Hey all, I’m sure there’s a sentiment that some of the smaller communities reddit had will take time to repopulate and gather traffic in the Fediverse. I was curious if Games still served as a melting pot for game talk, and I wanted to chat a bit here to see if I can reignite some discussion about MMO content.
Exploring this new little bubble of internet has me wondering how people feel about how online games have developed over time. Early 2000’s MMOs definitely had a special feeling to them, with lots of interaction between players, more obtuse(and grindy) challenges to overcome, but definitely a feeling of reward for figuring these things out or brute forcing your way through.
I’m wondering if eventually the social dynamic of MMOs will be reexplored. Parts of the game like leveling are definitely designed to be less impactful in the scope of overall gameplay, and cooperating between players is mainly focused on teamwork in the final endgame instances. I remember playing MapleStory, games like FFXI, etc where party questing during the leveling processes were huge and added a unique feeling to the social atmosphere and accomplishment at earlier levels.
If you have any thoughts about games you think still hit cooperative notes well, what you miss or don’t miss about older design vs newer ones, or just have any anecdotes in general I’d love to hear it!
I believe it to be a bygone era of games. Because there are quite a lot of pitfalls with this style, both socially and techically.
Social:
Just like with social platforms, we have become acutely aware that locking people to a server (this has some benefits like creating an identity, making it hard/long to levelup so that you dont just leave the server… etc) was not the best idea.
Because it has the fundamental flaw of not being designed for the masses of the internet. If there is a threshold to enter something, people will use it against you.
Because games are not real life where we exist 24/7, they are virtual worlds and is accessible from wherever whenever, people come into games with any kind of emotions. Be it frustration or pure bliss, you can never control this, whereas in the real world, if you see someone wobbling through the street in the middle of the night, you’ve got a ton of options on how you want to handle the situation.
In a game, what choice do you have? a few, but you have the greatest escape hatch ever: to logout/go offline.
This is why in modern MMO-ish games, what do they do? Either phasing like WoW or random instance in a Town (and only towns, the rest of the game is for you or the party you’re in) like in Path of Exile/Destiny.
Because the developers want to leave it to chance (since the probability of a bad interaction is highly unlikely and the idea scales on the technical side) and if it still happens? Just logout and log back in, boom, a different shard/instance.
But what is the cost? The guy you just encountered in the game has less persistence than a creature/enemy in games.
Okay, sorry, i dont want to make a whole blogpost about this, but i enjoy talking about it.