Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[StrejdaTom]

Sandbox mmorpgs aren't the answer because developers don't offer an experience or adventure the payers have to create their own experience which leads to the majority of player base being lost and standing around looking at each other. Themepark mmorpgs main problem is they have only a few rides at end game centered around capping tomes, dungeons, raiding and pvp. There really aren't a lot of role playing and character progression in mmos theses days. Single player games have more role playing and character progression than mmorpgs which is sad.

Also 99% of "sandbox" MMOs are just disguised themeparks that offer a little more stuff than other themeparks.
I haven't really seen many sandbox MMOs to be honest.

[silentwindfr]

How.. is that wrong? Players can make really nice content. It was proven. Developers will never make content faster then players can complete it. So.. why not give more powers to players? Why not have players make everything...? You could even have them make dungeons and BE the main villains of a game...

I think people need to sit back and see how powerful a Sandbox MMO could actually be.

it's naive to think that people will work hand in hand for create a society... into a game, some good example are all the survival game where people are free to do whatever they do, they tend to form group and after.... either attack other or defend from the first.

pve sandbox (and i did play a few) have another trouble, if people don't have any drive they will rarely do anything by themself. they need a carrot a good example are the raid, if the raider didn't get them shinies that are the best they are whining about it.

not every one is ready to immerse themself in a world they must build from scratch... that why game like SWG never get tons of player... because people get bored.

but don't get wrong, i think that the mmorpg must go over the sandbox and themepark type. and mix both type into a mmorpg, we can now make a mpmorpg that can use the good point of both and create something far better... now the trouble behind this is the effort/energy/money needed for this.

[Mikedizzy]

I think there needs to be a balance of extreme grinding and way too easy. A game is not fun if you sit and do something everyday for months trying to get one item or piece of gear. That is not content...that is just delaying content to be achieved and GATED. I like FFXIV because it has a fairly good mix and the grinding is not terribly bad for the most part and you actually feel like you are getting somewhere. Now they do have some aspects that feel like they get speeded through too fast and doesn't not really feel "good" but I think it will continually get better as they move along. I hope that this game goes for a very long time and becomes what we all hope it will be. I am in for the long haul but I do believe that the players that play these games is a dying breed...the younger generation want everything now and fast so that may not be a good sign for MMO's in general. I think it will take some time for that to come to be though.

[Onikimaru]

Well to be fair guys MMO's are generally huge games which doesn't leave much room for innovation because of the initial cost of making an MMO. If you make a themepark MMO and you can make profit why would developers risk losing money and potentially breaking their own game?, it's a smart choice in their eyes. And with how big these games generally are i don't blame them for not making more and unique content because, really they don't have much to work with since they have content release schedules and allotted development time. It's a vicious cycle...but then again i wouldn't really have a clue on how things are from the inside so i could be completely wrong here.

[KisaiTenshi]

even different type of content, why it don't appear anymore, because people want to copy WoW thinking it what work...when people get tired of the WoW formula.

I wish I could be a bug on the wall of the pitches for MMORPG's. I imagine they go like this:

"WoW, but like with Zombies"
"WoW, but with Pandas"
"WoW, but with craftable housing!"
"WoW, but with a third faction!"
"MineCraft, except, with cash shop stuff"
"WoW, but with cash shop stuff!"

Honestly, I used to think Freemium games were better than Subscription games, and then all the subscription games decided to hop on the "EVE" RMT bandwagon, and now they're just freemium games with a startup cost. For the love of all that is fun and great about FFXIV, never jump on this bandwagon. Cash shops just keep getting tweaked so that they bilk whales out of as much money as possible, and once the game is no longer making money, they just kill it. Freemium games rely on "the 1%", and should something better come along, the game becomes a money pit and has to be wound down.

