaw to it. Large doesn't mean interesting. You can have a huge but empty world. Yet these people yearn for something interesting, something to play with and play for and so they latch on to something seemingly grand. Same with forced grouping. A feature that was uncommon and unliked in the era of MUDs but for some people the forced socialization works to help them obscure the fatal flaw of there being no real underlying game.
If you ask yourself "What am I trying to do in the game?" and your answer is "Get to level 100" then you are playing a bad game. Not because the game has a leveling experience but because everything you did to get to level 100 is obviously trivial crap or you would be saying something else. Rather than something like "I need to make friends with the halfings because the dwarves told me only they know where the amulet of yendor is, but then again Fredo the elf implied I might be able to steal a tablet from the bee people that might tell me what i need to do". Now I know of some people will say all sorts of MMORPG quests say stuff like that. Sure, but YOU DON'T FUCKING CARE and it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. You only care about what level you are. And the reason for that is the underlying game sucks.
First, thank you for your well thought out post...It was interesting to read
Exploration can be an end in itself in games. Skyrim is a perfect example. I did not care at all for the silly main quest in Skyrim. Same goes for most of the side quests [which are typically very MMO like "Go to this dungeon.Kill Badass McBoss and get my family necklace back." What I did like doing in that game was just wandering around exploring stuff. The quests were just an excuse to go rooting around in an area I had not been to before.
I think SWTOR tried and to some level succeeded in bringing an meaningful story to MMORPGs. But that game also illustrates them main problem in doing this. You can only produce so much high quality handcrafted content. Even with a huge budget, eventually the players are gonna run out and be sitting around bored and you will pretty much have to pad out your game with "kill 10 rats" stuff because it's not acceptable for an MMO to say "The game is over now." like a single player game can. Either I think MMOs should follow the multiplayer version of Skyrim route and use procedural generation to inundate the player with admittedly mediocre content but a huge world to explore or they should go full on sandbox mode and let the player interactions tell the story of the world. Expecting a years long Witcher-calibre story all handcrafted by human devs would be awesome but I don't see how it's at all practical.
Exploration can be and often is an end to itself and there is nothing wrong with that. The various adventure style games were great games. Like the old Sierra games and Myst or whatever. But think about that for a second, think about playing those games as complete games in their totality; your feeling of the experience with the game. Then think about playing Skryim the way you describe.
There is exploration in Skyrim and its rather interesting and nice extra bit to the game. But the game itself is not really made for it per se. Its imperfect in this sense. Perhaps it is not so imperfect that it is actually a bad game. The exploration in an adventure game has more meat on the bone, there is always some reason or some extra little bit of this or that. In Skyrim you are exploring just to satisfy some curiosity and to exercise the RPG fighting portion of the game. This is fine as long as these elements blend together sufficiently to provide some basis for an actual game. But by and large I think when compare the "pure" game to an aspect of another game you can start get an inituitive feel for the weakness.
Now I think Skyrim is a pretty good game in a lot of ways, but aspects of it are weak when compared to a "pure" example where the game is mostly centered around that thing. But at the same time Skyrim was crafted in such a way that each of these weak features blend together into a whole such that there is an actual game to play. There is somewhere you are going, there is something to do, there is stuff you want, and additionally the RPG portions of the game conform around these things rather than being the sole point.
Most MMORPGs do not actually manage to make their games into a hybrid that is a collection of features with some overall theme like Skyrim. Skyrim is weak in many regards but combines them into a strong whole. MMORPGs try to do a similar thing and they invariable almost all fail.
RPG mechanics are meant to abstract and simulate aspects of your characters "life". They are meant to represent what you do, not be the sole object of what you do.
I am not going to post some kind of implementation, because this a) putting the cart before the horse and b) I would do it myself if I was that far along.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and MMORPGs have a real problem. There is no "G". They are a collection of (usually) weak game aspects shoved into a box that does not actually have a real game to play.
To put this another way, people are not playing the game, they are playing the stats of their characters, the game itself is incidental. But that is not all, when things DO get added in like the SWOTOR holocron exploration stuff they are very weak and bear no real relation to the game. Even when that particular thing when taken in isolation is well crafted the thing as a whole is still disjointed and divorced from the "game" (or lack thereof) and even when actually kind of fun invariably feels like a time waster. It comes out as completely out of context. A square peg in a round hole.
