an all 10 people that still play it.
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EQ changed it. EQ was the big move away from full-loot games that had easy/expendable gear and emphasis on tactics and skills (both character skill level, which doesn’t break/drop, and player skill) and towards PvE-focused games that had sought-after, unique gear that didn’t break and wasn’t easy to replace. EQ did have a steep death penalty, however, given the design of the game and how easy it was to die in an inaccessible location and lose your gear that way – people went to great lengths therefore to avoid dying (it didn’t create a culture of fungible/replaceable gear).
What WoW did was take EQ’s basic idea and make it prettier, more humorous, much more accessible (UI, spells, skills all simplified) and streamlined – which then had the impact of spreading the “EQ/WoW” style of design to millions and millions of players, many of whom had never played an MMO before WoW. WoW basically evangelized the EQ style of game – before WoW, EQ’s style was one style of several in the MMO world, and wasn’t the dominant one. After WoW … well, we know what has been the dominant style, hands down.
EVE is similar to UO in some ways – their idea was to make a game that was a combination of UO and Elite in space as an MMO, with ships as the player’s avatars. It obviously is an acquired taste, but the game’s initial design did feature similar aspects such as character skills that develop slowly over time, ship destroyed on kill, loot dropped on kill (so people used expendable ships and gear for PvP, other than for, as you say, “special occasions”, like major war fights and so on). EVE was able to make it work without splitting into Felucca and Trammel by having a core of the game, geographically be “consequence” zones, where PvP outside registered wars would result in the galactic police killing the aggressor, surrounded by zones with fewer consequences (still attacked, less likely to get killed by the security forces), and then ultimately the lawless, full-PvP-no_rules “nullsec” space. So the game has a sliding scale of zones. Albion has tried to do the same thing, but it isn’t nearly as compelling in Albion, I think, because the scope of a land-based game will always be much more limited than what EVE can manage due to the very limited amount of assets in each “system” in EVE as compared to what a zone has in a land-based MMO. The core idea is very similar to EVE, however.
I do think there are enough games that have that setup. What full-loot PvP players want, however, is a AAA-production level game that caters to their playstyle, which is niche. That’s a mismatch. Albion is about the best you’re going to get, I think, because your community is too small to justify creating a game with AAA production costs that only appeals to the niche full-loot PvP community of players.
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the website. tons of players that owned albion from betas and release still use the game client.
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Dark Age of Camelot would disagree. Going on 20+ years and it was a hardcore full loot pvp MMO.
Edit: Sorry, maybe I misunderstood. Does “full loot” mean that you can take peoples gear when you kill them? If so then I take back my comment. DAoC was not that game.
free servers that are pre pub 16 still very popular.
Based on the amount of people ive talked too, the amount of people that were going crazy that the game stopped being full loot drop, how many ppl want pvp only servers and more pvp content and how many posts ive seen for a full loot drop area.
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The best gear in the RuneScape does not come From the wilderness. Wilderness is actually pretty dead on old school runescape its a niche thing honestly. I have been pking since 2006. Some items do drop from the wilderness that you can only get there but they are not anywhere close to the best.
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Darkfall had the best gameplay I’ve ever experienced, graphics were fine, aim to hit, watch some of the pvp videos and the naval combat it was exceptional.
They screwed up the rest of the game though and that’s why it failed:
Super grindy, when you were done playing you setup your character to afk swim all night, took a year to max your stats.
Rampant cheating for roughly the first year it was out, totally screws a full loot game. The devs could never react fast enough. There was a paid cheat program for like $10/mo specific to that game which thousands of players used for a year before they found a way to detect it and did a mass ban wave.
Lots of launch exploits that created massive imbalance between those that got to use them, and those that came after the nerfs. They never nerfed the players that exploited.
No safe area for new players to skill up, high level players would camp newbie areas griefing, dry looting, etc. even selective looting would be a fair compromise (take 1 item or even just resources/loot but not weapon/armor). A game of sheep and wolves needs sheep, you gotta treat your sheep right.
They also fell into the everyone does everything dilemma. Everyone hordes their resources to raise their own crafting skills, etc rather than dedicated crafters that buy resources from players and sell gear.
UO:
Ultima Online added insurance so you could keep your armor/weapons from being looted at the cost of losing gold when you died. Other items weren’t insurable, resources and loot, so you banked often. Some things were blessed and couldn’t be looted like your spell book, runebook, etc.
They had a mark spell and a recall spell where you could mark runestones with mark, then use recall to teleport to that location instantly. This allowed you to bank and be right back to where you were farming in a minute, there were ways to not get killed and looted, having a recall macro to a hotkey could avoid being murdered 95% of the time. If you didn’t have magery, you could carry a recall scroll (cheap, low level spell) and it allowed you to cast without having magery skill points.
