Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
You can have an MMO without tavern games or horse training - indeed there are already dozens of MMO's without them.
Specifically tavern games and horse training? Sure.
Collecting cosmetics, mounts, player housing, etc? Far less.
There are plenty of side/immersive elements in nearly every single MMO. Persistence is only a piece of it.
You specifically said Important part bolded.
My argument here would be that you could make an MMO without any immersive elements to it at all. A persistent world, good combat system, good content. People would play that MMO.
My argument would then follow that without a persistent world, you dont have an MMO and so may as well be developing a MOBA.
I fully agree that every game has some elements that exist just for immersion. However, without those elements all the developer would be doing is aiming the MMO at a narrower audience, not making a game from a different genre.
I personally would be fine playing a game where the developer took all time spent on immersion only aspects and redirected it instead to aspects related to systems, mechanics and gameplay.
I'll take a great encounter any day over a great story. I can always find a great story by reading a book or watching a show, if I really want one. I can only get a great encounter in a game.
I wish there was a MMO that was founded on this philosophy.
Sadly, everyone has a story to tell. I don't need a story, I just need a setting. The story is the same every time. I go in there with my friends and kick everything that is not nailed downs ass.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Quite a late reply. Apologies, I'm not as active here as I have been in days passed. Yea, I am lucky enough to play on a server where 99 percent of the adult profiles (to put it mildly) are drawn to one location. Specifically the Goldshire inn, it's giving me some right laughs too. As a result, I usually just see normal profiles.
As for your other point. I don't actually see tavern games as an RP tool, it's a neat little addition to the game, if nothing else. That is not to say they cannot be RP tools. In the past I've argued, for example. That rather than code a game and all its rules and what not.A simple addition of a card pack and let players play their own card games. That would be much more of an RP tool. And arguably a lot more value. But it's going to be incredibly niche, a novelty at best. So I'm pretty conflicted about it. Given some other interesting choices made this isn't high on my list of concerns.
Few in this forum are gonna admit it, but that's how you get World of Warcraft. Ever since Cataclysm Blizzard has become increasingly consumed w/ min-maxing it's own systems. They've completely forgotten that a key part of the MMO experience is simulating a living, breathing, world which is a goal found all the way back in some of the oldest games of the genre.
If you want a persistent world that's just systems then that's pretty much Path of Exile.
We should expect MMORPGs to have a focus on roleplaying.
Noaani would probably love an MMO Raiding Game. Sure.
It would be a challenge for me to understand the mindset of playing WOW to have a character that hangs out in Goldshire.
I can work with that classification. It actually makes more sense to me. "Neat little addition to the game". I mean, the whole RP Tool subset of features falls into that classification for me. You are right though you don't have to RP with the Tavern games.
I really wish they would reconsider the whole add-ons' thing.
It opens the door to things like DPS meters, sure, but many people are just going to throw a rock throw the window and get in any way.
My main concern for a while now is bloat. Designing a bunch of games in a game to put in taverns so people can hang out seems like a lot of work. I have done a number of game jams and I know even a simple game takes days to be good. If players could write the mini games as add-ons like in WOW that would be a feature that is more than a neat little addition to the game.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
If WOW got rid of things like:
Raid finder, Dungeon Ques, Cross realm support, removed bloat raid difficulties(Heroic/mythic only).
I think WOW would be much more social of a game. You would have to prove your worth and know people to get in a raid by running dungeons. You could not just random que into dungeons and show your ass. It would be a lot more like early WOW. I think the stand-out feature in early WOW that made it a living, breathing world was that you had to know the people on your server to play it.
I am not convinced it has much to do with all of their systems and mechanics. Even though those too are full of their mistakes in Shadowlands right now.
I don't know how you play PoE, For me, it is far from persistent. I log on at the start of a league, make a new char. Speed run until mapping. Then I spend the next week or two seeing how rich I can get before another game comes up, or I stop having fun. I have never logged onto a character outside a league.
TBH, I would not care if the character got deleted at the end of a league. It is about the journey. My friends and me on discord racing to see who has the most exalts. It is kind of like a simi coop, semi competitive match that lasts a few weeks at most. Technically, I guess its persistent. I just would never play it that way.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
There is a reason PoE is the game I have spent the most amount of time in over the last few years.
Take that game, add in an actual persistent world rather than instances for all content, move the combat from an ARPG to more MMORPG (cooldowns, more individual skills), make top end content require 6+ and 18+ people rather than scaling down to individual players and make the game functionally 3D and I'd be set for a decade.
I don't think you are necessarily wrong with your point on WoW either - my issues with that game are not in regards to the focus on systems, but rather ion the lack of thought put in to each system and how it impacts the game as a whole.
