Eturnalshift wrote:
Ragnarok Online is a game that was developed by a Korean company, Gravity, and it did well enough to spawn sequel... but to my knowledge, the original still fares better. Ragnarok has 2D sprites in somewhat decent 3D environments, like Disgaea. The movement and combat is based on a point-and-click method of playing. There are several starter jobs that, as you progress, can evolve into stronger jobs... eventually being reborn into a stronger job. More or less, you can make the grind from level 1-99 about three times, each time, getting way stronger. Unfortunately, the game lacks a lot of the depth of WoW. The PvP content is all about who can reduce their cast time to zero or increase their attack speed... or who can carry more potions. The rest of the game is nothing but grinding (except for the occasional "collect 1000 of this" quest, which only reward rare equipment) and the end-game content is farming free-roaming world bosses. The game has a back story but its often lost in game... kinda like WoW - I mean, who reads the quests?
Maple Story is a bit more primitive. You have 2D sprites in 2D environments. The game plays like a platformer. I can't talk for the story or end-game because I lost interest in it over time.
The reason I wanted to detail these two games is because I tried playing them again after I quit playing WoW. (I played Ragnarok through college.) Even though Ragnarok has a large world, diverse community, plenty of classes, hundreds of enemies, a story and other content like marriage systems, P-v-P and Guild-v-Guild, the game wasn't nearly as awesome as it was playing it after experiencing WoW. We're spoiled with WoW and and all it has to offer. Blizzard has too much money to throw at the game and that is why other MMOs, like Ragnarok, will never be as good. I imagine playing Ragnarok or any low budget MMO after playing any other next-gen MMO (Aion, AoC, WAR, etc.) would have the same feeling, too. I think the best analogy I can come up with is its much like buying a 1998 Honda Civic EX; Sure, it'll do the job but it'll never be as good as that Maserati you used to have.
A lot of those issues you describe have to do with game design, not specifically the technologies used. They are convergent in that they both serve the aim of economizing on content. It's cheaper to make a cell-shaded or 2D game than a fully 3D game in the same way it's cheaper to drag out a grind indefinitely rather than make a new level.
WoW doesn't have the grindiness of Korean MMOs like those because of the level cap and fixed classes. Vertical progression IS the game, and it's very gameplay-dense at each level.
My idea was to exploit the former to advance the latter.
I think a game could be made most economically by using primitive graphics and broad horizontal progression with vertical truncation.
Rather than grinding another 100 levels, or reincarnating, there would be enormously parallel tiers of content. Because of the cheap design, they could be brought out in short order - a new instance every two weeks, even - and be very heavily reliant on developer creativity for content. Game balance and character growth would be based around this parallelism and min-maxxing that revolves around permutations.
When I say "permutations", think Armored Core.
When I say "parallelism", think running sitcoms that you sit down for once a week, to see the latest installment. In a video game setting, this would mean endless sidequests and dungeons that drop some new novelty, or with console-like dialogues, like in Star Ocean.