UO didn’t send your body back to a spawn point, when you were killed you became a ghost at that location, respectable pks would rez you after murdering you and looting anything they wanted from your corpse, many would often open a portal so you could get back to town to re-gear if you were in a dungeon or the wilderness. The other funny thing was you could carry a trapped chest trapped by a tinker, as well as mislabeled runes, so you might have a rune saying “house” but it really led to a guarded area where the murderer would be instantly killed if they recalled to it, or they’d instantly die if they opened the trapped chest. Or you’d mark the rune to the middle of a dragon spawn where they’d instantly kill anyone who used that rune lol
Housing was anywhere a house would fit in the environment. Never seen that in another MMO, if you found a flat area near a dungeon, near a mining area, near anything of importance, you could place a house. If you were a murderer originally you couldn’t go into town, you had to base out of your house. You could play a whole lot of non combat roles in the game and have a ton of fun. Houses decayed over time, if a player didn’t return for 2 weeks the house would collapse but all the items in it would hit the ground, lootable by anyone there. This created entire guilds dedicated to fighting over fallen houses. Even as a solo you could create a character with stealth, sneak right through a crowd of people and drop the house before they did, sniping the spot out from under them as they’re grabbing loot. Was a blast and the most lucrative thing in game.
Murderers had disincentives, the entire game was risk vs reward, if you were killed and your bounty collected, you received 10% stat loss permanently!! If you died a few times you had to delete the character and re-roll because trying to skill back up as a red murderer would just lead to being killed by other players.
Darkfall gameplay with UO sandbox would be the most epic game created. Albion is barely better graphics than the original UO, still isometric, all people want is a 3d aim to hit pvp game.
The other part of the formula modern games screw up is 1 character does everything. With UO and the 5 characters and limit of 7 skills per character you’d have a dexxer (warrior), a crafter or gatherer, a mage, a tamer, maybe a pk murderer. Crafting was a lot harder to raise so most people did not bother making a blacksmith, carpenter, etc. and the people who did make a maxed crafter had a lot of demand from players, and they bought resources gathered by players, that was one of the easiest ways to get gold to jump start yourself on a new server, chopping trees or mining ore and selling to crafters in bulk. The economy was 1000x better than this game.
The 7 skill limitation created dozens of viable templates from the same set of skills, you had healer mage (bandages and magery), alchemy mage, tank mage (weapon + magery), poison mage (magery + poisoning skill), archer mage. And your stats varied depending on the build, a tank mage expended points to dexterity to increase swing speed while other builds maxed str and int.
For warriors there were pure weapon builds, there was a warrior + magery but it didn’t have enough skill points to add the intensify magery so their offensive spells were worthless but they could use utility spells as part of their gameplay (heal, teleport, invisibility spell, etc) along with bandages to heal, it was a really robust build but all their offensive damage was from a weapon. They could also spec poisoning and apply poison to weapons and play that style.
UO is still live running since 1997, but they never updated the graphics so its dead. I don’t see albion as an alternative because it’s the same issue of wanting 3d aim to hit like darkfall.
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this is a false video made by someone who just wanted to ride the hype train to get views.
Majority of people are “below average” so this video is the same (hype wise) as if I made a vid saying “why most people hate their jobs and can’t afford a house” - I’d get millions of viewers.
PVP MMOs are great (Albion and Eve are doing great) - if not made by an indie company in their basement (sorry Mortal). Problem is - most large AAA companies are too scared to change and to take a risk to make a good full-loot MMO and its up to the little guys to fight the uphill battle.
Its the same as with the electric cars. They were here before gasoline, but were too “niche” and too “novelty”, plus all the huge corporations were so involved in the fossil fuels (read - PVE MMOs) that they blocked all the novel tech for almost 100 years. Until Tesla came around that is.
/thread
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See I see the pvp mmo’s as the boomers, the last of a slow to die era.
If not then we’d be all moving to that style of gameplay, but we’re not, quite the opposite.
so no, not /thread
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did you hear that from some guy on the internet? Or god forbid - you are that guy!?!
Lol @ “Eve and Albion are doing great” - sure, depending on metric you use. By the “big” MMO standards they are doing pretty terrible.
PVP MMOs will always be niche, regardless of who makes them because you cannot force someone
to be your entertainment. Averahe player needs to win something 75% of encounters not to feel hopeless, this is possible against computer but not possible against other humans for everyone invovled.
UO existed because back then there was no choice - you have tons of choice now.
Your analogy with EVs is deeply flawed, because it wasn’t “big evil corporations” that prevented EVs from proliferating, it was luck of range. EVs were actually widely used in various applications where range is not an issue (marshalling, airport vehicles etc) and in fact the only segment where they were not popular was consumer vehicles. As soon as tech allowed for better range they caught on.
