I've been meaning to write this post for a long while, but I had trouble putting it into words.

Fortunately, Steam's discovery queue came to my rescue, and provided me with a picture worth a thousand words:

...but what am I seeing?

This is why I'm here on Fractured forums instead of supporting other crowd-funded MMOs with higher profiles or bigger fanbases.

This is why I'm not playing venerable World of Warcraft, critically-acclaimed Guild Wars 2, or ever-popular Final Fantasy XIV.

This why I hate 99% of MMOs.

So what's upsetting me so much? Take a guess, I'll wait.

...

...

...

It's the mobs.
Player Character is smack in the middle of a group of mobs, beating some oup, but the rest of them... They're just sort of there. They do not help their compatriots. They do not attack on their own. They do not regroup. They do not run. They do not even pay attention.

And it gets worse in ways that the picture did not capture. They will live only on fields filled with exact copies of them and nothing else; or in mixed groups, surrounded by exact copies of their group and nothing else. They will wander eternally, exactly three steps at a time, inside a 2-meter circle. They will chase you for whole 4 meters before giving up or suddenly vanishing. They will come into existence, within an arms length from you, by either getting beamed down from SS Enterprise in a flash of bright light, or just gradually materialising out of thin air.

It's hard to tell fighting them from picking up a particularly thorny plant, or mining boulders that splinter off in heavy chunks that like to land on your toes.

Turns out, I can't enjoy an MMO without some sort of verisimilitude, and I can't get that if monsters don't feel like antagonistic actors, and not catatonic loot pinatas that oh-so-obviously spawn on a tight timer and in a very specific spot.
I want to go on a hunt, I want to run from an angry apex predator, I want to be ambushed by bandits, not just go and trim a field of passive-aggressive weeds.

It's not like I need some sort of life-like simulation requiring deep learning networks and Google's supercomputers to work, like some people like to point out.
All is needed is just care about presentation coupled with little smoke and mirrors.

• Tibia pulled it off perfectly, and that game is pushing 22 years of being developed by a tiny team of Teutons Germans.(1)
• Firefall was mismanaged to hell and back, and it managed to pull it off - nay, to knock it out of the park - in the beta in a fully 3D environment, and even managed to retain some of that after its disastrous launch.(2)

So, my question is:

Is that kind of thing also important to the dev team? To other players? To lurkers who feel on the fence about this whole Fractured thing?

Discuss.

---

Footnotes

(1) I'm not playing Tibia because it quickly turns from a game about adventuring in a hostile world to a game about going around with a potion-filled IV stand, almost literally crushing your enemies with bags of gold, and constantly worrying about your profit margins.

(2) I'm not playing Firefall because it lived a life of constant pain, had its soul sucked out, and its body died a slow, agonizing, humilating death, then had its shrivelled heart ripped out before the final death spiral, and is now dead. Super dead. 100% dead. DEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAD.

@althalus said in Heroes of the Storm has apparently entered a death spiral:

@dragomok said in Heroes of the Storm has apparently entered a death spiral:

You're replying in Russian about DotA 2 because it's a running joke in DotA 2 community that people keep running into Russians who only ever speak in Russian, yes?
That's... that's the perfect meta joke, well played, I couldn't have thought of a better reply.

OR maybe he is just Russian...

How dare you insinuate that muker is "maybe Russian"!

muker is not only a Very Known Russian, but also the Best Dang Visibly-Russian Russian in the whole forum, translating stuff, replying to every news article, descending upon fresh threads in Welcome to Fractured with lightning-fast speed and posting links to useful resources!

He's makes our community go round.

Ya know dis thingie, dat ya gotta use before you do all the other thingies? I mean, datthingieoverthere:

Da thingie is wrong, ded wrong, when you press da Tab thingie on your thingie with rectingular thingies. I mean, lookatit:

Dis so sad.

Da thingie shoulda do be roit and propa, when you press da Tab thingie. I mean, likeathisway:

Lovely Spaniards pls gib fix asap thx, much love in advance.

So @Lightspoon and @Eurav already addressed the part regarding Humans, so I'm going to address this one:

@miikiious said in Will humans be able to change with karma like demons and beastman?:

If demons can change into angels, will there be bonuses or special forms for demons that fulfill thier purpose and go down the road of complete evil.

I think you're missing the point here.

The way I see it, each race, and each alignment, represent a different mode of play:

• Demons and evil alignment are PvP,
• Humans and neutral alignment are mixed PvP/PvE,
• Beasts Beastfolk Beastmen and good alignment are PvE.

