Why Struggle in MMORPG is necessary...
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2022
- You want to strugle but just the right amount, you dont want to come out of the hardships in videogames with shining armor - you want to have barely made it because of the challenge.
Should rewarding content be locked in PVP area like in Runescape's Wilderness?
In todays Tangent Tavern clip Josh Strife Hayes and Callum Upton talks about the importance of the balance of struggle from players and game designers view.
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I remember FFXI... attempting to board the ferry for the first time, with my friends...
We gathered. We waited. We boarded.
The ferry departed.
Then half throught the trip someone thought it would be a good idea to start fishing... and pulls out a lvl75 octopus monster that instantly one-shot him.
And then the monster proceeds to methodicaly hunt every player on board.
...
...
...
that improbable, player generated event stuck with us to this day.
the good ol' Sea Horror
These days everyone at Blizzard would be shooting that idea down because it would feel bad for the players who got killed in that scenario.
But the reality is that's a story to tell, and one of the best parts of MMOs used to be hanging out in VC listening to the strange and funny stories from the people who were playing a couple years before you.
In fact Classic WoW was probably fueled more by the stories people used to tell about it than actual first-hand nostalgia. Ensuring that even Wrath babies wanted to go check it out 10 years later.
Reminds me of SWG where each planet and server had their own legendarily revered armorsmiths, dancers, etc. None were NPCs
a second one, still in FFXI
We were exploring a cave when one of us, a level 20-something dragoon, died.
We were accompanied by a veteran player, max level white mage. His pants had the very rare (and hidden) ability "0.5% chance to fail action against dragoons". This is because ennemies can also have classes.
So he tried to raise our dragoon friend and failed, with the flavor text "too intimidated to act"
The idea of a max level player being intimidated by a dead character not even half his level was too damn funny
@@diersteinjulien6773 This reminded me of when I was progging E5S on FFXIV as a WHM. I had recently set up a text macro on my rez to prevent overlapping swiftcast with the other healer. One of our teammates went down and I went to rez them, but I misclicked so I still had the boss targeted. The message "XYZ casts Raise on Ramuh" popped up in the chat even though the spell obviously didn't trigger, and my group got a lot of mileage out of teasing me for that one lol
One of my favourite quests in any game would be the one from Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where you're hired by one blacksmith to discover the magic spell a rival blacksmith is using to make his superior metal. Only you go there and discover that the rival blacksmith isn't using magic or anything, but simply singing himself a short song so he knows how long to heat the metal for. It's such a tiny thing with very little real payoff or significance, but its such a fun little trip from town to town to discover both an entirely understandable mistake and learning a bit of real life info about how blacksmiths worked their metal.
Its like the 'I learnt that bronze is made of tin and copper' all over again.
I LOVE that game, my dude, such a great setting and characters
That comes from the most imerssive RPG i played too
KCD proved to me that boring isn't always bad.
If the world is pretty and you're immersed in it, even running off to the monastery and living an ascetic life with a regimented routine and mundane errands can be the most memorable thing.
Then when you get caught unprepared on the road by bandits or something your heart is suddenly racing because you are no demigod and the danger feels very real.
Hanging out in the woods doing drugs with some lovely heretic women, getting drunk with a priest, hunting with the prince for nearly 40 minutes of real time?
Not exactly exciting, but it's memorable and just lovely.
Much more memorable than when I became an absolute chad able to put an arrow in the eye of any Cuman that came my way (through the magic spell of taping a crosshair to my screen)
I loved playing that game. I never did finish it. I remember an annoying boss fight I cheesed by shooting the dude in the head with 2 arrows.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a gem and every rpg should take lessons from it's quests and interactions. I remember every bit I played of it, and I played more than 500 hours of it.
My favourite quests are where the game tells you something and you gotta take it by word, ex.: where the assassin is gonna come at midnight, so you hide in the dark and set the time a bit before midnight. Or when you get intel how you should nagivate to Pribyslavitz. These are just a few examples, but very memorable ones for me.
"Nobody wants to struggle, but everyone wants the emotional richness that's given by enduring and succeeding at that struggle." This is a VERY human condition that manifests in just about all major life endeavors. We hate the difficulty of a struggle, but we highly value the satisfaction of accomplishment and the acquisition of new knowledge or experience. We have a saying in the writing community: "Nobody wants to write, everyone wants to have written."
"major life endeavors". That is the operative phrasing. Yes. We remember how hard it was, but that we persevered, in things like getting a degree, finishing a punishing elite miitary school, etc.
A video game isn't a major life endeavor... and if it is to you ("you" being a general sense of population)... you need a life.
The chad has spoken
But there are also different types of struggle. One struggle is a fight between EQUALS which is good, but the other is a struggle against a CHEATER which is bad. And raid bosses are CHEATERS. Take a good movie or anime fight. The best are the ones where the protagonist and antagonist are equals, where the fight could go either way and so the fight has episodes that build up the tension as each character gains and loses the advantage during the fight. But there is no real tension like that in a raid boss fight. It is just a nonentity carrying out a set pattern irregardless of what is happening and you win if you perform the set choreography without error. There is no interaction or fight as no one fights the other. Your blows don't have any effect on the boss and the boss just attacks randomly based on the algorithm given it.
@@mgass1354 I disagree. Two things can be true at the same time. I can both look back at university and be glad I successfully finished it. But also get a similar response if I think bank to my first Dark Souls, Blight town, queelag, wheel skeletons etc. I think you can have both.
@@1IGG
"be glad I successfully finished it".
This is not the same premise that Josh has been building on in his video's; that MMO's require struggle for people to be happy, that people's identity can and usually do revolve around MMO's they play, etc.
I play video games to pass the time and if I'm not enjoying playing the game, I don't play it. I play MMO's with my gf/caregiver to give us something we both can do together. If we aren't having fun, we don't play that MMO.
Josh talks about MMO's becoming people's identity, and adds on top of it, that MMO's require struggle in order for people to be happy.
To this day, my identity still revolves around having spent 10 yrs in the military as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist. My identity doesn't revolve around playing MMO's or video games. It doesn't even revolve around me having spent several years in law enforcement.
Was it the struggle to finish NAVSCOLEOD? Was it that I am a Gulf War veteran? Was it being in a warzone, twice? Maybe. Maybe it was the struggle, the danger, overcoming it and surviving that I my identity still revolves around having been EOD.
On some level, Josh isn't wrong. There ARE people in the world whose identity revolves around playing video games. Streamers, pro league gamers. And, given they use games as an income, it is understandable.
The casual gamer? No.
Enjoying a game, being glad you finished a game... is not the same level that Josh discusses.
Great video, but I don't agree with Callum about the full-loot pvp. I was a PKer in UO ages ago. I didn't do it for the risk/reward thing. I did it, because I was petty and liked making other players suffer. I thought it was hilarious. THAT'S why full-loot pvp worlds fail, because of people like my younger self.
And those are the only people who enjoy that sort of gameplay ultimately, the most toxic ppl you can find.
@@omarcomming722 you sound pretty sure of yourself for someone saying something that they literally have no way to prove.
I love risk reward gameplay and UO type virtual worlds, it is people like her younger self that ruin those worlds for others by getting waaayy too sadistic in there.
@@omarcomming722 that's just not true in the slightest
Weird because I was blue and didn't care that much about being killed by a red because you could harvest or craft everything and had dozens of sets of armor or regs in the bank.
