Riot Games MMO

Caeden said:

It is funny. I don’t think any D2 or WoW guys really did anything close to their blizzard work after leaving. I think you could say Brevik had a few solid things, but any former Blizz/WoW have just made vaporware.

Game Dev is about that one big idea and the right people on that idea catching lightening in a bottle. They peak and can remain solid but there’s usually only 1…maybe 2 big ideas in the brain trust guy.

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Yeah, design folks dramatically overestimate how importing the idea part is. What's the saying? "If you want to see how much ideas are worth, try to sell one of yours." I doubt most of those people really expected to do better after leaving though. They're mostly just creatives that wanted to work on their own thing. Just imagine being a designer working on GTA, "Hey boss, I have a great idea for a new game!" Boss: "That nice idea-boy, but are you done writing those 10,000 hooker death barks? Maybe once you're finished we'll see if you can convince one of our execs to abandon the top selling franchise in history to make your shitty my little pony mmo. We only needed one good idea, and we had it 30 years ago. Now get your ass back to the hooker hole."

Implementation and market conditions are far more important of course. I mean you still need an idea that has an audience, but I'd put that in the "market conditions" bucket. It's not just the individual devs though. Any designer will have tons of ideas, and a few of them are probably good. So any studio will likely have more good ideas than than the entire industry will release in any given year... But picking the right one to work on at the right time is tough, especially when you have a multi-year timeline with a rapidly shifting market. (With enough resources, you can kind of brute force it of course, but there are limits to that.) One good idea/implementation with the right market fit can potentially set a studio up for decades with sequels/related titles, but how many studios have had a hit and have gone on to make other, entirely non-related hits? It happens of course, but it's a pretty small number. Or maybe the better question would be, how many studios have gone bankrupt because they wanted to be creative and decided to make something different instead of making a relatively safe sequel that probably would have kept the lights on?

MMO's are dead until AI is advanced enough to create one from a prompt.

Early MMOs were basically proto-VR chat where you can fight orcs and dragons. That was a big part of their appeal.

Then people realized hell is other people and wanted a more curated experience with endless content drip

There is still a market for MMOs, but I do think they need to evolve to remain relevant. Just like how fps games had to move beyond team death match multiplayer

The show-off factor still exists, whether it is for earned outfits/mounts/titles or bought skins through the game store they will sell more if there is a communal space for randoms to gawk at how cool your stuff is. Lobby simulators and instances can't accomplish that.

I think what existed for MMO's was completely gutted by things like Rust, lost ark, etc. as noted, the Massive part of MMOS was barely a thing in "proper' mmos anymore. instanced mmos lost any feeling of actually being an mmo. you never just randomly came across other players in the wilde. you can't. you are in an instance.
large servers, and communities in those kinds of games are doing the job better.
This coupled with MMO's turning into jobs. this made mmo's unplayable.

Kill the Dailys, weekly, monthlies. Rethink raiding from the ground up.

Guildwars 2 was close. Rift had the base idea as well. its initial idea of pve town invasions, hot joined parties, etc, was great. but ended up failing at the high end, as it turned into a standard raid mmo.

I think they need to organize around hot joining pve raids, that don't require precise co-operation. so rando's can actually team up to work together. A greater focus on asynchronous co-op as well. so my playtimes don't need to line up with other guildmates play times, etc.

The last MMOs where I played mostly because of my guild was New World and Dune if you want to count that - both had core mechanics that required a coordinated group to do effectively. But that is also a double edged sword because if people stop playing, you’re bored because there isn’t a whole lot to do without a group