Yeah, just a bit, I’d imagine the biggest stumbling block would be the player’s initial reaction of “hey, WTF happened to all of my gear, stats and skills? Why am I suddenly only doing single digit damage? RAGE”.
It’s interesting in principle though.
Playing this idea a little bit further, just because:
You enter the dungeon, but you keep your gear. Instead, you lose all “memory” about your skills because…reasons.
(Of course only for the dungeon)
Then, before anything happens, you are presented with choice.
“Choose one Skill of these three.”
For example: —Warpath (LvL 18), Rive (LvL 16), Smite (Lvl 16)—
Completely unrelated to whatever you skilled.
So, you take Rive and slay you way through to the next layer / door / room.
Yet again, you are presented with another choice of skills:
—Rebuke (Lvl 14), Lunge (Lvl 10), Shield Rush(Lvl 25)—
You take one and continue your way. But…wait… these skills don’t fit to my Gear?!!
Luckily, I have an inventory. And I prepared diligently. (Like having a shield and 1W in my inventory)
This allows me to take this (rare) Shield Rush level 25.
(Monster drops will be accumulated at the end.)
Edit1: Let me give this a name - for all who know the game Hades:
This would be Last Epochs “Hades” Dungeon Variant
Edit2: This would allow for skill levels to up to above level 24 temporarily and only inside the dungeon. Which might be a fun experience.
Yeah, that doesn’t apply at all to Camelot Unchained. It will be RvR, and based on conflict, not a “glorified FPS”.
Pretty sure crowfall said the same thing, what? you don’t know what crowfall is? Oh my. Guess we will see I am 100% sure that your game of choice, will be different. This time they will get it right, this time they will shatter the records and roll in all of the money. No not some money, no not a lot of money, I am talking the entire world economy will revolve around your game of choice, world political conflict will be resolved in your game of choice, move over yugioh here comes your game of choice.
I think it is quite simple - most of these games put tons of padding to extend the “gameplay time”.
Also you do not have all that much fun off of the base gameplay, you need to reach a higher level before the game starts being fun and that requires lots of grinding - or in other words you need to endure hours of boredom before you are allowed to start having fun.
This however is not just an issue of today, it was very common with free mmos since the beginning(as those would usually require you to pay for power) - it just got more common as more games added power based microtransactions, or in the case of PoE balanced themselves around the best players and best builds instead of around the average player/build.
Games have also become more hand-holdy as they do not allow you to truly explore or discover things, they put a waypoint to every quest(thus making them grocery lists instead of actual quests), this is something they didn’t allways do - it has reached such a point that Elden Ring stands out for NOT using quest waypoints.
I could go on and on about all the differences between old game design and new game design - but my point is that the new design stuff sands off all the edges of the game but leaves you with nothing memorable. It is all made following the same checklist and it shows when every game by activision is almost exactly the same.
Pretty sure Crowfall wasn’t made by the people who made Dark Age of Camelot (the pre-quel), which was a successful MMO back in its day.
Maybe it just simply comes down to games being too loot driven now. It’s just a fact. That is even how games are monetized with skins and such. Those are just loot that you pay for. I liked UO because the game was about increasing your skills. You had a cap of 750 skill points and individual skills maxed at 100. There were skill synergies, but you couldn’t get everything. Lumberjacking made you hit harder with an axe in combat. Anatomy increased how much you heal with bandages(Healing skill) as well as making you deal more damage because you know the critical points to hit.
There were no crazy RNG loot. Almost everything in the game was craftable. The game was fun. It was fun roaming the land looking for the things you need for crafting, or just browsing the player houses with their merchants selling the things that they made. Running down into the dungeons with the undead (make sure you bring your silver weapons!), or into caves with dragons. There were even bards and animal tamers that had dragons as pets.
People complain about the RNG in games like LE. The fact is, without that RNG, the game would lose purpose fast for the vast majority of people. If it takes a week, or even a month to get your character almost perfect, and you just roflstomp everything, what is the point at that time? Rinse and repeat on a new character? That’s pretty much why I only really play LE after a big patch just to try the new stuff and grab the new uniques. I quickly get bored after I finish with that.
Just to reiterate my point. The focus on loot is the problem.
I think the ‘authentic’ experience went from grinding with a purpose – levels, gear, gold, mount, etc. To grinding for the sake of grinding, BUT, we’re going to time gate the grinding you can do, so it artificially takes longer to reach your end-goal.
Everquest was grindy as fuck… for XP. But, you didn’t mind it, because you were always grinding with a group, and every DING was like an orgasm. Then WoW came along, and there were more grinds. Hell, I spent about 2 or 3 weeks in the Plaguelands cemetery grinding gold for my epic mount. But, when I got it, I was ecstatic!
Then, everything changed…
Grinding in WoW now is: doing X amount of repetitive daily quests for reputations. Reputations that time gate items that are useless to you, once you have the reputation for them. But, you need the reputations to advance your level in whatever treadmill mini-game that expansion has: Artifact Power, Covenant Levels, etc. Which you need to get maxed in order to be accepted into groups to do higher level content.
Oh, and BTW, all that grinding becomes completely worthless once then new expansion comes out, because no content in WoW ever incorporates previous content or achievements.
Imo, mmo boils down to intrinsic vs extrinsic returns.
In the past, you grind extrinsically but intrinsically you gain social rewards like making friends, have fun in guilds, so it all balance out.
Now its about clicks, “you are not good enough”, toxic racist chat, from personal experience.
MMOs boil down to what players want and how jealous they are about other people and their progress.
I know WoW players who are happy running arround and picking up flowers after they played the storyline. I know people who need to play the hardest content there is ahead of the curve because they like to brag about it. The list goes on and on but if you only care about yourself MMOs are fun again.
People pressure themself into a gamestyle that is maybe not even fitting for them. After raiding world firsts years ago i said: “F this shit I’m done tortureing myself!”. Since then I play games in my pace and with an approach to get to more relaistic targets without suffering.
Missed a daylie login? Don’t care! Missed a daylie mission for the reputation (or whatever) grind? Don’t care! Wiped 20 times an evening because shit happens? Don’t care!
People simply need to be honest to themselfs, their abilitys, their skill and the tame they want to invest.
If someone has a hard time playing LFR in WoW he might not joind a hardcore raiding guild with the expectation to get things done because he gets carried.
Most players simply sabotage themself and blaim others for it.
Very good post, I totally agree with Macknum.
The main point of MMOs, compared with other games, is that they can be played in many different ways.
You can go high-end raiding, or slowly explore the world solo, or focus on crafting, or build yourself beautiful houses, or try and get as many mounts as possible, or collect pets, or hunt for achievs… You name it.
The game doesn’t try to force you into a mould, you do it to yourself.
Just find a way to play you really enjoy. Or go and play something else, there are plenty of games out there…
It’s related to the game developers that got the taste of profit from selling in-game benefits to players for the first time.
Forcing players to login every day, or they can’t claim their ‘bonus rewards’. Limit everything behind some bullshit whatever-points and you have to be in-game to ‘recharge’ it every 10 minutes or something. Most Asian MMORPGs are made this way.
Then, the most profitable monetization system became popular: Creating problems and selling the solutions.
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