@@saltyscrublyfe9862 except it sort of is. There are two kinds of pvp - arenas and open world. Arenas are fun, balanced, you choose to engage with it. Open world is the opposite, some games force you into it whether you like it or not, other games hide progression in pvp areas. The majority of players in open world pvp are there just to ruin someone's day. When they meet a real pvper, they melt instantly because all they know is how to Lord their power over people weaker than them. Its pathetic.
Hogger was a gnoll. My favorite boss was Edwin VanCleef. Simple dude got hired by Stormwind to do a job and gets screwed out of his pay so he starts a gang and terrorizes people of Stormwind
Not THAT simple, he was being groomed to be Shaw's successor as Spymaster of Stormwind, while being a Stonemason Guildmaster was his day job (and his real passion by all accounts), he was also a highly trained assassin/spy as well.
Van Cleef got shafted so hard... This was a boss I hated killing and wanted to side with him instead.His methods were wrong but he was the wronged party.
i absolutely loved the political commentary behind edwin and the defias, and it sucks so badly that they never *really* followed through on making them more than fodder enemies and early bosses
Been binging through all of your fantastic content these last couple months so imagine my surprise when I hear my name mentioned! Absolutely flattered mate, love what you do, cheers for the shoutout
After playing world of warcraft for some many years, there is still only one quest I really cared about: Timmy.
In the warcraft 3 reign of chaos, as you play with arthas, a mother in a village tells you that his son timmy was kidnapped by thieves.
There was no reward mentioned, but still, arthas would stop his current quest to go save Timmy. You find the thieves, you can hear timmy asking for help from, the cage he is in (he has voice lines), you kill the thieves and rescue him and then you give him back to his mother. Timmy mentions that other people have been taken by orcs (probably while you were saving him), so you set out to save those people. Many chapters later, when you come back to the city, you see that the city was already taken by the scourge, and there is a ghoul named timmy in your way that you have to kill. That was the first time arthas was forced to kill an inocent and someone he cared about (in game at least, cause he had to kill his wounded horse in the book before), and probably the first step into arthas dark path, eventually leading to the culling of stratholme, the event that broke him and turned him from savior of people to a guy just caring for revenge
"Make failure fun."
Josh, you need to realize that you're essentially asking the developers of modern MMORPG's to go against their core design principle - "Don't make failure fun. Instead make it frustrating. Not frustrating enough to make players quit playing altogether, but frustrating enough that they would consider buying our solutions to that failure. Simply put, monetize people's frustration from failure."
That's not core design principle , that's core maximum profits with least effort principle
@@imran8880 unfortunately that's where game design is going. Its very difficult for indie devs to not only get noticed, but to become popular enough to survive, and its even rarer to find a company that makes a game tor be fun, rather than generate maximum profits. And the thing is, it works. They know it works. And it's going to be forced into games regardless of if people like it or not. There's no real competition at the moment and people have slowly accepted it and make excuses to justify it.
I've been playing Black Desert Online for a year and a half. I've "saved the world" at least 13 times already but the quest that always stuck to me was "Travelling with Rullupi".
For context, the character you pick of whichever class will always be amnesic and not remember anything. So everything in this world is canonically new to you yet the story never stops for a sec so you can "smell the flowers".
So, by pure chance you meet this small adventurer called Rullupi in a bar and she invites you to go on an adventure to explore the lands. It's just you sightseeing some points in the world while Rullupi fills you in on some details. At one point we are drinking beer at the top of a bell-tower while looking at the wheat-fields.
Those quests where the most wholesome experience I had in any mmo that I can remember and I can only do them once PER ACCOUNT ffs :(
That's one of my problems with most MMOs. It seems like everything is overtuned like DBZ power levels. Story threats and damage numbers are merelly pumped up to silly levels and that's it.
I've recently started playing GW2 again, having played it YEARS ago before I knew 'how' to MMO.
ALL the STORY Content after you finish the Base Game (which if F2P these days) is REALLY hard. Like; you gonna DIE. It feels AMAZING to NOT have Story Content 'spoon fed' to me after years of being OP AF outside of 'End Game' content in an MMO.
I don't mind the numbers honestly, but I don't like taking galactic threats for the 3 millionth time
It's just a cop-out for having to actually write with quality, a lot of the time. Often, when MMOs try to do smaller stories it falls completely flat because usually they aren't really trying and the story is just a vehicle for content. So the bigger, the better, because you'll probably not notice as much.
@@Ithirahad The more grand and world-changing the event, the less you'll notice it.
I love ESO but almost every main quest has something to do with saving the world, i was just doing it because I wanted to complete them to end my subscription.
Hogger had that heroes story of being beaten up by a strong villain and you going away training and gathering friends to defeat them later.
Also why everyone remembers those 3 orcs that gank you in redridge
I just did a small quest in Xenoblade X where a character wants to go exploring with you, and on the way they meet an alien who they're initially scared of but stuff happens and they become friends, then the alien's life is put in danger and I genuinely cared more about the outcome of this 15 minute story than a LOT of main narratives.
Hey Josh, I think an excellent example of a great quest in Old School Runescape that is just about a small problem in a small part of the world is - The Hand in the Sand; Over the course of that quest I started to care about Bert, and I was so happy with how the ending turned out with his infinite sand pile.
But at its core the quest is a comedy-centric murder mystery investigation, and it's very short.
It reminds me when were around level 60 with my two friends in LOTRO, and we went to level 75 area, where actually challenging mobs were around. And if you are fighting against a mob 8+ LVL higher than you, you can't deal strike damage to them. Only DoT works. And we didn't have much DoT. Yet we attacked it. Used all of our potions, healing through it and at then end we managed to beat it (while killing other little mobs as well). We didn't get anything, because you don't get reward from too high quests either. However, we did a very hard thing and it felt... really amazing
A friend of mine and I duo'd an overpowered world boss on a private server once. Took 2 hours of constant health management and it was a slog that felt amazing. 15 minutes later a single player with maxed gear came over and killed it in a minute or 2... was a good night.
I absolutely hate going back and forth over the same spot for hours looking for something.
When I find it I don't feel proud that I was able to figure out, I feel like questioning whether the rest of the game is even worth playing.
It's possible to make a struggle that is engaging and thoughtful. But simply making something hard to find simply to waste player's time is not that.
Retail WoW is the game for you obviously.
the find a item.
there is a balance of find x and the only way to find x is to stand exactly at y do /dance, /flirst /joke and nowhere is there even a mention on this.
there was a quest to return a leave to its owner bo hints on where said owner was.
I thought this be a druid thing(wow vanilla) so off to darasus/thunder bluff) nothing.
I just needed to know where to stand to complete the quest.
When i started playing MapleStory there was a thanks giving event with a special mob outside of the towns, the turkey commando, it wasn't a boss level mob, it was a one hit kill for mid level and up players but for a new player was a boss like being i barely remember anything else about the first month of play aside from having to sneak away from that cyborg turkey...
Maplestory with the good old every 30 minute airship to Orbis with a chance of spawning lv75 Crimson Balrogs...
I remember mushmom on my assassin. I remember the el nath zombies. I even remember Zakum.
I remember going into the wilderness in OSRS when I was low level since I wanted to explore what things were there. I was killing these undead monsters in a graveyard when I noticed a dungeon/cave enterance. I went in and was met by the Corporal Beast which nearly killed me. I somehow managed to escape.
Hogger was a marker of being able to stomp the next zone... that and the lvl1 Hogger raids.