This is why any future "Free to Play" games can't keep using the "buy a titanic full of smurfberries" as a carrot to letting players rush through the game. Zynga produces a lot of shovelware games and Nexon doesn't quite screw their playerbase by putting pay-gates on the content, rather they keep releasing new glamor outfits, and people keep buying them. Those two companies are the "king" of free-to-play content, and only got there because they did it first in their respective parts of the world.

But what have they innovated on since? Nothing. The Sequels to games they already run are getting canceled, and aren't what the players want. You don't convince a player to "start over" by handing them the same game again but only with prettier graphics.

[Obysuca]

Nexon doesn't quite screw their playerbase by putting pay-gates on the content, rather they keep releasing new glamor outfits, and people keep buying them.

Sad part is, some of the games Nexon have aren't bad, until Nexon starts Nexoning it :/ I used to love Atlantica, played it for a good while upon release, but since Nexon got it, it seems they've pushed more of the stuff towards spending in the cash shop. Not to mention it attracted the Nexon crowd of "gamers" >_> so prices skyrocketed from like ~40k for a full set of lvl 50 armor pre-nexon, to like 1 mil for the same full set. Not to mention a few certain items went from ~100k to like 3 billion...

And content seems more geared towards "Did you spend $300.00 to get this outfit/mount that'll make you strong enough to continue to do more content?" Seriously, try imagining the worst RNG you can think of and put a 10.00-30.00 price tag on it with an 85% chance to get a worthless potion or something from it.
I finally quit after Nexon pulled a Nexon and removed a mercenary that was hyped, from the event it was supposed to come from, when other versions of AO, got it for free from the event -.-

But yeah, I miss the days of mmos when a new one would come out and you'd get all hyped for it and it'd actually be something different. Now everything is pretty much the same game, different graphics :/ I also miss the days when a mmo had an actual community and you knew everyone on your server and everyone knew the jerks and you actually had to be nice and cooperate to get things done. Now it's all "Screw everyone else, I won't see them again" and considering every mmo is pretty much the same, there's not really a community since people just drop it or take 5-6 month long breaks because the formula is stale.
Anyone else remember when FCs would have 20-40+ people on in them daily? Unless you're on an overpopulated server, most fcs barely have 10 on at a time, more so hovering around the 4-5 mark. In an older mmo, that would never happen unless crap went down and the fc/guild/linkshell broke, not just within ~1 year of release because of stale content. Take XI for example, 13? years, still going (though ending content updates this year :/ ) and just a plain old social ls has more people online at one time than I've seen in a FC on XIV since release.

I remember a time when people would spend every chance they got on a mmo and rarely, if ever, take a break. Yes, even people with jobs and families did this, so that's a poor excuse for "maybe they don't have time anymore" or "they have lives". People really need to stop using that excuse because guess what, people still played a mmo for the majority of a day(the old mmos that actually felt like an accomplishment to obtain something because of the time/effort needed to obtain it), even with jobs/family, they just knew how to manage time better than kids today do. But that's a whole other topic on how today's generation live their lives like the sims, wake up, work/school, sleep.

Too bad no one has Thal's balls to try anything different these days.

[gzuscry]

Stop whining about past (ancient) mmo's supposed effort. PPL have outgrown that kind of grind, to the point they understand its simply pointless. At that time that grind and all the mechanics at time were new to genre and ppl didnt quite compute in their brains the uselessness of that grind, nowdays quite the workload is taken of your brain by pretty graphics and completed story, there is more room in your brainpower to understand how UTTERLY useless and pointless that grind is.

In MMO genre there needs to come something new. OLD formula of linear one cookie cutter button rotation needs to go. MMORPG's need to implement active combat with active targeting and evading in all 3 dimension. Nowdays mmo's mob AI is dumb that it cannot handle the most basic and simplest hit and run tactics, in that particular aspect if there is even the slightest advantage of z axis AI is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo dumb they simply make monster invulv and force you to go through the vice versa exchange of hp reduction mechanic. To me all the shiny over dramatic animations of skills play absolutly no effect to my empathy at what they are supposed to convey, all I care and every single player out there is only the potency number writen on that skill. Therefore to me all the skills has same adverse effect as nuke lunching, you just press single button and go take a pee while mayhem unfolds - that needs to change by ~180 degrees.

