Grizzlebeard
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era
- Thread starter Ukerric
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YttriumF
The Karenist Karen
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How World of Warcraft Has Evolved With the Internet
Great article where WIRED interviews Blizzard's Ion Hazzikostas. Quoting from the article,
"Today, people are almost trained to min-max,” says Hazzikostas, referring to the play strategy of minimizing weaknesses and maximizing strengths. “The community pushes people in that direction, especially socially. Even if it’s not your preferred playstyle, the people who may want you in your group or may not, are holding you to some of those standards. Once it’s knowable, you’re expected to know.”
I agree with several of Ion's points ... we as a mmo community have changed.
Love this next one,
“It’s amazing how some of the old tropes you never quite get away from,” says Hazzikostas. “I actually have a coworker who was one of the original developers on a World of Warcraft, whose name you'd definitely recognize if I said it, whose own personal WoW Classic group split up at level 60 over loot drama in Blackrock. This is a group of developers who played the game 15 years ago, worked on the game 15 years ago.”
Wonder who that was?
Great article where WIRED interviews Blizzard's Ion Hazzikostas. Quoting from the article,
"Today, people are almost trained to min-max,” says Hazzikostas, referring to the play strategy of minimizing weaknesses and maximizing strengths. “The community pushes people in that direction, especially socially. Even if it’s not your preferred playstyle, the people who may want you in your group or may not, are holding you to some of those standards. Once it’s knowable, you’re expected to know.”
I agree with several of Ion's points ... we as a mmo community have changed.
Love this next one,
“It’s amazing how some of the old tropes you never quite get away from,” says Hazzikostas. “I actually have a coworker who was one of the original developers on a World of Warcraft, whose name you'd definitely recognize if I said it, whose own personal WoW Classic group split up at level 60 over loot drama in Blackrock. This is a group of developers who played the game 15 years ago, worked on the game 15 years ago.”
Wonder who that was?
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ShakyJake
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I guess FF and GW2 are the only real alternatives?
What's amazing is that we aren't that far off from 2024. By that point WoW will be 20 years old. TWENTY YEARS. 20 years prior to 2004 was 1984. If you showed me a game from 2004 back in 1984 my head would've exploded, not counting that it's multiplayer with millions of players around the world. WoW, to me, even the 2004 version here in 2020 still looks pretty decent. Gameplay wise? Not much, if anything, has significantly improved since then.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Mostly. There's a handful of other western-style MMOs, but everything outside of those 3 is dead.
I was watching a video from MMObyte who basically explained that Rift was dead - you queue for instant adventures that shower you with XP without having to learn anything about your class, level to max, then roll a new character and repeat.
There are no other western-type MMO around, the rest is basically anime-style action combat korean grinders (or sometimes japanese ones) with a half-life of 12 months. After that, they squeeze as much money they can while abandoning any development.
The MMO industry really is in a sad state right now. Even if you're not part of the "return to its roots" camp, there hasn't been any real advances in gameplay to make any MMO stand out in the past 15 years. For me, I'd just like to see a game with better dungeons and more meaningful loot. I don't need my eyes to melt over amazing graphics, or famous actor's voices, or movie like cut scenes. There are a few games on the horizon that I'm holding out hope for, but I'm getting older and more jaded.
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Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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For the longest time Ive just sat back and believed that PC's were just not at the point, hardware wise, to support new ideas. If you watch something as silly as the fortnite videos of the Travis Scott in game concert - you can clearly call bullshit on that idea. There are so many things going on in stretch of videos that it made me give props to the devs of Fortnite for their engine. I'm really at the point now that I dont think it's hardware. I dont think its internet speeds. I purely put the blame on the developers of MMO's sticking to this "tried and true" method of content that has just been done over and over adnausem. There is just this stale lack of imagination in the market and it seems like anyone that tries to break that "tried and true" mold is just beheaded. "Developing an encounter like that sir, is going to take at least this many man hours and cost this much money. We just dont have the budget to do that!" Even though they have millions available and that is just a drop in the bucket.
MMO's are becoming increasingly less popular due to the fact that if you played one, you've essentially played them all. When is the last time you played an MMO and was truly blown away? Destructible environments would go a long ways. Hell, a lot of the shit that was promised in EQ:Next was next gen. Hand those ideas to a competent team that doesnt draw retarded Vah'shir Lion people and you have your next big hit. But no, we have three MMO's that everyone's sitting on their hands waiting patiently to launch that.. for all it's worth, are the same f'n game we've been playing for the last 20-25 years. I would say I hate developers, but I really mean I hate the corporate bullshit that has taken over the industry.
Ashes of Creation looks great for what it is. I just think it's boring as shit that they think their "node" system is the best thing that they could have came up with to set themselves apart from the rest of the industry.
MMO's are becoming increasingly less popular due to the fact that if you played one, you've essentially played them all. When is the last time you played an MMO and was truly blown away? Destructible environments would go a long ways. Hell, a lot of the shit that was promised in EQ:Next was next gen. Hand those ideas to a competent team that doesnt draw retarded Vah'shir Lion people and you have your next big hit. But no, we have three MMO's that everyone's sitting on their hands waiting patiently to launch that.. for all it's worth, are the same f'n game we've been playing for the last 20-25 years. I would say I hate developers, but I really mean I hate the corporate bullshit that has taken over the industry.
Ashes of Creation looks great for what it is. I just think it's boring as shit that they think their "node" system is the best thing that they could have came up with to set themselves apart from the rest of the industry.
