Feelings regarding the industry

BenedictXV

Hi everyone,

This will seem like a random post, and i don't intend to rant on a specify game but i'll share my though on the industry as of today, 28 april 2011.

I'll be getting the "pulse" of the community in regards to game. Like i do hope good friends are able to do, i'll talk about what i found good in the community and what is bad about it and don't talk it personal, i aint aiming this at anyone.

First, the genre and the game. So many games out there... Feels like univers or planet to explore. I tend to be the kind of guy to get hyped realy fast about a game and to buy them quick too (i'm working on that). But why is there so many mmo? Not that i don't want diversity, but each time i look at MMORPG.com, i see like two dozen of new mmo arriving on the market.

I'm starting to be afraid that the model is more interesting for a game studio than the game itself. I fear that at some point $$$ is the only thing game studio's managers see. Imo, if you see $$$ before saying the entertaining part of a game is a fail start. Let's take my favorite example : Cryptic Studio and Star Trek online, i know we are not all fan of scifi mmo but still this game could have had the potential of having a huge player base and a lot of fun but it took them nearly a years to realize that and really start making " a game " . Other question is for people like me, have we created the dollar sign in the faces of those managers? I guess so, myself by being hyped real fast showed them that whatever game they make, as long as publicity goes on well they will get my 14$ a month so they know even if i don't subscribe for the next month, they will still make a "gazibillion" dollars.

The way i see it, id rather us set the standards and have fewer mmo's out but well rounded and more polished than what we have now. I am at the point where i think : Does this deserve my 14$? Most of the time the answer is no. Let's have fewer mmo but good one than having 10 000 average mmo's and 6 successfull in the list and don't get me wrong here, i love diversity but i don't like having dead fish in the pond even if it's still fish!

We, as first user base of these products, have the power to change stuff in the genre. We can say : " Sorry sir, your game deserve a - 100 on a scale of 1 to 10, go back to work". We in the end play these and enjoy them, none of us like to spend 79.99$ for a boxed game than a sub just to figure out the game isnt ready yet!  Let's say our word, we have to give chances to the good game studios that are trying to make AAA title, and show the one that takes it for granted that we raised the standards as of today.

I know it's utopic, but dreaming is still allowed today. We are good people in the end and what drives us in an MMO is the game but mostly the people, i play mmo to group, to talk and have fun with these folks. Let's us put it back that way.

Yamota

In my opinion the industry has started to move more and more from the persistant virtual world concept to more lets-make-a-single-player-game-online-so-we-can-charge-a-monthly-fee.

This is evident in more and more triple A games being released which really dont have much traditional MMORPG concepts but lots of quest lines that could might as well be in a single player game. Your actions usually has no bearing on the world or others and in many cases you dont even need other people around, or very few around, as most of everything is instanced.

Then ofcourse we have the WoW-factor which is more or less being used as the standard these days, resulting in even less thinking out of the box as WoW is all thinking inside the box.

Imo the industry needs to take a look at its roots, where it all began, and try to find new and improved ideas to make new virtual worlds rather than massively-single-player-games.

Then finally you have the dreaded F2P titles which most are really Pay to Win which are now flodding the market and almost all of them are of subpar quality with the excuse that they are "free".

2010 was indeed a really bad year for MMORPGs and 2011 havent started well either. DCU has come and tanked and is now bleeding subscribers and same with Rift, altough not as bad as DCU. However there are some potential bright spots in the form of GW 2, ArcheAge, Tera and potentially SW:TOR if Bioware stop thinking in single-player therms. But those are not released so nothing definitive can be said yet as we are shown only what the devs want us to see.

Time will tell but currently I feel the MMORPG genre is just one big cash cow with little true innovation going on.