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Watching "MMOs are anything But", and it made me think of Guild Wars 2:
Rym: "The world is now different...You didn't save the city. That city is gone for everybody."
If GW2 lives up to it's promise, it's going to at least feel like you affect the world in a real way. The area will reset after you've moved on, but the idea is that to you, everything you did had consequences.
The driving force of this is what they called Dynamic Events. The developers like to talk about one of the iconic WoW quests if you ever played on the horde (though they don't name WoW directly). They say, "You click on a guy and you are told that the camp is under attack by centaurs. And your job is to help defend the camp! But your actual quest objective is 'see those centuars standing around in a field? Go kill 10 of them."
In GW2, they say, if you are told centaurs are attacking, you can go to that location and witness them attacking. And if you or someone else doesn't stop them, they will take over the town, and you won't be able to see the vendors there anymore. Now the event you get when you approach the town won't be "stop the centaurs from attacking!" but rather "stop the centaurs from reinforcing the town!" If you succeed, now you can try to take back the town. If you do that, your next step will be to go rescue the prisoners.
All of this happens in the single world, and anybody can participate. Now these chains will repeat, because even though they have a lot of scripted events (1500 total they have said, they don't have an infinite amount. The hope is, though, that you never see the same section of any DE chain twice, because by the time it repeats, you will have leveled up to the next area.
I'm quite excited to see if they actually pull this off.
You also mentioned MMOs not having the character decisions to be called a Role-Playing game. GW2 is fixing that too, by giving every character a personal storyline quest chain. These quests will be unique to your character based upon your race and the decisions you make in character-creation and while participating in personal-storyline quests. The capitol city for your race will have only one "instanced" section, which is your personal home instance. In that neighborhood, the consequences of your progress on your personal storyline will be played out. If you fail to save someone, you can go there and visit their grave. if you do save them, they will be there to thank you. You can invite other people into your home instance and invite htem to help with your personal story, and they will get XP/loot for helping.
All in all I'm very optimistic, but we'll have to wait and see. Though I think if you watch all these videos you'll probably be as excited as me
Beta will be later this year, that's when I'll decide to buy it or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU1JUwPqzQY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OyHwqokkKk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBC_ig73aMs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4VKhrCDWfg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvHV7HB2BDc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ttfOuxB6Gc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3uMlHSbPSY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMTs74eWBJ4
The first two are the Arenanet official videos for GW2, and the rest are some fan made videos from Gamescom and from released trailers. Two are them are playthroughs with commentary by Totalbiscut, who is a British game critic in the vein of Yahtzee (he will find something wrong with the game, always). Oddly, TB couldn't find anything bad to say about his 40 min playthrough of GW2, and he stated that fact in the video.
So anyway, I hope this breaks the mold as much as it claims it's going to. Here's to Arenanet and innovation in the MMO space.
If GW2 lives up to it's promise, it's going to at least feel like you affect the world in a real way. The area will reset after you've moved on, but the idea is that to you, everything you did had consequences.
The driving force of this is what they called Dynamic Events. The developers like to talk about one of the iconic WoW quests if you ever played on the horde (though they don't name WoW directly). They say, "You click on a guy and you are told that the camp is under attack by centaurs. And your job is to help defend the camp! But your actual quest objective is 'see those centuars standing around in a field? Go kill 10 of them."
In GW2, they say, if you are told centaurs are attacking, you can go to that location and witness them attacking. And if you or someone else doesn't stop them, they will take over the town, and you won't be able to see the vendors there anymore. Now the event you get when you approach the town won't be "stop the centaurs from attacking!" but rather "stop the centaurs from reinforcing the town!" If you succeed, now you can try to take back the town. If you do that, your next step will be to go rescue the prisoners.
All of this happens in the single world, and anybody can participate. Now these chains will repeat, because even though they have a lot of scripted events (1500 total they have said, they don't have an infinite amount. The hope is, though, that you never see the same section of any DE chain twice, because by the time it repeats, you will have leveled up to the next area.
I'm quite excited to see if they actually pull this off.
You also mentioned MMOs not having the character decisions to be called a Role-Playing game. GW2 is fixing that too, by giving every character a personal storyline quest chain. These quests will be unique to your character based upon your race and the decisions you make in character-creation and while participating in personal-storyline quests. The capitol city for your race will have only one "instanced" section, which is your personal home instance. In that neighborhood, the consequences of your progress on your personal storyline will be played out. If you fail to save someone, you can go there and visit their grave. if you do save them, they will be there to thank you. You can invite other people into your home instance and invite htem to help with your personal story, and they will get XP/loot for helping.
