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Endgame is the worst thing that ever happened to MMOs
Wighty
Member UncommonPosts: 699
I hate to cross post an article from another site but this one truly deserves attention!
This is the article by Brianna Royce of Massively.. Some of the comments there are as good as the article! (pictures removed)
Endgame is the worst thing that ever happened to MMOs. I tweeted this last year, and it won't stop rattling around in my head. Every time a developer dodges concerns and leaps to his version of the "elder game," every time a reader claims a reviewer who doesn't get to endgame is irrelevant, and every time someone justifies a weak game mechanic because it doesn't matter at max level anyway, it rattles around some more. Endgame is the worst thing that ever happened to MMOs.
Having an endgame, thinking you need one, and designing your game around it -- this is the core problem of the MMO genre. No matter how hard you spin it, when you create a game with an endgame, you create a game with an end... and not much else.
[mod edit - please do not post full articles from other sites - put an excerpt and a link. I've cut the rest of the content, others should follow the above link]
Gaming is Dirt Cheap compared to this...
Comments
I fully agree.
+1
and i would say 2. worst thing is capped group size - it killed any chance of diversity among classes
I agree with OP for the most part. WoW did add flex raids which lets you run with different raid sizes. The worst part about endgame is that its just the same damn thing over and over. Get the best gear, wait until the next patch, to get the new best gear.......There really has to be something better. It makes the progress seem completely worthless knowing eventually the gear you have will be obsolete. GW2 kinda tried to offset this by making all top level gear the same, just a different skin. We need something revolutionary that changes MMORPGs forever, but I dont see that happening anytime soon.
i would really like a game with either unlimited progression or at least with progression like in ac/ac2, where it takes really a LONG time
In their original incarnations, you were not supposed to win an MMO. You weren't supposed to be able to say you did everything, it's over.
From that perspective 'endgame' is the fatal moment for an MMO for at least one player and one subscription and more to follow.
I give SOE some credit here. Most MMO's never die. If they plan to have 'end game' they also need to plan for that day when they have the stones to kill the title so new ones can replace it. The only one who has shown the tenacity to do that on a repeated level is SOE.
Great piece. It is sad what WoW turned our beloved genre into.
Read it earlier and I agree on everything she said.
Pretty much. It's absolutely nothing but the love of MONEY that MMO's have turned into what we see today. WoW was a big success so everyone tried to copy it. How many of those games actually survived?
More now than ever, I'm looking for a sandbox game that's "endgame" only centers around just how good you are at the game, or how well you've mastered something, even how famous/infamous you are in the community. If I want to farm "purples", I'll do it in WoW. There need to be more choices available.
I disagree. Internet forums are the worst thing to happen to..well..everything lol
If so, why are you on an internet forum? If it is really the worst thing, shouldn't you be avoiding it like plague?
Let's be honest about what end game is. It's developers telling players that they have no more content for them to play but they still want the player's money. That's all end game is. You reached the end of the Internet, log off now.
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I don't think the endgame in itself is the real problem here. As I see it is the problem that most themeparks put 90% of the content which you outlevel after a few weeks and leave you in the last 10% of the game for years. That means the content will be much of the same.
If a MMO wants leveling to be a 3 week tutorial so the players slowly learn all abilities and so on they should put 10% of the game into that and 90% into the game where we actually spend 90% of the time.
So much grey content as they have now is just a waste of game resources, only having a few open zones and some dungeons and the raids ain't really that smart.
They could of course do the other way around and let leveling be 90% of the time we spend in the game as well, either way works but repeating the same raids over and over for the hope of a drop gets boring pretty fast, when you done it a few times you lose the challenge and then it becomes boring. If you compare that to actually putting the content where the players are (which would mean a lot more raids, dungeons and open zones to play in) the games would last longer for most players.
They need either
a) single use story content instances (like in SP games), or
b) randomize re-usable dungeons.
Either way there is no repeating.
We have only ourselves to blame. if people would only stop buying this trash then the companys would have to make somthing different.
but when you get these obvious wow copy themeparks with " endgame " such as star wars, eso, wildstar, conan, rift, so on and so on and people by the millions pre order and buy the game only to quit a few months later.
these companys are making a killing and arnt going to stop making them.