I played SWTOR at launch with a friend, he was a Sith Warrior and I was a Sith Inquisitor. I enjoyed the story, we would go through each other's quests to see that story and help each other with our solo duties. This got to a point in the final Sith Warrior quest where my friend was level 46 fighting the level 50 final boss, Darth Baras. Level 46 is the lowest level you could do that fight, since anything lower and your attacks would miss or only hit for 1 HP. I came in with him as a level 41 healer, and when my friend would die, I would try and keep myself alive long enough for him to respawn and run back to the instance. This took 4+ hours. I found a small corner where the boss couldn't hit me with his lightsaber and could only hit me with a ground AOE. This had me spam-healing myself and jumping to hopefully avoid the blind AOE, and on the last attempt I remember my friend loading into the instance with the boss at 2% health right as I died, and he won. We had our "Darth" titles at level 46 and 41 and gladly showed it off. It's the most intense MMO memory I've had in 20 years of playing the genre.
I literally don't even remember the name of the final boss of my story, but Darth Baras is burned into my soul.
your final boss would be Darth Thanaton
One of my favorite role playing games is Ars Magica. The magic system is awesome, and unique, but what I really love about it is how the game is player-driven. The storyteller develops adventures based on the objectives of the players. For example, one player has decided they want to make a magic item that will give them invisibility. But there are rare reagents that will need to be acquired to do that, and this can turn into an interesting adventure, introducing new allies and enemies, power struggles, etc that can have repercussions in the future.
Computer games don't do this level of player-driven quests yet, but I suspect they're around the corner with tools like GPT-3. Once they happen, it should revolutionize the RPG experience again. The next step beyond open world games.
BEGONE BOT
34:16 On the topic of "hardcore" PVP, there's a way to keep the tense fights over unique rewards without having to punish the loser. You can still have unique and desirable locations in PVP zones, but also have killed players drop some sort of unique item instead of their own items when they die. Could be weapons, could be unique buffs that can be applied to existing weapons, or could be an exclusive currency for unlocking said rewards. Say it's made of soul residue or something.
Id take ears like diablo 2, turn them in for currency that you can spend on near BiS gear for whatever lvl you are. Even just transmogs and mounts. Hell, rare hair dyes. You can super reward pvp players and let them show off without really punishing the pve lambs they are trying to hunt.
Basically the hole wow has pigeon holed themselves into. You have legendary weapons to save a threatened world. Then all of a sudden they're small potatoes to the new evil threatening the world and the item you get... But then saving the universe requires you to kill 10 boars 😑
Also love how the entire chat starts spamming "HE WAS A GNOLL NOT A PIG" 😂😂
What I think is a little ironic here is that punishing mechanics, which you see a lot in old MMOs, are a huge culprit for pushing people toward guides. If you know you're going to be punished for failure, with losing items, breaking items, losing experience or durability, you're going to be less inclined to take a challenge on blind or to experiment with the knowledge you've gained. You're going to want to avoid that punishment by using the safest strategy possible, and consulting someone who's already done it is about the safest way you can find. Punishing the player for failure makes them pursue safety over fun.
@4:33 "I want to be an adventurer going on an adventure, doing heroic things for people who I care about, not just saving the world for nameless legions" - For me The Witcher 3 gave me the feeling of doing heroic things for people I care about.
13:45 Pretty much spot on. Went out on a backpacking mountain ascent trip with like 6 people, me and one of my buddies stayed an extra night. Started pissing rain while we were driving around looking for a new spot. We parked and set up a makeshift lean-to with a tarp to get the stove going and a fire started. It was amazingly fun, and I hardly remember anything else from the weekend.
I always used to remember in vanilla WoW, seeing "The Crossroads is under attack" and "The Barrens is under attack" and people rushing on to their mains to tackle groups of invading PvP'ers and that was always fun; players making it something sporadic and cathartic, rather than planned and to a certain extent, we all now have stabilisers on our bicycles when we go for a brisk ride.
Also, are we meant to care about the world we "live" in, through the lives of the NPCs we meet and how much they love the world?
Really liking these discussions; I feel developers could really benefit from reflecting on experiences like you guys had.
This is why I’ve found much relaxation after beating Cosmic Ocean in Spelunky 2 as well as loving the community aspects in Oxygen Not Included. I think the hardships of the former have genuinely helped me
Challenges in general are a funny thing. For example, failing in the arena in worldofwarcraft was a terrible experience i never really wished to face. I gave it a try, but everytime i lost it felt like i wasted my time. Why? Because there are (apart from my personal skill) too many variables which are out of my controle. Ironically, winning also didnt feel good. You got some ranking points and the feeling that the suffering will probably be over a little bit sooner. Even after reaching gladiator, i just learned the mount and forgot about everything.
On the other hand, failing in eve online which also results in loosing time AND loosing assets, never felt like that. I immediately knew what i had done wrong. Maybe i was not watching my back enough. Maybe i had cargo waaay too valuable. Maybe i just took a risk and payed for it. I KNEW i learned something and got better.
Winning in eve was also a very different experience. It feels incredibly good to win because you outsmarted someone. Because you were the more patient hunter, or maybe your trap was just too well laid. It also helps when you are with 300+ people in voice and the shared happyness or agony is ringing through your ears.
The point i am trying to make is, a good challenge is only a good challenge when
a)...the game does not give you a way to avoid it quickly. Nobody cares if you beat a challenge or paid for a boost. For the community, its equally worthless if both options are available.
b)...you can share it with others. Sure, beating a hard singleplayer game can be fun as well, but lets be honest its always better when you can brag about it ;)
c)...its a good balance between time investement and personal skill.
See for me losing in Eve felt like I was cheated. It was shit. It was cheap everytime. Either I stood no chance because of numbers or they stood no chance because of numbers. Either I got ganked when I was doing something else and didn't want to be bothered, or I ganked them when they were doing something else and didn't want to be bothered.
The only people who can claim Eve is good are awful psychopaths who gain joy at the suffering of others they inflict.
@@GeorgeMonet Exactly! It doesnt even try to be balanced, everything works around planning, amassing numbers, the better ship composition and so on. Its always driven by player choices, player planning or human error.
Now, i get that you dont like it that way and its totally understandable. You might even be right that it takes the mind of a psychopath enjoying to inflict pain onto others *giggles madly*.
And maybe eve isnt the best of examples, there seems to be a very large spectrum of emotions being connected to it. The point i wanted to bring across is, when you are loosing, there are a certain amount of factors which make you feel less bad or even good:
a)The feeling that you have learned something and improved
b)The feeling that you have lost because someone was either better than you or that you yourself made an error
c)The feeling that, besides loosing, you got something out of it. Some progress in any way.
Nothing is worse that loosing AND knowing that you have lost the most valuable thing in your life, time. Thats why i brought up the wow arena. They TRY to balance it, but there will always be fotm combinations objectively stronger than others. You have no authority about who you will fight or to NOT take a fight (which only means not interacting with the arena at all). Worst of all, though, is that when you loose you actually loos ranking points. I get it that its a must have to establish a ranking system, but honestly when there are factors which are out of your controle, loosing double feels REALL bad.
@@termagant425 From his comment I gather that he has no idea what he is talking about. So it is kinda sad to see people bash something they don't even understand. To us EvE players losing shit and being content for others is just part of game and we smile because even if we died like complete morons it was still good time. I was micro gang and ceptor/saber pilot 70% of my play time. My ships were cheap to run and I made all my isk doing pvp by catching stuff and making content. To me that was winning eve.
