Gamers today don't have the attention span or patience that they used to. Everything is instant gratification and over stimulation nowadays. I remember sitting down staring at my bloody spell book in Everquest for minutes on end. Imagine that in today's market, lol.
1) There is a market, comprised of a quarter million people, who all have the same preferences for an MMORPG. We'll label that preference "Old School", ignoring all the different, conflicting desires that fall under the umbrella of "Old School".
They're not conflicting. Essentially, when WoW became a hit all other type of MMORPG in the genre got left behind and never made the leap into the modern age. Well except games that play like City of Heroes. The heavily instanced rabbit hole action games like Champions, DDO, NWO etc. .
2) This market is invisible and unknowable. We must assume it exists.
Again, there on every MMORPG site I've been on. THere are articles and developers talking about where the genre might be wrong. I don't think you can compare these to NES old school players who number in the hundreds of millions while pre-2004 MMORPG players likely number in the 10s of Millions being generous.
3) There are MMORPGs that have already been developed for markets smaller than a quarter million people. Perpetuum, Mortal Online and Darkfall were all developed for markets much smaller than a quarter million people. A Tale in the Desert and Pirates of Whatever were also written for smaller markets, and seem to be doing fine.
Honestly, the genre is just not in a place where unexperienced and underfunded developers can make solid games. There's just a big gap in quality.
4) Given a budget of $10 million dollars (this is just my minimum buy in to write a decent MMORPG), and a box price of $40, if a quarter million people just bought the box, the production costs of the game would be covered. The game would generate $3.75 million a month in revenue because it would be a subscription game, per the "Old School" style.
Because the reality is that your not going to getting that making a game on a 10 million dollar budget. MMORPGs already have low playability and the low budget ones generally suffering.
Conclusion: Nobody wants to write a game for this market.
Yes, that has been the case but it seems to be changing somewhat.
What possible reason would every single developer in existence have for not wanting to write the game that this market wants?
Your answer: All the developers want to only write WoW, at the scale of WoW, so they opt to not write the old school style game in spite of the fact that the market is captive, has no other options, and true to their old school roots would want to play the game for a long period of time and pay a subscription for the game. Nobody wants to make a game for a market willing to pay $10 million ($40 box price) at launch, and $3.75 million ($15 subscription) a month. Even the developers who really like old school MMORPGs and the developers who wrote the old school MMORPGs.
Addendum to your answer: The market does exist, and the developer want to write a game for it, but the market will not accept anything less than a AAA game, so even if someone writes a $10 million game, the market would refuse to buy it.
This pretty much is what I'm saying.
My answer: Because the market must be assumed to exist, nobody in their right mind is going to try and write a game for them. They have gone into stealth mode, and show no signs of coming out.
My other answer: That market that we have to assume exists isn't actually an assumption. It's not invisible and unknowable. It just isn't composed of a quarter million people who all agree on what kind of game they want to play. It's a very small market and it isn't worth anyone's time to write a game for that market.
I am not entirely sure what your metrics are for looking up people talking about old school MMORPGS? Are you looking at them games themselves? Terms like sandbox, EQ like or just the term old school? Why do they have to be uniformed? You do realize that after 2004 basically all other types of MMORPG have not been made. There wasn't failure after failure of other types of games. They basically just didn't get made anymore. Like if Turnbased single player RPGs became the only ones made should the rest wanting a RPG have to be uniformed in the wants?
The reason dungeons have gotten smaller is the same reason games have changed in other ways since then; MONEY.
There are people that don't have 20 hours to spend on a game during a weekend. They have spouses and children and responsibilities to take care of and ignoring them would make them very very bad people. But they grew up gaming. they remember sitting and staring at a book in EQ or fighting their way up the tower of frozen shadow only to party wipe on the 6th floor and have to start all over. But it's ok, it's the weekend and they are single and sophomore year at college is still 3 weeks away. And, while they don't have 20 hours on the weekend anymore, what they do have the MMO developers are deeply interested in getting; MONEY.
So for their money, the developers give them part of what they remember. The best parts, and toss out all the time sinks, punishments, and general 'empty calories' involved with playing old school MMOs. To expand their audience these developers make it easier to run a raid on the weekend. It's only 3 hours now, not 20. You don't need to get 40 people together, you only need 5, and finding your way around does not take a map on ZAM or Gamepressure, because it's easy to get into, easy to do, and easy to get back out so the person can go on to what is actually important in their lives... the real world.
