I've not been blogging or posting here as much lately, due partly to the holidays, real life stuff, in-person gaming, and most recently my total addiction to DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online). By way of background, I first played an MMORPG back in the Meridian 59 days. Then I got hooked on Everquest in 1998-1999. Since then, I haven't played any MMORPG-- nope, not even WoW. Until now.

Having missed every MMORPG and all other Fantasy-ish types of video games from 1990 to the present (other than a brief stint with TOEE), I can't believe the differences between game styles. I think an old school v. new school analogy can be drawn between the two games:

Everquest:

Dying sux. You needed to go get your corpse somehow, and you had no gear to do it with, so unles you could get somene to do it for you, you likely died several more times trying to get your stuff back. You lost hard-earned XP every time you died.

If you killed it you looted it. If a guy shot an arrow at me, he must have had a bow. I kill him, take the bow, run back to city and sell it.

Sandboxey--You could go wherever you wanted in the world at any time and do anything. Sometimes you ran through a high level zone and got slaughered. And as I said, dying sux.

Related to sandboxey---there was a huge world with a lot of travel involved.

Fewer restrictions on gear---you could twink out a low level guy with high level gear.

Less quest oriented.  The quests didn't drive the game.

No magic stores.

XP given per kill.


DDO:

Dying is not a big deal. You appear in an Inn fully geared up. (My idea of heaven---dying and ending up in a bar with all your money to buy beer and bar food.) You just pay some money to fix the damaged gear. Sometimes you can even die and then go back into the same quest again before it expires and finish it up.

No looting of the corpses.  Rewards are given out per the quests.

Not sandboxey, not a lot of travel involved. You go on quests, that sometimes link to other quests. There is no true world that you are in---just a setting with a bunch of quest givers and places to buy and sell stuff.

Most gear has level restrictions.  

You can buy stuff at magic vendors.

XP given per quest completion, except in rare situations with Slayer Quests.


In the sense that the old school approach to tabletop RPG's is one of the players making their own destinies, with less restrictions, so Everquest fits the old school gaming mode moreso than DDO. DDO takes the more modern adventure path approach, just making them smaller and more frequent. XP is given out not per kill, but per quest, so it is less a combat driven at times, depending on he quest.

I am not surprised at the approach DDO took since it is based on 3.5. Thankfully the computer takes care of all the game mechanics and math, which is my main complaint with 3.x/Pathfinder. Because of that, the game is very enjoyable to me. The 3.x based game could be fun as hell if I were a Vulcan and could do the math in my head in milliseconds. Unfortunately, for someone who doesn't want to learn all the rules minutiae to gain system mastery, I'll never play the 3.x game on the tabletop and have as much fun as I do online.

I never got to the high levels in EQ---I think I made 30 or so. I never did the big guild raid stuff. In DDO I am at level 5 (3 Ranger, 2 Rogue). There are probably other distinctions that can be drawn, or other examples to back up the analogy at the higher levels. I look forward to finding out.

I also find it funny that the whole black market that sprung up with EQ, where you could buy game money or game gear with real money, has been taken over by DDO in this case. They sell stuff to you, and tie it to your account so you can't give it away to twink.

I actually kind of like these restrictions though, because I remember how much I hated seeing a 1st level guy walking around with the Armor and Sword of the Gods in EQ.

BTW, my character is on the Khyber world, named "Tapdatbooty".  Say hi if you're around.

It is very true MMO have mostly changed from a sandbox to a more structured quest-based play. DDO is a very extreme example of it.

And I can see a see some parallels between Old School rpgs and olders MMOs.

Where I think the analogy fails is the implication that newer MMOs are more like New School rpgs.  And that is because there is no such thing as New School. There is a style of game which we can broadly define as Old School. But outside the Old School roleplaying games have branched out in so many different directions. There are sorts of trends which have come and gone and then come back.