My friend on other hand hated pvp but loved everything else but pvp is what enables him to do what he loves and that is do insane trade setup,industry and diplomacy. He was type that talked to enemies of our enemies and made schmes. So even if he wasn't pvping he affcted pvp by telling us who to shoot at XD
boiling down eve to that limnited perspective of newbie who doesn't even realise how game operates is rather ignorant.
The WoW Classic Tirion Fordring quest was obscure, REALLY hard, and had nothing to do with the main story, lol. But the whole thing was amazing. Read the book about him, it's great!
Hey mate out of interest which book is it? I've been collecting these warcraft books in the last few years and prefer alliance lore.
Was it really this hard? I didn't feel like it.
I did a few HC dungeons in tbc classic the other day. One of them being blood furnace, a dungeon notorious for hard hitting mobs, assassin's that insta your healer while you pull a pack. And the other shattered halls, big packs of mobs, patrols etc. I usually tank on my druid. But the group i joined had a tank already, so i joined as DPS. I very good geared, both tank and DPS. The group i joined all bought the key to enter before we began. Fresh lvl 70s. The tank was also a druid, but gear was.. heh. I never back down from a challenge and thought, "yeah let's do it!". We pulled the first pack and tank insta died. We wiped and corpsed our way back. We tried again and prepared each pull, talked strategies for crowd control etc. And while hard, we made it. And it was so fun. Probably the most fun I have had in TBC. Running those dungeons with guildies, chonked up in BiS gear, steamrolling mobs isn't fun. Sure good banter in disc and such is fun. But not the dungeon itself.
"The power process
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the "power process." The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy"
Ted Kaczynski would have been a great game designer.
woah based
This conversation I think perfectly explains why the Soulsborne series is so fondly thought of, the game is very difficult, while at the same time still giving you everything you need to win, and allowing you to do so with the aid of others.
Bit of a long story here, but I want to share it after seeing this clip. I spent literal years playing Dark Age of Camelot. My first character was a troll thane, and the hours played was well over 300 *DAYS* of play time. And though he was my main, he wasn't my only character.
I spent years of getting my teeth kicked in. Over, and over again, and coming back for more. I died in PvE, of course, which really hurt because you would lose experience when it happened and suffer a debuff, but the majority of my deaths were in RvR (or PvP nowadays). I grouped up in zergs (our game community made the term popular, and carried it over in usage to WoW), full groups, small groups, duos, and solo a lot. I just wanted good fights, and I was lucky enough to find a bunch of really talented people to play with in all aspects of the game. We formed guilds, and alliances, and my guild was tasked with managing the second biggest midgard guild on our server (Tristan).
But all of it was because I kept getting my teeth kicked in, and coming back for more. All of the failures in the game, all the jankyness, all of the intense fear I had when facing off against someone alone in Darkness Falls... all of it lead to a fight which I will never forget. Just me and my buffbotted friend out roaming the frontier. No speed buffs, just trundling along. A norse female warrior, and a troll male thane. A large group of stealthers attacked us, and they went for my friend (the female norse) first, which allowed me to dps down one or two, and use CC on a few (slam and the shield style that stuns from the rear). We both used everything we had learned for years in that fight. Timing (waiting to use Purge at the right time for instance), good camera control (using the time spent on zephyr to scout where everyone was, and click on the right target for the next assist train), using assist and /stick, not just spamming stuns, and making use of my spells and instas.
The fight lasted long enough for the immunity timer on zephyr (a crowd control spell that takes you for a ride slowly in a straight line on a gust of wind) to refresh, because I got hit with the spell twice. So the fight lasted (if I recall) 7 minutes, which is an eternity in a fight in any MMO.
We killed most of them, and sent a few running. I had to use Purge twice, and Ignore Pain once (full heal). They were buffed themselves, but entirely unorganized and unprepared, and we won.
When we were done, we went to a nearby tower, ported inside, and just laughed ourselves silly. We typed (with no voice chat available at the time) in nearly all caps, going over the combat logs (which I miss having in all games), comparing notes, figuring out every second of the fight to see *HOW IN THE HELL* we just pulled that off. And of course, we went through it to find out what we could do better *NEXT TIME.* It gives me goosebumps even now thinking of that fight and the happy conversation we had in that tower afterwards. And when we checked the logs, we learned *HOW MANY* we faced. 14 vs 2! What a day.
There are other moments I remember from DAOC. Many, actually, but nothing quite as insane for me as that day. Years of trial and error and experience leading up to one glorious fight. My friend and I getting the penultimate "good fight" out of the game we both loved for years. No other MMO holds that same emotional investment. I've had glimpses of this kind of thing in other games, where I have had to pit my brain and reflexes up against tough opponents and come out ahead eventually, but so few games are made for this kind of reward. Most of them are made for the "Bazinga!" crowd, or for people who stream and make money off the game. I am just grateful I had so many good memories from the games I played, especially the MMOs, and all of that is from repeated failure followed by a success that *MEANS* something.
17:27 This instantly created a Fallout style animation in my head like "Having trouble with Raiders giving you trouble when you're just trying to trade your goods? Have no fear! The [Guild Name] are here!"
And it's just a little ad for their service that goes around on a forum or something like that.
Also, NO player should ever have to PvP if theyh want, and NOR should they have to "just buy things off of PvP." Those who don't want to PvP should never be dependent on those who do choose to PvP, and those who do want to PvP never deserve any special benefit for doing so. The benefit is that you enjoy PvP and have fun doing it, that's it.
This. I'm so sick of extra rewards and content being gated behind PVP. It immediatly implies that players are better and more preferred by the devs for wanting to play pvp and helps contribute to this weird video game elitism of pvp gamers bullying players not interested in pvp. It's weird to have some games be taken over and controlled by players who's only goal is to keep you from your idea of fun.
MMOs are too reward-based in general.
@@zappodude7591 I don't know, I think that making players feel rewarded for the time they spend in the game is a good thing, I just think that there needs to be flexibility so that players feel rewarded for doing the parts that they feel are fun, rather than being pressured into the parts that they don't feel are fun.
as they were thinking up of small connecting quests, i remembered one island in lost ark where you help a baby bird fly again
The game Gloria Victis does full loot PVP right, you are allocated 10 points and a 30 second time limit from when they die. A weapon or piece of armour is 8 points, while crafting materials are 2 points.
So, someone COULD take your main weapon but they could only take one extra smaller item. The item economy however is good as you can make your own weapons/armour or buy them off the auction house. There are events in which looting is off so you can enjoy it without risk outside of durability loss of your gear. While you are always free to gather a group on your own to take another factions location, or even go solo to capture smaller ones like mines, lumber mills and farms.
If you don't know about it, I'd suggest you look at it, I enjoy it.
So it is not full loot.
@@michaelh878 Closest you'll get without the game becoming too cancer
Technically it's partial looting :P I've played it for a long time...the system works pretty well, it gives you the opportunity to get some items if you win a fight (or you can always decide not to loot), while it doesn't get frustrating for the losing player.
It's also worth mentioning that it's not that hard to get back the equipment you've lost, and you don't need the best items to be competitive, so at the end it can be enjoyed by hardcore or casual players alike :)
@@spets5355 It's the best way to do it, in my opinion.
It means the killer has to think about what they want since there's no auto sorting in bags. So if they have messy bags, you gotta be fast.
I feel if they turned it into full loot (remove the points but kept the timer) people would just start using bots to mass click everything.
