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What every dev needs to do before making any new games, grab an axe and fishing pole!
fistorm
Member UncommonPosts: 868
Grab the Axe and the fishing pole and go down to the nearest secluded woods and stream.
Now cast out a line into the water and listen to the sounds of the trees, the chirps of the birds, and watch the bobber floating in the water. This is how a game should feel like in the 21st century. Like you actually are fishing.
Now put on some celtic women in the background wooing you with their beautiful voice.
Next, go over to the nearest tree you can find thats old and ready to be chopped down. Hit that thing with your axe. thats right use a real axe and wack that thing. Feel those woodchips flying back at you and how that bark is flying off the tree like that. This is how a game should feel in the 21st Century.
I want to play a game that feels just like all the things I do in real life, when I'm not in real life doing it. I want a living breathing world I feel like I am absolutely able to lose myself in and feel like I enjoy every single thing I do in the game and feel like I do in real life.
I want this game without some idiot pvp'r coming crashing through the woods and ruining my enjoyment of the game world, I want a RPG that is PVE. Keep that PVP punk kid in the arenas or somewhere he cant ruin my PVE RPG life.
If a game like Modern Warfare can make war feel realistic enough for people to feel like they actually killed someone with their toys. Then why cant we have an RPG without PVP where I can feel like I am really doing the things as long and as enjoyable as the real world?
Just saying, this could really help the game industry if you do this. Creativity comes from experience, get outside and try it once.
Comments
Creating a system isn't what's hard for a developer, recreating feelings, atmosphere, the human condition..,etc.. is
Art imitates life, it doesn't recreate it, it's also not a universal approach across mediums, there's a lot more to it than simply sitting in the woods with items and a soundtrack, that's hardly enough know how to be ready to recreate life in your art.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I agree with you there, but I also think they should visit one of the existing medieval towns to walk the streets of them.
Places like Valletta, Wisby and Rome for that matter do have a lot to offer, to see how people lived, their monuments and just get a sense of the place.
Besides, a bit of vacation together before starting on a new project that takes years doesn't hurt either.
Of course not, but rexreating something you never seen is even harder. Famous painters rarely just pull something out of their hats, they use models. There are exceptions of course but creating a beliveable world isn't easy and inspiration never hurts.
I think many times their architecture generally works, but other things are quite problematic with a good deal of game design. I think what your statement doesn't realistically take into account is where a game actually tends to falter. Many are medival fantasy (LOTR or similar) or just fantasy in general so architecture differs wildly from what may happen in real life. I think what creative directors need to sit down and do is lay out a proper plan ask each member of the dev team if this is feasible for them to do properly and go on from there.
A large problem with games anymore is there is no risk taken. We've come into this Activision style "milk everything as much as we can" style approach and taking 100% safe bets on design all to often and yet somehow the game developer still manage to mess this or that up. We quite literally have stale ideas in the gaming industry at the moment and it is rather disheartening. We copy and paste without polishing things, we cater everything we can to the lowest common denominator (never good for any kind of media/art form at all) all in the name of a quick buck and then wonder why this or that fail. We also see game development companies spending obscene amounts of money on AAA titles just to get someone's likeness or someone famous to do some voice acting.
The only true innovators anymore are the indie studios and smaller studios that really need to try new things or absurdly polish their games to get noticed in this day and age of both sheepish gamers and asinine game developers.
Yes, I think that's a major problem with the OP's idea. That level of detail is only possible with an enormous budget, and nobody with that kind of budget is likely to try to appeal the the subset of MMO players who want a sandbox. Personally I don't want a sandbox and if I was to create a game I'd go for story and giving people a way to share it.
That's assuming they haven't done just that, I mean a lot of devs go on location to map geographical sites, get feels for architecture, culture.. etc... Look what the battlefront team did, Most artists draw heavily upon source material as well as other influence during concept stages. Maybe I should have elaborated more in my first post, but this is basically what I was getting at. There's just a lot more to this than inspiration. It's really a matter of capturing feels in the end or reproducing them to be more precise, that's extremely hard to do, it also doesn't translate well to the game medium in many individual cases.
Like say fishing.. A fun fishing game is a lot different than a fun fishing trip. It can be a lot of fun sitting out in nature, that's the biggest draw to fishing, the act itself can be extremely boring, as nothing is happening most of the time, you're just waiting for it to happen, if it ever does... How do you translate that experience to artificial grounds, and make it interesting? You already lost the biggest draw to it in it's artificial nature.. The game-play supplement is a different beast entirely. Same with Sword play, and a number of other things.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
All are obnoxious anymore, even starting zones, especially starting zones.
