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Thread: Are MMOs just too easy these days?

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    I completely agree with Hhean. My predictions for 2012 article also talked a little about the decreasing difficulty of games to cater to larger audiences.

    I am mostly into FPS, RTS and MOBA games for the past few months and have not tried enough content in the newer MMOs to comment on them too much.

    However, you can clearly tell that the overall difficulty of games is decreasing. It is also clear that the easier games have a larger userbase.

    I would love to play some harder games because I love the feeling of accomplishment after overcoming an obstacle. I think the best options MMOs offer now are difficulty levels for instances.

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    Pretty much. Not just MMOs, but video games in general.
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    Why do games need to be difficult to be any good?
    It's not about being easy, It's about shit games
    but it's opinion, some people love over coming hard games for that feeling of accomplishment. Other people play games for fun.
    So, no I don't think they have gotten easy. I think devs have just gotten lazy.

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    Read this a few moments after it was posted. Gotta say that OnRPG surprises me more and more with how good the writers are. But in my opinion I gotta say he's got a point. I have more than a handful of games installed on my laptop at the moment, most of which I don't plan on playing anytime soon. Why is that? Is it because they're bad in some way? Maybe. Is it because I'm bored of them? Can say thats a big N O. Then why do I know that I won't play them again? Because the difficulty in general for most if not all of them is absolute garbage.

    Now to add on my meaning, take for example Vanilla WoW, I used to do raids on a daily basis way back when in those 40 man groups that would like at least 3-4 hours to do and that was if you're lucky and the group didn't wipe. Nothing will ever be able to replace the feeling I had whenever I was just in a raid with guildmates. Being in a guild ventrilo with 40 people in a group along with different channels for the subgroups and such, even if we wiped we had a blast and basically just looked back on what we did wrong and what we could do better next time. If we ended up downing and clearing the whole raid, we'd party like there was no tomorrow. To say the least, I really miss that kind of feeling and no other game could ever even come close to bringing people that close again.

    One game thats been doing it right and how I wish it would get ported to PC is Dark Souls, I've only had a small glimpse at the game itself and my god is it hard as hell to play, but it's exactly the game I would enjoy playing. Hell even when I died it was still such a fun game. The fact that literally like everything in the freaking game is trying to kill you made it such a blast. The intrusion system made it all the more fun with there always being a chance that some max geared out BAMF can just come into your world and just decimate you in mere seconds always gave the fear of whether you'd get wrecked or not.

    Just my two cents on this kind of thing.

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    I wasn't aware that there was a "difficult" mmorpg

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jancokman View Post
    I wasn't aware that there was a "difficult" mmorpg
    wizardry online

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    Depends on what people mean by hard. A lot of the times, when I see the "hard" content in MMOs today, I don't think "hard", I think "gimmicky and stupid" because the content itself isn't hard, it requires a specific combination of classes with a certain combination of skills all with a certain rotation that each character MUST follow to not doom the entire group because they aren't doing that 1% more DPS that is absolutely NEEDED in order to win the encounter before the monster flips it's "oh, the fight went over a minute, most players have the attention span of a gnat so it's time to oneshot everyone to restart the fight lolololol!" switch.

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    Yeah, they made everything easier. We used to spam the whole chat to finish a certain quest, cause we couldn't locate anything. I bet a lot of people also used walkthroughs on single players back in the day. Now it's easy as hell to finish a game in hardcore mode or whatsoever.

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    A nicely well written article and it sums up why I enjoy Entropia Universe so much.
    A lot of people don't like the RCE (real cash economy) aspect of it, but it adds exactly what is needed to provide the challenge.

    The real point behind these games is the acquisition of wealth, gear and items.
    In most games you accomplish this by doing quests, killing animals, monsters or other players, or by trading.
    There is a real imbalance in this though which removes the challenge IMO. There really isn't a significant cost to your in game wealth in order to accomplish the other 2.
    Basically you get wealth, buy better gear so you can kill bigger things and do better quests. The balance isn't there though because the wealth at each stage is too easy to obtain and the gear usually isn't damaged in the acquisition of more wealth.

    In Entropia however the cost to kill an animal or monster is usually greater than the base value of what you receive from its corpse. This is what makes it difficult and forces you to understand the market trends and always be changing your strategy in targeting animals and resources you can sell for more than its base value in order to build your in game wealth up.

    TLDR: Inflation and personal gold farming is what makes games too easy. Entropia doesn't have that problem and is why I really enjoy the complexity of it.

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    while i haven't gotten to read the article yet i don't nessicarly agree, while yes leveling up is almost always easy those of us looking for a challenge find it at end game content, personally i'd rather have leveling be easy since its my least favorite part of mmos and i power through it anyways, even with a story like swtor i only had interest the first pass through now i just want to power through it all.

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    so far, yeah they've been kind of boring. I mean I like some of the games but you got to admit that they kind of make things way too easy.

    Take a look at Glory & Destiny Online. Cute game, decent graphics and customization but the combat? I've been basically right clicking to do everything. The game even has an auto pot system which basically kills the need to even watch your HP/MP. I was having fun for a while until I realized that I wasn't doing anything but that: right clicking.

    Most of the action games are all about just combo juggling or stun locking. Rarely do you ever need to block or evade, just learn how to infinity juggle/stun lock and you are pretty much ok. No need to learn enemy AI patterns when your enemies never attack you because they are either in the air or dead.

    When are they going to make a 3D fantasy game where archers actually have to aim and mentally calculate trajectory instead of just seeing a target, auto locking and firing off arrows with 100% accuracy? When are we going to see a game where melee characters can actually parry attacks and clash blade upon blade?