I feel like ultimately, unless the entire game is built around making full loot as fair as possible, it's never going to be fun for both sides and it's demoralising enough when someone camps a quest spot and kills you over and over and take a bit of your gear every time
Truly the best clip in a josh strife hayes clips channel is a 56min masterpiece. Chef's kiss*
Guild wars 1 was kinda like this because the max level was 20 and you could easy reach it. But the whole campaign went on for much longer
You got to 20 pretty late in the original campaign. Difference was they didn't raise the cap in the expansions. And if you started from lvl1 in those you did get to lvl 20 earlyish in their campaigns.
Callum and Josh, two people whom's videos have been on while I've been planning D&D and painting in the background, good times!
The skills needed; imagination, organization, tolerance for boredom, attention span etc. Is no longer generally present in a demographic younger than say 40. (I don't know where that line goes exactly, I'm halfway to 60). These are the skills we learned when I was a child, as our primary source for entertainment was to be told to go outside and play before and after dinner. There were no screens to drip feed us dopamine or systems to condition us to be consumers and so on. If we wanted to have fun, we mostly had to make it up ourselves. We didn't care about the gaze of others and we went largely unmonitored. From I was around 8, we ran all around town without adult supervision, and were forced to figure out what to do and how to deal with nothing but some advice and some simple rules to guide us.
If you present situations/settings that require the aforementioned skills in games today, many players will simply have no idea what to do, even if by my standards the solution is right there in front of them. And even if they can, they won't be inclined to do so because it takes time and effort. I've seen it a million times by now and it gets worse every year. The things you talk about in the video that goes to the fundamental reality building blocks of the human psyche are absolutely true, but they don't necessarily apply to a scenario that's pathological in nature. Which in my opinion is where we're currently at, generally speaking.
I saw an interesting example of this only yesterday. Your boy Asmongold tried Minecraft for the first time (a game who's popularity partially contradicts what I'm claiming here to some extent, thank God). Asmon is a clever guy who's played games all his life and he manoeuvred his immediate situation very well. But he is also a guy that's been conditioned by a theme park MMO, and what struck me as I watched him play, was that at no point did it appear to occur to him that he could stop reacting to impulses in his environment and the implied steps on the "achievement ladder" in order to start structuring/organizing and self defining his in-game reality. That's the _first_ thing I would have done if I saw that those tools were available to me. I know it's just a video that's primarily meant to be entertaining and fun (and it was) but still, I wonder. If someone as resourceful as Asmongold is tied to these new neural pathways, what chance does an even younger member of the audience have to go against the conditioning our new reality has exposed us to? Subconsciously they want it because they're human and it has actual substance, but someone has to give them the space and the basic skills to recognize it in the first place.
Oldschool Runeacape draws heavy inspiration from Terry Pratchett especially with the quests. Even more cool, and I'm sure Josh and Callum would agree, is the tongue in cheek British humour and easter eggs thrown throughout the entire game and npc dialogue, and npc names.
I feel like if New World had more soul in it with that level of quirky detail, it could have been a massive game for people just to play for fun.
These positive discussions are a wonderful blessing, and I believe, will inspire, someone, somewhere, to move past the backwards facing paradigm! GET SOME!!!
This is what I love about Witcher 3. The scale of everything was big, but it made the story revolve around people Geralt cared about directly and the writers made you care about them. You didn't want to save the world from the Wild Hunt, you wanted to save Ciri from the Wild Hunt. Gaunter O'Dimm is probably the best written antagonist ever, and if you want, he could be your ally.
If a game can make you care THAT much about some old lady looking for her favorite and only frying pan?
The two quests that stick out at me in WoW, and I played for years, were the questlines that involved Tirion and his son in vanilla, and the one with the dying paladin in Litch King.
The Lord of Vampryum questchain in RS was awesome! Loved doing them and enjoyed them for the story bits.
another example of a great villain: Handsome Jack from Borderlands (2). the character makes the quests you go on extremely personal and imo it gets you invested in the story.
With respect to full loot pvp games like EVE (which I play), part of the excitement is undocking in something expensive and pvping in it, when you actually have something to lose and it matters it adds an extra thrill to the game.
Reminds me of playing WoW back in the days of Legion; after hitting level cap and doing World Quests, I'd intentionally go solo the 5-person group Rare Elites for those World Quests because it was the most challenging thing I could do without others. I was playing a Paladin, so it was possible for me to actually do that IF I played carefully and used every ability I could when it was needed...it's honestly about the only thing I really remember from Legion outside of making a Mage and grinding out reps for fun.
In Everquest original, the game gave you a better sense of progression from level 1 to 8 than World of Warcraft does from 1 to 60. Why? Because you were a flea when you started, you struggled to afford your spells and when you reached level 8 with your new pet and set of spells you felt like a god. Then you had a new reachable target, you had to reach level 12 for that talent or spell. That's how leveling is fun, make the journey worthwhile and rewarding.
So many good points in this video. Worth a watch even for people who have never played an MMO.
My favorite thing to do in games, single player or multiplayer, is go to locations I am not powerful enough to handle. I'll use stealth, I'll "pull" enemies and try to kill them one at a time, I'll run away. I do this just because I realized that is more memorable and fun to me. It comes from playing games without total level scaling, like Morrowind and Asheron's Call, even early WoW, where you can take a risk and maybe get a reward. In Morrowind, everyone remembers Daedric Ruins, because you can go to them early on, they are difficult, and the loot is good. In early Asheron's Call, just getting from one town to another was difficult. In games with large worlds, part of the fun is just getting to a new location and seeing it.
The least enjoyable moments for me are games that become too easy, and games where I max out my character, where there is nothing more I can develop. Once a game gets easy, or I max out, I either race to the end of the game, if it's close, or I just quit. My motivation disappears as soon as there is no challenge and it's all just going through the motions. One thing I like about Elden Ring, for example, is that the game does get harder at the end, to the point where people complain about it being too hard. But if it got easier - which 90% of games do - I would have got bored with it. I recently quit Elder Scrolls Online because the devs have constantly made the game easier and easier, to the point where nothing holds my attention any more. And I've saved Tamriel a dozen times, from a dozen different daedric princes, so I just don't care any more. I am the Chosen One x12, and have no interest in being the Chosen One x13.
One of the achievements that I still remember the most is when my Shadowknight finally completed all the quests to get his Darkforged armour in Everquest back in 2000. And getting my Dark Reaver (2h sword) was such a blast. There were great moments in other games (I still have fond memories of DAoC and COH) but things have changed. Doing my class quests in WoW were fun but they were not as challenging as they were in EQ. The last time I really had a blast in WoW was during Legion. The Class Halls were really fun.
I use to play World of Warcraft back when Wraith of the Lich King was about to come out. The thing I remember the most of my time in WoW is not any given quest or dungeon. It was the toxicity of chat in the Barrens zone. It was my whimsical trade chat messages to advertise the "slightly cheaper then vendor prices" 6 and 12 slot bags to get the ads to stand out. It was me and a few new friends struggling our way through Shadowfang Keep at-level with my warlock's Void Walker as the party's tank.
34:15 While I agree with Callum's point about the pvp needing some risk or reward, I think full loot pvp has some very bad caveats it enforces.
I've played alot of hardcore PVP games like Dayz, ARMA wasteland, RUST, ARK, etc. and the most common thing that happens in a game where you will lose all your stuff when you die, is that players STOP using any of the good stuff.
Good gear gets left in bases and vaults because no one wants to lose the thing they spent ages getting so they hide it away for that mythical future where they are garaunteed to not lose it, which never comes.
