General Discussion

 I am trying to start an open discussion on bringing immersion back into MMORPGs.  Are convenience and immersion truly mutually exclusive?  How would you make a more immersive MMORPG?

 Personally, I argue that immersion can be achieved without making a game tedious by changing game mechanics and redefining player goals.  Doing this will make a game more enjoyable because it adds another element, possibly the most important element, to the game: immersion.  If you can stomach reading all of this thread, including my responses, you'll find reasonably well warranted claims on how this can be achieved.

Talking points:

Too much civilization, imo: I'd like to play a game where the largest "safe" areas are scattered hamlets where only the truly brave venture outward into the world.  If there are major civilizations or large cities, they're too far away and the road is too perilous.  fewer, smaller safe zones please.  With fewer towns, you won't end up with random outposts that are largely devoid of other PCs.  Rather, towns could actually act as meeting grounds for players to group up.  Diablo 1 got the feeling of islolation down pretty well.  A single town, surrounded by a lot of content.  Multiply that by ten and make it so traveling between towns is fun, but no cakewalk and you'd have an mmo i'd feel immersed in.

Solo and group content should be in the same areas: earlier areas of dungeons should be soloable.  This would allow to people to actually find each other and group up inside the dungeon.  Also, design classes so that even some group content can be soloed but not quickly and definitely not with a 100% chance of success (ie, you die/ have to run away a lot if you're soloing group content).

No global chat, no lfg: if people want to group for a dungeon, they should just go there.  As per the previous point, if the best soloable content is in/near the dungeon then people should have no trouble finding others to join at the dungeon.

Instances are antisocial.  yeah.

Bigger dungeons: wtb dungeons i can get lost in.  Unfortunately, bite-sized dungeons have become industry standard because people don't have time to play through longer dungeons.  Solution? Have decent conent in the mid-depth level of a dungeon (ie, after the soloable content but before the really tough stuff) so people never have to go to the deepest level if they dont have time.

Quests are tedious! WoW, Vanguard, EQ2.  WAAAAY too many quests. Go back to the EQ one model of having a few quests worth doing rather than a billion killcount quests for coin and xp.  The process of going to town, picking up quests, finding a group that's on the same part of a chain, etc is so unfun.  Chains suck, for the most part and should be reserved for epic questlines.  Instead of chains, just have harder quests with multiple tasks.  Also, quests should start by DOING something rather than just clicking on an npc.  Really guys, you can't think of a more interesting way of starting quests?  At least go back the EQ model of I have a [quest] for you, why don't you talk to me about it?  (say the bracketed word and they'll continue with their story).  With advances in AI, i expected games after EQ to have more interactive NPCs.  Sadly, we've regressed. 

NO questlogs! NO "accepting" quests.  This way you can do a quest even if you didnt talk to the guy beforehand (makes sense right? If there's a price on someone's head and you kill the guy, you can claim the cash whether you knew about the reward beforehand or not) Keeping track of quests is not really a problem if there are only 2-3 GOOD quests for a dungeon.   Quest instructions should be vague and but could be clarified if you keep an eye out for clues, etc.  How do you turn in a quest? Just trade the npc the item that he wants.  This allows for secret quests where the npc himself doesn't tell you he wants such and such an item and you have do deduce it from clues around you.

Thottbott sucks:  Just design the game so we don't have to research where to get good items! Sheesh!  It's really not that hard, just make it so named have BROAD loot tables so every named has a chance of dropping a good item you'd use.  Also, multiple good items per slot per level range per class from various sources please.   No need to make every cleric farm x mob to get the best wristguards at the 23-27 level range.

Harsher death penalty: make us start a dungeon over if we wipe.  We wouldnt mind because A) there's still loot we want in areas we've already explored (broad and deep loot tables) and B) we could just take a different route because the dungeon is huge.  Obviously, don't design the content so you're constantly wiping even on the easy stuff (only on the hard stuff deeper in the dungeon =P)

Slower xp:  There's nothing wrong with a slow xp rate if you have the content to match it.  The problem with fast xp is that people hit max level too fast and then decide to reroll.  Nothing wrong with that, right?  Wrong.  I'd rather live in a gameworld where people play ONE character that i can get to know instead of dealing with a bunch of anonymous rerolls.  Again, this wouldnt be a problem if xp is slow and there's a lot of content to go with it.

