it all depends ... once upon a time, WoW was a bit like that. XRoads wild PVP, free-for-all ambushes in the wilderness, a reasonably sized world (not too big but not too small). Back in 2004 it did convey a sense of relative immensity. Which was part of the magic imho.
Every subsequent iteration ("evolution") felt like its main goal was to minimise the "downtime" between the farming/"phat loot" sequences (raids, instances, etc).
At the time, you could get a demo run a stone so at least some of the party could join quickly. But that took human interaction, some synchronisation ... it was nice and involved.
Disclaimer: I havent touched WoW in more than 10 years, but from what I know of it today -- it's teleport all the way, straight into the instance, with pre-made aor automatically composed groups. You pop in, you loot, you get out. Rinse and repeat.
Some people will enjoy the "instant gratification" part of this. I'm probably amongst those who did not, who don't and who probably never will. It is my opinion (widely shared? no idea) that immersion has been killed by all those "QoL" improvements.
I'm actually fairly new to WoW and I can't stand modern version. Classic is a way better experience for beginners in my view. The modern WoW is too manic and there's no mystery, sense of achievement for leveling. Leveling in classic MMOs IS the game, it's a shame to see so much of the "endgame > game" trend lately.
I don't buy that modern players don't have time either. WoW was only seen as an addictive timesink by the contemporary media but if they looked at the average hour counts of most modern multiplayer games, it would surprise many. Most modern service games demand fairly eye-popping time dedication to the casual observer.
Debatable. I wasn't around for Vanilla but I played Classic up through AQ. The game felt like a walking simulator.
Current WoW is certainly more streamlined, but you still have to earn the ability to travel around faster in current content. One of the Shadowlands zones didn't even let you mount (except for a rare drop for a special mount) until one of the content patches. And that and another zone still don't let you fly.
When you use the matchmade dungeon/raid finder, you do get teleported right into the instance. But for Mythic+ dungeons and Normal or higher raids you still need to manually gather a party and 2 people need to get to the summoning stone.
All of the city portals and the 15 minute hearthstone cooldown do make me a little sad though. My mage portals aren't appreciated nearly as much! :)
> My mage portals aren't appreciated nearly as much! :)
non combat abilities is something I feel like modern MMO needlessly eschew. Some people just want to fish and read lore and don't care about combat segments at all.
I loved Ultima Online for this. I don't think I ever had a character that was even half-decent at combat. I generally just messed around with trade skills and sold stuff. Our guild had a little town in a clearing near Yew, and I managed the vendors and just had a peaceful existence there.
It would certainly be great if games better supported that non-combat stuff. As someone who plays WoW on WRA I know that plenty of people love to just RP. Total Roleplay is a good addon, but it would be nice if even just a plain text profile and the ability to display if you're IC or OOC were native features of the game.
The dungeon-group finding tools with instant teleport detract from immersion but they are a life-saver if you don't have a lot of time to dedicate per session, or don't have many friends who play at the same times you want to, yet still want to go dungeon-crawling with a party.
There's really nothing stopping people from going the extra mile for role-playing and immersion, it's more the local server communities that have been harmed by these tools but WoW classic brought back a lot of that "old-school" feel for those who seek it.
I'm not really up on the current state of either but I think there's merit in both approaches, I personally found both enjoyable.
all valid point guys, thx for replying. Again, this was just my 2p, back from 2004 and the beta with the Stormwind invasion by skull-level Demons/big-evil-things. :)
I like exploring! Wizardry, Ultima, Elder Scrolls, whatever, I like to go straight off the path and into the weeds. I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible, and this is hard in very story/dialogue heavy games (especially since the advent of voice acting in games).
This is exclusively the type of games I play now except for 'sport' related titles.
Rim World, Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi, Caves of Qud are all fantastic narrative generators and give you a crazy amount of freedom.
Another type of game I've fallen in love with that I don't remember being around when I was a kid is automation games like Factorio or Satisfactory. Gives you that open world feeling + exploring but you're not just running errands or slaying dragons.
>I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible
I'd say that having to tell the story in your head is a sign of failure on the part of the game. But, for an open world sandbox RPG, so is restricting you from enacting whatever story you want and we don't have the technology to avoid both.