Therefore, turning a Demon into an Angel is all about taking a PvP-only character and converting it to PvE, while turning a Beastwoman Beastman into an Abomination is all about taking a PvE-only character and converting it to PvP.

In other words, it's all about the challenge of taking direct and deliberate actions against your default mode of play. This requires dedication, forethought and - judging by what we know so far - skill. If it didn't require that, there would be no challenge, it would give no bragging rights, and would be completely pointless.

For contrast, picking a Demon (ie. a PvP race) and "fulfilling their purpose" by "going down the road of complete evil" (ie. doing a lot of PvP) is a complete no-brainer. Giving extra rewards for doing that would either lead to them being:

• (if they were tied to non-leaderboard-dependent conditions) an obligatory reward that everyone but the people going against the grain has to earn, which would be dangerously close to obligatory grind,
• (if they were tied to leaderboards) permamently locked to top X% of players, which could lead to toxicity, as well as funneling a lot of players to try to constantly optimise for the narrow set of things that define being in top X%, which would be bad for sandbox feel of the game.

So no, I don't see that happening.

It's really simple for me.

I require something very specific from an MMO to enjoy it.
Horizontal progression, achievement-based unlocks, area of strict PvE, almost one-toon-all-classes, challenge of ascending to Angelhood - all of these features are nice bonuses. But if that something very specific is not present, I literally won't enjoy the game. Believe me, I tried to do that with many MMOs.

Prometheus said Dynamight cares about that specific thing.
This means that out of all upcoming MMOs that I have on my list, it makes Fractured the second* most likely game to deliver lifelike enjoyable active aggressive mobs. And since Dynamight seems to have a very sane and solid development plan, this is also the most likely MMO to come out (unlike EverQuest Next) and to come out the way it was promised (unlike Firefall).

And that's why I'm sticking to it.
(Plus that at the moment I have very controlled budget and little time, so I can't really laborously sieve through other MMOs right now.)

---

* The first being Em-8ER, which is better because it's also a successor to Firefall's beta, and also worse because the head of the project, the (in)famous visionary behind Firefall's beta, silver-tongued Mark "a film studio and a bus" Kern is already showing some small red flags. And they might or might not be indicative of bigger issues.

@eurav Ah, yes, the God of Evolutionary Psychology, where Universal Panhuman Truths are derived from your local zeitgeist, and the difference between a man and a woman is unimaginably insurmountable, while the difference between a human, a wolf and a lobster is so neglible it could not exist at all.

@Crowdac I was expecting a proposal that missed @FibS's thread about other Beastmen races, but found a shitpost.
I'm not disappointed, I'm not mad, I'm not impressed - I'm just surprised to find one so early.

Hunting, exploring, doing mercenary PvE work, and being all-around drive-by-healer.

I play MMOs solo for

reasons:

Reason #1: Shitty Schedule, Tumultuous Time

For all of my life, my schedule for playing video games has been unpredictable, prone to shifts and interruptions. I didn't know when I could play, or how much time I would have.

For obvious reasons, this makes it quite difficult to synchronize with other players, which you need to do if you want to regularly play non-solo.

Reason #2: the Piñata in the room

I hop around MMOs a lot, because I literally - and I mean it - can't enjoy MMOs where mobs feel too artificial. I've played 26 MMOs so far, and only 3 feel right.

However, out of the three:

• one existed in a permament state of development hell and is now defunct,
• another is a tiny, tiny game that is filled with ganking trolls and drama,
• and the last one starts you out as an adventurer, but very quickly forces you to become a potion-addicted ultracapitalist who crushes mobs with bags of money and has to engage in some of the mind-boggling grinds to get there.

I don't have really all that high hopes for Fractured, since I have some upcoming alternatives, but it looks promising.

Reason #3: MMOs are for meeting nice people

In virtually all types of multiplayer games, other players are either sworn allies you're chained to, or sworn enemies you have to fight. In open world MMOs, however, other players are strangers and passerbys, and your relationship with them is entirely up to you to decide.

That is the most important feature that draws me to MMOs, and it's completely not affected whether I'm playing solo or not. Just a bit of kindness can make someone's day. (Gods, I miss Firefall's beta; doing drive-by healing, saving people's thumpers, reinforcing them in the last minute and pushing an event from near loss into a clear victory...)

And you can actually meet people there, too, since they are not bound by whatever goal of the match they're chasing. There is nobody to shout at them for getting distracted from doing their in-game job, or shoot at them for sweet, sweet KDR.