In as far as even the newer MMO are still fundamentally kill, loot and levle up they are probably still closers to Old School games in spirit than something like Call of Cthulhu, Amber, Pendragon or Tales from the Floating Vagabond.

And then there's EVE Online, which is a virtual-world sandbox driven by player interaction instead of the "theme-park" approach of DDO or WoW, but it also includes some "modern" sensibilities.

I also played a brief stint of a hacked version of Fallout 2 that allowed for MMO gameplay.  Completely free-for-all, sandbox style game with "equipment" dropoffs at one or two major cities.  A very interesting experiment since the full PvP and deadly nature of the game requires you to team up with others just to survive, let alone gain power as a faction.  Most of the equipment being dropped off at the two locations also meant there was a constant war for which faction would hold the supply routes.

Instead of everquest a better comparison would have been Ultima Online, the original sandbox mmo, they introduced the entire player economy deal and chinese gold farmers.

I played WoW for a couple of days with the free trial, I could see how it can suck people in to spending chunks of time on it.  Ultima Online is rules heavy, it has in game DM's that patrol (check out these links for tales from an ultima online DM, (p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6), WoW is rules light its more an arcade game any anything else to DDO wich is rules intensive yet for what ever reason was not embraced by the public.

The thing I find most damning is that, DDO is _free_ yet its got nowhere near the uptake that WOW has... and its free. Is there something fundamentally wrong with using the DND rules for a MMO?

The sand boxing part I find interesting, is it allows you to role play more than anything else, if you want to be a master carpenter in UO you could be, in WoW your a tank/healer/dps... in DDO your a tank/healer/dps.

So in the most well know (to the rest of world public) rules set in DDO with AD&D, we have the least RP ability going.

The market goes where the money is and I don't see much sand boxing coming and bringing more free form playing back. People want quests, loot and leveling and they don't want to be master carpenters.

I think I got off track a bit I'll stop now

If your old school tabletop gaming actually resembled Everquest, then I might actually have to revise my sympathies towards that style of play.  

However, I think at play is more a factor of someone picking and choosing traits to fit a mold.  

I am inclined to agree with with BloodyCactus though, as UO is much more akin to what I conceive of old school sandbox play resembling, a model shared as well by EVE in many ways.  

Most games instead have aped EQ, just better done.  WoW is nothing more than EQ made so that normal people can actually play it without devoting their lives to it and living in their basement pooping in a sock.  The only thing WoW added was more and easier to discover quests.

My biggest beef with DDO is that by around level 4 if you are playing solo or grouping for that matter.  The quests/dungeons start to get rather long.  Which is fine for someone who can spend multiple hours playing video games.   However for the ability to pick up and play even for an hour the game starts to lose that ability pretty quickly.  Which really sucks.  It wouldn't be so bad if you could start a solo quest leave the dungeon and come back to it.  But it's, this all or nothing approach that blows.

Reading this thread has served to remind me just how much ALL mmorpgs suck compared to real RPGs.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;350541Reading this thread has served to remind me just how much ALL mmorpgs suck compared to real RPGs.

RPGPundit

I've been playing WoW for 4 years.  It does not suck, or I wouldn't keep playing it; however, it's a completely different experience from tabletop, and I don't want any WoWisms anywhere near my tabletop rpgs.

Quote from: BloodyCactus;350483Instead of everquest a better comparison would have been Ultima Online, the original sandbox mmo, they introduced the entire player economy deal and chinese gold farmers.

I played WoW for a couple of days with the free trial, I could see how it can suck people in to spending chunks of time on it.  Ultima Online is rules heavy, it has in game DM's that patrol  WoW is rules light its more an arcade game any anything else to DDO wich is rules intensive yet for what ever reason was not embraced by the public.

The thing I find most damning is that, DDO is _free_ yet its got nowhere near the uptake that WOW has... and its free. Is there something fundamentally wrong with using the DND rules for a MMO?

