Why chose a Themepark game design

What happened? I mean, besides never really being able to beat the game and never having the same quality as old Rpgs/Fps games. Why cut out the social contact and just make themeparks.

I can't spell apparently.

bamp

Theme park MMO does not mean no player interaction. You are retarded.

A lot of it is casualizaiton. Most people don't want to spend an hour getting a group of 40 together to go on a raid. Until WoW got really big most people didn't play MMO's. When they started to raids got smaller and smaller until they were 5 main dailies that could be ran in 10 minutes. Similar effects were had throughout the whole game and genre. People wanted to play what was popular, despite not actually liking the concept or gameplay. The market shifted to appeal to the new wave of casuals and not their dedicated fans. It didn't work. MMO's take a long time to produce and their model relies on lots of players spending small amounts of money. It's a kind of catch-22 where the only players who will be profitable are the ones who want the game to be in a state that would be unpopular.

Another problem is that many MMO's go the very expensive WoW copy route. When the MMO doesn't mesh with the WoW nostalgia hype-train it fails, partly due to the game being shit, partly because it was never going to live up to internet hype and was doomed to failure from the get go. This is a great example of how shit the game industry is as its controlled by share-holders and investors who know fuck all about video games and just want to see dollars at the end of the year.

Remember runescape? It's still around and doing fairly well. It doesn't make billions but its enough to keep a small company afloat. It started declining when the company went public, became a slave to stockholders and started to become a WoW browser MMO (RS3 + new combat update). They brought back OSRS which was a partial success but many old school people had already quit (me one of them, no fucking way am I doing 2000+ hours of shit again to get my character back). Maybe if companies focused on small, creative games with small but dedicated autistic fan bases they'd see more long term profits. But it'll never happen because investors don't understand that.

Because if people fail they can blame the ride and not themselves for the failure.

So what you're saying is that we need to kill the investors.

Because completely unbound social interaction is scary. Take a sandbox MMO like EVE. Someone can blow up your fucking ship because they're a lawless pirate and feel like it. Will they get hunted down like a dog and made to live a miserable life? Only if they fuck with the wrong person attached to the wrong corp. But that's the beauty and horror of the sandbox, that shit can actually come true. You can gather some like minded people, lead a conquest of a piece of null sec, build a space station, set up automated defenses to protect that station against hostiles, and watch it all collapse as some fucker allahu ackbars his space ship into your space station.

Another example is running around in RO. You can choose to party up with people at every opportunity not because the game demands 5 man party instances, or because the content's difficulty is hard enough to warrant a party. You do it because it's easier for both of you. There's no quest with an end goal in mind. You won't be partying up with random fuckers for five minutes, doing a quest in the area, and then scatter to the wind as soon as you all turn in your 10 bear asses. No, if you party in RO, the goal is to get EXP/item drops, and the party doesn't have an end point until someone speaks up and says "I have to leave". And each class is unique enough to make discussion of grinding spots an actual topic. If you party up with a Priest, a lot of people will say to go hunt Anubis. If you party with a Crusader, depending on their build, you can go to Glast Heim to hunt for really useful items. It's not about gathering up 3 DPS, 1 tank, and 1 healer and doing some instance, it's about making the most of what you've got and having fun trying to push the limits of whatever messed up party comp you gather through friends, guild, and people stumbling across your group.

But social things are hard. They will test your patience. People get used to being able to instantly find 4 other retards who can pretend that they play roles in a party. You play a sandbox and you have to learn how to play the hand you're dealt. You won't get to go farm this rad, ultra difficult dungeon every day because sometimes guildies don't log on, or there aren't other people doing that content that day. Maybe some other group is doing some other rad, ultra difficult content on the other side of the game world because they had two extra wizards and though "Yeah, we can do some rad shit with all this extra magical AoE". Maybe you're out of the loop and all your space bros are gearing up for a bloody war over a piece of space you've never been to before. You have to go out of your way to stay connected in order to get the fun of the sandbox, but it's a much higher high compared to the theme park, which tries to keep your drugged up constantly with daily quests, meters to mark your progress towards the next rep farmed piece of gear, etc.


Actually, most companies go the WoW-close route because it's the safe option. There is a blueprint to follow, and most companies think that the WoW blueprint, the one that earned Blizzard a bajillion dollars, is the way to make a game but appease investors. There is no guarantee the sandbox will be a success, and so investors are very wary of taking that leap of faith. With the theme park, some marketing fuckwad can make up some statistics about how much time and money players will spend on their MMO, shove it all into a Powerpoint, and get a bunch of endorsements and checks on the way out.

