Dark Fiend Forum
Welcome to Viltris's Forum, a subsidy of the Dark Fiend Sanctuary. This is the place where you can spam (and we'll call you a moron) or flame people (but we'll call you a coward if you do it anonymously). So... yeah, have fun. Viltris reserves the right to delete any post he feels should be taken off the forum. Deal with it.
Re: Wednesday December 10 entry of Dwayne's journal, I must point out that he is entirely wrong about Diablo II not being an MMORPG:
1) Massive: Just because Diablo II games are limited to 8 players doesn't mean that it isn't massive. I logged on at 5 AM and saw that 300000 people were playing...not massive enough I guess.
2) Multi-Player: Pretty self-explanatory here. Diablo II, like many other MMORPGS, can be played with other people. True, Diablo II can also be played off of Battle.net; does this negate the fact that it also has multiplayer option? I THINK NOT.
3) Online: JUST LIKE EVRY OTHER MMORPG, you must have an internet connection to play Battle.net. Single player can be compared to joining a server with no one on it. This has happened before, such as when I played Ultima Online. Occasionally I was all alone on the server, yet even when no one else was on, UO was STILL considered an MMORPG. It's not metaphysical here; the genre doesn't change depending on extenuating circumstances.
4) RPG: Yes, Diablo II is a roleplaying game. This can hardly be denied, no matter how much you argue, because as a player, you take on the role of a Paladin, Amazon, Barbarian etc. when you play the god****ed game.
Because it fulfills all the qualities inherent to an MMORPG, Diablo II is an MMORPG. A Lambourghini is not the same as a Honda Civic, but are they not both cars? Do they not both have a similarly designed engine? This is what I am saying: the engine behind Diablo II: Battle.net operates on the same principles as any other MMORPG. Likewise, a zeppelin is different from a horse-drawn carriage, in the same way RPGs are different from first person shooters, platformers, sports games, adventure games etc.
Also, I'd appreciate it, Dwayne, if you refrain from character assassination attempts in order to somehow justify your stance on a subject. I'm sorry your argument is weak; but you make yourself look bad when you deliberately misrepresent my comments to help further your own cause.
"Still, no matter how you look at it, playing traditional MMORPGs like FF11 or Runescape is different from playing Diablo II, and incredibly different from playing, say, FF5. (Yes, someone *cough*Alan*cough* dared to suggest that FF11 and FF5 played like exactly the same thing.)"
What I ACTUALLY said was that RUNESCAPE was like FF5. Dwayne said Runescape was bad because he couldn't find ****, or quests that told him to find MORE unfindable ****. He said, "In Runescape, you go find that obscure person in the world of hundreds of NPCs who gives you that quest and hopefully, you'll complete it somehow as you randomly explore the whole world, kill ****, level up a bunch, and find some good armor." As someone who has ACTUALLY PLAYED FF5, that was a good description of MY experience with the game. In FF5, you go find that obscure person in the world of hundreds of NPCs who gives you that quest and hopefully, you'll complete it somehow as you randomly explore the whole world, kill ****, level up a bunch, and find some good armor.
EXACTLY THE SAME. It doesn't MATTER that FF5 had a story and was linearly-driven; that story was hard to access and I found it difficult to find out what to do next often, because in order to progress, you have to talk to EVERYONE until you find the old man that tells you how to proceed, and then go off in a random direction on the world map to find the dungeon...hopefully. I've played more MMORPGs than Dwayne, so I'm pretty sure that makes me more of an expert than him in the field of MMORPGs. I mean, like Justin says, anything is infinitely greater than zero.
The question now is, was Dwayne's view of Runescape and, subsequently, ALL OTHER MMORPGS, skewed by his bad experience with Runescape? I'm not saying Runescape is a good game; I'm saying it's dumb to say all science fiction is dumb because you read ONE book in the Dune series and didn't like it. Judging a book by its cover is not good, yo!
I really don't care if he never realizes that he's wrong. All I want is his concession that:
1) Diablo II is, has been and always will be an MMORPG...unless Blizzard comes out with a patch that deletes Battle.net, effectively limiting Diablo II to it's single-player version.