Full loot PVP only works in games like battle royales because players are returned to even footing the second they start a new match, this doesn't happen in MMORPG's and results in winners just winning more and eventually lessening the experience for existing players and completely ruining any chance for new players.
Also him saying "Don't go to the PvP area then" just results in dead PvP zones, or worse, forced PvP because the rewards are too good not to do it.
Essentially hardcore loot PvP forces players to either risk more than they want to or go in at a disadvantage, that results in them not participating, so Callum saying that not risk or reward ends up with dead PvP is correct but his argument back is very short sighted.
This is true.
I would also like that add that in full loot PvP games like DayZ, Rust, etc the risk of losing all your stuff becomes overbearing on the community as a whole. Eventually there is no interaction between players because everything is driven by the mentality of "kill on sight" because you simply cannot afford to risk any sort of interaction besides that. It gets old extremely quickly.
That becomes the complete opposite of "emergent gameplay" and turns the community into what may as well just be a giant Quake 3 free-for-all deathmatch. Nobody talks or interacts, everyone just hides and kills on sight.
There's only so many times one can have hours/days/weeks of work robbed from them within literal seconds before they just stop bothering.
And yet people play games like DayZ and it's ilk because of the seriousness off the interactions, the extremely tight-nit communities that form, the thrill of having to take things slow and methodical to avoid death.
Or the excitement of PVP of EVE/Albion Online, or the full economy the games have.
The kind of experience you can't get if you remove the full loot PVP.
If you can't stand the full loot PVP, then don't play that game. Play another game without the full loot PVP. Sure, it's not as interesting or thrilling, or as emotionally satisfying. But you want the benefits of a full loot PVP game, then you'll need to suffer the downsides of a full loot PVP game.
>this doesn't happen in MMORPG's and results in winners just winning more and eventually lessening the experience for existing players and completely ruining any chance for new players.
Not true.
Full loot PVP is a huge factor in leveling the playing field. In Albion online, the Yellow Zone (Open world PVP without full loot PVP) is filled with people running around in the best possible gear they have. 8.3 tier masterworks, running around ganking random people, taking chests and dungeons from newer players, etc.
Those people are not present in the Red/Black zones (Open world PVP with full loot PVP). They don't dare take that gear out into the actually dangerous places. People are much more likely to be running gear much less expensive out of fear of losing it, leading to fairer fights.
Similar to EVE Online. The less risk inherent in a PVP activity, the more expensive and powerful the equipment people tend to use, leading to older players having more and more of an advantage. Station camping war deced players in Jita, with neutral logistic ships has insanely little risk, that people would pump many billions into their ship to do it.
The vast majority of people aren't using ships worth a tenth of that for generally roaming around nullsec.
At 32:00 the talk of repair and the idea of time being involved in anything. This is one of the reasons I eventually went Engineer on my Paladin. It saved time with repair bots, portals, and a bunch of other things.
53:58 the struggle to get the OG paladin mount in WoW was amazing and I felt so amazing once I had it.
I think the struggle has to seem doable and worth the reward. For each player that will change though. I don't care about better stats, I am a fashion princess, so a cool looking reward > useful reward.
I really liked the story narrative and personal connection in the Gothic series. If you look at those games, the maps are pretty small and you can jog from one village to another pretty fast. But it is packed with content. Each character has a character and does not feel to be there just for giving quests. Every person has problems that need to be solved.
That RuneScape handbook is what got me into RuneScape. Bought it at a school bookfair in 4th grade
I recently started playing a vanilla server for WoW for the first time do to the influence of a friend. Not gunna lie, I ot pretty addicted to it and it is without a doubt far more merciless than newer MMO's. But when I heard you say 'Hogger' I immediately had a tiny PTSD attack. It is a reference I am now a part of, despite my limited experience, and hearing it I now understand that my recognition of the subject is something that expands to a much larger, communial level makes me think I will not forget it anytime soon.
It is fun hearing you guys bring these perspective truths to light, experience them in real time, and now be able to realize that I have inadvertently become part of a communal legacy that expands much further back than my own experience.
Awesome discussion! So glad it was uploaded :).
Makes me appreciate this game I’m playing called “Pillars of eternity”. You go into a town and get to see the despair in the locals day to day way of life under an oppressive lord,
subsequently when you de-lord the lord and ‘save’ the people you feel so good about it- (and bad about the people your choices effected negatively).
Awesome stuff!
The odd thing is, I think my favorite bit of World of Warcraft was during BC when I made a Dranei Shaman and maxed out reputation in every faction by clearing every zone from lowest to highest, doing every quest. I specced healer, always asked people if they needed the group quests or help, and healed the way through all the instances for the extra quests. I saw a lot of people pass me in levels, but they stayed friends and helped me out a few times. It was a really cool pilgrimage.
About the struggle and dungeon finder. I think the saying "no one wants to struggle" is not entirely correct. Surely I speak only for myself and how I feel games, but I can tell that I've always loved the dungeon finder in WoW despite many players might disagree with me. And you're right - I don't want to struggle with looking for a group for an hour for simple dungeon, or spending 5 minutes flying there. But I want to struggle in a dungeon. I want it to be challenging, I want it to be difficult, but I want to be focused on the interesting stuff and struggle on that rather than struggling on every single step starting on finding your group.
I believe there's nothing wrong in making some things easier and simplier and focusing struggle on the areas where it's needed.
The Lucid Nightmare was a very aptly named mount because it took me about 3 hours to figure out the maze. I think I had a double teleport trap map because I just could not make heads or tails of it when I was trying to draw it out in MS paint. But despite having a miserable time in that one part of it, the overall journey was quite fun as it took you all over the world to some otherwise forgotten locations to do obscure tasks. And the best part is, the community has to band together to piece together the puzzle. There's a big discord dedicated to figuring out the WoW secret quests that they occasionally put into the game.
For those that don't know, it gave players a randomized labyrinth where you had to collect 5 different colored orbs. However, your maze could have 1-2 "teleport traps" where one of the rooms moves you to somewhere else in the maze that you've already been, making it extremely difficult to map things out. It always moved you to a set location so it was possible to eventually figure out where it was, but all the rooms were seamlessly stitched together so there was no visual cue that the room you found teleported you. And that was only one part of the entire secret quest chain.
I haven't yet watched the full video, but this also ties into the urgency issue - if the main quest is about something that feels very urgent (say, saving the world, to a lesser or bigger extent) then side content like exploration and side quests that aren't specifically related to that effort feel disjointed and break the immersion and rp.
This is something that MMOs will always have because they never lock you into a corridor to complete these quests.
Without having seen the video, the immediate answer for me is "as much as you establish is normal, within reason". The game should establish within the first couple of hours the general difficulty, and aim to stick with it throughout. Obviously make it too tough and no one will play, but otherwise as long as it's consistent it's fair game.
Usually game need increase difficulty throughout itself, as you study game in the beginning, adapt to it in middle and master the challenges in the end. If game has plain difficulty and it has luck in variety in gameplay situations(it is hard to keep healthy amount if nothing changes), you gonna be bored after first 3rd part of the game as you already know how to play and you see that rest of the game will not change.
or making it more difficult as the time goes but still within reason
You just click into videos and leave comments without watching them?
