MMORPG! Would you play if...?

The Game Room
1

Hey guys,

So I’ve been pondering on the MMOs of old lately and I realised many of the things that almost all MMOs include today were very often omitted- and as result of this, were much more enjoyable in several aspects(sure, horrifying in others, but you get the point).

So, I wanted to know-

Would you play an MMO if:

  1. There existed no PVP other than /duel ?
  2. Food would simply activate your Regens and not actually accelerate it to a couple of seconds needed at maximum- so your HP either regenerated very slowly or not at all?
  3. Classes were so different from each other that your class could do things others couldn’t at all, and vice versa- resulting in forced partnership?
    and
  4. If the game just had a higher degree of difficulty in general. I mean quite substantially more difficult.

Any feedback is, as always, appreciated :slight_smile:
Would just like to gauge interest. :smiley:

2

I won’t play any game requiring forced partnership.

3

I would play it if they junked all the precious carebear crapola and simplistic gameplay and gave the players a chance to truly control the destiny of the world.

4

So you’re essentially asking if I would play Everquest from 1999 through the Planes of Power era?

I did that. Had fun but don’t know if I have the time or inclination to do it again.

Only difference is food. In original EQ, food was required for your stamina bar to replenish but otherwise served no purpose. And a 1cp muffin worked as well as a 1gp iron ration. They eventually gave different foods different durations and added minor stats to tradeskill produced food (originally Baking was a vanity skill only) but regenerating hit points always came form sitting on your ass and waiting.

5

  1. There existed no PVP other than /duel ?
    Don’t PVP so don’t care.

  2. Food would simply activate your Regens and not actually accelerate it to a couple of seconds needed at maximum- so your HP either regenerated very slowly or not at all?
    I play to play, not sit on my butt

  3. Classes were so different from each other that your class could do things others couldn’t at all, and vice versa- resulting in forced partnership?

Absolutely not. I like MMOs because I CAN team, not because I MUST team.

  1. If the game just had a higher degree of difficulty in general. I mean quite substantially more difficult.

No, I don’t find grinding to be fun. I don’t find dying in game to be fun.

The combination of #2 and #4 would make the game unplayable for me.

6

Number one is a deal breaker, punching people over the internet is why i play games.

7

That pretty much is the question, isn’t it?

Likewise; Although a world that was more functional would help a lot. The EQ world was BARREN for a long time. Like, there were some merchants, and a few quests, and monsters to kill for XP and that was in. Emphasis on a FEW quests. It was better by PoP era, but still not -good- by modern standards.

That said, I don’t think I have time in my life for this stuff anymore.

8

This. Some of the most fun that I ever had while gaming, but a large part of that was being in high school and college and having the spare time to put into it. Well, technically I did spend quite a bit of time on the PvP servers, but EQ is still the first thing I thought of when I read that description.

In more recent years I have quit MMOs because they were taking up too much of my time, and I wasn’t spending half the time on those that I used to spend on EQ.

9

What does difficult mean in an MMO?

10

I suppose I do know if I’d have the time and/or inclination to do classic Everquest again: No.

As evidenced by me not perusing the classic emulation servers or even the occasional “Progression” servers released by SOE. That said, it was a unique experience and I’m glad I was a part of it.

11

Time consuming.

Back in classic EQ, if you died you lost a significant amount of experience and could even lose your current level as a result. You also had to hump on back to your corpse from wherever you were bound at (often a town several zones away if you were a melee class). And not as a ghost but as a naked PC, being chased by every skeleton, moss snake and puma in a tri-county radius. If you didn’t make it back to your corpse in time to reclaim your gear, your corpse rotted and all your stuff was lost.

If you had a cleric of sufficient level in your group who remained alive, he could cast a resurrection spell on your dead body to return you to your corpse and regain some of your lose experience. A necromancer could, for the cost of an expensive and cumbersome coffin, summon your corpse to him and save you the run (but not the xp). Neither was likely to do so for free unless you were friends or guildmates.

All this equated to time. Time to get to your corpse, time to regain the lost experience, time to ask for help, time to make back the lost gold, time to earn back the lost equipment if the worst happened and your corpse rotted, time that you should have been in bed but you’re streaking across Norrath chased by hill giants because you’ll lose your corpse if you log off for 14 hours. This is why I wouldn’t be playing classic EQ these days.

