Just spotted this drop on Massively about a new upcoming Japanese-developed MMO based on the venerable (and apparently very big in Japan) Wizardry series pioneered by Sir-Tech in the early 1980s. The real gotcha is that they are panning on a not-very-kind flavor of permadeath (yes, really) AND they are going to allow unfettered player-vs-player interaction, including but not limited to player killing. Supposedly there will be some sort of reputation system to discourage PKing whilst in the main town, but since when has that discouraged anyone who really hungers for anti-social interactions? Could this be the dawn of a brave new era, or is it 1997 all over again?
Man, I remember playing Wizardry in the old days on my Commodore 64. I thought the PS2 game was rather well done, so I could see Japan giving Wizardry a good treatment. I think it goes without saying that, being an Eastern-origin MMORPG, it will be a grind. The people in that part of the world aren't the least bit afraid of a bit of digital commitment, and probably consider us pansies to balk from it.
That's a real tired ethnic stereotype.Asians do not enjoy mindless grinding anymore than westerners. As far as digital commitment goes, one must have a level of commitment to have an online community. Otherwise your game is just call of shooty: no persistance:2; not a mmorpg; the instancing. So called western mmorpgs have always been just as grindy as their eastern counter parts, just in a slightly different way. You may have to spend a month of hardcore grinding in old lineage to get that next level, but that's hardly any different from grinding out the same tired dungeon to get that next set of gear. Oh wait, it's called raiding. It's not a grind guys, cuz you do it with 26 other people with artificial limits on attempts and zany prerequisites via quests and other nonsense! Instead of just going out and grinding that monster, you have to grind with your grind so you can start your grind! How innovative! It's not a grind, oh those are daily quests! Instead of playing for 20 hours to get that item, you have to play 1 hour a day for 20 days! No grind at all!
I'd be inclined to believe this is tired stereotyping if I saw a lot less examples of punishing grinds coming from that direction. Personally, I think they get around it by enjoying the communal interactions more than Westerners do.
And, just like that, I crap right into my own pants. This really IS Heaven, Virginia! This part here stands out to me: "While Okada plays many MMOs today, as a self-proclaimed hardcore gamer he looks back on the early days of Ultima Online and EverQuest as some of the "most interesting" of the industry." Such a highly diplomatic way of putting it. UO and EQ were abysmally awful games... but the times in which we played them were definitely the first of the new frontier. And I am so glad to know that I am not the only one to have missed them. However, I am disturbed... what does any of this have to do with Shadowbane?
I would love a true Wizardry MMO. I liked the combat / character options and all of Wizardry.. Permadeath? PK? not so much
I'll buy this thinking it's right up my alley, play for 10 hours, get ganked and thus deleted by the overpowered class I failed to play (probably a stealther of some sort) and uninstall!
It's not just a niche design, it's an unprofitable one, in the long term. You NEED a core pve safe zone, so that you can have some base accounts that won't quit and for pvp losers to fall back to and regroup. Some pvp losers are still going to quit, but this way, you mitigate the monetary loss.
Its funny that so many long term gamers still dont understand why permadeath is NOT viable in a virtual PVP world. My guess you guys never played much EVE.
Dunno, I would actually *love* to play that one, PVP, permadeath and all ... in a better world. The Wizardry setting, real danger to your char, full interaction between players, leading to intense politics and lovingly-played feuds ... And that's when I wake up and remember the kind of players likely to be found in such an environment.
Right. What you imagine is 'intense politics and lovingly-played feuds'. What you'd actually have is roaming gank squads of griefers looking to permakill folks and then teabag them, while spamming "U MAD" in chat. There's a wide chasm between the dream and reality of hardcore PVP.
Yes a perm death PVP game might be viable if you could populate it only with people you invite. But wont work in a for profit game. A group of anarchist types will immediately figure out the lowest effort means possible to "break" the world - then do it. The most common means is to use low levels to suicide zerg high levels one at a time. If you adjust the game to protect against this - you probably have high levels slaying noob with impunity. Virtual identities + death = fail.
Just have a PK range like the PK muds I used to play, and strict ban rules for known and posted exploits. Using an unposted exploit= punishment short of ban, depending on what it was and how you used it. Instead of permadeath, why not have chars just age and die?
The problem with permadeath is that the gameplay concept of most MMOs is highly dependent on character accomplishment. That means that permadeath will actually destroy your ability to experience the content that you were enjoying and force you to replay the content you've already done. It's one thing to allow people to voluntarily replay content, it's quite another to say "sorry, not yours" and yank the later content away. So permadeath usually becomes a contrarian mechanism to establish hardcore bonafides. It's pretty damn obvious however that the meaningless death in most MMOs is a bit hard on the suspension of disbelief. If the point of permadeath is to create a more logical game mechanic that people will find compelling and rewarding then there absolutely has to be a "The (Sims|Guild)" style "family" system that allows you to pick up most of the way toward where you left off. That is if you want to attract any non-hardcore players.
OK so now you a requiring defined classes and levels. So in order to add one cool feature you are requiring one and essentially 2 of the most uncool possible features in an MMO. Probably because aging and death from natural causes are unpleasant and depressing elements that we already deal with plenty in real life.