I said it before and i say it again, the only way we will ever get real change is to stop buying the garbage they are making.
stop being sheep and thinking you need to flock to every new MMO with " hope " it will be the next big thing, because guess what? it wont be.
deep down you know what it will be like just from a few hours of a open beta. the same old crap you been playing since wow.
AGREE x 1000
I just got to the supposed "real game" at cap and started raiding and it is slow, boring and tedious to say the least.
What i really want to do now at cap is travel around the world discovering new things, level up crafting and bring down rare open world bosses that i get limited time rewards for.
That to me is a game worth being called endgame.
Lets face it, we're not all great players. Some of us are good players, some bad players, some don't even know where the cntrl key is on the keyboard.
Back in the original MMOs having a friend that was a bad player was never really a detriment. If Bob wanted to come fight Nagafen, he could come. Now you wouldn't give Bob loot but he didn't care, he just wanted to fight the awesome dragon with his friends.
Now everything is locked away in its own instance with a hard cap on the amount of players that can join or its in the open world with an ever increasing difficulty scale. You cant afford to be friends with bad players anymore so Bob is tossed away like rubbish.
As the difficulty ramps up but the hard cap stays the same, more and more people are thrown under the bus until all what's left is a bunch of angst teens chugging red bulls like they were tic-tacs. No wonder everyone that plays endgame is a miserable jerk, its what the system produces.
Part of being a world is the ability to do things with tour friends
Another worthless thread on this site..
I am sorry - you can't make an MMO without endgame. Put yourself in the designers shoes..
1) Option 1 - make leveling slow and hard - ensuring that people will quit your game and you will be unable to retain subscribers. Let's call this the Everquest model.
2) Option 2 - make most of your game easy - some of it harder - and some of it really hard and time gated. Call that stuff at the end 'endgame' Now everyone gets to play - some never make it past the easy part - but they don't quit out of frustration. Almost none make it past the hard and time gated part. Thus everyone wins.
I don't understand why people on this site think MMO developers are idiots. They are not. They have tried the no endgame bit. They have even tried option 3 - make it easy and simply not have an endgame (GW2) - that didn't work either.
You can't replace mechanics that serve a purpose unless you have an alternate mechanic that works just as well. Endgame keeps the addicts occupied. Its a very important mechanic if your business is about catering to addicts.
Thank you sir.
CCP says you are wrong, they've been successful with no endgame for over 10 years now. Try to use some imagination."True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
More of the point it wouldn't be there if it didn't have some merit. Some people enjoy it, others think it destroyed everything,I still play WoW. Nothing wrong with differences in a game why would you want every one to be alike. Some have end game some have PvP.
Just be thankful for diversity.
They are idiot who burn they name to ash alone with the trust of people when release unfinished game and full of bug
or change the gameplay in worst ways and make the good game fall .
There said :
there are something only people inside will understand
But there are also something that only people from outside can see.
if there are no idiots then all MMO developer ready billions .
They know something don't mean they know all ,
and the more you know , the more you get trapped inside the box , that so called "we can't make MMORPG without end game"
Instead of wasting energy speaking of her problem with themepark endgame she could have spoken about games that actually try to come up with a different solution. There are a bunch of promising titles, everquest next, camelot unchained, black desert, sandparks like archeage, or the games that aren't fully MMO's like shroud of the avatar and star citizen.
Themeparks and endgame didn't ruin the genre, unless you are stupid enough to think that WoW ruined the genre.
WoW was the catalyst which is why it takes so much of the blame today. As soon as the game started to take off everyone began to copy it's ideas and create a clone of it. Although I know the games not for me at all I accept that it is a good game and will always be around with a solid userbase.
To what the OP said about Everquest, after about a year Everquest had ton of "End Game" content, Raiding was huge in everquest, when I was leveling up my first character I remember a friend telling me that the game really begins @ the level cap. From 2002-2004 2 out of the 3 expansions that came out in EQ (PoP and GoD) almost everything in those expansions was raid content. Realistically if you didn't raid you couldn't pass the first tier of either expansion.
I wouldn't blame High End content for alot of the issues that are there. There's a lot more too it than that. I know personally if a game doesn't have some form of raid content in it I'm really not interested in the game or have a very hard time getting into it.