Don't get me wrong I know nostalgia. I remember when I could hop in the car and nobody could reach me. I could go hang out on the beach and just enjoy the day. Do some surfing, get a tan, just be there and alone from the rest of my life. Today I have a little box in my pocket that keeps my life with me 24/7/365. I can't escape it. Even if I turn it off or don't answer, the other person on the line doesn't think. 'ah well, he must not be home' and let it slide, they think, 'Why is he not answering my calls?' it's now an insult to not let your life be with you all the time.
I'd like to go back to that time, I'd like to get away once in a while to be by myself, but I have about as much chance at rolling back time on the cell phone market, as you do on changing the fact that all those kids growing up playing EQ, still want to play MMOS, but they ended up with real lives and families and responsibilities.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
The only way we will get to see epic spanning dungeons again is as much on human expectations of fulfillment as it is on the developers. The best solution would be to make a dynamic system where people can push monsters out of an area, quests are generated by where monster populations are, and changes are enduring. EQ: Next is promising the first two, but we got to see if they will make the changes enduring or just make them like dynamic events in other games.
The reason the fate system in FFXIV and the dynamic event system of Guild Wars 2 fail is because they are not enduring and don't effect the game world in a meaningful way. They are really just another form of repeatable themepark quest that serves as a road bump for players on their way to the mythical end game, where we get skinner trapped into grinding relentless group content for cool looking armor and stat boosts.
Agreed.. I play GW2 off and on when in the mood and as much as the dynamic events sounded great on paper, in reality it felt short of expectations.. at least to me it did.. They are not, as you say it, enduring events that effect the world.. In reality they are only short lived repeatable quest.. Sure I reclaimed a village and the travel port, but the moment I leave and stop playing, the mobs will overtake that village in 10 minutes..
I'm all for dynamic events, but they need to effect the world for longer then 10 minutes.. The building of Halas example they talk about in the upcomming EQNext game is a big step in the right direction.. BUT we'll see..
GW2 dynamic events were disappointing - the chains weren't long enough - and the results were too short lived. BUT - they are good deal better then other games 'dynamic events" (FFXIV Fates, Rifts, Public Quests) and running dynamic events is more fun then quest hubs - a lot more fun when you are taking down end of chain bosses.
If it was any other company then SOE I'd be excited about EQ:N. They are just a mediocre studio. The best game they have put out in recent years is PS2. And while its not the worst game - it's not even a good game.
The reason dungeons have gotten smaller is the same reason games have changed in other ways since then; MONEY.
Except that the MMOs with tiny dungeons and all the other changes have led to 9 years of FAILURES. I think there have been many 2 AAA MMOs of the last 9 years that didn't die on release?
The reason dungeons have gotten smaller is the same reason games have changed in other ways since then; MONEY.
Except that the MMOs with tiny dungeons and all the other changes have led to 9 years of FAILURES. I think there have been many 2 AAA MMOs of the last 9 years that didn't die on release?
WoW is one of the most successful MMOs ever and their dungeon layouts are far simpler than EQ's. Yet they achieved of 20 times the number of players and an even more financial dominance.
Regardless of that success, trying to explain the fickle nature of the MMO customer as a direct result of simple dungeons is certainly unfounded, and at best spurious logic.
I could just as easily explain why there are no indigenous tigers in Los Angeles being due to the amount of smog the city had in the seventies drove them all out.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
The pre 2004 Western MMO market was much smaller than 10 million. I may be wrong but if you add up the subs for the big 3 EQ, SWG, DAOC not including WoW its about 1.5 million players.
Originally posted by Fenrir767 The pre 2004 Western MMO market was much smaller than 10 million. I may be wrong but if you add up the subs for the big 3 EQ, SWG, DAOC not including WoW its about 1.5 million players.
True.. not many people were ONLINE like they are now.. When I first started playing EQ, I was on AOL using dial up.. Over the years, technology changed and MILLIONS more got access to the internet.. So people using numbers from the 90's to now isn't comparing apples with apples..
Never said it was I was just replying to the post that theorized old school gamers were in the 10s of millions. There is for sure a market the question is will the market accept the game that can be made on a smaller budget than all the AAA titles released since then.