Levels aren't so bad, if you do the following -make sure people gain a certain amount of XP each day so they don't ranksit -make the hero/max level grind reasonable ( a vet should be able to make a new char to hero in 20-30 hours) - levels does not require classes per se, just experience. I think classes are necessary for a competitive mud, because otherwise people will go to the twink combo or fall behind- as MMO PK balance is the 2nd most difficult thing to balance out in gaming behind 2d fighters. As for aging, it's a good way to freshen things up, you can save your loot for your next character to make powerlevelling easy. (heirlooms)
Ummm You are demonstrating why permadeath makes a game more and more repulsive as you try to make it workable while at the same time demonstrating that your goal is impossible. The easier you make it to level the more disposable toons become. Forced free xp means people will end up leveling up gank toons with even less time invested. You basically just making a more and more complicated structure that has nothing to do with game play - but its taking you right back to where you started.
Goal of any PvP system is to encourage and enable Player vs. Player combat. PvP players want more, not less combat and don't like to be penalized for doing what they like. Creating a system with substantial penalties for loss, such a traditional definition of a permadeath, would only discourage PvP and people would only engage in combat when they are highly unlikely to die. Prime example of this is stat-loss PKs from UO, you'd never see one out in the field alone without support team and they'd never linger in one spot to minimize chances of retaliation. The only way to make permadeath viable in PvP title is to make death trivial, by ether making character advancement very shallow to the FPS-like point or moving this advancement elsewhere, like your account/invisible pilot/legacy instead of individual character. At that point you have to ask yourself, why bother with permadeath?
Alstein, you make it sound so simple, but you're up against nearly a decade and a half of MMO history. If permadeath could be worked into an MMO and not suck, it would've been done by now.
Now, this is something I can't agree to. PvP development is nonexistant, most of the development effort was spent on overpolishing DIKU turd. Problem with permadeath in PvP is twofold - a) its a penalty for dying in the game where dying is expected outcome b) it penalizes individual player for participating in PvP. Here is what I said in 2007:
Darkwind does it, by having a whole gang of people rather than just one character. Works great. Kind of small scale, but what problems Darkwind has stem more from other things than the permadeath, i.e. basically it got a bit repetitive. That could be readily addressed if it were developed on more than a shoe string budget.
UO in its original form was not "abysmally awful", but it would have been with permadeath. What a terrible idea, and a true griefer's paradise.
I like this, from the official site: Second best reason to play our game: try not to experience the biggest selling point of our game.
As a gamer from small times, I know that when I think Wizardry I always think of amazing anime characters and creatures.
I'm not seeing any post from "Fairytale13"... Seeing I only have 1 person on my ignore list (and (s)he's not it), I'm assuming post was nuked due to Lums new "No gratuitus self promotion" stance?
I try as hard as I can not to die in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. I don't want to prepare to die, I want to spend the game preparing not to die, even if one of the big selling points is that you'll die alot I would also probably like trying to avoid permadeath in this game.
After reading through this thread, my intial thoughts on this MMO are (to badly mangle and old design philosophy) A) Allow Perma Death B) Allow Unrestricted (or nearly so) PvP C) Expect more the double digit number of subrcribers Choose which of the two items above you want in your game. The only thing I can see that could possibly allow all 3 is, is if they somehow totally nueter the perma death. IE: Yeah your guy dies permanently but passes all his experience/money on to his "successor". Basicaly you'd just loose what you have equiped, but keep everything 'banked'. And the time to roll up a new body look. Something similar to EVEs "clones" system. While you could from a certian point of view say EVE has permadeath, I doubt anyone here would really call it that.
Summary for those without 20 minutes to spare: Perma death isn't so permanent. Perma death is always possible, but there are multiple chances to resurrect including sacrificing items to increase your chances. You won't be able to solo to the end game, it will require grouping, with particular roles to fill. Pvp conveys a criminal status that makes it more difficult to return to town and level up and criminals have to use shady vendors. Pvp can (will?) slow progression since players have to wait to lose their criminal status and can be actually taken to jail. There is a pvp flag though too. Their phrasing was weird, but it appears non-pvp characters can freely pvp against criminals. But your pvp flag will be tripped by looting the bodies of non-criminals I think. The exception is if you're taking your own stolen stuff back or are granted permission to loot for a friend. There will be a bounty system, where players can put bounties on other players for any reason. Chests and such can be trapped--in their example leaving them temporarily knocked out due to sleeping gas--but those traps also be disarmed with the right skill levels. Puzzles and platforming elements are included. Puzzles can reference lore and story information. Also player skill is involved in combat. Active shield blocking is an example. Interesting point, shields have their own life bar? They emphasized calculated risk vs. reward as part of the fun gameplay. There will be multiclassing where you can keep skills from your previous class. Stats are actually randomly rolled for your character and classes have particular stat requirements, but you can reroll by "backing out."
I played through the first dungeon of this tonight. Some impressions. The quest to kill 10 kobolds, when the dungeon contains one 3-kobold room that respawns every two minutes is just mean. The combat is timing/distance based, but controlling distance is hard because the controls are clunky. Flanking enemies is fun, though Everything is really easy, except the random Elite mob that will one-hit you. I guess they haven't balanced it yet. The cutscenes are shockingly terrible. The platforming is painful, because the controls are clunky. I'm not feeling any particular desire to play it again, at this point. It does a terrible job of creating a sense of progression, and there's barely a hint of a goal you're trying to reach. There's some mystery chick who says you're the brightest soul she's ever seen, but hello, MMO, so cut that shit out. There's also a lot of tedium and running through corridors between anything that could be considered an interesting fight. And the interesting fights aren't that interesting. I give it two Wendras.