I tried DDO.  I actually liked it better than WoW, but I get motion sickness in a lot of 3d games, and is one of the worst for me.  After 30 minutes or so, I'm ready to puke, take about 12 aspirin and go to bed.  WoW,s cartoony graphics don't seem to bother me.

Quote from: JRR;350594I've been playing WoW for 4 years.  It does not suck, or I wouldn't keep playing it; however, it's a completely different experience from tabletop, and I don't want any WoWisms anywhere near my tabletop rpgs.

I concur with this sentiment.  I enjoy MMOs, but they by and large bear only superficial resemblance at best to tabletop RPGs.

I'm frankly disappointed that I'm seeing tabletop take inspiration from MMO, because it should be the other way around.

You know the biggest problem I have--is that when it boils down to it, all the time spent in an MMO, can be better spent playing games via tabletop with friends. While I've made friends via MMO's, its not quite the same as sharing snacks, laughs and games with others.

I've got a few alts on DDO since it went free. I tend to play the superhero MMo's because despite liking to hook up with people to play, gaming scheduling for even MMo's is a problem.

A friend had their account wiped, and I just realized how much time they spent. If I spent that much time feeling good enough to write--I'd be the most prolific RPG author ever.

That Everquest play you describe sounds appealing to me...

I play WOW and still mostly enjoy it... but it has gotten progressively more convenient/easy... to the point now that I'm considering quitting.
Not that I think it needs to be difficult, but the convenience seems to be directed at pleasing people who don't really enjoy playing the game... don't enjoy the exploration/fluff and who only want to get to the top level (for some reason I don't understand).
The higher lvl instances seems a lot more linear... some are just one big room where monsters come in to fight.
The new looking for group system serves to make the storyline/fluff even more irrelevant that it was already getting to be.
In a way it seems to be going backward vs. tabletop design... to a game where you don't much need to leave the dungeon except to buy/sell... and the dungeon is a non-sensical series of rooms with XP (monsters) in them.

In WOW there is so much focus on getting to the 'end game' that I don't see why they don't just give an option for people to pay $100 and get a geared up lvl 80.

If there's any parallel there with the direction D&D has taken then I'm reaffirmed in my desire to have nada to do with 4th edition.

Otherwise, no... it doesn't compare at all with tabletop RPG play. It's a whole nother thing.

Have you done Wrath of the Lich King yet?  I felt the storyline in that was actually quite well done and quite well presented.  It's the most fun I've had in WoW since the original, certainly better than BC, and even better than original WoW really.

Of course, then you hit cap and it's back to raid or quit again, but I've solved that by simply taking the latter option.

Everquest was a tough game.

Recovery of one's corpse could consume an entire day if you died in a really bad spot. I'm not saying that this was good or bad but it certainly was tough.

At least the game was challenging and character death had real consequences. I didn't get much past level 30 on most characters. I got bored easily beyond the thirty mark and I had no desire to poop into a sock.

Quote from: J Arcane;350614Have you done Wrath of the Lich King yet?

Yes, and you're right, some really good story going on there... the whole Northrend area is really well done... but not quite as fun to explore as the classic areas... I'm still running across stuff in Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms that I've never seen before, odd little areas... 'hidden' quests. Somehow there just feels like there is a lot more 'depth' to the old areas and instances, it might be a facade but it's one that's convincing to me.
I think part of it is that the old areas are a bit more... romantic. Not sure if that's the word... but all the elf and dwarf ruins jutting up out of the earth... the feeling of buried/lost history... this ponderous sorrow hanging over so much of it. I definitely don't get much of that feeling in the BC or LK content.

And raiding, while it was enjoyable in it's own way... well, that's another game really... and a lot of that endgame upkeep begins to feel a lot like work rather than fun.

In that way it's similar to some tabletop RPGs I've played where the need for more content... supplements/splatbooks begin to water down/change the elements that drew me to the game to begin with. Usually I'd just stop buying the new material... but with an MMO the setting evolves around you whether you like it or not.