A Few Questions for my Fellow Wyvernites (On Gaming, and Games in General)

[Kama]

I'd like to start this thread off with a Disclaimer: Yes, this is a rant. I'm becoming more and more disappointed with the game "industry" as more time passes by. If I offend you, I'm sorry, that's not my intention. But I need a challenge and the truth is I'm just not satisfied, not even close.
And I'm sure I'm not the only Wyvernite that feels this way.

On that note...

What the heck is going on here, people? Have the developers of today's games gone starking, raving mad, or am I missing something?

I played Wyvern for nearly 10 years. In fact, by my calculations (and I have no way to verify the accuracy of my memory here), it'll be 10 years here in October. And I've never found an MMORPG (or any other type of game for that matter) that satisfied my need to game quite as much as Wyvern does. At least not since the early days of 3D gaming, (the N64 being the console that made a gamer out of me) the standard for a difficult and mentally challenging and immersive game seems to have gone steadily downhill. And maybe I'm wrong here, I haven't played every game out there, not even close, that's why I'm making this thread in the first place, on the hopes to spark an intelligent conversation about gaming, games, and the people who play them.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do like time-killers. I get immense joy out of popping a few zombies in the head, or gunning down helpless enemies in a first-person shooter (and most of them truly are helpless), and if there's a good backstory behind it, my tolerance for it goes way up. But I just can't do it forever. There comes a point where I have to put the game back on the shelf (metaphorically or literally), and let it gather dust until one day, I decide it might be fun to give it another try.

Since wyvern's been down, I've been giving consoles another chance. I recently inherited a Wii and my experiences there have been for the most part good. I've played games that I otherwise never would've given the time of day (several MMORPGs included, though there aren't as many client-based ones for Linux as I'd like, and I haven't found many for the consoles that seem worth the money), and was entertained for a while, yet the result always seems to be the same: I get bored. Even the Monster Hunter series, which I'm starting to become fond of, I can only play for so long before I want to.. well, you get the idea.

So before I forget the reason I started this post in the first place, I'd like to pose a few questions:

What is it you look for in a game? What frustrates you the most? Do you prefer a game that serves as an endlessly repetitive time-killer (being honest here >.>) or something that makes you think critically, and consider carefully the best route of action to complete an objective? Which games have you found the most enjoyable to play, whether they be for a console, a PC, or handheld device? And why? What games would you recommend to either type of player?

Speak your mind.

(Edit: On a further note, if anyone knows a good game(s) that I can run on Linux or WINE, and is either free, cheap, or worth the money, I'd love to hear about it.)

[Clubbz]

I've come to learn with the way I game, I can only play a game solo for 4-8 hours before I get bored and give up. The only exception are truly good rpgs, but they need to have an enthralling story. Nowadays what I look for is multiplayer experience. I don't just mean like Call of Duty shooting people, I look more for what people I know have, or if the community is new player friendly to meet people.

One of the things I liked about wyvern, especially before the first great downage, was even though it was a small community there was always lots of chat. Gaming is more fun when you have friendly people to talk to. I play FPS with people I know because chatting while you play extends the fun time for me. It's one of the reasons I can't get into most MMORPG's nowadays though, because while there is a ton of people playing them, very few of them are sociable, and even fewer are friendly.

[bonecrusher]

console games put me on the map for gaming,so console games are mainly what i play,online games all want money.and most the games arent any good.wether it's WOW,runescape,maplestory or whatever.i gotta say,i played runescape for 6 years and that game had a pretty big community,not much anymore.but i played that game with my friends when i was a kid for so long,but it got extreamly repetitive.so i put that game away.but enough about online games,none seem to catch my attention,dungeon hack was pretty good.but its really frustrating to know a single step could be your very last,and hours of gameplay could be lost in a blink of an eye.worse then that,its not really an online game,the best you can do is watch other people play.its pretty much a big 1 player game.but i have ALOT of n64,and ps2 games.and emulators for all the classic consoles,i have 47 playstation 2 games,and 40 n64 games.now im a specialist at shooting games,and rpg games,so games like perfect dark,turok,aidyn chronicles the first mage,quest 64.get my attention,mostly underrated games.and even conkers bad fur day was a fantastic game.even though its an adult game for n64.i've played alot of games.mainly classics,so i know what im talking about.and i have alot of good reccomendations.have you ever played aidyn chronicles kama? its a really long rpg,i have a file that has 89 hours of gameplay and still havint beaten it.its really good.

[Trayr]

Originally Posted by Kama

(Edit: On a further note, if anyone knows a good game(s) that I can run on Linux or WINE, and is either free, cheap, or worth the money, I'd love to hear about it.)

