Eh, lots of stuff going on around here, hardly any gaming. Therefore not much material to discuss. But here's a follow-up to something I've written recently.
I see the opposite case with WoW, where they have insisted on keeping the factions separate even with existential threats to the entire world of Azeroth that should have brought the two sides together. As far back as the re-opening of the Dark Portal, but certainly the threats of the Lich King and Deathwing would have created at least temporary truces in a semi-realistic setting. You can argue about how "realistic" WoW needs to be, I suppose. But the incessant internecine war narrative broke my suspension of disbelief, and I eventually stopped playing.
With SWTOR, BioWare is a bit more hidebound, due to the mechanics of the interactive story. But the decision was still made to separate the factions when they could have had at least a few crossovers—if they had gone to the trouble. The Bounty Hunter and Smuggler could have been neutral classes that could have gone either way, story-wise. There might be have been "gray" Jedi/Sith. But the mirrored-classes mechanic might have led to imbalances for PvP (not that I particularly care about PvP balance).
I'm not even against having factions in the lore. But there are ways around it in practical gameplay, like having most of the quest givers be faction-neutral; as seen in The Secret World and Rift's "Storm Legion" expansion, for example.
Maybe I'm just too much of a care-bear, thinking that we should just all be able to get along. The thing is, I like PvP when it's contained, like the "structured PvP" of GW2. I just don't see why I should be restricted from playing the character I want with my friends who want to be something else. The "us vs. them" mentality engendered by games like WoW is the worst example of insularity that has caused serious damage, oppression, and loss of life in the real world—in everything from sports-fan violence to global war. And that should have no place in a leisure activity.
~~~ The faction thing was something that disappointed me in ESO as well. It just puts restrictions on the social aspect, on who to play with. Tehre will always be some friends who prefer another faction and spend most of their time there. It already annoys me a bit in SWTOR, and there's only two factions there (which you can't really get around, lore-wise).That's the thing, though. It's an arbitrary decision that the lore is bent around. In Guild Wars 2, ANet could easily have had factions with the natural opposition of the Charr and Humans. But they didn't want factions in their game, so . . . bygones, I guess. They made the lore fit the game.
~~Ravanel Griffon, commenting on one of my previous posts.
With SWTOR, BioWare is a bit more hidebound, due to the mechanics of the interactive story. But the decision was still made to separate the factions when they could have had at least a few crossovers—if they had gone to the trouble. The Bounty Hunter and Smuggler could have been neutral classes that could have gone either way, story-wise. There might be have been "gray" Jedi/Sith. But the mirrored-classes mechanic might have led to imbalances for PvP (not that I particularly care about PvP balance).
I'm not even against having factions in the lore. But there are ways around it in practical gameplay, like having most of the quest givers be faction-neutral; as seen in The Secret World and Rift's "Storm Legion" expansion, for example.
Maybe I'm just too much of a care-bear, thinking that we should just all be able to get along. The thing is, I like PvP when it's contained, like the "structured PvP" of GW2. I just don't see why I should be restricted from playing the character I want with my friends who want to be something else. The "us vs. them" mentality engendered by games like WoW is the worst example of insularity that has caused serious damage, oppression, and loss of life in the real world—in everything from sports-fan violence to global war. And that should have no place in a leisure activity.
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Well, when you have a target to point your ire at, it not only serves as a continual goad to compete, but it also keeps self-analysis suppressed. Racism, politics, whatever, it all serves well to keep the status quo running and prevent resolution.
ReplyDeleteThis is good for a game running on a subscription model.
Not good for players, but that's a tertiary concern at best.
Very good point about the subscription model, but that's an entirely different topic for debate. And how successful has the sub model really been outside of WoW?
DeleteFFXI is still chugging along, isn't it? EQ and EQ2 were subscription for a long time. EQ2 has factions, but you can betray them and change your character. And... they aren't strictly sub any more. Not sure what FFXI does. (Or FFXIV for that matter.)
Delete...but yes, WoW is clearly the aberration in the industry, not the norm. I do wonder how much of it comes from the clear Orcs vs. Humans theme that started with the RTS. WoW does a lot of other things, but that clear core conceit is a cornerstone in their design approach.
I don't know about FFXI, but even EQ and EQ2 sub numbers paled in comparison to WoW, and neither is sub only at this point. In fact, given the nature of PLEX, it's debatable whether EVE is truly sub-only, even if CCP considers it to be. Most other games have gone hybrid or straight up F2P cash-shop, if they ever were sub only.
DeleteI would hazard a guess that the faction divide is really low on people's lists of reasons why they still play WoW, even among hardcore PvPers. Blizzard hit a perfect storm of ideas and circumstances and have ridden that tsunami ever since. That's not to say that they did or do not produce a quality game. But mush like Facebook, at some point Wow's popularity is self-fulfilling. People start playing WoW because it is the most popular, not necessarily the other way around.
