We are most definitely suppressing the bad memories. However in that same breath I would like to also note, that I believe it is the bad memories that amplify the good memories, and as such are completely necessary to making your experience as good as it may have been.
Every game developed these days seems tailored to convenience, and no doubt this is driven by our societies shift towards convenience in every aspect of life. I just hope Pantheon is here to stop that trend and to not be AFRAID to give us a game that isn't about convenience, it's here to kick our ass the way EQ did.
I often think it isn’t nostalgia of the game mechanics I miss, it’s the fact it was new. As much as I think I want old mechanics it needs to be in balance with something new. This to me is the hardest job you guys have making this game. An EQ or VG clone will not be enough and change too much and you risk losing the part of your intended audience. Half the fun I had in EQ was I had no idea what was going on. It’s hard to work out what part of the EQ experience I loved was down to game design vs community and the fact I never played a game like it before.
I think you need to try and work out what was good in the past because it was actually a good mechanic and what was good because it was just new. I think this tends to be more aimed at EQ than VG.
Cause I’m not sure I enjoyed waiting hours for a boat. but I did enjoy the fact that traveling felt like had travelled or I had to ask someone for help getting somewhere new. As odd as its sounds on the topic of travel in MMO's it isn’t the fact that I never get lost any more it’s the fact I play new MMO's constantly lost but it never matters. You need to somehow balance lots of mini topics like this.
Good luck :)
Let's look at it this way: Everyone can bowl, but not everyone can do it well. Should a bowling alley compensate for those who aren't very good by building special lanes for them? Should the bad players be able to buy a bigger ball to hit more pins? Buy the guard rails so that they can't get a gutter ball? Buy extra chances at each frame before the pins are cleared? Should a team be created for them because they won't find one for themselves? Wouldn't all of this take away from people who bowl for the sport and challenge of it?
Because that's what's happened to the MMORPG genre. All the challenge has been sucked out of it. Pay to win is rampant. People piss and moan wanting everything handed to them on a platter. My chosen genre has been taken over by coorporate greed and people who shouldn't be playing MMORPGs.
It's my opinion. Don't scold me if you don't hold the same. We can agree to disagree.
It isn't nostalgia that makes me yearn for hard mechanics. It's the hope that gaming on this level will be returned to gamers. I want my genre back. I want it gated with mechanics that separate the players from the buyers.
Is that too much to ask?
Marilee said:....
It isn't nostalgia that makes me yearn for hard mechanics. It's the hope that gaming on this level will be returned to gamers. I want my genre back. I want it gated with mechanics that separate the players from the buyers.
Thumbs up on that one Marilee!
For those that say we are looking through rose colored glasses - maybe for some are but a lot of us here have currently played or are currently playing things like p1999 or a vanilla server for a reason and for those people the difficulties are still fresh in their mind not some distant memory.
Zarriya said:Marilee said:....
It isn't nostalgia that makes me yearn for hard mechanics. It's the hope that gaming on this level will be returned to gamers. I want my genre back. I want it gated with mechanics that separate the players from the buyers.
Thumbs up on that one Marilee!
For those that say we are looking through rose colored glasses - maybe for some are but a lot of us here have currently played or are currently playing things like p1999 or a vanilla server for a reason and for those people the difficulties are still fresh in their mind not some distant memory.
Yeah I agree with this. I have spent a lot of time on p1999 over the past several years and i rarely get bored of it. In fact my biggest nostalgia is camping Hhk trying to make some money to buy a yak. I ended up super kos and had to do a ton of extra faction work later for my epic but when I really think about it even that was exciting. I agree that some things are better today like everything ai. But overall I think we have not forgotten the good and the bad.
Nostalgia, aka rose colored glasses, is what modern mmo apologists use to dismiss everything we liked about EQ or old games in general.
In reality, its not a "feeling" but specific mechanics and features that we liked about EQ and older games. Theres a reason so many people go back and play again and still enjoy them. That isn't true of nostalgia, that is something truly fun.
I agree with all of you, the majority of things that I look back on that even seemed like a pain to do at the time, I would still jump in and do again in a heartbeat.