All in all I'm very optimistic, but we'll have to wait and see. Though I think if you watch all these videos you'll probably be as excited as me
Beta will be later this year, that's when I'll decide to buy it or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU1JUwPqzQY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OyHwqokkKk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBC_ig73aMs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4VKhrCDWfg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvHV7HB2BDc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ttfOuxB6Gc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3uMlHSbPSY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMTs74eWBJ4
The first two are the Arenanet official videos for GW2, and the rest are some fan made videos from Gamescom and from released trailers. Two are them are playthroughs with commentary by Totalbiscut, who is a British game critic in the vein of Yahtzee (he will find something wrong with the game, always). Oddly, TB couldn't find anything bad to say about his 40 min playthrough of GW2, and he stated that fact in the video.
So anyway, I hope this breaks the mold as much as it claims it's going to. Here's to Arenanet and innovation in the MMO space.
Comments
Planetside 2 actually holds much more promise IMHO. There is zero instancing. If your faction captures an outpost, every other player experiences that change. Battlelines will change over time. You'll need to do massive coordinated pushes to capture territory. While I can't speak with too much confidence on how it will play out, it's certainly much more of an improvement over anything else in development.
Also, importantly - no autoattacking =D. If they take a similar stance towards loot as GW1, which is to say that getting the optimal weapons and armor is non-random and trivial and obtained simply through the leveling process, I may have to take a serious look at this game.
Eve online is actually one of the stronger contenders for a persistent world where your actions have meaning. The whole game is a player-driven monster. What Eve lacks that the others have is a meaningful narrative. There is a narrative, but it's more like the narrative of the players than the narrative of the world or the story.
You know what else this topic reminded me of? The "Organized Play" community in the pen and paper world. When I heard about Living Greyhawk, I thought it was the coolest thing ever - finally a way to play a character in a persistent world where my actions have consequence. Then I played some. It's persistent in that your character is portable from game to game (with a record of what adventures your character has been on). Individual groups and sessions could be quite fun, all told, but there was no "world". You couldn't even craft items when I played. It was a game with essentially a stock progression designed to allow for portability and potentially competition - but it lacked meaningful action. Characters were largely replaceable, hundreds of groups would run the same adventure, and the overall difference you made in the narrative was limited to statistics and rarely, if you played in select games, some meaning.
When I came back from Gencon in 03, I actually tried to "fix" the "Organized Play" thing a bit more to my liking. I was the "Play-by-Post" moderator on Enworld, and came up with the idea for "Living EN World" which captured at least part of that. Characters were portable, from one game to another. Each game had its own unique significance to the game world. Long-running characters became pillars that made new characters lives that much easier (by making the items they would use and such). But it has a lot of weaknesses, not the least of which is the play-by-post medium itself. It's still going though, and has migrated to a new edition, and it's a little different now from my original vision, but so long as they're still playing it I'm still happy it's being played. The smaller community, though, and probably less dicks to drag it down, so it did at least offer something people were not getting elsewhere. It also mediated one of the problems that the medium has (games fizzling out). People, like me, would spend hours building incredibly detailed characters, backstories, and personalities for games that might last less than a year and then die (slowly or quickly). Having the backup that any character that went on a failed out adventure could continue their career in a new adventure under a new DM had appeal.
But leveraging that personal hand-holding of having a specific DM and custom adventures that's available in that medium is not a strength available (without great expense and time right now) to the MMO genre. I think that we are making little steps every year though. World events, persistence, overall quality of narration, and such are improving by fair strides every year. But it takes a lot of code, and a lot of art, and a lot of thought to do it well.
I may have a lot more emotionally invested in the subject than most people. The end goal has been my end-goal since playing the original Dragon Warrior. Or rather, since reading the instruction booklet for the original Legend of Zelda. In some perspective, it's a useless thing to want, but it's still something I want. I would try to get into the insurance racket on items.
That and I find it incredibly boring to play the way I want, and the metrics for reward do not actually make me feel involved or interested in the world or the game.
Edit: In one word, what it comes down to is "immersion". I get none of that with Eve.
It just sounds fucking amazing to me. It's what PVP should be. And since the combat is much less like a hotkey MMO (where you press the same combination of buttons over and over), and more like an action RPG (there is active blocking and dodging of attacks), it's bound to be more skill based than most other MMOs.
In addition, they are striving to remove the Holy Trinity. There's no such thing as a healer "class." Every class has a slot for a heal skill. You're responsible for your own survival (through dodges and choice/use of your own heal skill). If you do go down, you are "down" in the borderlands sense. When you are in a "downed" state your character is unable to move and has a new set of skills. You can maybe throw rocks to do a bit of damage, or encourage your teamates to buff them. ANY player on your side can come up to you and revive you (a-la L4D or borderlands). Also like borderlands, if you manage to kill something while in your downed state, you revive yourself. I also know that rangers have a skill that allows their pets to "lick your wounds" so you can revive yourself unless your opponent has killed your pet.