There was other “difficulties” as well: NPCs didn’t say what they were so you had to check each guy to find who is selling sewing kits. Spells originally didn’t even list exact effects or mana costs. Your fire bolt spell said “Fires a bolt of flame at target.” Players had to datamine just to see what stuff did because McQuaid thought not knowing exact mechanical effects was more immersive. Quests were completely left to the player to figure out. “Oh, I lost my show in the Karanas” … scouring four zones all called “Karana” (East, West, etc) and finding the shoe on a rare named spider who spawns once a day if his place holder is killed… “My shoe! Thanks, take this leather chestpiece!” “Ummm… but I’m a wizard”.

But it all boiled down to time.

12

I miss a lot about EQ. If the game could be updated a bit, I’d happily play a MMORPG that was as difficult as EQ was back in the day.

Bomage Minimart <of Rallos Zek> is still alive and active (my friends use him for CoH and summoning items), but I haven’t really played EQ in years now.

13

Well, Sony is working on EQ Next but I doubt it’ll be anything like EQ1 used to be back in the day. Planetside 2 was good, so I’m cautiously optimistic they might make something interesting … but as they say, you are a MMO virgin only once and you can never get back that feeling when you run around dark woods killing fire beetles trying to figure out the game.

14

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this; Certainly there’s no way to actually judge, because they quite literally, objectively, full of facts, DO NOT “make them like they used to.” New games have far more transparency and have stripped out a lot of stuff that was deemed undesirable about the older games in the genre. We’re basically polishing the bran off the wheat and making white bread without realizing that maybe whole grains are better for us.

You know what I actually want out of an MMO? A game that tries less hard to be a “streamlined MMO game experience” and tries MORE to be a world simulator. Even stuff like original EQ’s faction system, where you just couldn’t GO to some towns because the guards would go ballistic on you if you weren’t visible was closer to trying to make you actually play in something that felt like a world. But that was basically dropped from EQ as well, since it was “too annoying” or something.

So basically, the game I am most likely to enjoy is the one that no one will make because People At Large won’t play it. Story of my life.

15

Or, because players don’t have endless amounts of time to waste on grinds.

Nearly every element you describe (or described above) as “difficulty” does not in fact make the game more difficult or deep. it does make it a lot longer and more grindy, which isn’t the same thing. The MMO market realized early on that grind was something that could be tolerated in very limited doses only, and msotly for the hardcore crowd. Which is to say, mostly annoying teens and twenty-somethings with lots of disposable time.

However, gamers are trending upwards in age, and the younger crowd isn’t as interested in MMO’s. Additionally, WoW showed that women were a significant market opportunity, but also less liekly to be interested in massive grinds. Additionally, the grinds tended to shove new players out due to the multiplayer nature of such games: grinds either had to solo-only… in which case you’re not actually MMO’ing, or they had to somehow make the lowbie population consistent… which is nearly impossible over time, or they ended up locking content away behind big walls that you couldn’t pass unless you had alread passed during the “sweet spot” when the hardcore players were running that content.

Guild Wars 2 bypassed a lot of this mess, but then they weren’t a “traditional” MMO is several ways.

16

Back down, buddy. I didn’t describe ANYTHING about “difficulty.”. I don’t CARE how -difficult- the game is. Stuff like not being able to go into a city because the guards attack you isn’t HARD nor is it “time consuming” - you just don’t GO THERE.

Seriously. Reading comprehension mate. I hate grinds. And I don’t see any place for them in a game that is supposed to be simulating a world, either.

17

I do agree with you on a lot of it. I think EQ hit a sweet spot where you had a lot of people who grew up on D&D and other fantasy role-playing games in the 70’s, 80’s and into the 90’s and who probably dreamed of a world where you could actually create and see these things. When you first started Everquest you had this 3D world where you were just you, not a party you controlled. And McQuaid made the game to immerse you as realistically as possible (in some ways) where you were encouraged, if not forced, to explore the world. Very few things were spelled out for you and a lot of the world was very unforgiving.

It was all very fascinating to me at the time. The theology, the factions, the discovery… but a great world didn’t mean great game play and while factions were nifty, having to grind out a bajillion skeleton kills for a kajillion bone chips to hand to a guy so suddenly all the guards in lizard-town accept you wasn’t exactly compelling. In a way, I suppose there’s no going back because now we know better and there’s no way of recapturing the wonder and marvel that came, frankly, from ignorance.

18

Would you play an MMO if: 1. There existed no PVP other than /duel ?
It’s not a deal-breaker. I like some PvP, especially auction houses, but also competition over resources and occasional battles. If the PvE game was interesting enough I’d still play the game, but lack of PvP risks making the game less interesting.

