Is the MMO Market imploding?
- Thread starter tad10
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Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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Go fish in Northern BC and then come back and tell me you didn't have fun.
"This spring is only 25lbs. Throw him back."
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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Breaking a fresh camp? Sure, it could be hard (if your puller sucked or you had a noob monk). Keeping the camp? In most cases it was a yawn fest unless SOE had some bullshit respawn timers in that zone.
I miss my chanter now. Camping, broken down by the hour, was usually 55 minutes of trying to stay awake punctuated by stark raving terror.
Angelwatch
Trakanon Raider
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WOW was an anomaly. We will, probably, never see another MMO as successful ever again. WOW succeeded by bringing in people who normally wouldn't play MMOs. Lots of these people wanted to play for the lore or because their friends played it. But a sizable chunk of WOW's players never played video games before WOW and aren't likely to play them again.
I think the biggest problem with the industry has been lack of quality coupled with WOW being too big for its own good. There are far too many examples of a new game launching that wasn't polished to the level that gamers expect and Blizzard is able to deal a deathblow by launching a major patch or expansion to coincide with the launch and doom the other game before it had a chance. Even when Blizzard didn't really interfere (like SWTOR), a lot of games managed to kill themselves. I had fun with SWTOR but it released at least 6 months too early. So once my initial 3 month sub ended, I never went back.
I think there is room for a hardcore MMO again but its going to be a niche game (1 million or less subs) and a lot of company's don't want to bother. Businesses by their very nature are risk averse so they've been trying to copy what has worked and duplicate it. Personally though, while I loved Everquest, I don't think I'd go back to such a hardcore game again. I've got too much other stuff going on my life 13 years later that it simply wouldn't work out for me.
I think the biggest problem with the industry has been lack of quality coupled with WOW being too big for its own good. There are far too many examples of a new game launching that wasn't polished to the level that gamers expect and Blizzard is able to deal a deathblow by launching a major patch or expansion to coincide with the launch and doom the other game before it had a chance. Even when Blizzard didn't really interfere (like SWTOR), a lot of games managed to kill themselves. I had fun with SWTOR but it released at least 6 months too early. So once my initial 3 month sub ended, I never went back.
I think there is room for a hardcore MMO again but its going to be a niche game (1 million or less subs) and a lot of company's don't want to bother. Businesses by their very nature are risk averse so they've been trying to copy what has worked and duplicate it. Personally though, while I loved Everquest, I don't think I'd go back to such a hardcore game again. I've got too much other stuff going on my life 13 years later that it simply wouldn't work out for me.
Bearing in mind that mostsingle-playerRPGs (and games with RPG-like design) tend to give more rewards for completing quests(/missions/tasks/objectives/etc) nowadays rather than just grinding on mobs (Japanese games excluded), the likelihood of some new MMO magicking up a solution out of thin air seems even more unlikely.
tl'dr: Grinding on mobs for xp or doing quests for xp. Pick one.
Famm
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Time is really the only resource there is for an MMO. Zehn also thinks there should be no levels, leveling, trash mobs, manual looting, mana, or travel. Fuck Zehn. He wants everything tedious to be automated so you can just jump in and go like Diablo or Skyrim or an FPS. Hell even Skyrim or Fallout or other single player RPG's still believe in the timesink. At least they are still fucking RPGS. These modern MMO's have gone all in on instanced dial-a-dungeon design and its utter tripe. Zehn and apparently everyone else that matters want the genre stripped of everything that set it apart and made it compelling compared to single player games. No wonder the whole thing is in a state of ruin, its all bland and vanilla cookie cutter shit. Plus as mentioned, the entire industry has moved past subscriptions to freemium nonsense now so the most basic building blocks of the style are completely superfluous.
Get rid of the fucking !/? style shit would be a fine fucking start. Its sad that ancient, outdated, primitive, andbuggyEQ had a more engaging and dynamic system of interaction with quest givers than any modern game of any genre. You literally talked to the mother fuckers. Granted it was a bug ridden sloppy heap of shit, but it was still superior to flashing signs over an NPC's fucking head. Where was that in D&D? "Ok, you approach town you see a small group of people and one of them is glowing bright green with money signs floating all around his head. What would you like to do next?" Fuck.
the lack of Accept & Decline buttons for quests went a long way in embedding at least part of the lore/stories into even the most casual of players.
"Fetch me a grog of [ale]"
What ale
Which ale
"Strom Thornbarron's ale you moron, off with you!"
Do i pickpocket this... do i kill this guy... do i buy it... who the fuck is this guy... which zone is he in..
COMPARED TO
"Fetch me sdfgjsdfkjllakg"
ACCEPT *follows the map*
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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The text driven quest idea is good on paper, but it has to be flexible. Eq was too rigid, so unless you guessed the magic word, you got no where. People would just brute force spam them with random words half the time. A system like that with advanced AI/language capabilities (aka, IBM's Watson) would be cool, but that is a lot of work.
Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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In context to quest text? I don't think so.. I'd much rather being doing a Rally call than quest grinding. I think rally calls would of been awesome in EQ and probably would offered just enough casualness to not have the market go full retard like it has.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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It's just a take on the Public Quest idea. I never saw any problem with it and you could argue that GM Events in early EQ were a form of PQ/Rallying Calls. I wish I had played EQ in 1999 during the Halloween Event. By all accounts it was the tits.
You can't use single player games because you can craft them around a single perspective. MMOs are all about "grinding" in some way or another. I'd like one that doesn't have levels and no quests. I've outlined in numerous threads what that would be like. EQN's keynote address got half of what I wanted. Could still be a pipedream though.
You shouldn't be so singleminded. Things will change.
i'd much rather grind mobs for exp than quest. quests in EQ actually felt like quests. you either randomly spoke with an NPC in a town or city and got a quest, or you found an item on a mob that you killed that said "quest item" and you knew you could do something with it and be rewarded with an item or faction or something. i still remember a lot of the quests i did in EQ because there weren't as many of them and a lot of them truly felt epic (i was a wizard so the staff of the wheel quest comes to mind) as you traversed the entire game trying to figure out how to complete the quest. in WoW, it was just a means to an end. you couldn't really exp grind by killing mobs, because they offered no real exp points, so the ONLY way to level up in warcraft was by doing quests, which in turn made them all feel mundane and just a huge pain in the ass as you just tried to clear your quest book before reaching the next hub.
I never played a wizard in original EQ but I did level one to 50 a few years back on p99. There was the Staff of Temperate Flux quest that sent you across the map for 4 different pieces. The beauty of that quest was that you were rewarded with an item that was incredibly useful no matter what your level was. Now a days when you're rewarded with an item from a quest it's typically useless by the time you get to the next quest hub.
I prefer quests to be few and far between, with rewards to you'll want your character to keep for a long long time due to their usefulness or legend.