I like big dungeons, but i think it's a thing of the past. Maybe huge openworld dungeons would work, but instanced dungeons taking several hours i just dont see coming.
Having said that i dont mind smaller dungeons if they are made well, i dont think the size has anything to do with what's wrong with MMO's. The thing that makes dungeonruns boring is overgearing them imo. New content bringing out better gear devalues older content. Then at some point people are so overgeared they just aoe tank and aoe dps everything ignoring crowdcontrols and interupts and other mechanics.
So, the main problem with MMO's imo is new content comes with better gear and thereby devalues older content instead of different gear adding to the older content without devaluing it.
That's a great and interesting point Flint I never thought of that. It would be great of newer gear perhaps brought with it different set bonuses perhaps focusing on adding variety to specs without devaluing older content. It may lead to some flavour of the month specs but overtime increase the variety present in the game.
I like big dungeons, but i think it's a thing of the past. Maybe huge openworld dungeons would work, but instanced dungeons taking several hours i just dont see coming. semi agree.. I just wish the instancing would just go away.. The whole need and excuse to have them was to appease each group to have access to loot and quest mobs.. So from the EQ days when some would fight over quest mobs like the Cleric epic in Skyfire, Instances were created.. OR.. Too many groups wanted to do the Live Tower in KC, but it was already occupied.. Again, welcome to instancing.. The solution of using instancing IMO was just a lazy cheap trick..
Having said that i dont mind smaller dungeons if they are made well, i dont think the size has anything to do with what's wrong with MMO's. The thing that makes dungeonruns boring is overgearing them imo. New content bringing out better gear devalues older content. Then at some point people are so overgeared they just aoe tank and aoe dps everything ignoring crowdcontrols and interupts and other mechanics. Agreed.. The tier gearing as we have it now with dungeon/raid grinds just trivializes most of the content.. It doesn't take long to put heroics and raids in WoW on FARM mode.. This in my opinion is more of a con, then a pro..
So, the main problem with MMO's imo is new content comes with better gear and thereby devalues older content instead of different gear adding to the older content without devaluing it.
That is a huge problem with me after all these years.. That games are so focused on linear progression, they actually build in obsolescence thereby pushing everyone to the top rung of the ladder.. There are better ways to avoid top heavy communities, just wish the devs would give us some.. LOL
it's not just overgearing that's the issue, its gross under balancing. Take WOW MOP, you could faceroll the dungeons from the very start in blue, and MOP gear has scaled faster than any other expansion. As a comparison, in TBC you could only really faceroll in the final tier of gear - which less people had. People improve over time, so you would expect like any other game genre that the game would get more difficult. I suspect the reason is that blizzard perceive challenging content as a 'risk' to their massive profit margins. Gross profits > all for Blizzard.
We all love atmospheric and satisfying dungeons regardless of size - size is not the issue.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Originally posted by BladestromI suspect the reason is that blizzard perceive challenging content as a 'risk' to their massive profit margins. Gross profits > all for Blizzard.
It seems Blizzard is now perceiving lack of challenging content a risk, as they are aiming for considerably harder dungeons in Warlords of Draenor. Might be a result of the player base having dropped hard during the previous faceroll expansions. They do collect data on why people quit, after all.
Meh, I've gotta mostly agree with the OP. Used to be a time when a game came on 3 or 4 tiny little floppy discs that took months longer to complete than these new titles that come on 2-3 dvds. Mostly due to exploration, actual penalties for dying, etc.
People want to go all apathetic over the time changes, pointing out the casual players as a need for more simplistic, jump in the action, and grind to max level in a day games. I say the casual players should stick to their single player games. that way they can waste their hour, save the game, and come back to it tomorrow instead of whining that my games are too hard or take too long to accomplish anything.
It's great that these megacorps are raking in tons of money off the unintelligent, thankfully none of it has been mine for years. The fact that facebook games rake in more money than the porn industry shows me that I'll likely enjoy a game of chess over the lastest MMO in this day and age. I've tried a few of the AAA titles over the years, and after going from zero to max level in under a week with almost every single one of them doesn't justify the box price, let alone the subs that some of them wanted. Yet the fanbois will rush to the defense of every single one of them lol.
