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Originally Posted by Stephen_Zuckerman  I guess what I'm saying is that an MMO isn't suited for what we're trying to do with it; what we've always tried to do with it. We can meet it halfway, but we can't make it really work. |
How so?
To further clarify... I agree the most common mode, or at least the most common
perception of MMOs is hundreds or thousands of people running around and killing stuff...the power-leveling, "ding" chasing, loot hoarding throngs of characters with names like "n00bk1lla". Sure, a lot of games are designed around this "least common denominator", which is a fancy way of saying that they're trying to appeal to the broadest possible market...which of course makes perfect business sense.
On the other hand, they don't do anything to necessarily dampen the concept of RP, even if they don't actively encourage it. I've heard reports of random pockets of RP breaking out in MMOs all over the place.
Looking forward, would we be able to realistically have a high RP MMO and still have enough interest to remain financially
in the black? Tough to say, but I'd guess it would be difficult to unlikely, as there would be more than just server costs involved. However, that's not to say that one MMO cannot figure out a way to cater to both the heavy RPers and the hack-n-slashers...to involve people in the plot who wish to be and to let those who just want to grind up to the top level do their thing. I can think of several ways this could be done, really.
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Originally Posted by stragen I would disagree with that. From my observations the layo community has shrunk. I would suggest that all the power-gamers have left. The quality of character-submissions needed to play, and the quality of resubmissions needed for prestige classes reflect this. This can easily compared to some of the first character submissions and prestige class submissions to more modern ones.
What is increasing is our perceived standards. Which may not be a bad thing.
Cheers,
Stragen |
Yes and no. It's bigger than it was when I started, smaller than it was a year ago. It ebbs and flows. I think the NWN community
as a whole is shrinking. Other large and long-time PWs close down and only a handful spring up to replacement. People move on to other platforms (NWN2, WoW, etc.) and so on.
Power-gamers still exist here and yeah, I think it is far easier and forgiven to level quickly these days and as been since we changed the system of "Epic" characters into "World Leader" characters and relaxed the cap on leveling past 20th. Is this good or bad? Depends. We had one character zip from 1st to 20th in about 2 months flat before we ever thought of lifting the level 20 cap. That character wasn't played much after that because he had nowhere to go...but I bet it was still kind of fun getting there.
Given the choice I still wouldn't zip up to 20th in a few months, because I had too much fun getting there in the first place. Others would have more fun rapidly gaining the power and ability that comes with that high-level status. I can't tell you though how many times I have heard people actually regret having gone so fast. That's not to say everyone will feel that way, of course.
And to touch on something Acacea said: Yeah, NWN is a really fun platform. It has some
serious limitations, but also a lot of potential that we, and the community in general, haven't fully exploited. That said, there's something to be said about being able to really change the way the game works rather than continually fighting the assumptions and hard-coded systems that Bioware put in place. Layonara on NWN has two key problems:
The first is that it was designed, balanced and built back when NWN stopped at level 20. At some point later, Bioware upped it and as a result there was a lot of compensation for the Epic levels, but it was still balanced for those pre-Epic characters. We now have enough active Epic-level characters to fill a server and then some, which of course presents an end-game problem for those characters.
The second is that Layonara has a far different balance curve than NWN's original intent. NWN is heavily built around Forgotten Realms and a much higher magic level that what Layonara is about. The battles we have fought in trying to get vision and pre-compiled mechanics to play nicely have been, in some cases, epic in their own right.
Don't get me wrong...I really do like the NWN platform, and I'll be a bit emotional when we eventually close down the NWN servers. I've put a ton of effort into this version of things, as a player, GM and developer. At the same time, I'm really excited about the potential of the new game system and the complete control we have over things. No more pulling out our hair trying to work around someone else's bugs or limitations. We get to pull our our hair working around our own bugs and limitations, which is far less frustrating.
And of course this is the point in the conversation where I just grin mischievously at what's been said and offer no clues as to how we are planning on addressing these things in the future. So speculate away. This is a pretty good discussion, and rest assured we are actually reading this stuff and listening to the interests of our community.
I'll step back from this now and let it develop on its own.