    What ever happened to puzzles and spending time actually trying to solve something instead of just finding everything in a linear path? Or actually having to find shit and not just auto route to everything while everything is labeled right off the bat? I mean it's one thing to have markers for NPCs and stuff after you've found them but it just seems kind of lame that you do a quest where you have to look for some item or person that can't be found by anyone in the village and your character can just walk straight there by clicking on the quest tracker. Do you know how many times I've set my character on auto run in games, then go watch something on my other monitor?

    It's almost becoming mindless button mashing to kill time. And I don't mean what people typically call action games where you are actually pressing buttons quickly in response to being attacked or to get hits in quickly but actual mindless games where they require so very little thinking because everything is simplified and streamlined to the point where people don't have to even learn anything about the game.

    Quick, everyone without thinking, what's the default key to open your inventory in any game (hint it's usually one of two)? or to look at a map? Character details? Hell even the damn screen shot button is usually the same.

    I'm really hoping this year we see some actual change because stuff is looking depressing.


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    Quote Originally Posted by tiger1526 View Post
    the thing about older nintendo games is they weren't really hard more about remembering things, most of them were arcade games that wanted you to fail so you would keep dropping money into the machine so they threw things in that were possible to avoid unless you knew it was coming, game design isn't like that anymore and you can react to things and fix it on the fly so it usually makes things easier.
    nintendo games=arcade games?
    uh..
    the nintendo versions of arcade games were always harder than the arcade counterparts
    arcade games are actually pretty easy

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    Meh like everything else MMO's are being made for the braindead masses I've given up on MMO's it's the same s*it different package. All players want to do is solo to end game you use to be able to find a party and have some fun with random strangers even make friends in game at least. Now you'll be lucky to find someone who want to help you. MMO's are now just single player games with too many people in them. As of late all I've been playing is TF2 and sometimes Minecraft because other online games IMO aren't worth my time.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tiger1526 View Post
    spoken like a true game hopper.
    why the **** do you think i hop between mmos. they all suck.

    im retired from mmo gaming as of jan 1st 2012.. (oh my he said that before) .. w/e

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    Quote Originally Posted by whitey View Post
    Why do games need to be difficult to be any good?
    It's not about being easy, It's about shit games
    but it's opinion, some people love over coming hard games for that feeling of accomplishment. Other people play games for fun.
    So, no I don't think they have gotten easy. I think devs have just gotten lazy.
    Although arrogantly put, it couldnt be anymore accurate.

    Its true that its not so much the "difficulty" or learning curve in games that make or break them now days, its the over growing compensation of "comparing".

    Now days you cant find a single game without someone saying "Nah i prefer **** over this" or "This is EXACTLY like ****", and there for games are dismissed way to easy.

    And devs now days have somehow come to the conclusion that softplay games will bring in larger audiences, there for leading to more people "paying" in cash shops - Hens the big trend of p2p games going f2p now, there is a little market in the p2p world.

    But i have to say, that 2012 is really looking good for the gaming world, theres alot of "new" trends, and takes on upcoming titles yet to surface that are actually making "changes" rather than the typical "go here, collect this, go back hand in" games.

    I see things like Firefall making new revolution to fps/open world gaming.

    Tera for its RPG free roam.

    Guild Wars 2 - for its great questing system to which you are not set on a steady 1 track path, and have no choice but too take the tedious ride.

    Diablo III - Well.... D3 will be awesome if and when it finally hits.

    I would like too see a more trend of good RTS games to come, but beggars cant be choosers.

    But i have hope for this year!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kashis View Post
    ...What ever happened to puzzles and spending time actually trying to solve something instead of just finding everything in a linear path? Or actually having to find shit and not just auto route to everything while everything is labeled right off the bat?...

    I'm really hoping this year we see some actual change because stuff is looking depressing...
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    Quote Originally Posted by DizzyPW View Post
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    What a wonderful review, I don't know if you writers get paid but if you do, this guy should get a bonus.

    I'm noticing we're entering an age of indie games and I'm hoping they continue to grow and spill into the MMO market and wash away all this dead weight we're being supplied, since most indie developers know how to make a game challenging.
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    We went over this topic a hell of alot in school in design classes and in discussions and panels from visitors. The industry is leaning towards easier and intuitive gameplay. Going with what was said in the article it is the obvious choice because it appeals to a broader range of player which means your game appeals to alot more people. Remember just because it is easy for one of us who has been playing games for years and may be skilled at it does not mean it is easy for most of the people playing the game.

    WoW is a perfect example of that, even with the incredible ease of LFR they still have only opened up endgame content to about a third of their playerbase. While it has improved from the old 5% numbers they threw around, think about the waste of resources when you make content that only a fraction of the players actually participate in. Think about what it means to make a game from a budget and profit standpoint when it is only going to target a couple hundred thousand potential players. Limiting yourself in these ways is not very healthy for MMO development which tends to be an expensive and highly competitive industry. You need to make games that appeal to large audiences to try and sustain enough players to be profitable and able to create new content.

    Theres a few other things with difficulty that have changed in games too. One of the new "hot" trends in game design is to eliminate the difficulty progression of a game. Alot of focus group feedback has shown that one of the top reasons people stop playing a game is because they get stuck. Running with that, one of big design trends now is to create a flat level of difficulty meaning that the end of the game isn't any harder than the beginning of the game, or even taking it a step further and making the game get easier as you go through it. The idea behind this is that if you can get through the start of a game then you are skilled enough to complete it.

    Theres some other topics for the reasoning too but the reality now is that making games for hardcore gamers and pidgeonholeing features to "classic design" is becoming the niche market. Games like LoL, WoW, Call of Duty, and so on have had tremendous success expanding what were limited markets by reducing the barrier of entry for new players and players who have limited/no video game experience. Many of the social games also appeal to non gamers for this reason too as they are easy to start, can be played very casually, and are designed to draw you in because your friends play.

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