Lastly, I don't care how 'niche' my idea of a decent game may be, small playerbase isn't going to hurt me one little bit. How many people these days whine about the trinity and solo 99.9999% of the time anyways? The community has already shown that other players and groups are wholly unnecessary, so small playerbase is a completely invalid point against some of the oldschool mechanics it's used against.
If I'm going to invest time and money into an MMO again, it'd better suck it up and give the finger to casuals and remember when games weren't spastic arcade action combat packed uselessness. If all I wanted in my games was zomgawesomewtf combat, I'd go play an FPS or the like. Calling a tiny cave with 5 or 6 rooms that somehow nobody else outside myself or my current group will be seen in, that always has uber loot and takes 10 minutes to complete if you're half asleep is NOT a dungeon, it's a pathetic waste of time for the xbox/mario kart generation that cries and slits their wrists when they get bullied on a fkn website of all things (LOL!!!!!!!), it's definitely not for me.
Originally posted by BladestromI suspect the reason is that blizzard perceive challenging content as a 'risk' to their massive profit margins. Gross profits > all for Blizzard.
It seems Blizzard is now perceiving lack of challenging content a risk, as they are aiming for considerably harder dungeons in Warlords of Draenor. Might be a result of the player base having dropped hard during the previous faceroll expansions. They do collect data on why people quit, after all.
Nobody interested in a challenging experience would play WoW anyway.
Meh, I've gotta mostly agree with the OP. Used to be a time when a game came on 3 or 4 tiny little floppy discs that took months longer to complete than these new titles that come on 2-3 dvds. Mostly due to exploration, actual penalties for dying, etc.
People want to go all apathetic over the time changes, pointing out the casual players as a need for more simplistic, jump in the action, and grind to max level in a day games. I say the casual players should stick to their single player games. that way they can waste their hour, save the game, and come back to it tomorrow instead of whining that my games are too hard or take too long to accomplish anything.
It's great that these megacorps are raking in tons of money off the unintelligent, thankfully none of it has been mine for years. The fact that facebook games rake in more money than the porn industry shows me that I'll likely enjoy a game of chess over the lastest MMO in this day and age. I've tried a few of the AAA titles over the years, and after going from zero to max level in under a week with almost every single one of them doesn't justify the box price, let alone the subs that some of them wanted. Yet the fanbois will rush to the defense of every single one of them lol.
Lastly, I don't care how 'niche' my idea of a decent game may be, small playerbase isn't going to hurt me one little bit. How many people these days whine about the trinity and solo 99.9999% of the time anyways? The community has already shown that other players and groups are wholly unnecessary, so small playerbase is a completely invalid point against some of the oldschool mechanics it's used against.
If I'm going to invest time and money into an MMO again, it'd better suck it up and give the finger to casuals and remember when games weren't spastic arcade action combat packed uselessness. If all I wanted in my games was zomgawesomewtf combat, I'd go play an FPS or the like. Calling a tiny cave with 5 or 6 rooms that somehow nobody else outside myself or my current group will be seen in, that always has uber loot and takes 10 minutes to complete if you're half asleep is NOT a dungeon, it's a pathetic waste of time for the xbox/mario kart generation that cries and slits their wrists when they get bullied on a fkn website of all things (LOL!!!!!!!), it's definitely not for me.
You may not care about the casuals or the size of the community but the game still has to be profitable especially if you want new content. You need money to make the game and maintain the game. What I see in the post above does not acknowledge that fact at all.
If things like the casual market and the kind of people that play the game should be important to you, if you want to have a polished title at launch which none of the "Old School" MMOs were it was almost like playing for beta for a few years in some of them, if you want the game to not just be released and immediately put on maintenance Mode a la Vanguard as there is not enough cash coming in to support paying people to make more content.
There is a lot more to making a game than just appealing to a Niche or the casual market it's about making a game that people will invest in and enough people will play for a long time so that you can keep making content and improving the game.
Everything that is not important to you is important to the people that are making games because it directly relates to their livelyhood and future employment.
The reason dungeons have gotten smaller is the same reason games have changed in other ways since then; MONEY.
Except that the MMOs with tiny dungeons and all the other changes have led to 9 years of FAILURES. I think there have been many 2 AAA MMOs of the last 9 years that didn't die on release?