What about the absence of strong penalties for dying. There is no consequences really for dying in these games.

But it does mean shitty and uninteresting

Because WoW made tons of money.

Well this is depressing as fuck. I am going to bed.

...

Because being a solo autist is what it's all about now, user. Don't you want to be like that dark trench coat wearing dual wielding edge master in that one chinese cartoon?

This is a big part of it. Games these days are at the mercy of the investors and shareholders WHO DO NOT PLAY GAMES and us devs have zero freedom when all they care about is the returns except when they think they know better than devs and players, which is usually. They have no creativity whatsoever and only care about copying what the most successful models in the industry are doing like WoW and this is a huge reason why there are so many WoW clones. We can't even make a game that isn't one because we're not allowed too and investors in the game industry seem to hate risk unlike other industries. Oh and they're a bunch of cucks. HUGE HUGE cucks. They have no idea how badly this hurts either because it alienates so much of potential customers.

Spicy

Don't kid yourself. All entertainment industries hate risk. This is why we see so many formulaic "summer blockbuster" movies or why Blockbuster laughed at Netflix when the latter offered to sell itself to Blockbuster in its early days. Books, too. I'll bet there's at least a hundred publishing firms still flogging themselves for telling JK Rowling that they didn't think Harry Potter would sell.

I don't know how to feel about this

No?
Fuck that. I play mmos to grind and to forget about the real world. If I wanted interaction with other fleshbags I'd go outside.
Major problems in modern MMOs are shit combat and pay2win models.

don't forget the stupid dad smart woman sitcom formula that has been around since before the fucking 60s

City of Heroes was not heavily geared fro social but it had the potential and it was glorious

one time there was this dude in a full orange tights super hero suit with just a utility belt his logo and grey hair, his name was OLD MAN

that dude carried my low level ass along with a bunch of others and it was a glorious time

Good video.


Yes. Yes I do. Nothing fucking wrong with this. Well I'd rather look like this, but anime boy in trench-coat is fine too.
Problem with said cartoon was the shitty written book it was based on, with plot, world and character actions not making much sense. Visuals and designs were all cool and sexy, they way I like my japanese animes.


Enjoying your reddit spacing? Probably that old man should have taught you not to use it outside of reddit too.

this faggot again
I keep telling you fags it's a habit I picked up from gaia

If only Eve Online wasn't so autistic.

Bull fucking shit, the consequences of EVE can be anywhere from total loss of your character being set back months to years of work to build stats, to complete loss of your ships, stations, and whatever else you spent on those ships and stations that got destroyed, and finally the consequences of word getting around of you dieing. It's fine if you're a newbie but once you've settled in you've got a reputation to uphold.

its going free to play next month so that'll be funny.

Only for t1 spaceships.

Nope, Control. That's what it's all about.
Devs must control how the players progress through the content they put out to ensure the game stays alive and interesting and everyone has the opportunity to have fun.
This sounds good on the box, and it can be good properly done, but usually entails some very weird decisions that only make sense for the Devs because they can see the whole picture.

Class buffs\nerfs are not applied because a certain class is too good\bad, they have literally nothing to do with that.
They are applied based on popularity of said class. If nobody is playing it, count on a buff, if too much people play it, count on nerfs or buffs for everyone else.
And if the devs believe a certain class will bring more players to the game because it's the only one they'd play, expect to see Ninja's and Assassins and other edgy shit like that being massively OP because all those 12s are not gonna play the game otherwise.
This is why you'll see so much discrepancy between the power of a class compared to others not being fixed, because their popularity and effect on population is what the devs see and care about.

Same goes for many other decisions. You see a sword that has 0,000146% chance of dropping for a boss, you ever wondered how that number came to be? Why not 0,000147% or 0,000145%? Why specifically 0,000146%?
Because by the law of big numbers, you can make a rough estimate on how many runs a player has to do to obtain that piece of gear, and if you know how long each run takes, you now have an estimate on how long is this piece of content gonna last per player. Even better, you can multiply that percentage by your population and using the time for a run, you'll know how many of those swords will be out in public at any point in time after the content is released. And you can know this even before the content was released.


So what does this have to do with casualization? Sandboxes are a fucking nightmare to model and predict because by their very own nature, it's not possible. The player's agency determines the rate at which something happens so even if you nerf the rate at which you mine an asteroid, if players for a big corp and cooperate, they are still gonna mine at an higher level, and even if you buff it, they might decide it's not worth it and never mine anything.
Consider how basic the economy in themeparks are compared to sandbox, now consider which one is easier to model and predict. Now apply the same to interactions between players, classes, towns, content, etc.