It isn't so much about really well crafted story, or procedural geneation, or even amount. Its that there is no real integrated idea of how things work and overall idea of what players get out of content besides advancing their character. Everything boils down to advancing the character, when you look at an MMORPG this is the main design theme, and that is not actually a game.
You are on the right track that because of the nature of online shared stuff it is very hard for the devs to come up with some sort of goal. And I would even hazard that they are no longer really aware of just what the structure that is imposed by a goal does to a game in general. I am not going to speculate on how to solve that problem. But I can tell you this. In the absence of a good solution for this problem they have given you a crap solutions, pure character advancement with no actual game. This works for a while because power is satisfying to some degree and addictive but it gets old. It is starting to get old for a lot of people.
People will agitate in perpetuity for all sorts of interesting features that have existed in other games they enjoyed. But they will continue to be disatisfied until these things are actually put into an actual game in a way that actually integrates with whatever the base idea of the game actually is. Most MMORPGs have no based idea besides character advancement. The notable exception are the games with large amount of emergent goals, such as EvE. Running missions in EvE alone would make it a bad RPG, but since EvE has tons of emergent behavior that "becomes" the game, it is actually a game unlike most other MMORPGs.
It isn't that any of the various features of MMORPGs are bad (exploration, crafting etc.) its that they are just additions onto a house with no foundation just collapse anyway. And so will anything added onto the structure with no foundation.
Skyrim has a foundation, a base idea of what the game is about what it should be doing. It then added various things onto this. In reality this base idea started 20 years ago with Arena and they have slowly but surely added more and more layers onto it. But they have never stepped away from the foundation. And their foundation was an actual game.
Many MMORPGs have done the same thing, but their foundation is not a game, its just character advancement. It is just a mechanic that exists in other computer programs that actually are game. This is masked by the appearance of content. But that content is just a hamster wheel and we all know it is. That isn't even open for debate anymore.
So yes exploration in a computer game can be quite good. It can be the entire game like in the classic Adventure genre. It can be a nice integrated piece of a different genre like RPG, where it adds flavor and variation in feel to how things get done or open up how to get through the world. It also has existed in various MMORPGs.
But go through those three cases in your mind and compare each to the other. You will find that when you get to many (not all) MMORPGs the exploration is not only a sideline. But there is almost no way for them to actually make them matter for real in the game that is "natural" or "native" to how the game works, and by that I mean the only way they can force you to explore is either by dangling a carrot or beating you with a stick; it is not actually part of the game and there is no way to make it some thing that is on its face some thing you just do in the game because that IS the game.
Edit: this is another notable exception concerning EvE, the game is structured in such a way that you literally cannot play it without a modicum of exploration and travel. You literally cannot play the game without some interaction with the exploration and travel mechanics, the game itself actually makes no sense without it. The location of things in games like WoW (and this encompasses many games even the non-EQ lineage games) is pretty much incidental, it really doesn't matter where Dungeon XYZ is. Its just placed somewhere for flavor. Even if we forget about teleporting mechanics. You just run to the dungeon, there is no real gameplay involved sure you hit arrow keys to move and you need to follow some directions. This is different than in EvE where you need to explore to find some asteroids to mine and then you need to figure out where to sell them and these two aspects are constantly changing. Which mining is availlble, what has good yields, plotting out your trade routes etc. These are all things that you need to constantly think about and the game is literally unplayable if you don't.
Another thought provoking post from you. I'd say in most RPGs character advancement is the goal. Particularly thinking of pnp RPGs, CRPGs are a little different...But whatever subgoals you may have in one adventure session your character and its advancement is the one thread that links those together. EVE is like that as well. Start a character and just do whatever you want within the game mechanics the game isn't going to give you many goals it is essentially a bunch of mini-games dedicated to character advancement. Same as what Skyrim turns into if you are not interested in the story.
Single player RPGs have the luxury of being more story focused because they have a beginning, middle and end point. Pen and paper games can drag out combat so even killing trash can take 45 minutes because the combat is more interesting than MMO combat and people can drop and pick up these games all at the same time with little trouble. This also allows the DM to drag out one story arc over months or even years of game sessions. If you try to make an MMO into "one game" with a focused goal you are going to run into problems. MMOs need a nebulous goal that people can never quite achieve in order to keep people playing [usually ends up being something very vague like "get best available gear" or "make tons of ISK".) You can minimize the amount of repetition required by adding more content and more different types of tasks or set player against player for the inherent dynamism of thinking opponents (like EVE does) but I don't see how you'll ever turn an MMO into a game where everyone has the same concrete goal which is integrated in the game's plot (if this is even what you aim to do?)