It's not what you are looking for, but it is a game that can be wine bottled. It is called I Wanna Be The Guy and it is, without a doubt, the hardest game I have ever played in my entire life (except for maybe qwop). It is a side scroller and it is uhh, tons of fun.

And also, if you really think about it, most games are repetitive time killers, Wyvern included. In fact, Wyvern is one of the most repetitive games I have played.

[bonecrusher]

i've been tortured by i wana be the guy,had some gamer rage moments from it.(who hasnt) but i beat it eventualy.really fun,good soundtrack from some classic's.

[Thonkhs]

First game i ever played was in the late 80`s bout 87.
It was as Adventure, and i have to say, i forget the name. But you where a lill Mage in need to do some quests, to get to open doors and so on. I just had the chance to play , wehn my brother was off and out of the house.. Then i started again with N64 Super Mario. Jump´run. And certainly Zelda. Till today we collected all Zelda games for Nintendo-consoles. X). And several othergames for consoles.PC-games, Ps, Xbox, .... And than there was a day i get to know Wyvern.
I love to solve riddels and to out for a way to solve a problem. Shooters are not mine. And i also palyed Call of duty and halo. But all those games get boring..... Some just end and you can start again... same story same whatever.
I love Dragon age 1 and 2. Mass effect also. they way you decide... will show up another path.. but they end. Congratz game is over. Press button to start again. And like kamadoes, that game will stay in a shelf and gets dusty.
When i started the game in april may 2004 *with good ol maaui waaui kitty* i still haven´t discoverd all maps and some few quests are left to be solved, there are still some secrets. The dungeons, you never have been knowing if there might be a shogg downstairs. *shivers , uuuh doublekilled*. Yelling for Tesh or Binnybunny to fix whatever. You can´t do that in other games. Not like that familiar way we had.
And i agree also with Clubbz, ppl often just are unfriendly, also when you play in a group. Sighs. And gaming s more fun, if your driving the friendly way.
Mudrpg`s you can play for free, have no secrets. its frustrating and boring just to do the same all the time. I really got fastidiously. Gameplay, quests, endless dungeons, ppl and community.I started maestia, just because i had too much time to spend, and i found some nice ppl ther, but i just know. The game bores me just right now.

that was enough blaaaa i will go and read a book or wash my dishes perhpas.

sry for all my typos. they are just for you, a lill gift.

[Valkon]

I miss quest randomization.

[Thonkhs]

Nummero UNO smiles and jumps around happiely Sends some hugs an coffee. Hows going my favorite nummero uno wizzy?
I miss it to shout numero uno the hole day in a chat ^^ *giggles* chchchcm

[binsenkind]

*nods@thonkhs*

wyvern is the only onlinegame that feels like a home to me, even if binsenkind is unplayable at the moment after my money was all spend while reskilling and i got stuck, platinum came up and ruined my business, the axemen were nerfed and i couldn´t do balanced axes anymore and electrinum armor is now impossible for me to make after the blacksmith-changes
but i still have a nice bench, so i can sit in the auction hall, drink some powerpuch rum and listen to the younger and tell them about the great adventures i did

no other game can do this to me... having fun even if you can´t do anything serious

maybe when wyvern is up i will hof my darkelf and get him into rogue-guild.
if i ever do the quest ^^

quests are really tricky if you aren´t native-speaking... they should be more flexible when it comes to enter the right word...

it shouldn´t be just "hug quivering blob"... there should be more possibilities with similar words, i think.

but maybe quests are nothing for a dwarf like me.

hack em up, get the gold, go deeper.

[Thonkhs]

hmmm your talking what i feel by heard. Wyvern is some kind of special game, a home-game^^ Hm. A familiar community, sitting at MAH. Pet kittys, and just beeing there. Wyvernfamily
If it will come up again i will go on Paletti, my newsest alt.

[Frosten]

Originally Posted by Trayr

In fact, Wyvern is one of the most repetitive games I have played.

That pretty much sums it up. I think every game has to have a little bit of a grind aspect.

As for other games, the only ones I have really played on the pc are Runescape, Diablo 2, and Wyvern. All of them required grinding to be "good."

As for console games, Call of Duty pretty much rules all for me. I've been playing them since the 2nd one (Big Red One). I'm not sure why, but I rarely get bored playing Call of Duty online.

All in all, though, I haven't found a game that reaches the bar that has been set by Wyvern. The majority of games seem way too easy, with the harder games being painstakingly annoying. I feel Wyvern found a good balance between the two.