Themeparks MMO are indeed the safe formula for Devs, but in more ways than most people imagine…

the secret is full loot when you die. eve doesnt count. uo is life

Today. It didn't used to be like this, not as bad as this at least.
Used to be that people met online others that had similar tastes and liked the game as much as them, but this isn't the case anymore. Like the other user said, some people join MMOs because they are popular, not because they actually like the game. So of course they become assholes to other people online, they don't even like the game and they need entertainment in some way.

Used to be that the worst that could happen if you shared an email to talk with someone, you'd have an awkward conversation.
Nowadays, you use the same Nickname between games and people will google it, find what else you play and judge\mock you for it. Maybe even find youtube videos to flag, Twitch streams to fuck with you, email accounts to spam and send to gay porn websites.
Even the standard bullying you had in most games is even worse now since the game isn't capable of being entertaining on it's own. Lot's of people get bored fast, especially in sandbox MMOs when they reach endgame, so they'll torment younger players with inpunity because that's more fun than playing the game at their stage.

So of course people are too scared to interact with each other today. It's scary for a reason, because the odds you're gonna find an asshole that will spend the rest of his online time trying to make his life miserable for his own amusement are huge, in an age where any fuckwit has internet connection, the base game is dreadfully boring and there's an entire culture surrounding trolling\griefing\baiting\triggering.

So I'll hire you for a party with a specific purpose in mind, we are gonna do this thing together and be off when it's done, not socializing at all, and if we end up repeating this enough times, then I'll consider adding you as a friend and seeing what you're after all.
There was a concept for Haven&Hearth where you made a small fake village where you pretended to live and accepted newcomers there. If they behaved and proved they weren't spies after a while, you'd tell them it's a fake village and you'd take them to the real one. That's how people socialize in MMOs these days and pretty much for the same reasons. It's not a matter of them being autists (but that's part of the reason), it's a matter of necessity forced on everyone else.

In most themeparks MMOs, there are only 2 types of actual rewards.
One is a bar that goes up. Be it XP, reputation or proficiency, it's a bar that unlocks content and goes up when you do a meaningless task.
Another is a piece of equipment, be it an armor, weapon or skill, that you put on your character and this gives you better stats or more combat options.

MMOs, as a general rule, cannot and will not take any of these from you.
Removing total from your bar is seen in bad light by the players and useless in the end. It's setting back their grind progress which upsets them and just means they have to grind more. For instance, you do something that upsets a faction and lose reputation? Doesn't matter, just go kill 10 yellow tigers over there to grind it back up.

Equipment is even worse. If a lvl 80 WoW character was to take his armor and compare his stats when naked to the stats the armor gives him, he'd lose any PvP engagement against his own armor always. Taking rewards that take several hours of teamwork to achieve and are the reason you can play the late game content would make several people very upset because using them is fun (flaunting, I guess) but adquiring them is terrible.
Ãnd when you consider threadmills, it just ends up being the same as XP bars but even worse, since you can indeed grind it back, it just takes hundreds of time longer.

For a game to remove something from you upon death, it cannot be an horrible chore to acquire again or every death will make players remember how unfun it was and they might just quit the game at that point.
As a rule of thumb, the faster it can be taken from you, the faster it should be to recover. And this here is the crux of the question again because everything you might lose when you die in an MMO has the same very high effort to adquire at lategame and therefore can't be removed.
You need different sources of power for the player that all contribute to increase his odds of survival but some can be taken with a single death while others might take several.

An easy fix is to let the player lose all regular armor and weapons to his corpse and one single artifact, keeping all other rares. The more they did, the more they lose, but at least they don't lose everything that actually matters with a single death and the rest can be bought in a random shop.

A better solution is to put rewards in a different place altogether. If players had to defend a town from another faction, keeping that town could supply them with cheap or even free normal weapons making any loss of those to death trivial as they have an entire village making more for them. But if someone takes the village from them, suddendly no more free swords.

Artifacts however should follow a different formula, especially to keep them unique. In the whole world, there should be a single version of each artifact, possessed by the first player that finds it and passed between players when they are killed or they give it to someone else. The artifact increases their odds of survival, making it balanced to lose it after death and their uniqueness makes it possible to gang up on him and take the artifact, instead of everyone carrying around The Legendary Sword of the LightBringer.

Of course, all of this needs a sandbox world where players compete for more than just another reward they can put on a bar or in their inventory…

Because casuals don't understand any other gameplay type, and there's no small studios who care about good games first and money second as opposed to the other way round.

some of this has to do with the type of PvP the devs want to encourage.