[Zfz]

What I really don't like about the interview is this:

『FFXIV』も同じですが、トータル時間からデザインするのではなく、1日で何時間、1週間で何時間プレイするかを想定したうえでデザインするようになっています。

We don’t think of the total gameplay time that will be required. Instead, we try to calculate how many hours per day or per week that something will require, and then base our designs on that figure.

The roulette, the weekly caps, the timed nodes, they are all the results of this design process. It tries to "train" the players into a routine and that is what the MMO genre in the end is all about, and that's why MMOs will never create better content than offline games. The aim of all of the designs in FFXIV is to fill your playtime with tasks.

I've always disliked these caps. If someone has the time to play 20 hours a day, let them. MMORPGs used to create a virtual world in which we enjoy our time. But this design philosophy fills that time with itemized tasks. You log on, you gotta first do your roulettes. Then you gotta run your week's worth of Alex-N, then you do your GC turn-ins, beast tribe dailies, etc.

I had to leave FFXIV in 2.1 due to real life circumstances, now I'm thinking of quitting because I don't like how my play time is dictated by a list of things that I must follow to make progress.

[SQBoard]

What I really don't like about the interview is this:

We don’t think of the total gameplay time that will be required. Instead, we try to calculate how many hours per day or per week that something will require, and then base our designs on that figure.

The roulette, the weekly caps, the timed nodes, they are all the results of this design process. It tries to "train" the players into a routine and that is what the MMO genre in the end is all about, and that's why MMOs will never create better content than offline games. The aim of all of the designs in FFXIV is to fill your playtime with tasks.

I've always disliked these caps. If someone has the time to play 20 hours a day, let them.

That excerpt from the interview you pointed out is slightly out of context and you're pointing out game elements that don't relate to that context.

Here's a bit more of that excerpt:

Yoshida：Ultima Online technically went on indefinitely. The game was developed by Richard Garriott（※21）, who basically gave players a bare-bones set of rules and a place to play the game. You started with a choice of 64 skills, and the rest was up to you. There was no clear objective or goal; you could literally sink an endless number of hours into that game. EverQuest came after that, and due to its monthly payment structure（※22）, all the time requirements for various quests and objectives had to be calculated beforehand. Once World of Warcraft（※23） came out, the though process became：“How many hours will I play today?” Developers had to consider that casual gamers could most likely only afford to play 1 or 2 hours per day. This applies to our development process as well. We don’t think of the total gameplay time that will be required. Instead, we try to calculate how many hours per day or per week that something will require, and then base our designs on that figure.

Yoshida makes no secret that he wants to get casual players into this game. But it's not just him. It's the general sense in the industry that a very large chunk of the current generation of the gaming public fits the demographic of people who can't (or won't) play games for too long in one sitting.

That's why mmo have shifted away from 5+hour raiding or having a leveling curve that takes years to hit cap or 20min wait on boat rides just to get to travel to another zone. Also things like duty/party/dungeon finders instead of camping in a specific area and wait for people interested to show up, quick travel options like teleports and even solo-oriented gameplay alternatives because having your game progress completely stopped if you can't find people to party with is a problem for people with only 2 hours to play.

(Played old EQ and believe me, having the possibility of doing nothing but waiting for a team or get into a camp waiting list and end up not getting in before logging back out happened way too much for my taste back then...sorry old gripe)

Supply and demand.

There's a big demand for abbreviated gaming experiences where you can feel you achieved something in about an hour when back in old Everquest days, it might take you that long just to travel and get your corpse back after death.

