I want to see gameplay footage. If it’s as fun as that mouse platformer game I’m in.
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Transformice. Exactly what I thought of reading Scott’s description.
Transformice looks like some browser game. Fall Guys at least appears to be legit.
I have a prediction for wow classic. Cause I, like everyone, am suuuuuuper nostalgic for it. But I imagine, that I’m tripping on said nostalgia and it’s one hell of a drug. I need to be reminded all the crap I used to complain about.
We will see. I’m certainly gonna play for maybe a month.
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It seems that they are going to release the true WoW classic, Warts and all. Personally, I don’t understand it. I highly doubt that is what people actually want, beyond a few hours of nostalgia, the frustration will drive everyone but the most hardcore players fleeing. They should be making a WoW with the same limited amount of content as the original, but with all the quality of life improvements of a modern game. That would get even someone like me to poke it.
I mean if it looks as fun as Transformice looks, I’m in. I don’t want it to actually look like a browser game.
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I definitely agree that’s what they should do, but we have a case of a developer listening to their fans here. We all know where this road goes.
Also fwiw, you then have to answer the difficult, maybe impossible question of exactly which quality of life changes you wanna have.
There’s been articles written about how the difficulty of certain things meant you were forced to work together, and the fact that you had no choice but to do this with your words and like, personal reputation meant that people who were trash got shunned and either got their shit together or left.
By sheer accident of design they created a community of people who weren’t trash. Some would argue certain quality of life changes would destroy this.
I mean this is basically it, blizzard can get caught in its own fan bubble very easily and it has the money to just make this and think it’ll succeed based on the apparent demand on their own forums.
There is certainly nostalgia, but to say it’s all nostalgia is obviously a vast oversimplification. There are some things that just changed about the game design from Vanilla Wow to all that which came after. Some of those changes are not “right or wrong” inherently, but there are legitimate arguments to have preferences that differ from the direction the game took. To go over a few of my own thoughts:
Servers used to be distinct communities. You had your reputation on that server. Server transfers were rare and controlled by the company, primarily used to either merge small servers together or to split up overpopulated ones. This meant that grouping up with someone else at any point while leveling or doing content, you had a chance to meet someone you liked playing with, and an incentive to play with them further. You would see them around town. People knew who each other were. Even further, server resources were limited as everyone shared the same instance… which is an interesting economy factor maybe not that ideal. The game has since taken step after step to make things convenient (dungeon finder queues with cross server stuff, phasing of content to keep people split up, everyone is merged together, purchasable server transfers, name changes, etc).
Storytelling wise they went from “you are just another grunt” in the beginning to “you are the chosen one” as the game went on. I don’t think this is a huge detriment, but it’s there.
A big one for me personally was dungeon design. Old dungeons, especially anything around Blackrock Mountain, was designed from a narrative first perspective. Here is a dwarven city under siege. There are ten different routes you can take that intersect in various ways and have various levels of challenge. Find your own way. Find backdoor routes. Find keys that make new routes possible. If you flip this switch the map changes, and you can’t go back the way you came in. In Scholomance or Stratholme you triggered various patrols and events with your actions. They felt more like places. But a lot of players (not me) didn’t like that and preferred the most straightforward “winged” dungeons with a consistent formula. The entire dungeon design of the first expansion was all wings, with maybe a few shortcuts and tricks, but generally it was all streamlined and timed out for a bite size hack and slash. This is really important to me, and I think both options have their place, but they basically abandoned a lot of what I enjoy. I miss “that kind” of dungeon mastery, as opposed to the current form… intermixed with mythic+.
Another mixed point is itemization, class performance, etc. This one I can agree with their goal completely, but a combination of nostalgia and very specific cool-factor was lost. I played a sub-optimal character in vanilla, and I’m going to reprise that. In the first expansion and further on classes and specs were often brought into parity with numbers tweaks, complexity pruning, making things have parity. And all of that was good for the raid game, somewhat ok for PvP, etc. Playing vanilla again, it just feels so good to be a hybrid again. Even if I’m not top tier at any one role, the vanilla game isn’t numerically hard enough short of Naxx to make me feel useless if I play a versatile hybrid character. It feels good to be the hero by using your character to fill the niche during a fight, react in time, etc. I’ll admit, even in vanilla it can suck and is sub-optimal, but it’s just neat to “play what you want” not “what’s best.” I enjoy both to a degree, but I missed this. Also old itemization is wonky and unbalanced and weird, but new itemization is largely boring and cookie cutter.
To go back to something I’ve said many times before, Blizzard is so good at polish (or at least was?), but they often polish the design too much. If you polish it enough you get a mirror, and at that point the grind and repetition and skinner box is just too blatant and obvious.
It’s impossible to have both in an MMORPG*
*As MMORPGs are largely defined today. We used to talk a lot more about this topic:
Either everything is pareto-efficient, and thus feels cookie cutter, or everything is wildly unbalanced and interesting. The more dexterity/reaction/realtime skill you let players input into the system, the more you can truly balance these extremes. But, then the players’ personal human skill matters more than the numbers on the screen, and you have a different problem altogether.
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I mean, I don’t disagree with that statement, but it seems like a weird non-sequitur response.
MMOs traditionally minimize player realtime skills and put the emphasis on basic competence, basic teamwork, and number-grind.
Make your numbers go up to be stronger.
If the game, at its core, is make-the-numbers-go-up, it is terrifyingly difficult to make interesting and varied experiences in that core gameplay. “Polish” it enough, and every quest/raid/whatever feels the same. Every item feels the same. They all become the worst thing to ever happen to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Flurry of Blows.
This kind of decision is exactly what makes a game feel like an endlessly repeating cycle of micro-optimization while suckling at the skinner box’s teat.
When unarmored, a monk may strike with a flurry of blows at the expense of accuracy. When doing so, she may make one extra attack in a round at her highest base attack bonus, but this attack takes a -2 penalty, as does each other attack made that round
That certainly sounds like a fun decision to make multiple times per game. <_<
Grind-based mechanics coupled with minimal relevant player input is a space that can not really be improved meaningfully. Polish it more and make it completely generic, or polish it less and make it fiddly/emergent/unfair.
Since we’re on E3 and surrounding stuff, did anyone else watch the shitshow that was Bethesda? It was a monument to pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. Everything they showed was trying to make up for Fallout 76 and was the hard evidence they shoveled it out the door a year early. Also basically saying “Look our MMO cured someone’s sucidal mental illness!” was the lowest I’ve seen any company stoop in a long time.
Did not watch real-time though caught up on the 76 stuff just to laugh that, of course, they are adding a Battle Royale thingy to it.
Oh right forgot about the bandwagon cash grab.
Late 3ed that -2 become irrelevant as that -2 penaly get subsumed by +10/+20 bonuses.
Oh also forgot that the auditorium was only 2/3 full and the only people applauding were people in the front row who were also their employees or influencers they work with.
Doom Eternal still looked fun with the “story” trailer, but that wasn’t really big news.
You’re kinda preaching to the choir here, but also you come across as not being very informed about the actual state of things in the real world right now. World of Warcraft current Mythic Raiding IS very much about realtime skills now. The theorycraft and optimization is already done for you at that level of play. As far as I can recall, you’ve never talked about having actually delved into these things and it always seems like you’re talking about them as a sort of platonic concept.
Ghostwire and Deathloop made up for it methinks.