Honestly I have to agree with the whole '2010 was the fault'. The MMO developer industry hasn't been listening to players for years now. I know this statement has been made over and over again but WoW killed the industry, at least when it comes to inovation. Now that's not a pun against WoW, infact I think its a great game and I play it from time to time myself, however every company out there is trying to make 'the next wow' but the truth is the next Wow will be made by Blizzard and Blizzard alone. These companies though (other major studios) think that to be sucessful they should have like six million subs at a time. Lets face it, that's unrealistic.
Before WoW games like UO, EQ1, SWG (pre-NGE), Ashron's Call and so forth and so on won people over by being inovative and offering more to players than their competitors. These days when developers sit down to make a game they first take the WoW model of play and then in some small way they add their own features, licenses, and concepts but in the end its a clone of a game that came before it. Then the expect those small contributions to drive the game to greatness. Labels are great but they don't make a game. WAR was a great example of that. The lead dev, sorry can't remember his name. Talked about WAR becoming a hobbie and something you would buy t-shirts for but the sad truth was that they spent all that time developing a game that resembled WoW with a PvP bend rather then taking the concepts they'd learned with Dark Age of Camelot and making a multifaction-frontier warring-housing friendly-amazing fest. Case and point developers arn't duing what they used to, which is sitting around a table eating chinies food (or any other num-num take-out) and staying up to the wee hours of the night coming up with solid and unique game ideas. These days corporate fat cat's tell the devs 'I want something like WoW, with 6+ million subs per month' and that's just not possible without coming up with something unique.
Again this isn't a WoW bash, rather its a 'rest of the devs out there bash' pointing out that to many people are using old elements hoping to get a buck out of us. The sad truth is SWG's NGE stuff was just SOE making the game more 'WoWlike' and that game has been ruined since as with SOE's reputation. So I hope 2011 brings forth some honest to goodness new gameplay elelments and perhaps a lot more fun stuff. If not I may find myself reading books rather than playing games.
Star Trek Online should have been the number 1 disappointment due to the sheer opurtunity the game had.Mortal Online to me is no comparison to the Large IP's of Star Trek and Final Phantasy.How would of a Star Trek game made by Bioware been like? I was thinking about this the other day after playing Mass Effect for the 1st time a Star Trek game made on that Engine played the way it plays would be Epic.
Ya, FFXIV was barely released at the end of the year. Everyone had more time to check out STO, and realized their disappointment. Star Trek is all about exploration, and they took that part out of the game. You can't even trek a whole planet or go "where no man has gone before." It was a HUGE disappointment.
These GENERALIZED WINNERS don't make a game company have to answer for their product. A lot of these companies are waiting for websites like MMORPG.com to put out their title as a winner so they canthrow it up on on their website.
These companies may not put the award for biggest disappointment up ontheir website... but at least they'll know it won the award.
The makers of Final Fantasy should see their game up as the Biggest Disappointment.
Well if you went to a resteraunt and ordered lobster and recieved Spam and was expected to pay for the price of lobster would you honestly be happy.
If game MMO companies want to do better they should only advertise their games with what is actually in it instead of things they hope to have in it maybe. Better communication with its subscribers instead of the smoke and mirrors game they try to use on them such as we plan on fixing this issue and adding this wonderful idea but we are going to keep it hush hush to see how long we can drag people along.
Thats what I see MMO's as anymore half completed, subpar working games with promises of things to come that never get implemented; all to falsely hold subscribers till they wise up and finally leave.
IF MMO gamers gtting frustrated over the lies being spouted to them by these companies is what makes them whiners then I guess I'm a whiner too then. I would rather be a whiner then a mind numb ignorant fan boy that follows the heals of the MMO companies like a little puppy, and even they after months of being fedthe thin air promises turn around and bite the hand like a rabid dog.
It all comes down to treating the consumer as your bread and butter. These companies believe they hold the consumer captive and can treat them like crap and retain them.
I gotta say, 2010 in a nut shell sucked, i am dissapointed in STO i was hoping for better like many others, but the thing i ABSOLUTLY hated the most was all the F2P games, cash shops just piss me off, id rather pay a sub and get content then to spend twice the money in little greedy F-N cash shops, buy a race, by a potion, buy! buy! buy! Bunch of drones following them. F2P is ruining the genre for me, screwed as a lifer on LOTR, and its my own fault for being a lifer but CO is screwing me too, F2P is bull*hit, money sucking cows. I hate them all!
2010 in General I stayed in the predictable arms of EvE. I didnt really break out untill Sept or so.
I "returned" to PotBS for a while,
I "returned" to Star Wars Galaxies and am still there if in Sub only.
MMOs are stagnate because most people dont want to step away from thier hobbies.
Game companies, find a way to bring more people in to the MMO genre or expect it to be a steady decline. I hate to sound doom and gloom but its a pretty accurate prediction I think.