Comments
Thanks for explaining. I thought you were agreeing with the OP about removing levels from MMOs . I agree with your post.
Uh ... then I have a VERY hot tip for you:
STOP SWITCHING AROUND GAMES !
Play one MMO over a long time, and you will have to level ONCE and not every time again and again and again.
If you keep starting new games, well then you'll have to restart from zero. Thats how this works.
At the current state of MMOs, I have no clue why anybody would complain about levels. You level like a month or two and then you're done. Almost forever. Until the devs introduce new levels.
I think this is a themepark phenomenon (sp?). You get on your tracks and have to do stuff alone, or in some distinct area, since you guys need to be in the same part of the story. In games like Ryzom you went to the main island and off ya go hunting/digging for mats, raising your skills. You could just fight and level your combat skills, you could explore the region dodging mobs, or watch the trecks of herbivores wandering about (I remember taking a ten minute walk just to enjoy the view at the world from the top of a waterfall).
In Anarchy Online you left the starter area and you could go out huntingm or you went to the Subway. Teaming was brought to you early, since you could go deeper and past mid-bosses earlier. You were not bound to story bits. Interdependence was brought in by different jobs. Fixers made you faster, could boost your NCU (buffs were limited by memory), give HoTs. Traders could boost you generally at cost of their own stats (Rift has a soul like that now), Doc had the usual DoTs, slow-downs and heals. Beurocrats had pets, charms and crowd control. You could combine different jobs and if you had a bad name to you, you wouldn't get buffs you needed.
Modern games all have in common I got bored when I reached max level and had to notice all that was there to do was gear grind. Doing the same instances to get gear just for the sake of doing the same instances again. So no levelling = no RPG to me. The solution IMHO would rather be to open games up more. Open dungeons (more than one per level/faction), interdependence, more exploration and an interesting world. Make the RPG come back and get rid of single player methods like "hard mode". I'm not playing DMC and even there I'm not into replaying the game again and again just in higher dfficulty. More RPG would be the solution to me, not less.
I agree with many that I think most have an issue with themepark leveling.. I know that I'm tired of that treadmill and really have played any games for any significant time for years.. I'm waiting for a sandpark game to come out.. I don't want to follow the breadcrumbs again.. I want the freedom to just go out and find my own trouble.. I'm all for LORE being in the game, and NPC that have bounty rewards in place, but no more storyline leveling.. BORING.. That should be left to SPG..
Now for the leveling aspects.. I would like to see minimal vertical progression and more horizontal achievements.. Use a military type of structuring.. Sure your veterans are more experienced and will normally defeat rookies, but that isn't to say a rookie couldn't tag along with a veteran and earn exp.. and definitely means that a veteran is a god that no rookie can defeat in PvP.. or keeps vets from one shotting 90% of the mobs in the game because of their top tier level..
Instead, lets focus on achievements.. Have in place a system like WoW's for example of achievements, but add to it.. Reward players with medals, ribbons and titles.. And have those achievements mean something in the game.. For the most part, design the game that promotes repeat play, without making 95% of the game obsolete because you out leveled it..
DING just hit 100 and had fun doing it.
I think those who complain about leveling are the power levelers. If you take your time follow the story go explore treasurs and fight rare mobs it's a completly different experience then a 12 pack of mt.Dew and telling yourself "must hit level cap before everyone else".
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Let me take another swing at this.
When your main concern is "What is my current level", rather than "How can I do this current content with my current set of tools"; the RPG game you are playing has failed as an RPG.
I think most people can easily, if they are honest with themselves and forgot how "invested" they are, agree that a large portion of MMORPGs engender this issue.
The problem is not levels, although I personally prefer skill-based games, the problem is that in most MMORPGs you are ONLY chasing levels or some other form of progression. You are not actually playing the game. This is how you know most MMORPGs are just bad games in general.
