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What makes an MMO fun? What is needed for future MMOs?
Karenna
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've played pretty much every MUD/MOO/MMO out there, going through the typical stages of excitement > obsession > boredom > unsubscribe > 6 months later resubscribe > repeat
...and having (finally?) kicked WoW for the second time, I began to wonder. What is it that really makes an MMOG fun? Is it the addictive nature of level grinding? Is it really the 'end game' that the developers hope we'll stick with, in spite of mudflation and constant loot drama that is so prevalent?
Then, I remembered hearing about the potential NASA MMO: http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/
...and I began to wonder about that and future MMOGs...what do they really need to do to succeed? Can they, or is the genre slowly dying due to the incessant rehashing/stagnation?
On the NASA MMO thing, I really hope it could work out, but I wonder what it would take to successfully merge education and entertainment, if it's even possible
...and having (finally?) kicked WoW for the second time, I began to wonder. What is it that really makes an MMOG fun? Is it the addictive nature of level grinding? Is it really the 'end game' that the developers hope we'll stick with, in spite of mudflation and constant loot drama that is so prevalent?
Then, I remembered hearing about the potential NASA MMO: http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/
...and I began to wonder about that and future MMOGs...what do they really need to do to succeed? Can they, or is the genre slowly dying due to the incessant rehashing/stagnation?
On the NASA MMO thing, I really hope it could work out, but I wonder what it would take to successfully merge education and entertainment, if it's even possible
Karenna on
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Also, MMO's aren't fun.
1. Social interaction, success and fun that can be shared with friends.
2. Having a persistent character that you can continue to make "better" over the course of many, many days of playing. Seeing your character progress and get stronger as you level is a reward in itself.
Of course, then there's many other reasons such as competition between players in terms of content and gear which ties into PvP as well.
I think I would play one if it wasn't an RPG. I loved Final Fantasy, in its time, but the gameplay style seems redundant to me now, a vestige of an earlier era and Dungeons and Dragons. Instead, I'd like to play an MMO that controlled like Zelda, or Devil May Cry—with game actions being direct, not abstract and representational (like in an RPG). That would draw me into the world much more, and I think it would also heighten the sense of interaction with other members.
Obviously you've never played WOW on a PVP server in Southshore.
Poor thread, so unloved.
Well, you beat me to it.
-Working together with others to boldly go where no guild has gone before
-Exploring a new world without having to leave my chair
-Becoming a badass motherfucker over time.
Except that in WoW it ends up with tons of waiting for the other 24 people to get their ducks in a row and then execute boss tactics that someone else wrote.
That's why I stopped raiding.
I don't play WoW any more. When I did it was kinda fun to come up with better tactics than the ones we found online.
If by "just" you mean over the last 3 years.
I think it's the promise of more things to come (the 'free' expansions), the continuity of the character and the persistent world he's living in.
Basically the same for me. Raiding becomes a drain on your soul, slowly eating away at you. Unfortunately, damn near every MMO has raiding as the 'end-game', and if you don't do that, there often isn't much to do!
So, for me, once I stopped raiding in WoW, I managed to entertain myself for another 6 weeks before finally pulling the plug for good.
So, what if the model changed? If the end game weren't raiding, what could it be? What if an MMO's end game were content created by the players (NWNish, but on a larger scale)...could that even work? I imagine that developers would be ecstatic to not have to spend months creating content that would be devoured in hours...but that would be replaced with the need to review player content so it's not full of cocks dicks lol.
FYI, I was really looking for some good debate on this, which is why I originally threw it in D&D, not G&T...but maybe it really does belong in MMO? bleh...
You are leaving out the effects of the random rewards. Both Psych experiments and the existence of slot machines attest to their power.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
While random rewards are a very viable method of hopelessly hooking addicts, it seems like random+repetitive raiding+inevitable loot drama is what turns off so many folks.
I'd actually propose that the 'churn' associated with that in most MMOs is what causes them to fail earlier than they should.
Wii U NNID: MegaSpooky
I can't wait until I'm playing EVE.
pipe dreams...
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
NASA should make a robot / building MMO, I think it could get some popularity. Something like Sim City, with a focus on robotics / extra planetary fun.
As far as MMOs go, I think I'll try the LEGO one but I've lost a lot of love for them.
Indeed. It's not all about getting to the end and raiding until you have the best gear so you can raid some more. The fun in CoX is playing CoX. I think a lot of this is the badass character creation system it has. You can look almost exactly how you want to from day one. You're not out doing quests for armor sets and weapons, because you don't need to. You're already at the image you want to portray, so you just go play the game however you want to.
That said, I wish that DAoC was still popular. I had so much fun with that game when it was at it's peak of popularity. The combat system was awesome, the RvR was the best PvP in any game, and the classes weren't as stale as most other games have. My kingdom to play as a Friar in any of these new games coming out. I miss my Friar. =\
Wii U NNID: MegaSpooky
I kindof agree...I think that the NASA MMO thing should be more of a set of tools to design/build robots/spacecraft/etc and explore, rather than try and force a leveling scheme on space exploration.
