What was said in 2010 is now "false"

[Rick Gentle]

I'm okay with sandbox as long as there's plenty of context and background to create something for myself in. If it's just a big empty sandbox, I can do better in my own head. But if they make sure that sandbox is in The World of Darkness, with vampires and ghouls and creepy stuff, I'm okay with having minimal theme-park content.

Theme-park content in most games is usually just a shiny cover over another way to make players grind. "Do these missions, get experience and money!" "Do this mission, grind faction rep!" There wasn't any actual impact on the world - which is what a good sandbox offers, even if that impact is temporary - and most of the theme-park plots were short and pointless. "Yes, you've rescued the Emperor from an assassination attempt! Here's your reward! Go away!"

[xxbxx]

But its a shame that its like that. Look, I virtually cant remember anything worthwhile that happened during my  gameplay of Eve Online... being podded in nullsec? No thats definitely not worthwhile. However I have memories from raiding WotLK content in WoW, no matter how weak is WoW in story and storytelling department.

For me that makes even weakly scripted content worthwhile, and sandbox only for its economy and PVP, but not story. And BTW there's no reason MMO cant have great story, its just developer decision to omit it and to make a cheap game.

True problem lies in people that accept to buy cheap products. That's why developers don't have a reason to up the bar, and make better game, why would they when audience will be satisfied with whats in essence sub-par product? Look at WoW NPCs, for example, almost all of them stand at the same spot 24/7 instead of being scripted and making the world come to life, but its the developer decision not to bother, because their users don't mind.

[Rick Gentle]

What World of WarCraft does, it does well - raids. The two times I got into a Karazhan raid, I had a lot of fun (not least of which because it had historical value in the setting as the home of Medivh. I was somewhat confused to see how Medivh's house turned into this massive castle with all these weird people in it. Isn't the butler a raid fight?). However, this was mostly temporary, present fun that was interchangeable with any other well-done scripted raid boss. After I left Karazhan, it was the same old game.

The nice thing about sandbox style is that there's still no storyline, but players actually have a chance to make a name for themselves - BECOMING the raid bosses, as it were. Corporations in EVE Online fill the roles of guilds, social clubs, trading organizations, PvP, and raid bosses. The added benefit is that if you manage to take out another corporation in EVE Online, it has a lasting impact - that corporation doesn't just respawn when the server resets. If an elder in the WODMMO is equivalent to a corporation in EVE Online is equivalent to a raid boss in World of WarCraft, then the game should be able to provide everything a player needs to enjoy themself.
Prepping to take on a "raid boss" - a.k.a. an elder player - in the WODMMO would hopefully be very much like a tabletop plot, but instead of scripts you have an actual human intelligence combating you.

[xxbxx]

I've played Eve Online, what you said isn't true. There's a difference between PVP and PVE, so a guy in a Nyx your fleet brought down wasn't a raid boss, sorry. Also, I said, sandbox PVP offers practically zero story. All time I played Eve Online, I haven't managed to find a single group of like-minded people to RP with, although the setting is very conductive to RP. If a guy puts damage the mobs deal to you in his bio, can you believe he'd be willing to RP? And about PVP, I'm better served with zero-sum game, such as a first-person shooter. At least there's no grind for gear there.

And, guess what, people don't want human intelligence against them in a MMORPG game. And they don't want a challenge in a RPG game either. Thats why dungeon master will make encounters well below your character's skills or level, so adversaries he controls have only slim chance of winning.

People are there to group raid or run a dungeon and get loot. Surely they dont want AI to have fair fifty-fifty chances that would mean wiping half of the time.

Also, most of the people here, I believe, wait for WOD MMO because they like the setting, whether for RP or not its another matter. Without the story (theme park content), all the potential of the seting is wasted. We might as well play Eve Online instead.

