Quote:
Originally Posted by fadetree
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The irony is that if you give players what they say they want, you ruin the game. They *say* they want it easier, better, faster, more powerful, more convenient...but if you give it to them, they get bored and wander off.
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Not true. All you gotta do is make them think you're making it easier, better, faster, more powerful and more convenient. Of course, with mudflation, you're limited somewhat in what you can do, but there're techniques they can use to reduce that effect. All they gotta do is understand player psychology.
People really do not fully consider the effect of declining populations, though. Companies panic when they start to lose popularity. As the numbers of incoming players go down and as mudflation wreaks havoc on the game, the quality goes down. The companies usually respond by giving the players easier access to the content and by copying what other games are doing. By copying what other games are doing they're ensuring that players who visit the game are less likely to feel like they're in unfamiliar territory. Essentially, games in decline will kill their own mother just to survive. And this is the ugly side, especially of big business.
Strangely, things are not always as they appear. Over the past 10-15 years I was led to believe that MMORPGs will only look more and more like WOW. They will degenerate and destroy all that's 'unnecessary' to the goal of addicting the player base. They'd become fancy slot machine games! Well, that's the feeling I HAD. However, I first played Wurm Online in July 2012. I gotta say that it impressed on me a feeling that surpasses Everquest 1. I first played Everquest 1 in March 1999. It burnt into my brain memorable moments. Even as I tried to play Ultima Online, I always felt drawn to Everquest 1 because of its 3d environment and more developed non-player world. But Wurm Online has created a sense of immersion I never felt in Everquest 1. That's mainly because the danger level in Wurm Online was higher, at least during my stay there, but it's more than that: everything in the world could be changed by the players. It truly feel like a breathing living world that slowly changed. It even had seasons. That moment when I stood on that hill, cold and frightened, in the clearcut and watched the stars and heard the wind is etched so permanently in my mind I will have to remember it for the rest of my life. NO moment in any other game has been so powerful. And I've had many similar moments in Wurm Online.
Wurm Online has a lot of grind because the skills aren't well fleshed out (and players like to grind, you know), but if you can stomach that part of it, this mmo sandbox is a beautiful gem.
Wurm Online is the spiritual successor to UO: Second Age and classic Everquest 1. But it too will grow old and degenerate. Even now I can see the "mudflation". I can see the age coming on.
No, immersion is not dead. It will be killed and resurrected forever, just as people die and children are born. I predict that in the future we will see game worlds far more complex and difficult than Everquest 1 was at its height. And I think that the line between 'game worlds' and 'worlds' is blurring too. It's hard to call these 'games'. They're more like fake realities than they're like games. You immerse in them and make another life. They're not there for you to have fun, they're there for you to create new unplanned experiences.