Reson #4: I have no social circle

Apparently there are a lot of people who drag parts of their social circle - their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, work buddies, barbers, dog groomers, frenemies, husbands, wives, secret lovers, overt lovers, "it's complicated" paramours, vicars, and fellow FLGS attendants - into multiplayer games they play.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I don't have a social circle. If not for my family, where noone else is interested in video games, I'd be alone as a dog.

So whenever I hear some insensitive self-appointed MMO gatekeeper say "hurr durr em-em-ohs are social games you shouldn't play them without a group and the devs should stop catering for carebear casuls like you", I get pretty salty. (Especially since, as I pointed out in Reason #3, MMOs are one of the few games where you can actually meet people.)

---

@Gamble - I hope you feel sufficiently smothered with reasons, mhm?

@crowdac said in Abomination races?:

I'm just inquiring about this because it might be cool to see for example an Uoadra turn into a Skaven being that both are pack oriented species.

From a practical standpoint, it doesn't seem like they are going to go for something so drastic, at least not initially.

If you look at the link @Gofrit linked:

@prometheus said in Demon Redemption:

@therippyone said in Demon Redemption:

so, that's some idea about what these transformations will be like - you'll still look vaguely like "you" but with the demonic stuff stripped out and replaced with heavenly set - bright auras, feather/halos, ancient rune masks of power, etc. XD

That's how it goes in a nutshell, yes

It genuinely looks like they're going to simply make every, er, distinguishing feature for Beastmen/Demons in two variants (normal and Abomination/Angel) and change base body texture, instead of going for a completely new model.

@sparky said in Now think Clearly Here:

@dragomok said in Now think Clearly Here:

@wolefie said in Now think Clearly Here:

I said before that I wanted to be a demon, but then didn't feel like it because I saw Exploited.

Link for convenience of future readers: eXploited, the self-proclaimed "#1 demon guild".

We're currently are the #1 ranking demon guild just look at the leaderboards. lol

So, we're not self-proclaimed at all, it's a fact.

Ohh, you are correct. Apologies, I corrected my post.

Now @WoLeFiE's worries make even more sense.

Silly @Tioboon, don't you know that when you ask a person for a good track, they instantly forget everything they know about music?

Anyway...

Since you've probably already heard about the popular ones I like (soundtrack of Darkest Dungeon, works of Ben Prunty, Supergiant Games' soundtracks by Darren Cobb, Dio's Holy Diver, Genesis' Land of Confusion, Nemesis the Warlock by Ron Hubbard, all of vocal tracks from MGS: Revengeance and their kazoo renditions), I guess I'll give a couple of semi-obscure ones.

• [non-vocal] I'd say the entire works of The Luna Sequence (
  - when it was doing rounds in pro gameplay montages.
• [non-vocal]
  .
• [vocal + non-vocal] Tracks from my favourite technically-for-kids-but-not-childish series - Crying, Singing, Plot Twists, and Foreshadowing Steven Universe - have a lot of good vocal and non-vocal tracks in them, but the former may or may not contain spoilers. (Aaand I'm not sure where you can listen to them legally.)

Hope that helps.

@roccandil said in PvP loot, an yet unasked question and diferent POV:

@dragomok said in PvP loot, an yet unasked question and diferent POV:

Honest-to-goodness, low-power-curve, horizontal progression is not something that was ever featured in a succesful MMO, as far as I can tell.

[...] One possible consequence is that it will be relatively straightforward to build a bunch of toons, all specced out for different purposes, and then you can just log with the one you need.

So, just like all other MMOs, minus 80 levels of grind between creating a toon and using it?

It's not an RPG game unless it has cannibalism in it...?

@dordolio said in Do you have any Fractured-related discussion topic that you want to discuss but don't have the energy to write the thread, and you feel kinda bad about it?:

direction? 3 posts?

No, no, they have a point - on a 2D plane, you only need 2 points to establish a line.

@gothix said in Crafting - Cooking:

I mean, we eat deers even in real life, so I see nothing strange about this request.

The difference here is that in real life, after you kill and eat a deer, its family won't declare a blood oath against you, assemble a team of their most skilled trackers, teleport on your home planet, find where you live, track you to your home, enter it in the dead of the night, surround you in your bed, and drop off a sternly worded letter about how what you did is against their pacifist worldview and you should feel ashamed of yourself.

@mazikar said in Crafting - Cooking:

Though I would not expect there would be enough meat on them to be worth the trouble...