WoW is one of the most successful MMOs ever and their dungeon layouts are far simpler than EQ's. Yet they achieved of 20 times the number of players and an even more financial dominance. And Wow is a complete fluke that has never been repeated, because most of their success came from their marketing and status, not their gameplay.
Point is, people can claim money is the reason devs have done this, but the evidence shows that MMOs with simple dungeons don't do so well, (its more about the general design of the whole game, but if you have easy dungeons, you probably have easy everything else)
Originally posted by Fenrir767 The pre 2004 Western MMO market was much smaller than 10 million. I may be wrong but if you add up the subs for the big 3 EQ, SWG, DAOC not including WoW its about 1.5 million players.
I don't understand... why is this significant? (though I bet if you took LotRO, AoC, and Rift, they'd murder someone to get those kind of numbers)
Originally posted by Fenrir767 The pre 2004 Western MMO market was much smaller than 10 million. I may be wrong but if you add up the subs for the big 3 EQ, SWG, DAOC not including WoW its about 1.5 million players.
I don't understand... why is this significant? (though I bet if you took LotRO, AoC, and Rift, they'd murder someone to get those kind of numbers)
That number is about 1.5 million players total for all 3 games if not more closer to 1 million. If you look at SWTOR, LotRO, AoC, RIFT, TSW with their subs alone they are far more than that number and if you count f2p players as well well they dwarf that number.
One thing that I miss on dungeons is puzzles, however on today's mmo's puzzle probably be an obstacle that nobody wants, as people crave for more 3D action and more combat and fights with legendary loreful creatures and become a bad-ass, and not spent 5 hours on a dungeon with slow progression that going to bored people out of their minds and not make the modern man thank that those huge dungeons are not worth doing....
In World of Warcraft Vanilla, people always seem to thing that the famous dungeon, Gnomeregan, is the largest yet most boring dungeon of them all.... I don't know why that people don't like Gnomeragen, but i think it's because for once the monsters are repetitive or there is not enough danger or the bosses are not challenging enough, or something else.
Now on modern mmo's the size of those small so called "dungeons" are not really worth calling "dungeons", the only true dungeons we like are what we called "raids" and those are the dungeons that we love and fight on, and the loot is great, and not only that, it's tons of fun and quite challenging. The reason that I think that dungeons are small in modern day mmo is because of what most game designer was thinking of "player size = dungeon size", if I am in a 5 man group for a dungeon, the dungeon going to be small, if I'm on a 25 man group, the dungeon going to be big and filled with many bosses up to 14. If there was a such thing as a 50 man raid, the dungeon will be SO FREAKIN HUGE, with 30 bosses. That's how it is in modern games, and people who likes to venture into dungeons of today, for the fun, for the challenge, and for the loots.
Originally posted by BladestromI suspect the reason is that blizzard perceive challenging content as a 'risk' to their massive profit margins. Gross profits > all for Blizzard.
It seems Blizzard is now perceiving lack of challenging content a risk, as they are aiming for considerably harder dungeons in Warlords of Draenor. Might be a result of the player base having dropped hard during the previous faceroll expansions. They do collect data on why people quit, after all.
They tried it in Cata and it did not work, and they nerf it.
They tried it in D3 inferno ... and they have to put in a difficulty slider. It is pretty obvious that making it too hard is not the way to get the market ... a difficult slider is the only good solution with minimal QQing.
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The reason dungeons have gotten smaller is the same reason games have changed in other ways since then; MONEY.
There are people that don't have 20 hours to spend on a game during a weekend. They have spouses and children and responsibilities to take care of and ignoring them would make them very very bad people. But they grew up gaming. they remember sitting and staring at a book in EQ or fighting their way up the tower of frozen shadow only to party wipe on the 6th floor and have to start all over. But it's ok, it's the weekend and they are single and sophomore year at college is still 3 weeks away. And, while they don't have 20 hours on the weekend anymore, what they do have the MMO developers are deeply interested in getting; MONEY.
So for their money, the developers give them part of what they remember. The best parts, and toss out all the time sinks, punishments, and general 'empty calories' involved with playing old school MMOs. To expand their audience these developers make it easier to run a raid on the weekend. It's only 3 hours now, not 20. You don't need to get 40 people together, you only need 5, and finding your way around does not take a map on ZAM or Gamepressure, because it's easy to get into, easy to do, and easy to get back out so the person can go on to what is actually important in their lives... the real world.