Take faction grinds for instance, it feels like work at the time, takes a lot of time to complete but while grinding it with other dedicated players, you meet new friends, partners, guildies, share experiences and moments that you will look back on for years to come as being the highlights of your gaming days and they usually stem from unpleasant experiences/mechanics like grinding, repetitive farming, raiding, dungeons, crafting etc. that you shared with others.
In saying that, not every old mechanic or grind was an important part of the experience but a lot of them were, which I think is why a lot of those older EQ/VG memories are still with us today and a lot of us are looking to recreate new memories that are similar to those ones in Pantheon. :)
Kilsin said:Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs?
Well, everything seems to come back these days everywhere we look, so why not let the stuff that made old school MMO's great come back too? I always said games like EQOA and Vanguard were way before their time. Now that we have been exhausted by the softcore, thempark MMO's...maybe it's time to bring back those older hardcore sandbox MMO's? Something you never see these days either and i always wondered why is how come some MMO's don't just make different server types to cater to all? I know the one road block would be you could be essentially spending time designing "2" games...but you could be like, "hey hand holding theme park fans (WoW players), go to these 3 servers. You old EQOA, Vanguard type players can go to these 3 servers". Heck this could also even lead to the themepark guys deciding to test the waters with the old school style servers and make them transition over?
I think we all suffer from euphoric recall from time to time (as is human nature) but I think it goes beyond just suppressing the bad memories.
Every MMORPG today is pretty brain-dead to play. There were so many hours spent in WOW (Even endgame hardmode content clears) where I would throw on a movie or be watching a TV show on my second monitor. It got to the point where my guild was selling 2-3 raid spots for Heroic Lich King kills (25man raid). After a certain point there was no challenge...
I think why EQ is remembered so fondly is because it actually enthralled us, challenged us, gave us a sense of embarrassment when we messed up, but even more so a sense of responsibility, even with the routine play. We could be clearing the Kael arena but if someone wasn't pay attention and wiped the raid it actually meant something... Because you never wanted to be that guy who wiped the entire raid. In WOW it's "Oh great X wiped us, fly back in your ghost form and let's go again" All in all 5-10 minutes AT MOST to return from a wipe, buffed up, and ready to pull again. That was unheard of in EQ.
I think the player already tends to remember the good more so than the bad, and as I have already written about on this and countless other game dev forums up to and including the beta phase, is that game dev forums exacerbate that tendency and nearly all negativity gets whitewashed and drowned out in the sea of white noise caused by everyone scared to death of offending the devs themselves.
Nostalgic memories of faction/exp/rare drop grinds are not what I mean, and really, on this forum, I think the consensus is more like "yeah, that grind sucked, but the reward felt so much better because that grind sucked." I think we all miss that grind because without it, achievement in MMOs feels jaded and hollow.
Where the rose colored glasses really happens is the forum whitewash of glaring mistakes and bad design. And I can think of tons of EQ1 and Vanguard examples that should have never, ever made it out of testing but did anyway because nobody was allowed to openly say "wait a sec, this sucks." And I can think of a ton of examples from games that followed because when folks with EQ1 and Vangaurd experience would tell the devs on the appropriate forum that their new design has already been tried and here's why that sucked, you get shouted down and forced into a false version of positive thinking.
Nearly every legitimate bad memory I have of EQ1, Vanguard and any other MMO is due to a colossal design flaw, glaring mistake or technical problem that should have never made it into production. It's never the game playing hard, but the game playing incorrect and on purpose. Killing the Statue of Rallos and the Avatar of War was hard. That's fine. Nerfing charm in all of Kael because the devs didn't like 6 man enchanter hit squads using charmed giants as pets, that was wrong and it is still a bad memory. That should have never made it into production, but the criticism got drowned out and silenced, so it did. Lots of mistakes and ill will make it into games because we are never allowed to speak critically or negatively.
