EQ 'Next'

[Merusk]

Like I've said, sign up for TUG. Sandbox pvp minecraft on public servers. Everyone seemed to dismiss it when I mentioned it in the KS thread, and yet here we go.

That right there.. that's what killed interest.  (I don't read the Ks thread so I didn't see it.)  No interest in a PvP game. Sorry. PVP AND Sandbox? Newp!.

Open PVP games have one cardinal rule.  He who's on longest wins.

UO and SWG became ghettos of player housing. Good idea, but not when your game world turns into a 3rd world shanty town. Especially SWG with it's atrocious pop-in graphics loading.

SWG and UO's player housing problems came from such limited worlds and need to access services.  Very few people want to walk 10 mins just to be able to sell shit or move to a different zone. So they cluster around the resources they want access to and the game devs never planned for that.    Hell, SWG assumed that if they put a buffer around cities that players would move out and explore.  Instead we got a nice buffer where hostiles spawn before we got to our player ghettos.

It's almost as if "where do cities appear and why do they do so" have rules that could be studied in some sort of discipline.  But that couldn't possibly be the case, right? Because game devs would be fools to not consult with these people if they were going to want players to build cities on a large scale. No, certainly the best route is learning lessons on your own and re-learning them every 10 years when a sandbox is churned out.  

Note: This is something I give CCP great credit for.  They actually hired an economist when they realized, "Oh hell, our space ship game is actually a giant economic engine. We should find someone who knows how the hell those work, we just code games and shit."

[Sky]

Ah, but why is there even a dude asking for ten rats?

UO tried to take that to a conclusion, the whole 'players hunt deer to extinction' thing. The ecosystem thing doesn't work when you throw thousands of players in a persistent world.

But really, the whole concept of mmo questing from WoW is really, really lame and busted. Until you can let go of that, not try to fix it, but to go back to not having kill 10 rats entirely, you're just re-inventing WoW again. I mean, what, so you bring him ten rats, then what? He stops asking? He asks for ten badgers? He makes rat soup? No, I say the idea of playing fantasy ratcatcher is what is broken.

[Sky]

Merusk, yeah I totally agree on the pvp thing. That's why testing will be a blast and release a train wreck. But really, minecraft is open pvp. We just don't play on public servers.

[Paelos]

Part of what makes housing work in a non-sprawl idea is to make them act as hubs for development inside a frontier. People clustered around cities because developers always put things you can only do at those cities.

If instead, you allow the player to create their own hubs in the world with all the access to the things they want (portals, AH, tradeskills, vendors, etc), you essentially let them make their own outposts. This works in a game where the worlds are big (for the explorer type).

The world needs to be huge in the next big MMO. The idea of small, crafted themeparks all lead back to wow. Minecraft has shown us that you can create a gigantic universe semi-randomly with diversity. It's possible.

[eldaec]

Yeah, I have no issue with it really.

There is a balance between no penises in EQ clones, and too many penises in second life, the target is fairly broad and not difficult to hit.

EVE, AtitD, UO, PotBS, SWG all managed just fine.

[Malakili]

The bigger issue for me is addressing the 10 rats question. Dude just asked me for 10 rats. I gave him 10 rats, he'll ask the next guy for 10 and the next guy and the next guy. He'll never get enough rats. Nothing will ever change when I play a different character because he'll want those rats.

This is the problem with "quests."  On a first character they feel pretty awesome.  On every subsequent character they are just the same grind as ever - except possible worse because you can't even choose to kill something other than the 10 rats because the quest xp is too juicy to skip most of the time.  In my magical perfect world every monster in the game would drop something of value to someone and players could post "quests/jobs" that people could fill and the game could throw a xp bonus at you for finishing a job.

[eldaec]

Ah, but why is there even a dude asking for ten rats?

UO tried to take that to a conclusion, the whole 'players hunt deer to extinction' thing. The ecosystem thing doesn't work when you throw thousands of players in a persistent world.

