What's the point of enemies?

Let me clarify:
I do play many MMOs. But what I see is that if a MMO is moving more towards a SP game the community goes nuts. Take a look at The Elder Scrolls Online. Many don't like that the game basically plays like a SP game. And of course many SP fans don't like the MMO mechanics in the game... so even in this game there is a conflict between SP and MMO.

So why do I think that there is a difference between MMO players and single player fans? It's because you can see it in SotA. For me the best example is how the quests are handled. Sorry if I have to repeat myself but how the Highvale quests have been treated just shows that even the devs think that there is a difference between single player gamers and MMO gamers. I simply cannot find another explanation for the dumbing down of the quests. A quest for which players had to think a little bit and explore a little bit was dumbed down because people didn't want to do this. It was too complicated. The first quest in the game - the quest that determines whether or not I get excited about the quests in the game - was dumbed down because people thought that it was too complicated. So instead of having to search, think and do something, now we just get the item automatically. And looking at who those people were who asked about watering the quest down - it was mostly the UO crowd. Tell me what I have to think about this. Because what I think right now is: Some MMO-fans don't seem to want complex, deep quests with twists and in which they have to think and explore. That is simply what I got out of this situation. And for me this shows that there is a difference between MMO players and SP players.
If there wasn't one, then why don't we have a really complex, deep, long and exciting quest at the start? A quest that shows how deep the other quests in the game will be? A quest that will make us think and explore and find things out? Yes, some mechanics are not in the game yet but I think that even with the mechanics we have now there could be much more complex quests. Why were the quests watered down?

Then after this disappointing experience with the first quests we leave the village and see enemies wandering around in circles, waiting to be killed - a behaviour enemies in most MMOs show. And no one is complaining about this. Instead the players fight them and fight them and fight them... And then they boast that they managed to get their skills higher than others. So for me this shows that this is fun for some people - which basically is ok. Yet it is not fun for me. I expect something different. So if this is fun for some will it be changed? And if it will be changed will it still be fun for those players?

The reactions I see about SotA right now tell me that there are many players here who want the game to be the way it is now - fighting mindless enemies and doing simple quests. And if you compare this to other MMOs and SP RPGs out there then right now SotA does compare to MMOs and not to SP games. And many people like it that way. Will they still like it if SotA would offer really complex quests and a different enemy behaviour?

Sure, many SP RPGs don't have complex behaviour for enemies, too but as I said they hide it better. Maybe it is because you don't see that many enemies standing around in one spot, maybe they use other mechanics. Maybe they hide their enemies in the landscape so that you don't see them standing around from afar. In The Witcher 3 enemies sit down, lie down, they dig through the ground etc. Most are not Standing around 24 hourse a day waiting to be killed. But you simply can see this enemy behaviour in most MMOs. You enter an area and you can see many enemies standing around or moving a few steps. There is nothing more to them. And I can see the same behaviour with the enemies in SotA. Even in Ultima 6 the enemies were placed differently. I remember entering a cave and a troll and some headless were standing around a campfire before attacking me. Or some monster was next to a carcass of a horse. It seemed way more natural.
My initial question was: Will enemies get schedules, too so that they don't stand around 24 hours a day at the same spot. If MMO-fans would think that this is interesting, too then all the better. I just got the impression that many are ok with how enemies are presented right now.

I am not a big fan of Dragon Age Inquisition and how enemies are handled is one of the reasons - but even in DAI the placement of enemies is much better than in SotA.
Some enemies are sitting around a campfire in a ruin, others appear after you triggered something. Some are even talking to you before attacking or they can be convinced to go away. Some storm out of a house when you open it...
You simply don't see them standing around the same spots very often - yes this is the case, too but now ALWAYS.

Maybe it is the placement and amount of enemies in SotA but for me it is not natural and it actually screams right in my face "cannonfodder"...

 

To answer you. Yes
they will be getting more love.
Semi recently mobs have started to guard gathering nodes.
Adding alot of what you asked comes down to making the animations for them.
So it will come in time and i got totsl faith it will.

 

~Hammers, Anvils & Brick Walls~
Frustration is the mother of invention and rhetoric is it's founder. Whether or not some comments are useful or not, they do help add stimulating thought into the tearing down, or reinforcing of our current system to make way, or ready for anything more to be built there. That's why I enjoy reading such spirited posts, because even a wrong idea can bring about more or better ideas. Our walls are only as strong as how much rhetoric they can take and remain standing.

You're right about Ultima 6... I'm hoping to see more in the ways of our AI, but I do believe the towns are first which I think is within the latest coming patch notes.