Real travel: yeah, i know vanguard epic failed on this one (they ended up putting in teleportation) but they only failed because travel wasnt designed as content.  Make it so the act of going from point A to point B requires you to fight an event or two (with the chance of rewards!).  Some points could be connected by teleportation, but if you want to experience the cool stuff you have to go wander off and find the isolated hamlets or the hermits living in a cave.   Also if you make the game too big horizontally (vanguard) you're going to have to put in teleportations.  But if a lot of your content is DOWN (caves) or UP (towers, buildings) then there's going to be a lot less running involved.  This goes along with the solo content being inside the dungeon.  Solo content fills up like 80% of the outdoor world in most games, but if you put it in the dungeon the overall world would be easier to traverse but just as big.

Discuss.

Edit: more stuff, scroll down 6 posts.

Play Ultima Online ;)

Best MMO ever

Close your eyes and forget about the graphics (old 2d version rlz)

Etwynn,

One thing I have realized is that what I would find amazingly fun in a game is not what most people would find fun in a game. You are not the average gamer nor am I. What we like is not what the masses would most likely enjoy and thus is probably not a good idea.

Then again, a good idea is one that gets you the most money right? I like what you say, but the reality is that most of the things I'd like in a MMO will probably be hated by most others. It's something I have accepted.

Most MMO's fail for one and only one reason.

1. They are broken in some way shape or form. By broken i mean there's something in them that viscerally pisses people off just by playing it.

An example of what I'm saying is Anofayle. I mean this guy is like straight PvE let me be railroaded and have no choices. THere are 10 million WoW subscribers, it seems to work.

EVE all the way :).

Cryomatrix

Some interesting ideas but the biggest barrier to immersion would still be other players who ran around shouting "LFG" & instantly saying "Quest" to every NPC in whatever town area you were in. 

Unfortunately the 'Convenience Players' are usually in the majority, so a game that forced players to take the difficult route might not last long. I think games have ended up going the easy route to allow for people who don't have the time or patience to really want to immerse themselves in the world, having said that though it should be possible to have more options that allow players that want immersion to effectively take the scenic route.

I play EQ2, where every quest NPC now conveniently has illuminated objects over their heads to remove the need to work out who to talk to. If this option could be turned off, and a simple text interface was also used to replace the 'Push Button Balloon Replies' then it could still accommodate both styles of gameplay from the same underlying programming scripts.

Most games already have the option to selectively disable 'Chat Channels', so as long as you aren't worried about people that think you have gone deaf you can play at a local level already. 

As anyone who has regretted joining a random 'Dude Pickup Group' can tell you though, the biggest problem will always be anti-social players, the necessary evil that pays all the bills.

Originally posted by LondonMagus

Some interesting ideas but the biggest barrier to immersion would still be other players who ran around shouting "LFG" & instantly saying "Quest" to every NPC in whatever town area you were in. 

Sorry i didnt explain this EQ function very well.  If you hailed an npc, he might say something like "Oh, where has [Gawan] gone!?" and you could respond "Who is Gawan?" (or, if you prefer, just "gawan") to get the dialogue to continue...i just used the word quest as a lazy example.

Originally posted by LondonMagus

Most games already have the option to selectively disable 'Chat Channels', so as long as you aren't worried about people that think you have gone deaf you can play at a local level already.

Typical response but unfortunately if /ooc is the traditional means of finding a group, then groups will usually come premade and full to a dungeon without even bothering to do a /shout lfm much less a /say would you like to kill these mobs with us.   This makes it impossible for those of us who want, to play at a local level.  It has to be universally enforced.