If I think of my worst ever days in EQ1, even when a best pal got her cleric caught in a bind point death loop, it was never the "hard" of EQ1 I minded. Even when my max skill jewelcrafter failed like 7 velium blue diamond bracer combines in a row, with the stated 95% chance of success, I was mad at the RNG but wasn't griping on the mechanic of all tradeskills have a base 5% to fail thing. It was logging out with an enchanter that could charm or a necro that could fear, and logging in the next to find out that neither could do their thing anymore because of some Vision thing in the patch notes. That's the bad day stuff I hated.
The lack of grind holds back the genre, but the lack of honesty about design holds it back even more.
A quick Google search resulted in the following definition for Nostalgia: "A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations."
I would say I am nostalgic when remembering EQ. However, I am only nostalgic because there has been no other game that has replicated the experience, but, that's not because it couldn't be replicated. As Dullahan and Marilee stated, I am only nostalgic now because the hard games for gamers and game mechanics that made MMOs challenging and rewarding no longer exist. If Pantheon captures the magic of the past, I wouldn't need to be nostalgic any longer - I could re-experience the magic in the present.
The old memories of better, challenging days may be the only thing to save current Gen MMOs - it's just development teams haven't listened to the gamers and have watered down the challenge to the masses to chase the money.
I hope Pantheon looks to EQ1's longetivity to realize that if you build a difficult, challenging, community based game, that you might not earn as much as possible out the gate, but you'll earn a lot more over the life of the game due to the longetivity it provides.
I think games like Shadows of Mordor and Dark Souls answer the nostalgia question pretty convincingly. If you make a great game that happens to be hard, it's not nostalgic, nor is it hurting the genre. It's just talent.
Bands like King Crimson, Tull, ELP and Yes were just as fun to listen to as LA Guns, Tesla, Bon Jovi and Cinderella. Both styles of music were rock music but each with different philosophies. I think the same is true for MMOG's.
This isn't directed at you specifically kilsin but I absolutely resent the notion.
Yes, nostalgia is a real thing and yes we all probably experience it to some degree but it is not what it is often made out to be. I am time and time again told what I like and don't like by other people who assume I am just nostalgic for something. The reality is that they are almost never right about what they say on my behalf and I know this to be true because more often than not I am experiencing what I claim to like around the time I am discussing it. I most certainly did not forget the negative elements from my play session from 2 nights ago, and you making that assumption on my behalf is illogical and is not a reasonable argument to make in favor of doing away with it. Are there some things that might need to be changed or done differently? Sure, and I am open to new ideas and tweaks but I will not accept them blindly (I will analyze them and make a judgement call on if they seem like they would still reasonably fit my expectations).
Mephiles said:This isn't directed at you specifically kilsin but I absolutely resent the notion.
Yes, nostalgia is a real thing and yes we all probably experience it to some degree but it is not what it is often made out to be. I am time and time again told what I like and don't like by other people who assume I am just nostalgic for something. The reality is that they are almost never right about what they say on my behalf and I know this to be true because more often than not I am experiencing what I claim to like around the time I am discussing it. I most certainly did not forget the negative elements from my play session from 2 nights ago, and you making that assumption on my behalf is illogical and is not a reasonable argument to make in favor of doing away with it. Are there some things that might need to be changed or done differently? Sure, and I am open to new ideas and tweaks but I will not accept them blindly (I will analyze them and make a judgement call on if they seem like they would still reasonably fit my expectations).
Nostalgia is absolutely a real thing, I wasn't questioning whether nostalgia was real or not, just how you viewed it and how it affects you and your memories, the question I asked was for you to define it in your own experiences and when you break them down into memories, are we, in fact, cherry-picking the good and forgetting the bad or do we take both and remember them equally.
I personally take both on board equally and have some of my best memories of bad experiences, for example, a monstrous faction grind in VG when doing the epic quest line and the SoD named mobs we had to kill only gave 1 faction per kill and nothing from the trash (we need 20,000 to cap faction), very few people can say they endured that and succeeded, many left the game burnt out from it but I pushed through, stuck it out, succeeded and made some great friends along the way, it is something I would do again in a heartbeat and something I will never forget! Some would view that as a bad memory but since I succeeded in my goal and made some friends along the way it made the experience worthwhile for me and I think that is what is important, difficult or challenging content rewards us in other ways and it's those other ways that usually make the experience memorable or deemed to be a "good" experience. If I didn't make those friends or achieve my goal, I would probably have a much different view on it, which is why I wanted to hear all of the communities views and experiences.
