Lets try this thread again: MMO design brainstorming.
How do you make an MMORPG that you can release expansions for to keep it updated, but the expansions don't obsolete the old content?
New stuff has to be such that even veterans want it, but not such that it makes old stuff useless.
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Literally impossible because you're putting an expiration date on your game, and also stifling innovation because if you make the new content too good you will make the old content a chore to play.
After so many expansions the overwhelming amounts of content will simply put off new players.
Just accept that MMOs are dead and the only design you'll get is skinned boxes
Ok, just a brainfart: an area has a special kind of atmosphere or whatever, so you need a special set of armor to be not affected. While you're leveling in the new area(s) you unlock or farm materials for it so you can wear it for the dungeons and raids of that part of the game. You would need a set of armor or partf of armor for every area but it shouldnt have better basic stats than the prior items. Another way would be some kind of skill you unlock or learn.
I think in general the traits and stuff you unlock and gain should be of more weight.
What if new items and skills are kind of like Hearthstone expansions? They are more or less on the same power level, just slightly better, and the old stuff is still very useful and relevant.
Like adding some strong mobility skill with the expansion, that makes people rethink old raids as well, or some item that has meh stats but a strong effect like damage reflection or whatever.
>They are more or less on the same power level
This is blatantly false. The average number of base set cards in any viable meta deck is super small, if they even have any. Decks are mostly made up of yearly rotation cards.
Google says this is the best deck today:
hearthstonetopdecks.com
And it has almost half standard set cards.
That's gimmicky as fuck and getting nerfed. The cards it uses are complete fucking garbage but only work well in that one scenario. Stonetusk? fucking really?
repetitive grinding is the cheapest way to keep players sinking hours into a game for shit like transmogs or better gear for raids/pvp, if there ever is a new generation of MMO's I hope they make that shit obsolete and make everything more skill based (as in player skill, not character skill rotations)
>player skill, not character skill
So not an RPG?
First of all, don't think about catering to autistic minmaxers. Whatever you do some basement loser will make a super complicated Excel chart trying to figure out the "best" gameplay.
Also instead of just upping damage numbers I like the idea of having specific flavors to gear in specific expansions. For example a water themed expansion may have a lot of AoE focused items or an expansion with some zerg-like enemy may focus on crowd control, etc.
Just redo what ragnarok did. A lot of shit to explore with forking paths and a variety of character customization. nowadays the map is just a huge plain field with ocasional structure but no forking path, hidden stuff, obstacles, etc
>First of all, don't think about catering to autistic minmaxers. Whatever you do some basement loser will make a super complicated Excel chart trying to figure out the "best" gameplay.
The problem is that autist will upload his build online and everyone will copy it, and 3 days after release your game is solved with everyone running the same build.
Integrate new content with the older content, rebalance new content to fit with the new one if necessary but don't make too much change either.
Add a high skill ceiling and monsters too hard to be fought alone to force player interaction
That's what I'm saying. This is inevitable so don't even try to go around it. Design the game for people who want to play it, not calculate it.
MMO should be about immersion and the journey. Not a rush to the end game.
No in game map. No easily accessible fast travel. No giant indicators of any kind saying that this NPC is important/has a quest/whatever.
PVE and PVP have no place in the same game.
>no map, no identifiers
Haven&Heart was an MMO that did that, people just programmed third party maps and identifiers that everyone had to use or be at a disadvantage.
Make a proper sequel to Guild Wars 1.
Worst thing about TBC was that it wasn't set on Azeroth. Like all WoW expansions, with the exception of Cataclysm, a seperate continent as the sole provider of new content destroys the need to go out into the old world which I find one of the biggest problems.
I feel that expansions in MMOs should be an expansion of the world and not a spin-off where you go on a completely seperate adventure.
Vanilla item level was meaningless. Some of the best items werent raid stuff. A staff with spell damage from lvl 40 was better than most lvl 60 stuff.
Thats how a good mmo should be balanced. Another example: ragnarok online. Rock scissors paper elements, if you want to kill a boss, you needed to go after specific equipment made to resist that boss. Usually drops from other bosses. Around the world.
Obsoleting old content is fine.
You really cant. Players are going to want new content, and they are also going to want to be rewarded for said content. Thing is,if you make all the content at the same "tier" or "level" then the rewards are at that same tier and they don't really feel like rewards anymore. The best way I can see that would maybe work, outside of homages to old content in new content, is to maybe scale the old content up with the new content and maybe make it where players can get cosmetic stuff from the old content. IE of someone likes the look of the older raid gear, they need to run a scaled up version of the old raid to get it.
This is one of the big problems.
>Black lotus? Thorium? Arcanite? Who cares. EVERYTHING gets a better equivalent in in the outlands. And the system never changed after.
Meanwhile in vanilla yoi had lvl 60s farming in lvl 30 areas because mats.were still useful later.
The problem is that dev's turn to Items for endgame. True endgame should be skill based, like FPS and Fighting Games. The endgame for those genres is reaching the highest level of skill while constantly adapting to competition. In an MMO they could have guilds constantly fighting for territory. It will never get old as long as people are always learning and getting better. What MMOs need is gameplay with a high skill ceiling.
A good MMO is a pipe dream. Here's an idea, how about non-MMO online RPGs? Why do multiplayer RPGs always have to be MMOs with microtransations and subscriptions? Maybe an open world RPG like Skyrim but with netcode so people can set up their own servers with custom custom and the like.
I don't care about the MASSIVE part of MMO, but I want the persistent world.