2) Not ALL MMORPGs are the same; some are better (i.e. more fun/better gameplay/good story etc.)...albeit, this kind of knowledge one can only come by by playing the actual god****ed game, and not by whining that you have no money. Using poverty as an excuse to justify flawed opinions is stupid, and you should refrain from doing so.
3) He is wrong for trying to justify judging something he has never played.
If I eat a steak and it's terrible, will I never eat steak again? No! I will try it several more times at better restaurants, to see if my hatred of steak is duely placed.
There is a 5000 character limit and I seem to have reached it...well, beats the guestb
And YES, FF11 IS an FF-RPG, because it is an RPG (see, being an MMORPG allows it to also be classified as an RPG) and it is made by Square, owner of the rights to Final Fantasy. To say Final Fantasy Online is not a Final Fantasy game is wrong for several reasons. I mean, what difference does it being an MMORPG make? NOT ONE of the other FF games made before now were sequels to any other game (excluding FFX-2...I GUESS IT MUST NOT BE AN FF GAME???) and they all have different characters (except Cid, but he is in FF11 as well). It's name is Final Fantasy and it is an RPG. Somehow Dwayne has made a massive mistake in LOGIC. Would you say the Lord of the Rings videogame is not of the franchise of Lord of the Rings, despite its name, just because it deviates from the book?
Final Fantasy 11 is a Final Fantasy RPG because it meets the qualifications of being of the FF trademark and of being an RPG. There is no standard on what an FF game should be; if there was, they would all be the same. I mean, either that or realize/admit that Square has been selling the same game to us for like 10 years.
You have to understand, Final Fantasy came from Japan, and they have different ideas about games than American companies. American companies tend to make sequels, or nothing at all. It is rare that a new innovative idea is actually turned into a game without having any predecessors like books, movies, other games etc. In Japan, the companies that make cars make beer and all sorts of other things. Companies don't have to just make one thing. Likewise, just because all Final Fantasy games have the same name, that doesn't mean they need to BE the same; in fact, there would be no point if they were all entirely the exact same game. All you would need is one of them, and Square would be out of business.
Dwayne has often said Square doesn't go out on a limb to be new or innovative; that they lose money by investing in things that might not sell. Is it my fault they stopped churning out the same game to do something different?
I'm sorry that Final Fantasy 11 is, LIKE EVERY OTHER FINAL FANTASY GAME, different from its predecessors. It is still a Final Fantasy RPG.
First of all, nowhere on my Journal did I ever claim that MMORPGs are really bad games, nor did I ever claim that they were all the same. I already conceded these points to you over AIM.
What does concern me is your attempt to classify Diablo II as an MMORPG. The thing is, MMORPGs are characterized by having thousands of people exist in a SINGLE GAME. In order to have that kind of thing in Diablo II, you'd need to fit about a thousand people into a single game, and then, and ONLY then, would it play like the standard MMORPG.
Sure, Battle.net is a massive server, but that's not what the "massive" in MMORPG means. When they say "massive", they mean that a single game is massively packed with players, generally on the order of a thousand.
Granted, this doesn't always happen in, say, Ultima Online, and you can show up and find a server that's dead quiet, but the fact is that under normal conditions (except when the game is dying) there will be a thousand players in the same game as you. Like Alan said, the genre doesn't change depending on extenuating circumstances.
But NEVER in Diablo II will you find a thousand player game the same way you do in an MMORPG.
Battle.net is different from the MMORPG server. When you play on an MMORPG server, that server is the entire game, and you're actually playing with the other thousands of people in the game. However, when you're on Battle.net, sure there are 300,000 people connected to the server, but you're not playing with 299,999 people. When you play, you're just playing with whomever happens to join your game.
In short, Battle.net is just a convenient way for all the players to go online and find someone to play with. Once they do, they're in a rather non-massive game with at most 7 other people. Battle.net is simply the middleman between you and the other people you can potentially play with.
Yes, Battle.net is just a middleman. You can do away with him altogether. You can still play Multiplayer Diablo II without Battle.net, such as over a LAN (and I think over a Modem, too, although I don't remember specifically). In that case, you'll find just how UN-massive Diablo II is, since the only thing you care about is yourself and your game and the people and monsters in your game. You don't care about the other 299,999 people on Battle.net. In fact, you aren't even using Battle.net!