2011 and so on will be big disappointments also if they don't shake it up a bit different than same o same o. I think we are all ready for an out of the box game.No more simplistic crafting, no more same clunky moves, ugly butt armor with no or very little customization.
The original idea from swg was great but the developers just couldn't pull it together..but the ideas they had were ahead of their time. Too many bugs and broken quests over ran their ideas. You could do it all ...make a living by crafting for the players, customizable housing and guild halls..ect ect but the combat was so broken, they broke up the crafting and entertaining trying to fix it.
I think having a multideminsional game without broken combat is what most of us want. With our individualality and without it being dumbed down. Have fighters that are better than others..because they go through specialized training...longggg hard specialized training that if you screw it up three times..you have to pick another catagory...give our brains formulas to figure out. Give up the games that 10 and 12 yr olds can easily figure out. Give our brains a challenge and don't listen to the cry babies...least IMO from a female gamers point of view.
What the general problem is for me with game companys is the lack of vision they have always harbored. They constantly keep trying to keep up with world of warcraft. They watch blizzard and jump the gun on how to design a game. Blizzard wins everytime because people lots of people play. always will if you can form a large guild or group to chat and quest with. they win everytime and always will.
Developers need to stay away from what the mega blizzard is doing. they need to Innovate and create something fresh. Don't make another Sword and board cookie cutter MMORPG. They need to sit down put some duck tape on the marketing dept and come up with something we have not seen!
hard to find a publisher that will allow this these days. They want it this way and it should be like wow this way.
We need a more adult driven game. We need to be able to express ourselves through our chosen avatar. If I want to hump a tree? Then by god, Why can't I?! If I want to turn on my guild or friends in this virtual world why cant I? If I want to create a service or start a cult in game why not?
I want to craft the best weapons/items and sell them then why am I limited on what I can make? Why do I need to be a level? Why can't i be what i choose instead of a quest or faction telling me what I am!
I can't get fully nude and run around as such. I always have to be a mage or warrior why can't i be a warrior/mage/priest who plays the guitar with my virtual metal band, whilst wearing a pink tutu I hand made!
Sounds crazy i know but options and sand box are the reason we are seeing a decline in MMO subscriptions. Our choices are limited and content is simply a rehashing of older content. Nothing new ever comes but options make the virtual world goes around.
Comments
And UO is starting to sell more game benefits in their store. Rumors of going FtP. It boggles the mind.
Once upon a time....
My vote would've been for Cataclysm. *Cough*
Honestly I have to agree with the whole '2010 was the fault'. The MMO developer industry hasn't been listening to players for years now. I know this statement has been made over and over again but WoW killed the industry, at least when it comes to inovation. Now that's not a pun against WoW, infact I think its a great game and I play it from time to time myself, however every company out there is trying to make 'the next wow' but the truth is the next Wow will be made by Blizzard and Blizzard alone. These companies though (other major studios) think that to be sucessful they should have like six million subs at a time. Lets face it, that's unrealistic.
Before WoW games like UO, EQ1, SWG (pre-NGE), Ashron's Call and so forth and so on won people over by being inovative and offering more to players than their competitors. These days when developers sit down to make a game they first take the WoW model of play and then in some small way they add their own features, licenses, and concepts but in the end its a clone of a game that came before it. Then the expect those small contributions to drive the game to greatness. Labels are great but they don't make a game. WAR was a great example of that. The lead dev, sorry can't remember his name. Talked about WAR becoming a hobbie and something you would buy t-shirts for but the sad truth was that they spent all that time developing a game that resembled WoW with a PvP bend rather then taking the concepts they'd learned with Dark Age of Camelot and making a multifaction-frontier warring-housing friendly-amazing fest. Case and point developers arn't duing what they used to, which is sitting around a table eating chinies food (or any other num-num take-out) and staying up to the wee hours of the night coming up with solid and unique game ideas. These days corporate fat cat's tell the devs 'I want something like WoW, with 6+ million subs per month' and that's just not possible without coming up with something unique.
Again this isn't a WoW bash, rather its a 'rest of the devs out there bash' pointing out that to many people are using old elements hoping to get a buck out of us. The sad truth is SWG's NGE stuff was just SOE making the game more 'WoWlike' and that game has been ruined since as with SOE's reputation. So I hope 2011 brings forth some honest to goodness new gameplay elelments and perhaps a lot more fun stuff. If not I may find myself reading books rather than playing games.
Star Trek Online should have been the number 1 disappointment due to the sheer opurtunity the game had.Mortal Online to me is no comparison to the Large IP's of Star Trek and Final Phantasy.How would of a Star Trek game made by Bioware been like? I was thinking about this the other day after playing Mass Effect for the 1st time a Star Trek game made on that Engine played the way it plays would be Epic.