Now I could write a very long post about all the various and sundry aspects that go into this, things like challenge and gameplay and how content is constructed. But I don't feel like it. Suffice it to say it is a mix of many things.
But boil it down to just the above statement as an elegant way to figure out what is wrong from the 50,000 foot perspective and that is it. There is no game, there is just the "ding!" next level.
When you have dinged 1000s of level across 100s of games, it intuitively becomes less and less impressive and it as the shininess wears down to tarnish you stop getting blinded by the reflection and start looking for the "game" underneath. You then slowly start to realize there is no game. Which is very hard to accept, because these are supposedly games and people are playing them, including yourself. But there is no game. You are just doing your time for your next "ding!". Whatever that "ding!" happens to be; level,skillpoint, loot drop, what-have-you.
Its a mile wide and an inch deep. After doing most MMO content once, you are basically done. I recently played TOME 4 on its highest difficulty setting (which is totally meant to be unfair). I had played through the game multiples and won more than once. Yet I had to consider and think each move I made all the way to the end. Most MMORPGs don't do this, because they mostly suck as games.
In that TOME 4 run I had my entire build planned out before starting, I had tested the build in the previous difficulty and I still needed to watch each threat and consider my tactics having to dynamically assess and react to each situation as it came up. Each phase of my "progression" was not about grinding out more uberness toward no purpose(most mmo grinding is crap; you can already kill that stuff), each part was purely about getting to the next step of the content, about whether the build I had planned could make it through either due to having enough offense or defense of the appropriate type at the appropriate time. Even after being fully kitted out and into the endgame I had to think and adjust at one point about 90% through, even fully advanced in gear and levels, I had to find a way to bypass a certain random boss that was unkillable by my build. This is something I planned for and was able to do. This was part of playing the game. There was an actual game to play.
Most MMORPGs never really give you a real game to play, they just repeat the same cycle over and over and slap a slightly different look on it. If something kills you, grind out more levels or loot. Bam that is it. How are leveling areas made? various mob spawns in regular placed locations. What is the game? Mindlessly go from spawn to spawn, kill stuff, hear a ding. Oh but bosses can be like challenging and scripted .... SO WHAT? That is a boss, where is the damn game? Answer: nowhere, it doesn't exist. MMORPGs are a collection of sometimes interesting things with no actually interesting game holding them together.
Why do you think you hear people sometimes advocating for huge worlds or open worlds? Its just another symptom of the same problem. No game and the need to distract from this fatal flaw. Because that whole line of reasoning has a terrible flaw to it. Large doesn't mean interesting. You can have a huge but empty world. Yet these people yearn for something interesting, something to play with and play for and so they latch on to something seemingly grand. Same with forced grouping. A feature that was uncommon and unliked in the era of MUDs but for some people the forced socialization works to help them obscure the fatal flaw of there being no real underlying game.
If you ask yourself "What am I trying to do in the game?" and your answer is "Get to level 100" then you are playing a bad game. Not because the game has a leveling experience but because everything you did to get to level 100 is obviously trivial crap or you would be saying something else. Rather than something like "I need to make friends with the halfings because the dwarves told me only they know where the amulet of yendor is, but then again Fredo the elf implied I might be able to steal a tablet from the bee people that might tell me what i need to do". Now I know of some people will say all sorts of MMORPG quests say stuff like that. Sure, but YOU DON'T FUCKING CARE and it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. You only care about what level you are. And the reason for that is the underlying game sucks.
Currently playing: EverQuest
Waiting for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
^^ Following on from above, there was a time when RPG's were about providing a framework and great setting/story to allow people to roleplay, then mmorpg came along and we had online avatars to do this - awsome! then over time more and more we drifted from role play and great story telling until certain games turned into buckets of features and mini games. players Avatar was no longer the focus, instead it was dps meters and mini games. What we lost was Story telling, cohesive worlds and Role playing Avatars - thing's that many modern players literally cannot comprehend (I hate reading the quests, I want to rush through the new world to get back to my raiding world! )
The positive is that games like Wildstar have shown to investors that the market has had its fill of this type of game, and WOW serves its purpose to keep people who want this happy - fair enough. It will be interesting to see what new MMO's come out post Wildstar and how the other AAA mmos continue to develop. When you no longer care when you next ding because you are having too much fun, that's when you know you are back in a great game.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
First, thank you for your well thought out post...It was interesting to read
Exploration can be an end in itself in games. Skyrim is a perfect example. I did not care at all for the silly main quest in Skyrim. Same goes for most of the side quests [which are typically very MMO like "Go to this dungeon.Kill Badass McBoss and get my family necklace back." What I did like doing in that game was just wandering around exploring stuff. The quests were just an excuse to go rooting around in an area I had not been to before.
