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Comments
Alternately, you are looking for something in an MMO that MMO's do not wish to offer. :P
No, but seriously. Just because the current method of making an MMO is stupid, that doesn't make the fundamental concepts of an MMO broken. They are inherently social games (when done right, at least) that focus on player interaction, both in a mechanical sense and in a social sense.
Ignoring that in order to allow people to play through an MMO as a single-player game is silly, as it ignores the fundamental reason that the game is an MMO- the social and mechanical interactions of a large number of players playing in a persistent world.
Currently, I am not aware of any MMO that actually allows this, but this doesn't take away that core reason.
It isn't. It literally isn't- it's not set in a persistent world, and it's not massively multiplayer.
That is due to computer limitations when early MMO's were released. They attempted to emulate old MUD games, but that doesn't work without far more processing power than they had, so they broke it down into the classes system.
MMO's since have copied them, but lost the fundamental reasoning behind the classes in favour of copying the mechanical elements to introduce game balance.
How what? A big problem with these kinds of games is that they're often too derivative of Diablo itself. PoE doesn't have the same area progression (many of these games have something that's like D2's Act I, something that's like its Act 2, etc. etc. Torchlight 2 is really bad about this, even if I did like that game for the most part) and stand-ins for Diablo's monsters, which is a thing that tends to happen with this particular genre.
They're offered as quest rewards, can be found as drops, and make valuable trades. They're thankfully also weighted based on your stats, meaning you generally won't get, say, Ground Slam, if you're playing a witch.
As for why it was included, I have no idea because I'm not on the devteam. I have to assume it was probably to streamline the often tedious process of grinding through 20 levels of passive skills to get the one you actually want. Because that's boring as all hell. I should note that skill gems level up seperately from you and continue to do so as long as you have them equipped, and every item in the game (excepting flasks, jewelry, and a single unique Chestplate) is socketed.
There are also three different colors of gems relating to which stat governs their use, and sockets are colored correspondingly. You can't put a red gem in a blue socket.
It makes for a greater diversity of possible character builds (I'd think that'd be obvious but maybe not).
The story (obviously) and it makes the whole thing a bit more immersive. I obviously liked Diablo II, but it was a bit weird knowing the world was ending outside while you were looking at the wealth of Lut Gholein. This dissonance is even greater in the Torchlight series, despite my liking it.
To be honest it doesn't effect the game in any mechanical way, but it does make you feel like you're playing an actual Witch as opposed to a generic spellcaster. This is why I personally chose to focus on curse and minion skills when I made my character, since those are generally a bit more witch-y. Whether or not you care about that in the slightest is entirely up to you.*
In honesty I don't think that what I posted just above this is anything you couldn't have inferred from what I already said, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm sorry for flipping on you.
*she also knows a fair bit of cold magic, but that's tangential here
How does it differ itself from Diablo, and how does this make it a good game? What aspects did it keep, and what did it drop- and how does dropping that make it better?
Okay. Why is this so? Is there something advantegous towards being able to pick up skill gems later? Does the game even need skill gems at all, or could it have dropped skill trees entirely and still worked?
Well, that doesn't tell me a lot about how it actually affects player builds. The reason they're usually built as they are is that skills which support skills the player uses are added to that player's skill tree. Why does everyone having access to the same massive skill web significantly improve on that?
Does the whole game support this immersion? Does the gameplay try to support it, or is it just a TES-type deal where you have a whole bunch of lore and then a game entirely divorced from it?
Okay; that's a legitimate reason. Do any other classes do that?
What I'm saying isn't that the fundamental concepts are broken, but that the execution of those concepts has become severely warped over time as genre convention has overtaken creativity and the wider pool of potential that underscores the term "MMO".
I think the idea of a single-player MMO experience is less for the game to be played strictly as single-player experience, but to allow a player to play "on the fringes", so to speak, with more social and mechanical versatility than is currently provided. That kind of player wants an experience where it's plausible to solo much of the game's material, but where there are natural and interesting reasons for partying up. They might solo for the purposes of combat and have a much more social experience when it comes to other gameplay factors, or perhaps the opposite -- they might play as a recluse that joins others by necessity of violence. It's just that currently, one has to exist under very rigid, conventional MMO structures rather than freeform it.
Both are contended points, though. Every player's game is a sort of "pocket dimension" and a persistent world in and of itself (unless you tick over to NG+). As for massively multiplayer? It depends what you mean by that. Only a handful of players can exist in any player's world at a given time, but you can buddy up or fight a random sample of players drawn from whoever happens to be playing online at the time. Not that I'm convinced it's an MMO, mind, but I do think it walks a blurred line due to the pool of potential players you can play with at any given time.
I haven't disagreed with that so far.
But that is done. In fact, it's basically half of what's currently on offer, with people only teaming up by necessity/in guilds for end-game content, etc.