One of the most successful games of all time is Football Manager, which mostly involves staring at spreadsheets of numbers about football players. But it's also one of the most immersive games ever! Give me space, freedom, and simple tools to build my own narrative and I'll be more engaged than listening to the most soaring dialogue you might be able to write.
Quite apart from the voice acting, what about the writing itself? As a starting point, how far are we from having bots that can DM a plausible tabletop session?
Yeah, I think this is the secret. For me, I sort of bounce off things if they're too procedurally generated, since the tech isn't there to not make things seem too samey after a while.
I like discovering my own stories, but I want those stories to be how I fought off a dragon to save a town, not how I went into a dungeon for no reason whatsoever and came out with some more treasure and otherwise made no impact on the world.
Absolutely, but like, how cool would it be for a bot to be generating you new quests with an awareness of the full world state and everything you've already accomplished in the game thus far, plus seeding in bits and pieces that will tie into an overall arc?
I could imagine that potentially being extremely immersive, and doing it for a pure text-based interface would be a great first step on eventually doing it for a 3D open world game.
Yup, it's already being used as a placeholder during the process in some AAA games but I assume we're not far off the quality needed for final assets, even dynamically generated locally. Same goes for art, even narrative elements at some point.
It's quite a tired engine at this stage but Bethesda have actually been rather tech forward in the past. Especially with MS acquisition, some kind of procedural cloud-assisted world would make a ton of sense.
However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Heck, I think Bethesda copy/pastes too much now compared to something like New Vegas which has barely has any repetition.
> However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players.
Less immersive than an ostensibly grand city that only has a handful of named NPCs and a few guards? The best and worst city Bethesda have made thus far is still Vivec. Best because it has enough NPCs and redundant economy to feel like a plausible city. Worst, simply because the structure of the cantons is poorly conceived, and because the exterior is barren.
Vivec was probably magical at the time but I literally cannot navigate from memory. Every canton blurs together and traversal is time consuming. I think Whiterun or Megaton are quite well designed.
Deprecating authored settlements in Fallout 4 was quite disappointing but Boston is probably the most impressive technically, diamond city etc nestled amongst the sprawling and surprisingly explorable ruins of the city.
Boston itself was great, but Diamond City seemed undeserving of the name to me. It's just a handful of people. Also the setting of known size, the baseball diamond, throws off my suspension of disbelief that maybe distances and population sizes in Bethesda games are simply compressed. Cities like Whiterun and Balmora are the size of a small villages but are presented as a cities; I can accept that as some sort of distance compression. I can't do that with Diamond City because I know how big a baseball field is. That 'city' must really be 1:1 scale, or at least close to it.
Basically if I can't get lost, it doesn't feel like a city. I can get lost in Boston or Vivec, those feel like cities. The others require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but Diamond City particularly makes that hard.
I concede that Vivec is dated (although I first played Morrowind about 2 or 3 years ago and still enjoyed it.) I consider Witcher 3's Novigrad as an example of a modern game getting it right. There's not exactly a ton of named NPCs in Novigrad, but there are enough buildings, alleyways, etc to get lost when wandering around. Also there is redundancy in the town's economy; numerous smiths, taverns, etc.
I think all of those games are absolutely tiny when you take into account human scale. You can't traverse any real world city in the few minutes or so it would take for Geralt to circumnavigate the entirety of Novigrad. Agree that you should get lost in a big, redundant world. Bethesda have their work cut out for their next games.
DayZ (and it's ilk) is probably the only game that comes close to 1:1 but is not to most players tastes to take a human amount of time to walk across rows of empty fields. That game is absolutely enormous. It's a pretty niche game though.
> However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side.
Do you think that in the 2020s, we can't do better generators than what existed in the 1990s?
You're evidently don't belong to the CRPGs' target player base :)
The basic idea of CRPGs is to give you an avatar that is as different or as similar to you personally as you want and let you experience the avatar's interactions with the world they live in. It might seem that it's currently the case for 90% of the games, but please remember that early CRPGs competed with Pong, Pacman, and Asteroids, not Quake. You'd have a hard time identifying yourself with a paddle or imagining spending your entire life in a maze being chased by ghosts. You would have a much easier time with an Elven archer roaming Middle-Earth, especially if you've read and memorized the Trilogy by heart.
From that basic premise, I'd roughly distinguish two main ways of realizing it: via numbers or words.
