12/23/2023 0 Comments Dislike mmo due to massive time sink![]() Cheating suddenly becomes frowned upon when in competition with other players. ![]() Does it really matter that you beat the game on easy instead of hard? Only to you.įairness comes into play with multiplayer games as well. Many games have difficulty settings or consoles, or built in cheat-codes that allow players to tailor the experience to suit their desires. "Cheating" and other forms of rule-changing in single-player games is not only acceptable, it's encouraged. This is because fairness doesn't exist in their single-player predecessors. And any time there's a sense of accomplishment compared with others, there's also a sense of fairness.įairness is a very important concept in developing MMORPGs. When I first set foot inside Cazic-Thule - when I finally joined the elite ranks of those who roamed Onyxia's Lair, and Molten Core - that was an accomplishment. The point is that the distinct geographical layout of mobs in, for example World of Warcraft, or EverQuest meant that players could directly associate areas with accomplishment. "So, WTF does this have to do with fairness?". Thus MMORPGs scale their content in the same way that classical Japanese RPGs did: Mobs of various difficulty levels are intentionally painted over the landscape. You wouldn't want a game that would spawn a level VR14 mob right next to a level 5 player just because a VR14 player rode by. They can't, really, because players of all different levels might wander into the same area at the same time. So what does this have to do with MMORPGs, and why is this important? Well, MMORPGs don't scale. That barrier to exploration, that sense of, at some point, you'll be strong enough to go somewhere or do something, simply doesn't exist in Oblivion.Īs many here know, Bethesda's follow-up RPG hit, Fallout 3, used the same scaling to set the initial level of encounters, but "locked" the level of monsters once the player visited an area, this avoided some of the annoyances many had with the complete world scaling found previously in Oblivion. Every dungeon visited, even if previously done previously at lower level, would have monsters at the player's current level.You could never encounter a challenge that was too easy or too hard. Oblivion was famously criticized by a portion of "hardcore" gamers for scaling every encounter throughout the entire game to the player's current level. This brings us to one of the major changes in single-player RPG design, the somewhat controversial implementation of dynamic content scaling. "Shouldn't the developer have expected me to be level 15 by this point in the game?" In fact, all of these details are carefully crafted to produce the game experience. All of these details are determined by the developer. The dev makes all the rules: from whether where/when/if monster re-spawns, how much gold it has, how much inventory space you have, what items drop and when and where. In a single-player game, everything about the game is exclusively in the domain of the developer's control. This I guarantee as gamers we are all intimately familiar. While people will differ (greatly) on their opinions as to any single certain mechanic being fair or not this is simply their assessment as to its individual contribution to overall fairness.In order to better understand the dynamics of fairness in an MMORPG like ESOTU, let's just consider far simpler example of a single-player game. I honestly believe that there is no "version" of fairness, it's an idea, an expectation, not a mechanic. The real subtext of all these posts, rants, flames, and ideas is: I think we can agree they all are just discrete symptoms. Progression Systems - In EVERY form lol, Vertical, Horizontal, Missionary, on so on.Grinding (locations, nerfs, power-gapping).Over the week, we have all noticed an increase in passionate topics and heated debate around issues like: **Beware the wall of text - Part MMO game development theory, part insight, part history, and most importantly - Part opinion.**
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