12-27-2011, 02:14 AM
WW2O: Too slow paced -- too much time spent not fighting vs fighting. Insta-death has its good points but 15 minutes driving and then exploding instantly from an enemy you never saw does tend to make people ragequit. And while manually adjusting my iron sights is an interesting novelty and has its moments, it's not really conducive to action.
Planetside: Mediocre FPS mechanics (no body-part hit boxes, poor weapon selection), base and tower layouts all too similar resulting in a lack of variety in tactics.
POTBS: Basically all PvP was a 6v6 deathmatch. No goals, no objectives, no sneaky things to try, no strategic maneuvers to make, just 6v6 in a flat ocean (there were rare maps with islands in them but they often played no role...kinda like fighting in a flat plain with 1 tree in it). Also, the 6v6 nature grates on you because what if you have 4 people? What if you have 8 people? And 6v6 is hardly an MMOG.
I could, in a way, even list Rift here because for the most part I was not looking forward to my next bit of gear. It wasn't that advancement that kept me playing, it was the PvP action. Unfortunately they lacked variety and it just got old. There's only so many times you can play a simple, flat "hold the ball" game before you're sick of it and dangling a slightly better hat in front of me if I play the tiny map another 85 times does not make me keep playing.
Really Planetside came the closest to demonstrating that non-gear based PvP can be awesome and worth playing for months on end. The biggest problem with Planetside was simply that it wasn't a very good FPS.
I think what it boils down to is "content", though.
PvP games need content just as much as PvE games, and this is frequently neglected. A PvE game can't just have a big world full of monsters with no objectives, expecting us to run around killing them for no reason. Why anyone thinks a PvP game can work that way, I don't know. PvP games need content too.
Warhammer was a great example of this. Every zone was PvP + PvE. The PvE area was full of quests and content and action and felt alive. The PvP area was literally just a building. In terms of landmass, PvP may have been 30% of the game but in terms of developed content it couldn't have been more than 1%.
How many developer hours goes into the PvE development of a game like Rift or WOW?
What type of PvP content could you develop if you had 80,000 man-hours to spend on it?
Planetside: Mediocre FPS mechanics (no body-part hit boxes, poor weapon selection), base and tower layouts all too similar resulting in a lack of variety in tactics.
POTBS: Basically all PvP was a 6v6 deathmatch. No goals, no objectives, no sneaky things to try, no strategic maneuvers to make, just 6v6 in a flat ocean (there were rare maps with islands in them but they often played no role...kinda like fighting in a flat plain with 1 tree in it). Also, the 6v6 nature grates on you because what if you have 4 people? What if you have 8 people? And 6v6 is hardly an MMOG.
I could, in a way, even list Rift here because for the most part I was not looking forward to my next bit of gear. It wasn't that advancement that kept me playing, it was the PvP action. Unfortunately they lacked variety and it just got old. There's only so many times you can play a simple, flat "hold the ball" game before you're sick of it and dangling a slightly better hat in front of me if I play the tiny map another 85 times does not make me keep playing.
Really Planetside came the closest to demonstrating that non-gear based PvP can be awesome and worth playing for months on end. The biggest problem with Planetside was simply that it wasn't a very good FPS.
I think what it boils down to is "content", though.
PvP games need content just as much as PvE games, and this is frequently neglected. A PvE game can't just have a big world full of monsters with no objectives, expecting us to run around killing them for no reason. Why anyone thinks a PvP game can work that way, I don't know. PvP games need content too.
Warhammer was a great example of this. Every zone was PvP + PvE. The PvE area was full of quests and content and action and felt alive. The PvP area was literally just a building. In terms of landmass, PvP may have been 30% of the game but in terms of developed content it couldn't have been more than 1%.
How many developer hours goes into the PvE development of a game like Rift or WOW?
What type of PvP content could you develop if you had 80,000 man-hours to spend on it?