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Tell it to all the kids who play Fortnite, Apex, and Warzone - full loot PVP is very popular, perhaps the most popular type of gameplay of any. They just haven’t been given the opportunity to see it in a good AAA MMO, and in fact it is most likely because of aging players like the WoW playerbase - the “boomers” (gen X and older Millennials most likely - boomers don’t play games). Full loot doesn’t have to be hard on low skill casuals, it could have counterbalances built in like EVE and other games have had. Who that kind of gameplay is hard on is the fragile players who are easily frustrated probably IRL as well as in video games. So MMOs have been their “safe space” if you will away from the millions of “angry” “kids” who play the full loot PVP games.
One of the most funded games to date, perhaps the most funded, is a full loot PVP MMO. Star Citizen. It follows in the EVE tradition but takes it to the next level.
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Albion online, Eve Online doing just fine with a consistent player base growth the last few years.
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wait… Star Citizen is full loot!!!
If yes - Im outta here…
Yes, it’s a basic premise of the game that you can steal other players’ ships, cargo and take their gear. Looting their bodies for all the gear they are wearing is in testing right now and should be released within a month.
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Bruh you’re talking about further segmenting an already segmented community. So you want…
-Open world non full loot PvP
-Full loot PvP areas
-PvE content too.
You basically want Albion. So just go play Albion xD
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Why would even watch a video of a dude that needs to advertise about Honey lol and shows off working out? Clearly he needs a life.
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Star Citizen, if it ever gets released, is not an MMO. It’s a single player/ multiplayer game. It’s also a kickstarter game that has been in development hell for ten years.
Star Citizen has become highly criticized during its long production process, both for the fact that there is still no clear release date and for the challenges backers who have abandoned the project have faced in receiving a refund. The launch of the game was originally anticipated for 2014, but was repeatedly delayed. In 2013, Cloud Imperium Games began releasing parts of the game, known as “modules”, to provide players with the opportunity to experience gameplay features prior to release. The latest of these modules, known as the “Persistent Universe”, was made available for testing to pre-purchasers in 2015 and continues to receive updates. No projected date for the commercial release of Star Citizen is currently given.
After the initial Kickstarter ended, Cloud Imperium Games continued to raise funds through the sale of ships and other in-game content, and is now noted for being the highest crowdfunded video game and one of the highest-funded crowdfunding projects overall, having raised over US$300 million as of June 2020. Such methods of generating crowdfunded revenue have however led to criticisms and legal issues surrounding the project. In addition to crowdfunding, marketing is now also funded through external investment, having received US$63.25 million as of March 2020.
The game’s developers have attracted criticism for continuing to raise funds enthusiastically while failing to meet project deadlines, as well as doubts about technical feasibility and the ability of the developers to finish the game.
Between September and October 2015, The Escapist magazine wrote a pair of highly controversial articles citing various sources who claimed that the project was in trouble. After Roberts wrote a scathing response to the articles, Cloud Imperium Games threatened the site and its owners with legal action which never materialized. In March 2017, Derek Smart wrote that both parties had settled the matter out of court. The statement from Defy Media reads “In response to your request for comment, I can share that CIG and The Escapist have mutually agreed to delete their comments about each other. We wish each other well and look forward to better relations in 2017”. The article later came in third (tied) for an award by the Society of Professional Journalists.[136]
In September 2016, Kotaku wrote a five-part series about the various controversies surrounding the project.One article in the series was related to a long-rumored feud between Smart and Roberts.[138] In December 2016, Star Citizen was the recipient of Wired’s 2016 Vaporware Awards. Massively OP awarded the game its “Most Likely to Flop” award for both 2016 and 2017.
So yeah. Have fun playing with vaporware.
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I agree that full loot MMO’s won’t work anymore. However, there are combinations of open PvP and partial loot which can still work.
Take Ultima Online for example back during Age of Shadows. They had non-PvP areas for people to play, but they also had open PvP areas (no flag needed, murders allowed) with partial looting. You could insure all of your valuable items so you wouldn’t lose them, and there were also blessed key items. However, the most valuable items (power scrolls for skills+stats) dropped in PvP only areas and needed to acquired & moved to safety to sell.
Now, I’m not sure about having end-game items only accessible in PvP areas – that probably wouldn’t work today. However, you could have non-PvP zones with top tier loot which would be heavily saturated and therefore more difficult to farm, and the exact same top tier loot in open PvP black zones with murders allowed (where fewer players will venture, making farming faster with less competition).
This way any player can farm loot (slowly) from safe zones, or take the risk to farm faster from open PvP zones.
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