I just wanted to hear everyone own experiences and thoughts on the nostalgia and how you think it affects the genre, don;t let someone else's view or opinion sour the topic, what matters is what you think and what your experiences have been :)
Kilsin said:Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs?
I know I did for a long time, and as I played game after game, and found no satisfaction, I began to realize it was the things I THOUGHT I disliked about EQ1 that made it special. The death penalty, the corpse runs, the difficulty.
I did a Project 99 run for a while and I really found myself enjoying the game, the only downfall was that the "experience" was lacking since I knew where to get the best xp and money, and there was no learning curve, the difficulty had almost all been negated by familiarity.
Fulton said:Kilsin said:Are we favouring the good memories while suppressing the bad memories we had of past MMORPGs and is that hurting the genre or is this what the genre needs?
I know I did for a long time, and as I played game after game, and found no satisfaction, I began to realize it was the things I THOUGHT I disliked about EQ1 that made it special. The death penalty, the corpse runs, the difficulty.
I did a Project 99 run for a while and I really found myself enjoying the game, the only downfall was that the "experience" was lacking since I knew where to get the best xp and money, and there was no learning curve, the difficulty had almost all been negated by familiarity.
It took me a long time too, but once it clicked and realised how important it actual was for my overall experience and how it shaped my journey, I was kicking myself remembering some of the rant posts asking for things to change when in fact, they didn;t need to change, I just needed to understand them better! ;)
I've had so many debates on this with upcoming MMO's, which here I don't see that happening... YAY!
Every MMO in development if you go to the forums and talk about EQ and wanting the things that made the game a "pain", you're attacked as just being nostalgic and that nobody actually liked that. I was told this while I was even playing on P99 and discussing on games waiting to come out.
As others have stated, yeah nobody "likes" the negative things such as corpse runs, long travel time, exp loss. At the same time, those definitely were the things that made things so great. I agree with those sentiments 100% myself too. Even on the point of no maps, such as EQ had. We live in an age where you can find everything you want online, but even with that someone can make a map, but you may not know exactly where you are. Can even go further with downtime. In EQ the downtime was a great thing because in groups people would sit and chat to each other while getting mana back or waiting on spawns... call me crazy but I loved downtime in groups. :D
Back on EQ I remember fan sites where I could get a location of something and run around spamming /loc... it was still tough finding what I wanted and rarely was able to manage a perfectly straight line to it. :)
So yes, technically it is nostalgia because that's all about remembering things that were great. That nostalgia was there in large part from the "bad' parts as well.
No maps is such a great thing imho. I can log into EQ today and navigate my way across the world and through most of the dungeons if not all of them because I never had a map when I explored them. If I really think about it hard, and try and negate the only remebering the good, I can remeber times when I was trying to meet up with friends and would die and be sent back to my bind point. One of the biggest times like this, a RL friend of mine told me to come play with him in High Hold Keep. I was level 17 at the time and the journey was just awful. I had to find my way to the Butcherblock docks, go to Freeport, through the commons, through kithicor, highpass, and finally to HHK. It took me about 6 tries to get there without dying and I was bound in Kelethin. But because of adventures like that, experiences where I learned the world I am able to traverse the game without a map. In every single game today I just open my map and run around with it open, almost never learning the lay of the land. I find it so much less immersive to not actually know where I am.
Rallyd said:We are most definitely suppressing the bad memories. However in that same breath I would like to also note, that I believe it is the bad memories that amplify the good memories, and as such are completely necessary to making your experience as good as it may have been.
Every game developed these days seems tailored to convenience, and no doubt this is driven by our societies shift towards convenience in every aspect of life. I just hope Pantheon is here to stop that trend and to not be AFRAID to give us a game that isn't about convenience, it's here to kick our ass the way EQ did.
