Is anyone else planning on not playing the mmo?

[Webbstre]

T-e-c-h-n-i-c-a-l-l-y MMO just means any game with a massive amount of players online. People just forget that

[cybrim]

Ok it is FREE to play, just try it... you don't have a trial period... you have your entire life... just like runescape... but not as repetitive...

[wolfmane]

T-e-c-h-n-i-c-a-l-l-y MMO just means any game with a massive amount of players online. People just forget that

This is true, though for me the defining point of an MMO is when you're sharing cyber or server space with massive amounts of players, not just that they happen to be online playing the same game. Maybe that's a subtle distinction, but an important one imo. There are plenty of words that have technical definitions that have different meanings or socially common meanings different from the original.

For me, based on my take on MMOs, D&D no longer qualifies, whether they call themselves an MMO or not. There is heavy instancing in WOW these days, but you can still walk outside that main city into a persistant overworld shared by a common mass of players. Non-instanced players can also interact with the main hub cities from the persistent outside world (initiating city-leader raid attacks) outside the normal bounded structure of the traditional instanced raid. The difference is that you have a choice in WoW, where as that option isn't available in D&D.

[indelible]

T-e-c-h-n-i-c-a-l-l-y MMO just means any game with a massive amount of players online. People just forget that

For me, based on my take on MMOs, D&D no longer qualifies, whether they call themselves an MMO or not. There is heavy instancing in WOW these days, but you can still walk outside that main city into a persistant overworld shared by a common mass of players. Non-instanced players can also interact with the main hub cities from the persistent outside world (initiating city-leader raid attacks) outside the normal bounded structure of the traditional instanced raid. The difference is that you have a choice in WoW, where as that option isn't available in D&D.

I think at best you could qualify World of Warcrafts levelling experience as the MMO part of the game. Once you get to 85 and start doing stuff for yourself, you're forced into a situation where you're using the capital city as a general chat lobby, and the dungeon finder to find groups for dungeons. Outside of that, nothing much else is required of you, at which point it becomes a lobby based game and nothing more, ala D2.

I was hopeful that they would take steps to rectify this in Cataclysm, but they didn't, so I stopped playing.

[wolfmane]

You've never sailed off the side of dalaran to go mineral farming down below and get engaged in PVP?

I can't really claim anything about WoW since I haven't played since lich, it may very well be what you suggest. It may have evolved, since I left, to really put players on a rail. I just know that it always seemed like that at times and some players get caught up in the instance only thing; they never really engage in the potential the overworld has, especially on an open PvP server.

[indelible]

You've never sailed off the side of dalaran to go mineral farming down below and get engaged in PVP?

I can't really claim anything about WoW since I haven't played since lich, it may very well be what you suggest. It may have evolved, since I left, to really put players on a rail. I just know that it always seemed like that at times and some players get caught up in the instance only thing; they never really engage in the potential the overworld has, especially on an open PvP server.

I don't know what server you were playing on, but I was on one of the largest PvP servers in BG9, and that rarely happened. There was the infrequent bout of openworld PVP, but generally people stuck to Wintergrasp (and instanced "zone" that you could queu up for), as well as dungeon and battleground grind. At 80, there was the inital rep grinds that you had to do if you wanted to raid at a decent level, but once you'd done that, and got all of the rep you needed to exalted, you didn't ever have to leave Dalaran unless you were being automatically transported somewhere else.

There's no sense of exploration in World of Warcraft anymore, not that there was much of that before. Back in vanilla, we spent a great deal of time outside Ogrimmar and Ironforge dueling with people we knew from the battlegrounds. There was a real sense of community, and people frequently roamed around the open PvP zones, as well as The Barrens, looking for those players that had just killed them in a battleground, or beat them in a duel the day before. Come raid time, all of the larger guilds on the server met up outside the various raid dungeons and - prior to the raid starting - there was a lot of fun had between Horde and Alliance. It was really good fun. That doesn't really happen anymore.

[wolfmane]

I think I must have had a slightly more aggressive server or something then. I just seem to remember more open action, maybe that was just my personal play style. Anywyay, the memory is starting to get fuzzy so maybe I might be coloring Lich with my experiences in Crusade and vanilla. Sad to hear that the sense of community and exploration has gone away but I think I felt it coming and that's a lot of the reason I left as well.

[SimonSaysBaka]

Im gonna buy and play all Runic games untill my eyes bleed and my fingers are grinded down to the bone!

[Sekkurel]

Im gonna buy and play all Runic games untill my eyes bleed and my fingers are grinded down to the bone!

now thats what i call devotion xD

[krestof]

I think it may be possible to get some activity on the outside, public areas which is actually entertaining and meaningful. The first thing that has to happen, though, is the world needs to be BIG. I am talking about sprawling areas with many places to explore... and every hundred meters or two there doesn't have to be some permanent landmark used in a fetch quest. And certainly the next town isn't a 5 minute walk away. So this would give us lots of potential for scenery and other minor landmarks, special areas where certain creatures may spawn over a large range, and the sense of being immersed or even lost... but it also would thin out player population except in the cities or traveling routes.