[Rick Gentle]

I think a vast majority of people interested in this game are either fans of the setting - meaning that they like RPGs, because you can't be a fan without being a fan of one or another of the published RPGs - or they're fans of EVE Online who are interested in other CCP products. We shouldn't have much of a problem with finding people who will get into the setting.
EVE Online does have raid boss analogues... the primary difference between their "raid" system and WoW's raid system, though, is that you're fighting a raid boss WITH a raid boss. _username, can you give us an example of a couple of those crazy-huge capital ships?
In a sandbox game, there's a lot more freedom for what you want to do. I found a little bit of RP when I was playing EVE Online - I was an Amarr captain going down the road of becoming a saint - but I didn't really try looking too hard. I was distracted by all the numbers. Even PvP in a sandbox can have story. Theoretically just playing the game is you creating your own story - emergent roleplaying and whatnot. You may not get handed a script (or scripted bosses), but there's still story. In WoW, you basically HAVE to PvP and fight raid bosses to get anywhere - and where you get is more PvP and raid bosses. In a sandbox, especially if the promise of the WODMMO holds true, you'll be able to defeat a raid boss-analogue by talking around him, if that's what you want to do.

[xxbxx]

Not true, in a WoW or any other MMO, you don't have to raid, oo run dungeons, or do battlegrounds to obtain gear. Gear is there, but is it necessary? Or just you want it?

Sometimes I just want to RP, when I do I don't need levels or gear. Level one character is all I need. So the goal doesn't matter, what matters is whether you had fun getting there.

You perhaps wanted to say that a majority of MMO players are there to get the best gear they can. But for me its an empty goal not worth pursuing, as long as I don't have a story to immerse myself in. That's why I found Eve Online to be too shallow for my taste. To each its own I guess.

Sandbox offer great freedom, but it have its serious drawbacks. Mainly the crowd that want open world pvp and ganking wants a sandbox, yet they fail to realize every successful mainstream MMO needs to reduce travel time. One of great things about WoW and one of the reasons of its success is that they pioneered LFG tool, so you can queue from the trade hub or while questing, while other MMOs required you to make groups from chat channel, and waste hours in doing so. And you just cant have open world pvp with dungeon/battleground queue! That open world pvp requires people to be outside of the trade hub, and that's where sandbox conflicts with mainstream MMO design. Those that have the time to camp a gate for hours just to have ten minutes of entertainment are a minority.

That's why IMO its ideal to have both theme park and sandbox content, with a degree of balance, its good even to those that want open world PVP, while providing way to efficiently play for those that don't have the time. How? Its easy to simply give bigger rewards for questing in a PVP zone, or for just queuing in LFG tool from a PVP zone, easy enough.

And I don't think CCP can pull off that social PVP stuff, no way. Every character will be too one-dimensional, bent on acquiring as much power as possible, and given enough knowledge of the game, very hard to trick. It doesn't provide base for meaningful roleplay, where character flaws can come to the forefront.

[_username]

EVE Online does have raid boss analogues... the primary difference between their "raid" system and WoW's raid system, though, is that you're fighting a raid boss WITH a raid boss. _username, can you give us an example of a couple of those crazy-huge capital ships?

The most dramatic example of large-scale PvE is probably the Incursions.  It's basically elite PvE...a small percentage of Eve players do it full time, but anybody with decent skills and the right kinds of ships has a good chance of getting in on it.  This video is a couple years old, but is still accurate.  For a sense of scale, each of the little purple blips is a ship in fleet, controlled by an individual player.  The "Kundalini Manifest" they keep referring to is a Revenent class Sansha Mothership.  It is *possible* to snag a blueprint copy of one of these things, but the number of documented cases is in the single digits.  A couple month ago one of these exceptionally rare ships was discreetly constructed then publicly auctioned for 290 billion ISK (about $11,600 USD).



The vast majority of player-owned capital ships are carriers and dreadnoughts, which can be used very effectively for either PvP or PvE.  Above that are motherships, which are almost exclusively used for PvP.  Titans are the closest thing to what you described as being a raid boss.  They're elusive, though.  It's hard to know with any certainty, but Titans tend to be kept in stasis: piloted by purpose-built characters, often logged off on inactive accounts, waiting for months or even years, until they are needed.  They are simply too valuable to leave floating inside the force field of a starbase.  When they appear, they are summoned from nowhere, do their alliance's bidding, then disappear again into the void.