I think SWTOR tried and to some level succeeded in bringing an meaningful story to MMORPGs. But that game also illustrates them main problem in doing this. You can only produce so much high quality handcrafted content. Even with a huge budget, eventually the players are gonna run out and be sitting around bored and you will pretty much have to pad out your game with "kill 10 rats" stuff because it's not acceptable for an MMO to say "The game is over now." like a single player game can. Either I think MMOs should follow the multiplayer version of Skyrim route and use procedural generation to inundate the player with admittedly mediocre content but a huge world to explore or they should go full on sandbox mode and let the player interactions tell the story of the world. Expecting a years long Witcher-calibre story all handcrafted by human devs would be awesome but I don't see how it's at all practical.
There is another more subtle benefit of all that story telling, it provides weight and a background to that virtual world. The benefit of this is that if done well players love returning to the world, and if this is complemented with content that remains playable at max level you dont need to pump out endless content at an impossible rate. One approach is to slow progression drown dramatically and apply some player scaling - now that world remains meaningful and the game does not focus on literally consuming everything and moving on. We talk about player locusts, but when a developer designs a permanent world that makes 90% of itself redundant and empty at the end - and then compounds the problem by SPEEDING up the levelling process instead of SLOWING IT (insane) then that's a big problem.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Exploration can be and often is an end to itself and there is nothing wrong with that. The various adventure style games were great games. Like the old Sierra games and Myst or whatever. But think about that for a second, think about playing those games as complete games in their totality; your feeling of the experience with the game. Then think about playing Skryim the way you describe.
There is exploration in Skyrim and its rather interesting and nice extra bit to the game. But the game itself is not really made for it per se. Its imperfect in this sense. Perhaps it is not so imperfect that it is actually a bad game. The exploration in an adventure game has more meat on the bone, there is always some reason or some extra little bit of this or that. In Skyrim you are exploring just to satisfy some curiosity and to exercise the RPG fighting portion of the game. This is fine as long as these elements blend together sufficiently to provide some basis for an actual game. But by and large I think when compare the "pure" game to an aspect of another game you can start get an inituitive feel for the weakness.
Now I think Skyrim is a pretty good game in a lot of ways, but aspects of it are weak when compared to a "pure" example where the game is mostly centered around that thing. But at the same time Skyrim was crafted in such a way that each of these weak features blend together into a whole such that there is an actual game to play. There is somewhere you are going, there is something to do, there is stuff you want, and additionally the RPG portions of the game conform around these things rather than being the sole point.
Most MMORPGs do not actually manage to make their games into a hybrid that is a collection of features with some overall theme like Skyrim. Skyrim is weak in many regards but combines them into a strong whole. MMORPGs try to do a similar thing and they invariable almost all fail.
RPG mechanics are meant to abstract and simulate aspects of your characters "life". They are meant to represent what you do, not be the sole object of what you do.
I am not going to post some kind of implementation, because this a) putting the cart before the horse and b) I would do it myself if I was that far along.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and MMORPGs have a real problem. There is no "G". They are a collection of (usually) weak game aspects shoved into a box that does not actually have a real game to play.
To put this another way, people are not playing the game, they are playing the stats of their characters, the game itself is incidental. But that is not all, when things DO get added in like the SWOTOR holocron exploration stuff they are very weak and bear no real relation to the game. Even when that particular thing when taken in isolation is well crafted the thing as a whole is still disjointed and divorced from the "game" (or lack thereof) and even when actually kind of fun invariably feels like a time waster. It comes out as completely out of context. A square peg in a round hole.
It isn't so much about really well crafted story, or procedural geneation, or even amount. Its that there is no real integrated idea of how things work and overall idea of what players get out of content besides advancing their character. Everything boils down to advancing the character, when you look at an MMORPG this is the main design theme, and that is not actually a game.