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Kriptini
Vyemm Raider
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ArcheAge. They had an extremely solid game that was unfortunately murdered by their 1.0 update. This was pretty recent, too.
I think the biggest problem right now is that developers are making games they think people want to play, instead of just making a game they want to make. EQ didn't do surveys, or polls, or open dialogues with the MMO "community." They just made a game they thought would be fun. I truly believe if an MMO releases that is new and revolutionary, and that people really want to invest their time into playing, it'll be by accident.
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Destructible environments imply dynamic collision detection geometry. In games today destruction is mostly pre-defined, and all clients have all possible geometry pre-rendered locally. If you are going to really implement a freely malleable environment like Landmark/EQ:Next, then you have to update every single players view of the world with everyone elses - every step of the way. This would probably work in todays internet up to a set point of players, like 32 or 64. But that does not make it an MMO. We even have problems running WoW Classic with lots of players, so they have to implement login queues and layering, and this game just has to send out player/npc spawn/movement data to everyone else.
Also, given enough time you'd just end up having people make the terrain into penis shapes.
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a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
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Every game, regardless of type, has devolved into the mobile archetype. I spend X amount of time to obtain Y. Whether actual skill is involved is irrelevant.
The game play hasn't been improved upon. Just extended. Division? Farm more. Farm more. More and more and more. And more. Diablo fucked this shit up long before we even realized how much it would destroy innovation.
MMO isn't a viable game model. Full stop. It has to be built upon everything else.
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I just want one game that has fantastic dungeon crawl content. I'd take EQ graphics. No cutscenes. No voice acting. No 300 step long world sprawling main story quest.
Let me grab 3 or 4 or 5 people, and queue up into Guk, and go through it top to bottom, side to side, murderhobo'ing frogs.
I dont need giant raids, or dodge roll 503855 red circles, or always be pressing buttons have 90+ apm gogogo.
Let me grab a mix of classes and spend an hour or two or three crawling through giant dungeons, figuring out how to split rooms, or crowd control rooms, or kite rooms, the old gen way.
Or 15-30 minutes to do smaller, faster dungeons with lower rewards, in the new mmo gen style.
The good parts of the last 3 generations all mashed into one without the tedious bits.
Let me jump right into complex group content, give me a wide variety to pick and choose what I want my kit to look like, and make that the meat of the game.
Probably couldnt sell enough glam on a cash shop though.
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ShakyJake
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This is what I've been saying. Some studio out there should create a free-to-play dungeon crawler. Just dungeons, no open world. Maybe a hub or something so people can show off their shinies, but all other content is dungeon or dungeon-like for 5 or so players.
rhinohelix
Dental Dammer
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Blizzard/WoW got so big that it snuffed out all competitors and drove everyone else into the mobile game market. What killed MMO's without a specific platform purpose like GW2, (which we were lucky to get in the West, a few years later and we wouldn't have gotten it, I don't think) was monetization: Companies found a better way to make money (FTP with grind, pay-to-hurry, microtransactions/cosmetics, etc.) and that therefore killed the need to build worlds that encouraged exploration, adventure, etc. Basically, the old paradigm of the sub to D&D pen-and-paper campaign gave way to the micro-transaction for millennial smartphone quickie game. So MMOs died because it was so much easier to make mobile games that rang the Pavlovian bell so much more than camping for SoW Boots in LGuk. Meanwhile WoW sits there like Ogre on the barrel in Revenge of the Nerds and won't let anyone pass or grow; every other RPG that has come out has been more in the Destiny-mold. They are MMOs but nothing like what came before, because if they were, WoW would come find them and strangle them in their cribs. All the Asian MMOs suck for the Most part and while I enjoyed ESO and love GW2 (I am flirting with taking another character to 80, even though I have only one or two characters close to max or caught up with the Living World; I really don't like the expansions very much and find them tiresome) anything now that comes out will have to break new ground or risk being flattened or have a different set of expectations.
EDIT: To answer the thread, I know this puts me in the minority but I dislike dungeon crawls; I much prefer the open world. I like the cities and outdoor areas, the overworld and the wilderness. I love the way the world comes together when they do it right, the geography and the overarching world narrative. Its harder to do but done right everything works out so well.
EDIT: To answer the thread, I know this puts me in the minority but I dislike dungeon crawls; I much prefer the open world. I like the cities and outdoor areas, the overworld and the wilderness. I love the way the world comes together when they do it right, the geography and the overarching world narrative. Its harder to do but done right everything works out so well.
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I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I like open world as well. I'd like to see a game that combines some great open world/outdoor areas, with some deep, non linear dungeons. No reason why in 2020 we can't have a mix of both. Hell, EQ did it pretty damn well and that was 20 years ago.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Money.
Given the amount of money necessary these days to produce a quality expansive game, nobody is going to go the MMO route. Any game with significant investment to produce a good quality, you will have transaction filled instanced lobby games, which means there's no need of a great open world.
It's a rat race between the rising costs required to produce a modern-era MMO and the simplification that create the revenue streams needed to persuade investors to give you the money - because your kickstarter does not produce enough money for that to happen. The upper bar for open world expansive MMO is basically Project Gorgon.
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One of the problems is that after the boom of WoW the copycats came, but not only in the form of outright clones but other games trying to copy the business model of a) forming a habit of playing daily and b) fleecing whales by providing bling bling and "services".
Together withlootboxes "surprise mechanics" and DLCs they are the four horsemen of the upcoming second gaming apocalypse. Because the current AAA Hollywood-esque development model isn't sustainable once people have a lot less disposable income.
Together with