I don’t think the “MM” in “MMORPG” means Mega Man.
All the times I spent having to walk from town back to my corpse to get my loots in MUDs. Are MMORPGs just letting people respawn right at their corpses these days?
You seriously seem to have some odd one bit binary brain. “If there is puzzle element no execution allowed. If execution is part of game then no thinking or puzzles allowed.” Why can’t there be both? Knowing and figuring out what to do and then being able to actually do it can be two different things.
Also if your fucking experience from the genre comes from 200 years ago, maybe don’t try to pretend you know what you are talking about.
Pretty much. In FFXIV dugeons if you die you go back to the beginning but everything you killed stays dead and you just run to where you died, takes a minute at most. There are raids that are just a big boss and if you die you can immediately try again.
Also dungeons have teleport points after every boss, so you don’t even need to walk the whole way every time.
Kinda. Depends on the specific dungeon. In WoW it’s typical now to have “wings” with 2-3 bosses. Trash stays dead after you kill it unless you reset the instance (which means everyone left for an hour or the raid lead specifically selected that option, probably because they want to farm more trash). Typically there is a teleporter or the map works in such a way that it’s easy to go to each wing to cut down on travel time. Also there’s wipe recovery, which usually means yes… someone in your party just resurrects the entire group right there in front of the boss again.
In dungeons you typically don’t have full wipes, and the trash doesn’t respawn, but you do respawn at the beginning of most (but not all) dungeons. Designers choice really. This is partially because modern wow dungeons are designed around a certain competitive framework. You’re “expected” to clear it without wiping, and there’s a timer, and if you beat it in time you get stuff. Every death lowers your timer, and obviously running back hurts it even worse.
But wait, then there’s encounters generally referred to as gauntlets. This is like a boss encounter + trash encounter intermixed. These you would always have to re-do from scratch because the whole thing is seen as a single encounter.
Then if we go back to vanilla we have dungeons with respawns. This could be short respawns (sort of making it a gauntlet, but without a boss) or the long respawn that is intended to be both a “punishment” for failing to finish an area in time, and an opportunity to get more trash-loot to help you gear since you didn’t finish on time.
Further related, in vanilla and rarely later there were timered encounters. Fail to clear all the towers to baron Rivendare: no boss for you, try again another day (or hour). But like a lot of the above, the game moved away from these mechanics, though I personally enjoyed them.
The worst one of those was probably the original (bugged?) Vaelstrasz where you had one hour to kill him. If you failed, you were locked out from the rest of the raid for a week. Since he wasn’t a one-off boss, that was pretty punitive. Overall the game designers have moved heavily away from this sort of thing, but they could be interesting at times.
There’s nothing wrong with puzzle or execution or both. The problem is when they are structured in a one two punch with one directly after the other.
If they are simultaneous, then as soon as the challenge is overcome you move on. The door opens and you are on your way.
If they are one-two then you get a situation where you feel great because you finally figure out the puzzle, or mastered the execution, but the door doesn’t open. You are still right where you are, do not pass go, do not go to next level. If you solve the Sphinx’s riddle and it tries to kill you anyway, that is some fucking bullshit.
If it’s so easy to retry, then what’s with all the song and dance? Just dps until it’s dead and keep coming back for more. Like, was Leeroy Jenkins even a problem when his whole party died? Just respawn and go again.
Don’t know 'bout WoW, but in XIV bosses and any other unkilled baddies reset after wipe, filling their health back up, so you can’t just die against a boss over and over again until it’s dead. But a sigular wipe is basically nothing more than some wasted time.
Oh you want to zerg it down. There are a few times and places that worked. Not for instanced raids, as they were designed to reset, but Azuregos (an outdoor raid boss) it was possible. That’s also how they killed that one “unkillable” boss in Everquest way back, right? They just kept dieing and rezzing, picking up their weapons, and going again, till it eventually died.
Nowadays they would almost definitely put a soft enrage on an encounter to prevent something like Kazzak terrorizing Stormwind.
If you’re interested, one of YouTubers I sometimes watch, Quill18, plays a promotional copy of the game, if you want to check it out in action:
Scott’s MMO - Everything is perfectly stateful. No respawn, no redo. Both the PCs and the NPCs are on hardcore mode.
The world is perfectly peaceful and you just go around getting treasure and killing rats. Eventually the demon portal opens up and demons come out. To win, the players have to not only kill all the demons (of which there are a very large, but finite, number), but must go into hell and defeat the demon lord. In case of failure, the demon lord and all the demons come through the portal, kill all the PCs, and now both worlds are hell. Have to start from scratch then with a server reset. If players win then some other even more terrifying enemy comes. Perhaps an alien invasion.
I’m fine with this, especially if it keeps scaling up insanely like Tengen Toppa Gurren Laggan and you go from escaping hell to fighting universes.
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Nice concept, but also has basically nothing to do with modern post-wow mmos.
That’s the point.
You know the final boss is another server full of PCs that also “beat” the game already.
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Here’s where the majority of MMO raids/dungeons lose me.
You’re in a crew of 4 to 16 (As many as 32), you get maybe 4 chances of the Lotto that is “Need or Greed” (Provided it’s something your class can even use), if you completely lose out you get some tokens. In 4 more raid you have enough tokens for a bracer or belt.
Making run the Raid 40+ times seem down right obnoxious.
Well, a lot of people agree with you. They’ve tried to solve the problem several different ways. In current WoW they have this loot system called “personal” now, and it’s enforced for everyone. So everyone has a chance of getting loot, they’re not directly competing with anyone else. Also there’s a random chance any item will drop at a higher level than normal. This has several layers of aggregate other problems I don’t want to dig into here because nobody here should really get into it, but suffice it to say the loot system has several weird consequences as well.
Because of their nature mmos want people to play consistently over long period of time, so they do stuff like that to try to limit it so hardcore players won’t blast through new content in week getting all new gear and then stop playing until next content patch, thus dropping the active playerbase down. It’s a bother, but I also understand why it has to be so.
Though there is some fun to be had in optimizing fight that you can clear already, fixing mistakes and pushing to do it a bit faster every time.
The nice thing about FFXIV is that since you can change your class/job at any time, even if the loot that drops isn’t helpful to your current class, you’re constantly getting loot to encourage you to try out a different class/job.
While the system isn’t perfect, when I played the game, I found it much more tolerable than traditional systems like in WoW.