What's wrong with ORPGs?

[Growlur]

This is a crosspost from our Shadowclan boards. With a lot of complaining going on about the limited content of Toontown, I thought I'd just go through some of the major limitations of nearly every other ORPG out these days, and make note of how Toontown stands with these issues.

1. Adventures in real time:
In paper RPG's days can seem like minutes and minutes can seem like days. Unfortunately, in an ORPG everyone must be on the same timescale.

2. Groundhog Day:
The world never changes. Everyday features the same monsters in the same places that are most likely camped by the same players as the day before.

3. But Mom, I don't want to be an adventurer!:
If your fantasies do not involve swinging swords or slinging spells, you have few options.

4. Room to room combat:
RPG's evolved from tabletop games where physical location mattered. Then, most MUD's crammed everyone into rooms. Graphic interfaces have brought back the illusion of depth, but the game mechanics clearly have not.

5. What if Superman was a jerk?
Thanks to ORPG's that allow characters to reach god-like levels of power, we now know the answer to this question.

6. The inmates are running the asylum:
With only a handful of GM's to manage thousands of players the world is largely in the players' hands. Alas, few developers have made positive use of this situation.

7. Here be Dragons:
Digital words are finite by nature. I doubt that even an army of overworked, outsourced, foreign programmers could create new content faster than players can explore it.

8. Transient characters in a persistent world:
LOTR would have been a very short story if Frodo had just logged out with the Ring.

9. The Devil is in the details:
In traditional RPG's we read and hear a few details of a world and fill the rest in with our imaginations. In ORPG's it is hard to imagine a quaint village while you are looking at a couple of sparsely decorated shacks inhabited only by vendors.

1. Since it's quite difficult to solve an issue regarding time (just like the 0-timer) it would be fallacy to fault Toontown for this. To be honest, I can't see how a timescale change would even assist the game.

2. The "war on the cogs" never progresses. In fact, minus invasions, it has yet to even change slightly. Naturally the war cannot come to an end or the game would be over, but being able to do grand things that make an actual change on the layout of a district would be a vast improvement over what we currently have. It seems even the rules that govern the toon world are dictated by cogs.
This was not nearly as much of an issue until the concept of defeating cogs in a certain playground area arose. Although I understand that the Devs were trying to relieve more crowded areas of the map, I believe that rather than laying down the bandaid of playground specific cogs, they could fan the game out more towards the high end. This would accomplish two things:
a. Allow more freedom of interaction between high end and low end toons.
b. Children who have a difficult time doing basic things would be able to get closer to the middle game section rather than being perpetually stuck in TTC.

3. Perhaps we don't swing swords or sling spells, but the truth of the matter is if you're not defeating cogs in Toontown, you must be getting jellybeans. Disney will need to work hard on this because children have short attention spans. They are not going to stay in Toontown to defeat 1000 Dreamland cogs, they're going to stay because there is a lot of fun and toony stuff to do with their friends.
I'm not sure shops are the answer to this problem because they would require human beings to run them. Sort of like being a vendor in Ultima, nobody wants to stand around hocking wares.

4. Toontown has limited itself to four person round style combat. This doesn't allow much in the way of flexibility or large scale cooperation or teamwork, and makes things like gag training quite difficult since the larger group must be broken into several smaller groups.
Perhaps Cog HQ offers us a change of pace from this, but I seriously doubt they would rework a fundamental of the product at this stage.

5. This is naturally where Toontown shines. A 100 laff toon can't do you any more harm than a 15 laff toon, because you can simply leave any unwanted interaction with any toon, and it's very easy to disappear in Toontown.

6. Toontown characters are able to make only minor physical changes to the world that we all interact with, and this limits the amount of collaborative efforts of the toon population. For example, nobody's estate is on a "shared" ground.

7. This is probably one of the sorest spots with Toontown. The world as we know it is explorable in no time at all. A 15 laff toon can make it to Dreamland in 3 minutes tops. I truly believe that contrary to the current layout and concept of Toontown, it IS possible to open up new sections by just dropping hit detection zones and adding artwork and monsters. A system of tasks need not be in place, you could simply add streets with different mixes of cogs at different levels to achieve the necessary effect.

8. They are making improvements to enhance the roleplay, such as removing credit for an invasion if you switch districts. Rather than feeling just as if you've logged in to the same grind, invasions can help give a temporary sense of urgency and time importance that most games lack.

9. Toontown gets good to high marks on this aspect. You definitely feel that every aspect of the world is a "toon world".

[Horace]

Can't really add much to it, but those are good thoughts, and thanks for letting me read it!

[Prof_Peppy]

Very nice post. I just have one question...


Could you explain this? I was unaware of this.

It's fair enough to say that Toontown does just as well as any other ORPG in this catagory. However they are making improvements to enhance the roleplay, such as removing credit for an invasion if you switch districts.

[binky kookytooth]

Credit for buildings defeated in a district only apply to that district. You have 'seperate counters' for buildings defeated in each district. When you return to a district you will retain credit for all defeated buildings not yet recaptured by the stinkin' cogs.

[Cool Coconut]

Ug! Me Nub Gruk lat koz lat iz Tupid Humie! Hoowah!

[Growlur]

Originally posted by Prof_Peppy
Could you explain this? I was unaware of this.

"It's fair enough to say that Toontown does just as well as any other ORPG in this catagory. However they are making improvements to enhance the roleplay, such as removing credit for an invasion if you switch districts."

According to the patch notes for patch 1.0.6.5.test:

Switching shard during a cog invasion will reset credit for it.

Now to be honest, when Test hit a Mingler invasion yesterday I didn't get a chance to switch districts because the invasion was so short. However, I would read this to mean that if you get double credit for all gags used during an invasion and then leave the invasion, you will lose the double credit.

I believe you should be able to log off without losing the credit, since if you logged back in you would remain in the invasion district.

Again, this has not really been thoroughly tested due to limited test window time.

[Firecat]

Great Post!

Misha and I are online gammers, which is the reason we play ToonTown "off and on" so much. We usually get into one thing at a time, so when we were playing AC, or AO for instance, we rarely ever logged into ToonTown, however once ToonTown went live (with LE), even when we stopped playing for a while, we did still keep the accounts, for the kids to play when they wanted. (And of course for us to also be able to play again when we wanted, such as we have been doing lately).

We do all love ToonTown, but can also see your point! It would be nice to have large scale "events" and things of that nature, to keep the game interesting and not always so much the "same" all the time.

Misha of course comes up with much better ideas about this than I do. He keeps telling me he wishes they would add a huge monster in every now and then, that would take about 100 Toons or so to kill. Of course he even explains it better than I do, and makes it sound really cool...lol.

Anything so that it is not just the "same old thing" all the time would be nice. Even my children lose interest for a couple of months at a time, but just like us, they always do come back.

So this is not a "complaint" by any means, just a suggestion that would liven things up a bit every now and then. :O)

HUGS,
Firecat