By numbers, I mean a situation where your avatar can be described as a bunch of numbers, as is the world, and you're supposed to find your own meaning in those numbers. Which ones matter to you, which you don't care about, or which represent an ability to do things you care about. You are then given an array of activities that both require the numbers to be aligned in a particular way and allow you to improve the numbers for you.
By words, I mean a situation where your avatar is presented to you via description. The numerical values that underpin the avatar identity and the shape of the world are still there, but you experience them only indirectly, through the description of the environment, your avatar actions, and their consequences.
There are not many "pure" realizations of either way because, taken to the extreme, the number case turns into an Excel sheet with all column and row names garbled, while words simply become a book or novel.
Of additional note is the issue of effort on the game creator's part. You generally can't procedurally generate descriptions above a certain length, especially not if you want the descriptions to be meaningful, not only readable. You'd need AGI for that. Procedurally generated content is crucial because it allows you to lengthen the time the game is played. You can read a good fantasy novel in a few days, while you can easily lose 200 hours to a single CRPG.
Back to exploring the wilderness. Morrowind leaned towards the numbers-based gameplay if my memory serves me right. You were required to perform an action repeatedly to improve your skill in that action. Take jumping, for example. I remember locking the spacebar in a depressed position on long treks between cities because jumping raised your strength. On the other hand, it did have a lot of hand-crafted, meaningful locations that you would visit multiple times. It had a few different plotlines you could follow and some memorable NPCs and you were given quite a lot of freedom in how you wanted to interact with the world. These are all features closer to the words-based gameplay. Still, most of the game consisted of repetitive, although more tactical than dexterity-based combat in the wilderness or dungeons.
Some people have a stronger preference for one gameplay style, and for them, Morrowind found a perfect balance. Relatively high freedom in what you could do, the plot, and the NPCs who sometimes even spoke more than a few words, were enough to give them a plausible reason to go and have real fun... By killing skeletons for 5 hours, nearly dying for 4h 50m, then getting a level-up, a corresponding dopamine rush, and going on a skeleton-killing spree in the last 9 minutes. You'd probably die to the boss lich in the last minute, allowing you to rage-quit the game and go back to beating skeletons again the next day.
Is it fun? Yes. It's one of the kinds of fun CRPGs are designed to give you. Since the early days - and I mean the times of ADVENT[ure] and Zork - the CRPGs evolved tens of subgenres, took advantage of the progress in hardware and in the general inflation of game makers' budgets, enlarging the scope, but the basic idea is still the same. To give players either: enough of the descriptions to make grinding meaningful or enough grinding not to frustrate them into not finishing the story.
One note: obviously, at some point nearly all CRPGs became graphical and later multi-media, one way or the other. That didn't, and still doesn't, change much. You can present the description of the world with words alone, with words and images, words and animation, images alone, images and music alone, and so on. What's important is that you are describing a world, an avatar and its actions within that world.
Another note: multi-player changes things drastically in the case of CRPGs, especially if it is not co-operative or is "massive". The metaphor is still the same, but the cost-benefit ratio of various game features is completely unlike the single-player version. MUDs were early multi-player CRPGs evolved as a cross between BBS and IRC, and their rise and eventual brutal demise under the weight of op-wars and spam a warning widely heard by CRPG makers. The MUDs persisted, barely clinging to existence in some niches, and later gave us MMORPGs, which are also completely different from single-player (or 1-4 people coop, later on) games. So I don't think talking about WoW is very relevant to the topic, ie. Morrowind.
Interesting, but I don't think (even without taking into account the "Criticism" section) it can be applied to CRPGs. I was very careful to put the "C" every single time because, while related, CRPGs are quite different from table-top RPGs. By simply excluding both the Game Master (no way to improvise, add meaning above and beyond what could be predicted and accounted for) and other Player Characters (again, no way to improvise and adapt the in-party interactions) makes for an environment so different from TRPGs that they are bound to be perceived very differently by players. While it's possible to grind in TRPG, it's utterly impossible to grind for 60 hours. CRPGs also have a clear ending - either as an end of a story, end of content, or end of leveling up. The MMORPGs may come closer to TRPGs, but the "massive" scale also makes for a drastically different environment compared to 3-6 party members + GM. The closest to the TRPG would be co-op multiplayer in the vein of Baldur's Gate, but then again - no GM and technical limitation also make it pretty different. If I recall correctly, Neverwinter Nights tried to introduce a multiplayer with a GM, but then the problem became the amount of work needed to get to the expected amount of detail; it was simply too much effort for a single GM. MMORPGs side-step this issue by employing hordes of developers and admins, on top of encouraging player-made content.