In fact, Star Wars: The Old Republic is often derided as a single-player MMO due to the fact that players can experience nearly the entirety of the game's content on their own.
That's not what a persistent world is, though. Let's take the easy way out and quote Wikipedia:
Dark Souls hits upon some of those points, but it misses out on several. The world doesn't continue to exist when the players are logged out- their personal world is completely severed. Plus, the notion of each player having a "pocket dimension" directly undercuts the idea of a persistent world, which exists entirely independently of the players and would continue to exist and evolve even without the players being online.
I guess you could take "persistent world" to mean "a world in which every single player who plays the game could be logged out, but the world is still loaded on the server and enemies are moving around, etc".
It kept the general blueprint of gameplay (again, left click to attack/move, right click for skills, keyboard for other skills). I already said what it dropped, and I don't think I really need to go over why a game being overly derivative detracts from its appeal somewhat, even if it's a fine game otherwise (see also: Fortresscraft).
I'd say in general it kept most of the good aspects of Diablo (II in particular) and dropped the ones that didn't age well, but more importantly it refined what did work.
I'm going to assume that the "trees" was supposed to be a second "gems" here, correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes there is, because again, customization. In most games of this type you have to put a billion points into shit you just plain don't care about in order to get one or two skills you do. Here, it's a lot easier to build whatever character you want. It is a bit more random, but generally speaking, I had much less trouble making my Witch a minion-centric character than I did with my Necromancer back in D2 (and certainly less than making my Witchdoctor one in D3 -_-).
What this leads to is a greater variety of character builds and the inability of one or two to completely dominate the game. I'm sure anyone here who had a Battle.net account back in the day remembers the ridiculousness of Hammerdins, and why no one wants to see that sort of shit ever again.
This is somewhat hard to explain without actually showing you the skill web. So I'm going to do that. EDIT: I didn't realize this, but that's actually interactive. So you can fiddle with it if you want. I'm not sure why it only starts you at the Witch's first node, though.
In brief, it goes back to my point about customization. There are already six classes that account for (respectively) Pure Strength, Pure Dexterity, Pure Intelligence, Strength/Dexterity, Strength/Intelligence, and Intelligence/Dexterity. But, the skill web lets you take that a step farther and hone in to where you really want your character to be at.
Let's say your Alex and want your character to be a master swordsman, that's cool, because there're about twenty different passive skill nodes that relate to that (that's only a slight exaggeration), and they're easily reachable from all three Strength-focus classes (and if you wanted to, with a little reaching, you could get them for any class). It makes the character more "yours" as opposed to Generic Tank #323.
You could hypothetically ignore the story if you wanted to, I suppose, but I think you'd be missing out on a lot.
The lore does actually impact the gameplay, but it's hard to explain how without mad spoilers. After the first two or three quests, there are really not any "go here, kill X" objectives that aren't part of a larger, overreaching storyline. And there's one quest at the end of each act that overlaps into the next.
I devote about 95% of my time with this game to my Witch. However, my brief experiences with the Marauder and Shadow have seemed to indicate that there are similar things for each. The Shadow feels like a sneaky bastard as opposed to just a generic rogue, and the Marauder feels like....well, a Marauder.
Nothing wrong with not elaborating in game design when publicizing something you like. In fact, I had the impression people here where put off by it more than anything.
@Lazuli: I've wanted to at least try it, but haven't for a number of reasons.
You should.
Unless you have like a 1994 internet connection. Then it might be a problem.
This is difficult to explain, but I feel the appeal of playing an MMO solo ought to come from the fact that it's unusual and more difficult, but mechanically supported. It ought to be part of the character and partially narrative. As in, you have to be clever or really on the ball to play solo, and that playing solo necessitates a completely different kind of strategy and a different kind of resourcefulness. The key is the context of the play experience.
I don't think this is the case, simply because I wouldn't want to discount the notion that pocket dimensions can be a legitimate MMO setting. As far as my opinion is concerned, an MMO is any game wherein a large number of players can interact at one time, with "large" being defined as beyond the limitations of current arena-based multiplayer games (Counter-Strike being the classic example). For what it's worth, each player's world in Dark Souls is largely persistent -- events are only ever driven by players, true, but the player also has to deal with the deaths of NPCs until NG+ ticks over and some resources are very limited in each playthrough.
This is less about whether Dark Souls is or is not specifically an MMO and more about whether its conventions could be adapted into one -- or, essentially, a different take on whether an MMO and a single-player game could be exactly the same thing experienced differently via different choices and styles of play.
I would argue that Dark Souls is not an MMO.
I would also argue that it's better at being an MMO than any actual MMO I've played.
Okay, I get most of your points, so I won't quote the ones I am satisfied with.
No, I meant trees. Does the game need skill trees as a concept in order to work? Games rarely do- hell, that's why World of Warcraft is/has planned to drop them entirely.
