WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.
I guess Light No Fire has a good chance of becoming such a game. It’s gonna be No Mans Sky, but on one earth sized fantasy planet. I don’t think it will have large cities though. 🤔
I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.
But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.
traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to
They don’t work. Vanguard did it way back when, with their three continent world. Each one had enough content to get from lvl 1 to lvl 50, the max, and your starting race determined your starting location. It could take up to an hour to get to friends. Even on the same continent, with a mount (before they added flying mounts), it could take a half hour of running to cross the map… and players complained so vociferously that they were forced to add fast travel options.
I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
So. I’m on the side of more difficulty sliders please, but it’s not just to get more people in the door. I want to be able to make games more difficult when I can too. I generally play on the hardest difficulty first, then lower it until I’m having fun.
But there are games where making it easier cannot work, to my knowledge. A good example, I think, is Post Void, which is VERY inaccessible in a lot of ways (epilepsy warning, if you look up the game, even with the accessibility setting on, it’s still bad). The visuals need accessibility options to be improved, but the gameplay really can’t be made more accessible without severely harming the gameplay. At best you could add more starting time to the flask. I rolled hard off this game due to chronic illness, but I loved it. But I also hated it for similar reasons. Some games are just niche, and frankly, there’s enough games out there that you don’t have to play all of them.
Hot take, but the open world nature of Elden Ring drove me crazy. Coming from a series grounded by its tightly knit and highly curated environments, I never understood why Elden Ring is so unanimously considered the “peak” of the series.
I enjoyed my time with it, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the game could have been without the open world inclusion. So for me it’s not necessarily “how big is too big”, but whether or not the gameplay necessitates an open world.
Agreed the level designs in dark souls coupled with the exploration made them s tier an adventure. Elden rings was ok but with all the traveling I felt more like a tourist.
I’m with you on it, because my completionist tendencies saw me trekking between one too many copy-and-pasted side dungeons in the 50 hours I gave Elden Ring before I couldn’t take it any more and never came back to finish the game.
It’s not like the moment-to-moment combat is any less fun than the games that came before it, but since the game lets me indulge in my worst tendency of finishing every optional thing before progressing things it just felt like a meaningless checklist slog.
It’s definitely a “me” problem, but it’s just one reason why I tend to prefer a more focused experience than a sprawling open world.
The copy-paste dungeons were a big issue for me. And the amount of reused enemies and bosses. There is definitely a way to “optimally” play the game for the best experience. But I’d say that goes against the nature of what an open world is supposed to represent.
considering lemmy is so spread out and there’s many apps for it, I think post formatting is down to user preference and choice.
I’d suggest swapping to a view that will at least show titles so you don’t make the mistake of clicking on something or seeing something that’s a spoiler for you.
my point is that its on the user, not the OP. especially given the game its from.
(For the sake of this discussion, we’re talking spoilers in general, not whether a 5 year old game should be considered spoilerable)
Wait, so your solution to spoilers, is to tell everybody everywhere to stop having auto loaded images in their feed? Instead of, you know, having the OP spoiler tag their content? Wow.
I had read some posts on Usenet back then with some players saying UV wasn’t as tough as they hoped it would be. (…) I thought “Oh really? Ok then. You’re all dead.” (…) It wasn’t meant to be fair, or even finishable. I can’t even get past E1M3 in nightmare. Any level with backtracking would be almost impossible.
There is a secret level in Doom II described in the biography Masters of Doom by David Kushner. It was made as a prank, where the boss had the face of one of the Johns and moved at 200% faster speed than the player. I’m not sure if this made it into the retail or shareware versions they shipped.
if we going by quantity, I think 2007 was the most stacked, like omg the amount of hype for these games at the cafeteria lunch table was insane. www.imdb.com/list/ls087306278
it honestly feels weird hearing people call these games “classics” xd I am NOT ready for this!
It think it has to be 2007 just because there are games that didn’t crack the top 10 that year that would be goty in other years. It’s also a huge year for multiple platforms, pratically every major franchise had a good release that year.
Ditto this, 2007 was a fucking crazy year. All that next gen hit at once, people still taking risks on unique ideas. Nowadays you only see that kind of stuff from the indie scene, though they’ve been doing a great job with it IMO.
2001 easily had the most games that were highly rated and as others have said you some real classics. The PS2 was hitting it’s stride, the original Xbox Launched, and the Gamecube was right there.
2011 also had some damn amazing games: Arkham City, Portal 2, Skyrim, Skyward Sword, Minecraft, Mortal Kombat 9, Starcraft II, Bastion, Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3 to name a few.
i was going to go with '06, but it looks like '04 was revolutionary for many game genres, and considered a major milestone in video game history due to its lasting affect on future titles.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne