World of Warcraft. After it, a lot of player retention mechanics became super obvious in other games for me, especially because a lot of said games were copying “the king of MMOs”
Dwarf Fortress is my main go-to example of procgen done right. Whenever there’s discussions of “game X sucks and is lifeless because it’s mostly procgenned”, I look back at DF. Lazy procgen is the problem.
I know at some point I saw a game with absurdly high damage and health numbers, I can’t remember which one it was, whether a mobile thing around 2014 or a korean mmo, but that was the point where I very easily understood “big number better” is total bullshit
Elder Scrolls Morrowind was the first game I’ve played that gave almost complete freedom to the player, with lots of things carrying consequence, especially in relation to NPCs. That shopkeeper you killed? Still dead. This essential NPC that is a literal demigod? Yeah, you can kill him, have fun in this broken timeline you just created where you can no longer advance the main quest.
There’s actually an official “back path” for the Morrowind main quest if you killed Vivec. You need to take an item from his corpse to Yagrum Bagarn, but you also need a high reputation. If you muck up the back path, too, you can brute force the main quest by completing the final step anyway, but good luck figuring out how to do that without a quest pointing you to what you need.
World of Warcraft. After it, a lot of player retention mechanics became super obvious in other games for me, especially because a lot of said games were copying “the king of MMOs”
Dwarf Fortress is my main go-to example of procgen done right. Whenever there’s discussions of “game X sucks and is lifeless because it’s mostly procgenned”, I look back at DF. Lazy procgen is the problem.
I know at some point I saw a game with absurdly high damage and health numbers, I can’t remember which one it was, whether a mobile thing around 2014 or a korean mmo, but that was the point where I very easily understood “big number better” is total bullshit
Elder Scrolls Morrowind was the first game I’ve played that gave almost complete freedom to the player, with lots of things carrying consequence, especially in relation to NPCs. That shopkeeper you killed? Still dead. This essential NPC that is a literal demigod? Yeah, you can kill him, have fun in this broken timeline you just created where you can no longer advance the main quest.
I wonder if that MMO with big damage numbers was Shaiya Online?
There’s actually an official “back path” for the Morrowind main quest if you killed Vivec. You need to take an item from his corpse to Yagrum Bagarn, but you also need a high reputation. If you muck up the back path, too, you can brute force the main quest by completing the final step anyway, but good luck figuring out how to do that without a quest pointing you to what you need.