Don't get me wrong I know nostalgia. I remember when I could hop in the car and nobody could reach me. I could go hang out on the beach and just enjoy the day. Do some surfing, get a tan, just be there and alone from the rest of my life. Today I have a little box in my pocket that keeps my life with me 24/7/365. I can't escape it. Even if I turn it off or don't answer, the other person on the line doesn't think. 'ah well, he must not be home' and let it slide, they think, 'Why is he not answering my calls?' it's now an insult to not let your life be with you all the time.
I'd like to go back to that time, I'd like to get away once in a while to be by myself, but I have about as much chance at rolling back time on the cell phone market, as you do on changing the fact that all those kids growing up playing EQ, still want to play MMOS, but they ended up with real lives and families and responsibilities.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
GW2 dynamic events were disappointing - the chains weren't long enough - and the results were too short lived. BUT - they are good deal better then other games 'dynamic events" (FFXIV Fates, Rifts, Public Quests) and running dynamic events is more fun then quest hubs - a lot more fun when you are taking down end of chain bosses.
If it was any other company then SOE I'd be excited about EQ:N. They are just a mediocre studio. The best game they have put out in recent years is PS2. And while its not the worst game - it's not even a good game.
Except that the MMOs with tiny dungeons and all the other changes have led to 9 years of FAILURES. I think there have been many 2 AAA MMOs of the last 9 years that didn't die on release?
WoW is one of the most successful MMOs ever and their dungeon layouts are far simpler than EQ's. Yet they achieved of 20 times the number of players and an even more financial dominance.
Regardless of that success, trying to explain the fickle nature of the MMO customer as a direct result of simple dungeons is certainly unfounded, and at best spurious logic.
I could just as easily explain why there are no indigenous tigers in Los Angeles being due to the amount of smog the city had in the seventies drove them all out.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
True.. not many people were ONLINE like they are now.. When I first started playing EQ, I was on AOL using dial up.. Over the years, technology changed and MILLIONS more got access to the internet.. So people using numbers from the 90's to now isn't comparing apples with apples..
I like big dungeons, but i think it's a thing of the past. Maybe huge openworld dungeons would work, but instanced dungeons taking several hours i just dont see coming.
Having said that i dont mind smaller dungeons if they are made well, i dont think the size has anything to do with what's wrong with MMO's. The thing that makes dungeonruns boring is overgearing them imo. New content bringing out better gear devalues older content. Then at some point people are so overgeared they just aoe tank and aoe dps everything ignoring crowdcontrols and interupts and other mechanics.
So, the main problem with MMO's imo is new content comes with better gear and thereby devalues older content instead of different gear adding to the older content without devaluing it.
That is a huge problem with me after all these years.. That games are so focused on linear progression, they actually build in obsolescence thereby pushing everyone to the top rung of the ladder.. There are better ways to avoid top heavy communities, just wish the devs would give us some.. LOL
it's not just overgearing that's the issue, its gross under balancing. Take WOW MOP, you could faceroll the dungeons from the very start in blue, and MOP gear has scaled faster than any other expansion. As a comparison, in TBC you could only really faceroll in the final tier of gear - which less people had. People improve over time, so you would expect like any other game genre that the game would get more difficult. I suspect the reason is that blizzard perceive challenging content as a 'risk' to their massive profit margins. Gross profits > all for Blizzard.
We all love atmospheric and satisfying dungeons regardless of size - size is not the issue.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Meh, I've gotta mostly agree with the OP. Used to be a time when a game came on 3 or 4 tiny little floppy discs that took months longer to complete than these new titles that come on 2-3 dvds. Mostly due to exploration, actual penalties for dying, etc.
People want to go all apathetic over the time changes, pointing out the casual players as a need for more simplistic, jump in the action, and grind to max level in a day games. I say the casual players should stick to their single player games. that way they can waste their hour, save the game, and come back to it tomorrow instead of whining that my games are too hard or take too long to accomplish anything.
It's great that these megacorps are raking in tons of money off the unintelligent, thankfully none of it has been mine for years. The fact that facebook games rake in more money than the porn industry shows me that I'll likely enjoy a game of chess over the lastest MMO in this day and age. I've tried a few of the AAA titles over the years, and after going from zero to max level in under a week with almost every single one of them doesn't justify the box price, let alone the subs that some of them wanted. Yet the fanbois will rush to the defense of every single one of them lol.