What I will say is that you literally just pointed to the most popular MMORPG and the most popular ARPG as being games with little to no story - which just proves the point that story really just isn't needed. It is nice to have, for sure - and in most games my first alt is all about exploring the games story- but it is not at all needed.
It's important to note that plenty of WoW clones have had better systems and gameplay loops yet repeatedly failed. You can't ignore that it was the years of backstory from it's RTS days that got players invested in the original concept of Vanilla and it's that investment that's kept them hooked even as the game has continually fallen from grace.
I'm not saying all games need a story to succeed...I don't care about it in Overwatch, League, or Apex. However, there's probably a good reason many of the top MMOs over the last decade all came from IPs w/ mountains of lore; WoW, ESO, SWTOR, FFXIV, Neverwinter
Even in the genre there's plenty of games that don't require a story, but they do have little immersive things. WoW is really the only one that gets away w/ no player housing. MMOs are grindy as hell and these things provide a way for players to slow their burnout.
And as I've been saying, it's not like Intrepid is adding a whole lot of roleplay tools. There's far more egregious sources of bloat than anything roleplayers are asking for.
An excellent point; The element of added backstory and the immersive-ness of a game world's lore genuinely aids the environment. PFS don't need lore; those are all about the action. In a game wherein a player could be doing a LOT of different things (i.e. an MMORPG) it's better to be able to feel like you're more than just a gun pointed in a first-person perspective.
But it is also important to note that most of those games also had a better in-game story than WoW.
I'm not at all saying that an MMO can't have a story in order to be successful. All I am saying - and that you seem to agree - is that it is absolutely not needed for success.
Of the 20+ MMO's that I have played, the one that had both the best story and the best story-telling (for an MMO setting) was by far EQ2. That also happens to be my favorite of those MMO's - so I am not even saying I prefer MMO's without a story (though I would play the shit out of an MMO that had the best content/systems, regardless of story).
League of Legends is a MOBA. It's not an RPG.
Apex Legends is a Battle Royale. It's not an RPG.
An MMOFPS doesn't need roleplaying tools.
Though, even Fortnite and Overwatch have dance emotes.
Re-read that part of the conversation. I was showcasing very successful games that rely solely on it's systems
and don't really need a story while pointing out that the most successful MMOs tend to need an established lore as the majority of the playerbase wants to feel immersed in the world.
Not having a pre-established lore doesn't immediately mean the game is dead, Archeage and BDO both have rather forgettable stories, however both still have many features that were built almost entirely for immersive reasons.
That lore can come in the form of previous games and books such as WoW, ESO, etc or it can be player generated such as in Eve and Archeage. Ironically I don't even think AoC really needs a story, one of the primary reasons I started my YouTube channel is to track player made lore b/c Ashes has is a chance for players to actually be the heroes and villains in a way that's just not possible in other games.
Arguments about whether or not a player infiltrating a guild to gather information is roleplay or just playing the systems are entirely pointless b/c it's not an either or thing. As w/ nearly everything in life it's more of a sliding scale and some will be far more on the make believe side while others will be far more on the systems side and that'll change from person to person and day to day.
Neither is bad, it just means Intrepid needs to find the balance that makes most of us content.
Players such as @Noaani & @Vhaeyne will have far less heads to bash in if no one is playing the game b/c the majority of MMO players want to feel a part of a living world and pure roleplayers needs systems players to help drive the in game content.
It isn't the majority. Again, if it were, lifeless games like WoW (even if there is story that exists, it isn't in the actual game) would be dead.
Edit to add.
EQ2 - great story, great storytelling.
Rift - great story, ok storytelling.
LotRO, great story, fairly good story telling.
WoW, ok story, shit storytelling.
Archeage, ok story, ok storytelling.
Age of Conan, good story, good storytelling.
ESO, great story, good storytelling.
Find a connection in there in terms of how well each game has done in relation to story/storytelling.
That being said - League of Legends has an animated show dropping soon.
The largest games on that list had years of backstory long before they were released.
Yeah, but so does the smallest.
Decades of story, in fact.
That's the point.
WoW has years of sub-standard story and is popular.
LotRO and Age of Conan have decades of some of the most influential western literature behind them, and had middling populations at best.
Archeage had an extremely popular current novel series as its basis, and it did nothing at all for the game.
Then we look at EQ. EQ as a franchise had more written about it than Warcraft as a franchise when EQ2 released - and it was far better story. Today, it has probably three or four times as much written, ad there are two games with yearly expansions.
Again, it didnt help.