But really, the whole concept of mmo questing from WoW is really, really lame and busted. Until you can let go of that, not try to fix it, but to go back to not having kill 10 rats entirely, you're just re-inventing WoW again. I mean, what, so you bring him ten rats, then what? He stops asking? He asks for ten badgers? He makes rat soup? No, I say the idea of playing fantasy ratcatcher is what is broken.

Again, works in eve.

They put an awful lot if effort into creating an economy driven by supply and demand across different parts of the world.

Worked in atitd too.

Not saying iut is automatically worth the effort for a mass market product, but it can be done.

[Threash]

The bigger issue for me is addressing the 10 rats question. Dude just asked me for 10 rats. I gave him 10 rats, he'll ask the next guy for 10 and the next guy and the next guy. He'll never get enough rats. Nothing will ever change when I play a different character because he'll want those rats.

This is the problem with "quests."  On a first character they feel pretty awesome.  On every subsequent character they are just the same grind as ever

Replace character with game.  Quests were great in WoW, because the alternative was static mob grinding.

[Venkman]

Not saying iut is automatically worth the effort for a mass market product, but it can be done.

And that's the rub. Sandbox games require players bring a lot of themselves to the game, whereas RPG/WoW-types are spoon fed content gates. In MMOs, the numbers show players prefer the latter. But thousands of disconnected social and mobile apps show that the general populace of non-MMO gamers prefer quick hit solo minigame style experiences wrapped in a metagame with longer-term rewards and some light interaction with other players. What they don't want is a sandbox that requires an ample supply of apologies for broken or incomplete systems. And they won't stick around for a WoW-type that doesn't do WoW as well.

RPGs-as-sandboxes has been tried and proven to have a narrow focus. Whether this is because executional issues prevented mass adoption (i.e., SWG launch combat), graphics prevented good enough marketing after 3D arrived (UO, atitd), or the game just requires too much of an off-putting time investment while you slowly crawl through space in that time before you meet anyone who can help (Eve), it's going to take a lot of clever presentations by people with unarguable development and publishing chops convincing enlightened money folks to try this again.

[palmer_eldritch]

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

[Venkman]

Oh, and the housing thing. Unfortunately that too runs against the thousands of players problem. SWG effectively allows unlimited housing, in part to provide socialist-style equal opportunity to answer the issue UO had with shards too full to allow anymore housing. But real Urban Planning includes allowing competition to rotate through available land as business and resources change.

Minecraft can work because the world can be infinite, or infiite enough that it really feels the same. But the desire to be near other people is shared between altruists and sociopaths.

So the spectrum kinda runs:

• On one side the game requires players accept being pissed off that someone else is faster, has more money, or got there first (UO)
• On the other side, the game requires players to accept the virtual rules are so much like the real world they include everything from resource limits to zoning regulations to town/city councils, inspectors, engineers, infrastructure, and then policy and fire safety to solve the inevitable crimes that follow antisocial behavior (SL to some degree)
• And in the middle is games where everyone gets a house, it's its own instance, it's interesting for decorators but not an absolute requirement to the game mechanic and therefore gets some fun support from the devs but is never really rolled into the heart of the game (EQ2, maybe Wildstar though they have the kinds of minigames I mentioned above)

A virtual sandbox which doesn't include all of the rules of the real world will always be in an arms race of contrivances. And those that do have all the rules will just piss everyone off.

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

Runescape is like Eve though. Might as well be in a separate genre.

[Margalis]

I got sick of MMO quests after 2 weeks of WoW.

Quests effectively make every non-quest activity irrelevant. Not a good tradeoff when quests are usually terrible and no different from just going out and killing stuff yourself.

MMOs definitely need some re-conceptualization. There is room for quest-driven WoW-style games but there isn't room for 20 of them.

Quests were great in WoW, because the alternative was static mob grinding.

WoW quests are static mob grinding where the game picks the mobs for you.

I do see the value in quests for story stuff, for introducing mechanics, leading players to new areas, etc, but in the end having a guy tell you to go kill 10 rats is not particularly different from going out and killing 10 rats yourself. It shifts XP gain per minute away from fighting and more towards the busy work of running around collecting and handing in quests - is that a good thing?

Give me a game where I want to fight because fighting is fun and because I need to fight to explore the area. Or something. I mean, games like Skyrim do this better than MMOs.