I agree with the op, but I could understand if all not money is put in GRAPHICS, but in GAMRPLAY. The sights and sounds could be natural. A game where you would wont to live in.
A game that you don't have to fight 50 creatures, one after another, just to go 50 feet to give the appearance your playing for a full game when in reality it's a small game.
If you're looking for a great virtual fishing experience, it makes far more sense to look for it in a game about fishing. "Fishing" in an MMO isn't designed to be anything like fishing because, of all the reasons a player wants fishing in an MMO, having a realistic fishing sim is pretty low on the list.
That goes for your logging example and every other aspect of an MMO. The problem in this case is that you're looking in the wrong place for what you want.
Here are some games you might like:
http://www.worldfishingnetwork.com/fishing-games/post/top-10-best-fishing-games-of-all-time
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
That is true, some MMO towns actually looks like the devs had a lot of real inspiration mixed with imagination, like Divitys reach to mention one. Other towns are a few houses randomly placed without any logic and very little place to live in (for some reason do I think of GF in EQ2 here).
But it is rather different to watch photos of a place and actually walk the streets yourself. I did take a long stroll in Wisby (been more or less the same since 14th century) and it was pretty amazing, the place was very well planned and the houses were placed with a purpose. It is hard to descibe for someone who hasn't been there and photos just don't tell the whole story.
And yes, some devs do travel to watch places, it is worth the effort.
Sitting a while in nature do have points as well, someone who spent their entire life in Chikago might have some problems with making a beutiful forrest or rainforrest for that matter. But fishing is only relavant if you plan to add a somewhat realistic fishing system in your MMO (which isn't a bad idea). You can of course not translate it straight over anyways but I am pretty sure it should give you some fun ideas.
Me, I like fishing with a sixpack, only annoying thing is when fishes disturbs me.
The real thing MMO devs should do however is to go down to their local ARMA or SCA and learn the basics for wielding a sword. You can't exactly translate that over either but it will give you an idea about what stances and attacks you actually can make and what is just silly. MMO melee combat could use some new ideas and at least a small dash of realism. Right now I get the feeling that devs learned all they know about combat from playing D&D.
Fishing actually used to be pretty popular in Wow so there is some interests for it at least. A friend of mine used to sit 30 mins there whenever he needed to relax...
The thing is that it is a pretty different way to get crafting mats then the usual running around and mining. Instead of just finding the right node you do something different. I could see rules for panning for gold in rivers instead of gold mining nodes as well.
A team of 3 with chainsaws and a hydraulic log splitter can take down, cut ,split, and stack a good sized tree in 2 to 3 hours. They usually end up filthy, sweaty, tired, and occasionally injured (someone takes a branch to the face by accident).
One man with an axe and a maul? I couldn't even guess. My idea of roughing it is a motel with no room service. :-)
While I'm totally in support of detail in gaming, and freedom in gaming, I'm not so sure about realism.
That neither.
The biggest challenge is to resist Investor's pressure to change the game a.k.a. nerfing the game to the point it generates faster money but takes away much the lifespan of the game. And to resist the call from bad players screaming for nerfs because they can't cut it.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
You ready have it Wurm Online Pve servers. If you don't mind the dated graphics you have everything you would want In an living breathing mmo world.
MMOs usually solve that with forcing you to kill 20 mammoths to get enough leather for a belt. The hard thing is to make crafting fun but not too fast and easy.
But there is a big difference in a bit of realism and total, if you need to spend months just building a cottage it gets boring but the same thing can be said about letting you do it in 5 minutes.
While there could possibly be some kind of market for a VR sandbox that is realistic I think the devs need to have just a small bit of it, to let something that would take days IRL be done in a minute is acceptable and still adds a little realism to the game without making it too tedious.
Still, cutting down 20 trees to make a bow feels a bit silly...
Let's call that "Knowing when and when not to listen to the players".
And that is indeed important, totally ignoring you players will make you miss good ideas but always nerfing stuff will make people running through the content way too fast and not challenge the players enough for them to keep playing.
If the game is too hard you will lose many players, but if you make it too easy most your players will tire way too fast so you need to balance things right. Sadly are probably all games today in the "too fast and too easy" cathegory which have lead to the average player only staying 6 weeks (and those numbers are from 2014, might be even worse now).
But creating a feeling of realism in the world is important as well, worlds that doesn't feel believable isn't a bonus in MMOs. Singleplayer games like Morrowind did this very well (the npcs even got married and got kids there) but MMO worlds tend to feel very scripted and that doesn't make you want to stay longer either.