The only thing that can be claimed is that WoW had more written about it that gamers consumed in games and associated with a game IP - but even then since that game didn't really continue the story in in any interesting way, the story in it cant be claimed as anything keeping people playing.
Also, this isnt really a derailment. The thread is talking about RP features, and this discussion about story is a subset of that.
If you don't have a great story then your systems need to make up for it such as in Eve Online.
That said, at the end of the day it is still a game and obviously bad games will not grow regardless of it's story, hence LOTRO.
SWTOR wasn't the the worst MMO...but plenty of people felt it got better when it stopped trying to be WoW in space and shifted to being KOTOR 4 by focusing on it's class narratives.
One thing you can't deny though is that the vast majority of MMO players are casual. For this particular conversation I'll define that as someone who has less than a few hours a day to play, if not only a few hours a week.
These are the guys that are going to get the most out of single player (usually immersive) elements such as an engaging story/questing, animal taming, mat farming & crafting, parlor games, etc.
Now specifically in the case of WoW, I think you have a good deal of bias. You've called it lifeless and said the story isn't interesting. Mechanically, when WoW is good it's really good and when it's bad it still tends to be better than most. It's far from a perfect game but the reason so many people complain is b/c they know what it could be if Blizzard ever had the balls to step down from it's pedestal and admit it's mistakes.
As for it's story Nobbel87 is able to make a living off of a YouTube channel solely dedicated to Warcraft's lore, people run around in the real world w/ Horde and Alliance emblems permanently tattooed to their bodies, players went bananas for Legion b/c not only did it have good systems (at least during the last patch that is) it was the close of a storyline that started in 2002.
If people are invested in the world, whether it's b/c of the pre-written story or the one crafted by the players, they are far more likely to continue playing the game. It is an important pillar of the genre.
Even if you disagree w/ all of this I would have to ask how you'd want to handle leveling in an MMO w/o a story. Eve has it's skill points but it's more of an economic simulator which really can only work in a game like Eve.
One of the more common request in regards to questing in AoC is "no fetch quest" b/c of how badly WoW handles them due to most of it's questing being little more than a timegate between you and max level. Whereas in ESO the story is intrinsically wrapped into everything and it's questing is viewed overwhelmingly positively.
Or they could go the PoE route and simply throw a mass of linear content at players that has no need for a story. They could also do this with branching content - there is no specific need for it to be linear.
As to this paragraph. I have two specific thoughts,
First, any IP with enough of a following will have people making a living off the lore - this is in no way specific to WoW.
Second, people have tattoos from WoW and other IP's, but more often than not it is because of something they associate that IP with, rather than the IP itself (where they met friends, partners etc). It is a reminder of good times had with friends rather than a reminder of the game.
You could not escape hearing about it. The ads and hype was off the chart for a while. People were excited about the "Potential" of a TV show and MMORPG that can be enjoyed in tandem. It was a new concept.
I always thought it was a massive case of companies not understanding the wants and needs of their target audience. Instead of investing all the money in the game, they spent a lot on a TV show. They made a shitty game and a shitty show. In the process, they also wasted tons of money on advertising.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
As if anyone claimed that if a game has a great story it will be a great game.
I would hope that you can make better arguments than that.
Who are you talking to and what argument is being made?
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
1. I would be willing to bet that literally nothing exists that can back this claim.
2. You fall into that 1% I mentioned that enjoys blitzing to the endgame. That's fine. I've done the endgame blitz before and had my fun w/ it, but I've also done the slow, story based, playthrough. I've seen both sides of this.
My statement was built on the fact that the majority of gamers are casual and I'm really hoping no one here is going to try and dispute that. They are the ones not racing to the end game to bonk each other's heads which is why I said they're far more likely to invest more in the single player and immersive parts of the game such as questing. I even gave you not one, but two, different games where players enjoy the questing experience b/c of how it's story is built into it. You yourself admitted that big IPs bring people in and they're big b/c of their stories. SWTOR likely would have died a long, long, time ago if it hadn't been for the fanboys invested in it's universe. Hell, who do you think are the ones still playing LOTRO in 2021?
You say people get WoW tattoos to remember friends and partners they met in game? How many friends have people made just for being a fan of Fallout? Skyrim? Zelda? Mario? Dragon Age? Mass Effect? Half-Life? Stardew Valley?
I've been following One Piece for over 20 years now and have not made a single friend based on that fandom...Never once in two decades have I even had someone watch an episode w/ me. Yet I'm actively saving up for a full sleeve dedicated to it.
People like to remember things they can invest themselves into it either b/c they've made friends, been a part of it the better part of their lives (i.e. Nintendo games) or b/c they resonated and connected w/ the world; which is what a good story helps do.
