Thursday, September 24, 2009
I Will Start Playing MMOs When...
The animation, combat, and bosses are on par with Ninja Gaiden.
They wont do it though, because a certain percentage of the MMO userbase would not be able to handle the difficulty of real time combat.
Anybody with a one eyeball, one finger, and a 14.4K modem can play World of Warcraft and just click on an enemy and watch their character walk over and start bashing them, and eventually reach the level cap.
Dont get me wrong, I understand that high level MMO play, especially on big Raids and PVP servers, requires skill to play properly. Sure its mostly logistical skill, managing all your items and powers, but there is an element of manual dexterity involved to pull off certain combos and spell chains. Sure. I get that.
But in Ninja Gaiden and God of War, the combat most closely resembles a fighting game - not an RPG, like most MMO combat.
How much damage you can do and how long you can survive in combat is not premised on how many months you have been playing or how many items or powerups you have collected, but rather on the skill of the player.
The reason we wont ever see an MMO that requires razor like reflexes to defeat the hardest enemies and bosses is simple: money. These companies make more money by having more people subscribed. If the limit on how quickly you can reach the apex of power in the game is player skill, rather than time invested (in months), people would be able to beat all of the content in the game within weeks of it coming out. A certain percentage would not even be able to beat the game at all without help from more skilled players.
Someone has to say it: the quests, combat, and leveling up system in World of Warcraft and most MMOs are designed to SLOW YOU DOWN. They are designed to hand you one tiny breadcrumb at a time, and keep that carrot dangling in front of you. You could be the best World of Warcraft player in the world, but when you start at level one, you suck. You cant do anything. You cant explore the whole world, you would die. You are boxed in by your low experience and lack of items. All of that talent you have isnt worth anything, because your character has a jock strap and a club that barely scratches the hide of the sewer rats that you need to need to kill to reach level 2.
Ive ranted enough, so lets not even talk about graphics, animation, enemy and boss design. God of War vs World of Warcraft? LOL.
MMOs are still in the 20th Century in all those regards.
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3 comments:
Sure the KOTOR MMO looks amazing, but until I see it smash some of the conventions I listed in my rant, until I see it running @ 60 FPS with block and dodge animations and enemy attacks designed for 60 FPS, it will just be another MMO, even if it is the best one on the market.
There's Huxley, a FPSMMO that runs off the Unreal Engine three, that might be decent. It's pretty much has disappeared off every bodies radar though because they haven't said much recently. It's supposed to be on the 360 and PC but so far all they have really shown is some of the closed beta footage from Korea on the PC. The 360 version is anybodies guess.
Man, I was excited about Huxley and Age of Conan in 2007.
Ive pretty much given up on MMOs until The Old Republic.
Obi Wan, you're our only hope.
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