Argyleyn wrote:The local militia leader sends you off to speak to one of their ex members who lives in another area. He reveals to you the name of the organisation and that they are up to 'something big'. You then roam Westfall looking for one of the defias who carries a message to another group of bandits. Once you find him and kill him, you then are sent to Stormwind, one of the capitals, where some gnome ninja-spies inform you who the Defias really are. Then you return to Westfall and you are supposed to escort one Defias traitor to their secret hideout to uncover its location, while multiple bandits attack you on route. When you finally uncover their hideout you are sent to kill their leader (with a group in an instance this time) and it all ends in a very climatic battle a pirate ship strongly resembling 'Goonies' if you ever seen that.
Is that not just the same as a "speak to someone", "find someone", "kill so and so" just strapped together though? It's the same in DAoC the DR quests are slightly more interesting like that but at the end of the day it's still just a combination of the basic quest ideas. It's about time MMO companies started investing a little more into their quest engines when they're such a big component in the games. The first and easiest step is removing linearity from the quests, that is make sure there is plenty of different options and paths to follow on a quest such that the quest turns out very differently as you make decisions along the quest - this happens to an extent in modern MMOs but it's so weak and so obvious that it may as well not happen. The second step is to start adding some thought requirements to quests to make them less mindless, a very quick and basic example would be something like have a quest, where you have to duo to fight a massive demon and have one person have to run through a maze of traps that makes the demon vulnerable for a few seconds so that the other player can attack him in this time so that there's proper cooperation needed - it could be made even more in depth if you had a trio or some such. Also again going back to Khaldun's puzzle chests from UO - essentially a puzzle game where you had to use thought to complete it and if you don't you end up setting off traps, all the time whilst trying to avoid very high level mobs wandering round the chests whilst also at the same time it being a PvE dungeon - that took skill, thought and reactions to succede and it was amazing fun.
Argyleyn wrote:In every game also, even if there are player opponents the amount of things they can do is actually limited.
Again, this is why I'm one of the few that LIKED artifacts, that LIKED MLs, that LIKED CLs - they added new abilities such that you can almost always improve. A good MMO for PvP is one where you can lose a fight and say "Damn I could've won if I remembered to do x" rather than as you say, the dull old pointless mezz, PBAE, win - that's just pointless. More abilities and such make fights far less linear which is why I'm a big fan of new abilities as long as they're balanced and that's the key point. I feel a LOT more fulfilled playing my minstrel or my sorc than I do my theurg/merc simply because they have so many more abilities there's almost always room for improvement.
Argyleyn wrote:As for the type of players, it's obvious blizz doesn't like 'killers' as it has taken every measure to stop people from getting harassed or annoyed by pvp'ers, either by dishonorable kills either by pve servers where you need to flag.
Killers aren't automatically greifers, standard PvP or PvE can still satisfy killers, DAoC was a poor example for killers in PvE because it was simply a case of if a mob is 10+ levels higher than you or whatever then you can't solo it, again going back to UO as an example you could defeat pretty much anything IF you were good, I used to spend ages kiting and playing with ancient wyrms and balrons, casting the spells I needed to to heal, popping pouches to break free from paralyze spells, drinking pots to cure poison and so on until eventually I'd drop it. Likewise, killing in PvP is enough to satisfy killers if it's engaging enough but I don't think that WoW's PvP really is engaging enough to satisfy killers.
Argyleyn wrote:For the 'achievers' i don't agree at all. I think wow's endgame is terribly competitive atm at the point where top guilds propably live in it. To be top pvp'er in wow, pretty much 24/7 playtime for a couple of months is required.
But that's just it, and the same is true for DAoC to a lesser extent - playing for hours on end, isn't imo an acheivement in the slightest, I very rarely get chance to play DAoC nowadays, but if I can play for 2hrs and make 50k I still feel I've acheived far more than the guy who's been on for 12hrs and gained 100k. Again back to my above UO example, I used to know countless overpowered tamers, twinked to hell in the best equipment they could be with 3 pet dragons but could halve of them solo a balron? no. Finally as another example it's what I disliked about DAoC's PvE - it was hard to excel in it, fact is if you had the best equipment possible there was only so much of a level of mob you could defeat, it was a straight out cut off no matter how skilled you were you had 0 chance against monsters of a certain level and WoW seems largely the same, that is your acheivements are heavily limited to that of other players by game mechanics.
I'm certainly interested to see how Warhammer online turns out, on one hand they've got the EA advertising machine, a set of intellectual property that easily outshines Blizzards and the experience of making a very good MMOG previously but on the other hand Blizzard has alread made
the MMOG for the masses and is it now too late for someone else to create an MMOG to lure in those socializers and explorers that WoW has already captured? Personally I hope Mythic pay more attention to those of us Blizzard ignored but honestly, first looks it sounds like Mythic is trying to compete directly with Blizzard only.