However, in PVP everyone has access to a Coup-de-gras that takes about 2-3 seconds and eliminates downed characters forcing them to respawn. Downed characters also take damage so they might die just by area damage.
This death system is also in PvE as well AFAIK.
For more info, watch the PVP video in one of those links with TotalBiscut. There's also another fan video in there that gives an overview of PVP.
I'm just so god damned excited by this game. I'm starting a podcast about it soon
Those are my exact same thoughts as well. I LOVE the emergent gameplay that can happen, I just hate playing the actual game to create the emergent gameplay. I love what Eve represents as possible, but not what it is.
MMO Arcade Demon's Souls.
I'd play it. I'd watch people play it.
The first problem isn't that big of a deal if you make a real living world. The second i think is the big flaw in this. Mostly I'd say think of how much you die in a game like STALKER, Fallout, or really any other game. If you had to restart every time you die it would be obnoxious.In an MMO setting you have even more problems, like other players. How would you handle PvP? If someone plays for a while gets good gear a dies in a firefight, they then lose everything invested into that character.in a statefull game I think such a mechanic would more likely just decrease player engagement than do anything particularly productive.
Playing an MMO without respawning to some degree would probably be like playing a modern game without the ability to save, ever.
edit: Now that I think about it, I recall playing Legends of Kesmai when I was much younger. It was an MMO where death left your entire inventory on your corpse in the world, and there was free PvP everywhere (although there were town guards to discourage it in civilized areas). I...probably had fun? I must have been about 7 years old at the time.
In the case of you die, pay to try again, you gain a certain amount of real impetus to get better at the game. A game that focuses purely on skill, strategy, or knowledge becomes more rewarding rather than less. Even in a stateful game, it can have meaning.
Let's say that, in an example, the game incorporates a world-spanning puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to learn a whole lot of information from all over the game world. The world is full of traps and dungeons, and monsters that are each essentially a puzzle in themselves to figure out and overcome. But once you've learned how to avoid a particular trap, fight a particular monster, and solve a particular dungeon - the task becomes routine. Every time you pay your ante, you're not just trying to build up a character, what you're really paying for is the opportunity to go back with what you've just learned that doesn't work, and try to solve the problem in a different way.
In some sense, if you removed the penalty (let's say you just restart every room every time you fail and have to repeat it), the cost for failure might not be sufficiently high to keep the tension at the desired level.
Once again, I'm not saying this is in itself a good design. But I like to keep in mind that virtually any mechanical change is a trade-off of sorts. By making the cost of failure higher, you can influence how victory feels. That's why I immediately fell back on the game Demon's Souls. It's a very good example of how, for some players, making a game that brutally punishes can be more rewarding.
As far as Eve is concerned, Eve is a Starship pvp sandbox. It's sort of like MMO meets a 4x game. Player corporations vie for control of null-security space and build their own sovereign empires. There is a civilization-esq planning of building stations, starbases and sovereignty structures to produce resources to use in conquering other player empires. Even the intro "high security" zones are not free from pvp. You can literally be killed anywhere at anytime since game mechanics don't prevent players from attacking each other but instead, in high security, NPC "police" come after the offending players after the fact. Eve has plans to bring in more character development with the launching of its Incarna expansion, but so far you can only design your character and walk around your quarters in the station. But again, the devs of these games are actually trying to bring about most of the changes that players demand. It has just becomes an issue of: "how do we do this?" "How much money will it cost?" And not an issue of: "Do we want to do this?"
I think the solution, without changing the business model, is to move away from individual achievement and move towards a co-operative model of everyone vs. the environment. Think about a game like the Pandemic or Shadows over Camelot with thousands of players vs. the computer all at once. Even if you suck, you are still helping. It's like the entire game is one gigantic and impossibly hard raid. Therefore it will still have the effect of making players feel obligated to keep playing to help the team.
Having not yet read "Ready Player One", I think that might talk about an imaginary game that has a sort of aspect of this.
It's certainly not the same thing as a simulated world, but I think it can be a cool tool to make something work in the interim before we can really support huge comprehensive simulations.
Those were fun games! When seeing a bad-ass character wander into the room you're in and realizing you have to RUN FOR YOUR LIFE or you'll be set back days/weeks/years. That actually got your heart pounding. Dying hundreds of times in wow doesn't affect me. There isn't any consequences to it. Dying in EVE is closer and does get your blood up. You just have to deal with spending hours working for those few seconds of watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, watching C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
*ahem*
Without risk, success is meaningless. Being afraid to lose is a terrible way to live.