You're comparing the wrong things in reference to that excerpt when you mention weekly caps and dailies and such since it has nothing to do with that. The 1-2 hours a day description has more to do with being able to "finish" a dungeon run in 30minutes instead of 3 hours and other such design considerations.

The thought process for things like weekly/daily caps is BECAUSE of the people you described of having 20 hours a day, not the people who can only play 1-2 hours a day.

Content development takes months to release and it's a problem when people "finish" all of that in 2 weeks and have nothing to do for the next 10 weeks in a quarterly content publishing cycle.

The alternative to weekly caps is to substantially ramp up the grind so that even if you play 20 hours a day, it would still take you 3 months to finish everything before the next round of content is pushed out.

You can try sandbox-like player-made content like dungeon creators and such but i've seen those end up being farm generators or just generic throwaways once the novelty wears off.

There are good player-made content but the percentage of players who want to create is small compared to people who want to just use pre-made content. That's part of why you don't see big sales numbers from sandbox mmo like you would from triple-a themeparks (another reason why there's so many themeparks). Too many people want to jump in and play exciting content instead of spending hours trying to figure out what to do (create).

For themeparks specifically, the ideal alternative is to be able to crank out content on a weekly basis but that isn't that great an option because most likely, the content being released in that schedule are low-hanging fruit that are probably akin to copy/paste content. Other games try to have a hastened churn rate for content but they can't sustain it...either the quality goes down or they eventually hit delays.

[KisaiTenshi]

That's why mmo have shifted away from 5+hour raiding or having a leveling curve that takes years to hit cap or 20min wait on boat rides just to get to travel to another zone. Also things like duty/party/dungeon finders instead of camping in a specific area and wait for people interested to show up, quick travel options like teleports and even solo-oriented gameplay alternatives because having your game progress completely stopped if you can't find people to party with is a problem for people with only 2 hours to play.

(Played old EQ and believe me, having the possibility of doing nothing but waiting for a team or get into a camp waiting list and end up not getting in before logging back out happened way too much for my taste back then...sorry old gripe)

Believe me, there was some fun in "taking forever" to get back to something, because that left your corpse lootable, so you needed to get back ASAP or abandon it. Largely though the entire "wait around for something to do" is awful, and it's something that "business interests" don't care about. Businesses are more than happy to let players login, do 1-2 hours worth of play and logout, because it costs them less money. However RMT completely takes advantage of this. So the less "Active players" on simultaneously can cause instances where 50% of the active players sit around one zone, and all the remaining zones are filled up with RMT bots because nobody is actually watching. I can't tell you how often I've seen this outside of FFXIV.

"New feature" is announced, Bots immediately occupy all capacity for doing it (ugh the "public farms" in Mabinogi were completely free money to RMT because of this) and thus players then demand it to be nerfed or made "harder" thus destroying any incentive to actually do it.

You're comparing the wrong things in reference to that excerpt when you mention weekly caps and dailies and such since it has nothing to do with that. The 1-2 hours a day description has more to do with being able to "finish" a dungeon run in 30minutes instead of 3 hours and other such design considerations.

I'd rather have a "3-5 hour" dungeon experience broken up where the "boss rooms" are broken up like Alexander/Coil is, but 2-3 hours of it is actually "Solving" the dungeon (Wizardy Online did this) the first time as a form of progression. Think "The sunken temple of Qarn" but you have to find segments of the map, unlock floors by completing 1-2 "boss" rooms (Wizardy had as many as 8 "boss" rooms on a floor, and you weren't solo'ing any of it when it was new content.) This allows you to either form a party and solve it quickly, or play it solo and use traps/dungeon-mechanics to deal with the mobs.

But overall, the pace of existing dungeon "party" content is fairly good. I miss the "outdoor dungeon" aspect because it made the dungeon's seem larger and less empty seeing other players trying to solve it too. FFXIV V1.0's dungeons actually were seamless (Shposhae was an "outdoor" dungeon, and was replaced with Satasha in V2.0, both being level 15 content.)