ok, so with all the ads on SD for MMOs, I’m considering getting back into the MMO fray, after struggling to get into such games on previous occasions.
But the thing is…I’m just looking for some escapism. So, a beautiful / evocative fantasy world, with minigames maybe, and an emphasis on exploration, trade and socialising.
…and less emphasis on combat. I can’t really be bothered to kill 3000 lizard scorpions, this is the kind of thing that’s put me off MMOs before.
So I guess I’m really looking for a Virtual World…
Except these all seem to suck, and tend to just have a contemporary theme.
Could try LotRO; While it still follows the combat-heavy MMO formula for the most part, it does a remarkable job of also providing the things you say you want, and in making you care about the quests, relatively.
It’s not really that surprising that most MMOs go for this setup as it has been proven to work in a big way. Also, when you think about it, by and large, the “stuff of heroic fantasy” is vanquishing foes, not growing tea (Though you can do that in LotRO).
True, but I don’t see this as a fundamental part of wish-fulfilment or role-playing.
e.g. If I had a machine that could produce a perfect VR experience, I wouldn’t want to create a world with giant spiders or a massive mechanoid boss creature that I have to kill.
Not unless you wanted to act out heroic fantasy in your VR experence, anyway?
I think the implication is that games in which you kill things keep people entertained a lot longer than games where you walk around and look at scenery. Most people don’t seem to view ‘exploration’ as a goal in and of itself, especially when there is no inherent challenge in it (Which, contrary to real life exploration, there really isn’t in any MMO, unless you count the monsters that try to eat you, which takes us back to point 1.)
I’m only partway through the tutorial, so I can’t say how good it is yet, but the Planeshift MMORPG claims you can play the game (and have fun) without ever engaging in combat (other than a brief fight in the tutorial to teach you how combat works).
So far I will say it’s got good graphics for a free MMO. One word of warning though, it’s brand new and it’s still considered a “work in progress”, so I wouldn’t be surprised to run into a bug or two.
There really aren’t any virtual world type games left. They are just not popular enough. Fallen Earth was the last one that comes to find, but it failed and it was sci fi not fantasy. I would recommend a Neverwinter nights 1 or 2 persistent server.
I would recommend the FreeRealms (free) MMO. It probably won’t keep you busy for 100s for hours, since it’s a kid’s game and after level ~20 there aren’t any more missions unless you pay, but there is a pretty good variety of missions and the combat stuff is well marked and all opt-in so you can decide if you’re in the mood.
I think it’s just that they are very hard to do.
Most games that claim to give you a choice are actually just sandboxes, and the only alternative to combat is wandering around.
Incidentally, I shouldn’t have put the word “exploration” in the OP. I just mean more time to take in the surroundings and more original things to do than thousands of combats.
I was recently discussing the rumours about a harry potter mmo with a friend. I was saying that if they could make the school and surrounding world interesting and interactive enough, I wouldn’t care about joining the big fight against Voldemort.
But making the rest of the world sufficiently interesting is a huge creative and programming task.
By “fantasy” I mean the more general meaning than sword and sorcery.
Fallen earth definitely looks worth a trial, they are still accepting subscribers.
Odd, i thought the company went belly up. In that case it’s probably exactly what you want, there is combat but it is heavily crafting based and you don’t have to fight anything if you don’t want.
Actually, it involves making important, often gut-wrenching decisions, like Gandalf deciding whether to go over the mountain, under it, or around it in FOTR, or the various machinations in the Amber universe (do I, as Corwin, trust Random while I’m an amnesiac, or not?), or can I forsake Stormbringer as Elric, or let it destroy just about everything I hold dear? Combat, when necessary, is the end effect of a series of decisions by the characters: it is rarely an end by itself.
There is some combat, killing critters for crafting materials etc, but the main point of the game is building and sustaining a community with the other players.
Sortof a meaningless distinction, since no one (or very few people anyway) play MMOs for the sheer joy of fighting monsters. They do it because… it’s a means to an end.
Good luck building an MMO that allows you to make gut-wrenching decisions, BTW. Heck, good luck building a computer game that does so, since MMOs are ruined by the other players, and single player games are ruined by saves and by being…games.
Oddly, gut wrenching decisions are best found in extremely linear games, because you just can’t TRUST the player to make them if given any free agency.
Well, writing the “harry potter” post a few days ago, I realised that perhaps what I’m imagining is something that isn’t done simply because it’s too hard to implement at this time.
It’s easy to forget that MMOs are perhaps the most difficult genre to develop for, and to give thousands of players something to do for hundreds of hours is one heck of a challenge.
It’s not surprising that so many RPGs depend on a “Streets of Rage” mechanic, since it’s one of the few that works.
It’s just a shame that that setup is so common that many people assume that MMORPGs by definition must be like that, and little effort has apparently gone into any alternatives.
Effort has gone into developing alternatives, they’ve all just generally died swift and ugly deaths. It’s just that, apparently, no one has found an alternative that WORKS.
Fundamentally, the people playing these games are mostly morons, and that’s a problem for a lot of things intelligent people want to see in their games.
<shrug> If MMO publishers want to keep reinventing the wheel, bully for them. Don’t get too hung up on the “gut-wrenching” semantics; I was mainly alluding to decisions which have you between the rock and the hard place. A good strategy game, at the very least, should ideally be chock full of those (like in Civ, where I am often faced between the dilemma of guns vs. butter (or in my case, research)-something which isn’t exactly amenable to a simple reload of the autosave. Got my head handed to me the other night when I didn’t bother to do much with my military (ocean map) and got invaded by that South African guy.
Anyway, like I said, if MMO makers want to keep treating their player base like children, they can go right ahead. I think Eve Online has it more “right” than most, precisely for that reason, in that you can do things which actually are significant, within the game world. It’s just that I’ve got tons of ideas for what I think would make for extremely cool MMO experiences, but nobody is making them. Aside from my big hairy magnum opus here, I imagine an 1940’s era Atlantic Ocean chock full of submarines and ships, or skies over 1944 Germany full of planes, and deeply working strat (as they call it-I’m something of a wargamer too), and…you get the idea. But these can’t work without mere competence at (at least) the mid-to-higher levels of command, and most MMO’s don’t even have any sort of concept of a command hierarchy.
