“It’s like the chicken and the egg, Will, the chicken and the egg!”

Huh. I remember keep sieges in Dark Age of Camp-a-lot as incredibly laggy. Then again, you enjoyed DAoC while I remember it with loathing, so….

UO did have the ability to place houses anywhere. As did SWG. In both cases, the landscape filled up rather rapidly, resulting in severe cases of virtual urban blight. I would not try to argue to anyone that open landscape housing had “been done, and done well.”

I’ll agree on the rest of your examples, though. World PvP -can- work in the right game. Players -can- have fun just sitting around and chatting. Etc.

I agree and I find the same things frustrating as you Keen. However, I understand that it is extremely difficult to look or learn from games in the past if you have not experienced them. I started MMOs with Ultima Online and I have to say that everything that came before that has absolutely no meaning to me and it isnt even part of my radar. I would think that many people feel the same way about what came before their first MMO.

PS: that’s also source of most of the community problems in games in the last years compared to pioneer games (UO, AC1, EQ, and hell even DAoC, AO and SWG). Veteran gamers have more patience and have learned to enjoy the setting, the atmosphere, the world (when those games were still worlds…). Today’s MMO player generation are mostly console rejects who don’t have a clue about what a mmo>>RP<<g used to be, they play that like they play the latest Super Mario.
I call them "Fast Food Gamers". Everything has to be handed to them, fast. Result is worlds are shrinking to the point of not being worlds anymore, instant travel everywhere killing immersion, and spoiled brats whining on forums as soon as the game contains something remotely challenging.

Anarchy Online also had a very steep learning curve if you wanted to fully use all the character customization options, way harder than DAoC or other games of the same period. Such a game would flop nowadays, the “Fast Food Gamers” don’t have neither the patience nor the will to learn such things, they just want purple loot, and they want it now.

That was a wonderful series finale for TNG.

I agree and disagree. Your basic point that many of these features have been done before is absolutely sound. The problem is that these games generally came from an era where investors and publishers were defining success by maybe getting 250k or 500k subscribers. A game with these kinds of mechanics could manage 250k or 500k, no doubt. The problem is that the investors now want much larger audiences for their game. They want to be the next WoW, or at least to try to pull a few million subs.

And frankly, as other posters have already pointed out, you aren’t going to get huge sub numbers with these kinds of features. Ultimately what turns people off of these games, I think, is when they realize there is something that they can’t have. And all of these features that you yearn for (well, not all… but most) are features that create that experience of not being able to have something for some gamers:

Massive PVP that matters? The losers lose out.
Open world housing? Late comers lose out when all the real estate is taken.
Challenging content? Less skilled players or players who don’t have the time to put in lose out.

For an entitled gamer, why play a game where you can’t have something when there are plenty of games that will bend over backwards to hand it all to you on a silver platter? And unfortunately, the majority of gamers are entitled. Note that I am not using the word casual here because there are some casual games who are not entitled and some serious gamers who are.

I hate this system. I hate that the vast majority of new games shoot for the lowest common denominator to get as many subs as possible rather than finding a niche in the market and shooting for a reasonable slice of the pie.

Everybody is aware that the problem isn’t that these games can’t be designed with these features. The problem is that they can’t be successful based on current standards of “success.” The market dictates that these types of games can’t be made and it has nothing to do with the possibilities of design.

You are wrong about casual players.

The real casual player doesn’t care about what the hardcore do and just plays… casually, you know? I even know people who haven’t reached max level in SW:TOR yet.
Most of the supposed “casuals” whining about lack of content are people who often play more than the “hardcore” who raid like 3 evenings per week. And those fake “casuals”, who are actually people who play a lot but don’t want to make the same effort than the “hardcore” to experience the content, give a bad name to the real casuals. It’s those you see whining they want “raid gear” without doing raids.

I would love to see a shift where players generated their own content. Until they can actually build the world the content will be themepark.

@Don: I sort of believe that in the long run, this is where MMOs will evolve to – towards total player control. The early MMOs showed two important points: 1. Players are the MMOs worst enemy 2. Players are the MMOs best asset. Player driven and player generated content is vastly superior to static themepark content. The randomness, the dedication of players, and the imagination is in my opinion far beyond anything a development team can dream up. The problem is that player generated content requires control of the MMO mechanisms by the players. This is where the first point comes in – MMO players also have a talent to use this freedom to make the game challenging, frustrating, if not unplayzable for many people.

This is why there has been a shift – starting with EQ – to reduce player control and DEV teams have taken charge and try to control every little part of MMOs in order to make the game accessible and pleasant. With increased DEV control comes of course increased DEV responsibility. If players lack the tools to create their own fun content then any lack of content is the fault of the DEVs. Ultimately, it seems that there is little room for further evolution down the path of DEV control. However, there is plenty of room in the other direction.

The problem to be solved is: How do I give players more control, thereby giving the ability to generate fun content, without having the negatives associated with it? The answer to this may very well be: even more player control. I read about World of Darkness yesterday and they are starting this by letting people run for office and hold certain positions wherein these positions actually have some power or authority attached to it.