I could not have said it any better :)
I feel the opposite actually, the things people say were bad about games like EQ, were actually the things that are good. We have spent too long focusing on accessibility and not leaving people out, making it easy has no rewarding feel to it. Yes it used to sting when I died and lost exp, or maybe didn't even know if I was going to get my body back, those events brought friends and people together, it showed me the what success felt like and showed me failure as well. People say Nostalgia makes us only look at the good things. The things they call bad now, were and still are the good things. If you cant put the time in to get keyed for a dungeon or raid, then well you aren't worth taking to the dungeon or raid. instead everyone got everything and that just doesn't work. This is where they have the rose colored glasses. Thinking that how things are NOW are what is good and right. The MMO Genre needs to go back to the beginning, in order to move forward properly. Even WoW wasn't bad until they took all those challenging things away, and things that you had to earn. Vanilla and BC. After that it lost the value of earning something through hard work and effort.
The worst about nostagia is the idealization of the past.
I think there is a negative, poisonous ,side to nostalgia
And because this is a game that tries to recapture what made MMOs great (all these years ago)
It is important to be aware that a nostalgic attachement can work very destructive
Often with nostalgia,we try to recapture that feeling long lost
Certainly the case here;Many of the supporters,and the devs themselves, have nostagic feelings (and how many topics have shown up lately about what made EQ so great or captured the magical moments in it?)
The idealization of the past can be blinding for what is best at the present I believe.
It can keep people trapped in a past they must unravel before they are able to grow.(a potential danger for the genre and probably one of the reasons why the genre has done so poorly;
A lot that have attempted to make an MMO were captivated by the past success of wow and tried to copy that all the time,instead of trying new things and figuring out what works now,at the present time)
It is acceptance that separates healthy from unhealthy nostalgia,the ability to move on.And sometimes accept that,yes,times have changed and some of these memories can't be exactly recreated because we live in different times,have different needs.
What I would dislike a lot is that interesting game mechanics and things that show great promise for the game ,would be compromised because of the strong pursue of an ideal for which these nostalgic strive so hard
Unable to see it is a sentimentalized past that no longer can be real;it is inflated and causes unrealistic expectations.
The past is sometimes idealized in such a way,anything less than "perfect" would be a disappointment.And nothing can be perfect,because it is idealized with unrealistic expectations attached to it.Might explain a lot about the downward spiral the genre has been in over the years.
I hope we are not. If we forget or ignore our past... especially the bad... we are bound to repeat it.,, there is a saying which I cant remember that stated the same and its something I live by in all my business endeavors. That and the encouragement to all those who work for me that the only bad ideas you may have regarding your work are those you do not share with the team.
Almost all of the really hard and negative occcurances I have had in past MMOs are the ones that taught me the most for future endeavors within these worlds and I would hate to forget them seeing that inevitably they all carry over.
I agree with Fluffy.
Nostalgia is great because it's nostalgia. It is, by definition, a positive feeling associated with the past.
It is important to acknowledge the reasons why we felt the way we did at the time. Twenty years from now I hope to have nostalgic memories of the early days of Pantheon.
If I went back in time the way I am now, with the knowledge I have, I would not be even a quarter as captivated by EQ as I was at the time. You simply don't get to experience the infancy of an entire genre of games very often.
As many have said above (and quite eloquently, I might add):
Nostalgia does not imply always bad things will follow should we consider revisiting it!
As Liav points out, it was the whole experience of EQ as my first MMO that has cemented these feelings of nostalgia for it in my mind. The newness of it all, the optimism and positivity from the majority of the players you met and the chance to carve a REAL place for yoiurself in Norrath!
Your decisions mattered.
Your ability to play your class mattered.
Your reputation absolutely mattered!
When I play newer MMOs, there is still the shiny freshness of being new .....
... but the whole experience fails to meet the bar by comparison. Something (or many things) is/are missing!
... and once the freshness wears off, you are left unfulfilled.
So in answer to the OP's question:
"My earliest MMOs (EQ, and VG somewhat) have given me a benchmark by which to compare others...
... and they have all been found wanting".
Evoras, has been waiting 5386 days for Pantheon