[Nigama]

Woah... I should do drugs and watch space battles in Eve..  lots of pretty colors and moving dots.

Nigama

[Rick Gentle]

Not true, in a WoW or any other MMO, you don't have to raid, oo run dungeons, or do battlegrounds to obtain gear...

Sometimes I just want to RP, when I do I don't need levels or gear. Level one character is all I need. So the goal doesn't matter, what matters is whether you had fun getting there.

You perhaps wanted to say that a majority of MMO players are there to get the best gear they can.

I think it's fairest to say that you don't need an MMO at all to roleplay. In a sandbox setting, more of the burden to create the story is on the individual player, this is true, but that burden is something roleplayers usually have to take on for themselves anyway (and most of them enjoy it immensely), even if there's a big world full of background and races and politics. All that is meaningless unless somebody wants to use it. I doubt too many hardcore raid guilds care that they're playing on Azeroth; rather, the focus is that they're fighting big-ass monsters that drop The Next Big Thing in loot. In a sandbox - or in a tabletop RP - you server as your own developer (at least as far as the DM/Storyteller says you can). You get out of the game what you put into it.


"Sandbox offer great freedom, but it have its serious drawbacks. Mainly the crowd that want open world pvp and ganking wants a sandbox, yet they fail to realize every successful mainstream MMO needs to reduce travel time. One of great things about WoW and one of the reasons of its success is that they pioneered LFG tool, so you can queue from the trade hub or while questing, while other MMOs required you to make groups from chat channel, and waste hours in doing so. And you just cant have open world pvp with dungeon/battleground queue! That open world pvp requires people to be outside of the trade hub, and that's where sandbox conflicts with mainstream MMO design. Those that have the time to camp a gate for hours just to have ten minutes of entertainment are a minority."
This should not be an issue for the WODMMO - they're not putting in dungeons or battlegrounds. There are plenty of ways they can reduce travel time (subways, taxis, etc), but even if they didn't, then vampire factions could band together like corporations in EVE Online and stake out domain. There should also be no problems for communication, with the added benefit that you might not NEED a "Looking For Group" tool, if there are no dungeons or raids to group up for. You'll need a contacts list and a slightly-more-useful Contacts List (a.k.a., a Friends List).
Vampires are much more solitary than anything you'd see in a WoW-paradigm game, so I expect we'll be able to succeed even if we spent 90% of our time alone. It would just be a lot slower than if you had somebody working with you. This is as true in EVE Online, I believe.
There are servers in WoW that are Open PvP, and they still have battlegrounds and dungeons on those servers. If they were to do such a thing for the WODMMO, it's definitely possible.


"And I don't think CCP can pull off that social PVP stuff, no way. Every character will be too one-dimensional, bent on acquiring as much power as possible, and given enough knowledge of the game, very hard to trick."
What you describe here is an elder. There are many elders in the World of Darkness. They provide lots of content for roleplaying. Nobody should be able to master every Ability or Discipline, so there's always a weakness or flaw. The burden of sandbox is that you have to discover what those flaws are yourself.

[xxbxx]

I sincerely hope CCP will not make the game the way you describe it, Rick.

Without dungeons group game play will be limited to PVP, so the game will end like Eve Online, in fact. That will make, basically, a PVP game with very weak PVE.

Second, because interactions in MMO between players are superficial, and rules of the game are simple, don't you mind that, actually, WOD MMO vampires would be like Eve capsuleers, and a neonate will be as proficient as an elder in defending himself? That I had in mind, in a PnP game you have much more freedom to play to a weakness of an adversary simply because relation between players isn't superficial. Also, by "having to find weaknesses by ourselves", haven't you, by chance, had in mind the meta-gaming, which is completely incompatible with immersion in a game? That's one of the reasons I didn't like Eve.

