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posted by martyb on Monday January 07 2019, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the Figured-it-out dept.

ArsTechnica:

Gaming was like breathing. It was the biggest part of my life as a teenager, one of my priorities as a college student, and eventually one of my most expensive “hobbies” as a young professional.

Then all of a sudden, after thousands of hours spent playing across genres and platforms, boredom hit me hard for the very first time in my early thirties. Some of my favorite games soon gave me the impression of being terribly long. I couldn’t help but notice all the repeating tropes and similarities in game design between franchises.

I figured it was just a matter of time before I found the right game to stimulate my interest again, but time continued to go by and nothing changed.

Is it that games have failed to innovate, or that real life is ultimately more engaging?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 07 2019, @09:20PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday January 07 2019, @09:20PM (#783380) Journal

    At first, MMORPGs were neat. The MMO part alone was once a fantastically fun novelty. No more hotseat turn taking. I started Everquest when it was new, and while I came close a few times to ditching it when a rough edge screwed me, I kept at it. You know how it used to be. You're in the middle of a fight deep in some dungeon, and you get disconnected thanks to a technical problem with your lame ISP. When you return, you find that of course you have lost the fight, died, and been resurrected miles away on the surface. But all your equipment is still deep in that dungeon on your corpse and getting back to it could be a real problem. One of the worst game play aspects of early Everquest was the ocean voyage. You had to wait for a ship, or time your arrival. Ships came only once every 15 minutes-- of real time, not game time. Then it was another 30 minutes, real time, for the ship to cross the ocean. Perhaps they thought passengers could chat with each other during that extended down time. Nope. Sensible people went AFK. If you had a lag spike any time during that voyage, you stopped moving and could easily end up in the ocean because the ship did not stop and would just sail out from under you, and there wasn't much you could do about it.

    As Everquest matured, they addressed all those issues. Nice, but the basic game play of kill monster, get experience and loot never changed, and that became unbearably boring. They did try to get a little creative with some of the quests, but the room for creativity was simply too little. In a very fundamental way, it was hardly more than multiplayer Ultima 3, published in the early 1980s and credited as the first role playing game to have a party combat system. And Ultima 3 was merely D&D, the combat and exploration part, the tedious number crunching parts, the stuff that computers excel at, on a computer. Actual role playing is still a bit beyond the so called RPG game. That only happens when the human players agree to play that way.

    Games have improved tremendously in the graphics department, but game play, not so much.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @07:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @07:26PM (#784238)

    Almost every MMO that hastry to stay away from the 'themepark' EQ model has failed. Who knows what it will take to get a MMO to succeed outside that genre. Even with WoW becoming a stale game and it's new expansion not doing so well, I don't see any real changes in the marketplace any time soon. The kickstarter games like Camelot will probably have a dedicated niche audience and no real mainstream success.