Now the reason I'd want to make the world so big isn't so we can play the MMO like a single-player game. Rather, it is to allow monsters and various quest objectives to spawn while no player is even near them. See, the typical MMO style where we have some random bears that we have to collect bear asses from which spawn infinitely in a somewhat small area and patrol the same 4' x 4' square is pretty lame and boring. You end up just camping the same spot and wait for them to respawn. And then even the fights are not particularly interesting. By contrast, what I am looking for is a way in which creatures or items respawn which is not so monotonous. I mean, they DO have to respawn, otherwise the world would be cleaned out in no time.

When we increase the size of the world, we need to do some things... since, for example, the bears you may be asked to hunt may be few and far between, the quest has to require less done. Say, instead of getting 20 bear asses, maybe just 2 or 3. Then, you need to throw in MORE random things which may be interesting finds or hostile creatures which, let's say they're randomly spawned too, but they're just there because they are. Lastly, the fight with the target creature, such as the bears, would have to be much more intense, and the reward for going through all this needs to be appropriate.


Ok, so here's an example. You come to a homestead near the outskirts of a town and talk with a farmer. He says that last night a huge bear broke down his fence and killed a goat. He managed to shoot the bear, but he did not kill it. It had ran off somewhere, and many cows ran out as well. So what he wants you to do is track down that bear and finish it off, as well as bring any cows back.

So you go running off into the woods. There is a trail of blood which is rather easy to spot for a while. But then it gets harder to follow. You wind your way around the trees and find one cow. You can either... take it with you, which would probably slow you down; tie it up somewhere so it will stay in one spot; or take it back to the farmer immediately. This isn't an "all or nothing" thing, so you just get some amount of money/exp per cow. So then you keep going, and -- oh snap -- you just walked right into a web... and there is a very hungry monstrous spider waiting. You fight that off, kill the bugger, but it poisoned you. Loot anything from it you want like chop off its leg or pincher or silk spinner. Maybe search for some other thing it caught and find an adventurer's pack.

Now this doesn't necessarily have to be a "generic poison", and hopefully you have some antidote for it. If not, you can go back.. or maybe try and tough it out and keep going. I dunno, are you still strong enough to take on a bear? Well it was injured. So you keep trying to track the bear, and you actually cross a road. You see a merchant walking along it, and he happens to have a particular spider antidote on him (hopefully for the right kind of spider). Then, did you bring your cow with you? Maybe he wants to actually buy it from you. You know, the cow that isn't really yours. So now you keep tracking the bear, and lets say you find one of those plants you can pick for some herbs or a mineral vein. >.> Ok, that's pretty lame like WoW. Maybe just a rock exposed from erosion which looks like it may be valuable.

Then you find the bear.. it's sleeping and seems to stink awfully. You sneak up on it about to kill it and realize its already dead, and its insides have been cleaned out by something. Then you hear something behind you and it's the giant space flea of doom! ...Or just a few wolves which had hidden when you first arrived. Now I suppose you could back away slowly and they'd stick with eating the bear. Or maybe you could fight them and maybe run a survivor off. Either way, you take a more direct route back to the farm, find another cow, spring a tripwire, and almost become a troll's lunch. Wow, that was probably not so simple as any other side quest, was it?

And the thing is, all these extra encounters were all randomly generated... either they were already present in the game world or they were created due to this quest. If we have a huge world with tons of seemingly simple quests like this, plus bounties for killing stuff, many random things to discover, very dangerous monsters, intelligent bandits, etc etc ... I think it may do alright.

[Webbstre]

I think it is WAY too early to speculate on that kind of stuff

[Sekkurel]

What you said is pure crap
Honestly have you ever played an mmo ??? or just runescape ?

Theres 1 mmo out there that i love and im corrently playing. It doesnt have much to it : Graphics are kinda sh1t story is all the mythology of the world mixed into one story gameplay is also kinda iffy and the rest goes on. Yeah it sounds bad but i love and you know why ?

DIVERSITY

Ok your ultime goal in a mmo is to reach the "top" that means lvl cap reached best gear best pet/mount etc. But the way to get there in most cases and mmo's is the same. Farm instance b and boss a to get drops and lvl up. Not in this game. You have so many things to do i cant even begin to explain all of them but so far i have managed to piece together about 5 or 6 possible paths to the top and thats without cash usage. One or 2 of them is farm some low lvl instances and sell the drops to earn gold and buy gear and stuff for your char or make farm in certain special maps for items that high lvl people need to evolve even further but are either to busy or to high lvl to farm.

[cybrim]

They should just call it a Wad-O (wad because it is just a wad of players online)

[grackle]

The mmo won't be a real option here. Besides living in a neighbourhood that seems a very low priority for upgrades or even maintenance Canada as a whole has had bandwidth allowances reduced by ccrt.

However it does sound like the mmo should be a success and I eagerly await Torchlight II.
grack

[cybrim]

I just don't see a point in this original post... it is like he didn't even read the idea behind the MMO... F2P should be enough (with a good team behind it) to attract most people to try it, complaining about a free product that a tried and tested group is putting together is VERY POINTLESS-

*End of Troll-like Response*

[adoomgod]

I'd put it as simply as, please wait for the product to come out before you judge it, especially with a thread title that comes off a teensy bit snooty.
From what they told us, this will not be a stereotypical MMO, so why not see how it comes out?

Also... i don't like the vast majority of mmo's yet i still have my hopes high for this one... i think there are good reasons for that.