There is of course a limit to how much work you can put into things like this but making a rainforrest by a team that never been outside NYC have it's problems.
What I describe is basic things you find in a game. Woodworking gathering and fishing, these things will be around the entire gamelife for crafting. I agree some people hate fishing, but there is other crafts you can do that you do that you do enjoy. Some of the crowd will pick fishing as their craft only because they like it.
These basic crafts you see in games time and time again get no attention and should have been the focus to the degree I describe because they are only 7 to 8 crafts and are the very basic and core of your game.
Why not take the time to develop those crafts to be, yes, time consuming with the feeling of realism to a person who enjoys them in real life so they can walk away really feeling an experience of accomplishment in game. I bet logs would be worth alot more on auction if it took some time to gather instead of hitting trees like a gold farmer. Giving value to your craft.
If you cant even give your basic core elements a real mind blowing realism feel to it because you want to develop other things instead, then your game will always only be quarter good or half good at its core and that leads to bordem much faster, expecialy for a crafter.
Focus on the feel of the core of the game and let new stuff develop from there. If you had the core I described, you could then have Log hunts in swamps for rare logs like you see on TV shows of them trying to find that one log in the swamp worth alot.
If you give someone realism, people wouldnt get bored with the crafting as fast as some games where you press a button and see an item icon only. Look at the price of wow gathering items, pages of herbs for the same price, pages of copper for the same price... Whats worse is no one felt some sort of feeling of actually picking flowers and mining a rock and just a click spamfest of an empty experience of doing something. They spend hours gathering and its mindless and really boring. Same for all cores of the last how many games so far.
Your post is the EXACT Reason as to why many MMOs (mostly World of Warcraft) are losing Subs!
If every Dev, Player would read those lines, we'd have much better games and continuously be immersed in them.
"My Fantasy is having two men at once...
One Cooking and One Cleaning!"
---------------------------
"A good man can make you feel sexy,
strong and able to take on the whole world...
oh sorry...that's wine...wine does that..."
I do fish in real life, I find it very fun and rewarding experience. In games however sure you can have fast and tacitcal and even cartoon if you wanted on an iphone app which takes only hours of development. What I want is a bit more then that, I want a game that you can feel what your doing as if you just did it in real life... Again, look at the shooter games these days, look how real it looks when your in the game doing war, how can shooters have gotten this realism so right and dead on but RPG world not offer any MMO to that level of realism and experience yet?
LMAO i guess i have no faith in game developers anymore because i had a complete different thought process.
I thought grab an axe to butcher the design and grab a fish pole to reel in naive customers :P
In all honesty,don't know why i have to repeat it but we SHOULD understand that these are businesses,VERY little passion in the game designs.Less than 2% of the developers should be telling us they are proud of their work,instead if they were telling the truth ,they would be telling us sorry for the poor game but it is all we can afford to do.
There is not one developer out there willing to throw away his own money and take chances,they all have a backup plan of some sort to at least get their money and some profit before folding a failed attempt.
This whole industry is about luck and timing and some x factor to which i have yet to figure out.I see so many brutally bad games getting support that really nobody should be supporting.I guess it is like a bad movie,some will say GREAT movie,Oscar awards go around,others will be "oh the book was much better".A lot of different folks with different strokes.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I actually think the sandpark (mixed) would quite literally be the best approach if done properly. Sandbox doesn't necessarily mean no story to the game or lore etc. The repopulation still has a backstory and is sandbox oriented for instance.The overall problem with sandboxes and themeparks both is the way people view them. Sandbox to most people means an open world pvp (often full loot) game with combat and building mechanics along with harvesting (a la Ark : Survival evolved but in MMORPG form and without Dinos) and while that is technically a form of sandbox it is not the only way to do them either.