[KallDrexx]

Give me a game where I want to fight because fighting is fun and because I need to fight to explore the area. Or something. I mean, games like Skyrim do this better than MMOs.

Sounds like you want GW2

[Threash]

WoW quests are static mob grinding where the game picks the mobs for you.

I'm guessing you never spent 14 straight hours sitting in a corner of cazic thule farming the same 8 lizards over and over or you wouldn't be making that comparison.

[trias_e]

While I'm not going to defend the epic catassery that EQ entailed, I never saw why being forced to move from place to place to kill 10 of monster X was better than just chilling out in a spot and killing respawns.  If anything, it's just more of a pain in the ass.  I suppose it disguises the process a bit more and gives you some story for it (which is why TSW was good:  It capitalized on one of the only things that makes quests in MMOs potentially interesting.)

[Margalis]

I'm guessing you never spent 14 straight hours sitting in a corner of cazic thule farming the same 8 lizards over and over or you wouldn't be making that comparison.

I've killed Mandragora in Khazam for maybe 6 hours, is that close enough?

In the end I don't see much of a difference. In many ways I prefer farming the same 8 lizards if it means being part of a party as opposed to running around doing glorified fed ex shit solo for 8 hours instead.

Sounds like you want GW2

Is the exploration in GW2 worthwhile? Most MMOs have the problem where the land mass is super small compared to the number of players. It's hard to feel like you are exploring anything when there are 20 people around you at all times.

I definitely think there is a niche (maybe a large niche) for a game with a very large land mass where when you explore you aren't just going to a new zone in a fairly linear progression but rather finding genuinely new territory. Obviously each individual bit could not be as hand-crafted, but the tradeoff may be worth it.

Exploring in MMOs these days is like "exploring" Mount Everest.

[tmp]

The world needs to be huge in the next big MMO.

No, it doesn't. If anything, the push towards instance matching, faster and faster mounts/ships/whatevers to shorten travel if not downright 'click on map to teleport anywhere' systems tells something about the 'world' being viewed mostly as obstacle on the way to doing things, and little else.

Except for the Explorer type, of course. But fuck these guys.

[Paelos]

The world needs to be huge in the next big MMO.

No, it doesn't. If anything, the push towards instance matching, faster and faster mounts/ships/whatevers to shorten travel if not downright 'click on map to teleport anywhere' systems tells something about the 'world' being viewed mostly as obstacle on the way to doing things, and little else.

Except for the Explorer type, of course. But fuck these guys.

We already have that. That's the point of this whole discussion. Making lobbies for matching is fine in a achiever dungeon crawl. It's not in a sandbox.

[Draegan]

For EQN to be successful, the world is going to have to be very large. Large enough to give a sense of having empty pockets or wilderness. If they want to go sandbox and away from themepark rides and quests, it's going to need so much room that you will feel like you're far away from someone. Not only that, they will have to get rid of all quest style game design.



EQN is using storybricks, now that might be another silly layer that does the same thing, who knows.

The market started off with long travel times and a sense of permanence (corpse runs, xp loss, long travel times, long leveling curves that put "history" behind your character) and then with WOW it has drastically been diving in the complete opposite directions. Super casual, short level curves, instant travel, no loss on death, no penalties and the only thing you lose is time (and not that much). The market is flooded with these kind of games.

I think the market is going to swing in the opposite direction, starting with EQN. I'm not saying that it's gonna be uber hardcore where you have to group at level 1 either. If EQn is done right(tm) then it'll have a very easy to ramp into the content, very casual beginnings but the higher end content needs to be difficult, challenging and time consuming.

The trick is to make the actual gameplay fun and enjoyable so that the long travel times and difficult, challenging and time consuming content is actually fun to play where you are playing just for the joy of playing. My example is League of Legends, where it takes a while to hit level 30 but the gameplay is actually fun where you don't mind the wait to 30.

The problem with the hardcore mindset of yesteryear is that the grind to whatever goal you were going after consisted of camping a single mob for hours or killing the same 10 mobs for hours on end with very boring autoattack based combat.

