Where are all the MMORPG games? lol

Where are all the MMORPGs, A+++ titles?


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Kirun

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I think between M&M and Evercraft, you're going to see a massive dropoff for the nostalgia factor amongst boomers, fueling shit like TLPs and WoW Classic. Both M&M and Evercraft are essentially feeding the "nostalgia", but also offering "new".

If the devs of both games play it right, I think they'll deal a massive deathblow to the money train that both server types bring in for DPG and Blizzard.
 
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mkopec

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I said WEIRD not BAD.
New world is not a bad game. It just falls apart in the end game department. But everything up to that is AAA. Or at least AA. Its definitely worth a play through if you never played it, just dont expect to stick around after, because, like I said, nothing to do.
 

Chris

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Numbers suggest otherwise. A shitty game with a dumb setting managed almost a million concurrent players and cracked the top 5 on Twitch for a month. If an MMO can get almost a million people to try out roleplaying a conquistador (lol), I'd argue there's a viable market hungry for a game that doesn't suck.
Amazon's marketing budget and brand recognition got a million players then crashed and burned after a month.

Roleplaying a Conquistador sounds amazing if you can do Catholic rituals, slaughter/bang natives and get bigger and bigger crucifixes to stick on your player housing.
 
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Fucker

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It's going to take 15 years of development and most players will quit within 2 months.
That is exactly AOC's fate. Hardcore pvp game wherein one guild will monopolize everything and thus drive everyone away. They might have more runway than 2 months, but not by much.
 

Mist

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New world is not a bad game. It just falls apart in the end game department. But everything up to that is AAA. Or at least AA. Its definitely worth a play through if you never played it, just dont expect to stick around after, because, like I said, nothing to do.
I was referring to Starfield about the bad. Read the quote my quote was quoting.
 
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...

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I wouldn't even try to adapt an ip to an mmo. Just make everything in service to the game and game play and play loop then adapt lore in your genre.

Do not hire any of the refuse from modern Hollywood to wrote the story arc or setting. Ask old nerds to do it
 
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pwe

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Once AI gets more integrated with gaming companies, we'll probably see MMOs come back. AI can take on quest writing, story line evolution, etc. Maybe it can make it more consistent too.
Taken to the extreme AI could run a huge evolving MMO, where even the developers don’t know what will happen the next day. NPCs literally building and expanding cities. Orc raids burning shit down. An actual living and breathing world. With a mastermind AI pulling the strings.
 
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Mist

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Taken to the extreme AI could run a huge evolving MMO, where even the developers don’t know what will happen the next day. NPCs literally building and expanding cities. Orc raids burning shit down. An actual living and breathing world. With a mastermind AI pulling the strings.
Technically all of this is already possible, with dynamic/procedural "monster ecologies" planned for the earliest MMOs. This was possible back when MMOs first started, but abandoned in favor of a more static DIKU content model.

Obviously, tech has improved since, but design philosophies haven't kept up with the tech.

And no, you wouldn't have 1 "mastermind" AI pulling the strings, because monolithic models scale poorly along a number of different axes. You'd have an entire ecosystem of models that take input from developers and translate it into generative content. Instead of writing dialogue directly, writers would write 5-page backstories for NPC townsfolk and assign them key plot hooks for quests to sprinkle into dialogue. Larger backstories for more pivotal NPCs. Quest models would then use those hooks to string together different versions of quests for different players. If a quest proved incompletable or was rated poorly after completion, then that would be fed back into the quest model.

But in order to do this, you need to create a world that collects a lot of feedback data from every point of player interaction within the world, and then uses that data to constantly retrain and fine-tune the underlying models. The infrastructure for all this would be pretty enormous, but I think someone will eventually build it.
 
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Talos

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Roleplaying a Conquistador sounds amazing if you can do Catholic rituals, slaughter/bang natives and get bigger and bigger crucifixes to stick on your player housing.
Vince Mcmahon Wwe GIF
 
  • 4Worf
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gLobal

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The genre got hit by a combination of a juggernaut entry, a bunch of cheap/bad clones, and vaporware. Then smartphones took over, and the gaming industry evolved into microtransaction shitfests that make more money with less effort. On top of that, the concept of a persistent world lost its novelty.