@@farmerpiney first time on youtube?people comment and leave a dislike/like when the vid is 1 second old all the time
@Z isnt that just pure nostalgia?theres a reason why even disney recycle alot of their old content
okay I gotta say: WGS is a baller quest. And it was built up and a culmination of many preceeding runecsape quests. Lucien starts of as this unsuspecting man in a tavern who we hand the staff or Armadyl too at the end of the temple of Ikov quest, not understanding the gravity of what we have done (elder artifacts + mahjarrats = bad time). We then go through a whole bunch of other quests to unlock WGS where we learn more about the mahjarrat. During this time we also naturally level up and do more quests so we meet the slayer masters, the warriors guild dudes, hazelmere and cyrisus and arguably would build a meaningful connection within the limitations of runescapes immersive experience. WGS itself then weaves together many questlines, creating this feeling of a world that isnt just a bunch of theme park locations completely separated from one another but rather a continuous intermingled environment (e.g. the crux equal being formed, infiltrating general khazards base, the black knights shown as a more serious threat, furthering the lore behind the mysterious Guthix at the point in the lore). The cutscene where lucien just easy mode kills almost all the slayer masters/warriors guild dude and hazelmere was pretty devastating and probably the most a runescape quest ever hit me emotionally. Then the final part in the temple is just so eerie and ominous, I loved it. Plus that soundtrack when you fight the elemental guardian is fire.
In Warframe the efficient resource farm is a technical, organized group activity:
One guy supplies energy to the team, one guy doubles resources dropped, one loots bonus resources from corpses and the last one boosts the dmg. With randomized tileset you go into a survival/defence mission on a specific planet and it n survival you spread to look for a good room that will give you more enemy spawns.
Afk/chat while your team are everything down and pick up the loot from time to time. 20 minutes later leave and you are good with that resource for a long time.
I still remember that after years since I've dropped the game.
In Everquest, there was Fippy Darkpaw. There was highpass and the griffin near the Great chain Bridge. Stories that connect to us through struggle have meaning. Go to the next thing and click on the object isn't a struggle.
A part of the problem of shared suffering gameplay being memorable is it can be negative memories as well. It is dependant upon the people you suffer with on whether it ends up good or not. As an example I raided competitively in Rift in vanilla through first couple of expansions of it. We had a boss that we wiped to for 2 full raid slots before we defeated them. The thing that makes that a positive memory is not only was the raid together and not making stupid mistakes but majorly because a couple of raiders between wipes in the open air time continued to make us laugh and smile and joke and that made it "fun" in the moment frustrating and fun but in hindsight just a joy to remember. In contrast I've raided with different people and had my nerves grated on for hours and then I remember wiping in a raid in EQ2 in TSO and it was because people just weren't paying well enough attention and it made the night terrible and I still remember the night and the fight vividly but its not a positive memory. So you can't develop a game to assure positive memories and hindsight fun from suffering....that is community dependent, and the fact of the matter is most communities in most games are self centered, quick to complain, and toxic.
TLDR: Community makes social games better or memorable not the games themselves. Most communities online are bad in the modern day.
Josh in this video you talk about the PVP and PVE circles, the game that did this perfectly was called Dark Ages of Camelot, Darkness falls was an PVE dungeon that you got access to when your realm held the most keeps in the PVP area and once you got access to it, a bloodbath started with everyone going in and killing every raid party who was in their farming. From my 20 years of playing games this is the single best mechanic i have seen.
The majority of the items in the game were crafted and all the "best" crafting materials came from Darkness Falls :)
Absolutely love yours and callums joint vids
In FF14 most of the struggle is optional. Not only like high level raids, but also stuff to get rare outfits, pets or mounts. A friend of mine stayed up all night waiting for a rare boss to spawn, together with counless other players. Or ginded a boss 50 times to get the monster hunter mount.
Fishing is similar. Got to wait for the right weather in the right location to have a chance to get a very rare pet.
As optional as it may be, it still shouldn't feel pointless, time wasting, or annoying.
Do a thing a certain amount of times ? Sure, just a matter of Time and dedication.
Do a certain thing on a bonus objective (example : kill a certain boss within a certain amount of time) ? Sure, have a group dedicated to it.
But time-gating an objective, or making them extremely repetitive ?
My brother in god, that's what made me quitting FF14.
That, amongst other reasons.
On the topic of quest design, TBC and Vanilla WoW sam some of the most top tier quest chains in gaming in general.
Shadowmoon Valley specifically had The Cipher of Damnation and Teron Gorefiend's quest chain which are some of my favourites. Both also relate to what the guys were saying about making the players care but in different ways:
- In Teron's quest you were discovering what an absolute unit of evil the dude was up until the moment he possesed you, and you got to witness his power in your own hands.
- In the Cipher of Damnation, you reunited an old shaman with his sons and they all come along to fight a massive giant made out of demonic energy. The giant itself is mostly irrelevant but the series of tasks you do for the shaman and his sons really makes you care about the characters, as minor as they are.
My biggest memories in mmo's is from GW1 working with a couple and figuring our way through the game and then getting in to pvp religiously, as well as the world pvp in wow, suffering through it at low levels and then at high levels coming back to help with ganking security.
Callum's comments on bloodwood trees reminds me of why Josh's comments on PvP players and PvE players shouldnt be forced to mix; neither side really gets the other or wants what the other wants, it's just games companies stretching their mass appeal for profit forcing these two groups together and all you end up with is unhappy players.
In the original mod of Arma 2 Day-Z there was a man named Dr. Wasteland. The game was a full loot pvp sandbox where you could get shot and bleed out/break legs things like this. You could however log out with an injury to not die, but you'd need prompt help to survive when you logged back in. So people would post on the forums for help and get in contact with Dr. Wasteland or one of his so called "white list medics", people who would come save you.
It was pretty intense to go on a medic mission. You'd have to find a wounded guy who had like a minute or two to live max when he logged back in. Was the best combat medic type game thing i've ever took part in. Some of the medics even had helicopters and stuff and would med-evac people to safer locations.
that screenlayout says so many things
hearing lucid nightmare brings back memories of me spending 10 hours of mapping that damn maze its my default mount now just the feeling of completing it overshodowed the struggle
m best memories of mmo was doing quest with guildmates to get crafting material and roleplauing events in towns. the rush to max lvls to grind loot feels so emptu
I like challenge, so long as everyone on my team is on the same page.
My most memorable moment of defeating a raid boss in WoW was Heroic (before Mythic came around) Blackfuse from Siege of Orgrimmar during Mists of Pandaria. We wiped on that encounter over four hundred times over the course of maybe four weeks. It was such a complex fight on both a personal and a team level - you had to do your job properly, at the right time, working with multiple people. Each time we'd have one person make a mistake and cause a wipe (which when you've been at it nearly three hours solid, its understandable) or our collective damage output wasn't quite high enough or we just plain got unlucky and had to adjust the tactic very slightly.
When we finally defeated it? Oh, we were happy. So damn happy. We weren't a top guild, but we were ahead of the curve and had beaten one of the hardest raid encounters ever designed. And next week, we defeated it again the first try because we were so practiced at it and were now confident in our ability to do it. It was never easy - but it was manageable.
Then we had Heroic Garrosh. Maybe three hundred wipes, but its a longer fight so that took a solid month. Technically an easier fight, but exhaustion would kick in because each fight took over ten minutes. We eventually beat that too, and it felt good - but never quite as good as defeating Blackfuse.
For WoW, Jaina's story/quests was one of the memorable parts of BFA. And the Kyrian quest that sends you to redridge is one from Shadowlands. Or the tea party guy and quests I liked too in Revendreth. Or even how I used to enjoy making new WoW characters because of those initial 10 to 20 levels where it felt like I was tackling small scale problems even if the quests were still simplistic.