We'll see.

[Draegan]

The world needs to be huge in the next big MMO.

No, it doesn't. If anything, the push towards instance matching, faster and faster mounts/ships/whatevers to shorten travel if not downright 'click on map to teleport anywhere' systems tells something about the 'world' being viewed mostly as obstacle on the way to doing things, and little else.

Except for the Explorer type, of course. But fuck these guys.

We already have that. That's the point of this whole discussion. Making lobbies for matching is fine in a achiever dungeon crawl. It's not in a sandbox.

I agree 100% but I think you have to toss in the word instanced to achiever dungeon crawls. You can't really do the matchmaking thing in open world dungeon games which is what EQN is going to be.

[Falconeer]

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

This always surprises me. In twelve years ince its launch I have never met a single person playing Runescape, I've never met anyone playing Runescape, and I've never met anyone who said they at least played Runescape at some point. Did you? Where are these 10 million hiding?

[Draegan]

The world needs to be huge in the next big MMO.

No, it doesn't. If anything, the push towards instance matching, faster and faster mounts/ships/whatevers to shorten travel if not downright 'click on map to teleport anywhere' systems tells something about the 'world' being viewed mostly as obstacle on the way to doing things, and little else.

Except for the Explorer type, of course. But fuck these guys.

Bleh too many posts in a row, sorry.

But like Paelos and I said, these games are out there already. You have this in WOW, Wildstar, Rift and TOR. All these games are exactly the same, which is why Wildstar is going to be popular but it's going to have a short retention rates. With the whole sandbox angle, EQN is going for a "world" feeling and not a collection of nicely crafted zones that lead you around by the nose by a string of quests. Because of this design theory, you have to have a large world that doesn't make you feel claustrophobic. For all of it's shittyness Vanguard had a pretty well crafted world. There was a lot of empty, but it did present you with a decent world perspective.

[Malakili]

I think whoever mentioned Runescape is on the right track.  

1) Browser based is huge.  EQN won't be browser based, but if they can figure out some kind of lightweight client that allows people to get into the game with minimal download and just loads up whatever they need to do their little mini-game stuff (farming, armor smithing, whatever!) that will be a major help in getting a wider audience into the game.

2) The aforementioned mini games are important.  We've already mentioned that people don't want to spend an hour walking across a desert to get to the fun.  Let people do their thing in 10-15 minute spurts while never leaving the first city if they want and contribute somehow to the larger stuff going on "out there" in the sandbox.  

3) Starting out should be easy and fun.  Let people ramp up to going out into the sandbox if they really want to, don't throw them to the wolves right away.  Good tutorials would help a lot with this.  The casual players will get an idea of what they can do quickly and easily, and the more experienced players will head right out into the wilderness to do whatever it is they want.

[MediumHigh]

Players don't care about large expansive worlds anymore. Its not a draw, its not a feature, its a "why is there nothing to do?". If the next EQ game wishes to be a success it better remind people how much of a game (log on, do fun stuff, log off) it is, otherwise it'll just remind people that "GW2 is still free and awesome".

[shiznitz]

EQ Next will be "free."  That is not in doubt.  Awesome is certainly in doubt.

[Malakili]

Players don't care about large expansive worlds anymore. Its not a draw, its not a feature, its a "why is there nothing to do?". If the next EQ game wishes to be a success it better remind people how much of a game (log on, do fun stuff, log off) it is, otherwise it'll just remind people that "GW2 is still free and awesome".

Not in and of itself they don't.  But they do care about interacting with large amounts of people, even indirectly, with whatever they are doing.  Which is why I think they two can easily be integrated. Log in, do fun stuff, make it such that this places them a participant in the larger sandbox with minimal effort, log out.  Meanwhile, the people that want to log in, spend 10 hours sieging a castle, log out get some of the required whatever they need to do so from the people who are doing their 15 minute stuff.

[Draegan]

Players don't care about large expansive worlds anymore.

What makes you say this with confidence? What game has expansive worlds and failed because of it? People love Minecraft servers, and that shit seems to me to be expansive as hell.

