care to share your experiences in MMOs?
I've played several. Of them, UO, WoW and Eve stand out most to me.
UO had an awesome skil system. There were no levels, everything was skill based. If you wanted to improve your fighting, fight. Want to improve your spells, cast spells. And there were no classes, so no being locked into a certain class, no need to make new characters if you get bored of the last one, and no worrying about classes becoming bad after development changes. Only skill
totals were limited, so you could decide at any time, for example, to stop designating swordsmanship as gain skill, and take up something else. As you play
Instead of stagnant quests and infinitely repeatable raid, UO was more community driven, and each server had a community events manager who created custom events specific to his server. They would meet with in-game guildmasters personally and host events that made sense for the community on their server. There was custom housing, and player-made towns that integrated into the game map. Rolelaying communities could form and integrate themselves into official events. UO did things that I've not seen any other MMO do.
But, eventually developers changed, and new people came in who had their own ideas and destroyed a lot of game mechanics. UO was originally an open world with player driven communities and events, it eventually became an everquest style grindfest of standing around killing monsters, waiting for them to spawn, then killing them again for hours hoping for rare equipment drops.
Wow, for all people like to complain about it, really did a lot of things right. Sure, it's done a lot of things wrong too, but WoW PvP is the best I've seen in any MMO. It's the most complicated, the most involved, and the fastest paced. There's no standing around, it's not about auto-attacking and waiting to see who wins. It might not be well "balanced" and the dev team has traditionally liked to play favorites with classes, but pvp gameplay itself is generally a lot of fun. Additionally, WoW has a great deal of attention paid to detail. Vanity pets and mounts don't have much effect on gameplay, but it's nice to be able to collect them, and it adds an element to gameplay that most other MMOs generally lack, and WoW has enough variety to give it a lot of versitility. Not everyone wants to pvp, not everyone wants to raid, not everyone wants to collect vanity pets, not everyone wants to do quests, not everyone wants to explore the world...but in WoW, each of these things is developed with enough care and attention to detail that players who enjoy each of these things can do what they want. A pet/mount collector can easily spend months collecting pets and mounts. A pvp player can choose amongst battlegrounds, arena and world pvp events. WoW has a
lot of variety, and each of these various unrelated components of the game are generally well developed, and sometimes more well developed than some entire games.
So yes, WoW does have a lot of things going for it. But, like UO, the old dev team has left and the new developers don't share the same vision as the previous. A lot of new development is terribly recycled and stale, sometimes to the point of being ludicrous. I didn't mind grinding boars at level 5 to supply the local dwarves with meat. But when at level 75 I'm still killing deer for meat in grizzly hills, and at level 82 I'm still killing wildlife in cata zones for the same reason...somebody really needs to come up with something new. Raids, same thing. Go into a "new" raid, ask an experienced player who a boss mechanic works, and most of the time they'll sak you if you've done some other boss from previous expansions, and tell you it's just like that other boss, except avoid purple spots on the floor instead of green spots. Everything is basically the same, and the recycling over the past few expansions is making everything kind of boring. Naxxramas during Wrath was an especially bad example, it being an entirely
copied dungeon. They didn't ever bother making a new one, they just pulled an old one from years prior and gave it tougher monsters. Very little in WoW has been new for years. And worse, a lot of the "new" (recycled) material isn't as good as it was in previous iterations. It's one thing to feel like everything is the same, but it's painful to see things that are mostly the same, but just not implemented as well as they were in previous expansions.
Eve is a very good game. But it suffers from the fact that while it's a
good game, it's not really a
fun game. Eve looks great on paper. They did a lot of technical things very well. The economy is solid, and mostly player-driven. The ships and upgrade systems are complicated enough to be their own meta-game. Gameplay is completely free and open: you can do pretty much anything you want; no compulsory quests, or story driven gameplay. You are your own man and can do as you please, with no needless hand-holding by the game.
But Eve suffers from two major flaws:
1) To be succesful, you pretty much have to be either a pirate or a member of a large corporation. There's no such thing as trade chat pugs. Gameplay is very cutthroat, and generally unfriendly. In other MMOs it's common to be doing your own thing, meet something and start chatting. You add them to your friends list, and go play with them again another day. Eve...isn't like that. When you see another player, odds are good that they're either trying to kill yo or keeping an eye on you to see if you're trying to kill them. Part of this is culture, part of this is mechanics. But if you don't enjoy being "the bad guy" waiting around to ambush other players and kill them, you're missing out on a significant part of gameplay.
2) The most effective ways to advance your character involve not playing. Eve has no levels, and skills are gained in real-time whether or not you're logged in. There's nothing you can do in-game to directly make your character better at what he does. Simply queue the skills you want to learn, then log out, and your character will grow just as fast as if you're logged on. The primary other limiting factor in character growth is simply money. If you have more, you can buy better ships and components. But, it's an accepted practice to trade in-game currency in exchange for purcashing play-time for other players. As in, I buy a month of gametime for you, and you give me 300 million in-game money. Which granted, is an elegant solution to the gold-farming problems experienced by other MMO's, but between this and the skill system, it basically means that on day one you can spend $30 instead of $15, and then not log in to do anything other queue skills, and at the end of the month odds are you'll have just as "powerful" a character as the guy who played 3 hours a day. So...what incentive is there to actually play the game?
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Topic: MMOs (Read 7453 times)