Lastly, I don't care how 'niche' my idea of a decent game may be, small playerbase isn't going to hurt me one little bit. How many people these days whine about the trinity and solo 99.9999% of the time anyways? The community has already shown that other players and groups are wholly unnecessary, so small playerbase is a completely invalid point against some of the oldschool mechanics it's used against.
If I'm going to invest time and money into an MMO again, it'd better suck it up and give the finger to casuals and remember when games weren't spastic arcade action combat packed uselessness. If all I wanted in my games was zomgawesomewtf combat, I'd go play an FPS or the like. Calling a tiny cave with 5 or 6 rooms that somehow nobody else outside myself or my current group will be seen in, that always has uber loot and takes 10 minutes to complete if you're half asleep is NOT a dungeon, it's a pathetic waste of time for the xbox/mario kart generation that cries and slits their wrists when they get bullied on a fkn website of all things (LOL!!!!!!!), it's definitely not for me.
Nobody interested in a challenging experience would play WoW anyway.
You may not care about the casuals or the size of the community but the game still has to be profitable especially if you want new content. You need money to make the game and maintain the game. What I see in the post above does not acknowledge that fact at all.
If things like the casual market and the kind of people that play the game should be important to you, if you want to have a polished title at launch which none of the "Old School" MMOs were it was almost like playing for beta for a few years in some of them, if you want the game to not just be released and immediately put on maintenance Mode a la Vanguard as there is not enough cash coming in to support paying people to make more content.
There is a lot more to making a game than just appealing to a Niche or the casual market it's about making a game that people will invest in and enough people will play for a long time so that you can keep making content and improving the game.
Everything that is not important to you is important to the people that are making games because it directly relates to their livelyhood and future employment.
Point is, people can claim money is the reason devs have done this, but the evidence shows that MMOs with simple dungeons don't do so well, (its more about the general design of the whole game, but if you have easy dungeons, you probably have easy everything else)
I don't understand... why is this significant? (though I bet if you took LotRO, AoC, and Rift, they'd murder someone to get those kind of numbers)
That number is about 1.5 million players total for all 3 games if not more closer to 1 million. If you look at SWTOR, LotRO, AoC, RIFT, TSW with their subs alone they are far more than that number and if you count f2p players as well well they dwarf that number.
One thing that I miss on dungeons is puzzles, however on today's mmo's puzzle probably be an obstacle that nobody wants, as people crave for more 3D action and more combat and fights with legendary loreful creatures and become a bad-ass, and not spent 5 hours on a dungeon with slow progression that going to bored people out of their minds and not make the modern man thank that those huge dungeons are not worth doing....
In World of Warcraft Vanilla, people always seem to thing that the famous dungeon, Gnomeregan, is the largest yet most boring dungeon of them all.... I don't know why that people don't like Gnomeragen, but i think it's because for once the monsters are repetitive or there is not enough danger or the bosses are not challenging enough, or something else.
Now on modern mmo's the size of those small so called "dungeons" are not really worth calling "dungeons", the only true dungeons we like are what we called "raids" and those are the dungeons that we love and fight on, and the loot is great, and not only that, it's tons of fun and quite challenging. The reason that I think that dungeons are small in modern day mmo is because of what most game designer was thinking of "player size = dungeon size", if I am in a 5 man group for a dungeon, the dungeon going to be small, if I'm on a 25 man group, the dungeon going to be big and filled with many bosses up to 14. If there was a such thing as a 50 man raid, the dungeon will be SO FREAKIN HUGE, with 30 bosses. That's how it is in modern games, and people who likes to venture into dungeons of today, for the fun, for the challenge, and for the loots.
They tried it in Cata and it did not work, and they nerf it.
They tried it in D3 inferno ... and they have to put in a difficulty slider. It is pretty obvious that making it too hard is not the way to get the market ... a difficult slider is the only good solution with minimal QQing.
And you decide what is "good" for everyone?
I would say LFD is great design, so is fast travel, and instances. I guess you have "bad" preference by "association" from my viewpoint.
Then go in for however long you want and then leave?