[bonecrusher]

wyvern was/is the most addictive online rpg i've ever played,even if i didnt get along with half the people on the game,i still made a huge name for myself from the time i logged on for the very first time,or the second i hofed the big daddy of cavies.in the time it toke me to start playing,to now,i slowly came from my online silence,and began making ALOT of friends on wyvern,from the one of the first players,to some of the newer guys.even though wyvern doesnt have a giant player base like some online games,it still has a great family of dedicated players,willing to do anything to save their favorite mud.i gotta say,possibly the most fun i've ever had on this game,was when we had black rose mage arena brawls.those were always fun.even getting destroyed by zega and godwinson on my old rak was something to remember.wyvern always will hold a spot in my heart for the best online game i've ever played.and if we get through this hour of darkness,we should all go sit in mah,and have beers.and celebrate wyvern's resurrection.

[Baurus]

I second that one buddy. It's been too long. I've been sitting here practically waiting for the game to come back and waiting on R's word to Binsenkind's offer. Hopefully everything works out with that but yea Wyvern is really my favorite game too, and as soon as it comes back up i'm getting to work on my new pally thats like level 6 and keeping Riordan on the way to 27.

I agree that it is repetitive as hell, but most games are. World of Warcraft is worse in the repetitive place though. The PK brawls and the Live Quests of Wyvern really give it the flair it has. Can't wait for the game to come back online so I can say hey to some old friends who may not be on the forums. Wyvern has certainly introduced me to a few really good friends and my lifelong pal (Bonecrusher).

And just because I have to reminisce on it. My favorite memory (or well maybe not my favorite but still pretty good) on Wyvern has got to be when my axeman Riordan and Bonecrusher's Belray were grouped with my brother Vesrayech and I think we were the first group to travel to floor 100 in an RD in recent history. I mean prior to the floor 50 RD change i'm sure it was common but I don't think anyone has done it since then except us 3. Certainly a good time. Then there was the time me and Belray did Hades. That was certainly a whole lot of fun. both of our first times there. But yea I have countless times that I've had fun with my buds on wyvern and when the game comes back up we gotta make some more for sure.

But yea... Come back Wyvern we miss the world that was our home away from home.

-The wyvern lifelong, Riordan

[Baurus]

oh and also when Wyvern returns i'm gonna destroy belray in PK. Thats right Bonecrusher. it's happening.

[bonecrusher]

Originally Posted by Baurus

oh and also when Wyvern returns i'm gonna destroy belray in PK. Thats right Bonecrusher. it's happening.

not likely,i do like 180 damage a hit to you sometimes.i remember the time you and glacio's shoot rushed me,and i killed you both.that was great.haha.

[Baurus]

yea yea yea. that is really unfair. a +4 black dsm and then 5 pieces of plat and still take a lot of damage from you. ridiculous.

[binsenkind]

oh, and i remember when binsenkind lost his whole inventory cause of some server-bug. all i had was one million in the bank.
i bought myseld a toga and some sandals not to be naked and cried in NVA.

and then... all axemen were busy helping me out with essential stuff for min-price, they were so nice. i had a full set of everything in minutes and tesh sent me a couple of elec-slabs, so i could make myself decent weapons again.

that was great, i´m still very thankfull for that.

*bows*

...

but i really, really still miss my portable home with the portal to the temple of world in it

...

haha... and tahuuti the mage, a friend of mine had the license to summon me when he was in danger... so... it could happen everytime... suddenly i was in combat and tahuuti was yelling: "Dwarfs to me !"
that was funny

[Vozka]

This is a very interesting thread (apart from all the offtopic!). My dream job is to become an indie game developer, so I probably look at games from different perspectives. I'd like to compare this to music (I'm also a musician): I listen to some music for its technical quality, like some subgenres of jazz (bebop for example), which tend to be emotionally pretty cold. I listen to some music because it creates strong or complicated emotions, be it thrash metal, IAMX, NoMeansNo or something completely different. And I listen to some music to just have fun, dance, clean my head, whatever - like electro swing, lounge or freetekno (as you see, these also vary greatly). Great music should have something from all of them, or at least two - for me, that is for example technical metal like Tool or Meshuggah (usualy not proggy metal) or good psychedelic trance.


Although I wouldn't consider computer games an art form yet, I see the potential and would definitely consider many good games art even now. Therefore I (subconsciously) seek somehow similar qualities in gaming and also like quite different genres. Sometimes, I obsess over the simplest games that introduce something new (once it was Heaven2Ocean).

But I also love games that have high budget, look quite mainstream (in the boring sense, I hope I'm not a gaming hipster yet), but make me do something new or contain lots of interesting subtle stuff that only an appreciative gamer will notice, like almost anything made by Valve. It's kinda like listening to Gorillaz.