The beauty of the MMORPG is that it bridges the divide between these two types of players in an almost entirely unique way.
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Now, not only am just kind of exhausted of defending the minutia of my argument, when I looked back in the thread to remember what it was we were even talking about at this point I saw that OP had actually requested we change the subject b/c he's right...none of this is actually covering the tools that will be available to Roleplayers so this is gonna be my last say on it.
@Grihm sorry for getting this far off the rails. If you aren't yet I strongly suggest joining the Unofficial Roleplay Server and if you don't mind a bit of self promotion I actually have a video on this topic going out tomorrow. If you really hate YouTubers then ping me in the Discord and I and about 200 other people will be delighted to answer any questions
There was a discussion back then in relation to not every quest in that game being voice acted, and a developer (Illucide, iirc) chimed in saying that the data they have indicates that most (iirc they used 90%) players simply click through quest dialogue anyway, so they didn't see much value in voice acting the bulk of quests.
So, yea, I have nothing to back it up, but only because I am not willing to go looking for it (and it may not actually be on line anywhere now). However, you and I also know perfectly well that you won't find any comment from anyone that would have reason to know that would refute this.
As to your second point, in games with a story that is worth it, I always end up running an alt to look at the story after my main is at the level cap. There is a reason I am able to compare the quality of story and storytelling in all the games I have played.
While the bulk of gamers are indeed casual, that doesn't mean they are stopping at each quest update to dead what is being said - in my experience it is the casual players that are least likely to do so, as they just want to get on with killing stuff in the time they have available. Not even specifically about progress, they just want to carry on with the killing.
I used the notion of remembering friends as an example, it obviously isn't a catch-all. A friend of mine has a Skyrim tattoo. He started playing the game in 2015 when I showed him it. He was at a point where he needed something to do to keep his mind occupied, as he had just left his rather abusive partner.
The tattoo of the games logo for him isn't a reminder of the game, or any piece of content. The tattoo is because that game means personal freedom to him. If you talk to most people with a tattoo of any specific IP, there will be a story as to why that specific IP means more to them than it does to the average consumer of that IP. Friends and such is one such reason, but not the only reason.
I would be shocked if you could find even one person that said they had a tattoo of a game IP specifically and solely because of the story of that game. There is always something deeper that the person associates with it.
I will guarantee that you have a deeper attachment to what it is you are saving to get a tattoo of than most consumers of that IP will have.
You say a lot of casuals play this. And that's true. But -that- is why people blitz through quest. I'll explain the reasoning.
Casualisation of games has been a thing now for many years. You can see it all over the place, I'll give some examples.
World of Warcraft, like you mentioned. Kept adding tool after tool that made the game more casual. You know the ones, they've been argued to death. But the one I want to highlight specifically is markers. The reason you can blaze through quest text in WoW these days is because after you accept all the quests in a specific hub, you open the map to see where it all is. The areas are highlighted all nicely. Before, in 2004/2005 when Questie add-on was not a thing, you had to carefully read the text. Like you'd have to get his favourite food. A Zhevra carcass and place it at a specific place, the place was described in the quest's text. And that was it. It naturally made you read the quests. And, as a result, you learn more about the lore of the game. Nowadays they have to do it with cutscenes otherwise people won't remember any of the lore.
But it happens everywhere, not just WoW, look at the devolution of Morrowind to Skyrim.
From a business perspective, it makes sense for a game to want to 'reel in' the casuals. The retention of players will be lower by using these types of tools, so you have to get players to care in a different way. Ashes does it in the form of community projects. Like help build a metropolis node.
The problem, and reason why we won't see an MMO without all the convenient features is because that core audience is very niche.
Quest markers have definitely increased the number of people that just click through dialogue, for sure.
Thing is, there are two things players do to make this process fast. The first is that we are able to assume that the mobs the quest want us to kill are likely to be in the general direction that the quest chain is heading, so we can usually be fairly well assured that if we just grab all the quests and keep moving in the same direct we have been, we will find what we need to find. The second thing is that we have websites we can refer to if the above doesn't work.
Since we are talking about WoW, I'll carry on with it. WoW was many peoples first MMO. As such, many people didn't know the above two things. As such, many people wrongly assumed that you had to listen to the quest givers in order to know what to do with the quest. Many people in WoW got addons before they realized that there were already faster ways to quest than stopping and reading every quest.
Addons like Questie were a result of players wanting to click through quests and not realizing there were already alternatives - so the desire of the bulk of the playerbase to skip quest dialogue is somewhat apparent in the fact that they exist, imo.