World of Warcraft: Current Year

Kithani said:

MMOs are a dead genre IMO the only real "market" for it is 35-50yo neckbeards who never grew up and the ones that did don't have the time to sink into a subscription based game anymore. I doubt we'll see any MMO game release in the next decade that is as popular as WoW was unless you redefine what people typically think of as an MMO

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MMOs in a manner of speaking have already been redefined a bit. The closest approximation would probably be action games with RPG-like elements where you have more than 20ish players running around at the sametime where ever you are, with even more at central hubs.

Of course you might argue that isn't "massive", but if you think objectively about old MMOs like UO/EQ1/WoW/ and what have you

1) You rarely saw large numbers of players in the open world outside of special events/world bosses anyways - too many usually detracted from the overall gaming experience. Early MMOs had players self-filtering (if Guk is too crowded, you went elsewhere), later MMOs added actual filtering like shards/layers.

2) The largest amount of people in one spot were usually towns/hubs

3) As you progressed, you spent less time in open world and more time in specific places like dungeons or raids

Newer "MMO lite" games dispense with the "thousands of players at sametime!!!" because that isn't a draw anymore - players are more interested in what their personal experience will be like, which has led to more curated online experiences. Instead of giving players a concert at Woodstock, they're giving them a band playing in a smaller club.

I think if we ever see a next big “MMO” it will be if VR ever really takes off personally until then I think game designers have come up with more addictive gameplay styles like MOBAs and whatever Fornite is.

The usual addictive draw from EQ in my memory was the “permanent” character progression where it felt like I was working toward something longterm which wasn’t really an itch scratched by other genres at the time but now you have achievements and battlepasses, TF2 hats

TJT said:

Riot games remains in the best position to throw down a MMO. They have game lore stretching back to 2008. Along with wildly successful side projects that all worked to further expand upon the world.

If they will succeed at their MMO remains to be seen. Development time for these games is seemingly measured in decades at this point.

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I have hope that Riot can do one properly, I just don't have hope they'll do it before WW3 finally kicks off

I dunno, I still feel like Riot's project might end up as Project Titan 2.0: They probably tried to make something more unique, but started to question "is it actually fun?"

I think it’s going to take truly advanced VR for the next evolution of the MMO to occur.

There's a market for MMOs but they're so costly and so time consuming to produce we stopped getting them. At this point if I was pitching ideas I'd suggest buying a dead yet promising MMO and doing a remaster relaunch kind of thing. EverQuest : The Heroes Journey is taking that desiccated zombie and making it hop. How much could WildStar or Warhammer Online really cost to license compared to fresh from the ground up development?

krismunich said:

The "dungeon rush" player just needs a carrot it seems (dinar system)

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They needed a carrot (when many of them were already doing the raid for rep, etc. and would complete the quest automatically)? Or finally got to eat their carrots, as they could dump their hundreds (or more) of lower level crests into Gildeds and could upgrade existing gear further?

I wish the next MMO would move away from persistent worlds and have a more dynamic world. Kill Queen Dain Coldbeaver IV ? you have now his son on the throne. A Saturday night drunk troll raid that ends up wiping out all the Coldain? That's it, no more coldains.
That would require a very good generative AI to quickly react to player actions, but I do think we're getting there.

The biggest issue you run into there is FOMO and loss of agency. Even if you create new content to replace the old, newer players will forever miss out on content that is now gone and eventually complain/demand "fresh start" servers. And if player actions determine the server, you'll run into the "sleeper's tomb" conundrum where people outside the group that causes the change might not want the change and resent it, but feel like they don't have any power to do anything about it

MMOs are stale because the gameplay loop hasn't been refreshed outside of wow. Grinding for levels is a dated concept. Doing anything that requires ungodly amounts of time isn't gonna work in today's world of short attention spans.

A truly revolutionary MMO will create ideas and systems that are barely recognizable from today's MMOs. I have some ideas but I doubt many old school MMO peeps would share. But essentially I'd draw on rogulite and seasonal rotations in order to combat both time investment grinds and FOMO issues. I would also draw on lineage/hereditary themes in order to incentivize perma progression. Finally, I would have some sort of permanent death to truly make the world feel alive and dangerous. On top of all that it would be absolutely massive with 1000s of mob camps, boss mobs, and dungeons all around the world no fast travel. in order to prevent griefing there would be world changes dynamically and through seasonal resets. The best farmable areas wouldnt remain so very long. The world would feel alive with various factions, politics, religions and migration patterns. There wouldn't be leveling, at least it would be very minimized, instead all or most power comes from items and crafting and maybe hereditary traits.

That's just my ideal mmo but I doubt it's anyone elses.

Most of these "off the wall" mechanics people describe as the wishful "future" of MMOs already exist in some capacity of "mmo-lite" type games now.

The issue with MMOs is the same that it has always been. People don't really give a fuck about playing with Random_Retard_Timmy. They want to play with their friends. MMOs used to be the only "open-world" style RPG games available that also allowed you to play online with your friends. Now that they aren't the only game/genre in town offering that type of gameplay and many other studios from Triple AAA to Indie are making those types of game, you're seeing the slow death of the genre. People like the allure and fantasy that "massively" suggests, but the actual reality is people could give 2 shits about interacting/playing with those people.

A game like Erenshor is the future, where it's essentially an MMO, but you can only play it with 1-9 "buddies", while the rest of the world is populated by interactive AI bots, giving the allure/illusion of "massively multiplayer".

Cybsled said:

The biggest issue you run into there is FOMO and loss of agency. Even if you create new content to replace the old, newer players will forever miss out on content that is now gone and eventually complain/demand "fresh start" servers. And if player actions determine the server, you'll run into the "sleeper's tomb" conundrum where people outside the group that causes the change might not want the change and resent it, but feel like they don't have any power to do anything about it

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Yes but two elements of what you wrote is for me proof that it could work : we all remember the sleeper, and if you feel powerless against something, you might become stronger so next time you may do something.
bascically, I'm advocating for a super dungeon master and I do think AI might be able to do, even if limited.

Y'all acting like Pantheon isn't gonna save the genre. You can still get in on the bottom floor!

Kirun said:

Most of these "off the wall" mechanics people describe as the wishful "future" of MMOs already exist in some capacity of "mmo-lite" type games now.

The issue with MMOs is the same that it has always been. People don't really give a fuck about playing with Random_Retard_Timmy. They want to play with their friends. MMOs used to be the only "open-world" style RPG games available that also allowed you to play online with your friends. Now that they aren't the only game/genre in town offering that type of gameplay and many other studios from Triple AAA to Indie are making those types of game, you're seeing the slow death of the genre. People like the allure and fantasy that "massively" suggests, but the actual reality is people could give 2 shits about interacting/playing with those people.

A game like Erenshor is the future, where it's essentially an MMO, but you can only play it with 1-9 "buddies", while the rest of the world is populated by interactive AI bots, giving the allure/illusion of "massively multiplayer".

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This is really the crux of the mmo market, at least in the western world. These companies police the social aspect so much it constricts any type of authentic natural player interaction, whether a troll red tagger or upstanding blue protector, from liberal virtue signaler to based racist, all philosophies should be welcome to foment a strong community that self regulates.

You can’t self regulate trolls in global chat beyond blocking them in some cases.

New World is constantly a situation where someone intentionally drops racial slurs or call people gamer words and the server mass reports them and they get a 3 day chat ban, although that’s common in any PvP game. I remember some instances where just before a war the other side would try to bait players and get them banned before the war started lol