Building and freedom is a big draw for a sandbox game. Story if well done is a big draw for a themepark. However we've run into situations where neither of these are fleshed out or polished real well and presented in a manner that actually appeals to gamers as a whole. How many people here actively read quests or pay attention to the story when they are playing an MMORPG or an RPG for that matter? Many skip them even when presented with audio cut scenes because they quite literally just run around wanting to do this or that and well honestly rush to max level as fast as possible to get to "end game"
And this has become the largest problem overall with the MMORPG genre. The way progression is done and the way content overall is handled particularly in the case of themepark MMORPGs. Gamers care less about the journey and more about getting instant gratification of getting to end game content to say they are a bad ass and they miss a lot of content and often a pretty decent story line (Final Fantasy XIV : A Realm Reborn has a fantastic storyline that I'm sure many people skipped, but they also present you with the option of going back and watching all the main scenario cutscenes from an in which makes it more palpable to skip them and go back and watch them later)
This is where a mix of the genres can come into being effective. Let's use The Repopulation as an example here of something to do system wise (which while based on the all to oft used hero engine differs in aspects from a good deal of games using it). The Repopulation takes the skill based approach while still using a dice roll mechanic often seen. Meaning that as you do something repeatedly you get better at it. If you use an assault rifle frequently you will become more proficient in it. Now if we switch to a game like World of Warcraft which at one point actually used a similar mechanic (albeit to a lesser degree) and removed it in favor of dumbing down the game and making gear more "accessible" so it was purely level based instead of level + skill based. The skill based game works because there is technically no "end game" content as the entire purpose is to make yourself stronger by actively going out and doing the things you want to do.
This can translate well to a themepark style game if fleshed out beyond the scope of what WoW did and create a game that is truly classless. First let's remove this pretense of "gear" progression based PVP from the mix to do this. Then you make available all skills but base them around how often something is done. If you want to say focus a lot on healing like skills continued use of healing spells would unlock more powerful skills for healing and get you better at healing with that initial spell, f you want to focus on purely melee damage focus on using specific weapons + skills, Tanking? Heavier armor or perhaps lighter and a shield and the like. Have these things add value to your progression to what you want to do and then infer a skill cap or a skill deck scenario so that someone cannot intrinsically become all powerful with using all skills all the time. Tie the skills to different pools of mana stamina etc and work to flesh out archetypes that people can build for without making a class directly "You want to make a rogue like character?" Well we recommend focusing on X, Y, and Z to do that sort of thing.
Both types of games have their strong points and their weak points and mixing the two together in a properly polished manner would result in a game that could be quite good. I think following the things we are doing now is not working to keep peoples attention, i think we no longer focus on the journey in the game, i feel the game worlds while better looking are not anywhere near as expansive (look how massive the world in everquest is compared to ANYTHING more modern) and that we need to break away from the current norms and find a good mix of things
I think every dev actually needs to go back and play old fighting games, old RPGs, and watch some classic fantasy/sci fi movies.
I personally don't want a game that is a replacement for things I can do and see in real life, because I have a real life. I also prefer fantasy/sci-fi because I don't want to deal with real world cultures and religion fucking off my happy time with their "lore"
All jokes aside it's been pretty well proven that super realism doesn't translate well into games. To each his own though.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get the feeling you would be that pvp kind of guy who would run through my woods while I'm fishing and kick water in my face, grab my fishing pole, break it and beat up my ass while telling me I'm not strong enough Karrrrrrrrl. I hope no dev that makes RPG listens to your advice about realism. If super realism does not translate well into games, look at the sales figures of skyrim. When devs take enough time to build a core of a game you make more money and people play your game much longer.
Maybe what we need is a Todd Howard to make us a game and show the MMO world how a RPG should feel like.
And you don't think they do things like that already?.
Game devs are human beings from different backgrounds in life and that have hobbies and enjoy all sort of different things, and yes, I bet that fishing and camping, for example, aren't exactly rare between those. And I've also heard of several development teams that do it while on company hours specifically for research.
Game devs (not all, but I bet as many as people from other industries do) do know what does it feel to be outdoors, how water is supposed to look like, how being in the woods is supposed to be like and so on. Thing is, making a game, as almost any creative activity turned into business (movie making, graphic design and so on) means that you have a finite set of resources (people, money, time...) and you have to juggle them to get a product out of the door.
An artist could spend months, or even years, getting the fishing bobber moving perfectly right and realistic in the water, making unique trees that chips and fly out of it when hit by an axe... and it can probably do it if he was doing it out of his own artistic expression... but when you're trying to make a product that is supposed to be released (not finished, art is never finished) at a set date and you have limited amount of money, people and time you can't let that artist use all that time when you also need him to do hundreds other things, which is why shortcuts are taken and some things lower in the priority list tend to be left at the "good enough" phase.
I work in video editing, usually we say something like, If you want something "good enough", you need to take it to the 90%... but if you want something perfect, you need that extra 10%... unfortunately, doing that last 10% takes about 90% of the time you spend working on it.
After all, when was the last time you've heard someone say that a game sucks in most aspects, but he's still playing because he loves how the bobber moves in the water when fishing, and the treebark looks like when cutting wood?.
What can men do against such reckless hate?