Remember when you bought a bad MMO and still played it anyway for the free month? Well, now a bad launch for an MMO is a kiss of death thanks to social media and there are plenty of options for the jello-brained gamers. Any decent (non-lobby, non-grindfest, non-MicroTX) MMO these days will struggle to maintain development and keep subscribers because the concept is entirely foreign to the modern gamer.
 
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Mist

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There's just a lot of different games that scratch different parts of the MMO itch but at different intervals.

Want a game where you loot a bunch of shit and if you get lucky you pwn a bunch of newbs for free? Play Fortnight or any other BR with colorcoded loot levels.
Want a cooperative/competitive pvp game about cumulative advantage? Play any MOBA.
Just wanna grind shit? Well, every fucking FPS game has Experience Points now.
Destiny 2 has a bajillion armor pieces and guns to collect, etc.

It's much harder to build "The One Game To Rule Them All" than it was a while ago. But people said there would never be a bigger pop star than Michael Jackson again, due to the breadth of the music scene, and then along came Taylor...

So yeah, I believe someone will eventually utilize AI combined with good design and other next-gen tech to produce something outstanding at some point that will command all of the industry's attention in the same way WoW did for a while. What exact form it'll take, I have no idea.
 
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Lunis

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I think the back to back failure of Warhammer and SWOTOR made a lot of publishers weary of investing in MMO's. On top of that you have most games becoming service/seasonal to where they make just as much as an MMO would. Future is bleak for sure.
 

TJT

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There's just a lot of different games that scratch different parts of the MMO itch but at different intervals.

Want a game where you loot a bunch of shit and if you get lucky you pwn a bunch of newbs for free? Play Fortnight or any other BR with colorcoded loot levels.
Want a cooperative/competitive pvp game about cumulative advantage? Play any MOBA.
Just wanna grind shit? Well, every fucking FPS game has Experience Points now.
Destiny 2 has a bajillion armor pieces and guns to collect, etc.

It's much harder to build "The One Game To Rule Them All" than it was a while ago. But people said there would never be a bigger pop star than Michael Jackson again, due to the breadth of the music scene, and then along came Taylor...

So yeah, I believe someone will eventually utilize AI combined with good design and other next-gen tech to produce something outstanding at some point that will command all of the industry's attention in the same way WoW did for a while. What exact form it'll take, I have no idea.
This is a concept that I absolutely love. It currently only exists in LTRPG books which can be tons of fun.

But there's this whole idea of dynamic classes. Like everyone gets some basic bitch class and you have standard progression like joining the mage guild and becoming Mage->Magus->Arcmagus. Which is good and powerful and requires grinding and such to accomplish.

Or you can fuck off and run into the forest come across some weird ass encounter which gives you a hidden class that was never even documented on an entirely different skillset that can do whatever the fuck. With its own limitations and excitement. Then there's a whole universe of these differing classes, secret classes, secret progression and so on because it's all guided by the game.

But all of it requires a near-sapient AI dynamically doing all of this. You're seeing the start of this with AI language models doing really engaging choose your own adventure stuff.

A man can dream.
 
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Pogi.G

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I don't have much hope for the mmorpg genre moving forward. Pantheon is never going to see the light of day. These other games that are coming out will probably die off in 6 months or less.

A couple of things I think could extend the life of the mmorpg genre.

1. Blizzard makes a wow version of Diablo.
2. Daybreak games remakes original everquest.
3. Daybreak focuses resources into creating everquest 3.

1 would probably have the most appeal to a larger player base. 2 and 3 would certainly be niche. That said, these three things are never going to happen.

I think the apple vision pro is a step in the right direction for a ready player one type universe. time will tell, but I think that is where things are heading next.
 

Khane

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Blizzard already tried to make a wow version of Diablo. It was called Diablo 3, and then they released a half assed expansion to it years later called Diablo IV.
 
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Chris

Potato del Grande
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A couple of things I think could extend the life of the mmorpg genre.

1. Blizzard makes a wow version of Diablo.
2. Daybreak games remakes original everquest.
3. Daybreak focuses resources into creating everquest 3.
Daybreak is probably the only studio less competent than Blizzard in this space, excluding the actual scam studios.

A studio with a proven track record has to make a D&D Forgotten Realms, Warhammer 40k or Magic the Gathering MMO, or Riot makes the Runeterra MMO.

I can't see any other way. Diablo is too shallow for an MMO. Diablo 4 is the limit of what the IP can achieve. Everquest is a dead IP. Most non gaming IPs are too shallow for a MMO or not designed for it.