Whereas in an MMORPG, the other thousands of players do have an impact on the game. Minor as that impact may be, it's infinitely greater than everyone else on Battle.net who have NO impact on your game whatsoever.
I suppose if you consider Diablo II to be an MMORPG because you're on a server with hundreds of thousands of people you'll probably never play with, then I suppose you could consider Secret of Mana to be an MM Offline RPG. Just because each game is limited to 3 players at a time doesn't make it massive. Last time I checked, there were millions of people playing. (Of course, that was back in the days when the SNES is popular.) It's definitely Multiplayer. Singleplayer Secret of Mana is just like three player games except the computer controls the other two players. And with Emulation nowadays, you CAN play over a network, so we have online play. And anyone who claims that Secret of Mana isn't an RPG is a fool. So there we have it. If we follow YOU'RE logic, Secret of Mana is Massive, Multiplayer, Online, and an RPG, so it must be an MMORPG, right?
Granted, it's a stretch, but so is your Diablo II argument. If we decide to follow your rules, then they must both be MMORPGs. I suppose if you follow your rules and try hard enough, we could classify ANY game as an MMORPG. That's completely ridiculous!
You realize that if we classify a game based only on what the genre name's individual words mean... Well, take RPG for example. I do believe that in almost all games, you play a role. Hence, almost all games in existence are Role-Playing Games. Yes, Counter-Strike is a Role-Playing Game, then, based solely on the words. And every game that takes at least a few brain cells must be a Strategy game, because in every game you must use Strategy to win. That means we could consider Tetris to be a Strategy game. And now you see how ridiculous it is to classify games based on words.
Genres are more than just words. They are a set of characteristics and expectations and styles, and it's because of these set of characteristics that we don't have ridiculous classifications like Counter-Strike being an RPG.
The defining characteristic of an MMORPG is having games with thousands of people--not just servers. Sure, Diablo II fits the words, but it doesn't fit the characteristics of MMORPGs. (Same with Secret of Mana.)
Likewise, on the other side of the argument, there's more to being an FF-RPG than to just be an RPG with the FF-name. FF-RPG is a STYLE of RPGs. (Actually, this style originated with Dragon Warrior, as far as my information goes, but FF popularized this style, hence my terminology for the genre.) FF-RPGs are usually characterized by being SINGLE-PLAYER (with the rare exception of split control, like in FF6, where you can divide the characters between the two controllers, but it's still essentially single-player), with some kind of storyline driving the game, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with turn-based, menu-based combat (or similar to turn-based, like ATB/time-based), and, of course, being an RPG.
There are many RPGs WITHOUT the FF name that are still FF-RPGs because they share the same style and major characteristics. These include (but are not limited to--I dare not say I've played all RPGs) Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire (at least the first two), Dragon Warrior, and Pocket Monsters (yes, this game does indeed follow a really similar style as FF).
However, FF11 does NOT fit the style and characteristics of the FF-RPG. It clearly does not play like any FF from FF1 through FFX. It is an FF game, but it's an MMORPG and not an FF-RPG (at least not in the same sence as Chrono Trigger was an FF-RPG, which is the way I use it). (Hey, if you have a better term other than FF-RPG that means the same thing that doesn't get us all confused about FF11, tell me the term and I'll be glad to use THAT instead.)
In conclusion, there's more to genres than words. Genres are about styles, characteristics, and expectations. There's more to being an MMORPG than just being massive, multiplayer, online, and an RPG. (By the way, it's actually a MassiveLY Multiplayer Online RPG--that is, it's not just massive and multiplayer, it's MASSIVELY multiplayer, hence the thousand player games. Sorry, I just caught that error just now. Diablo II is massive and multiplayer, but it's not massively multiplayer.) Likewise, there's more than an FF-RPG than having the name FF and being an RPG. On a more fundamental level, there's more than being and RPG than just being a game where you play a role, and there's more than being a strategy game than just using strategy. The words themselves don't mean much. (For example, there is no Kill-**** genre, even though there are lots of games where you kill ****.) They are just labels to help us get across the ideas. So, before you classify a game into a genre, think about what that genre means, and not just what the words say.