~Our Future~
I have great confidence within the future of our AI. I think it will be the shining star within our game. "But it does take time"...
But not only that, it takes a creative mind to have them all seem like different personalities of real people
That's the artwork of our future
~Time Lord~

 

Grinding is probably the least interesting gameplay I can imagine.

I've played a lot of games that focus on gameplay other than grinding and they've had more shelf life for me than your typical MMO. This would include,
- Survival elements that require planning, resource management
- Time management elements
- Sandbox elements
- Procedural content
- Emergent content
- Random events/encounters
- Combat that requires tactics and has real consequences when you lose
- Unpredictability
- Discoverability
- Interactive environments that are fun to live in
- Scope and scale, meaning you can't just instantly go anywhere you want and do anything you want

When there's too much focus on how easy players can grind, though, and that becomes the main measure for the success of a game, it waters down or removes all the more interesting and better forms of gameplay.

 

When leaving Highvale I see all of those enemies and I instantly know: Now I have to fight them all. I have to fight my way through those enemies in order to reach this or that location. It is so obvious... They are just there so that I can kill them. They don't even pretend to do something like rummaging through crates or broken carts etc.
Also, why can't I talk to some of them? Why does it always have to be a fight?

Enemies could yield, crying that they have kids they have to care for. Some others could scream that they don't want to die. Some could offer to talk to the hero and we could bribe them or scare them away. Some could simply flee saying that it is not worth dying for their leader...

 

These hypotheticals could lead to interesting implications in a Virtue system.

Mercy. Justice.

I like!

 

Apparently now you can in some scenes

 

I am afraid you are over simplifying the explanation, and ignoring the fact that I keep pointing out that a directed narrative rather than a true open world pretty much erases a player having to grind the same brainless PvE mobs. The fact that you make a story progression and move from place to place, gives a direction that an MMO choose your own fate situation does not have. Problem with SoA is it wants to do both, and so in between episodes you are left with those brainless PvE situations again and again without any point, whereas with a single player experience like DA there is always a forward momentum that has nothing to do with AI.

So in making a joint multi and single player game I believe its possible that neither will be as rewarding an experience than if they just concentrated on one approach.

 

I generally agree that grinding isn't super interesting, but most of those things you named simply can't be stretched into a very long game, otherwise it would be commonly done. The amount of effort it takes to give the player one minute of something truly new and interesting to look at on the screen is more than what it takes to give the player 100 hours of stuff to grind through.

Generally speaking the giant problem with producing perpetual content is that humans are incredibly good at pattern recognition. Anything that's randomly generated will eventually seem all the same to you regardless, because you get accustomed to the patterns that it follows.

In order for a game to offer an element of intuition and thereby an element of learning it needs "dimensions". There basically need to be relationships between things that are more complex than what a human can immediately comprehend on a logical level, and thereby create room for honing your intuition for those relationships, rather than simply being obvious. (The same way that the relationship between multiple objects in three dimensional space is mathematically highly complex, but on an intuitive level easy to grasp). That kind of dimensionality is hard to attain in abstract systems without it being really confusing and requiring a lot of explanation though, which is why actually moving things around in three or two dimensional space is the most popular form of creating content that leaves room for intuition. That's one of the major reasons why so many games end up being about combat or exploration in some way, and why it's so hard to make something like forging a sword or having a conversation into an equally interesting experience. Those kinds of activities don't really relate to multi-dimensional relationships in any visual sense, so it's very hard to covey them in an interesting but comprehensible manner as such.

 

Its not about a long game, necessarily. but a replayable game. And yes, it's been done many times before, in different degrees, to different extents.. but actually requires creativity and engineering. Most MMO producers just want to stick with a formula, because its easier to stick to a formula in terms of developing the game, and less of a risk as far as selling the product goes.

 

I think you're being a bit absurd here. It's very easy to demand these kinds of things, but actually designing a system for it is at the very least hard enough that nobody has pulled it off yet as a profitable MMO format.

 

Its not about being so hard its difficult to pull off; its that MMO producers have been content to not even try to go in that direction.

The things I'm talking about exist in single player games, you just port over some of the same mechanics, adjust them as necessary, and realize that the game is going to play differently than MMOs around that are oriented 100% around grinding, so some players won't be used to it. One of the biggest problems is the players, and what expectations they have about what an MMO should be like.

 

Well, an MMO shouldn't be designed to discourage group play like ESO did when it was released and playing an MMO with the idea that you should accomplish everything on your own is also a concept that will get a lot of resistance... since multi-player RPGs should give incentives to play in groups... like a single-player games does by giving you party members.