There's still plenty of skin, and skin is a delicacy to many meat-lovers. There's hardly anything but skin in pig's ears, but they're considered a delicacy in Lithuania.

In my case:

1. I got sick and couldn't use computer for about a week,
2. my job is getting a bit hectic at the moment so when I come back, I'm usually tired, and tired + Asperger's = no words.

So it seems there are plenty of people who do care.

Some - like @TheRippyOne and @Roccandil - would be interested in a deeper level of simulation than my, er, "don't spawn them in front of my face and make them appear to do something other than waiting for death" preference, which is nice.

Others - like @boogis and @Gothix - care about a lot about aggro, whether we're talking about single- or multi-mob behaviour, respectively.

Well, this makes me happy I'm not totally alone in that regard.

@mae said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

I've seen posts where it is said wildlife will have "alignment" just like players. Some will be peaceful, and you lose karma for killing. Some are aggressive and you gain karma. Seeing a pasture or a den of some sort of animal type is common, even in reality. Now, entering a dungeon and seeing a group of mobs in a static boss-minion formation, that's not cool. But Fractured should be ok since its not an instanced asian mmo.

All good points, really.

@meninodeouro said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

Maybe you do not know, but the everquest next had with a similar proposal, mobs that think before acting, would be a very interesting mechanics if it were implemented in the game.

Ohh, yes, they planned to go really far with that. Not just the "mobs pass the basic criteria for being perceived as actual enemies", but the whole thing with ecosystems and populations and spontaneous boss creation and what have you. It would probably be complex enough to be the main feature of any other game.

@boogis said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

@jetah what game?
i tell you my game - nature. in nature even if one animal killed a prey then other animals can come and take his food if they are stronger no matter who started killing this pray first. what you are suggesting is kindergarden system for kidds, or like a jail system where everyone has curtain amount of food in a fixed time a day. no one hunt everyone just happy, under stricked supervision of jail administration. people need more freedom mate.

I kind of see why people who love the sheer horrifying brutality of nature would be interested in enabling loot thieves. Now I wonder whether people like you, who enjoy that total lawlessness, outweigh people who absolutely can't stand having their precious loot stolen 17 picoseconds after it drops.
I mean, sure, always-on PvPers on Tartaros/Demon's world are probably thinking like you, but I wonder about Human and Beastfolk players.

There's also always the "you can always kill the looter, ya big carebear casul avocado" argument, but I wonder how (presumed) invisibility from Illusions and (presumed) stealth from Assasinations are going to factor into that.

...huh.
I seem to have a really lucky draw in these drawings. O_O

Congratulations to everyone else!

@Ekadzati, @TheRippyOne - you had a good discussion going, have you considered making a thread about wars and social contracts to see how the rest of the fanbase feels? I feel it would make for a good discussion, but I also feel people interested in social side of PvP are not going to see it in a thread about mobs...

---

---

@zidroc said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

A post in another topic I saw awhile back pointed me to a video about Ultima Online (the OG), and a little known feature that they scrapped because of how quickly players killed mobs. They implemented a virtual ecology, where the "herbivores" are plants, and the carnivores ate them, and so on. This doesn't necessarily answer all of your concerns, but it would give the mobs life instead of mindless wandering.

Here's the video in question:

(I happened to watch it in last couple of months).

Modelling ecology is a tricky proposition, since ecology seems like the kind of system that requires a lot of forethought and work to become noticeable, let alone enjoyable to interact with.

It's one thing where virtual ecology makes a player go like
"Crikey, those noobs overfarmed rabbits and deers in Acetonia - again - and now I can't farm Bear Asses until next week."
and it's another where it makes a player go like
"Crikey, by carefully manipulating populations of different wildlife species, I've triggered an exodus of bears that will follow a a juicy, juicy gradient of prey population densities straight to xXxTownville69xXx's doormat, which will disrupt their wild honey production, allowing me to unload all my reserves for a considerable profit."

...but then again, even rudimentary modelling ecology leads to mob in-fighting, and OOOHH YES, mob in-fighting can be fun. Firefall beta didn't have a full-blown ecology, but it had mob factions. I liked to herd swarms of Hissers onto Brontodons, and my favourite memory is of a (brief) five-sided players-Raiders-Chosen-Brontodons-wildlife battle that I accidentally started.

Wow.

So of course the one MMO with reasonably planned out development plan has its core library sweeped out from under their feet.

Hopefully that will turn out to be a temporary obstacle. I wish all the devs best of luck!