In something like WoW you could go back and forth dying and trying to kill people all day. When you add consequences like in EvE, PvP becomes a Big Deal.

The suits meme certainly has a lot of truth in it, but these past few years the reverse has been going on at a strangely high rate: incredibly autistic creative teams with no talent whatsoever other than having blue hair or a diploma in humanitarian studies manage to shill their shitfest to investors and get funded, laughing all the way to the bank and leaving the company to deal with the aftermath of aforementioned shitfest a few months after the project is complete. They then disband and form new studios to shill different shit to a different group of deluded investors. After repeated bombs, this in turn encourages the suits to play it safe even more, going full circle.

uo does it fine and best already

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Why can't there be an MMO that takes place in a gigantic theme park?

that would be too immature. theme parks need colors and fun and minigames. we just cant have that kind of thing in our very serious game industry for grown ups who have discerning tastes

What about a gigantic theme park, but the theme is an FPS, making it parodically brown?

parodies are okay, but well have to have anthony burch do some writing for it since nobody else is very clever when it comes to that kind of stuff.

There are literal themeparks in a bunch of mmos. FF14, DCUO, Casion in PSO2.

I like skill based games but they're the same as your themepark in terms of satisfaction. Its only really good at the top but even then it gets boring.

FFXIV is best MMORPG on the market right now in terms of community and content. Only down side is the awful combat system but they're killing PS3 support and updating the combat. This could make it vastly more playable.

I can't stand action bar combat anymore, Wildstar was decent as was Tera but you can only do the same content for so long.

Elder Scrolls Online is now standable/semi good.
But Holla Forums hivemind wont hear any of that. The combat isnt fucking tab based which is nice.

Sure thing user :^)

Tell me about the combat.

Yeah, but I want an MMO that entirely IS one gigantic theme park.

Yeah I heard things about this game, once it got a few patches in it turned into something decent. People just shat on it at first then forgot about it.


It lifts a lot of restrictions they had, PS3 was the reason for the long ass global cool down. Its 2.5 right now, if that was changed it would play a lot smoother. Plus whatever else they change.

I find the game boring as shit in its current state, speeding it up might help keep me subbed longer then a month

The main reason people shat on ESO is because it resembles a generic wow clone more than an elder scrolls game.

Yeah not buying that. The only changes that will probably be made to the combat, is dumbing it down even more.

But it doesn't that is just Holla Forums circle jerk talking out of its ass. I get strong Elder Scrolls vibe when playing it.

Its like Darkfall/Skyrim, its pretty simple, but once you start to get good at it it can be pretty enduring. What do you want to know about it specifically?

I kinda liked how skyrim did dual wielding - using different weapons in real time in unison is rare and engaging thing in video games.
Does TESO do this in the similar fashion? Can I have fire spitting staff in one hand and axe in the other?
Also is it really hitbox-based real time action combat, or something like Tera - only pretending to not be taget based one?
How is dress up?

I wish Tera had content. The game was a lot of fun, in spite of the cancerous community that got so bored of the game so fast that all they do is play loli animal girl dressup. I mean hell, I'd probably be part of that group if I held any real connection to the game or community. It was a nice middle ground of WoW timer bullshit and action game feeling, but no endgame and nothing to really do as an alternative sucked. PvP sucked some-fucking-how, probably the lack of modes and the shoddy connection. There was zero reason to wander the world after you hit max level other than achievements, but who gives a fuck about those? Crafting is fucking worthless, as they are in any WoW clone. There weren't even any extremely difficult BAMs, one of the features the game used to sell itself to players, once you hit max level. I imagined a guild group of ten people roaming the lands on the hunt for giant monsters, having a grand old time fighting and dying repeatedly to purely optional but fun challenges.

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong about it all, but my time with Tera was bittersweet. Maybe if I did give a damn about the world I would have discovered some rad shit like hidden quest lines about how fucked up the gay vampire race was. Or maybe I would have discovered the elves' secret plot to genocide all other races after the war was done. Wait, there was a war against some demons and shit, right? I honestly don't remember what Tera's story was about.

tits

Goodvideo.


Yes.YesIdo.Nothingfuckingwrongwiththis.WellI'dratherlooklikethis,butanimeboyintrench-coatisfinetoo.

Problemwithsaidcartoonwastheshittywrittenbookitwasbasedon,withplot,worldandcharacteractionsnotmakingmuchsense.Visualsanddesignswereallcoolandsexy,theywayIlikemyjapaneseanimes.

Enjoyingyourredditspacing?Probablythatoldmanshouldhavetaughtyounottouseitoutsideofreddittoo.