Aye, I don't think that the faction divide is a key factor in WoW's success, or that it's easy to tease out just how much of a factor it is. Just ruminating, since Alliance vs. Horde runs deep in gamer DNA. I don't even know what the factions are in RIFT, for example, nor do I care. *shrug*
DeleteFFXIV is wholly subscription, no cash shop and by all accounts doing very well. FFXI has always used that model although I believe the re-launched XIV may have cannibalized it more than EQ2 did EQ, for example.
DeleteI really like factions in MMOs. I think they add a huge amount to gameplay as well as, obviously, helping the lore. I'm not so keen on the uber-hard-core WoW version, where the two sides are forever separated, though. I much prefer the original Everquest version, where anyone at all can become the ally of anyone at all if only they're prepared to put in the effort.
One of my very fondest memories from the early years of EQ is the many, many hours I spent with my Ogre shadowknight killing Militia guards in dead-end alleys in East and West Freeport until I'd raised my faction with the Knights of Truth-guarded who ran North Freeport far enough that they saw me as an ally and let me walk their streets with impunity.
I also remember the early days of Vanguard, before they watered faction down, when I had to hunt five hundred or so bandits of some description (the details are hazy) before my Orc could go meet up with some friends who were based in the Varanjar area.
Far from seeing these kind of things as a barrier preventing players from having fun together I see it as quality content they can share, albeit at a distance until enough monsters have died.
Those are excellent examples of doing faction right (though I don't know about the amount of grind apparently involved). Now imagine that some Orcs decided that Garrosh had simply gone too far and no longer reflected the Horde "ideal" and therefore they turned coat and pledged their loyalty to Varian. It's doable, if the folks at Blizz want to make that effort.
DeleteWhilst ESO doesn't allow you to group with members of another faction, your guild memberships are both account and faction-wide. As a result, while I'm playing my AD character in its "AD focused" guild, I can still see the guild chats of my EP and DC guilds as well, so if an event is happening or someone needs a group, I can easily log out and back in to my character in that faction instead. It's not completely ideal, but it could be a lot worse too. That said, I'm an incurable alt-oholic, so of course I have a character in each faction that's more or less at the same level as my other "mains" for each faction.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, overall, I prefer the SWG (everyone groups with everyone unless they're specifically pvp flagged to a faction), EQ2 (everyone groups with everyone unless on a pvp server), and TSW (everyone groups with everyone in pve, faction only matters in the pvp battlegrounds) ways of doing things. I'm glad Rift finally caught up and removed the faction barriers as well.
TESO is not the worst of the lot by any stretch, at least you can join cross-faction guilds, even if you can't actually play together with cross-faction characters. As I said in the prior post on this topic, TSW has almost the opposite problem: everything BUT the cabals (guilds)—and battlegrounds—enables cross-faction play.
DeleteFaction-focused design works fine in PvP games. It defines a player's enemies, and it gives recognizable enemies on the field of battle. I suspect that TESO wanted that for their PvP focus. But, for people who just want to PvE, it becomes a hassle.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that WoW thought PvP was going to be a bigger part of the game than it turned out to be. But, people identify with the faction a lot, particularly the vocal hard-core, that removing them hasn't really been an option.
I think the fact that they gave all pre-orders the ability to be any race/any faction gives lie to the "recognizable enemies" angle, unless it was an afterthought. In TESO's case it's not so much what you want to play as where. If someone for whatever reason thinks the Ebonheart Pact or Aldmeri Dominion storylines/locales are better than the Daggerfall Covenant, they are out of luck if they want to keep up with all their friends who are playing Daggerfall. That may be just be important to some people. I confess that I tend to play solo or duo with Scooter most of the time anyway.
DeleteI know far more people that have played both sides of the Horde-Alliance divide than have played one side or the other exclusively, and those that are the most rabid about it tend toward PvP servers, methinks. Which also engender a bullying atmosphere in my experience, the major motivation behind my dislike of PvP servers and faction fanaticism in the first place.
Factions are outdated if MMO PvP is going to continue to exist only in specific zones. While some world PvP does exist in these games, it is rarely a focus and hardly worth even being mentioned as a feature.
ReplyDeleteBasically, leave factions for PvP zones!
See my reply below, RE: EVE. Of course, I don't play EVE and would not play a game that incorporated such nefarious gameplay.
DeleteI personally don't like factions any more either. They enforce so many needless restrictions for people to play together as well as the amount of options available to the player. It seems mostly for PvP but then the PvP that comes from this is often feels a lot more forced and disjointed. I really enjoy the guild based conflict wherein players are the ones controlling their experience... or maybe having a range of factions that you can later enlist in.
ReplyDeleteI was going to say that EVE is the most purely PvP game I know of. And to my knowledge, it has no factions that are not player organized.
Delete