Does this actually work? That is- is this actually a form of customization that works, or would the game have been better served by dropping skill trees entirely?
That seems... incredibly over-complicated and unnecessary.It kind of reminds me of FFX's Sphere Grid.
You know, I know this is supposed to be a positive thing but really I think that even only having cosmetic purchases still does the whole "making you feel bad for not spending money" thing just as much as any other kind of content.
Good, because it's not.
Then it' going to be a problem, living in Venezuela and everything. Meh, I'll try it anyways.
Well, the key is also in the MMO experience- that is, the social interaction between people. Is there really a point in people depriving themselves of that social interaction?
Okay, I can imagine there'd be some few instances where it would be- if you were a monk who took a vow of silence, for example, and had to rely on yourself. For the most part, though, that's a very specific exception, and the majority of MMO design should focus on the points of having players interact with each other.
Pocket dimensions can be a legitimate MMO setting. The thing is, the worlds themselves have to remain persistent; even if pocket-dimensions are deleted upon finishing them, if you log out in the middle of one, it should remain there and active in the meantime.
That's kind of the thing, see. In an MMO, you are in control of your character, but you aren't in control of the setting. The game world exists entirely independently of you. Other people can play in it, interact with it, and so on even if you are not there, because the world is persistent- not based around your log-in times.
It's that element of social interaction, again- you're not the only person in an MMO, they need a playground, too.
A persistent world doesn't have to be a single world, though. It can be hundreds of millions of pocket dimensions. The key difference is that they exist separately to the player.
Dark Souls lacks that. The world is the player's, in Dark Souls; it is not a social tool.
Well, if you dropped skill trees entirely that would probably necessitate dropping skills entirely? Unless you mean also putting the passives in gems, but that would necessitate items having a lot more sockets (I've yet to see an item with more than four, I think that would necessitate somewhere in the 4-8 range.)
Ultimately I think the hybridized path works best, since it gives you a bit of incentive to grind while also not making you need to grind to get to anything interesting.
I'd say so. I'm not too far into my Marauder character, but he's a swordsman, even though Marauders are generally depicted as wielding large two handed weapons like mauls and swords are supposed to be a Duelist thing. It's not "locked in", if that's what you mean. I don't think the skill tree is eliminatable here, because it would reduce the amount of customization down to the standard Tank, Sneak, and Spellcaster trifecta if it was just the actives.
I should also mention the Keystones, which are critical passives that have a bigger impact how the game is played with that character. Those'd be the large ones on the web with fancier graphics and specific names. For instance, one my witch has renders all effects of shields completely useless on her, and instead grants said effects to her minions.
I thought that at first too, but it's not really. It's just really big. It's surprisingly intuitive when you're taking it one point at a time, regardless of whether you're plotting out a specific character build or just sort of going along with it node-by-node, as some do.
Naw. I've never seen the developers nag, and the only reminder that you can even buy the stuff is a tiny dollar sign-shaped button off to the side. It's a good deal less intrusive than other, similar methods.
Honestly most of the aesthetic stuff you can buy isn't even all that great. I wanna get the re-skin for my skeleton minions though. I can turn them into living statues instead, which is the kewl.
Would this be better for the game? I have never seen a skill tree that would not work better by doing it another way.
Considering that the game would then be reduced solely to combat, I'd say no.
Unless you can think of some other way skills/magic/what have you would work, but I can't.
I guess you could make skills a property of the equipment itself, which might be interesting, but I cannot think of any way in which it'd be better than the hybrid skill web/gem route they took here. Just different.
There have been attempts to do it other ways. Guild Wars 2 has an attempt, I hear.
I've never played that.
GW2 is one of those games whose name I hear thrown around a lot but I don't actually know much about. Other examples include Dark Souls and Dishonored.
edit: this was supposed to be an edit to that^, idk.
anyway I am now going to go play more Path of Exile. I need to do stuff with my Marauder and maybe advance the plot a bit with my Witch.
Neither have I. I rest assured in the knowledge that it can happen, however.
One day, there will be an MMO with a completely free build system.
One day.
OK
well
until then
*flies away on a rocket*
Rayman Legends gets delayed and is going Multiplatform.
I don't exactly have a problem with it going multiplatform, since Rayman is one of Ubi's better properties these days, but they better have something great in store for us. More brilliantly-crafted levels, specifically.
>Multi-platform
>Still no word of a PC release
Dammit Ubisoft, Rayman Origins is one of the few Steam games I paid full price for and I'd buy Legends at full price too if you'd let me.
>Buying a Ubisofr PC release
Why would you do that to yourself.
^Because Origins didn't have any obnoxious DRM, (and was totally DRM free if you bought it retail). And hopefully Legends won't either.
Wow. I...Didn't think they even knew how to do that anymore.
They stopped doing it because there was a massive PR backlash
And they're also selling it in the same month as GTA5. Financial suicide if I ever saw it.