Third, sandbox and theme park are two completely different concepts. I see you're defending the merits of a sandbox, but you don't see that sandbox can't substitute for theme park game play, or vice versa.

[Rick Gentle]

Just because a game doesn't have dungeons doesn't mean it doesn't have PvE. EVE Online doesn't have dungeons, but it has PvE. (Admittedly not the focus of the game, but you can play your whole experience in EVE in PvE. I did up until a friend of mine invited me to his corp. EVE has some extended PvE quests that take you through multiple "rooms", but people can jump in and out of those at will and pick up where they left off.) SWG didn't have many formal dungeons (that one cave on Dathomir and the Tusken Raider fortress are the only two that spring immediately to mind), but PvE was a powerful part of that game. In fact, half of PvP was PvE, because you had to take out NPC guards in order to take control of a city or planet.

I don't know how you've interacted with people in MMOs, but I've found my relationships with them to be much more lasting and impactful than any relation with any NPC. (Even if she was really hot!) If you're having a deeper relationship with a computer-controlled avatar than you are with a player-controlled avatar... That better be some damn good programming.
Sure, I care about computer-controlled characters. Christof Romuald makes me laugh, and Pisha was damn hot, and I really, REALLY HATED LaCroix - but playing with my friends is just... better. I'd rather play a stupid game with a friend than a good game alone. ESPECIALLY if it's an MMO, the whole premise of which is having lots of human-controlled avatars around.

Not sure how you're equating neonate defense with elder defense... That might be the case if the game was full free-targeting (i.e., reliant on player skill instead of character stats). Certainly, if they kept the scale from tabletop (in a 1-5 range for any given Ability or Discipline), then the scale is noticeably more equitable, but if your neonate character tries to take on an elder in single combat, I'm going to sit there and giggle like a Malkavian.

I hadn't had meta-gaming in mind when I was thinking about having to find out weaknesses, actually - but that depends on the developers making the game complex enough so that where we would otherwise meta-game, we could instead do it in-game. (I.e., Nossies spying, tapping cell phones, having a wide range of contacts, etc.) The developers have mentioned that they're planning on players using social networks and out-of-game apps to keep up with the game... Not sure I consider this meta-gaming, since it should theoretically be possible in the game itself. (It's just not technically supported.) Using knowledge about a player to influence a character is a bit mega-gamingful, but if emergent roleplay holds it shouldn't much matter.

If you define a "theme park" as being made up all quest-giving NPCs with faction alignments and "go-here-do-this" quests, then no, sandbox can't replace that... but only to the degree that it would use PCs instead of NPCs. EVE Online has a thriving contracts system, which is in effect one player giving another player a quest. in any game there are plenty of faction alignments that will want to favor their members over non-members (perhaps even to the point of attacking non-members like we see in most theme park locations).

It's not like games based solely on PvP can't do well, either. Take a look at Team Fortress or All Points Bulletin or even, if you like, EVE Online or a dedicated PvP guild in WoW. I personally like my games to be challenging, and human players are much better at delivering that than a computer.

[Valamyr]

Without dungeons group game play will be limited to PVP, so the game will end like Eve Online, in fact. That will make, basically, a PVP game with very weak PVE.

Yeah... welcome to Vampire-Planet :) Gonna save you a few years of figuring-it-out...

This is what this crowd is buying for the most part, although incredibly enough, half of them don't even realize it. :p

I like alot of people in this crowd, but many don't fully realize what the pure sandbox some are clamoring for leads to. The few people with extensive EVE experience who still hope WOD to be an intensively sandbox setting do know what they're asking for, though - it's not a strictly bad ideal, it's just a very narrow niche, and to this day despite the enthusiasm I've witnessed these last few years, I still seriously doubt it's truly something to aim for if CCP wants to broaden it's appeal.

As for me, I love the setting enough to try whatever they come up with, but I'd rather see it being a marketing success rather than being designed to please the most hardcore crowd. I think that's best achieved through a balance, where traditional content is every bit as prevalent and supported, but it seems the focus is squarely placed on 'sandbox first' since Black October.

