MMO's are all about interaction with other players, right?
Yet, many players enjoy them for PvE content. Obviously, a good MMO will keep churning out content to retain subscribers, but when you get down to it aren't all MMORPG's just watered down versions of single player RPG's?
Take World of Warcraft. Sure, it has it's appeal, but is the gameplay anywhere near as good as Diablo 2 or Zelda: OOT? If you packed it's PvE elements into a single player package, and kept updating the content as people do the MMO counterpart, would anyone really want to play it, or would they stick with the normal WoW even though all they're doing is playing the same game, but with a million other players sharing a server?
So what is it about playing PvE content with other gamers that enhances the experience vs playing it by yourself?
Those three steps give you a huge reservoir of demand. Co-op elements in MMOs fill that demand. You can go into more detail about the strategy of teamplay against AI challenges but it really comes down to being social.
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PvE is much better for leveling and such, although provides limits once you've reached the level cap. I ideal is to power level on a PvE server then move your character to PvP.
You're also making one of the same mistakes I did about MMRPG's: that their content is inferior to non-MMO's and their primary draw is the sociability. Plenty of MMO's don't have content, and yet they have excellent sociability. Those games die. You need quality regardless of your genre to succeed long-term.
To use your example: Would WoW be less popular without the social aspect? Absolutely, but it's because playing with other people adds new layers to games, not because it's lacking in other departments.
Besides, it's designed to be MMO. Asking what would happen if you took the same game and made it single player is ridiculous...the game would be designed for that format, and many elements would change. Of course it would make a crappy single-player experience, because that's not what it was intended for. Your criticism, framed this way, seems self-fulfilling, and unfair from a design perspective.
While I do enjoy PVP, I more often seek cooperative play with my friends on an MMO. It's an experience not easily replicated in other genres.
I satiate my competitive hunger with fighting games. Although, it would be fun as hell to take Nu into an MMO. I'd party with Nemebro just to piss him off.
Last edited by StyleTime on Sep 19th, 2010 at 04:46 AM
Gender: Male Location: Northumberland,
United Kingdom
I never really went into battlegrounds and the arena when I played WoW... I also never reached the level cap so didn't get to go on any proper raids. The best times I had on the game were doing instances though. The cooperative "whole is greater than the sum of it's parts" thing... fun stuff.
yeah, teaming up with friends (and strangers) to take on a powerful foe is always a great thrill....it unless they nurf everything and make it entirely too easy....
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Most people spend most of their time leveling in WoW soloing, so yeah, it would work. WoW has some of the better storylines as far as MMORPG's go. The quests actually have plots and arcs, and now they're all being improved with the release of the new expansion.
How far in do you have to get into the game before you reach that point? Because (and I always read all of the quest text so that's not the problem) I never encountered anything more than "go kill ten goblins. Go save the fields from bandits. Kill ten bandits".
I hate grind. Hate it. And I've been talked into trying that game far too many times.
I was able to level a Mage to 40 and completed a number of story arcs the game had to offer as well as maxing out the quests of entire zones and I can't say I experienced anything much beyond that either. Not to mention I genuinely find the quest box text info a very uncompelling way to tell a story. In FFXI you actually get cutscenes where characters interact with eachother with music in the background that's made to fit the scene, and aside from having a silent protagonist instead of a scripted one and the less personal, world changing stories of the main Final Fantasy games, its story is as fine as any other in the series, and in many ways surpasses them in its incredible scope (sadly a lot of people don't really get to experience it and get put off by the considerable difficulty). However it wouldn't really work as a single player game either as the creators purposefully made it so that you needed to cooperate with other players to get through a large portion of content. It'd be ridiculously hard to solo beyond level 30, and near impossible from 40 onwards.
I fail to see how "go kill some arbitrary number of goblins (even though it will have zero effect whatsoever) because they're annoying some farmers" is at all some sort of plot-based reason.
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Sep 18th, 2010 09:31 PM