Exploration is another thing that makes me addicted. Wandering around the home village or distant lands is awesome, no matter if in Wyvern, ADOM or Morrowind. Yeah, this is mainly an RPG thing, but it worked in Borderlands very well too.

I often appreciate taking some feature or quality to the extremes, and these too can be very different: Game complexity (=thousands of different ways to die in Dwarf Fortress or roguelikes in general, or, for something completely different, Just Cause 2: Let's take any generic B action movie and EXACTLY transcribe it into a game. Yes, with cheesy characters and tons of explosions. Oh, and the player must be able to fly. And tie people together. And shoot a hole to a gas tank and ride it like a rocket. Yes, the plot must be cheesy. Yes, he must be able to destroy a whole f***ing Island. JC2 also falls into the second category, although again very different from mentioned Valve games.

Sometimes I play rally games for the feeling of speed and nice landscapes. Sometimes I shoot zombies in Killing Floor for the moments of panic (and because its coop-y enough to be fun and not too much to be unplayable with complete strangers without communication like L4D). Sometimes I spend days managing little trains and other vehicles made of crispy pixels with a few internet friends in OpenTTD.

I rarely play for story, because I'm bad at adventures (trying to change that now with Sam & Max episodes. Every time I have to look into the walkthrough, I think about the situation and what I did wrong to get stuck) and other games rarely are good enough, but there are exceptions - Fallout 1 and 2 or Witcher come to mind. Some games, like Serious Sam or Sauerbraten, don't need a story at all. Some games don't have anything else, not even puzzles, like (a free game where you create stories from memories of an old man and it has tens of different endings, can't remember the name, it's been a while), and are absolutely terrific.


Some games offer many different qualities, including ones that are hard to define, like great community, and that is also the case of Wyvern. Or World of Goo, that is one game I wouldn't fear calling a piece of art. There are many ways to look at games, many ways to play them and enjoy them, and although mainstream gaming is generally quite shallow, there are always good games that give you something more than short amusement.


But yeah, few of them impacted me as much as Wyvern. Damn, we need to do something about this situation.

Originally Posted by binsenkind

[...] quests are really tricky if you aren´t native-speaking... they should be more flexible when it comes to enter the right word...

it shouldn´t be just "hug quivering blob"... there should be more possibilities with similar words, i think.

but maybe quests are nothing for a dwarf like me. [...]

100% agree, I believe we may be speaking about one particular quest . But then Tesh told me I missed some hints from somebody that would greatly help to solve that problem, so maybe it's just us stupid (and oblivious) dwarves.

[igorith]

Two words: Elder Scrolls. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is, by my standards, the best game out there. There is an immense amount of solid gameplay (can't tell you how much for certain, but you can look it up), hundreds of quests, a plethora of dungeons, and lots to do overall. I would seriously take the origional Oblivion game (no expansions added) over the entirety of World of Warcraft's main game and three expansions. The game offers a stupendous amount of improvements from the previous game (Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) including much improved AI, dynamic movements in the environemt (i.e. a rolling and falling corpse versus a static one), full voice acting, and much improved graphics, just to name a few. If you have been an Elder Scrolls fan as die-hard as I am, You'll praise the amount of great things that came in Oblivion that weren't in Morrowind. Overall I love the series and love Bethesda Softworks. Todd Howard is my hero.

To answer your "bonus question", I don't know alot about linux, but I do know one very simple, very basic game that I know WINE can handle: Rodent's Revenge. Its about a mouse that traps cats by pushing blocks. Very retro and very fun.

[Kama]

Mmk, now that I have a few moments to spare, it's time to revive this thread.

So.. I bought Call of Duty: Black Ops a few days ago, and tore through the Campaign mode on Veteran in a matter of hours. For a game that I paid nearly $50 for, I'm glad I didn't buy it for just Campaign mode - and the multiplayer online is relatively challenging, depending on who you're playing against (my favorites being the snipers who know what they're doing, they're more fun to play "virtual chess" with). And the reason I bring this up foremost, is that a good deal of the game felt like it was on auto-pilot. That frustrates me to no end. It's as if the game developers are targeting the lowest common denominator (which I'm sure they are); for example, at points in the game it would ask you to perform a certain action in order to move forward.. and if you don't perform that action, then the game does it anyway.

That's just ridiculous, in my opinion.

Anyway.. I'll try to get back to some of your replies now.

Clubbz - I couldn't agree more. It's always more fun to play a game when the people are sociable. Especially in MMORPGs, if the people aren't friendly than it might as well me a one-player game. That's what it feels like, at least.

(My eyes hurt now, so I'll come back and add more later) -.-