IMO one of the biggest things being left out of todays MMoRPGs is a true first person view like original EQ had...where you saw your hands and your weapon in them, you looked down you saw your feet, you had to turn your head to see things around you and behind you, plus as you ran your view floated slightly up & down, not enough to cuase motion sickness but just enough to give a feel like you where running.

Going into a new area or dungeon in this manner was much more immersive then the 3rd person view that is popular with the devs of games since eq (AO had an OK 1st person but not as good).

True first person combined with collision detection...yes its also hard for your character to seem real when your fighting a monster with 20 other folks and your all in one spot, or your running thru a city and everyone you approach runs right thru you.

Will anyone ever bring these 2 immesion factors back?,     if it comes in a good game I will be there.

More:

More on travel One way to make travel actually fun would be to implement random events that occur as you’re traveling.   These events could scale based on level and how many group members you have with you.  Events could include a named appearing, an npc appearing and giving you a quest, getting ambushed by thieves, etc.  While fairly rare, these random events could offer excitement and provide unexpected rewards if you succeed.  In addition to events, traveling from one town to another should involve having to fight through a small section of a dungeon or through some mobs on one portion of the road/trail (high hold pass in EQ, or whatever it was called.  The orc area you had to pass through to get from Freeport to Qeynos)

Most of the “content” should be dungeons: I want more meat and less “let’s make open zones where things randomly spawn and walk around.”  Open areas should be open.  It’s not normal for dozens of giant spiders to be walking around in broad daylight so let’s not settle for that.  The only things that I should see outdoors are my aforementioned “events” and the occasional static camps like an abandoned building filled with crazy zombies. 

Be creative in making mob spawning immersive: I don’t want to see mobs “pop” out of nowhere.   Couple of cool ideas to add immersion: named being spawned from specific location(s) such as orcs being born out of muck, mobs coming out of a portal,  or sprites coming out of a fire.  These spawn objects could be temporarily disabled if you can clear to them.  Mobs spawn around the corner, out of sight of any player characters.  Immersive “pops” such as mobs coming out of stealth, being teleported in a summoner in a different location of the dungeon, etc.

Smarter mobs: it’s ridiculous that mobs 30m away don’t agro when they see you fighting their comrades.  Make dungeons crawling more about being tactical and not notifying all of the surrounding mobs to your presence.  Pulling mobs quickly out of LoS of other mobs would avoid adds, but if you fight in the open long enough you’re going to wipe.  Also, make mobs work together.

Hate management shouldn’t be the end all, be all of grouping: Make player collision and knockbacks an important tactic to keeping mobs off your clothies.  The mobs should use similar tactics.  (previous poster beat me to it)

Backstory: not all content needs to relate to the main storyarch but there should be something big going on.

Cinematics, please (a la Diablo 2)

(seemingly) Dynamic world: Different versions of areas depending on level or whether you’ve completed an event.  All the players who’ve finished a certain quest enter the torched version of Tristram that is no longer a npc village but now a dungeon.  This could also be used to recycle the graphics of a dungeon by populating it with different/higher mobs and creating different events.  Don’t underestimate the power of nostalgia; going back to a previous dungeon to rid it of evil (again), continuing on the same quest line could be very immersive.

Interactive UI with an aesthetic theme.  Clean, informative, not too cluttered, and most importantly functional.  BIG health bars so we can see them in our periphreal vision (most games go the other way and say "let's make really small ui elements so there's  more viewing space! Wrong.  I stare at the health bars and cooldowns  and ignore the graphics if they're too small.)  Better yet, I should be able to deduce my cooldown state/what abilities i can use by looking at my character.  I should be able to tell the health of my groupmembers not by their health bars but based on how much they're bleeding...Do away with health bars entirely and i'd be happy.

Wave, i totally agree on the 1st person perspective thing.  I did it in EQ, but in WoW and vanguard i just zoom out because of being able to see behind you gave such an advantage.  I'd consider having a game with locked first person view with a respectable fisheye effect, but only with a decent resolution screen =P