Speaking of the NASA game more, I imagine they would have to offer it for free (ala America's Army), but what's the best way to pay for it? If it were free, would people be against ads in-game? It seems to work for Dungeon Runners, at least...
it's definitely a mix of the game's addictive design and the small "Rent-a-friend" communities you can build with your guild. The community is what got me to come back a second time, and it's mainly the reason I quit aswell.
Show a guy anything that is mildy interesting. Tell him it has a ranking system. Tell him he can progress himself up this ranking system through skill over time, and he'll become an addict.
I felt the same way about WoW, resenting it while striving away for a nonexistant prize.
Luckily I started getting bored around level 25 and began playing less and eventually moved onto other things.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
MUDS sometimes did this. I used to play on the MUD that inspired Brad McQuaid to add graphics and create Everquest. The zone creation tools were freely available, if annoying to use. Players could submit zones they wrote for approval, ranging from newbie exp areas to high end dungeons, and if it looked good one of the head area makers would put it up on a test server and do a walk through of it with the maker, inspecting it. If it got approval after polishing, it was put into the main game and the person who made it would be given an area maker GMship of sorts. It let them do things like have easier access talking to the people who sometimes had to code new effects for the zones and to look in on groups doing the zone without sending their own character into it. It was a neat system, if unwieldy at times when the head area makers were backlogged or busy with RL stuff. And the tools really sucked from what my friends told me.
For the OP, you might want to look at the Bartle test and its description of the four main dominant ways of approaching the game. It's an old thing since it was conceived during the days of MUDs, MUSHes, etc. but still carries over well to MMOs.
For a player like me that's predominantly achiever, a killer and explorer in fairly close proportions, and socializer last, the community isn't as important to me as to some others. How I derive enjoyment from the community is different as well. Chatting with friends and goofing around with them was always fun in WoW, but while one guy enjoyed regularly having his guildies roll up gnomes and run marathons through the game world, I enjoyed writing up a detailed guide of each of the major rogue talent builds and their use in PvE for the less studied rogues in the guild alliance I was helping lead at the time. Fun came more from tweaking and improving characters through talents, gear, skills, etc. and having a steady supply of cool stuff to do solo or with friends. This ranged from raids, pvp battles against other established teams on the server, neat areas to explore, collecting vanity pets, and sillier stuff like constantly getting into snowball fights with the mage class leader during Molten Core runs. In a game like Star Wars Galaxy where you had more customization on a lot of stuff, I did stuff like try to catch one of every fish on a planet and then use them to decorate my home and a player city's town hall. I tend to get pretty high scores in three out of the four areas Bartle defines, so it's not particularly tough to entertain me compared to someone that's almost entirely killer or explorer.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I want my fair share just as much as anyone, but there are some real assholes out there. I also have problems with guild leaders telling what to do, how to spec and when to play. I don't like that.
I'm not saying there can't be structure, but being TOLD to log on such a character and SPEC THIS WAY is not how I want to spend my 15/month.
Carebears, the soft chewy center of EVE.
Asheron's Call - Darktide server back in the day.
Planetside back in the day.
What made them fun? In retrospect, player choice/interactivity. Games these days spoon feed you everything, you really have no say or impact in what goes on. Basically a game needs a great PvP system to be fun.
ACDT = FFA PvP, you drop a fair amount of stuff when you die (but you can mostly control what you drop), players established their own "teams" with guilds, players claimed their own towns, players claimed their own hunting areas, *legitimate collision detection*, etc.. Most other "PvP" MMOs since and to be basically force players into playing how the devs want them to. "You're on this team, you can't attack these people, these are your towns, here's where you'll hunt." That crap sucks. No room for politics or player influence, which is 1000x more fun than doing the same scripted event week after week.
And collision detection made it by far the most skill-based MMORPG I've ever played. All other MMORPGs two idiots just stand around and spam buttons until someone wins the random number generator game, in AC you actually had to be able to dodge spells/arrows to win. Sure, lag screwed it up at times, but I'll take a game with skill-based collision-enabled combat over you-stand-here-I'll-stand-here-kk-what'd-you-roll combat anyday.
Combine that with a gigantic game world where guilds fought for control of the best towns and hunting grounds and it created the best political landscape I've ever seen. (I suppose EVE probably does this too but EVE's gameplay just didn't do it for me.)
As for Planetside.. I mean how can you beat being in a battle with 100 other people, tanks shelling, artillery bombarding, planes bombing, shotguns blasting, rockets flying, snipers sniping, etc.. For all its flaws Planetside's massive battles were insanely fun and if it still had the population I'd still be playing today.