Would you play an MMO if: 2. Food would simply activate your Regens and not actually accelerate it to a couple of seconds needed at maximum- so your HP either regenerated very slowly or not at all?
This sort of detailed game mechanics question in unanswerable without more context. I could see a game be fun with this, or I could see it being a chore. Of course, quick recovery is generally my favorite stat to improve in games, but it really does depend on the overall play of the game.

Would you play an MMO if: 3. Classes were so different from each other that your class could do things others couldn’t at all, and vice versa- resulting in forced partnership?
Forced partnership is a deal-breaker for me. My playtime consists of 15 to 30 minutes chunks of time at odd hours of the day, totalling maybe 5 hours a week at most. If a game can’t let me accomplish anything in those timespans, then I won’t play the game.

Also, I prefer more customization rather than less. Class systems can be too restrictive if not designed well.

Would you play an MMO if: 4. If the game just had a higher degree of difficulty in general. I mean quite substantially more difficult.
Difficulty is very subjective. It’s a Goldilocks problem: too easy is not fun and too hard is not fun. It needs to be just right. Games that have scalable difficulty solve this problem the best. Let players choose their preferred spot on the risk-reward curve.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After playing many types of MMOs over many years, I can accept almost any design decision. But the trick is the game has to be fun.

Star Wars Galaxies: I only played the beta; it was too broken when it went live. They never did get it right. It’s dead now, so no going back.
City of Heroes: A great game, but character progression was too slow after about level 30. It’s dead now, so no going back.
Guild Wars: Too instanced and too lonely. The next version is better in every way.
World of Warcraft: Very well designed game. I quit because they deleted the content I was playing in. Never going back because of Blizzard’s privacy policies.
Lord of the Rings Online: Very immersive, but I found the gameplay frustrating. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I wanted to like the game. Might try again someday.
Age of Conan: Starts out great, but too grindy past the starting zone.
Champions Online: Simply got bored. I really liked the character customization, both appearance and abilities. Might try again someday.
Star Trek Online: Repeat of CO. Great characters, ultimately boring gameplay. Might try again someday.
Rift: Good game. Shows how a class system can still allow interesting customization. I quit mostly because I got bored. I might try again now that it’s going free to play.
Star Wars The Old Republic: Mostly fun, but they designed the game around max-level characters. I didn’t want to spend years as a second-class player. Then they did server mergers and wiped my characters’ names. That’s a deal-breaker; no going back for me. (I wish more games did not require unique character names, like CO or STO.)
Secret World: Very nice progression design. The learning curve is a little steep. Higher on my list of trying again.
Guild Wars 2: Very great game; nearly perfect. I wish I had more time to play.
Planetside 2: Nice game, if rather simple. I play some every week.

19

snicker I did play from 99 to PoP then bailed for WoW.

I went back a couple years ago when SoE gave me a free month, but the game changes bothered me - Freeport was almost entirely different, the auction house was seriously different, the combined server was almost vacant.

I went back to WoW after cataclysm, played for about a month, really didn’t like it. The underwater Thousand Needles was a trip, and the huge ‘grand canyons’ were funky.

I liked Lord of the Rings Online, mrAru still plays but I bailed because the guys I group with switched to Guild Wars 2, which I am having an absolute blast with.

And I still like EVE Online, which is more or less pure PVP, just there are areas where you won’t get blown out of space by another player.

20

Yup. That was EQ, all right. Damn I loved that game when I played it.

I remember leading pickup “Rescue Raids” when some noob guild wiped trying to break in to the Plane of Fear.

And contested rare spawn progression raid mobs. Want to move to the next raid tier? Every member of your 70 man raid team has to have completed this incredibly difficult and time consuming prerequisite…that guilds that were further along than yours would sometimes kill first to cock block anyone from competing with them for the phat loots from the next tier.

And something like 30 hours of consecutive camping (on a holiday weekend) killing trash hoping to trigger a rare spawn needed for one of dozens of steps to achieve my epic leafblower…that was mostly useless, but I eventually got it.

It was good to be a druid in that game, though. We could solo anything that did not summon…and a few things that could. We could quadkite anything that didn’t summon. We could teleport. We could DPS as casters without looking like an owl on a cocktail of acid and steroids. We had great buffs, and could make coin selling them. We had Boo Boo Bear…and sometimes used him as a suicide bomber…

Would I endure that level of pain again? Hell no. WoW is considerably more player friendly, and I like that. There’s no reason a game has to be as brutally harsh as EQ often was, and less reason that I’d pay for it knowing there are things I would enjoy more on the market.