There were some Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds that had at most 20 people online, so not MMOs, but felt like an MMO. They were an MMO minus all the people in the background, only the people you interact with were present, the rest are invisible.
horizontal gear progression like FFXI had for 8 years. Kept endgame content that was there from the start of the game relevant until the day they decided to turn it into FFXIV.
GW1
that is all
>no dark ages gap
ree
>dark ages
?
easy. design your game such that each new expansion has ready made content from 1 to max level. then increase the level cap by 2 each expansion. the point of getting max level isn't to get more powerful through leveling, it's more to gain crafting and armor skills necessary for the latest xpac armor/weps. this would encourage people to play alts when an xpac drops while not penalizing them for neglecting their mains.
this would only work in a skill based game though. a wow clone/click-fest would fail since it only relies on the stats and not the player.
this is correct. you have to get rid of the gear treadmill. people always compare mmos to theme parks, but in real life just because a park gets a new ride doesn't mean no one wants to ride the old ones anymore. make the game actually fun to play instead of a grind for bigger numbers.
Why do item levels exist anyway
They determine the numbers on the item.
A level 20 Pants of the Bear and a level 80 Pants of the Bear will have the same stats in different amounts.
>Stonetusk is a bad card
Normally yes. When it's 1 mana 5/5 charge, no.
Don't have items or gear that matter - just fun content that people want to do because it's enjoyable.
This is why UO was the best MMO ever made
>Normally yes.
I used to play a paladin deck with 1TK combo boar, you could also do a shaman one I think. Fun times.
I thought that would be reflected in the level requirement
No, since some quest rewards don't have level requirement.
Also expansions jump power level hard, but the level requirement stays linear.
In Vanilla level requirement and item level were close, in WotLK they are waaaay apart. Its not just a joke that your pants are more intelligent than you, a lot of gear had more stats on it than your character has.
Good discussions. Keep posting anons.
Remove leveling alltogether.
Each new "tier" of a dungeon/raid is obviously harder than the previous one.
Personal loot, each boss is guaranteed to drop something usable by you but with randomized suffixes. So gaining ilvl is easy, but getting bis is very hard.
New player cant enter high tier raids unless his ilvl is sufficient.
Old players are incentivised to keep doing old raids with rare loot like mounts, pets, transmog, special currency to buy cosmetic shit. This way new players will have no trouble finding low tier raids.
And the most important one - player ilvl is SCALED DOWN to the tier the raid is set in. If you're in full t8 - you will NOT one shot everything in t1, but rather be scaled down to t1+ ilvl so the raid is still a challenge and boss will not forgive major fuck ups.
Just do away with power through items, horizontal instead of vertical power levels
Guild Wars 1, while granted not a real mmo, had you max out your items and level really early in the game, and from that point on you just got more skills, put rather minor and cheap attachments on your gear, and got gud
>MMO setup that allows for expansions that don't lead to obsolescence of old content
There's a few ways:
1. Follow the loot treadmill system, but don't let people bypass old content on the way to new content.
2. Make an open-world MMO where people do whatever the fuck and the expansions just give them new stuff to work with or new locations, maybe with new AI enemies and stuff, but the primary focus will still be PVP and player interaction.
Is obsoleting old content really that bad? By the time old content gets obsoleted, most players have run it so much that they don't want to see it again for at least a few years. I get that it's frustrating for new players who never get to experience it, but that's not such a bad price to pay compared to forcing everyone to do old content so new players will have someone to do it with (which is never that much fun for new players, I might add).
The more I think about it, the more I feel WoW has pretty much perfected the formula, and all the bad things about it comes from the nature of the genre. You can remove the gear resets, sacrificing players' ability to catch up with their friends, but the social aspect is the selling point of any MMO, so people would just drop it. You could remove the whole idea of progression so everyone can always play with everyone, but that would remove the part of the game that hooks people into playing month after month despite the relative lack of novelty. All alternatives to the current formula seem to have too many consequences.
I like this idea. Didn't Destiny do something like this with a new social area? You had to win 7 games in a row or something?
Not every MMO needs to be an RPG.
You guys think a COSMETIC gear treadmill is ok?
Absolutely
GW1 did it and it was fun
constant interaction with other players and constant updates adding new items (which make old items obsolete) are two most important requirements for an MMO to survive
nothing can make up for a lack of new, better items that players can work towards
Item loss on death, allows expansion to add vertical progression but all vertical progression does is increase risk and reward.
Kill yourself.
gear is just a means to the end of dickwaving. even if characters had no stats people would be bragging about how they were world first for the new purple hat and complain that their old yellow hat was worthless because too many people have it now.
ok just means I'll enjoy all the old content while I'm preparing for the expansion =>)
How about this: No gear, no leveling, just people playing video games for gun.
I just started playing RuneScape and I think what system they have in place is really neat, the professions are actually something you'd want to level up ex. Cooking because there are no healer classes so the only way to heal is by leveling up your cooking. The quests aren't all just "kill x and acquire y"
and you can level whatever you want without having to pick a class, maybe take a system like this and expand on it and add party elements, world bosses, having the whole world map be accessible and not have immediate aggro everywhere except dungeons, so new players can see the big bad monsters wander around and not have to worry about being oneshotted and see higher level players get together to kill something as a sort of motivation to level up
Remove the RPG. Make it skill based.
Only if you actually had something to do like GvG, PvP, base building, or raidable guild bases. Seriously why are MMOs never focusing on gameplay. What's the point of cosmetics when the game itself isn't fun?