You are on the right track that because of the nature of online shared stuff it is very hard for the devs to come up with some sort of goal. And I would even hazard that they are no longer really aware of just what the structure that is imposed by a goal does to a game in general. I am not going to speculate on how to solve that problem. But I can tell you this. In the absence of a good solution for this problem they have given you a crap solutions, pure character advancement with no actual game. This works for a while because power is satisfying to some degree and addictive but it gets old. It is starting to get old for a lot of people.
People will agitate in perpetuity for all sorts of interesting features that have existed in other games they enjoyed. But they will continue to be disatisfied until these things are actually put into an actual game in a way that actually integrates with whatever the base idea of the game actually is. Most MMORPGs have no based idea besides character advancement. The notable exception are the games with large amount of emergent goals, such as EvE. Running missions in EvE alone would make it a bad RPG, but since EvE has tons of emergent behavior that "becomes" the game, it is actually a game unlike most other MMORPGs.
It isn't that any of the various features of MMORPGs are bad (exploration, crafting etc.) its that they are just additions onto a house with no foundation just collapse anyway. And so will anything added onto the structure with no foundation.
Skyrim has a foundation, a base idea of what the game is about what it should be doing. It then added various things onto this. In reality this base idea started 20 years ago with Arena and they have slowly but surely added more and more layers onto it. But they have never stepped away from the foundation. And their foundation was an actual game.
Many MMORPGs have done the same thing, but their foundation is not a game, its just character advancement. It is just a mechanic that exists in other computer programs that actually are game. This is masked by the appearance of content. But that content is just a hamster wheel and we all know it is. That isn't even open for debate anymore.
So yes exploration in a computer game can be quite good. It can be the entire game like in the classic Adventure genre. It can be a nice integrated piece of a different genre like RPG, where it adds flavor and variation in feel to how things get done or open up how to get through the world. It also has existed in various MMORPGs.
But go through those three cases in your mind and compare each to the other. You will find that when you get to many (not all) MMORPGs the exploration is not only a sideline. But there is almost no way for them to actually make them matter for real in the game that is "natural" or "native" to how the game works, and by that I mean the only way they can force you to explore is either by dangling a carrot or beating you with a stick; it is not actually part of the game and there is no way to make it some thing that is on its face some thing you just do in the game because that IS the game.
Edit: this is another notable exception concerning EvE, the game is structured in such a way that you literally cannot play it without a modicum of exploration and travel. You literally cannot play the game without some interaction with the exploration and travel mechanics, the game itself actually makes no sense without it. The location of things in games like WoW (and this encompasses many games even the non-EQ lineage games) is pretty much incidental, it really doesn't matter where Dungeon XYZ is. Its just placed somewhere for flavor. Even if we forget about teleporting mechanics. You just run to the dungeon, there is no real gameplay involved sure you hit arrow keys to move and you need to follow some directions. This is different than in EvE where you need to explore to find some asteroids to mine and then you need to figure out where to sell them and these two aspects are constantly changing. Which mining is availlble, what has good yields, plotting out your trade routes etc. These are all things that you need to constantly think about and the game is literally unplayable if you don't.
Another thought provoking post from you. I'd say in most RPGs character advancement is the goal. Particularly thinking of pnp RPGs, CRPGs are a little different...But whatever subgoals you may have in one adventure session your character and its advancement is the one thread that links those together. EVE is like that as well. Start a character and just do whatever you want within the game mechanics the game isn't going to give you many goals it is essentially a bunch of mini-games dedicated to character advancement. Same as what Skyrim turns into if you are not interested in the story.
Single player RPGs have the luxury of being more story focused because they have a beginning, middle and end point. Pen and paper games can drag out combat so even killing trash can take 45 minutes because the combat is more interesting than MMO combat and people can drop and pick up these games all at the same time with little trouble. This also allows the DM to drag out one story arc over months or even years of game sessions. If you try to make an MMO into "one game" with a focused goal you are going to run into problems. MMOs need a nebulous goal that people can never quite achieve in order to keep people playing [usually ends up being something very vague like "get best available gear" or "make tons of ISK".) You can minimize the amount of repetition required by adding more content and more different types of tasks or set player against player for the inherent dynamism of thinking opponents (like EVE does) but I don't see how you'll ever turn an MMO into a game where everyone has the same concrete goal which is integrated in the game's plot (if this is even what you aim to do?)