[Sky]

This always surprises me. In twelve years ince its launch I have never met a single person playing Runescape, I've never met anyone playing Runescape, and I've never met anyone who said they at least played Runescape at some point. Did you? Where are these 10 million hiding?

Libraries, for one. We had a hardcore group that used to play daily, it tailed off for a while and now I've seen a new batch of kids playing. It seems to be the early-mid teens demographic. The late teens to early twenties tend to have a laptop and use the wifi for locally installed f2p.

Players don't care about large expansive worlds anymore.

You should probably refrain from statements representing what players want, player. But to address your EQN vs GW2 point, I think you've got it completely wrong. Why on earth make another GW2, that already exists and people have characters there. Much better to create something that isn't GW2 and try to capture those players.

[Mrbloodworth]

#1-3 are true. F2P is the perfect model for sandboxes, but SOE hasn't shown much expertise on that.

www.planetside2.com

[Hoax]

Counterpoint: Runescape is sandboxy and has more active players than any MMO except possibly WoW (I think they're both on about 10 million).

This always surprises me. In twelve years ince its launch I have never met a single person playing Runescape, I've never met anyone playing Runescape, and I've never met anyone who said they at least played Runescape at some point. Did you? Where are these 10 million hiding?

Its basically all kids under the age of 16. You know the demographic people up thread were claiming are too coddled and adhd'd the fuck out to enjoy a sandbox.

[Nebu]

My daughter played Runescape for a while with friends from school.  I watched over her shoulder a few times and the game was a cesspool. I was glad when she quit.

On a side note about the ADD generation; I play a myriad of games with a group of guys in their 20's.  They are all outstanding gamers, but have the attention span of a gnat.  They watch movies while gaming, text, and are always doing something else at the same time.  Were that not enough, they can't seem to stay with any game longer than a month before flitting off to something else.  Watching their behavior has been very helpful in adapting my teaching style to today's youth.  

Delayed gratification is a vanishing phenomenon.  If you tell a kid today that they can't look at their phone the moment it makes a text sound, you'd think that their head would explode.

[Paelos]

Players don't care about large expansive worlds anymore.

You have no basis to make that statement. Achievers may not give a shit, but again THEY ALREADY HAVE THAT GAME.

[Nebu]

Achievers may not give a shit, but again THEY ALREADY HAVE THAT GAME.

I think the key with achievers is that they have a voracious appetite for content.  Decent MMOs will always have a small market because of achievers.  They are always searching for more content to devour.  WoW is not enough. Particularly when it comes to solo/small group content.

[Sky]

Delayed gratification is a vanishing phenomenon.  If you tell a kid today that they can't look at their phone the moment it makes a text sound, you'd think that their head would explode.

I've always enjoyed people-watching, but it's become more fun with the advent of smart phones. It's quite literally a horrible addiction and watching people in crowds compulsively check their phones every minute or so is kind of sad. But the extent to which people seem to be disconnecting from events as they 'share' the event is even worse, imo. I've seen entire sections of seating almost ignore a concert while they text or take pictures of each other or the band (watching the show on their phone instead of, you know, it's right fucking there in front of you). Yes, I get the irony that I was ignoring the concert while noticing this behavior but I have adhd so there.

Why, back in my day dernit, you only paid attention to the guy next to you when a damn doobie was being passed. And even then he had the courtesy to nudge you.

[Falconeer]

I think it's safe to say that there's a huge untapped potential for something REALLY like Minecraft in a shared big universe with a working economy and some safe areas and some wild risk vs. reward vs. random zones. We can discuss forever if what has been done so far tells us anything about it, if UO or EVE or WoW or Runescape say anything meaningful about what THE GAMERS (all of them?) really want. I think, as I just said, that there is obviously room for something that groundbreaking, that shaking and shocking as Minecraft recently, and EVE back in the days, have been. But the combination of expertise, talent and luck hasn't happened yet and there's no way to say when it'll happen again.

Probably not this time around, and almost certainly not SOE and Smed, but I have a hard time thinking five years from now we won't have bigger, more ambitious Minecrafts. Newer, less broken UO/SWG. Or less spread-sheety, less spacey EVEs.