[Radical21]

Without dungeons group game play will be limited to PVP, so the game will end like Eve Online, in fact. That will make, basically, a PVP game with very weak PVE.

Yeah... welcome to Vampire-Planet :) Gonna save you a few years of figuring-it-out...

This is what this crowd is buying for the most part, although incredibly enough, half of them don't even realize it. :p

Or maybe they realize it but they also realize what a PVE game means: Interaction between players is superficial at best, no interesting emergent roleplay because 95% of the players couldn't care less and only want to grind for better gear or vanity items.
Evidence: Every PvE focused MMO I ever tried.

There are "Roleplaying guilds" in some of these but they fall into the category of very soft RP since they typically do not follow a rule system and thus cannot really form interesting stories without 'god-modding' through these at pivotal points.

The game can definitely have some fun tomfoolery in these cases but it doesn't take long for it to grow old then, at least for me.
If you really wanted to play that kind of game you don't have to wait for CCP, you already have TSW.(which I admittedly have not tried)

[xxbxx]

Rick, if you mean that all PVE in Eve is repeatable (missions, epic arcs, incursions, complexes), and that's completely devoid of meaning, being just an ISK grind, then you're right.

That kind of PVE I have in every Korean MMO, and that's just an excuse for quality PVE.

Radical21, better is superficial interaction between players, than a forced, fake relationship. If nobody says anything in a WoW dungeon run, that means it went well. Should I try to roleplay during dungeon runs, with people from non-RP servers (WoW dungeon LFG tool is cross-server)?

Lets say, as an Eve player you run an incursion, or some high level complex in nullsec and you need some buddies to help you out. Do you know you can wait for hours to find a group, or your buddies to come online (been there, done that)? I'll run a dungeon instead with LFG tool in WoW within thirty minutes, then I can choose to do something else, like crafting, farming mats, or RPing with people interested in that.

There is quality RP if you take a closer look, not everyone is a Mary Sue, or is interested in ERP (erotic roleplay) only, even in WoW. After all, you rolled a char on a RP server, didn't you?

Valamyr, you're right, pure sandbox will invariably lead to a niche PVP game, as there's not much beside other players, and will appeal to those that want as little interaction with NPCs as possible. Eve is an excellent example, all PVE is only an ISK grind and NPCs are devoid of personality and without any discernible motives whatsoever.

[Valamyr]

Interaction between players is superficial at best

To some extent, allowing players to have some independence and ability to play and progress without being in constant fear of griefing does 'diminish interaction', but its the sort of interaction alot of people want to see diminished or not experienced at all. 'Superficial interaction' sounds awful, but like any marketing buzzword, it doesn't tell the whole story. I could also advertise 'complete freedom of playstyle' while marketing a blue MMO with a PVP switch. Ultimately, it boils down to what  your players will enjoy and demand more of. At the end of the day, more people  careful about an enjoyable and stress-free gaming session than a 'maximal interaction' griefest, but there are niche games that do successfully cater to the latter. Its just that they dont tend to (ever) do well. I liked Shadowbane and Darkfall and early UO, and they were all quite hardcore, but they all either radically changed their ways or fail. Meanwhile, MMOs which compartimentalized PvP and gave players choice, at the expense of "superficiality", thrived whenever they were well executed.

Its possible to break that mold, and to some extent, EVE did it - but I still think its foolish to just brush aside past lessons.

If you really wanted to play that kind of game you don't have to wait for CCP, you already have TSW.(which I admittedly have not tried)

Heh, well Ive tried it. Preordered it even; and reported on it (quite negatively) after just a few days here. Having a broad formula thats meant to be inclusive isn't a guarantee of success, you still need a dozen other ingredients. Story, combat systems, fluidity, 'polish', general fun factor, to name only a few. TSW failed pretty solidly in several of these categories, and even an hardcore sandbox gamer will be seriously put off by an hardcore sandbox that doesn't get the basics right, too. Attention to detail is paramount, and actually, it is probably moreso than what we usually argue about.