[MUD-Dev2] genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard]

[Sean Howard]

"cruise" <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
> Criticisms of CoH's treadmill gameplay always confused me. Yes, combat
> is all there is to do - but most mainstream MMOG's up until that point
> had relied heavily on combat anyway. All CoH did was strip out many of
> the "downtime" elements and concentrate on making the combat as good as
> possible. I still feel it's the dynamic and fun combat in any of the
> current MMOG's (yes, including Auto Assualt).

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you are seeing the same
five types of zones with very little variation for the first 20 levels,
and not much more there after. I don't know about you, but grinding seems
a lot less painful when I'm killing monsters in the woods, the desert, the
swamps and not warehouse after warehouse. I once did three consecutive
missions in the same office building type zone and that's when I decided
that CoH could bite me. It wouldn't require THAT much effort to put some
uniqueness in the missions.

Plus, outside of the missions, there's very little exploration or need for
explorations - most of the zones are cityscape with some variety, but
certainly not enough. Likewise, there's no crafting, lewt collecting, lewt
trading, things to do while hanging out avoiding the next office building,
and so on. A lot of that downtime stuff is where MMORPGs happen - not in
the instanced missions. That's where Diablo happens.

I will give them credit for player bases (though I'd like to see it done
on a more personal level rather than simply rewarding the biggest and most
consistently logged in super groups) and the mayhem missions are pretty
cool, but you've got to do three crappy (non-storyline progressing)
missions to play them.

-- 
Sean Howard