One trivial example of player control could be the old housing situation in UO. Many people liked the idea of going out in the world and being able to throw down a house somewhere and call it their own. No real restrictions. The problem, however, was that the landscape looked like a clusterf$#@…imagine as part of elections, some people got voted onto a housing development council and one requires permission to place their house in a certain location within a town jurisdiction. There can be bribes, there can be careful plannings to make nice towns, some people can just decide to make it random and clusterf#$% like…being President of the Housing Development Association sounds on paper boring…but hell, how much fun could you have with it!

Player control can be extended to almost anything (death penalties etc.) DEVS would be responsible for providing the tools and the players will be in charge. There is a lot of room for development into that direction for MMOs and it may be the only unexplored venue for future MMOs to settle in. If you imagine a linear scale of player control and you would start with UO…on the right side you would go down the path that MMOs took…towards less player control (EQ, AC, DAOC, WOW etc.) but the entire other side is still unexplored.

Neverwinter Nights let people build their own worlds. The player generated content and communities were pretty amazing. I can’t believe this style of game was never modernised.

@swarmofseals

Uhh, Massive PvP that matters? The losers lose out.

Well, that’s the advantage of having 3 factions instead of 2, the alliance system if one faction was dominating meant the other two would team up against them, and the simple fact that you could be hit in the back by the enemy realm meant that losers could come back. And the massive open pvp lands meant it was difficult to keep all your bases covered, you never knew when they could ambush you or attack your keeps, thus splitting your forces and suddenly, the fights aren’t so one sided anymore.

Open world housing?

Yeah real estate can run out, I think that happened in UO, DAoC’s solution was to make entirely seperate zones especially for housing, and that could be entirely expandable, it was kinda cool and meant late comers could still get a plot of land.

Challenging Content?

Thing is, you can have challenging content, you just need to make it so there’s SLACK in the content so that you don’t need everyone performing at 100%. “Doesn’t that make it EASY content?” No, the boss can still be complex and difficult, just have space for the less skilled players to do something, or give them the ability to participate as well while the more skilled players take the larger risks/more difficult tasks in a particular encounter. Things like *allow people to die and not instantly fail an encounter* have fallen out of favor, I mean sure skilled people should be able to win faster and more easily but less skilled should be allowed their more chaotic, longer, and more death happy tactics, zombie zerging that boss till he goes down… that’s fine. Heck Albion’s dragon strategy REVOLVED around getting a quarter of your raid slaughtered, then having another group pick up the boss while you in combat rezzed everyone.

These are all things older games have done, while most recent games focus 100% on the combat maximalist attitude… and that’s why they’ve been getting so boring. When it comes to casual combat leveling and ease, WoW wins, and all it’s competitors offer *nothing* superior or “innovative” in terms of combat, or any secondary activities. The gear treadmill however is dieing, people are getting exasperated with the system of constantly escalating loot, which is why blizzard is trying to focus the next expansion on the pvp conflict and secondary activities. What they’re doing wrong is a post I don’t feel like typing up at this time of day, so there ya go.

@Don
There will always be a part of scripting and programming if you want decent freedom of creation in such “toolboxes”. You can actually use the NWN2 toolset without coding a single line, but you’ll have to stay with the default behaviors.

@Zederok

Some things worked, some things didn’t, but people tend to throw out the good with the bad which is unfortunate, and in turn… take in the bad with the good as well. These older MMOs had problems, DAoC had plenty of problems, but mechanically it had some GREAT ideas that have never really been implemented since, with only a few basic attempts at it only coming around recently. Same goes for other games, with far too many attempting to emulate wow, and unfortunately copying everything that makes people disatisfied with wow along with giving a “not as good” experience as a fresh release simply can’t have the polish wow does with it’s years of additional development time. SWTOR is an extremely unfortunate example of this, although the legacy innovation is something I love, and that’s the kind of idea I would enjoy seeing more of in the future.

So yeah, I can think of tons of things I disliked, but I can also remember tons of things I liked, heck, vashjir is the first time I’ve seen anything like the underwater world ToA did in DAoC, and for all the problems ToA brought, it’s enormous, detailed world was not one of them.

@gankatron
I agree on the form but not on the term. Back in the “old school” games, you had casuals too, but most weren’t spoiled brats like today’s “fast food gamers”.
I just don’t agree with the amalgam of the terms “casual” and “lazy player”/”bad player”. My “fast food gamer” can be a casual or a hardcore.

I agree Keen, but there are things that I really want back in MMO’s too but I am not naive enough to realize that some of those really fun things we liked back then wwill never work in todays MMO. Plus if soem of the things I loved back were put in then you would segregate the game off from a huge share of the population. Like it or not WoW made MMOs mainstream and if you want some niche things then be prepared to play a niche game.

I Would love to see player housing again and I dont understand how a game like WoW can implement pokemon pet battles over player housing in MoP but then again I also understand that Player Housing is niche at best. There are many other things I wish were back in but we either have to play an Indie MMO with a shoestring budget or daydream about what-ifs.

@Keen: I agree with that assessment

Keen , One of our favorite practical jokes to play on new gamers on WOW was to tell them that our guild had a guild house in Burning Steppes.This was right in the middle of Vanilla Wow. And as long as you belonged to the guild the mobs wouldn’t aggro you when you entered the zone. Thinking about it now it would have been cool to actually have housing in Burning Steppes, but alas zones mean nothing now in Wow.

The history of mmorpg’s is great but the future is brighter.