Ya, FFXIV was barely released at the end of the year. Everyone had more time to check out STO, and realized their disappointment. Star Trek is all about exploration, and they took that part out of the game. You can't even trek a whole planet or go "where no man has gone before." It was a HUGE disappointment.
Well if you went to a resteraunt and ordered lobster and recieved Spam and was expected to pay for the price of lobster would you honestly be happy.
If game MMO companies want to do better they should only advertise their games with what is actually in it instead of things they hope to have in it maybe. Better communication with its subscribers instead of the smoke and mirrors game they try to use on them such as we plan on fixing this issue and adding this wonderful idea but we are going to keep it hush hush to see how long we can drag people along.
Thats what I see MMO's as anymore half completed, subpar working games with promises of things to come that never get implemented; all to falsely hold subscribers till they wise up and finally leave.
IF MMO gamers gtting frustrated over the lies being spouted to them by these companies is what makes them whiners then I guess I'm a whiner too then. I would rather be a whiner then a mind numb ignorant fan boy that follows the heals of the MMO companies like a little puppy, and even they after months of being fedthe thin air promises turn around and bite the hand like a rabid dog.
It all comes down to treating the consumer as your bread and butter. These companies believe they hold the consumer captive and can treat them like crap and retain them.
I gotta say, 2010 in a nut shell sucked, i am dissapointed in STO i was hoping for better like many others, but the thing i ABSOLUTLY hated the most was all the F2P games, cash shops just piss me off, id rather pay a sub and get content then to spend twice the money in little greedy F-N cash shops, buy a race, by a potion, buy! buy! buy! Bunch of drones following them. F2P is ruining the genre for me, screwed as a lifer on LOTR, and its my own fault for being a lifer but CO is screwing me too, F2P is bull*hit, money sucking cows. I hate them all!
2010 in General I stayed in the predictable arms of EvE. I didnt really break out untill Sept or so.
I "returned" to PotBS for a while,
I "returned" to Star Wars Galaxies and am still there if in Sub only.
MMOs are stagnate because most people dont want to step away from thier hobbies.
Game companies, find a way to bring more people in to the MMO genre or expect it to be a steady decline. I hate to sound doom and gloom but its a pretty accurate prediction I think.
2010 was kind of an empty year, but we did get some interesting games such as Vindictus and Global Agenda.
Don't know what to put here, honestly.
Whoa, 1 where they didn't give the answer on the front page..
Although you could have seen the results for most of them with the votes before hand anyways since none where all that close.
2011 and so on will be big disappointments also if they don't shake it up a bit different than same o same o. I think we are all ready for an out of the box game.No more simplistic crafting, no more same clunky moves, ugly butt armor with no or very little customization.
The original idea from swg was great but the developers just couldn't pull it together..but the ideas they had were ahead of their time. Too many bugs and broken quests over ran their ideas. You could do it all ...make a living by crafting for the players, customizable housing and guild halls..ect ect but the combat was so broken, they broke up the crafting and entertaining trying to fix it.
I think having a multideminsional game without broken combat is what most of us want. With our individualality and without it being dumbed down. Have fighters that are better than others..because they go through specialized training...longggg hard specialized training that if you screw it up three times..you have to pick another catagory...give our brains formulas to figure out. Give up the games that 10 and 12 yr olds can easily figure out. Give our brains a challenge and don't listen to the cry babies...least IMO from a female gamers point of view.
What the general problem is for me with game companys is the lack of vision they have always harbored. They constantly keep trying to keep up with world of warcraft. They watch blizzard and jump the gun on how to design a game. Blizzard wins everytime because people lots of people play. always will if you can form a large guild or group to chat and quest with. they win everytime and always will.
Developers need to stay away from what the mega blizzard is doing. they need to Innovate and create something fresh. Don't make another Sword and board cookie cutter MMORPG. They need to sit down put some duck tape on the marketing dept and come up with something we have not seen!
hard to find a publisher that will allow this these days. They want it this way and it should be like wow this way.
We need a more adult driven game. We need to be able to express ourselves through our chosen avatar. If I want to hump a tree? Then by god, Why can't I?! If I want to turn on my guild or friends in this virtual world why cant I? If I want to create a service or start a cult in game why not?
I want to craft the best weapons/items and sell them then why am I limited on what I can make? Why do I need to be a level? Why can't i be what i choose instead of a quest or faction telling me what I am!
I can't get fully nude and run around as such. I always have to be a mage or warrior why can't i be a warrior/mage/priest who plays the guitar with my virtual metal band, whilst wearing a pink tutu I hand made!
Sounds crazy i know but options and sand box are the reason we are seeing a decline in MMO subscriptions. Our choices are limited and content is simply a rehashing of older content. Nothing new ever comes but options make the virtual world goes around.