TL;DR: I think the distinction of CRPG vs. TRPG is useful, and directly comparing the two doesn't work that well.
I think I missed an important detail: Daggerfall and Arena are abundantly full of nothing interesting - I don't think you played them if you think I'm not a CRPG target :)
I'm not even sure if you can actually reach another town on foot, there's so much of flat boringness. You can definitely get lost and never find your dungeon again in one of those (Arena?) because there's no map helpful enough to find your position.
Of course, I gave up at that point, having run out of things to do (besides walking), and not being able to come back to the fast travel.
Yup, I didn't play Daggerfall, you're right. I actually started with Might and Magic VI, I only read about the earlier titles. I read about how much of an improvement to the series MM6 was, but I never experienced how much worse the games were before. I enjoyed a zoomable minimap, sounds of secret passages opening after completing some objective and monsters lurking around the corner (plus some voice... acting? well, synthesis, at least), notifications about quest progress, a journal, a comparatively large number of distinct locations, etc. Probably due to improved graphics, so a higher amount of RAM needed for them, MM6+ were split into maps, so no matter how lost you got, you could just go straight ahead and arrive at the map border after 5-10 minutes max. Faster with the fly spell. There was also a compass, which greatly helped with navigation, especially underground.
But, to go back to the original topic a bit, you only gave up (wandering the wilderness) after you ran out of things to do. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but you did have fun until you had things to do there :P Exploring the wilderness in MM6 and MM7 was also fun, and actually essential if you wanted to seriously power-up your heroes. There were random encounters with enemies, some waaaaaay above your current level, but the physics engine and the exploitable real-time-but-turn-based mechanics were primitive enough to let you, with some luck, camp a troll safely from behind a rock. Then there were one-time semi-random treasures in chests to discover (watch out for traps), hidden locations with quests, altars and trainers, in general everything you would need to take it easy in the latter parts of the game. Of course, there was a high risk of ending up dead, having run into too powerful opponent. For example, in MM7 there was a killable and exploitable dragon (high-level monsters sometimes had more than one drop, and you had to click twice to get them - but if you saved after the first drop, you could repeat second click as long as necessary for there to be 3rd drop generated. Rinse and repeat. I spent a frickin' DAY doing this. Got enough money to last me to endgame, though) in the tutorial, that you could find if you explored a little. It was, obviously, mercilessly slaughtering low-level characters, and it was impossible to kill it without a very heavy save scumming and a lot of preparation. On the flip side, entering a random cave in the tutorial and facing a screenful of fire-breathing winged lizard kind of set the tone of "wilderness exploration" later on.
In summary: exploring the wilderness can be fun, but it's the "numbers based" part of fun. I mean, sightseeing was not really worth it until much later, when the 3d-accelerated graphics begun in earnest. And even then, the main motivation was to level up, find treasures, kill monsters for exp - all focused on bumping up some numerical values in your character sheets. There were certainly some useful clues to discover here and there, and the mentioned hidden locations and quests too, but the meat of the game at that point was to grind. And it was fun! At least as long as monsters still gave you enough exp, the drops were still worth the effort, and you could get back to civilization relatively quickly.
To be honest, I'd be very happy to play a modern take on the CRPGs from around MM6 time. Large, but not vast, maps filled with randomized content but hand-tuned and with frequent hand-made locations, with quests and subplots to discover, without "you cannot go there, because you cannot go there" prevalent in modern CRPGs... I would like it combined with a mainly tactical, but real-time combat as in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. First person perspective, preferably solo, or in a party with mechanics similar to Vampire Redemption/Bloodlines. Non-linear plot, freedom to decide how to finish the more important quests (not just 2 choices, make it 6 at minimum), freedom to ignore the plot entirely and focus on buying a house... Fallout 3 was, IIRC, kind of similar to what I have in mind, but I'd like a dark-fantasy setting. If you know of any game like that, please share :D
