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Tera Beta Gabe comments.
left1000
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
"Maybe I’ve been spoiled by SW:TOR and its fully voiced and interesting quest chains. Tera suffers from the worst sort of old school MMO grind bullshit. As bad as the quests were I kept doing them because I wanted to keep fighting. But there is something wrong with an MMO when you would rather grind than do their quests. "
The part I find ill-informed here is "MMO grind bullshit"
This speaks of a pretty serious misunderstanding about what an MMO is. Originally MMO's either didn't have any quests, or had very few quests, gameplay wasn't about doing quests at all. I'd argue that doing quests isn't even essential to the equation. UO, DAOC, EQ1... barely had any quests, players were almost never questing! In fact, "questing" itself isn't typically a very social or "multiplayer" activity, in WoW when someone tells you they were questing they don't really mean they were interacting with others, they mean they were checking off a laundry list of tasks they didn't care about, alone, just for the rewards. WoW was really the first mmo in which, you were always on a quest, at all times, usually dozens at once, no game has really ever made these interesting. WoW has 10million players and it's almost all just "fetch/kill/collect bear pelts". Most of this "questing" was for players interested in playing alone, it gave them a way to stay interested while they were alone, for the longest time UO, DAOC, EQ1 were all basically totally unplayable solo. In EQ1 most classes flat out could not play by themselves at all, this was a serious flaw in selling new players on mmo's. UO is basically all one giant grind, you are constantly grinding away at incremental skillgains, that's how it works, make 10million of these and master the skill (use a macro 3rd party program why don't you). In city of heroes/villains, do you really care who the bad guy is? or what villain's lair you are busting up? no not really, you're just there to do the bustin, that's why user created levels are so interesting, no one really cared about what was canon or what wasn't. Maybe quests are key now in the era of WoW-clones, but honestly; bad quests are just flat out worse than no quests at all. Do players in WoW even enjoy the quests? or is it mostly just filler? or a way of drawing in casual appeal? Warzones aren't a quest. Killing the same opponent 100000times for reputation isn't a quest. Raids usually technically come with a quest, and so do instances, but... people would still do both without a quest, why? Instances and Raids are one of the few parts of the MMO that is actually "MMO" it's fun, and it's fun with others.
I'm pretty sure that the MMO's that succeed, do so not because they have the best quest writing, but because that old school mmo grind bullshit is better in that game, the abilities are more interesting, the core mechanic of pressing the hotkeys are more satisfying. Most WoW players probably don't bother to read all the quest text either. The only mmo I've ever remotely "cared" about a quest for is sw:tor, nah scratch, that DDO has the most engaging quests out there. DDO is all quest all the time. Even during the beta weekend (totally fresh/blind) when I played up through level 25... I found myself skipping through dialogue when I was alone (and when I grouped up I felt like my gameplay was slowed down for no reason, losing 20-30% of my time sitting there waiting for party members to finish dialogue). Sw:tor has voice acting, it even has good writing, what it doesn't have though is a reason for me to give a darn. It's all just "blah blah blah blah" even if an event does have a major plot point, or change something... well it resets 2minutes later, and other related quests don't acknowledge the event or change at all! If anything the phrase "MMO quest bullshit I never read" is a bit more apt and telling than insulting the grind. The grind does get old sometimes, but the grind is the core gameplay mechanic, the rest is just window dressing/filler.
I think Tera will be a success regardless of the quest writing, it will come down to how fun it is to dodge an attack for the 1000th time, and how deep the trigger system is, will the trigger system be as successful as GW1, or as unsuccessful as the dozens of no-name korean-style action mmo's that have already been made available to english speaking players in the past?
The part I find ill-informed here is "MMO grind bullshit"
This speaks of a pretty serious misunderstanding about what an MMO is. Originally MMO's either didn't have any quests, or had very few quests, gameplay wasn't about doing quests at all. I'd argue that doing quests isn't even essential to the equation. UO, DAOC, EQ1... barely had any quests, players were almost never questing! In fact, "questing" itself isn't typically a very social or "multiplayer" activity, in WoW when someone tells you they were questing they don't really mean they were interacting with others, they mean they were checking off a laundry list of tasks they didn't care about, alone, just for the rewards. WoW was really the first mmo in which, you were always on a quest, at all times, usually dozens at once, no game has really ever made these interesting. WoW has 10million players and it's almost all just "fetch/kill/collect bear pelts". Most of this "questing" was for players interested in playing alone, it gave them a way to stay interested while they were alone, for the longest time UO, DAOC, EQ1 were all basically totally unplayable solo. In EQ1 most classes flat out could not play by themselves at all, this was a serious flaw in selling new players on mmo's. UO is basically all one giant grind, you are constantly grinding away at incremental skillgains, that's how it works, make 10million of these and master the skill (use a macro 3rd party program why don't you). In city of heroes/villains, do you really care who the bad guy is? or what villain's lair you are busting up? no not really, you're just there to do the bustin, that's why user created levels are so interesting, no one really cared about what was canon or what wasn't. Maybe quests are key now in the era of WoW-clones, but honestly; bad quests are just flat out worse than no quests at all. Do players in WoW even enjoy the quests? or is it mostly just filler? or a way of drawing in casual appeal? Warzones aren't a quest. Killing the same opponent 100000times for reputation isn't a quest. Raids usually technically come with a quest, and so do instances, but... people would still do both without a quest, why? Instances and Raids are one of the few parts of the MMO that is actually "MMO" it's fun, and it's fun with others.
I'm pretty sure that the MMO's that succeed, do so not because they have the best quest writing, but because that old school mmo grind bullshit is better in that game, the abilities are more interesting, the core mechanic of pressing the hotkeys are more satisfying. Most WoW players probably don't bother to read all the quest text either. The only mmo I've ever remotely "cared" about a quest for is sw:tor, nah scratch, that DDO has the most engaging quests out there. DDO is all quest all the time. Even during the beta weekend (totally fresh/blind) when I played up through level 25... I found myself skipping through dialogue when I was alone (and when I grouped up I felt like my gameplay was slowed down for no reason, losing 20-30% of my time sitting there waiting for party members to finish dialogue). Sw:tor has voice acting, it even has good writing, what it doesn't have though is a reason for me to give a darn. It's all just "blah blah blah blah" even if an event does have a major plot point, or change something... well it resets 2minutes later, and other related quests don't acknowledge the event or change at all! If anything the phrase "MMO quest bullshit I never read" is a bit more apt and telling than insulting the grind. The grind does get old sometimes, but the grind is the core gameplay mechanic, the rest is just window dressing/filler.
I think Tera will be a success regardless of the quest writing, it will come down to how fun it is to dodge an attack for the 1000th time, and how deep the trigger system is, will the trigger system be as successful as GW1, or as unsuccessful as the dozens of no-name korean-style action mmo's that have already been made available to english speaking players in the past?
left1000 on
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