I remember armor repairs. People would keep multiple sets just because they'd run out of gold.
I played WoW from Wotlk Launch to MoP launch, quit, started again in legion, then quit around the midway point, started again in SL and quit again around halfway through. I can't name a single interesting quest-chain or kill quest aside from Wrath-gate questline that I would want to go do again simply for the story experience. All the zone quest-chains in SL are so forgetable that I barely remember anything about them.
Not an MMORPG but the sidequest design in Witcher 3 is one of the best I've ever seen. In most MMORPGs you would get a kill quest for a specific tough enemy, or a group of enemies and you would go kill that and it would be "super easy, barely an inconvenience". You would then forget about it in 10min because it is exactly like the other quests you've been doing the past 7hrs.
but for W3 I still remember tracking down the werewolf, and hunting down the Leshen, and discovering the vampire in Novigrad. I know it would be very difficult to have the same kind of movie-like narrative in an MMO BUT, it wouldn't be difficult to at least have the same kind of quest design. MMO quests are shallow busy work of chores weighing quantity and time sunk greater than quality and experience "go gather X of something", "go kill X of something", "go deliver this to that guy in the next town", because there is really nothing of substance here. You have to level up and this is it. and that practically makes up 90% of all mmo quests. Then end-game hits and you realize that the most important content of the game is about some great enemy you haven't heard of ever in the 30hrs of gametime you spend leveling from 1 to max level. You don't really know anything more than maybe their name so you don't really care. Now it is just about rewards and chasing that dopamine fix getting the good item gives you. MMOs needs to ditch the chore quests and start designing narrative driven experiences for every zone you're in with some interesting side-activities drizzled in. Maybe you're not the savior of the world at level 37 in the Red pine valley but maybe you can save some family from a curse and get revenge or the witch or discover that the family murdered the witches son/daughter by doing or finding something hidden (encourage exploration instead of just going from quest marker to quest marker) and that changes to quest objective, and that would be cool enough.
I remember how sucked up into the storyline of Infamous 1 and 2 I got. God damnit Zeke, you made me cry.
When i was a kid, i played WoW MoP and I still remember when I got my wind dragon. It was probably easier then most other things, but it was MY achivment and I still remember it to this day. Whenever I do play Live WoW I Always use my wind dragon since hes MY pet, the one I grew and nurtured. I dont really know what the last time was when I was proud like that.
I absolutely loved all the old school rpg games like the phantasy star games and original FF games. Failing was fun! There were no guides. You talked to people and had to remember their hints I. Order to make it through! I remember walking out of the first town in Phantasy Star and getting one-shot because I walked the wrong way! I went west instead of East and got merked! It was exciting!
This discussion reminds me of Acherons Call Battle Mage Quest that you had to start at level 4 and didn't get to truly complete until level 75+
Epic quest burnout sounds a lot like superhero movie burnout. You can only see the world get saved so many times from a blue sky laser before it starts to get boring.
For RS3, the fight with Zamorak actually ends (lore wise) with the hero losing his “godly” powers, and it now a mere normal mortal again. They’ve lowered the contextual power of the character so that less epic or grand threats are now more of a challenge to the character, so bosses and content moving forward do not have to be as epic for a good while now!
Your line "Maintaining friendships is effort" reminds me of how my friend connected the idea of "maintaining a friendship with old friends is akin to watering plants. It's not super hard, but you have to do it. Problem is, when you have a lot of plants, some get less water and they die anyway."
Speaking of catastrophic in-game events that then become "lore", proud to say I was there and part of when the Sleeper Awakened in Velius (EQ)
I totally agree with your point about villains. The Disney villains that frighten me the most are Gaston and Mother Gothel because they are both kinds of people you can meet in real life.
please upload more of the twitch talks!!!
I remember playing vanilla Everquest and while waiting for a goblin group in Highkeep spending my time in the pass guiding lost players to the zone they were looking to get to. I would spend hours just guiding people through a maze of mountain passes with my mage while waiting for a spot in a group and occasionally soloing a mob or two when nobody needed help.
Or playing vanilla wow and doing a blackwing raid as a test for getting into a raiding guild. Blackwing bugged out and did his opening breath weapon attack twice, killing all but 12 of us. I was playing a paladin and resurrected a druid (for some reason blackwing didn't tag me so I wasn't officially in combat) who further rezzed a priest. It took the 14 of us over 2 hours to kill Blackwing. I was juggling rarely used paladin abilities by tossing Judgement of Light and Judgement of Wisdom on blackwing to help with healing and mana regen for our healers. Got the invite to the guild after that.
I play a lot of GW2 and the latest expansion was pretty forgettable. I didn't really care about the world end proclamation. But I can remember this small Asura in Siren's Landing looking for artifacts. Explorer Hiffa. She sung her own theme song, was very insistent that you help her and thought she'd be famous after she brought all these artifacts back home. Then a wyvern attacks her and we use the artifacts we painstakingly got for her to pelt the wyvern down.
Hiffa then goes back to base camp with a crippled leg, disappointment and nothing to show for her adventure. A classic tale of hubris and I love explorer hiffa for it.
"I'm going to be so famous. Hiffa statues! Hiffa dolls for the kids! Galas in honor of-you guessed it-Hiffa! That's me!"
Oh God I remember that NPC. My favorite random NPC is a pirate Captain in Bloodtide Coast that sings a Tyrianized version of the Major General's song from the Pirates of Penzance after you complete his event.
2 that come to mind are the early investigation missions in Secret World. I had fun puzzling it out.
The other was the little merecat family side quest in Ori 2.
Sad, but it stuck with me.
Speaking of saving people, Prince Ali rescue. I still find that quest hilarious, how most of it is just setup for rescuing the prince and then getting the guard drunk so you can sneak him out. Another quest where you help someone is Dream Mentor, there you help an adventurer essentially battle his inner demons (I almost died on that quest, mainly due to the person you helping does nothing to actually fight the bosses in his dream world)..
one of the best feelings in video games is when you overcome a struggle and there is nothing that can beat that feeling. But the struggle has to be something that you can overcome and not something like trying to get an item and the struggle is that its rng if it spawns or not.
I’m struggling to understand your sentence structure. :D
So many things in life are about the delta. The change from low to high. A profound delta is what you remember. Not just with video games - think about the popularity of videos about power washing, lawn mowing, carpet cleaning, etc. What people are watching for is to see the noticeable transformation, and to witness order being created from chaos. The worse the chaos, the greater the delta and the more satisfying the transformation. It works in narrative design as well. Watching a character grow is more satisfying the greater the change in the character. Likewise with satisfaction derived from achievements in games of any kind. If you feel outmatched and hopeless but eventually succeed then that delta will be significant and memorable and satisfying in a way that subsequent clears will never be, because even though your faster clears represent demonstrably higher highs, the delta is smaller and feels less significant.
Brothers in arms people suffering together is how I felt when I first got into ARK and got lucky stumbling onto a server with mostly decent people in it back in 2015
struggling to just tame a trike and people helping me with basic stuff like finding metal to make metal tools
We suffered together and got frustrated together and formed a bond over it
I remember working so hard for my Val Hazek armor in Monster Hunter World, or endlessly killing Heide Knights in DS2 SotFS for their armor (it has a lower drop rate than the original game)
Such a fond memory of really *earning* those armor sets