Hand Holding
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@mrchipps said in Hand Holding:
I don't necessarily mind if the beginning of the game is easy. But if it gets to the point where I don't feel connected with the world or I can just watch netflix while playing I wont be invested enough to just play to play. I just hate getting to the end of a game like an MMO only to find you don't have to go to the world for anything.
Many games these days are doing that where you don't ever need to go into the world for anything and just teleport every which way which makes the world feel insignificant. You should want to feel like the world is alive
This right here. Devs spend many many man hours developing awesome worlds and then allow players to just teleport through them. I mean, yes, running around is kind of a pain but it will cause players to interact. A scene if you will...
I'm walking up a trail and spot another player. Will they attack me? Who are they? Maybe I should hide? Should I attack them? Is it a decoy with friends waiting to ambush me?
So many questions on such a simple encounter with another player.
Or walking up the same trail and see another player surrounded by goblins getting beat down. Oh damn, let me help this person. Goblins are killed and other person is grateful - a friend is made. They invite me back to their guildhall where all night festivities are going on.
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@kellewic I like the way that you put it. I have spent many hours in old game wondering this same thing. The fact that I died makes me learn. The fact that I made a new friend allows me to do the same thing in this case. It is about interaction and putting life into your world. If you take it away or don't have a point for the players to interact and do something out of common interest you won't have a following or make a strong game.
I think many game devs see that games are going towards all these hand holdy mechanics in their games forget that the worlds that really thrived had a following that build a backbone of community and life in their game. I think the hand holdy is where games go to die and try to just stay alive with the masses. The games that really hold meaning are ones that bring a new life to the table.
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@gothix said in Hand Holding:
@jetah said in Hand Holding:
@gothix said in Hand Holding:
They are making the game solo friendly, so it will not be as difficult as you would hope.
However, I do hope that at least a part of content will be difficult and require well organized groups, and player skills, so that only like 20% of player base (on average) is able to do it.
Not everyone should be able to do everything, otherwise whats the point if there is no competitivness. Competitive crowd will just leave and play something else.
Solo for most PvE but not PvP.
Why would developers create content, spending resources so 20% of the population can see said content?
Why did vanilla WoW have Naxxramas? (that only like 5% of population could do, and only 1% of population could clear it)
Because competitive players want to have something to work for, something to strive for, something that takes time and effort and isn't just easily doable. They want something that when they finally succeed to "have bragging rights on", to have accomplishment not reachable for everyone.
Competitive crowd is seeking MMOs like that, and if some MMO is made so everyone can simply do everything, then whats the point?
Of course, developers can chose to make MMO like that, but such choice will send a bulk of competitive players that like the challenge away to play something else.
PvP will of course be challenging - if care bears don't get their way and it ends up punished
however there should also be a part of PvE not doable by everyone and his mother.At least I'm hoping for such MMO. I don't want Farmville 2.0 with upgraded graphics.
and they stopped doing that when they noticed that only .5% completed Sunwell. They opened Wrath up for more of the population to see the end game and their numbers skyrocketed (which might not have a correlation but who knows).
now they offer different tiers so everyone can see the lore (even though mythic tier has a 'different' version).
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@jetah Sunwell was hard as fuck! I think only 10/20% of the guilds tryed to do it duiring TBC.
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@finland that's why they decided to change how the raids were designed.
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@jetah was a challange like naxx 40
I never cried for not having cleared it. It's somehow acheiving.
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@finland I think one thing that drew me to wow in the first place was that people could go at this place. It wasen't that I could do it but I could live through their accomplishments. It was cool to see the news on people clearing it. It was also super cool that you could aspire to be there one day. I think something like this level of difficulty is what drives people to want to achieve more.
One thing I wrote about in another post is that it would be cool to have something with high difficulty but award things that are not gear. Things that allow you to show off that you have the skill to accomplish something great is good enough and I bet that would get people to do it. If you have a 1st kill in the world golden trophy with the bosses head on it, people would go HAM looking to kill it. Same thing for silver and bronze. Just getting the trophy would be something of myth for most people and that would push people to try harder.
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@mrchipps Yeah that game was epic. Now everyone can get epic or legendary thigns but you feel common.
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The problem I see is that making everything soloable means nothing is challenging in reality. In a single-player game you can scale challenge by making it harder for ONE person. But in an mmo, even if something is slightly challenging by yourself all you have to do is find an additional person and now its easy as hell again. This is why soloable content is boring because it can always be too easy. When something is made with a group in mind, even with 4-5 people it is still challenging because it was made with multiple people in mind. A tutorial as @Myux pointed out is good, people know where to start, but they wouldn't be told what to do from there on.
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@miffi Something I pointed out before is that with the age of internet and communication anything that is remotely easy will be tackled by everyone even without skill. Anything that is hard make take some time but eventually people will share it and it will be tackled by everyone. With how people can communicate, show videos and the such you have to design a game where it should be able to supplement the game with outside content and discussion but not just instantly solve the game for everyone.
I think developers these days need to embrace the fact that information travels faster than the speed of light and design around that fact to make a challenging game that people can work on together. If people are trying to accomplish something they will seek out whatever resources are available to them.
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Indeed. Less equals more.
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@mrchipps I agree, its why randomly generated content is at times better since no one can fully anticipate it. Also have some sort of portal dungeon will help as it means its always different.
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If DS can make the HP scale with how many players are attacking and assisting then it could be harder. During the Legion pre-patch we had invasions where anyone, level 1 - 100, could attack the mobs and their HP could scale.
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@jetah I definitely like this idea. I like that people of all depths in the game could go in and contribute. Can make pve challenging for sure and for everyone that wants to participate.
Though the only downside is that then there is no need to play before going into challenging content.
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@mrchipps a dungeon can be just enough that one very skilled player can solo it (pvp aside).
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Thanks for the rundown. But I was talking about not having a hover over in-game description.
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@jetah Though why can't there be both solo, solo super hard and group and large group dungeons and activities?
Except I may just have been reading this all wrong. I see you would definitely need to play and be very familiar with the game and be very skilled by playing a long time to challenge something, that would be okay with me.
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Yeah hand holding theme parkish is getting tiresome. However there is the opposite end of the spectrum where you have to read an entire 50 page guide on a game to figure out what you should do which isn't ideal also.
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I would imagine as with most games these days there's going to be a large amount of hand holding.
In order to offer itself to the widest audience they need to make it as acceptable to as many people as possible.
Sadly higher skill level players don't tend to get catered for when greater numbers of players are more rewarding to a new game looking to establish itself.
Don't get me wrong I think the game will eventually, I just don't anticipate it in these initial phases and iterations of the game.
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@gambles I'm sure there is a good middleground between most theme parks and EVE Online. But even EVE Online is very succesfull, so I hope the devs are a bit bold.