Don't assume that: because most people don't want their MMOs to be single-player experiences that we don't want a more advanced RPG experiences. Those are completely unrelated.

What exactly does THAT have to do with MMOs? And how can you not think of any other explanation other than "the MMO crowd did it"? SotA's current quest design makes a LOT of assumptions about the player's knowledge without doing any effort to properly communicate it.

If it's a quest that everyone has to complete in order to progress the story then everybody should be able to complete it despite how good or bad they are at solving puzzles. Running around with absolutely no clue as to where you're supposed to go is NOT fun. Ever. The devs acknowledged the problem and they made adjustments.

Again, this has NOTHING to do with MMOs in relation to single-player RPGs... or are you going to tell me that following a quest marker in Skyrim (a game that starts to fall apart when you try to figure stuff out by yourself, since none of the NPCs are scripted to properly give you directions) was because Bethesda secretly wanted to design an MMO?

I'm not suggesting that quest markers are good; I'm giving you a very real example as to how ridiculous your conclusions are.

Hell, ESO does a better job of telling you where to go through NPC DIALOGUE than Skyrim does. I say this because I play both games without quest markers and it's practically impossible to do so in Skyrim (watch my Lets Play on Youtube if you don't believe me).

Of course! Who doesn't like being treated like intelligent people? I said intelligent, not psychic!

All you had to do was ask for more depth in the behavior of the enemies and not mention MMOs at all. We all want a more elaborate and intelligent game... that's why we're here in the first place!

 

Do you think they have no idea at all if an idea is good until they have built the entire game and brought to market? Designers prototype ideas all the time, test play them, bring them up to focus groups, talk about them to other people, try to hash out all the flaws. If you don't see them trying that just means nobody has figured it out to the point where they can reasonably raise money for it.

It's a lot easier to build single player titles around finite content because single player titles can end whenever they want. Having a continuous online presence isn't part of their value proposition.

Either way, I think you have a very cynical vision of what designers and producers actually do. There isn't a person in the industry who wouldn't love to invent something completely new that people love, it just isn't as easy to do as it is to ask for. It also isn't an issue of "playing it safe", it's an issue of having to be honest about whether or not something will sustain a community for a long time when it comes to spend millions.


You should look into The Secret World. That's a game that has tons of the stuff you're asking for, entire vast branches of content built around storytelling and exploration, but reality is simply that all the riddles and what not kept people busy for a few weeks at most, and then it's right back to having to wonder how to keep playing for months at a time. That game is top notch in so many aspects, but lost a huge amount of money.

 

I'm not cynical at all; It's experience; I've seen it time and time again. Movie producers do the same thing too -- that's why there are so many superhero films out now. It takes someone who actually has a vision they want to create (like Richard Garriott) and people who are willing to fund it. And sometimes people do try things new; it just takes resources and talent. And there's a lot here that SotA is doing new that's good, I'm behind what they're doing, and appreciate that they're trying to work within a budget and a timeframe. I'm only frustrated when there's pressure to keep to MMO conventions because of familiarity.

I don't need to look at The Secret World. I have games that I've continued to play for years without any multiplayer content.

 

That makes you a tiny minority though, so it isn't exactly fair to act as though nobody is trying to build games in a better way when you're judging what's good based on personal preferences that really aren't shared by a lot of people.

 

I'm not sure you have any basis to say my personal preferences aren't shared by a lot of people. And I thought we agreed that grinding is the least interesting form of gameplay.

 

I'm pretty sure that the majority of people don't play the same game for years at a time. And yea, grinding isn't super interesting all by itself, but like I said in my first post, it's all about resource generation for the real game, which is character building.

 

@Aetrion,

I don't know about that.

But the bigger point is I enjoy all different types of games -- I'm not really picky about the genre -- some are just more replayable than others. Grinding is something people easily get bored of, and it doesn't keep people playing MMOs forever. I've stopped playing MMOs because there was nothing left to do but grind, and I know many who've done the same thing. Resource generation itself isn't very interesting either, if the resources just go back into more grinding; if its just a feed-in for the grind cycle.

 

Well, having to gather resources just to spend them on generating more resources is why I think reagents and item damage are stupid concepts, but when I bring that up suddenly everyone LOVES grinding.

The time in the game needs to be filled with some actual activity, it's just a hell of a lot easier to make the rewards fun than to make doing the same thing for months and years fun. The difference between grinding and just playing a lot is ultimately whether you play because you enjoy it or because you want a reward. Since lots of people enjoy combat it's the most logical thing to make that the thing you spend all the time for rewards on as well.