vjek said:In a word? Monetization is what I would remove.
In more words: I would return first sale doctrine, eliminate SaaS, DLC, and similar concepts. Overall, selling the game as a product instead of a service would be my goal.
When it was a product, it was better, historically.
There's nothing wrong with "Master of Orion", and then "Master of Orion II", but this concept of never-finished games with launch day patches + continuous DLC, I think it's purging anything good from video games as a product.
As a software developer myself, I treat the development process as a creative act, and the result as art. I don't believe art should be monetized, personally. I know others feel differently, but that's my opinion.
I think you are very right. SaaS works great for some (mostly business) apps. It is having a horrible effect on the gaming industry and hobby.
If I had to change one thing it would be player reliance at the early levels of gameplay. So many games are solo until you reach max level then find a guild to raid in. It becomes a very lonely leveling experience and it seems to reduce the value of other people. There used to be a time when your reputation with other people mattered just as much as your skill with your class. Nowadays its all about who pulls the bigger numbers and the mentality of "What can you guys give me" and not "What can I provide my team with".
The other thing that ties in with this is zone relevance. EQ was really good about viewing the world as a whole vs partial fragments. For example (and correct me if I am wrong) but the paladin epic quest had max level paladins return to Freeport (a starting level zone) to kill one of the guard captains who was level 50 or 55 and this required the paladin finding a group and made this zone relevant at max level. The epic quest then continued by sending the paladin to various other zones which ranged in levels to kill specific mobs. This style of questing design increased the value of these zones by giving max level players a reason to go back to them, and also fostered a need to group within these zones even at max level. Most modern games have you progress from one zone to another and rarely give you a reason to look back, and this just devalues the zones longevity, and the overall content offered by the game.
The mentality & focus of both players/developers..they go hand in hand
Or maybe rather the core fundamentals games are build around and focused on lately..people you cant change though,unfortunately.
I'm of the opinion that many of the new generation gamers have horrible taste & since they have come to love elements that
are in reality bad for quality of the overall games & since devs just cater to what is popular we have ended up in some
kind of vicious circle where 90+ procent of the modern games released is pure garbage with lack of any depth;all smoke & mirrors but no real quality game.
So having to sum that up in one word isn't easy ,but guess it would still be overall "focus"
Meaning that instead of following fads,devs would follow their own vision and make it happen
Rather than following what is popular atm,which is poo covered with nice graphics..& then they even sell reskins of that in the cash shops
Kittik said:I wish game developers never had to answer to money people.From what I've seen over the past 6 years, that's what we have today, and the results have been: Pantheon, Shroud of the Avatar, and Pathfinder Online, to name only a few.
Micro transactions and monetary holdouts. The latter meaning developers intentionally designing content to be slowly released for the reason of generating income when they could just release the content all at once (if the content was good enough, they wouldn't need to holdout). This does not include legitimate expansions, but instead expensive DLC that was clearly already designed but simply locked to create a "sense" of exclusivity (or restrictive race/class matrixes that will "magically" change with a future expansion).
Kilsin said:Community Debate - If you had the chance to change one thing, what would you change about modern games? #MMORPG#CommunityMatters
Expansions that do NOT ease down and ruin the game.
Darch said:Micro transactions and monetary holdouts. The latter meaning developers intentionally designing content to be slowly released for the reason of generating income when they could just release the content all at once (if the content was good enough, they wouldn't need to holdout). This does not include legitimate expansions, but instead expensive DLC that was clearly already designed but simply locked to create a "sense" of exclusivity (or restrictive race/class matrixes that will "magically" change with a future expansion).
sadly true & then the focus shifts from creating quality content & game improvements
to" which shiny mount or reskin of the aforementioned can we sell next to milk the players some more?"
Chop a new expansion area up in smaller DlCs to milk that too.The greed that takes over slowly ruins the game.(& the genre all together it looks like)
Also with serverly overprized items only fools would pay,but they do.Since more and shinier mounts keep
getting added to the game for prices outrages as ever ,ranging up to a few hundred of dollars.
Then it results in monetary holdouts indeed & content that lacks depth and is unfulfilling
while at the same time all the fluorescent particle effects on the shiny cash shop items totally break
immersion ingame.I guess the greed falls under the "focus" i mentioned(being money then instead of good game development) And while its true that a company needs to generate money for upkeep of an Mmo , a lot of the resources gained are used for other things & more than half to upkeep the cash shop with practices that border gambling with some kind of reward boxes that give a chance to get an item. Its real cancer for the genre
Kilsin said:Community Debate - If you had the chance to change one thing, what would you change about modern games? #MMORPG#CommunityMatters
Character creation that allows for players to design realistic human models. I'd love to play a game where I actually look like my avatar... or if a world had more realistic interpretation of human forms/shapes. I see many games have toons that look like artistic renditions of what I would expect to see in an X-man movie... not the populace at the grocery or subway or crust punk show.
It's probably an unpopular opinion, but I would get a kick out of being able to actually make/see more tall/lanky or out-of-shape/heavy-set type avatars, as opposed to Ken/Barbie ^_^
That'd boost immersion for me supremely <3
My buddy once took photos of himself, myself & my brother in-law, then stretched the photos over the skins/skeletons on Unreal Tournament using a green screen & a mod of some type. We populated a map with a bunch of our avatars & it was hilarious, running around blasting ourselves/eachother. The avatars were not body type proportional, but it was a similar idea in practice.